The Pizza Box arrives safely at London Euston, following a traumatic late night journey from Aberystwyth; the object was subjected to delays, unpleasant fellow passengers and even threatened to be disposed of by an unknowing platform assistant, ‘Hi mate, want me to chuck this away for you?’ ‘No, no, no don’t take that, that’s work that is’ ‘Right you are…’
Quote from Jacques Derrida’s ‘Paper Machine’
Written in chalk pen on cardboard
Live Drawings
of ‘3 Darn Hawdd’
by
Kim James-Williams
17.04.2012
"The page remains a screen. That is one of the themes of this text which also takes account of numerology, including computer number logic and the digitization ofwriting. It is primarily a figure ofpaper (ofthe book or codex), but the page nowadays continues, in many ways, and not only metonymically, to govern a large number of surfaces of inscription, even where the body ofpaper is no longer there in person, so to speak, thus continuing to haunt the computer screen and all internet navigations in voyages of all kinds. Even when we write on the computer, it is still with a view to the final printing on paper, whether or not this takes place. The norms and figures of paper-more than of parchment-are imposed on the screen: lines, “sheets,” pages, paragraphs, margins, and so on. On my computer I even have an item called a “Notebook,” imitating the one you carry around with you, on which I can jot down notes; on the screen it looks like a box and I can turn its pages; they are both numbered and dog eared. I also have an item called “Office”-bureau-although this word, like bureaucracy, belongs to the culture and even the political economy of paper. Let’s not talk about the verbs cut and paste or delete that my software also includes. They have lost all concrete and descriptive reference to the technical operations performed, but these infinitives or imperatives also re tain the memory ofwhat has disappeared: the paper, the page of the codex. Thus the order of the page, even as a bare survival, will prolong the after life of paper-far beyond its disappearance or its withdrawal."
- Derrida, Jacques (2001) Bowlby, Rachel (trans.) (2005) Paper Machine Stanford: Standford University Press p.46
Scores written during a re-performance of Bruce Nauman’s ‘Body Pressure’
As part of ‘3 Darn Hawdd’
17.04.2012
"Though “temporal drag” is always a constitutive part of subjectivity, exteriorized as a mode of embodiment it may also offer a way of connecting queer performativity to disavowed political histories. Might some bodies, in registering on their very surfaces the co-presence of several historically-specific events, movements, and collective pleasures, complicate or displace the centrality of gender-transitive drag to queer performativity? Might they articulate instead a kind of temporal transitivity that does not leave feminism, femininity, or other “anachronisms” behind?"
- Freeman, Elizabeth ‘Packing History Count(er)ing Generations’ New Literary History 31.4 (2000)
Reenactment of Valie Export’s ‘Action Pants: Genital Panic’
(noun)
Credit: Hannah Mann and Jess Rose
04.05.2012
Commodore Cinema, Aberystwyth
Photo-Shoot in cinema with cunt exposed: Hannah Mann, I love you with all my art
(return to, repeat, re-imagine)Cigarette
Coffee
Repeat, repeat, repeatChapter Two
6am bedtimes (Cigarette, Coffee)
A little late (in the day and in the Dissertation process generally) to be trying to read Derrida
Writing is a bodily act
Performance/Writing: Re-iterative
Coffee
Repeat
Marina Abramovic / 100 PISAMA / 100 LETTERS
ABOUT SENDING AND RECEIVING LETTERS
Since I was very young, until my early thirties, I had serious problems in opening and reading any letters I received. Letters would stay on my table for weeks before I found the courage to open them, and during this time my sense of guilt would grow and grow. Most of the time, when I finally opened the letters, it was too late to answer them and my sense of guilt was worse than ever. I kept every single letter, from the first notes received from my mother, in I965, up to the time I left Belgrade for ever in I979. I decided to chronologically write down the first sentence from all of these letters, without noting the name of the senders. When finished, I was astonished to see how it was possible to trace all my life just by reading the text created by all these first lines. Later I heard that Marcel Duchamp, on receiving a letter, opened, answered, and immediately burnt the letter he’d received. Jean Tinguely never opened or answered any letter, and every christmas he made a ritual of burning unopened envelopes, which sometimes included important information and even checks. M. A.
