Perhaps it is the absence of a definite article at the beginning of the sentence that causes it to suffer from a crisis of meaning?

The word analogue in this context is in reference to its use in biology: Whereby an organ or body part provides an equivalent function to one occurring in a different creature but has evolved separately.

Simple enough.

But the sentence feels unsure, surely it should mean that both creatures have evolved their spines for defence against predators and therefore have, despite being evolving upon different lines, adapted the same solution to their problem.
However without the clarification of the word THE, and S’ to pluralise the urchin and hog it could just as easily be read as if an individual spine of a sea urchin is equivalent to an individual spine of the hedgehog, in that same way that a knitting needle is analogous to a porcupine’s quill. Which is not nearly as enlightening a statement.

Since I first saw the photograph I have been fascinated by it and its self-consciousness. It is not as simple a statement as it appears and simply not vigorous enough its clarity of language to be so. It is deeper than it appears and yet near meaningless at the same time. Perhaps it is so intriguing because it describes so well peculiarities of our condition as humans. We live on the edge of chaos, but with the unshakable feeling that we are missing something that will make everything make sense.

Poetry Machines

The screen is mightier than the pen

I wish I were a better writer, I wish I could write like most people wish they could sing.

Combinations of symbols on paper are essentially meaningless, but some people are capable of arranging words with blends of familiarity, surprise, restraint, abandon, surrealism, logic, metaphor, and literalism into sentences that can encapsulate and transform their subject. Or us. Perhaps it was a fear of the apparent power of the written word that caused Ed Ruscha to take a type-writer, throw it from the back of a Buick, take photographs, and print them in a picture book.

   Perhaps though, it wasn’t. But to my mind that interpretation of The Royal Road Test looks great written down.

   For her new work in the Saison Poetry Library (Southbank Centre) Lucy Harrison has digitally scanned the first eight words of 200 poems in a collection instigated by poet in residence Lemn Sissay. These individual words now separated from each other and the poems from which they had been cribbed, have been discovering themselves in new seemingly boundless other eight word combinations across eight television screens. DVD’s play random sequences of words onto the screens and create word strings that free from cognitive arrangement, resemble poetry.

The ability words have to convey is apparently limitless!

   Lucy Harisson’s Poetry Machines is reminiscent of many poetry & writing techniques and also shares a lot with previous forms of Fine Art. The groups of randomly generated words that appear on the eight television screens may for instance represent the ultimate Oulipo. But it feels strange to a see flickering cathode ray tubes transmit vaguely coherent eight word poems from a lasered memory. It is entirely uncanny when all the screens act together, as they occasionally do, and create not only a coherent, but also beautiful sentence.

This Poetry Machine can write better than me.

Damn.

Within half an hour and a little selectiveness one could fill a page with short poems better than anything I could’ve written: I know, the comments book left with the work confirms it. This book was less of a comments book but more of an opportunity for viewers to record the word combinations that would never exist again within the works life. To write down those half sentences that accidentally had meaning.

   The book shows a record of the generated phrases that people decided meant something. This was perhaps why the work is called Poetry Machines, with an S, plural. The machine is not the sentence generator, but it is the consciousness of the viewer, searching for insight and order amongst the haplessly chaotic word strings.

   One can find meaning, and even beauty in anything if one considers it intently enough. Perhaps this is something even more powerful than language: human consideration.

   One would think it would be pertinent to this article for me to include some chance-generated poems as examples of the phenomenon, but that won’t happen. It won’t happen because the work demands that I don’t, its intention is that the viewer finds the meaning and the poetry. It needs you to go and be the machine that orders the chaos and no example I give can bring you close to that experience.

   It does not feel strange to view Lucy Harrison’s new work in the Saison Poetry Library. Although not being in a traditional gallery environment, the work was not alien to its surroundings. And it didn’t feel like a ‘big deal’ that it wasn’t in a gallery either. There was none of the jarring, anarchic, incongruity associated with the term ‘intervention.’ Or the weightiness of social discussion that fills much of Lucy’s community and participatory-based works. The work is cradled within the volumes that inspired its production, there is less distance between the works conception and realised form. Usually the gallery creates a divide between art making and art presentation. The translation of the work into the gallery space is a process that resembles completion, the end of enquiry and introduction to the market place.

Lucy Harrison’s Poetry Machines remains spouting strings of words in the Saison Poetry Library until July 5^th.  It needs you to make those strings into poems.

-REVIEW OF CORTEZ ARRIVES FOR DUCK & COVER-

In its final exhibition before the summer and the degree show UCA Canterbury’s Herbert Read Gallery treats visitors to a new exhibition called Cortez Arrives. It includes work from Jo Addison, Adam Gillam, Mike Marshall, Max Mosscrop, Alice Walton & Simon Wells.

The show collects together works that are reportedly anti-representational and are intended to exist, within the sphere of this show at least, without reference to art criticism. Adam Gillam and Max Mosscrop particularly talk in terms of instinct, feeling and chance when discussing the making of their works. The result, as one might imagine, is art that is as self-conscious and tentative as its makers. I guess this kind of work is supposed to create greater consideration of the thing in itself. Therefore it uses a language we all understand from modernism and is one that still has some relevance today if appropriately framed.

Cortez Arrives therefore creates a difficult curatorial challenge. How to make this show work? A curator must be able to make these pieces inter-relate without drawing any comparisons between them. (To do so would too closely resemble intentionality and cognitive thought.) The curation of the show needs to give as much reign to feeling and gut reaction as it does to actual conscious consideration. How lucky therefore that is the artists themselves who have put this show together. Gillam described in a Q&A that when the artists involved first discussed Cortez Arrives all were aware of each other’s work and voiced which of each other’s pieces they ‘liked’ and wanted to see exhibited. Essentially the process of curation was like cherry picking works and shoving them together by a process of mutual congratulation.

CORTEZ ARRIVES AND SHOWS US HIS NAVEL.

This show does contain some genuinely interesting works. Mike Marshall’s photo for instance is a highlight. Furthermore Simon Wells’ 3-letter words are really successful and enjoyable and have a sense of play that evidences a wit and engagement with the concept of Cortez Arrives that the rest of the show and its curation plainly lacks. On march 22^nd some writing by Joseph Beuys was added to the Cortez Arrives blog. (http://cortezarrives.blogspot.com/)

‘Art cannot be understood in the sense of a positivistic concept of knowledge, i.e. art will never be a means of appealing to the intellect with rational, analytical concepts, that is with that which one nowadays in the culture of consciousness apprehends by “understanding something.”‘

Wells’ small pictures, such as sup pictured below, take letter characters and reduce them, re-presenting them as pure graphical forms and no longer intellectually loaded with the language they once represented. Thus we are able to experience them with awe again. As a child maybe does, when first discovering how to make monosyllabic sounds that mean words.

fig. 1 Sup Simon Wells

In wells’ 3-letter words one can finally find something that resembles the shows title, which is taken from this unpublished fragment by poet George Oppen:

Cortez arrives at an unknown shore

he is absolutely lost

and he is enraptured.

Sadly this potentially poignant moments that lay within Well’s wall mounted words are completely trampled upon by the clunky and self-conscious nature of the rest of the show. Being expected to experience this exhibition without recognising that the work resembles textbook post-modernism is infuriating as in truth the sculptural works in the show feel like pastiche. By trying to remove themselves from the knowledge of art experience these artists have managed to make a show that feels easy, jaded, lifeless and simple.

Another quote from the blog:

‘Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see.

You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly.’ (Georges Perec)

One almost wishes this show wasn’t set about quite so slowly and stupidly. Luckily there is something else to make this exhibition worth visiting: The comments book. It is a source of angry and often ignorant hilarity. Art school is for the most part a fairly wooly place. Except for in the leaves of this book: It seems at UCA the students may not get vocal about very much, but they are tangibly offended and by what they see as bad art:

Fig. 2 Comments left by visitors to Cortez Arrives.

(When I asked Mike Marshall if he minded me reproducing these pages for duck & cover he mumbled some passive aggressive statements questioning the intelligence of art school students. But officially his reaction to the what’s in the comments book is ‘I don’t mind it,’ and why would he. If these comments were made without intelligence then they were made without knowledge. Could it be that they reflect the show?)

One would assume that there was something new to Cortez on his unknown shore to make him so enraptured. Trouble is the Cortez Arrives exhibition likes to think that the move from jaded knowledge to rapture is something that must occur in the viewer. That it is somehow our responsibility to stupefy ourselves to the point where the artwork engages us. But if this were the case then would not any object in any place have the same value as the paintings, sculptures and other works in the gallery? Why show us these objects at all? Simon Wells’ words however imbed within the works themselves a movement away from knowledge and it is possible to become enraptured by them. I recommend seeing Cortez Arrives if you are already in Canterbury purely on the strength of Simon Wells.

Cortez leaves on may 2^nd 2009.

I would take a quill, scratch out my inhibitions, and write you a million I love you platitudes: If that meant I could keep you a day longer. But all those descriptions of feeling would not communicate one ounce of what I feel. All those things I could write you would not prove anything.

   I could fill a dirigible with true descriptions of how I love you, a big fluffy cloud of words of such cliché and quantity that it would break free of its linguistic moorings and float away from all meaning.

   My romanticism twitches in my writing hand, but is kept from being expressed upon paper by my cynicism. Cynicism that forbids me to express in words all that it is that I feel toward you. What use would it be? Words have no meaning: No depth, breath nor height. I could never express the truth of love, could not even describe the outline of one facet of love with words.

   I feel no loss at language’s failure in this instance. I would take a quill, scratch out my inhibitions, and write you a million I love you platitudes: If that meant I could keep you a day longer. But it wouldn’t affect how long we will hold this love. I will keep you for as long as it lasts and I will never want to discover its limits. I do not fear the possibility of losing it. It is not a love that needs constant proof or reassurance. It is not under our control, it cannot be stored and saved through our action, or captured in our words. We can do nothing but experience it. It is so vast that I cannot imagine ever understanding it, I cannot imagine ever being without it.

   My cynicism is not one that questions love, or romance. But it is one that doubts our ability to even understand quite what this love experience is. It is also a cynicism that operatively is untrusting of language. Language is not only inadequate as an expression of love but it is also capable of reducing it.

   The love that we have is not my love, I have no right to make it mine by making it fit in the leaves of a book, the pages of a letter or the stanzas of a verse.

   But despite all this logic and cynicism, this love consumes me, and it tells me to write a love letter. 

The ominous ship that lurked in the bay has gone. The pirates have left for some other shore where the stories are not so predictable. So too has the ticking of the leviathan that you thought would be a metronome metering out the tune of your legacy forever.

You are the boy who never grew up, who never was able to carry that responsibility which was laid upon his shoulders.

Your lost boys are missing, or perhaps they just left.

Like the pirates, they are equally dissatisfied by the polar world of black & white that you had for them.

There is no one left to believe in you.

You are the boy, who lives surrounded by dying fairies. Who has found himself unable to fly, and with a body that does not age but still damages.

You have mistaken yourself in the clam shell mirror for a man. With chest puffed you stride through Neverland. ‘Flying is for babies,’ you say to all who will hear. But the Piccaninny stay behind boulders and Tiger Lily has turned away from you.

Wendy Darling has stopped sending her offspring; you’ve lost your last tie to Kensington Gardens.

Oh little boy this was a choice you were too young to make. Sympathy for Peter Pan.

I do not know how to use irony.

   After time my affection for the machine grows beyond just physical attraction. I feel that the threshing machine understands me like no other ever has and I visit it at night under the dim light of a bare light bulb that hangs from the roof of the barn.

   I tug on the cord that is the pull start to its engine and listen to its rumbling heartbeat. The belt is mesmerising as it turns, a moebius strip more beautiful than anything to be found in the human form.

   I find myself drawn to discover the inner workings of the machine and spend more and more time in its presence. I begin to lose track of days. When I do come into work, the other employees are understanding. But they do seem to wonder about the lacerations on my fingers and bandages on my arms. It is a small village and soon there is much gossip. For fear that the villagers may find out about my secret love with the threshing machine and chase me out of the village with pitchforks, or worse destroy the machine: I resolve to go and commune with it one last time. But then I must break it off. It is unrealistic to think that our love could last and we are only hurting ourselves.

   Turning on the machine I again begin to stare into its open mouth, the rollers, prongs and other moving parts within it seem to call to me. My desire to know the machine intimately becomes overwhelming and I feel is if that if I enter the mouth of the machine I will understand it, know it, and maybe even become it. I clamber over and with a deep breath jump into the depths of the trundling parts. At first it is exciting. It doesn’t quite know what to do with my flesh. It can identify no part of me as its normal meal of stalk or husk, which it knows how to separate neatly. But still it thrashes at my legs eagerly and slowly drags me into its mechanism. Rather than tearing my flesh clean off or simply injuring my legs with cuts and bludgeonings, most of the damage done to me is caused by friction as the thesher’s rollers start to cook me. It is slow, but I am unable to escape as I feel my legs barbequing, when the pain subsides I know that they are completely dead. I want to stop the machine, as I realise I’ve made a terrible mistake. I want to walk away and pretend I had never fallen in love with the machine. But I cannot do that now, I cannot do anything but wait for my inevitable fate. The worst part is a creeping suspicion that the threshing machine never loved me at all.

I sit with a new blank page. Turning over and folding back the many pages scrawled with the memory and heartache of a thousand mistakes past.

Its time to write a new story.

One that isn’t about me, or my past or any of my stupid experiences.

With pen in hand I start off, writing the story of things that have never happened to me. But which I would like to.

I start off with a character. Completely devoid of situation or history I begin to attribute things to him. I start with me then I add a bit of a hard-boiled attitude. Better facial hair and the sense of right and wrong of a Buchan hero. He is an awesome character. But what can I do with him?

Before launching into a narrative I transpose my character into a few situations and imagine how he might react.

   He is calm in crisis.

   His wit sees him in control of every situation.

   He is the desire of women and the envy of men.

I hate him.

What an awful character. He’d be great in an adventure story but I can’t write adventures.

Imagine what that guy would be like day-to-day. Everything would be so inexorably calm and under control.

Do I still function like i used to?

Blame the headlines.

Blame the supermarket strip lights humming.

Blame all this damn work that I cant get round to actually doing.

I’ve been worrying.

I’ve been worrying about my bank account.

I’ve been worrying about not feeling sufficiently penitent.

Blame the state.

Blame the government and newsreaders.

Blame everybody who says everything’s OK.

When clearly it isn’t.