c a n y o u m e a s u r e m e p l e a s e ?

Our thoughts on dust and the value that can be attached to routine items via labeling has brought up Cornelia Parker and her hugely referential practice. ‘The Negative of Whispers’ is a pair of ear plugs made of dust collected at the Whispering Gallery in St Paul’s Cathedral, London. The work makes obvious connections between ideas of sound; to whisper is to talk quietly and earplugs are to block out unwanted noise. Both are methods to prevent sound from travelling but the control lies in the different parties, a whisper is a negative space, filled by an earplug. The cathedral achieved its name due to the fact that the whisper of a person facing one side can be clearly heard on the other side on account of the rounded space. Materials, dust and whispers, also both appear ephemeral. She has managed to transform them into something permanent and even precious.

This is a continual theme running through Parker’s work; ‘Exhaled Blanket’ is a slide show of dust and fibers taken from Freud’s couch. These works are about the reverence we hold for objects of those we desire and perhaps by owning them or seeing them we can feel closer or more connected to that individual. Man Ray also created something similar in both subject matter and theory. ‘Dust Breeding’ is a photograph is a document of ‘The Large Glass’ after it had collected a year’s worth of dust. The notion of the celebrity is key to all these works – it would be an entirely different work if the slide show were of fibers from her own couch. Admiration is beneficial but also damaging, however by highlighting the beneficial qualities we’re shown we can utilise it too. Tomorrow will involve devising a list of artists to email, requesting to sweep their studio.

We’ve done some experiments with ‘You've Got Your Arm In The Head Hole [The Label's Sticking Out]’ and decided that the white board looks better than the chalkboard – the green meant the film didn’t show up as well. We will be back with final images once we purchase the correct pens for the job.

Also, here’s an image if the potential set up for ‘Lose Yourself in the Music’:

Compass is still on our mind – thinking about maybe a talk/presentation of ideas/work. This would maybe be recycled from previous ideas such as art in porn or something to do with Facebook/YouTube comments.

Haegue Yang has a show on at the moment titled ‘Quasi-Pagan Minimal’. The most interesting aspect was the main installation; installed among walls painted an Yves Klein–esque blue, is ‘Sol LeWitt Upside Down’. Yang supplements LeWitt’s otherwise vacant cubes with Venetian blinds – a familiar practical element in domestic and public spaces alike, used to shield interior activities from external view. The suggested, ordered space now carved into the air by LeWitt’s modular constructions becomes an actual site of enclosure. The constructions now obstruct the view beyond rather than assign it classical perspective. Other pieces in the show felt slightly too decorative for work that seemed to be about the alienation and division.

We watched ‘The Man From Earth’ and there were some truly beautiful moments in it. One of those moments being when a character opposes the notion that clocks measure time and instead proposes that they merely measure themselves. It looked at life holistically, simply through dialogue. It also exposes the meaningless nature of opinions about a life we haven’t even seen; reality is more than who we are and who we were. Another entertaining factor, something we’re always impressed by, is the fact it the entire film is recorded in one room. This is especially exciting when the discursive activity occurring in that room has taken you far beyond it. At the end you feel you are transported back to your own place and suddenly you don't belong there. You want to be in that room having the same discussions over and over again. But what they were saying about how things are measured got us thinking about other tools, which are used to measure stuff when perhaps they’re just measuring themselves (Tom Friedman’s ruler built only from memory springs to mind, as well as Duchamp’s ‘3 Standard Stoppages’). Looking further into this, we found that there are biblical undertones:

‘We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves. When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise.’

2 Corinthians 10:12

It’s a message about being humble and allowing others to dictate ones level of success as opposed to doing it yourself. A fun experiment might be to make a variety of tools and measuring devices and attempt to create something using those tools.