I’ve gone back to websites for the first time in six months. I meant to take a short break and go back to writing to people, then this became new work and what follows is a description taken from ongoing work of an introduction to what I sometimes call unanswerable emails.
I'll also add new video called raindrop.
9
I wonder if writing to fellow artists and writers means anything and if it does, how to go about it.
I spent a few years trying to write after cancer treatment and Ruth’s death, then found a way into a text called talking and came up with video. One problematic and book size text led to three versions of another and sharing this work turns intimacy towards what Lacan calls extimacy. Seeing this work in a different way somehow necessitates putting it out there in digital times or what Byung-Chul Han calls infocracy and these are difficult times in so many ways. And to do this, the work has to mean something straight away... it can be a cursory note on the end of retroactive and performative text.
Writing to you is the start of a new body of work that requires some kind of exchange and here communication is the wrong word. Something happens with the work of art and various transformations bring about my needing exchange.
There is no prize at the end of it in digital times and Warhol’s fifteen second prediction has everything to do with the formation of new work. It’s not about a growing number of storage or digital storage, but about language and form. The work can be found if you look for it and an exchange is possible in saturated times. And I can only make my way from something Anna Akhmatova was doing, turning a reclusive moment into something else.
My second three texts are all called presentation and each text ripples with video. Recent video made something of Anne Carson’s barbarians or Greek sheep and current video begins with an ancient shell. It begins with a digital still and event. In it, a snail from long ago climbs on to a modern building and dies. The building is not really modern having been a shed for cattle on scary nights. And the event turns time backwards, just in time for the start of new video and a collection of emails that have something to do with unanswerable communication. I sometimes write close up to online communication or sleep and this passage and the previous one (in a text called shell) problematise writing to you. It sets the tone or says what can’t be said in the face of the monolithic nature of the work of art. It all happens at the end of a short text called shell and elaborations run backwards into a body of work.
extracts from text called shell
Christopher Sands, Angela, 20 May 2023
Lacan uses the phrase primordial monologue in his anxiety seminar and this monologue seems a long way from what characterises an exchange. I occupy somewhere and my preoccupations begins with looking and looking again at a text or video. I don’t know what I’m looking at and retroaction doesn’t imply a short hop in the direction of something shared. Something is considered and reconsidered and setting work off amounts to an invitation. It might not get anywhere and I rely on work and workers I know, but this beginning can be changing direction. I have some work and looking and looking again can be shared. It can be part of new form or formations and I think the work of art implies an invitation.
Looking back at recent work, I would say it involves working backwards somehow, stretching back from current work.