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. I think what drives these paragraphs is an interest in attention to detail, close, slow, mediating inspection. This is evedince 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??]
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.”
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 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.
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.)
Vivian – not sure about this bit above, apart from not leading into the subject very sensitively I am not sure I want to talk about or illustrate what I think my work “does”...but best to keep going for the moment!
LINK THESE TWO PARAGRAPHS
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). In The Companion Species Manifesto.
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.