Tracy whwd

What

I wrote a text about the aftermath of a separation of a marriage with three main characters: a wife, a husband and a woman with whom the wife establishes a relationship after the marriage. The narrator was a fourth character, an interlocutor in the story – involved but on the periphery, involved enough to have the information to retell from mostly primary experience. It has no fixed point of blame or fault – there a is a ping-ponging around the text before vilification is concentrated more on one character than on the others, but the blame doesn’t rest there, blame is moved and displaced throughout the text and never settles in one place.

How

It is written in first person, the voice of the narrator is a witness to the events. This is the adult child of the wife and husband characters. The wife and the husband are only referred to using pronouns. The woman with whom the wife develops a friendship is named and the sister of the narrator is named. It is constructed chronologically, looking back over a six-year period. The text is economical, focusing on pivotal moments that are capable of delivering the narrative and hinting at its emotional impact.

Why

The story is a true account. Looking at a diaristic approach. Not naming the primary protagonists is a method of depersonalization to introduce some level of objectivity in the re-telling. I was thinking a lot about what happens when an artist makes a work through assemblage/construction, or by whatever process and then it is presented as a fixed object in a gallery or other situation, a finished thing that is contained, is available for interpretation. Stops being in the hands of the artist and is delivered to the potential responses of a viewer. If I present part of a story that is still continuing in the real world and has much more agency, more reality in it’s primary instantiation in the world then the artwork/text is very obviously secondary, and very obviously a weak representation. I think what I am saying is that no magic moment is possible, no level of transcendence is possible – this might be influenced also by the sensitive subject matter of the story. There is some sort of facing of facts as to what an artwork can possibly be – an ordinary everyday artwork.

How could this develop?

I am anti-develop of particular things right now. I think I want to make things that stand beside each other and talk but not to make works that lead/are a progression to the next work, etc. So maybe what this can act as is one talking point within a larger questioning. One question in a set of questions that are all gisting around something but perhaps might not fix on one thing. And for me, at this point, I can’t put an easy wrapper/label on this set of questions.