Stillness in a mobile world


I have been invited to write an extended essay for the forthcoming publication, Stillness in a mobile world, eds. David Bissell and Gillian Fuller, International Library of Sociology Series, Routledge, 2011. My chapter Performing Stillness: Communities in Waiting belongs to a cluster of research entitled Performing Communities which interrogates how participatory performance-based interventions in the public realm can help cultivate models of social agency, sociability or temporary collectivity, in resistance to the increased experience of atomization/individualization within contemporary urban life. It investigates the capacity of participatory performance to intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated and navigated by producing ‘counter-publics’, new social formations for rehearsing and testing alternative – ethical, political, critical – forms of individual and collective subjectivity. Central to this area of enquiry is my own practice-based involvement (as an art-writer) in the art-project Open City, which in this chapter is interrogated through the prism of a specifically Deleuzian-Spinozist philosophy. My chapter brings together art and philosophy to interrogate the critical potential of performed stillness, conceiving of ‘being still’ as an affirmative and constitutive space of ‘being-with-others’ (Nancy) or of ‘bodies in agreement’ (Spinoza). The chapter’s argument is developed from my earlier article 'From Passivity to Potentiality: The Communitas of Stillness', in the peer-reviewed Australian online journal M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture, Vol.12, No.1 and has been tested at international conferences (PSi #16 Performing Publics, Toronto; Mobilities + Creativity, Narrative, Representation and Performance, University of Surrey    

Background to Publication: This collection on the conceptual, political and philosophical importance of stillness is positioned within a world that has increasingly come to be understood through the theoretical and conceptual lens of animation. Criss-crossing the humanities and social sciences, metaphors of movement, from Manuel Castells’ space of flows to Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modernity underpin much work within the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry) that is interested in understanding the world through relations of movement and flux. Moving away from a sedentary metaphysics of being-in-the-world, burgeoning mobilities research illustrates a commitment to exploring the differentiated dynamics of a world increasingly characterised by networks of corporeal, virtual and imaginative mobilities. This collection suggests that while a focus on such a dialectic of stasis and movement is significant, it neglects other registers and modalities which still and stillness inhabits: where still emerges through other configurations of matter which are not necessarily reducible to the dialectic of mobility and immobility. What happens if we think of stillness not only as rhythm, but also as technic or trope? As attunement or perception? As such, each chapter in this collection attends to stillness through a range of different grammars and vocabularies from human geography to media studies, from cultural theory to fine arts; illuminating the multiplicity of ontological and epistemological registers through which still moves. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the diversity of this collection illuminates the multiplicity of ontological and epistemological registers through which stillness moves: from human geography to media studies, cultural theory to fine arts. With the help of luminaries such as Deleuze, Bergson, Barthes and Beckett, this book interweaves cutting-edge theoretical insight with empirical illustrations which examine and traverse a multitude of practices, spaces and events. In an era where stasis, slowness and passivity are often held to be detrimental, this collection puts forward a new set of political and ethical concerns which help us to come to terms with, understand, and account for (im)mobile life.

Below is a PDF of the forthcoming book chapter:

‘Performing Stillness: Communities In Waiting’ in Stillness In A Mobile World, eds. David Bissell And Gillian Fuller, (International Library Of Sociology Series, Routledge, Oxford 2010), pp.87 – 106.

‘Performing Stillness: Communities In Waiting’ represents Performing Communities, a sub-section of my broader enquiry, Not Yet There (http://www.not-yet-there.blogspot.com/), which investigates the capacity of participatory performance to intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated by producing ‘counter-publics’, new social formations for rehearsing alternative – ethical, political, critical – forms of sociability and collectivity.

Central is my practice-based involvement (as an art-writer) in the art-project Open City, whose performance-based practice is interrogated through the prism of Deleuzian-Spinozist philosophy. Key research was undertaken in Japan (dislocate festival, Yokohama) supported by an Arts Council Grant, Exploring New Strategies of Participation within Site Specific Performance, 2009. The contribution to knowledge is in exploring the affective potential of performed stillness, conceiving ‘being still’ as a constitutive space of active, embodied citizenship.

The chapter develops an earlier article ‘From Passivity to Potentiality: The Communitas of Stillness’, published in the peer-reviewed journal M/C – A Journal of Media and Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1, Still, 2009. Its ideas have been tested at various international conferences (including PSi #16 Performing Publics, Toronto, 2010 and Writing, Site+Performance, ANTI festival, Kuopio, Finland, 2011). Related investigations exploring the use of invitations for producing collectivity have resulted in journal articles ‘RSVP – Choreography Collectivity through invitation and response’, published in the peer-reviewed online journal Rhizomes (‘Hives, Tribes, Assemblages: New Collectivities’, 2011); ‘Pay Attention to the Footnotes’, in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2010; ‘Social Assemblage’, in FrenchMottershead - SHOPS, People and Processes (Site Gallery, 2010), and ‘Permission Granted’ - essay in the online journal, Drain, 2011. The Spinozist notion of affect was further elaborated as part of an invited essay in Reading/Feeling: The Affect Reader, (If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, 2013).

The Summer of Dissent

I will be producing a new piece of critical writing in response to the proposed Summer of Dissent at Plan 9. The Summer of Dissent brings together a range of practioners seeking to dismantle and reassemble cultural norms through collective action and singular acts of sedition. Events reflect concerns around physical and mental survival - ranging from The Keepers, a mapping project that seeks to preserve and build knowledge of urban wild food, to The Coming Insurrection, a discussion around freedom of speech and textual terrorism. By collectively scrutinising the current geo-political situation through the prism of cultural production these events invite the audience to view, collaborate and question. 

Image: Ali Jones, Everybody Move

The programme at both Plan 9 and off-site venues, includes the enactment of Guy Debords' Game of War by Rod Dickinson & Class Wargames; a psychic meeting calling for an Art Strike by the Second Temporary Art Strike Action Committee (Alytus Chapter); weapon making with Girl Gang; research into insanity by the collective Alialani; and a public swim protest with Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting. 

A publication will also be produced to document Summer of Dissent with a commissioned text by Emma Cocker and a specially produced flyposter from Laura Oldfield Ford.

More information can be found here.

(UN)Folding Zagreb

I am going to be participating in this research-creation workshop as a way of developing and extending some of the performance ideas developed in collaboration with Open City. I am in the process of developing further research – entitled Between Wandering and Waiting – which continues to investigate the creative and critical value of strategies such as wandering, waiting and performed stillness within an artistic practice, by asking how they might contribute towards the production of pragmatic models (‘tactics’) for interrogating contemporary forms of subjectivity. As part of this research I am in the process of developing critical connections with other artists, performers and theorists interested in similar concerns. Whilst my practice is primarily theoretical/writerly I am interested in opportunities through which to (tentatively) test out some of these ideas through practice.

(UN)Folding Zagreb is a three-day collaborative workshop that will take place during PSi15 directed by Sara Wookey, Bianca Scliar Mancini and Christopher Brunner

In a format that resembles a workshop but that aims at a collective research-creation process participants will use movement and rhythm as techniques to explore how to know Zagreb through affects. Participants will share a short reading pack, which includes philosophical texts, as well as other relevant writings and images that will set a common ground of knowledge about the city.

With three molecules of actions, each one with a specific focus on either movement, visual or sound elements, this method of approaching the city is strongly based on improvisation techniques, both from dance and music, which priories flow and process; it is anti-flaneur as it proposes participation and movement of the body as a tool for engagement with the others in the space of the city, exploring the notion of gestural contamination.

(Un)Folding Zagreb consists of intense work during the three blocks of three hours of  activities in the studio (physical propositions), outdoors (tasks of collecting) and on mapping techniques ( collective composition). 

No Longer and Not Yet

The text below has been written for this year's NTU degree show catalogue.

"The conclusion is the event whose occurrence brings about the end; it is a point of resolution that draws the experimentation to a close. An answer has been found, a result gleaned, a decision made. Conclusions often rest upon the production of something definitive, something certain. They describe the final chapter of the thesis, which attempts to draw together the loose ends, to smooth out or reconcile the differences or inconsistencies within an argument or investigation. Here, the indeterminate or unruly meanderings of an enquiry become dutifully reined in or stilled, where the restless activity of a thinking process is required to steady itself, to fix upon its goal. Conclusions can terminate the trajectory of a given episode of time or line of narrative – they are the final scene; the end of an era, the protagonist’s last breath. However, within art practice conclusions are rarely definitive or final, but rather present as provocation for future action or as moments of pause within a never-ending permutational chain of possibilities. Enquiries become shaped into one form, before being collapsed back once again for the process to begin afresh. The fine art degree show itself should be seen in such terms – less a marker of closure as an opening out into the space of the future. It is a double-headed arrow – pointing back towards the creative labour of production and of thinking, and forward as a promise of what might still be to come. It signals and celebrates the results of an imaginative process that has already taken place but significantly is also charged with potential.

 

Strictly speaking, the degree show is not an ending at all, rather a space of transition, of new beginnings. It is the visual manifestation of a rite of passage according to whose terms art students exit the realm and restrictions of the university to navigate their way into the world beyond. The duration of the degree show is a zone of expectant limbo. We are between times – no longer and not yet. However, this rite of passage is not just about the initiate (student) increasing their status on the hierarchical ladder of social standing, of graduating into the – employment – ranks of the ‘with honours’. Rather, an (art) education has the capacity to function in more critical terms. For social anthropologist Victor Turner, universities should be understood as ‘liminoid’ settings or as an ‘antistructure’ capable of generating alternative ways of being and thinking to the mainstream or habitual. Whilst the liminal experience often reinforces and works with existing social hierarchies, Turner argues that, “liminoid phenomena … are often parts of social critiques or even revolutionary manifestos … exposing the injustices, inefficiencies, and immoralities of the mainstream economic and political structure.”[i] Rather than being easily – unquestionably – assimilated back into the existing social order then, the critical subject produced through the liminoid experience has the capacity to conceive of things differently or invite change – they have a transformative potential. It is this questioning potential that a fine art course hopes to nurture. Undoubtedly, there will be those for whom the degree show will function as the final conclusion to their practice, indeed those for whom the art degree itself is valued only for its transferable properties in an ever competitive job market. However, perhaps there will also be others for whom the experience will continue to function as a provocation or as the catalyst to go out and make things (differently)."

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[i] Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, The Human Seriousness of Play, (PAJ Publications, New York, 1982), pp.54-55

(not) new work

I am currently developing ideas for the publication which is being produced through collaboration with other art-writers/artists as part of the Critical Communities project.

Re: Writing

Abstract:

In the process of writing about other things I have noticed that there are often these embedded fragments, half sentences and curious revelations that seem to simultaneously describe or equate to the act of writing itself, and the struggle therein. I want to use the publication as an opportunity to produce a piece of writing that is perhaps approaching an idea of practice. I am interested in recycling or reusing text fragments from existing work. I want to return to earlier writing and rescue fragments that had perhaps seemed incidental or unremarkable and collate them as a litany of reflections on writing, on writing as a practice. I am interested in the way that this format will ultimately allow me to bring fragments of ‘academic’ writing into proximity with material that is rather more personal, doubtful or which has hitherto remained hidden. I want to find a way of introducing a sense of inconsistency or contradiction or a feeling of moving between critical, philosophical or even theoretically (sounding) fragments and those which speak much more about a feeling of a love affair with the process of writing, or of the inevitable experience of failure or inability or inadequacy encountered in the process of trying to write about art practice. It is a rule based piece I suppose – the rule being (not new work) or (nothing new). I suppose the other rule I am considering is in terms of the length of the text – which is going to use the 'rule' inherent within the brief which is to produce a piece of writing with an upper limit of ‘2000 words’.

(sample excerpt below)

Re: Writing

(1) I am not sure how to begin; (2) It is certainly taking the shape of words; (3) However this is subject to revision; (4) Categories quiver at the point of collapse; (5) Trying to produce some other way of adequately describing the experience; (6) I am hesitant in speaking the words out loud; (7) Without due care things might spiral out of control; (8) She begins. The pages tremble; (9) Subject position is cast adrift; (10) Words unfurl, not knowing how they got there; (11) Uneven and discontinuous; (12) Always out of reach; (13) Full of holes; (14) A tender documentary residue; (15) Not so much a beginning then as a suture; (16) It is a liquid state or heavy like an industrial accident; (17) In which the seams remain critically visible; (18) Unassuming moments when nothing happens; (19) Breaks things down but also leaves them open; (20) Bringing into crisis, intensively, with care; (21) Within the limited constraints of a given language; (22) Things remain insensible or nameless; (23) I won’t play by their rules; (24) Pushing at the edges of one meaning whilst holding back the terms of another; (25) Worried until they begin to recombine differently; (26) In a more contingent, disruptive manner; (27) Complicate the possibility of arriving at a single answer; (28) But rather to conceive of new names; (29) By reassembling its languages into counter-narratives; (30) Always happening in the present; (31) It is impossible to ever exactly duplicate an action; (32 The discrepancy between what is visible and what is not; (33) I feel something; (34) Flutter-flutter; (35) Wanting more; (36) To feel its letters over my tongue; (37) I try to take it all in at once; (38) It is in these things that I remember; (39) I have not forgotten; (40) A graft of something already existing; (41) Meaning to try, a tentative attempt; (42) As an echo or vibration drawn and performed through the body; (43) Clandestine love affairs with another’s thoughts; (44) Once uttered they become rather hard to delete or forget; (45) Each bringing the other into being; (46) Silences that mark unexpected endings; (47) Ideas buried beneath the surface; (48) They seem to resist forming words; (49) Instead bleed across one another; (50) Contiguity is only ever a form of being in contact with; (51) Rather than unnecessary interference at its periphery; (52) Both a spatial form and a temporal event; (53) A pivot about which things turn; (54) Proposing tangents to be – both literally and literarily – followed; (55) Haunted by memories of earlier inhabitations; (56) Whether this thought can be mine alone; (57) A memorial to those unspoken; (58) By one’s own volition; (59) Like the nagging of an obsessive’s itch; (60) Intellectual holes that may well be revealed in time; (61) I feel duly torn in two; (62) Not wholly knowing how to respond; (63) It is not that easy; (64) Something has been left unsaid; (65) Sometimes a foil is needed through which to conjure reflection; (66) Language can be irredeemably imprecise; (67) In a language that cannot be read; (68) Only infrequently captures the experience of the moment; (69) I am letting you in; (70) As a process for producing tangential experiences; (71) I am willing it to happen soon; (72) An intuition for knowing when to yield; (73) Touching upon; (74) There can only be so many ways of saying the same thing; (75) Yet there is an inherent incompleteness in the task at hand; (76) Dialogue broken, a sentence stalled; (77) A speechless mode of incommunicable proximity; (78) A mode of attendance or attention; (79) The prospect of hearing me on your lips; (80) As closely as possible; (81) Logic might become frayed; (82) Thoughts well in my head, heavy and meaningless; (83) A kind of restlessness; (128) I have had such thoughts before; (84) Being struck by something; (85) In case of an emergency to let in breath; (86) A desire to avoid the temptation to simply repeat; (87) Making blind leaps into darkness; (88) Stammering in the path of understanding’s procedural flight; (89) Resilient sites of criticality; (90) That emerge simultaneously; (91) An action is required; (92) Proximity to the work does not guarantee any certainty or assuredness; (93) Conditions; (94) Refusing to play by the terms of existing power relations; (1) The cycle of iteration begins again once more; (95) The notion of the telos is often rejected or sabotaged; (96) Beyond words as such; (97) Without obligation; (98) The continual reconfiguration of the rules of engagement; (99) Between producing illumination and further opacity; (100) Before other meanings have begun to fully form

As part of the project we have responded to the abstract's of each other ... here is an excerpt from the response to my work from Nathan Walker :

"Into Suspension. Re guarding. Guarding. Taking all that stuff and re-cognising it. Because there is so much writing in the world the job is not to make more but to construct new texts out of the ones that already exist. This is working clever. Emma is removing the specificity and allowing for a kind of openness. In context. Emma is not producing academic writing. This is practice. This material is different material. Like instead of a new quilt we have a patchwork. Instead of starting again Emma is sifting, dealing (like we deal with cards) with the writing stuff. Emma is interested in plagiarism. The thief. Les Voleurs. Stealing your own work and writing into it. Saying things without knowing what your saying. Arrows. Indexically. Storage space. Holding space. Writing about one thing and it really is writing about an other thing. The stuff behind the words. The reclamation of recycled materials that perform the space of writing. This is about the process of writing itself. The struggle within the labor of practice. The hesitation, the deliberation of practice. The fragile moments of writing. Foil the goal. No goal. Own Goal. Re-Writing. Re(ally)Writing"

Still

I have been invited to extend my essay 'From Passivity to Potentiality: The Communitas of Stillness' into a longer text, as part of a book proposal being made to the Routledge International Library of Sociology series. More to follow soon.

Inconsistency as strategy

Here is an outline of my revised conference paper to be delivered as part of the 35th AAH Conference "Intersections", at Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, 2 - 4 April 2009 (original abstract and context for the paper can be found here). Extracts from the paper and an interview (with Ben Judd) undertaken as part of the research can be found on Ben Judd's website under Interviews and Texts.


Image: Ben Judd, The Symbol, 2009

This paper explores how the seemingly undesirable presence of ‘inconsistency’ can function within artistic practice as a way to strategically resist, refuse or even attempt to revoke the societal pressure to perform in a consistent manner or from a single, stable position - according to expectation, convention or the norm [...] Arguably, the interrogation of inconsistency requires that certain conceptualizations of both subjectivity and knowledge to be brought into question or challenged – it is a term of ethical and epistemological import. What is at stake in thinking through the terms of inconsistency, perhaps, is the question of what it might mean to be, and in turn how this contingent (inconsistent) experience becomes subjected - even subjugated - to various forms of translation, definition or homogenous representation. Inconsistency, in this sense, is not only a necessary part of practice and thinking - which perhaps disappears as things approach resolution - but can also be deployed strategically as a way of subverting, challenging or resisting the ‘pressure of consistency’ or of conformity, of expectation or of homogeneity. My attempt then is to propose a critical function for inconsistency where it shifts from meaning a mode of dithering or incoherence (a deficiency on the part of the individual) towards a mode of agnosticism or questioning that deliberately reveals the impossibility (or illusionary nature) of singular and stable positions (and which in turn points towards the deficiency of various systems of belief, classification or representation). Here, agnosticism is put forward as a critical form of uncertainty, the doubt that a particular question or problem has a single correct answer or that a complete understanding of something can be attained. Here, agnosticism is a mode for addressing the experience or perhaps even the problem of being human, by insisting on the inadequacy of any single or consistent model of its representation.

My encounters with various artists (including Ben Judd, Vlatka Horvat, Dutton + Swindells) have enabled an understanding of inconsistency to develop where it shifts from a mode of refusal (of a binary logic or of the tyranny of consistency) to one of possibility (a form of affirming multiplicity and productive heterogeneity). In this paper, I want to indicate four (overlapping) models of inconsistency emerging within specific artists’ practice – inconsistency as shimmer (being both, remaining in between); inconsistency as the flagging of possibilities; inconsistency as impasse or obstacle (as an aporetic stammer); and inconsistency as rupture (the emergence of the unexpected). In each model of inconsistency, the underlying struggle perhaps is to question or refuse the dominant pressure towards consistency or homogenization especially in relation to the experience of self and its subsequent representation. Inconsistency is a way of resisting or rejecting consistency as the desirable paradigm, a device or tactic for thwarting the easy assimilation of complex human experiences into a single or stable position. It reveals the inadequacy or fallacy of existing systems of classification or representation, whilst simultaneously attempting to rupture such systems in the pursuit of something new. Inconsistency describes a mode of restlessness, of being critical of or frustrated with existing options; of relentlessly searching for or trying to produce some other way of adequately describing the experience of being"

Mobility and Creativity

My paper 'From Passivity to Potentiality - the Communitas of Stillness' has been accepted as part of the conference, Mobility and Creativity: Narrative, Representation and Performance, which will take place in the Department of English, University of Surrey, UK (3 July 2009 - 4 July 2009). Keynote Speakers include: Reina Lewis (London College of Fashion), John Urry (University of Lancaster) and Ginette Verstraete (Amsterdam University)

I will be presenting a paper as part of the second panel:

Panel 1 : Postcolonial Encounters

Panel 2 :  Mobility and Aesthetics

Panel 3 : Asylum and Refugees

Panel 4: Cinema of Borders

Panel 5 : Mobile methods

Panel 6 : The invisible city

Panel 7 : Creative Dis/Locations

Panel 8 : Travel Writing

Conference information:

Mobilities has increasingly become central to the analysis of social relations in contemporary society where it often appears that ‘all the world is on the move,’ from the movement of diasporas, tourists, migrants and refugees. While the emergence of this new ‘mobility paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006; Urry 2002, 2007) originated within the social sciences, this conference focuses on how such a ‘mobility turn’ has been narrated, represented and performed within the arts and humanities. The two-day international conference aims to explore creative responses to these diverse mobilities in literature, art, film, and theatre for example. How have these complex mobilities been negotiated and critiqued through creative practice? Is creativity dependent upon mobility?

The paper will extend and develop ideas from a recent essay (of the same title) which will be published in the online journal m/c (Spring 2009).

Paper abstract.
Referring to my collaboration with the artist-led project, Open City, I will investigate the (im)mobility of stillness as a creative strategy. I will explore the potential of an active and resistant – rather than passive or acquiescent – form of stillness that can be activated strategically within a performance-based practice; in turn producing conditions in which a radically dissenting – yet affirmative – model of subjectivity might be developed. Stillness is often presented as antithetical to the velocity, mobility, speed and freedom proposed by new technologies and the various accelerated modes by which we are encouraged to engage with the world. Stillness and slowness have been deemed outmoded or anachronistic forms of mobility, as fastness and efficiency have become the privileged terms. Alternatively, stillness has been reclaimed within a resistant – or at least reactive – “counter-culture” for challenging the enforced and increased pace that we are required to perform. Rather than focusing on a model of stillness based on the attempt to ‘opt out’ of the accelerated time-zones, mobilities and narratives of contemporary capitalism – the move towards a more spiritual or meditative existence by removal or denial of contemporary societal pressures – this paper will explore the potential within forms of stillness specifically produced in and by contemporary capitalism, by reflecting on how they might be (re)inhabited as sites of critical action. With reference to the writing of Gilles Deleuze – especially in relation to Spinoza’s Ethics – I want to explore how the asignifying or affective possibilities produced by the collective performance of stillness can be understood as a mode of playful resistance to or refusal of habitual social norms; additionally producing the germinal conditions for a nascent community of experience no longer bound by existing protocol, a model of “communitas” emerging from the shared act of being still.

At the margins of intelligibility

I have been commissioned to write an essay on the work of Dutton+Swindells for a forthcoming catalogue/publication about their practice.

"Contradictory words seem a little crazy the logic of reason, and inaudible for him who listens with readymade grids, a code prepared in advance […] One must listen … differently in order to hear an ‘other meaning’ which is constantly in the process of weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid being fixed, immobilized." Luce Irigarary

        Image: Dutton + Swindells

Synopsis

This text is underpinned by the dilemma – even my anxiety – of being asked to write about an art practice whose signature is one of incomprehensibility and contradiction. It follows an extended period of discussion with the artists, Dutton + Swindells, where my role has been one of trying to ‘make sense’ of their practice – develop an understanding or rather an apprehension of it – whilst resisting the temptation to make ‘sense’  – rationalize or explain – through the writing subsequently produced. The text itself has emerged slowly, awkwardly, as I have struggled to find words or ways to speak about a practice that is critically aligned to a certain kind of muteness. It attempts – acknowledging the paradoxical nature of the task ahead – to say without wholly saying; to speak without speaking for; to comprehend the work by recognizing the power of the incomprehensible therein. The phrase ‘beyond comprehension’ is often used pejoratively, as an expression of disbelief or frustration when something cannot be made sense of or appears to lack meaning or rationale. It is synonymous with all that is baffling, impenetrable, inscrutable, unintelligible or as clear as mud. However, there is also an archaic meaning for the term where it describes the condition of limitlessness or the state of being boundless; of something existing beyond one’s grasp, beyond capture. The incomprehensible is thus that which fails to communicate or be clearly understood at the same time as that which resists or exceeds existing definition. It is marked then by the dual possibilities of deficit and excess, refusal and promise. Dutton + Swindells play with these dual possibilities, attempting to harness the affects of the former in the hope of conjuring the latter. They make work that is tactically incomprehensible in the attempt to summon or create the conditions for an encounter with that which is beyond the terms of what is already known. How then to speak of such a practice? This text attempts to occupy the threshold between speaking and not-speaking-for, between attempting to make sense of the work, yet at the same time remaining faithful - or demonstrating fidelity - to the work’s incomprehensibility, its contradictions. My plan then is to explore the nature of the endeavour within Dutton + Swindells’ practice - its tactics, manoeuvres and operations - and largely leave the work produced to speak - or indeed remain mute – for itself, to articulate its own terms.

 

     Images: Dutton + Swindells

The full essay will form part of a catalogue/book which will be published by Site Gallery later in 2009. Below is a PDF of the text.