part one
menu	next

all i want - or "some kind of forward" i want this work to be a kind of diary, maybe… working notes i want to approach this piece of writing as working notes i want to be conscious of movement, of change openings rather than a linear progression...

openings writing as a flow i will follow them wherever they go meandering through painting, maybe… i am working with deleuze and guattari as conceptual allies i want to try and build a home for my thoughts it may be temporary from the chaos of my thought patterns my mind as a chaotic space this an opportunity to concentrate my thoughts i’m tied to a particular text for a while i’m tied to this text i have decided that this text should be for me as much as anybody else this may become tiresome in the long run in which case i will stop and go and do something else i’ll live in it for a while set up camp i don’t want this work to close anything down, to close down any of my thought paths i don’t want it to enclose creativity i want it to be creative follow broken lines open up possibilities writing as a flow i will include any ideas that i get for artworks i will call them proposals they may never manifest themselves but as long as they exist as possibilities then that is enough i want to include a series of images some will have personal invitations, others may invite themselves i want to work on something that may open onto new futures from the chaos of thought build a home at the same time allow for ‘lines of drift’ as i stroll through the gallery i will reflect on the late paintings of turner what deleuze and guattari might call ‘wondering’, acting as if nothing is self evident 1 i will wonder about these paintings my approach is chaotic i’m trying to embrace chaos and build a temporary home this is not a ‘precise activity’ 2 my approach is intuitive it also draws on the precise concepts of my friends deleuze and guattari knowledge through intuition knowledge through precise concepts pick up some of their conceptual tools build a home outside i can hear the sound of hammering build a home a steady rhythm build a home my other friend, hardy, will also be along for the ride…

many years later… september, 1959 - or "what is an encounter with people you like?" i want to use turner i want to use hardy maybe ‘use’ is the wrong word i want to make friends with them i want them to be the animals that populate me

go on a journey with them though patterns of thought an attempt to think in "strange, fluid and unusual terms" 3 beginning with the chapter from a thousand plateaus ‘1837: of the refrain’ of course we will wander elsewhere "no correct ideas, just ideas" 4 "just ideas: this is the encounter, the becoming, the theft and the nuptials, this is the ‘between-two’ of solitudes" 5 i’m reading deleuze and guattari, i’m reading hardy, i’m looking at the late turner's time is passing i want to explore jerks of thought i want to try and work with them experiment with them avoid looking for meaning i’ll take special pains not to try and comprehend them but i’ll try to trace the curve of their sound i’ll glance into the chaotic landscape of thought and build a temporary home home at a glance i’ll build many homes a whole shanty town

september 28, 1959 - or "i spoke today with john at work about fractals" i work as a gallery assistant at tate britain yesterday i was working in the clore gallery, which houses the turner collection i’m drawn to the paintings of turner i’m drawn to the last paintings he ever exhibited

i’ve been examining these paintings for years at extreme close range; gas clouds… and from a distance; nebulous, coloured mist… forms solidify then vanish what is it that draws me to these works? what is it that keeps me returning? i’m not interested in biography, i’m not interested why turner painted these works or when. this is not my concern here. as paul klee noted in his diary in october 19o9; "though it may be very enthralling to pursue problem cases like van gogh …there is far too much biography in art…i do not want to talk of the things that a number of works have in common or what distinguishes two bodies of work from one another. instead i want to take a steady look at individual cases, even if the works happen to turn out well by chance, as recently was the case with two or three of my ‘paintings’." 6 i have no interest in trying to place these paintings in any kind of context with his earlier work or slot them into some kind of linear time line, just want to look at the paintings stand in front of them and try and really think these works stand in front of these works with my conceptual allies deleuze and guattari with these late turner’s something ‘comes through for me’ and i want to explore this but i want to go beyond the notion of subjective opinion, i want to try and think beyond the unhelpful relativism of that tired question "does it work for me?" i want to think of the paintings by turner as working machines, machines at work, as ‘machinic assemblages’ that stand up on their own, that exist in themselves as living bodies what i am can become part of this assemblage, an increase in the dimensions of the multiplicity it could have been his earlier work or any one of his works that i could have plugged into but today, it is these late paintings of turner to which i am drawn maybe there is something about the fact that these are late paintings the way turner worked at this time an ‘astonishing producer’ rather than a painter turner was experimenting hazarding improvisations improvisation needs it boundaries its home an abode

sunday, october 11 - or "page 311" the refrain is comprised of three parts or movements: there is chaos order in chaos and escape paths that we might call ‘cosmic lines of flight’

i. at the beginning of this plateau we are told that a child lost in the dark gripped with fear is singing to comfort himself. this fear, this darkness, this great unknown is chaos, it is night time, it is ocean, it is white noise, it is beyond meaning. the song that the boy hums under his breath is the beginning of order in that chaos. it is the ordering of white noise, it is the gathering of random frequencies, giving them a periodic movement, vibrating the air, it is a bow being drawn across a cello, it is the lens of the eye as a focusing device to order light. we see a momentary determination of a centre. ii. this beginning of order in chaos we are to think of as a ‘home’. a circle has been drawn around a ‘fragile centre’. we can now organise this limited space. many diverse components have a part in this, landmarks and marks of all kinds the components are used to organise space forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible the interior space protects the germinal forces of a task to fulfil or a deed to do the space that has been drawn becomes a sieve or a filter we can select and extract from the chaos outside we can select frequencies from the sea white noise to order the vibrating air sonorous or vocal components are very important: a wall of sound or a wall with some sonic bricks in it. radios and televisions become walls of sound around every household that mark territories combining rhythmic vowels and consonants that correspond to the interior forces of creation as to the differentiated parts of an organism "a mistake in speed, rhythm, or harmony would be catastrophic because it would bring back the forces of chaos, destroying both creator and creation" 7 iii "finally, one opens the circle a crack, opens it all the way, lets some one in, calls someone, or else goes out oneself, launches forth" 8 we are told not to open this circle not where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another region, ‘one created by the circle itself’ "as though the circle tended on its own to open onto a future, as a function of the working forces it shelters" 9 "this time, it is in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic forces. one launches forth, hazards an improvisation. but to improvise is to join with the world, or meld with it." 1o "one ventures from home on the thread of a tune. along sonorous, gestural, motor lines that mark the customary path of a child and graft themselves onto or begin to bud ‘lines of drift’ with different loops knots, speeds, movements, gestures and sonorities" 11 we are told that these are not successive moments in an evolution. they are three aspects of a single thing: the refrain "the refrain has all three aspects, it makes them simultaneous or mixes them: sometimes, sometimes, sometimes… sometimes chaos is an immense black hole in which one endeavours to fix a fragile point as a centre. sometimes one organises around that point a calm and stable ‘pace’ (rather than a form): the black hole has become a home. sometimes one grafts onto that pace a breakaway from the black hole" 12

october 22, 1959 - or "i’m going on mi holidays" for a break before writing this piece of work i recently spent a week in dorset or ‘hardy country’.

it was a coincidence as thomas hardy was one of the writers referenced in the plateau ‘1837: of the refrain’. when i got back i decided to follow up this reference. quite by chance i had one of his books on my shelf. a short novel called 'the well-beloved'. it had been there for years, it seemed to have followed me round but i’d never read it. when i picked it up i instantly recognised the place that was illustrated on the sleeve. it was chesil beach, a bank of pebbles that links portland with the mainland. hardy tells us that portland is a "peninsula carved by time out of a single stone…" 13 i had spent time in this area during my trip. the plot of the novel unfolds between portland and london. in his introduction miller notes that as a novel "certainly it is an odd or superficially absurd one. it tells a story of a sculptor who falls in love with a girl, his cousin avice, then twenty years later with her daughter, the second avice, and then, after another interval of twenty years, with the granddaughter of the first avice, avice the third" 14 ideas from this novel began to filter through my thoughts there were harmonies with the deleuze there were harmonies with the late turner harmonies as affects: "consonance and dissonance, harmonies of tone and colour, are affects of music or painting" 15 harmonies, well-springs, chords, resonances, echoes… hardy opens up spaces and offer ways to think becoming-world and offer ways to think painting hardy also offers ways to think about ‘home’ the island has a clear physical boundary one draws a circle… the frame as the boundary a painting as an island a delineated space the island is also a home the chaos of the west sea and the unknown stretching out a chaos that threatens the home with exhaustion or intrusion the west sea turner’s painting as chaos turner as the orion nebula, the tarantula nebula, bright galactic nebulae a gas cloud "from chaos, milieus and rhythms are born…" 16

october 27, 1959 - or "what do you think of turner?" working at tate britain it is my job to be with these paintings i spend my life with them i spend hours and hours looking at them over and over again

i ask a colleague what she thinks of turner’s paintings "they would make good firewood", she replies i laugh, and agree, because of course they would they would make good firewood she didn’t say whether she liked them or not she didn’t reply "i’m trying to think whether turner works for me?" turner sometimes used his paintings to block up broken windowpanes sometimes he used his canvases as cat flaps "they would make good firewood", she replies it is no longer of any importance whether one likes a painting or not burning the canvases is a constructive suggestion i remember hearing a story about anselm kiefer piling up his paintings and burning them a rupture… a line of drift…

return - to the top