Jane Fawcett (UK)

Escape, escape! Escape. Escape.

[ED I know the Agatha Christie texts from the performance and its interesting to see it work here as text alone. I think what drives these paragraphs is an interest in attention to detail, close, slow, mediating inspection. This is evidenced and supproted by the theory quotes. Perhaps later in the text this could be put more specifically into practice through the application of this kind of viewing/considering through a written description that links to the leisure themes you seem to be pointing to?? This first chapter feels more like a summary of the whole thesis, think the experiences you describe could be expand upon as there seems to be room for further mediation on their significance ]]

New Abstract

I will continue to work on a series of short pieces of writing that I began earlier in the year with the texts I wrote on Rob Stone, Agatha Christie and Pierre Klossowski. I will work on new texts as separate frames within the theses, illustrating them as this. I have begun a text on my experience of reading Donna Haraway, attempting to describe my affiliation to her through a process of activating an understanding of experience through writing. I am also writing a story based on visiting the Sonneveld House and the Cube House Museum in Rotterdam. I will write a piece on the role of the female in picaresque novels as a historical figure, and plan to write about Freuds objects on his desk as a way to summarize subjective projections of characters and experience. I plan for my theses to be made up of these separate texts which will hopefully do something towards explaining my interests in certain references and a desire to materialize these affiliations.

1.

I am visiting the Cube House Museum, the Cube House Museum is a Show Room, or Show House in Rotterdam it is a postmodern building shaped like a cube and turned 45 degrees on its axis, it is placed atop a kind of regularly shaped “holder” which is also a part of the building.

I am visiting it because I feel like I want to mediate something, I want to see if I can feel how I imagine the man who calls himself a concierge feels.

This man greets me and asks me for the 2 euros it costs to enter the building and then tells me I am free to feel at ease walking around the house. The house is apparently his own abode.

He seems to have made some desicions about the architecture and what he thinks it might mean, either for himself or for everyone, Im not sure.

The room which has a bed in it also has a maroon jersey duvet cover, covering the duvet which is on the bed with matching pillow cases on the pillows at the head of the double bed.

I wonder if the concierge has a girlfriend or boyfriend who stays over occaisonaly.

There is some display cabinets downstairs in the room that has a sofa and television in. These cabinets house contemporary Fantasy figurines from various films and a selection of books from the same contemporary Fantasy genre.

The concierge has somehow wholly affiliated this post modern architecture to that of his desires, or that of his intuition.

He choose to make his house a Show House and to buy and show objects in vitrines. The house can be accsessed by the public on saturday and sunday. I expect because he has assumes this is automatic and that he is in alliance with Fantasy in a desire to pursue it through this presumed matching up.

2.

Escape, escape! Escape. Escape.

I have recently finished reading Agatha Christies book “Destination Unknown” I wanted to read it as it about a woman named Hilary Craven who is pretending to be someone she isn't. In fact she is employed as a spy because of the vague descriptions of a persons appearance on the passports of that time. “Red hair, no distinguishing features” being the description which indistinguishes her from an other woman. That other woman was the red headed Olive Betterton who died in a plane crash destined for Casablanca, the plane Hilary was scheduled to take, but because of bad weather detours she missed.

Hilary had come to Casablanca to escape from England, from the rejection of her husband and the death of a friend. She had been spied upon herself going into chemists trying to purchase sleeping pills. Because of the small amount she could buy in each shop she frequented a few in an attempt to buy as many as she could. She was followed by an English man who was apparently after a particular type of toothpaste that was common in England but not in Casablanca. She registered this mans actions and thought this toothpaste purchase amusing, it seemed to lighten her mood momentarily as she reflected on the necessity of such an ordinary seeming English particularity over the choice of suicide. She didn't realise he was following her.

She was found in her hotel room later that evening by the toothpaste brand enthusiast, he had used a small specialist device to open her door with the key from within the room both locked and still in the door. He was a spy and he had followed her and sat down to challenge her suicide proposing an adventure that he suggested would end in a sure death anyway. It seemed a kind of challenge to her apathy as well as her urgency. He assured her that death that would be on the horizon but that it would be preempted by an amount of time as a spy herself, and as an alter ego.

I didn't realise that the book would be about an imposter. I was on holiday in Italy and I found it on a shelf in the corridor of the house I was staying in there. I wanted to read it as I knew it was a page turner and it could keep me feeling urgent for a while. I felt very english reading it, at a vague but (too) obvious parallel with the leading character, going somewhere hot and feeling very pale. “The roaring and the revolutions of the plane excited her. There seemed to be a kind of elemental savagery in it. Civilised misery, she thought, is the worst misery. Grey and hopeless.”

3.

In a recent performance I asked 4 people to listen to one paragraph each of my recorded voice on an MP3 player reading and speaking a story I had written about my experience of reading the Agatha Christie book Destination Unknown. The performers passed on the MP3 player having spoken their part to the next person in line within the domestic setting of a friends bedroom where a few of us had organised an evening of events and an exhibition. Fig 1. is the text I wrote with the crossed out words that the performers did not catch or speak.

It was, I think a sensory experience for the performers. Though their agency was mediated by an apprehension of keeping up and understanding the words they were hearing, which was essentially a story about myself. How, I wonder then does this negativity assert itself in terms of self-image? That is both mine and the performers. Is there a way that this performative act can act as a gesture, redeveloping a negative agency in which you ask others indignantly to perform your autonomy.

Is there volume in the word could? (could you perform for me?) requests are being made....Im parralell? Passing on of responsibility? Singled out and used as material....what am I limiting?

As a representation of the real the image is always, partially, phantasmatic. In doubting the authenticity of the image, one questions as well the veracity of she who makes and describes it. To doubt the subject seized by the eye is to doubt the subjectivity of the seeing “I.” Peggy Phelan (Page 1.)

4.

There is a commonness in the English language to mistake the verb peruse to mean 'to quickly glance over' when rather than that it actually means; 'to read carefully, thoroughly and with engagement'

Looking at writings of and around Donna Haraway there is something in this grammatical misunderstanding that rings some kind of bell. Haraway explores what she calls “significant otherness” by taking the dog-human relationship seriously. She positions a way of writing which coerces the binaries between nature, culture, science and narrative to open up and level on the same plane. She writes as an avowed Daughter of a Sportswriter (Haraway, 2003, p.3) with fact, story, concise comment and anecdote all sharing a common ground.

I am compelled by her autobiographical affinity and pursuing/perusing! an understanding of her position as she describes as “a scholarly foray into too many half known territories, a political act of hope...”(Haraway, 2003, p.3). The Companion Species Manifesto. Haraway, through the telling of filial stories points towards a position of empowerment within the embodied situation of the narrator. The condition then of speaking from this position is of experience, and relating to subjects is able and aloud to be “half known”. As she speaks from the present, as yet unarticulated moment. To understand these relations as territories in the first place is to take them seriously.

p.64, more on this negative way of knowing (Haraway)

On an organized trip with a friend in Rotterdam we were driven around the city with a self proclaimed Dog Whisperer picking up many different breeds of dogs in a van and ending up in a park where we walked them together. We were introduced by the Dog Whisperer to Eva, a rhodesian ridge back and we tried thinking about why the hair on her back grows the wrong way. It is probably a story of human migration causing dog cross-breeding, exchange, wildness etc…The line on the back of the ridge back is a kind of composite detail and I wondered what compelled us to think about this detail as a way to begin thinking about our desire to make work together as reflection on what we consider latent in both of our personal anecdotal histories and how in sharing these anecdotes it might become possible to make a collaborative biography. This is the beginnings of a question towards understanding agency in artistic production and in friendship as a condition of 'affinity' rather (what does this mean for me as an artist? How do I align myself?) than 'identity'. In relation to texts?

Against the detail of Eva's ridgeback hair we considered together the squirrel’s tail and the imaginative projections that come about for us through the lack of a visible vertebrae. I also talked about the back of my head where flat hair covers the curls that grow underneath. We planned to make a story in hair growth, very particular hair growth as a back drop to our understanding of Haraway’s anecdotes.

Thinking of the way Haraway is able to maintain something of an intimate distance to subjects and characters through her story telling I stake a claim in three interchanging positions that filter into each other. Those positions being the Observer, the Mediator and the Moderator in an attempt to narrativise these as subjects and positions which I can utilize as a way of inhabiting an unknowing position. These roles exist within an informal vocabulary of my working practice and are used to describe a way of characterising modes of production and context.

5.

I am going to read part of an introduction to an essay by Rob Stone, which was written in response to an invite by Maria Fusco to contribute to Cosey Complex. Which was a one-day event at the ICA in March 2010, and was centered on the artist and musician Cosey Fanni Tutti. Rob Stone is an academic who is now teaching at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, in the department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory.

I came to read this essay as a friend is studying for a PhD which Rob is supervising, and because of my regard for, and interest in this friend I wanted to know what kind of person Rob might be, what he was interested in, how he would speak and what he would speak of. Possibly so I could imagine some kind of written affinity between both of their interests, which might allow me to understand my friends work better through a 2nd hand connection. I imagined conversations between these two people, and a liveness.

It all felt very melodramatic, because of the amount of people involved within the essay: Rob, members of his family, Cosey, all of the music and the bands he refers to, and Maria who invited him. But I also felt that the melodrama reach me and my friend and was present in my activity of attempting to locate him within all of this.

Realising my apprehension of understanding my friends works through the writing of his supervisor stayed with me as some kind melodramatic active self-awareness. This all helped me to internalise Robs essay, which felt strange. It felt strange, as I knew it wasn’t a plausible way to enter into understanding my friends work.

And it also felt strange because it was unrequited, because my friend was probably not aware of this, that I was using an indirect source in order to link some affiliation. I was aware that I wasn’t reading a conversation between the two, but I was actually reading what I imagined as an authority on another person, in order to perhaps feel or perceive some kind of connection. This is where I think I started to imagine the many people involved, my awareness of the situation posited them as both present and unknown.

I think it is in this contrast between the ways I encountered the essay through approaching it with a filial attention. And the way in which Rob was invited to write the essay through addressing an archive that held for me an anticipation. It was the space inbetween his invite and my reading that felt full of people. People who were active and available to Rob, and people who were active, available, passive and silent to me.

6.

Frances Stark talking about Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence pg 12-14 in Collected Writing 1993 – 2003 legacy ....pg 12 (Harold) Blooms essay has much to say on the encounter between latecomer and precursor as a displaced version of the paradigmatic encounter between reader and text (Paul de man, Blindness and Insight : Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1983, p 273 ( from Stark book pg 12)

7.

In a lecture by Jan Vewoert for the PPP project at Piet Zwart Institute he spoke of the difference between the played out roles of the female and the male in the position of liar, idiot or fake within a picaresque novel. In his experience these roles are specificically gendered in that the male liar in the novel is (still) present as the writer and author, whereas the female is written about in terms of passing through history. That is she is dead already, unable to surpass her given role into a living presense, this instead turns her into something of a legend, even a myth. I wonder if in a literary sense there is a way to do something with this, something that isnt only performative and does more than parody. It would seem to be that because it is a fiction than perhaps there is.

8.

Freud "They picture the space of psychoanalysis, documenting the genesis of psychoanalysis in the perplexing presence of so many images......" pg 1 A man almost transfixed by the incoming gaze of the antique statuettes that circle the space in which he will inscribe his reflections on human psychic life." pg 1 Many scholars have contemplated the significance of the archeological image in Freud's thought”. Pg2 “The reference to archeology demonstrates, I suggest, a profound engagement with both the function of the image in the structure of memory and the structure of mnemonic images in the formation of the subject”pg3 “Culturally and persoanlly determined choices of furniture and fitting created the material environemnt for a mental journey in which the present of the reclining analysand is suspended, and then fractured, by the surfacing of buried or mnemic fragments from childhood that are no longer accessable in full to the adult consciousness that they, none the less, overdetermine. pg5 “Freud himself thought his project through the metaphor of scenes” pg 4 – relation to mimesis, staging etc.

9.

Jane Fawcett 10th June 2011

I was looking at the work of Pierre Klossowski in the library that is within the Whitechapel Gallery in London. I had asked if they had any material on him. I had never used this library before and there was only me and the librarian in the small room. The librarian asked me if I was writing a thesis on Klossowski and I replied saying no and that I was just interested. I started thinking about my level of engagement and why I wanted to concentrate on this passing interest. I was unsure what I was going to get out of the visit, as being there felt like a commitment that I couldn’t quite attribute to anything.

I had come to read something that referred to Klossowski through somebody suggesting I look at the exhibition “The Living Currency” at the Tate Modern. The curator Pierre Bal Blance refered to Klossowski to help frame the exhibition and I thought it seemed interesting, he wrote “Klossowski’s text develops an alternative model of economic exchange, which places the body at the center of our everyday relation to the economy as the only valid form of currency” I had spent only about 15 minutes at the Library before going home with some names of books after some inspired quote copying.

I spent some time searching his name on the internet when I got home and felt really confused that the Robert Bresson film Au Hasard Balthazar I wrote about for my undergraduate dissertation kept coming up. I was ignoring the links for a while as the memory of anxiety that came with scouring the internet at that point wasn’t a very hopeful feeling for continuing this work, and I was also ignoring it because I couldn’t imagine it would be the same Klossowski.

I had become worried more recently about my interest with Bresson as I knew a lot of people interpreted his films as spiritual and catholic in a very narrow and conservative way through its religious symbolism. I thought it was a bit stupid to align myself with these presuppositions, especially in the case of Au Hasard Balthazar where Anne Waizemsky plays Marie, a girl who is bandied about and mistreated from group to group along with her counterpart, the donkey Balthazar. And I could understand in retrospect why some might see these links between the donkey and the girl as quite overt. When I did end up looking at the links I realised that Klossowski did indeed play a part in this film, he played the Merchant. One of the many that were greedy for Marie the girl.

Realizing this was a bit strange because what I ended up imagining was the space around all of these bodies and wondering about my own - around Klossowski and his biography, Bresson and his performers and the interpretation of all of these. The space around seemed to be made distant and material. If the body became the only economic currency then what happened to objects, space and rooms and things that had been left behind by bodies in performance, and also what happened to me? It all felt like a background and I imagined that background as dramatic, heavy and neurotic.

Klossowski had a really privileged intellectual upbringing, surrounded by poets and philosophers, “thinkers”, and Bresson directed “anti-acting”. How then could I occupy any space from within all of this in order to think. All I could think about was animating myself from inside Klossowski's drawing. Perhaps I could assist the weird little peter pan fellow on the shoulder of Andre Gide, making remarks, pointing or gesturing. I am surprised by how this crowd of thinkers actually gave me space for such imagination, and how my insecurity is beset by the imagination of their lives. Maybe Klossowski is quite a contagious character for me, and maybe his biography with all of these connections actually makes me active in the tone in which I think about entering it. Things started to turn fictive, the body turns into fiction, and I feel my body become the moderation, which manages these histories and images.