Dan snatches phrases towards a method statement

[Steve: This is a really rich set of notes. There seems to be a key problematic to tackle in the bit I have made bold below - if this were the central question of the text on method, what work would you bring (describe and contextualise) to highlight the issue at stake?]

A black clad man

proxy bodies

visually referenced juridical and penal furniture

the tyrannical control of the artist

observation and representation of bodies

whether or not my physical body is conceptually necessary

rickety modernist design; prototypes

alibi

the gaze that looks but doesn't touch — embodying this gaze

between 1930 and 1970 (or between 1900 and 1989 maybe)

works kept in very close quarters with one another

What do you wear?

—Do you like being lonely? — If I could make choices I'd choose it

and last till the end of time, my love

I'm not lonely I've got the entire modernist canon

I'm in part about loneliness. Do I like that about myself?

the text is the machine

Elena Ferrante: 'The "I" who narrates my stories is never a voice giving a monologue. It's always a woman writing, and this writer always struggles to organise, in a text, what she knows but doesn't have clear in her mind.'

a cartographer and a folklorist. one is thoroughly abstract, one is thoroughly embedded. {this sentence could go in the direction of 'one is x and the other is y' or 'one is x and at simultaneously y'}

Players: the stage (see Anne Boyer) the audience (a mute chorus, troglodytes)

it is probably more interesting for the stage and the audience to respond to the dialogue than it is to show the dialogue

richer and more outlandish interpretations

to revert or not to revert to a trite essentialism?

consider giving something to the audience that neither of the speakers have

video on an intimate scale (developed by now to video-as-clothes)

images function as puppets

situation I have constructed and orchestrated - refers to an outside world - in the form of my studio - another situation I have constructed and orchestrated

work that is figurative or refers to figuration, but avoids direct completed unitary figures.

to describe this as: "I'm very interested in figurative sculpture but I've never made something that resembles a person as such" is toeing the line to the representational tradition. The point is to challenge this tradition, or maybe even expose it as a regime.

be clear and precise with historical references. expunge the vague (this is an aspiration not a methodology)

what kinds of representations are prohibited by the prevalent militarised masculinist aesthetic?

everyman in a superman's body {not an answer to above Q}

everyman as outsider

struggles to negotiate with institutions and architecture

the creativity he shows in this struggle

there is pleasure in this creativity. I do think it's important to enjoy oneself at least a little bit.

object lies across the border between furniture and figurative sculpture.

lies: fibs, reclines

an object that can "pass" at any point along a sculpture-furniture spectrum. plays diverse and subversive roles by being incorporated into the different discourses that define this spectrum. -Am I consciously making a parallel between this 'genre spectrum' and a gender spectrum? -Would I support this parallel?

describe the EG LC Dad me vid in more detail. Q: is there a thread,— a central fib maybe —, connecting the narratives or is the clothing thing enough of a conceit to be getting along with?

both a plinth and the stageset for a drama. and ALSO a sculpture. is there a three term version or "both"?

a lot of this, right back up to the black clad figure with which this text began, is about turning the lens of the male gaze. but this is a problematic turn because there is some moustache twiddling man behind the lens. we are the lens and the gaze. how do you turn a lens upon itself? how do you dismantle the master's house with the master's hands? how do you figure the unfigurable ground of the form/matter dichotomy? these are discrete but related questions.

In tackling this representation I'm conscious of something Anne Boyer has said regarding masculinist culture and its productions: 'to keep the struggle theatrical fixes power'. Work around masculinity always risks sliding into a kind of gentle parody, a sort of friendly homo-social self-deprecation men perform to keep each other entertained. I would like my work to reflect on what Boyer calls 'another, real struggle: it's not between actor and actor. It's between the actors and the stage.''''

[Steve<<:Unpack this and be more explicit about the relation of this term to your work. ]

approach dormant themes and subtexts in an attempt to make them explicit

a phantom of my own body

a sensual relationship between my body and my body of work

as opposed to 'self-loathing attacks on the signifying intelligence' from within its own terms, attacks which take the ground of that intelligence for granted

TALK MORE ABOUT HISTORY AND TIME -TALK ABOUT INHERITANCE-TALK ABOUT THE TAUTOLOGY / PLATITUDE OF MASCULINITY BEING PATRILINEAL but be anti-Oedipal [S:...and most of all, talk about the work: what is the work actually doing?]