MARCH 2003
a collaboration between Howard Britton, Daniel Jackson and Simon Morris

This action took place at the Gustav Metzger congress at the Atlantis Gallery, Brick Lane, London on 15th March 2003 press release can be read online, courtesy of Daniel Jackson.

PRESS RELEASE

a text that destroys itself in the process of its own reading

Howard Britton
Daniel Jackson
Simon Morris

At the Gustav Metzger congress, Dr. Howard Britton (psychoanalyst), Daniel Jackson (artist) and Simon Morris (artist) completed the following action: “a text that destroys itself in the process of its own reading.” This collaborative work was first shown at the Atlantis Gallery, Brick Lane, London on the 16th March 2003. A second opportunity to view this performance will take place at The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds on Saturday June 7th 2003 as part of the symposia: ‘Sound & Vision: interpreting the visual’ which will also feature work by the composer Dr. Christopher Fox and Dr. Stephen Bury, Head of European & American Collections at the British Library (organised by Chris Taylor, Denise Raine and John McDowall. Booking is advised – contact c.a.taylor@leeds.ac.uk)

Beginning with two separate texts on the work of Gustav Metzger, one black on white, one red on white, the authors Dr. Howard Britton and Simon Morris will take it in turns to read aloud pages from their work. Using Extraction, a computer programme created by the artist Daniel Jackson, words will be randomly removed, one by one, from each author’s text. 2 versions of Extraction will be running simultaneously. One will present the words from Britton’s text, ‘Gustav Metzger: a manifesto for destruction: between two deaths’, black on red. The other will present the words from Morris’s text, ‘Beyond Representation’, red on black. These will be projected onto the wall behind Britton and Morris, side by side like facing pages of a book. In the manner of a dada poetry recital, as one author reads from their text, the other author will simultaneously read aloud the words that have been randomly removed from the other text by the Extraction programme. Like a virus, or process of contagion, the aural presentation of words from one text will increasingly cover over the aural presentation of words from the other text, until meaning is completely destroyed/disappears. Extraction will aim to remove all the words in the performers text in the same time that it will take the performers to read their texts. Extraction presents the text, without the structure of their original meaning, and imposes its own order on the authors words. As the writer William S. Burroughs said: “Language is a virus from outer space.”

Text written by Simon Morris

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Texts presented at the congress
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Beyond Representation
- Simon Morris

In spite of Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: the dematerialisation of the art object from 1966-1972, paintings and objects still fill our houses and public spaces. Material is everywhere, so an immaterial process, first publicly demonstrated in 1961 on the South Bank in London, a work that destroyed itself in the process of its own making is worthy of our serious attention and maybe closer than the rest to the point of art. Artists are, after all, fascinated by the void, the big NOTHING, as recent exhibitions on the subject testify (1). There is a lot of something in an exhibition on nothing, there is a lot written about nothing and many people will travel the distance, make the journey to view nothing. As John Cage so clearly observed in his work Silence: “Every something is an echo of nothing.” (2) So the artist Gustav Metzger is prescient to be working with an agent of destruction, which leaves us with nothing to look at. Metzger works with the immaterial and his process leads inextricably towards the void.

The space left by a destroyed artwork makes clear the true function of art which is to represent the gap between the artwork and the place it occupies. All art operates on this principle but the absence of the work, through its destruction makes this function more visible. The act of painting has been seen by some as framing an absence. The act of destroying a painting takes us straight to the void.

Art engages with the real, a space that cannot be described and to some the artist is heroic as they dare to go where the rest of us dare not go, they make a raid on the impossible. As Metzger dons his gas mask, we know we are going to go on an exciting journey with him, that will disrupt our normal set of identifications. Let’s confront the real, the name given to that which cannot be labelled or described. The psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan introduced his 3 registers; the imaginary, the symbolic and the real in the 1950′s. Speaking beings spend their lives within these three spaces. The real is far removed from anything that we conventionally attribute to reality. It is the experience of a world without language. If language names, it is all that escapes the name. It is a suitable space therefore to encounter those events that defy images and words: the holocaust, apocalypse, nuclear and atomic meltdown. In psychoanalysis, the real is the space that cannot be imagined, mapped, or symbolised. It is glimpsed in parapraxes, slips of the tongue, in wit, in bungled actions, in dreams, in all that interrupts us, disturbs us. We experience the real as a discomfort, as a lack, as non-knowledge or a nonsense. It is a space we cannot put into words and in our inability to articulate it, we have a sense of lack, an emptiness which we fill with fetishised objects. Using the imaginary and the symbolic, we try and construct something to cover over our anxiety of incompleteness, to screen ourselves from the horror of the void. We are filling the void and attempting to cover over our fears. It is our inability to engage with this space of the real that causes our suffering as human beings. We fill our museums with ‘permanent’ objects in spite of the fact that life is in flux and our presence on the earth will be fleeting and transitory. Metzger is determined in his rejection of the commodification of art, a negation of the superficial objects of desire, the capitalist candy that fills the galleries and the dealers that push it: “You stinking fucking cigar smoking bastards and you scented fashionable cows who deal in works of art.” (3) This is why the emphasis in Metzger’s practice is on process rather than any concrete products, as the methodology he employs involves the aesthetics of disappearance.

For the purpose of this paper, I would like to examine two aspects of Metzger’s practice that place us, as spectators, in a confrontation with the real. The first is the destruction of the work in the process of its own making, as evidenced in the South Bank demonstration in 1961 and the second is the Historic Photographs that were shown at the Musée d’art Moderne de la ville de Paris. So, firstly let’s turn our attention to the destruction of the surface in Metzger’s auto-destructive art. The surface of a painting is a screen, a veil, evoking a ‘beyond’ that we cannot access. The art critic Hal Foster refers to ‘visual pops’ as the bits of the real that erupt through the deadened surface of Andy Warhol’s car crashes. The theorist, Roland Barthes refers to these seeping wounds as the punctum. But in Metzger’s performances, the hydrochloric acid is applied, the veil melts, the canvas disintegrates and a gaping void remains. The artist is not just on a mission into the void as Yves Klein so aptly demonstrated with his leap into space but can through the creative act systematically and actively repeat the experience of loss. His work acts as a cathartic trigger, it is art in praxis, work aimed at making us realise the dangers we are facing and provoking us to social change.

Metzger’s work is closer to the point of art because he confronts the concept of nothingness head on. In the act of covering it over, Metzger exposes it. Kerry Brougher dealt with this in her essay (4) on Metzger when she pointed out that artists like Warhol had been working with images of destruction, but not destruction itself: “In Manifesto Blanco (1946), Lucio Fontana called for an art which would go beyond two dimensions and take into account the third and fourth dimension; his means of doing this was to slash the canvas. Like Jackson Pollock, Fontana saw painting as action, but unlike Pollock he literally broke through the canvas, overcoming abstract painting’s inability to avoid being a representation.” (5) But Metzger doesn’t just punctuate the surface; he destroys it in his acid-nylon paintings or invites the spectator to go beyond the surface in his Historic Photographs. Critical commentators (including Metzger), talk about the link between Jackson Pollock’s actions paintings and Metzger’s actions. But I think there is a more explicit link between what Pollock SAID and what Metzger DOES. In interview, Jackson Pollock responded to a question about his controversial method of painting with the following statement: ”My opinion is that new needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements. It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any past culture. Each age finds its own technique.” (6) I would contend that Metzger’s extreme practice of auto-destruction is a clearer expression of the horror of the atomic age. Jackson Pollock’s words are a better fit for Gustav Metzger’s practice.

The historic images that Metzger works with allude to something beyond themselves, something that is beyond representation or articulation in language. Andrew Wilson in his article, ‘Gustav Metzger: A Thinking against Thinking’ talks cogently about the Holocaust being beyond representation. He quotes Jean-Francois Lyotard who says the holocaust “cannot be represented without being missed, being forgotten anew, since it defies images and words.” (7) This reminds me of Christian Boltanski who has almost approached the subject through not approaching it and makes a clear case for more subtle engagements. I know Rachel Whiteread made the immaterial material for her monument in Vienna, but it still seems too heavy handed when you reflect on the words of Christian Boltanski: “Somebody asked me but I didn’t do it, in Germany to, to make a monument about the…holocaust and I said I didn’t want that because I don’t want to make monuments about the holocaust. But I told them that I think that the best solution to make a monument about the holocaust will be to make a monument very, very fragile and monuments that you have to rebuild every week. Because if you make a monument in bronze, after some time you forget completely why the monument was there but if you have to rebuild the monument every week, you must to repeat the prayer every week and you must to think about the monument and if the monument is destroyed – this time is very dangerous and for this reason I think it is much better to make very fragile monuments and not heavy monuments. I try to, to make pieces who are very open to plenty of interpretation and not to say something but to say a story and the story, everybody can listen to just what they want to understand.” (8)

Both Metzger and Boltanski share an understanding that by working with the immaterial, the fragile, the temporal, the spectator is activated as witness. As Andrew Wilson said: “…it cannot be emphasised enough that Metzger conceived of auto-destructive art as a public and often monumental art even though it was also an art that disappeared. In the event of its disappearance could be found its meaning as witness.” (9) Metzger also understands that you can’t cognitively engage with the subject through a direct engagement with images of the past so he covers them over. He screens them from our sublimated gaze. If you are going to engage with Metzger’s work and a subject that is so monumental, you are going to have to travel the distance, open up the photograph and go to a space beyond representation. Metzger does not allow the spectator to become a consumer but places them in a confrontation with history.

Looking at statements by Naum Gabo and László Moholy-Nagy, Metzger became aware of the need for movement in the work of art and the active involvement of the spectator. In his work, Metzger rejects the nominal viewer-object relations and places the spectator in an entirely different position. The method of destruction is not hidden but is made explicit within the work. The viewer has a direct relation to the dynamic process of its unproduction and to its meaning. Metzger comments directly on this in his text, auto-destructive art: “One of the greatest contributions of kinetic art is the establishment of new spectator – work relations. We can make an instructive parallel to classical physics where phenomena existed independent of the observer in time and space, and modern physics where it is accepted that the observer and his instruments are capable of changing nature in the course of the experiment, and that time and position in space of the observer vis-à-vis nature are crucial.” (10) This presents the viewer with a new relation to the work. Rather than in a classical piece where the viewer is presented with an illusion of completeness, the viewer is acknowledged as taking an active role in the production of meaning. Duchamp awarded the spectator a 50% stake in the determination of an artwork’s meaning. Our understanding of our active role in the production of meaning – the act of consumption completes production – although made explicit by Berthold Brecht in the thirties with his techniques of distanciation etc. is given a fuller definition by Roland Barthes and others in the sixties. The death of the author and the birth of the reader allow us to understand how meaning is constructed in the discourses that articulate it. Film theory has also added to our understanding of viewer-subject relations and allowed us to achieve a more complex examination of the field of representation. By acknowledging the role of the reader/viewer in the production of meaning, it was clearly acknowledged that readers changed and engagements happen at different moments in time which means that meaning is never fixed but is constantly in flux, always shifting. Film terms like suturing or interpolation examine further our relation to the text. We are woven into the fabric of the text, and must negotiate our relation to it.

In Metzger’s Historic Photographs, To Walk Into and To Crawl Into, the images are covered over with a horizontal and a vertical blanket which the spectator must choose to go under if they are to engage with the work. The work is literally ‘beyond’ the surface and Metzger invites us, the spectator, to punctuate the screen as a bodily experience and enter the zone of emptiness. Not safely distanced enough to make sense of the image through the imaginary and the symbolic, but close up, sutured into a space in-between. In a confined space, underneath the blanket and in the dark, the spectator becomes more aware of their body and their breathing as they struggle to decipher the work and are literally forced to feel their way through the image. The gap between art and life is filled by the spectator which makes the title of the exhibition Life/Live particularly resonant for Metzger’s work. His work deals with memory but collapses the distance between the present and the past. The artist is not the person with the ability to represent so-called “reality” but the one who makes our engagement with the work explicit to us. The one who removes the gap between us and the work.

Emptiness or nothingness is a created/curated space. Art evokes something that cannot be named. The point, at which art exists, is the point beyond description. I return to the spectator as the recipient and producer of meaning. How do you feel when you are confronted by the physical act of annihilation? This is where the art exists – in the relational space between the spectator and the work – in the space of transference that escapes definition. By erasing the screen or taking us to a space ‘beyond’ the screen, Metzger places us in a confrontation with the real, a space that is beyond articulation, a space where art exists.

1 see eds. Ele Carpenter & Graham Gussin, Nothing, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, 2001
2 John Cage, Lecture on Something, Silence, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, NH, p. 131
3 Gustav Metzger, Manifesto World, 7th October 1962, damaged nature, auto-destructive art, Coracle, 1996, p. 62
4 Kerry Brougher, ‘A world on the edge of destruction: setting the stage for Gustav Metzger’, in Gustav Metzger, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1998.
5 Kerry Brougher, ‘A world on the edge of destruction: setting the stage for Gustav Metzger’, in Gustav Metzger, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1998, p.15
6 Jeremy Millar, ‘Rejectamenta’, Speed-Visions of an Accelerated Age, (eds.0 Jeremy Millar & Michiel Schwarz, The Photographer’s Gallery & The Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1998, p. 106.
7 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews”, University of Minnesota Press, Mineapolis, 1990, p.26
8 Christian Boltanski in Christian Boltanski, edited and directed by Melvyn Bragg, Phaidon, ISBN 0-7148-6045-X
9 Andrew Wilson, ‘Gustav Metzger: A Thinking against Thinking’, in Gustav Metzger: Retrospectives, Museum of Modern Art Papers, vol. 3, (ed.) Ian Cole, Oxford, 1999, p.73.
10 Gustav Metzger, damaged nature, auto-destructive art, Coracle, 1996, p. 41

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Gustav Metzger: a manifesto for destruction: between two deaths.
a text by Dr. Howard Britton

Whilst preparing this presentation I came across Genet’s account of Dostoyevsky’s novel  ’The Brother’s Karamazov’ in which he says: …’it seems to me that any novel, poem, painting, or piece of music that does not self-destruct, I mean, that is not put together like one of those Aunt Sally side shows in which it is itself one of the heads to be knocked down, is a form of imposture’.

There are many psychoanalytic themes I would like to take up in Metzger’s work, for instance, the function of repression in the welding and boarding up of the Historic photographs exhibition; or Metzger’s work on the concept of equilibrium – such as Drop on Hot Plate, or the kinetic sculptures, or the unrealised project to keep a sheet of metal in a constantly floating state on the Thames – all of which can be read as questions of the stability of the ego in relation to the contradictory forces of the unconscious and superego. Instead, I intend to limit myself to a consideration of the element of destruction in Metzger’s work since, in whatever way his work is considered, there is an enduring preoccupation with the notion of destruction and specifically art forms which are auto-destructive. The name auto-destructive art rather than self-destructive, which Metzger attributes to Brian Robins, suggests a dialectical, almost Hegelian reading of Metzger’s art as something which contains within it the seeds of its own destruction – the implicit contradictions which lead to a historicist perspective, linking, via Marx, to a critique of the capitalist modes of production. Metzger’s constructions such as the thirty foot cube, or the sculpture consisting of 5 walls, precisely illustrate auto-destruction as the way in which their own internal tensions cause the destruction.

Although Metzger has a life long preoccupation with decay, it would be a mistake to emphasise this axis in isolation and whilst I will focus on auto-destructive art in order to give an ethical position to Metzger’s work, his work with auto-creative art cannot be ignored if the dialectical nature, and more especially the ethical continuum of his work, is to be understood. Around the same time that auto-destructive art is acknowledged in the DIAS event of 1966 which attracted much media attention, Metzger introduced in 1965 auto-creative art in the form of the liquid crystal light projections. Here it is possible to identify the dialectic specifically in terms of the death drive (Thanatos) on the side of auto-destructive art, and the life drive (Eros) in the form of auto-creative art.

Metzger’s work with auto-destructive art is often seen as an aesthetic of revulsion which reminds me of Kristeva’s concept of the ‘abject’, and which I interpret as an eruption of the real as beyond meaning into the symbolic register – as a kind of wit that disrupts the hegemony of meaning.  The decay involved in auto-destructive art may on the one hand be natural, such as the time based sculptural projects which would auto-destruct with the passage of time; or on the other hand the decay may be contrived through corrosive agents, such as the South Bank demonstrations in 1961 where Metzger butchered three sheets of nylon coloured red, white and black, stretched across metal frames, by spraying them with hydrochloric acid and thus causing the nylon to slowly decay over a twenty minute period. Metzger takes the normal state and reduces it to something else.

My approach to Metzger today will be developed around two concepts drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis: those of the symbolic and the real. These are difficult concepts and I am oversimplifying them, but let me define Lacan’s concept of the symbolic as the locus of meaning which always comes from the big Other – in Lacan’s paper, ‘The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire’ he refers to it as the ‘treasure house of signifiers’. This sees the entry into language as an alienating imposition which results in a fundamental splitting of the subject. The real on the other hand, is what is beyond the symbolic, in other words, beyond meaning, or beyond language – that which we could say ex-sists. It does not posit the big Other, but is more on the level of the drives and their satisfaction as jouissance. The real is exemplified in Metzger’s work by the liquid crystal projections – part of his auto-creative art – as they represent a creative zone positioned beyond meaning. Although I will not be referring to it today, these two concepts of the symbolic and real are complemented by the imaginary register and much of Lacan’s theorisation of psychoanalysis can be read as a translation of Freud into this ternary structure.

I would like to suggest that when Metzger speaks of the technological, or manufactured, it can be positioned in the symbolic register as that which is constructed as meaning. To the extent that it is based on the existence of the big Other as locus and guarantor of meaning, this could be interpreted a master position. This is the discourse of science, the hand maiden of capitalism and that which Metzger protests about as a form of oppression of the individual. This is the discourse that is bound up with production and the Hegelian master-slave struggle for prestige. What is interesting is that the Nazi death camps of the so called master race were also structured on a production line process – where the end result is death, death of the individual. Indeed, it is clear that the death camps established by the British in South Africa during the Boar War were modelled on the factory process at the height of industrialisation where the human is subsumed to the machine. The existence of the Nazi death camps provided a subjective rupture on which Metzger’s work subsequently repeats. To subvert Horowitz’s phrase, ‘War is capitalism by other means’, and Metzger’s incarceration through his anti-war protests can be seen as the logic of his work or the repetition of trauma. The work of the symbolic is a fiction in the sense that Lacan brings out in his discussion of the English Utilitarian philosopher Jeremey Bentham’s ‘The theory of Fictions’ in Séminaire VII on psychoanalysis and ethics. The symbolic functions as semblant – in other words, something that makes it work – this is how we make our lives work – my patients come because something doesn’t work in their lives, they experience an eruption of the real.

Let’s take two ideas from this: production as fiction and death as individual on the level of the signifier. So when Metzger destroys, what he is destroying is the semblant, the fiction, the meaning, the constructed meaning, which is capable of producing death and which he opposes to Nature which is on the side of the real. On this account the outcome of the production process for Metzger is installed in death. But nature is in turn the death of the symbolic, it is what cannot be symbolised, it is beyond meaning and thus forms the second destruction or death that liberates us from the signifier and the death it represents of the thing. And it is this that his destruction seeks to evoke – the beyond of meaning, the real that does not lie, the ex-istence. This incidentally is the anti-aesthetic as the anti-meaning, and why Metzger takes up in the 1990′s the role of the spectator. Capitalism produces meanings, and one of those meanings which inserts itself into Metzger on the level of his particularity, is the knowledge of the death camps. Here in the emergence of the real, of nature, we see an alternative death. ‘…life slips away, escapes all those barriers that oppose it, including precisely those that are the most essential, those that are constituted by the agency of the signifier’ (Séminaire VII, p. 314) What is significant about this second death, as Lacan explains around the figure of Antigone in Séminaire VII, is the possibility of an ethical moment as opposed to the law of the signifier and the moral order represented by Creon,. The ethical functions at the level of a particular truth (of the creator or spectator) whilst the moral is at the level of civilisation – for instance, in the concept of an aesthetic. In Metzger’s auto-destructive art we have an ethical substance associated with destruction by nature which we can install on the level of the second death. So Metzger moves between the two deaths – The object – the scientific object of death – the technological object which is the first death. And the second death which erases the first.

Metzger’s work (and life) is frequently presented from the perspective of social or political critique of capitalism. There is an issue here of Metzger as revolutionary and much has been made of the political position of Metzger and his hostility to capitalism. It is interesting to note here Metzger’s interest in psychoanalysis through the work of Freud and William Reich and their development of a psychoanalytic account of aggression in the individual and in society. However, I would like to read the revolutionary stance taken by Metzger as something more than the political overthrowing a repressive social order. This I believe is clear in his essay, ‘nature demised resurrects as environment’, where he opposes nature to environment, which seems to represent the constructed world of culture (and hence symbolic) that he wishes to overthrown in favour of nature (as a manifestation of the real).

This reading would suggest that Metzger’s revolt is at the level of language and he knows (or at least his work knows) that revolutions as usually understood – for instance, the Marxist project to overthrow capitalism – simply impose another master. According to Lacan, Marxism has not succeeded in overthrowing the imperialism of the discourse of the Master, but simply altered the distribution of its force by replacing a master signifier such as ‘individual’ in capitalism, with that of ‘worker’.  For Lacan in Séminaire XVII, revolution is posited in terms of ‘how to stop this little mechanism’ of the Master discourse, since calling for political revolution is only calling for another master. As Freud demonstrated, any mass movement is based on idealism and thus reproduces, according to Lacan, the ‘resurgence of the discourse of the master’. The idealised object functions as a master signifier, around which a new system is constituted. In other words, it is at the level of the signifier that we are alienated and which we will never evade at the level of meaning. From this perspective the surreal movement and automatic writing has real revolutionary potential – as does anything that escapes from the tyranny of the signifier and the systematic construction of reality it represents – whether that reality is Marxist or capitalist. It is possible to see Metzger’s refusing to take up the position of the master, because the only absolute master is death.

It seems to me that Metzger, both in his art and his life. is in revolt against the symbolic which he experiences as death, which in turn explains his political radicalism which – for instance, in his CND protests and his resulting imprisonment – is most active when it touches on mass destruction, that is to say, death through the logic of the signifier. So I would like to suggest that this would make Metzger an ethical revolutionary against the signifier and morality. But this is probably going further that I am qualified to go since it raises other questions about the role of the artist in the social framework, or the social function of art – and these question are too big for my small knowledge of such discussions to consider.

If this analysis is correct then it should be possible to find these trends in his current work. The newspaper which has featured throughout Metzger’s work is the model of capitalist production process: the print works typifies a system that reduces the human (the stories themselves) to a series of cogs and wheels. The consumption of the forests for the paper is an assertion of the symbolic fiction over the real. The newspaper creates the Other of meaning, the Other’s words from which a semblant that we call culture is constructed and whose logic is death. But in his auto-destructive art Metzger gives the lie to this process, to this celebration of the Master discourse. Here we have Metzger inviting us to celebrate the destruction of the symbolic in the eruption of the real. The paper floating down on the opening night into the pit is a moment of eruption when the words turn into a fluid movement and, for me, that is the moment when they leave one death and, move into the second, ethical death, through the liberating destructive act.

By looking at auto-destructive art I have suggested that Metzger’s work is informed by an ethic and that in his opposition to the signifier he is an ethical revolutionary. My suggestion then is that Metzger’s auto-destructive art is in fact concerned with what I have called a second death and that the main intention of this is to establish a freedom from the signifier. The signifier is, as Lacan says at the end of Séminaire I, the death of the thing, and Metzger restores the thing, through killing the signifier – the master – in a second death which invokes the real. Meanwhile, auto-creative art can be seen as an attempt to describe an art that is free of the signifier, free of meaning. This second axis of Metzger’s work is a logical continuation of the ethical insistence discovered in the auto-destructive art, and reminds us that Metzger is really interested in the second death as liberation from the Other. In doing so Metzger shifts the roles of artist and spectator, and frees them from aesthetic and moral norms that permit the construction of death camps.

FRENCH TEXT :

Simon Morris : philosophiquement irresponsable
Howard Britton

N.D.L.R. _ Invité à s’exprimer dans la Revue d’esthétique sur le rapport de son travail avec la philosophie, Simon Morris, dont la pratique artistique est tout à fait inhabituelle puisqu’elle est entièrement construite par autrui, a demandé au docteur Howard Britton, psychanalyste, de parler en son nom : ” À l’instar du psychanalyste assis derrière l’analysant, je m’efface pour stimuler le désir chez d’autres… “

Depuis sa naissance artistique en juillet 1990, lorsqu’il sortit à coups de scie d’une grande boîte de bois 1, l’activité de l’artiste britannique Simon Morris a consisté à explorer une série de thèmes liés les uns aux au tres : l’effacement de l’artiste de son travail, le rôle du spectateur et, ce qui est le plus important, les questions de la construction / déconstruction. En d’autres termes, il s’est impliqué lui-même dans le processus de la signification, dans la manière dont elle est créée, détruite et modifiée par le langage. Par exemple, pour son œuvre le plus implicitement heuristique, les deux volumes Interpretation 1 et Interpretation 2, récemment réalisée à New York, deux personnes travaillant dans un même domaine _ des théoriciens de la littérature pour le premier, des artistes pour le second _ écrivent chacune un article érudit, puis Simon Morris supprime le texte proprement dit mais garde les notes infra paginales, qu’il envoie alors à l’autre personne pour qu’elle reconstitue le texte. Tout au long de ce processus, chaque auteur reste inconnu de l’autre et n’a aucun contact avec lui dans sa tentative de ” reconstruire ” son texte. Chacun des deux volumes comprend cette succession de chapitres : directives, construction (par le premier auteur), effacement (par Simon Morris), reconstruction (par le second auteur). Le rôle de Simon Morris, qui consiste à ” effacer “, est alors un rôle de construction par suppression, et ces pages effacées exercent une étrange fascination puisque, en plus des notes elles-mêmes, les appels de note demeurent à leur emplacement exact. Chacune des pages de ce chapitre est donc une feuille blanche où une suite de chiffres flottent arbitrairement dans l’espace : le système de mots qui leur donne sens et leur assigne leur place est totalement absent. Chaque page renvoie ainsi à la notion freudienne d’Unheimlich, d’inquiétante étrangeté. Les deux volu mes ont fait l’objet d’une belle et soigneuse fabrication 2, et leur couverture a été conçue pour évoquer celle de l’édition anglaise des Écrits du psychanalyste Jacques Lacan, auxquels Simon Morris s’intéressait alors de plus en plus.

Cependant, au fil des trois dernières années, on observe dans le travail de Simon Morris une modification qui l’a conduit à attaquer la signification de manière plus appuyée et plus rigoureuse, et c’est là que l’on peut découvrir un rapport prééminent et insistant avec la philosophie, surtout si l’on considère la psychanalyse comme partie intégrante de la philosophie. À mesure que Simon Morris concentrait plus systématiquement son travail sur l’effacement de la signification _ par exemple, dans A Text that Destroys Itself in the Process of Its Own Reading (” Un texte qui se détruit dans le processus même de sa lecture “) et dans son grand projet en cours 3, The Royal Road to the Unconscious (” La Voie royale vers l’inconscient “) _, il s’est de plus en plus préoccupé de philosophie, en particulier Platon, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Barthes, Freud et Lacan. Bien que les étagères de Simon Morris (voyez son projet Bibliomania 4, qui témoigne de son goût pour les rayons de bibliothèque ou, plus précisément, pour les listes et catalogues de livres) soient garnies d’une série d’ouvrages généraux sur la philosophie et de volumes de philosophes, il n’y a là rien qui relève de l’érudition, au sens d’étude rigoureuse et suivie, et Simon Morris n’essaie pas davantage d’illustrer certaines doctrines philosophiques. Il a plutôt avec celles-ci un rapport éclectique, qui le conduit à employer les idées, les phrases et les mots de philosophes de manière grossière, superficielle et inappropriée.

Par exemple, le rapport de Simon Morris avec Platon s’établit principalement à travers les premiers mots du Banquet : ” Je crois être assez bien préparé à vous faire le récit que vous demandez 5. ” Pour Simon Morris, cette phrase reflète la manière dont il a travaillé à la déconstruction / construction de la signification, en particulier les constructions de textes et d’histoires. Et c’est là tout son rapport avec Platon. On peut voir un autre exemple de ce genre de rapport irresponsable avec la philosophie dans la façon dont Simon Morris essaie de désigner sa fonction dans son travail quand il tente de susciter du désir chez autrui à travers un processus de collaboration : il s’appuie souvent sur sa connaissance de la psychanalyse pour présenter son rôle d’artiste comme un résidu ou déchet de ce processus, une ” scorie “, mot qu’il tire du Séminaire XI de Lacan et de la description de la position de l’analyste 6.

En l’occurrence, Simon Morris utilise la philosophie pour énoncer ou nommer quelque chose d’un parcours qu’il a accompli ; il s’en sert comme d’une sorte de repère indiquant rétrospectivement où il se trouvait. Pour Simon Morris, la philosophie est alors un moment de coagulation : ses œuvres fondées sur ce processus sont coulées dans le moule d’un mot ou d’une phrase portant la garantie de la philosophie. À ce premier niveau, la philosophie est pour Simon Morris une sorte de capiton momentané, qui attache à son travail un signifiant presque au hasard pour inverser ou contenir le glissement du sens. Si celui-ci dérape complètement, il y a seulement aberration, mais Simon Morris prend soin de s’assurer que ce sens n’est jamais un maillon d’une chaîne de signification puisque créer une théorie philosophique cohérente ou tenir un propos philosophique conséquent contredirait la manière stricte dont il travaille contre la signification. Tel est le premier niveau auquel Simon Morris établit un rapport avec la philosophie.

Mais il y a une deuxième manière, plus utilitaire _ quoique liée à la première _, dont Simon Morris se sert de la philosophie, et qui a pour fonction de lui permettre de continuer à travailler au-delà de la limite de la signification. Ces dernières années, Simon Morris a constamment pous sé son travail de plus en plus loin dans une zone de non-signification : appelons-la, et je pense que Simon Morris commence à l’appeler aussi, après Lacan, le réel, ou ce qui existe. De manière très semblable à ce qui se passe dans une analyse 7, Simon Morris travaille avec le réel, en faisant vaciller le signifiant pour produire une jouissance 8 indépendante de l’Autre. Simon Morris utilise son activité artistique pour aller au-delà de la signification afin de jouir à l’écart de l’Autre, et c’est cette jouissance qui soutient sa position d’artiste. Mais j’affirme que la ” jouissance ” de Simon Morris vient de ce qu’il utilise la philosophie comme un moyen d’échapper à la rencontre d’une jouissance submergeante pour retourner au désir de l’Autre. L’au-delà de la signification n’est pas un lieu où il peut vivre 9 _ sauf dans les rencontres momentanées, sortes d’escarmouches, que représente son travail. Le réel dans lequel est situé son art n’est pas un lieu où la vie est possible, et la philosophie est un pont de cordes suspendu au-dessus du gouffre qui sépare les deux continents de la signification et de la non-signification : elle est ce qui lui permet de revenir à toutes jambes se mettre en sûreté. Mais la philosophie qu’il a choisie est précisément celle qui travaille aussi à la limite de la signification. Il est alors inévitable, comme je lui parle de cela, qu’il aille prendre sur son étagère le Tractatus logico-philosophicus de Wittgenstein. Mais Simon Morris ne fait pas une lecture suivie et approfondie de ce texte, il en tire plutôt une phrase : ” Tout ce qui se laisse exprimer se laisse exprimer clairement. Sur ce dont on ne peut par ler, il faut garder le silence 10. ” C’est la philosophie comme talisman, comme breloque porte-bonheur, comme un signe de croix pour chasser les vampires de la non-signification alors que l’on est précisément en train d’évoquer et d’embrasser la non-signification. Il en est de même pour l’utilisation que Simon Morris fait de Derrida, qu’il a lu de loin en loin ces deux dernières années. Ici aussi, nous ne trouvons pas Derrida directement dans son travail, mais dans sa façon de se libérer de son travail. En particulier, Simon Morris parle d’un texte de Derrida, Glas (1974), et de la collision des voix qui brouille la signification.

La logique de l’effacement de la signification opéré par Simon Morris est qu’il ne peut pas rendre une signification à cet effacement, bien qu’il ait besoin d’y penser et de travailler avec le ” rien ” qu’il évoque 11. Il n’y aurait plus de lien éthique ou logique avec la non-signification s’il se mettait à y penser en tant qu’artiste puisque, par définition, on ne peut pas penser à la non-signification. Pour éviter cette impasse, Simon Morris revient à la philosophie, et l’on peut en voir un exemple dans ses plus récents travaux en collaboration avec moi. Voyez A Text that Destroys Itself in the Process of Its Own Reading ainsi que son travail inspiré par l’artiste Pavel Büchler, The Play of the Unreadable (” Le Jeu de l’illisible “), et The Royal Road to the Unconscious : Simon Morris a intégré de la philosophie, au moyen de la présence du personnage du psychanalyste, dans la matérialité même, dans la lettre même de son travail. Dans son plus récent projet, la stimulation, comme c’est habituellement le cas chez Simon Morris, provient d’un artiste, Ed Ruscha. C’est toujours un artiste qui, d’une manière ou d’une autre, est la source d’inspiration de Simon Morris 12, ce n’est pas un philosophe. Dans The Royal Road to the Unconscious, Simon Morris a photocopié et agrandi au format A2 les sept cent trente-six pages de L’Interprétation des rêves, de Freud, puis il a travaillé avec soixante-dix étudiants qui suivent son enseignement d’histoire de l’art à découper ces pages mot à mot, au long d’un cours de trois heures, en prononçant à haute voix chacun des mots à mesure qu’ils étaient découpés dans chaque phrase. Ces trois cent trente-trois mille neuf cent soixante mots ont été ensuite recueillis dans l’ordre. Une vidéo a été tournée de cette performance, sur la bande son de laquelle le psychanalyste lira à haute voix L’Interprétation des rêves à l’envers. Puis Simon Morris jettera les mots découpés par la vitre baissée d’une voiture conduite par le psychanalyste à quelque cent quarante-cinq kilomètres-heure sur une route située à environ deux cents kilomètres au sud-ouest du divan psychanalytique de Freud à Hampstead. Une vidéo sera aussi tournée de cette éjection des mots hors de l’unité structurelle du texte de Freud, éjection qui les soumettra à un moment aléatoire. Le psychanalyste aura ensuite la responsabilité de mener un photographe enregistrer la manière dont les mots seront tombés, et ces photographies seront recueillies dans un livre 13.

Tels sont les thèmes récurrents de la déconstruction / construction de la signification : Simon Morris s’efface de son travail, et c’est par cet effacement que l’artiste s’engage dans l’au-delà de la signification. Mais ce dernier projet est en l’occurrence réalisé avec la collaboration de l’analyste : celui-ci introduit l’équivoque de signification qui unit le tout. La philosophie, représentée par le psychanalyste, devient ici la substance même de l’œuvre : ce n’est pas une œuvre inspirée par la philosophie, ce n’est pas une œuvre lue à travers la philosophie, mais c’est une œuvre qui intègre la philosophie dans sa déconstruction / construction même. Par cette collaboration, en donnant un rôle au psychanalyste dans son travail même, Simon Morris ouvre un espace pour que la signification existe au moment même où il la détruit. C’est la définition que Lacan donne du signifiant dans ” Subversion du sujet “, mais Simon Morris ne connaît pas ce texte 14. À la fin, l’analyste rend à Simon Morris la signification reconstruite par le choix des photographies. Je me demande si ce que Simon Morris es saie de dire, mais qu’il n’a pas encore articulé, c’est qu’il y a un signifiant dans le réel, qu’il y a une forme de signification dans la non-signification, et c’est ce sur quoi il essaie de travailler. Il se saisit d’un aspect du projet philosophique, avec lequel il travaille, mais pas en se plaçant sur le plan de la compréhension _ laquelle viendra plus tard, lorsque le travail sera fini. Toutefois, dans la mesure où le psychanalyste, au moins dans une orientation lacanienne, rend équivoque la signification afin d’en tirer obliquement une jouissance, Simon Morris peut avoir le beurre et l’argent du beurre, je veux dire situer son travail grâce à la philosophie précisément entre extinction et lueur persistante.

Le travail de Simon Morris est manifestement lié à la philosophie à deux niveaux. Premièrement, pour donner une signification à ce qu’il fait _ comme artiste qui réfléchit après coup sur son travail. Mais, deuxièmement, il y a une utilisation plus profonde de la matérialité de la philosophie au niveau de l’existence, qui permet à Simon Morris de continuer à travailler au-delà de la signification : il se sert de la philosophie comme d’un talisman ou d’une amulette magique qui garantit le retour à la signification, bien que par une voie différente de la première. Simon Morris est vraiment un artiste qui travaille avec un projet philosophique, qui fait de la philosophie dans le processus même de son travail, dans une action, et non dans une signification per se. Son rapport à la philosophie se situe à un niveau profond mais refuse nettement tout systématisme car celui-ci contredirait la dynamique même de son travail.

(Traduit de l’anglais par Dominique Férault.)

Notes :

1 The Box with the Sound and Vision of Its Own Unmaking (“La Boîte avec le bruit et la vue de sa demolition”).

2 Simon Morris, Forbes Morlock et Liz Dalton, Interpretation 1, York (Angleterre), Information as Material, 2002 ; Simon Morris, Tim Brennan et Cindy Smith, Interpretation 2, ibid.

3 Ce projet a été réalisé depuis la rédaction du présent article.

4 Simon Morris et Helen Sacoor, Bibliomania 1998-1999, York et Londres, 1999 ; Simon Morris, Bibliomania 2000-2001, York, Information as Material, 2002.

5 Traduction d’Émile Chambry, Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1964, p. 31. (N.D.T.)

6 Alan Sheridan, dans sa traduction en anglais, utilise le mot ” slag “, mais Simon Morris préfère le synonyme ” clinker “.

7 Simon Morris a caressé l’idée de suivre une analyse et d’en faire une partie intégrante de son travail d’artiste.

8 Dans la psychanalyse lacanienne, c’est une jouissance qui est liée aux pulsions, au corps, et qui échappe au signifiant et donc à l’Autre.

9 Bien que ce soit psychanalytiquement le lieu du psychotique qui souffre d’excès de jouissance.

10 Traduction de Gilles-Gaston Granger, Paris, Gallimard, coll. ” Bibliothèque de philosophie “, 1993, respectivement 4.116 et 7. (N.D.T.)

11 Simon Morris est un grand admirateur du Saut dans le vide fait par Yves Klein au n° 3 de la rue Gentil-Bernard, à Fontenay-aux-Roses, en octobre 1960.

12 Par exemple, Sol Lewitt et Mark Dion pour Bibliomania, Gustav Metzger pour A text that Destroys Itself in the Process of Its Own Reading, Paul McCarthy pour Spinning : De-centering the Self (“Tournoyer : dé-centrer le moi”), et Ed Ruscha pour The Royal Road to the Unconscious.

13 Ce livre est aussi paru depuis la rédaction du présent article : Simon Morris, avec la collaboration de Howard Britton, Maurizio Cagliandro, Daniel Jackson et Dallas Seitz, The Royal Road to the Unconscious, York, Information as Material, 2003.

14 Voir : Jacques Lacan, ” Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir dans l’inconscient freudien ” (1960), dans : Écrits, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1966, p. 793-827 : ” Là où c’était à l’instant même, là où c’était pour un peu, entre cette extinction qui luit encore et cette éclosion qui achoppe, je peux venir à l’être et disparaître de mon dit ” (p. 801).

ENGLISH TEXT:

Simon Morris: philosophically irresponsible
Howard Britton

Invited by Professor Anne Moeglin-Delcroix to examine for the revue d’esthétique in France the relation of his work to philosophy, Simon Morris, whose very unusual artistic practice is completely constructed by others, invited the psychoanalyst Doctor Howard Britton to speak on his behalf: “Taking the position of the psychoanalyst sitting behind the analysand, I efface myself in order to stimulate desire in others… “

Since his artistic birth in July 1990 when he sawed his way out of a large wooden box (1) the work of the young British artist Simon Morris has been involved in exploring a range of interlinked themes: the erasure of the artist from the work, the role of spectator, and most importantly, issues of construction/deconstruction. In other words, he has involved himself in the process of meaning and the way in which meaning is created, destroyed and shifted through language. For instance, Morris’s most covertly heuristic work, ‘interpretation 1′ and ‘interpretation 2′, which was recently launched in New York, involves two workers within the same field – literary theorists for the first volume, artists for the second – writing an academic article from which Morris deleted the main text but left the footnotes. The pages of footnotes were then sent to the other person to be reconstructed. Throughout the process the two contributors were unknown to each other and had no contact in their attempts to ‘reconstruct’ the text. The two books each consist of the following sequence of chapters: instructions; construction (by contributor 1); erase (by Morris himself); reconstruction (by contributor 2). This process is then repeated for the second article. Morris’s function which emerges in the act of  ’erasing’ function as one of construction through deletion and these erased pages have a strange fascination as the numbers indexing the footnotes remain in their exact position on the page in addition to the actual note itself. Each individual page in this section is thus a white sheet with a consecutive sequence of numbers arbitrarily floating in space. The system of words that gives them their meaning, which holds them in place, is entirely absent. Each of these pages resonates with Freud’s notion of das Unheimliche (the Uncanny). The books themselves are beautifully produced and are designed to evoke the cover of the English edition of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s Écrits which Morris has become increasingly preoccupied with at the time.

However, over the last three years it is possible to note a shift in Morris’s work which has led to a more sustained and rigorous attack on meaning and it is here that it is possible to discover a persistent and prevalent relation to philosophy – especially if psychoanalysis is included as a part of the philosophical project. As Morris has come to focus his work more consistently on the erasure of a meaning, as for instance, in ‘a text that destroys itself in the process of its own reading’ and in his current major project, ‘The Royal Road to the Unconscious’, he has strengthened his involvement with philosophy and in particular with the philosophers, Plato, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Barthes, Freud and Lacan. Although Morris’s bookshelves (and see his ‘bibliomania’ project for his fascination with bookshelves, or more specifically book lists) testify to a range of philosopher’s books and general guides to philosophy, there is nothing academic or rigorous in terms of a consistent study of their works, nor does Morris try to illustrate certain philosophical tenets in this relationship. Rather, Morris has an eclectical engagement with philosophers, his is a scurrilous, tangential and irrelevant use of philosophers’ ideas, phrases, and words. For instance, Morris’s engagement with Plato is predominantly through the first line of ‘The Symposium’ which reads, ‘In fact, I’m well prepared to answer your question’.

For Morris this sentence reverberates with the way that he has been working with the deconstruction/construction of meaning and in particular the constructions of texts or stories. And it is the extent of his engagement with Plato. Another example of this type of irresponsible engagement with philosophy can be seen at work when Morris is trying to articulate his position in relation to the way his work attempts to provoke desire in the other through collaboration. In these situations Morris frequently draws on his understanding of psychoanalysis by referring to his role as artist as that of ‘clinker’ or the waste product of the process – a term that he has developed from reading Lacan’s Seminar XI and the description of the position of the analyst(2).

On this level Morris uses philosophy to articulate, or name something of a journey that he has made; to act as a kind of retrospective indicator of where he has been. Morris draws from philosophy a moment of coagulation when his process based works are poured into the mould of a word or sentence drawn from the guarantee of philosophy. Philosophy on this first level is a momentary quilting point for Morris which pins an almost random signifier to his work to reverse, to contain the slide of meaning. If it slips away completely there is only madness, but Morris is careful to ensure it is never linked into a chain of meaning since to create a consistent philosophical theory or discourse would contradict the precise way that he work against meaning. This is the first level on which Morris engages with philosophy.

But there is a second and more instrumentalist approach to the way Morris uses philosophy – albeit connected with the first – and which functions to enable him to continue to work beyond the rim of meaning. In the last few years Morris has constantly pushed his work further and further into a zone of non-meaning – let us call this, and I think Morris is beginning to as well, after Lacan, the real, or that which ex-ists. Much as in analysis(3), Morris works with the real, by making the signifier vacillate in order to produce a jouissance(4) that is independent of the Other. Morris uses his art to move beyond meaning in order to enjoy away from the Other and this is the jouissance that sustains his position as the artist. But it is my contention that Morris’s ‘enjoyment’ is premised on a use of philosophy as a way of rescuing himself from the encounter with an overwhelming jouissance in order to return him to the desire of the Other. The beyond of meaning is not a place where he can live(5) – except in the momentary skirmishes represented by his work. The real where his art is located is not a place where life is possible and philosophy is the rope bridge hanging above the chasm that separates the two continents of meaning and non-meaning. It is what enables him to scurry back to safety. But the philosophy that he has chosen is precisely that which also works at the edge of meaning. It is inevitable that he takes from his shelf as I talk to him about this, Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’. But Morris does not give a sustained reading of this text, rather he will pull out a sentence ‘What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence’. This is philosophy as a talisman, as a lucky charm, as the sign of the cross to keep away the vampire of non-meaning, whilst precisely embracing, or evoking the non-meaning. The same is true of the use Morris makes of Derrida whom he has been reading on an off for the last two years. Again we do not find Derrida directly in his work, but in his way of rescuing himself from his work. In particular Morris at present talks about Derrida’s text, ‘Glas’ from 1974 and the collision of voices which confuses meaning.

The logic of Morris’s removal of meaning is that he cannot return a meaning to it, yet he needs to be able think about it and work with the ‘nothing’(6) he evokes. It would cease to be an ethical, or consistent link to non-meaning if he was to start to think about it as an artist since by definition one cannot think about non-meaning. To avoid this impasse Morris turns to philosophy and an example this can be seen in his more recent collaborative works with the psychoanalyst Howard Britton. In ‘a text that destroys itself in the process of its own reading’, in his work inspired by the artist Pavel Büchler, ‘The play of the Unreadable’ and in ‘The Royal Road to the Unconscious’, Morris has integrated philosophy, through the presence of the figure of the psychoanalyst, into the very materiality, into the very letter of his work. In this latter, current project, the stimulation as usually the case for Morris is from the artist – it is always an artist in some way or other – that is the inspiration for Morris(7), it is not a philosopher. In ‘The Royal Road to the Unconscious’, Morris has increased the size of Freud’s 736 page text, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ by photocopying it onto A4 paper and then worked with 70 students who attend his History of Art lectures to cut out each work over a three hour period speaking each word as they were cut from each sentence. These 333,960 words were then collected in page order. A video was made of this performance and the psychoanalyst will read out the ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ in reverse order as a voice over. Morris will then throw the individual words out of the window of a car driven by the psychoanalyst at 90mph along a road 122 miles south-west of Freud’s psychoanalytical couch in Hampstead. A further video will be made of the eruption of the words from the structural unity of Freud’s text as it subjects them to an aleatory moment. The psychoanalyst will then be responsible for directing a photographer to record the way in which the words have fallen and these images will be made into a book.

Here are the recurring themes of deconstruction/construction of meaning, erasure of the artist from the work that forms the basis of Morris’s engagement with the beyond of meaning. But now in addition the collaboration includes the analyst as equivocator of meaning that holds it all together. Here philosophy, in the form of the psychoanalyst, is made into the substance of the work: it is not a work inspired by philosophy, it is not a work which is read through philosophy, but it is a work which integrates philosophy into its very deconstruction/reconstruction. What Morris has done through collaboration, through giving the psychoanalyst a role in his work, is to maintain a space for meaning to exist at the very moment that he destroys it. This is the definition Lacan gives of the signifier in ‘Subversion of the subject’(8) but it is a text that is unknown to Morris. In the end, the analyst returns the reconstructed meaning to Morris through the choice of the photographs. I would speculate that what Morris is trying to say, but which he has not yet articulated, is that there is a signifier in the real, that in non-meaning there is a form of meaning and he is trying to work there. He is taking an aspect of the philosophical project and working with it, but not at the level of an understanding – which will come later when the work is finished. Yet to the extent the analyst, at least within a Lacanian orientation makes meaning equivocate, in order to derive a clinic of jouissance, Morris is able to have his cake and eat it, I mean to position his work through philosophy precisely at the point between extinction and still glowing.

Morris’s work is clearly linked to philosophy on two levels. Firstly, to give what he has done a meaning – as an artist retrospectively reflecting on his work. But secondly, there is a more profound use of the materiality of philosophy at the level of being that enables Morris to continue to work beyond meaning, using it as a talisman or a magic charm that guarantees a return to meaning, although by a different way than the one he initially took. Morris is truly an artist working with a philosophical project making philosophy into process, into an acting out, and not a meaning per se. His engagement with philosophy is at a deep level but precisely refuses to be systematic as this would contradict the very dynamic of his work.


1′the box with the sound and vision of its own unmaking’.

2The English translation by Alan Sheridan uses the word ‘slag’ but Morris prefers the synonym ‘clinker’.

3Morris has also flirted with the idea of going into analysis as part of his work.

4In Lacanian psychoanalysis this is an enjoyment associated with the drives, with the body, that escapes the signifier and hence the Other.

5Although psychoanalytically it is the place of the psychotic who suffers from too much jouissance.

6Morris is a great fan of Yves Klein’s ‘Le saut dans le Vide’, 3 rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, Octobre 1960.

7For instance, Sol Lewitt and Mark Dion for ‘bibliomania’, Gustav Metzger for ‘a text that destroys itself in the process of its own reading’, Paul McCarthy for ‘spinning: de-centering the self’, and Ed Ruscha for ‘The Royal Road to the Unconscious’.

8′There where it was just now, there where it was for a while, between an extinction that is still glowing and a birth that is retarded, ‘I’ can come into being and disappear from what I say’. (page 300)

a collaboration between Simon Morris, Dr. Howard Britton and book design by John McDowall

spinning was launched at The Royal Festival Hall in London, with an accompanying performance, as part of the small publisher’s fair organised by Martin Rogers and RGAP.
TEXT below was performed:

spinning: de-centering the self

by simon morris

“I’ve been quoted a lot as saying, “I like boring things.” Well, I said it and I meant it. But that doesn’t mean I’m bored by them. Of course, what I think is boring must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I’m just the opposite. If I’m going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don’t want it to be essentially the same-I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away. And the emptier and better you feel.” 1

“When, to excuse myself, I once remarked that I was conscientiously making an effort to keep relaxed, he replied: ‘That’s just the trouble, you make an effort to think about it. Concentrate entirely on your breathing, as if you had nothing else to do!’ It took me a considerable time before I succeeded in doing what the Master wanted. But-I succeeded. I learned to lose myself so effortlessly in the breathing that I sometimes had the feeling that I myself was not breathing but-strange as this may sound-being breathed.” 2

“I was experimenting-experimenting with the camera in the room, with the mind, with the props and the actions. I was experimentative when something seemed to happen. Then I would repeat it, refine it. The refining usually meant heightening the experience. I was interested in spinning, and I would often spin in front of the camera. I got to a point where I could spin for 30-40 minutes. I would bang my outstretched hands against the wall, that helped me from getting disorientated and dizzy. The intuitive action that I kept returning to became an involvement. I still make actions and sculpture that relate to spinning.”3

“Spinning: a space between. Lucy Irigaray notes in Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, that when her mother goes away the little girl does not do the same things as the little boy. She does not play with a string and a reel that symbolise her mother. Because she and her mother are of the same sex, her mother cannot have the object status of a reel. Instead the little girl is distressed. She plays with dolls-a different kind of object from the reel-she dances, ‘this dance is also a way for the girl to create a territory of her own in relation to her mother’. In her dance she spins around de-stabilising existing connections between herself and her place, making new ones between herself and her m(other). She creates, ‘a vital subjective space open to the cosmic maternal world, to the gods, to the present other.” 4

“In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all…” 5 “There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely it is integrated into his own experience, the greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later. This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places-the activities that are intimately associated with boredom-are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, is how today it is becoming unravelled at all its ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambience of the oldest forms of craftsmanship. The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work-the rural, the maritime, and the urban-is itself an artisan for of communication, as it were. It does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.” 6

“268. MCU of Oedipus under his wide-brimmed hat, staring ahead of him, tears pouring down his cheek. He suddenly clasps his hand to his eyes, then spins round several times. He stops, removes his hands from his eyes and continues to sob, then walks off to the right. 269. MS of a milestone at the side of the road which reads ‘Thebes’. The lower half of Oedipus’s body is seen as he walks past it in the direction of the city. 270. MS, tracking sideways with Oedipus as he walks across the barren hills, continually clasping his hands to his eyes. He halts by a milestone. 271. MCU. He puts his arm over his eyes and spins round in a circle again. He stops, looks ahead and walks on, tears pouring down his cheeks. Camera pans right as he moves away from camera and down a road into the distance.” 7

“I have nothing to say and I am saying it.” 8

“A painter seats himself before his pupils. He examines his brush and makes it slowly ready for use, carefully rubs ink, straightens the long strip of paper that lies before him on the mat, and finally, after lapsing for a while into profound concentration, in which he sits like one inviolable, he produces with rapid, absolutely sure strokes a picture which, capable of no further correction and needing none, serves the class as a model. A flower master begins the lesson by cautiously untying the bast which holds together the flowers and sprays of blossom, and laying it to one side carefully rolled up. Then he inspects the sprays one by one, picks out the best after repeated examination, cautiously bends them into a form which exactly corresponds with the role they are to play, and finally places them together in an exquisite vase. The completed picture looks just as if the Master had guessed what Nature had glimpsed in dark dreams. In both these cases-and I must confine myself to them-the Masters behave as if they were alone. They hardly condescend to give their pupils a glance, still less a word. They carry out the preliminary movements musingly and composedly, they efface themselves in the process of shaping and creating and to both the pupils and themselves it seems like a self-contained event from the first opening manoeuvres to the completed work. And indeed the whole thing has such expressive power that it effects the beholder like a picture. But why doesn’t the teacher allow these preliminaries, unavoidable though they are, to be done by an experienced pupil? Does it lend wings to his visionary and plastic powers if he rubs the ink himself, if he unties the bast so elaborately instead of cutting it and carelessly throwing it away? And what impels him to repeat this process at every single lesson, and, with the same remorseless insistence, to make his pupils copy it without the least alteration? He sticks to this traditional custom because he knows from experience that the preparations for working put him simultaneously in the right frame of mind for creating. The meditative repose in which he performs them gives him that vital loosening and equability of all his powers, that collectedness and presence of mind, without which no right work can be done. Sunk without purpose in what he is doing, he is brought face to face with that moment when the work, hovering before him in ideal lines, realizes itself as if of its own accord.” 9

“Irigaray’s notion of the daughter spinning to make room between her and her mother, resonates strongly for me. I imagine being five again spinning round and around in the middle of a room only stopping when the furniture, walls and floor begin to revolve around me, when everything around me slips out of place. For me, this is the place of prepositions: a space inhabited by angels. To travel the distance, to think between, I need to be ‘spun out of place’. But I also need to be engaged in my encounters with others. Working practices which necessitate both freedom and committed contact present opportunities for questioning my own ways of thinking and making. This creates a real space for critical and transformative dialogue where I discover parts of myself in my encounters with others.” 10

“There’s this aspect of getting into something repetitive, going with that repetition to the point of discovery, and then sort of letting go in that space.” 11

“Micha is alone in the empty room. Suddenly she begins to turn slowly; her circling accelerates, she is standing on her toes, having transformed herself into a spinning top propelled by an invisible whip. She becomes a spindle, her feet resembling a knife tip. She is lifted up off the ground, a twisting white cocoon between floor and ceiling. Suddenly she lets out a short, shrill scream and the strait-jacket bursts.” 12

“PAY ATTENTION This circular kind of story, for me, goes back to Warhol films that really have no beginning or end. You can walk in any time, leave, come back again and the figure was still asleep, or whatever. The circularity is also a lot like La Monte Young’s idea about music. The music is always going on. You just happen to come in at the part he’s playing that day. It’s a way of structuring something so that you don’t have to make a story.” 13

“I’ve been quoted a lot as saying, “I like boring things.” Well, I said it and I meant it. But that doesn’t mean I’m bored by them. Of course, what I think is boring must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they’re essentially the same plots and the same shots and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I’m just the opposite. If I’m going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don’t want it to be essentially the same-I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away. And the emptier and better you feel.” 14

1 Andy Warhol, In His Own Words: Andy Warhol, (ed.) Mike Wrenn, Omnibus Press, London, 1991, p.16

2 Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, Routledge, London, 1953, p.36

3 Paul McCarthy, ‘Kristine Stiles in conversation with Paul McCarthy’, Paul McCarthy, Phaidon, 1996, p.8

4 Jane Rendell, ‘Travelling the Distance/Encountering the Other’, Here, There, Elsewhere: Dialogues on Location and Mobility, (ed.) David Blamey, Open Editions, London, 2002, p.53

5 John Cage, ‘Four Statements on the Dance’, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, Wesleyan University Press, New Hampshire, U.S.A., 1973, p.93

6 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, Illuminations, (ed.) Hannah Arendt, Fontana Press, 1973, p.90f

7 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Oedipus Rex, Lorrimer Publishing Limited, 1971, p.124

8 John Cage, ‘Lecture on Nothing’, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage, Wesleyan University Press, New Hampshire, U.S.A., 1973, p.109

9 Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, Routledge, London, 1953, p.60-62

10 Jane Rendell, ‘Travelling the Distance/Encountering the Other’, Here, There, Elsewhere: Dialogues on Location and Mobility, (ed.) David Blamey, Open Editions, London, 2002, p.53f

11 Paul McCarthy, ‘Kristine Stiles in conversation with Paul McCarthy’, Paul McCarthy, Phaidon, 1996, p.16

12 Rebecca Horn, Rebecca Horn; Diving Through Buster’s Bedroom, (ed.) Ida Gianelli, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1990, p.98Freud

13 Bruce Nauman, ‘Pay Attention’, Bruce Nauman, (ed.) Joan Simon, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, 1994, p.80

14 Andy Warhol, In His Own Words: Andy Warhol, (ed.) Mike Wrenn, Omnibus Press, London, 1991, p.16