(My Words, Other People’s words)
Works shown
Pavel Buchler’s Mission Statement
Simon Morris' The Royal Road to the Unconscoious
Kenneth Goldsmith reading a passage from Soliloquy. In ‘Sucking on Words’
Discussion
(In relation to Pavel Buchler’s Mission statement) what was it for? Is it something that he did before a project?
I don’t know. I just came across it. One day when I was researching Pavel Buchler and I thought it was interesting and quite unusual visually. I’m not sure what his intentions were.
Who is he?
He’s an artist. He won the Northern Art Prize last year.
Pavel Buchler ‘You Don’t Love Me’ 2007
That’s just a few of the people I have looked at in my research.
Do you think that?… when you know you’re being recorded you’re a bit different to usual?
I asked him that actually. I contacted him with some questions a couple of months ago and I asked him if he was aware of the recorder and if it affected the results. He said he just got used to it after a while and he didn’t think about it. He said he went on with his day to day life and recorded himself in his every day existence.
So did he record himself having sex with someone? Is that what was on the clip?
It was an argument with his partner.
She didn’t want to be on the tape, but his response was “You’re on the tape now, it’s too late ha ha”
For my final dissertation submission, I am planning to write a book that reflects on my research and experiences over the last year. Sort of like a journal mixed with zine like qualities, which I aim to bind myself.
Kenneth Goldsmith is one of the people that you really sort of look at in your work quite intently. Are there any bits of his work that you kind of thought just haven’t worked or that have made you decide to do something similar. Like the way you have based the layout of your books around his book Soliloquy. Is there anything you’ve done that you’ve not been quite satisfied with or anything that didn’t quite work?
I think the main issue I had when I first looked at Kenneth’s work is that I really liked it and at first I was like “right, I’m gonna try this and that”, but then I realised that I don’t want really want to imitate other artists. Other people do that and it can be quite successful. It’s often done as a homage to a previous work. I really wanted to use my own processes on their work. I thought I would take it a step further and after that every idea that came into my head, I’ve tried to make a book from. I’ve got really addicted to it. But I think that, although I wouldn’t go back to transcribing those sorts of things or imitating others. It was important because it led to everything I did after.
Do you think it has something to do with the role that the artist plays in these pieces and the role that the audience plays? That piece for example (clip of Soliloquy reading). It was a very different experience him doing that and him transcribing his work and like you say when you read it through it sparks off imagining what the other people were saying. You as an artist, do you prefer being on the artist’s side or the audience side, now that you’ve done both?
I’d like to say that I can be both, because I don’t generally do readings of my own books. I tend to get other people to do it because I want to be able to be artist and audience at the same time . Plus it’s a part of the participation of the work and I get to experience that. His books are not his words and my books are not mine. It’s something that has been spoken or written somewhere else, then put into a book and spoken aloud again. I don’t know whether he gets other people to read his books aloud. I should find out.
Can I see your books?
Yeah, they’re here on display. Look at whatever you like.
Those who came to my presentation two weeks ago. What did you think of the work? Not in the sense of if it was good or bad. I just want to know any thoughts that you had.
Can you go through the work you showed again?
I passed my books around the group to look at and discuss.
Have you got people to read your Morse code books aloud? Like dot – dash – dash- dot – dot etc?
That would be very interesting. I’ve not done that yet. I’ve played them though a computer. When you translate text into Morse code using a computer programme. It does take a while. It’s not a quick process, but it’s quite enjoyable. Once I get into it, I don’t want to stop and go and do something else. I’m a bit of a geek you see. It’s quite nice to go through little endurance tests. I enjoy just sitting and going through the motions and enjoying the process of making.
Where would you put your work? Do you see it in a gallery or do you only want it for this kind of format; for presentations and discussions? Where would you have it?
For the degree show, I would have it so my books were presented like books, as in on shelves. And I would have maybe a couple of them presented with other media. One of the works I am planning to show is ‘Pulp Fiction? Pulp Fiction.’ For which I would have my two books (Pulp Fiction? And Pulp Fiction.) displayed along with mp3 players with readings of the books on. I want it to be that you can read and listen to both pieces. People may not know or pick up on what the relationship is between them, but they can engage with it either way.
You could maybe leave your works in book shops and see if people will take them.
I suppose that would be a way of distributing them. I’m thinking by the time I graduate, I would like to continue producing books and distributing them in different ways.
I don’t think they seem like nice little objects you would want to leave around for people to find. They seem like research type objects. So maybe they would be better in this sort of context.
At the minute, I’m just making them for people who ask for them. My film books, which are a little more accessible are quite popular. I think these are books I would more than likely distribute. They’re more entertaining and more mainstream. It’s a bad word, but it makes sense. My ‘Arnie’ book is very popular. I’ve given away and sold 6 or 7.
If they are popular sell them.
I don’t want to do that though. I want to spread my work around, but I don’t want to make money. Not from these anyway.
You are going to hate me for asking this, but why have you looked at Tarantino?
Well because I love him and because when I first started doing this sort of work, I wanted to transcribe a celebrity talking and he is a person who I associate with talking really fast and using lots of filler words and hesitation. So I went for him, because watching Tarantino speak is quite an experience because he talks so fast and is so animated. After that I couldn’t stop. After I did that, I decided to do the same to all if his movies.
Theres a person you may want to look at called Graham Rawle. I don’t know if you’ve heard of ‘Woman’s World’. It’s a graphic novel and he cut up 1960s magazines and made an entire novel. It’s a very big book. Theres a copy in the library. He’s literally taking that language and putting it into a setting which is of that era. It’s quite interesting.
What is the Spider Man book from?
Basically I transcribed all the dialogue from a Spider Man comic and made this book from it. All the text is a similar layout to the original comic book. Not the exact layout obviously, because the book is smaller than the original comic, but it’s all in a similar position as on the pages of the original comic.
Why have you decided to use different font characteristics like bold words and words with all capital letters etc?
I didn’t want it to be exactly the same. I’ve used Garamond throughout but I wanted to keep some of the original elements such as the words in bold and words in all capitals, which are supposed to represent them being shouted by the character.
The others are so uniform, but with that one (Spider Man) it’s different. Surely in your ‘Pulp Fiction?’ book, the way people say different questions would come through in the text.
It’s because ‘Pulp Fiction?’ is produced from a script, which is designed to be used in a live action film. But with a comic book, you do have to rely on how things are written. It’s fairly different. I guess I just wanted to keep a little of the comic book’s charm, while also taking it away, by giving it a much more uniform appearance.
Why did you change the size?
I didn’t want to do it A4. I prefer making pocket sized books. A5 is the biggest I would go to and because it fits in with my other books, it’s like a little collection.
There’s something like really delicate about handmade books and they just seem so… You said you transcribed 24 hours of news. The fact that it’s now in this little book kind of makes it easily accessible.
So what shifted you from doing all ums and ahs to doing all the questions from Pulp Fiction?
I think it’s basically that I didn’t want to carry on doing the ums and ahs. I didn’t want that to be it. I wanted it – I just basically thought about all the things I associate with different films and different texts.
I then showed the group a sound clip of ‘The Trance’ by Fiona Banner.
As soon as I heard it, I realised that she had chosen these films because action films… they are very visual and it made me think about why I love Pulp Fiction so much and why people like Arnold Schwarzenegger. They like him for his one liners and I like Pulp Fiction for the dialogue, in particular the questions. I’ve decided to make another book C**ino using star symbols because of all the vulgar language used in it. I really wanted to know how many questions there are in Pulp Fiction and what they would look like on their own.
You could even do the same sort of thing with nouns or verbs or place names or weather.
Well that is one of the things that Kenneth Goldsmith did. He took a year’s worth of weather reports and produced a book from them. But yeah, I’ve come across a lot of artists that do this sort of thing, where they transcribe things and they extract things that they like out of different texts and films and conversations and I enjoy it too. I guess I’m doing it in a different way.
I kind of like it because it’s a weird taxonomy. It’s like some sort of sado-science in a way.
The only thing is, it’s really addictive. Once you start doing them. You just think “I want to know what that looks like” and then you just go and do it, but unfortunately I have lots of other things I’ve got to do. Like, I’ve decided to do my final submission for practice on context in context as. I want to have the book, but also to read it aloud. I also want a CD of it, so I can put all the works I’ve referenced on it as well.
Have you thought about? You know the way you’ve done the Spider Man book? The movie books are about copying movies, copying TV and breaking them down. Have you thought doing it to books? By taking books and taking all the ums and ahs out and taking the other words out?
There was a book a bit like that at the exhibition (Perverse Library exhibition, Shandy Hall), that just had the punctuation.
Oh yes, I can’t remember who it was by. There’s a woman called Elisabeth Clarke that does that sort of thing.
Is she the woman who came to do the workshop?
Yeah, it is. She’s in Paris at the moment, so I can’t go and interview her, but I’m going to send her some questions at some point.
I think at the beginning I was thinking of everything being small and quick projects, but I would like to start doing larger texts. I think it’s partly the fact that I wanted to have lots on the go at once because I’ve got a short attention span.
What if you like picked a word and then like if you were doing a movie or whatever you could see how many times they repeated it like ‘cause these people work a lot with like words and text and sound so maybe instead of the ums and ahs maybe you could just pick a word.
There was an artist that did that and I can’t remember her name. Candice Breitz, maybe. I’m sure it is. I would show you some stuff but I can’t remember if that is the artist I’m thinking of. She got lots of footage of people doing the same thing like slamming phones down etc. And lots of clips of the same actor doing the same thing and saying the same thing and made multi-screen works. If you looked at them online you could put your mouse over the screens and it would show you the different clips of them doing the same things in different movies. She had obviously looked for that certain thing. I was thinking about editing the movie Pulp Fiction and having all the ums and ahs or just the different questions, but I’ve edited movie footage before, so that’s going to be one of those future ventures that will take a lot longer. I’d like to look more into video, but I don’t think I’m quite ready yet.
You could do something that was like ridiculously torturous like go see every film on screen 10 at the cinema in Leeds and transcribe something from those, but you would have no choice as to what the films were so you might end up seeing the same movies over and over again.
I like that. I like leaving things to chance.
You could just be like “what’s on screen 10 today?” and book yourself in for the whole day.
I sort of like the way you bring attention to what exists. For example, there an extremely large number of questions in Pulp Fiction and we’ve all seen it but I’ve never really noticed that before. So I like the way you’re not just doing arbitrary things like not necessarily just the ums and ahs or punctuation but actually sort of doing something that draws attention to what is actually there. You’re not making something up. That’s kind of interesting.
I think I like this process because it’s leaving things to chance. I much prefer that because when you’re not thinking of… When you’re not consciously thinking about something it tends to work to work better. Things tend to work better like from chance. It’s a pain, but for this it works.
Imagine if you were able to find other films and TV shows or whatever and you’ve happened to notice some sort of peculiarity and then you could take that down. That would be kind of nice. For me, that’s my favourite, Pulp Fiction.
I would definitely like to do more things like that. I think I’ve reached the limit of transcribing filler words. I think I enjoyed doing it, but I definitely prefer doing this sort of thing, because I suddenly realised I could be doing stuff that I enjoy. Not that that wasn’t enjoyable but I thought I could really go somewhere with this. “I can watch Pulp Fiction and see how many questions there are, that would be really cool” and then my brain kind of exploded with ideas so now I have another three books on the go that are all half done. I can’t stop starting books. I can’t even finish them now.
Are you doing the answers (of Pulp Fiction) in a book as well?
Yes, it’s printed and I just need to bind it now. Me and Sarah are doing our performance on the 24th of ‘Pulp Fiction? Pulp Fiction.’ We’ve gone through it once and it works quite well. The questions don’t quite fit together with the answers, but that’s actually quite good.
I have another three A5 books that I’m gonna make in the next few weeks and they’re all going to be in A5 boxes.
Are you going to approach some galleries and maybe show them?
I don’t know. I’d love to but I’m not feeling that confident at the moment. The last time I tried to put my work in a gallery it got shot down so. That was a long time ago.
Sometimes it just depends on what it is.
The Wild Pansy Press space is sort of leaning towards artist’s book work.
Has Chris picked up on what you’re doing? Does he know about it?
Yeah I think so. I mean I don’t think that… they’re O.K but they’re not very professional though. It’s not like I’ve done a big novel or anything.
Well why do they have to be bound professionally? They seem like they kind of fit into a handmade…they’re artist’s books.
The worst people can say is no.
You’re right. I’m trying to be bold. This is my bold year.
How about the International Book Fair?
The school has a stand.
Are we going to be doing a stall for the degree show at all? Was that one of the ideas?
The Book Fair isn’t a fundraiser thin. It’s more like a thing to present your work.
People can sell work.
Last year there were people selling things and putting the money to the degree show.
You could choose whether you want to put your profit towards the degree show. I wouldn’t mind.
I think you should approach Wild Pansy Press and try and set a space at the Book Fair.
Have you spoken to Aymee Smith? She does a lot of this sort of work. You need to talk to her.
As soon as she said she was writing her MA dissertation or her next essay on the best way to read Alice in Wonderland I was like “wow, that’s amazing”.
There’s a woman who is doing a project about the typewriter. She’s making a series of books on words and text and the typewriter. I can forward the information to you. It’s like a project. The submission date is the 21st of February.
Thank you that would be great.
I’m going to turn the recorder off now.
Thank you all for coming.
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