Style note: Quotes are used for notes and otherwise transcribed from memory
OH: So I came to Camberwell saying that I wanted to reconcile two kinds of chance somehow. But actually I’ve had a lot of chance to read and I sense that they are basically extending from a similar point in two different directions, like we are here now, chance processes would be nice to put down for a while, I’ve been carrying them since BA and although they aren’t exhausted and they have helped to keep everything going, I’m tired of them because the cool thing about them is be-here-now. As in I guess in the history there are two main schools, one is a ‘camera shutter’ with a level of surrendering authorship to an automaton and at the other end you have chance processes with performer-participants. Both are linked to the history of chance operations which is in surrealism; both the sense of ‘automatic writing’ in the former and a sense of ‘subconsciousness’ or interruption in the other. And in-between there are other points, the event score, The Large Glass etc.
MDSG: Duchamp is an interesting example because it has lots of other things in there like whenever we look at Duchamp we are drawing on so much more like his readymades were often remade later
OH: Yes like Frenchness with the chocolate grinder and Catholicness with the bachelors and the breaking at the end but yeah. Also there’s the mausoleum quality to (unremembered) and so anyway I have these drawings.
It’s a plan for a totem the influences are small gestures of measurement and the totems at the British Museum, one in particular …
What are the gestures? (M)
A series (of figures, stacked)
Stacking
Monument - an ironic monument to something guessed or to monuments or to something small?
Urban and landscape (OH)
Language - non-verbal language
Non-specificity in the monument and specificity in the workshop sometimes is needed
Certainty and un-certainty
History (like monuments remember things and often they are quite small but not always, like studs in the street or plaques or they take all forms (at least in Britain))
Post colonial/historical legacy
Symmetry and non-symmetry. Lateralisation. Like how it’s a level of tolerance in the workshop (1mm) and often more as a human at human scale. So what are the gestures
Well the problem is a lot of these gestures actually aren’t symmetrical so what do you do with the other hand? (OH)
- Ok good because now we are in an artistic problem not a grand social problem (MSDG)
Monuments don’t have to go up (MSDG)
Do some gestures have to move?
Memorilising small things?
What is a minor work? Compared to a major work. Like even Ulysses is made up of loads of small moments. Like everything is overwhelming. (MDSG)
What if all the elements are there, but less? Or smaller?
Journalling note:
What is the role of antagonism?
Magnets
Ritual and repetition - still relates to chance through ‘moments’ like but not laying claim to those moments just that those moments might remind you of other moments and of my work and that’s enough
ps. this gesture also comes from a yoga thing of trying to bring two things together. Like I’m not saying that yoga is necessarily a thing but also don’t ignore thing and anything can be a resource
p.p.s. more drawings from the BM
