13.  Go on a long enough trip

         down the time line

 

         tickets used

         itineraries shot

 

         and you’re left with these sheafs –

         ghost travel folders, empty.

 

         Now what?

         Now exactly what?

 

                                 Rachel Blau Duplessis

                                 Draft 43 : Gap

                                 April 1999 – July 2000

 

 

October 2024

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If it’s idle to be of your time, to be implicated in & subject to the forces & conditions that constitute an era, then what kind of art is it that can offer its attentions to track these circumstances & flows, to attempt to chart & stir perspectives rather than be singular products, commodities or emblems?

 

I found the answer more in literature than art. In poetry. Long poems. THE long poem. VERY long poems. The ‘life’ poem. Namely Rachel Blau Duplessis’ ‘Drafts’, Louis Zukofsy’s “A”, Lyn Hejinian’s ‘My Life’, Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’ & more locally AJ Carruther’s ‘Axis’. While not poetry, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Passagen-Werk’ is also significantly influential.

 

The extended/ongoing project as a dedicated mode coming from & into duration & plethora offers a lifespan (or at least a chunk of it) as a kind of temporal scale. A cartography informed & intuitive (Pound’s ‘in periplum’) to record & dialogue with what is, what’s ceasing to be & what’s in the midst of becoming. The cycles & sequences, the historical into the contemporary, the contemporary into the historical, how the short, fast time of a moment or event torques or dissolves inside the long, slow time of transformation & process. With the author as both stable viewpoint around which it all swirls & as prone subject of its own spin & becoming past.

 

I like the quiet of poetry & books. Their layered communication & ability more than any other artform to present, as Blau Duplessis puts it ‘how feeling thinks, how thinking feels’ & looking to enter such a project for myself where language & image, matter & concept intersect, I opened this. The work is not to be for exhibition or sale. The intention was to operate like a poet, a quiet documenter, something unspectacular. With one page completed per day then grouped into months. This changed almost immediately & it has continued to stretch & compress since. Themed sections (Cantos? Episodes? Essays? Konvolutes?) were adopted with stopping points & open closures in order to sustain a work of duration for both myself & any possible reader/viewer. In portrait format with an A2 sheet of paper (initially A1 hand torn in half) like a page in a book (& I guess they unfold that way too) as a constant parameter that provides a set field of action & constraint. 

 

Implicitly & explicitly contradictory, hermetic & capacious, nomadic & embedded, aloof from trends & expectations but in process with them. How the social, the political, the cultural, personal, psychological, biographical, historical, biological, geographical & technological all surge, fold & feedback above & below the consciousness of my lifetime.

 

The following works on paper, photographed & presented here are the traces of these metabolisations & prehensions, poetics & poiesis.

 

It is a commitment (of what) & a biding of time (until what) while bearing witness (to what) & generating an offering (for what) etc.