The shadow of your smile

Mild und leise wie er lächelt

We face each other. I’m paraphrasing, already, but I think it was Nabokov who said something to the effect that by paying attention to an object one ceases to perceive it, seeing instead the thoughts, memories and associations that it evokes. Transparent Things through which the past shines. So yes we face each other, but something holds me back, a familiar refrain, the music of time. Let’s dance, I say. I realise I can picture the pattern on your dress but I can’t see the expression on your face, and I wonder if I was avoiding it then, or if that pattern is the only key to a moment long passed. Perhaps I’m still too busy looking at the surface of the lake. It’s difficult to fathom what the Starnberger See saw below paradigms of archaeological knowledge which would pale in the face of the pearls of wisdom that were his eyes. We face each other. Day for night, night for day, their botanic majesties recquiesce by a regally appointed tableau. I infiltrate a flat formula of formally geometric factors and contradict its incontrovertible countenance with irrational contingencies. I call this place ‘home.’ It’s not always easy to tell when you’ve arrived at where you wanted to go. Perhaps you didn’t even have a destination in mind in the first place. Let’s go for a walk I say. Where to? You say. I’ll tell you when we get there I say. Several hours later we arrive. Back home, where we started. Where is this place, home? You ask. Somewhere inside the spiralling circles of a tree trunk, you don’t know until you chop it down. The agave, for example, takes one hundred years to flower, and then it dies. This is what I mean by home. We face each other. Meanwhile, concurrently, a concatenation of consubstantial strokes connote a continuous continuity, a series of expressive gestures I could have called them, and if I were reading this text for the second time I might have considered that it is only their apparent differences that mark them out as expressive or gestural. I might have noticed that while each is the same, none are identical. Perhaps I did. Perhaps I do. Perhaps we have arrived back home where we started. Perhaps I should read the end bit again, as a gesture. Consider the word gesture. Gesture, gesture, gesture, gesture, over and over and over, it loses its readability, it loses its meaning. Or maybe it simply gains a second nature, as physically it becomes more familiar, so familiar that legibility no longer seems relevant, a subjectivity is produced where the living being exhibits in a gesture the impossibility of its being reduced to this gesture. Within the tree trunk this script, this scrivinery, refuses to speak and spells a spiralling paragon of paradoxical parallax. I follow its dance from chirograph to choreograph as it flourishes within its baroque genealogy, as it devolves into my vestige, my vivacity, my occupation in Agamben’s absence. So, you say, where are we going? I told you, for a walk. We face each other, foliage a deux, a recipe for reciprocity. But where is the paradigm? I’ll tell you when we get there. Now it could be that we are caught up in a gyratory gesticulation, and there’s an encircular logic of point and counterpoint as we trace and retrace our steps without repeat. A clock with two hands that never tells the same time twice. Again Agamben agrees a paradigm moves from singularity to singularity and that a gesture is what remains unexpressed in each expressive act, so it could be that this ‘unexpressed’ is only revealed by the movement from one petition to its identical repetition, it could be that the gesture is in the difference between the two identical singularities. Distracted by the ornamental, the decorative, the oscillating multiplicity, by the ticking of the clock, by the pattern of your dress, I lost sight of that expression. Verdantly identifying two of the same genus without envisaging the genuine articulation in the constant return from one plant to the other, rather than the echo on the wall that sets the sight unseen. What do we share but the space between us when we find ourselves touching, lost in music, two first person singularities. It’s not always easy to tell when you’ve arrived at where you wanted to go, but as I return home I think I can picture, mildly and gently, the shadow of your smile.

text by John Harrington

'head' / ' i still don't know how to dress myself and J.B. is not the ascetic woman she thought she would be but i love this hat

'Kopf' / 'ich weiss immer noch nicht wie ich mich anziehen soll und J.B. ist nicht die asketische Frau die sie dachte dass sie sein wuerde, aber ich liebe diesen Hut'

(head byManuela Gernedel/ hat by Morag Keil), ceramic, 2009

"today was a good day and i don't owe anyone anything"

my play, performed at Maximiliansforum, Munich

http://vimeo.com/30315099

everything must go,

Limazulu, London, 2010, with Morag Keil

'84 ', with Fiona MacKay and Morag Keil,Wilkinson gallery, London, 2010

Breadball, ryebread, varnish, polyfiller, gymnasticball, 2007