Page Forty Three

As part of the Colchester Art Society Winter Exhibition I am showing two language-based works. This blog post will explore the first of these, Page Forty Three. Page Forty Three has been a side project that I started earlier in the year. Read about the process of creating this piece of work below.

This project came about out of a studio experiment in which I set myself some arbitrary rules to follow. Linguistics continues to play a part within my practice and in my studio, I keep a stash of old books (because as a text artist it is good to be surrounded by text). I knew I wanted to do something with the books and with the notion of editing and changing the meaning of language. I was keen to break some linguistic rules and bring humour into the work.

The process started simply - I picked the first book I came to out if the box, opened the book and took the page out. At this point there was not process involved in picking the page number (as the title of this project suggests the page number of this randomly picked page was page 43). I then edited each sentence with a black marker pen. Censoring all but one of the words on each line. Leaving only the 1st, 2nd 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th word respectively as I moved down the lines, allowing me to start to break up the language and push it to its limits (Deleuze, 1997). This number system added some structure to something otherwise random. It also set as a starting point, to create a system which could be reused and easily followed in subsequent pages used.

I was not overly taken with the aesthetics of the page-marker pen result. However, found the remaining text to be interesting and humours. I have a long-standing love for Dada and this plays into that perfectly. It allowed me to bend the usual linguistic rules of our shared public language (Wittgenstein in Kripke, 1984) and start to separate the text from reality. The words left give an insight into the content of the page they are taken from but are nonsensical and do not read particularly easily. This gives the work a playful edge as we are creatures of making sense of things (Peirce, 1931-58), but the outcome makes this difficult to do. We are usually apt at working out what things are supposed to mean and so the audience may still find some meaning in the words.

Having previously developed font ACcomplete4 I typed the words up. This further removed them from their origin and put a stamp of recognisability to them in relation to my practice. The words become easier to read and digest once typed as they became their own entity and appear at first glance as if there is a logical intention behind the word selection. Which is then dashed once the work is read. 

The decision to record the words came from wanting to create something that engaged more than one sense. It also felt relevant due to the tradition of reading stories aloud allowing for more than one person to be reached at a time. The work becomes a Dadaist story time. Within The Minories Page Forty Three is provided for listeners on a headset allowing them to become enveloped in the experience. The performance of the words is intentionally as smooth as possible, to give the initial impression that they are logical and follow linguistics rules and expectations. However, in reality the recording process become difficult as I tripped over the delivery of speaking words in a sequence that held little sense.

References

Deleuze, G. (1997) Essays Critical and Clinical. University of Minnesota Press.

Kripke, S. (1984) Wittgenstein Rules and Private Language. John Wiley & Sons; New Ed edition.

Peirce, C. S. (1931-58) Collected Writings (8 Vols.). Ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss & Arthur W. 

Skinner, B. F. (2002) Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Hackett Publishing Co, Inc. Revised Edition.