- sitting in the back garden, taking a break from writing essays, enjoying the sun #
- trying to decide what is the best exhibition i’ve ever seen #
- just back from Blackheath looking at SPAN housing #
- finished my second philosophy essay! break-time! #
- eaten shi’s lovely dinner, waiting for coffee to brew now #
- starting core course essay, hope to finish by sunday #
- writing about the artist tino sehgal #
- can i somehow relate sehgal’s work to the philosophy of deleuze and guattari? #
- skyping jon in nz #
BLOG—Two Years Old Today!
. . . and what a couple of years it’s been!
When I began posting to this blog it was because I was bored with my life and wanted to start developing an interest that to lead on to bigger things. The writing served this purpose for me and blogging seemed a good way of forcing myself to practice this.
To begin with the posts were sporadic and varied, covering anything and everything that I thought was interesting. As time went on the writing became a bit more concentrated on the art side of things, moving away from technical concerns, this also matched changes in my work situation. In 2006 I left work and started college, taking the Postgraduate Diploma in Contemporary Art History at Goldsmiths College in London, so not only did I stop working and returned to education, but I left my home in Cambridge and moved back to London.
The course has possibly been the best move I have ever made, although I still feel that I have long way to go to actually realise much of the potential that could come from it.
However the greatest thing to come out of this year has been meeting my fiancé, Shi Li. To be fair, nothing else matters quite so much to me as this. I have found love when I had more or less given up on it, and she has completed my life to this point and allows me to go on to the next stage in marriage and in work.
I feel that I can do anything.
Here’s to another two years, and many, many more!
Engagement Rings
Shi and I are engaged!
Yesterday was our 4-month anniversary and we decided that we should make our intentions official before Shi goes back to China on the 2nd of May. So yesterday was spent running round London looking for rings.
We are commissioning a custom-made engagement ring from Amanda Doughty, a friend of mine, but that won’t be ready for a few weeks so until then we’ve got two gold bands to have something to show.
This is the most amazing time of my life! Thank you Shi for accepting my proposal.
Buren—Lyotard—The Written Word
Although it’s not clear if this is a direct response to Lyotard’s exploration of his work (Lyotard, 1979; Lyotard, 1981) Buren made his own statement about why he produces texts and what purposes these texts serve.
This piece, Why Write? comes across as almost reductively prosaic in its presentation of the facts of writing that Buren considers relevant. The types of writing that he undertakes are literally enumerated and defined: 1 Necessity, 2 Urgency, 3 Reflection, 4 Commissions, and, 5 Pleasure.
He states that “what a visual work has to ‘say,’ if anything, cannot be reduced to any other ‘saying.’” (Buren, 1982, p.109) The act of writing and its remnant, the text, are disabused of the function of complementing the work of art, in the way I believe Lyotard proposes for Buren’s work.
My writing shouldn’t obscure the fact that my main activity is tied to the ambition of making visible the “not-yet-seen”: the two activities can neither be isolated or confused. Although one has the mad desire of flushing out the “not-yet-seen,” the other could never aspire to express the “not-yet-said.” (Buren, 1982, p.108)
The function of the writing for Buren is to act as a sort of testing ground for the work of art. In Buren’s case, at least, the work of art is (textually?) “silent” – the writings about them act as a “baptism of fire” (à la Nietszche?) from which the effective work of art will emerge unscathed:
… only those which can emerge intact or reinforced manage to prove that they have something to “say” beyond the written word. (Buren, 1982, p.109)
This seems to suggest a necessary synergy between the work and the text, that the text serves to justify and promote the work to a new state. However, the text is never the artwork in a very real sense – the difference between the artwork and writing is described as “the uncrossable and impossible distance between the two ways of saying.” (Buren, 1982, p.109)
He finishes by making the pointed remark that “if I put time and care into my writing, it’s because I feel that words have a certain strength, and their power shouldn’t be monopolised by so-called specialists.” (Buren, 1982, p.109) Exactly who he is directing this to is unclear, but I can believe it could easily be towards Lyotard’s co-option of his work.
I suspect that Buren is talking about his artworks in-particular, rather than about art in general here. He may also be reacting to some other critic, I don’t know the context of the piece, Buren may have had many critics in mind, Lyotard may be completely irrelevant here. But I think Buren’s conception of writing is an interesting adjunct to his work and obviously provides some useful background to it.
- BUREN, Daniel (1982). Why Write? Art Journal, vol. 42, no. 2 (Summer). pp.108–109.
- LYOTARD, Jean-François (1979). Preliminary Notes on the Pragmatic of Works: Daniel Buren. October vol. 10 (Autumn). pp. 59–67.
- LYOTARD, Jean-François (1981). The Works and Writings of Daniel Buren: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Contemporary Art. Artforum International no. 19 (February). pp. 56–64.
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