Visiting Writer - Jerome Fletcher
Arnolfini is pleased to welcome Jerome Fletcher as visiting writer for the Pale Carnage exhibition. Senior Lecturer in Writing at Dartington College of Arts, Jerome’s wide practice encompasses novels and poetry for children, digital text, live writing, artist’s books, translation, collaborative writing, performance and text/video installation. He has published a series of literary concept books on Decadence with Dedalus Books and his work has been anthologised in amongst others, Artificial Paradises: The Penguin Book of DrugWriting.
Jerome's Blog
Post 4 01 March 2007
Explication: In the gallery
Writing and Pale Carnage – the shadow text.
I am struck by the contents of one of the rooms in the show. It contains work by three artists – Cerith Wynn Evans, Athanasias Argianis and J.D. Williams. All the pieces here are to my mind predominantly writing pieces, although the impulse to oppose textual work with visual art work, forgets that written text is always visual. It requires the eye to perceive it…
[Q. What about Braille?
A. This is an oddity. My understanding is that when someone ‘reads’ Braille it is the visual cortex which is stimulated]
… it requires light to illuminate not the text itself, but the space around the text.
The Wyn Evans piece functions as the translation of a text, Victor I. Stoichita’s A Short History of the Shadow. There is a simultaneous apparition on a computer screen of a section of the book and its translation into morse code/dots and dashes, plus a simultaneous performance of the morse code by a Tom Dixon lamp set at a slight remove from the screen. In effect the Stoichita text exists as a sort of ‘shadow text’ to the performance of it by the lamp. It is literally a case of the written text being brought to light.
Opposite the Wyn Evans are two sculptural piece by Athanasios Argianis, both textual in nature. The first piece, Lyrical Machine, acts as a performance score and calls to mind an Apollinaire calligramme. Song Machine no. 5 is a six-sided, three dimensional figure with a text – I WAS SWEPT OFF HER FEET - cut out of it. Because of its position and the way it is lit, there is also a 2-d shadow of the text cast on the gallery wall. (shadow text is the only truly 2-D text as any printed text could be said to have some depth).
On the end wall of the gallery is an installation of 60 framed drawings and photopies, by J. D. Williams. Each frame contains a reworking of the same basic shape using black shoe polish on computer printout paper. The black and white (plus grey) shapes again call to mind the notion of object and shadow, but also have a hieroglyphic quality – as a series they present the possibility of a lost language now incomprehensible to us. It cannot be decoded. The basic shape which is being constantly reworked is one which Williams spotted at the edge of an Artaud drawing. The drawing itself contains the written text ‘La Bouillabaisse de formes dans la tour de Babel’. This is the text that lurks in the shadow of the Williams piece – in the same way the Ezra Pound poem via its quotation, Pale Carnage, lurks in the shadow of the show as a whole. The Artaud shadow-text draws together incomprehensibility, translation and decoding around the reference to the tower of Babel, the narrative which describes the moment when incomprehension and the need for translation entered the world.
Post 3 13 February 2007
Some synthetics:
Pale – pallid – pallor – pall – appall – appalling
(Pall is a false etymology here).
To pale is the opposite of to ‘blush’, that other all-pervasive trope of the Romantic imagination. Pallor is blood diffused rather than suffused. It writes horror and decay on the surface of the face, rather than embarrassment or shame.
And who are these three spirits who draw the me/him/poet apart?
They have a Classical, or maybe Renaissance, air about them.
Perhaps they are lent this by the olive bough.
At the same time the form of the poem looks Japanese.
Given Pound’s propensity for borrowing forms from other literatures that would make sense.
If he is responsible for introducing the haiku into English then he has a great deal more to answer for than his dubious politics.
Post 2 08 February 2007
What else this is…
Vertical bar
Manner in which a ruthless beauty loiters
Colour of the light stolen from the Sun by the Moon
Shade of the shade of Death’s charger
Complexion of a consumptive…
…The poor darling’s [Rosario’s] features have been transfigured: the lips which were so red are now tinged with violet; dark shadowy circles like blurred splashes of kohl are visible beneath her eyes and they continue to deepen; she has lost that faint ambience, reminiscent of fresh raspberries, which testifies to the health of adolescents. … but it did not take long for [the Marquise] to become alarmed once she saw that the girl’s complexion had taken on the pallor of wax,…
…[the Marquise had gone from doctor to doctor – seeking out the celebrated and the obscure, the empirically-inclined and the homeopathic – but at every turn she had been met with a sad shake of the head. Only one of them had taken it upon himself to indicate a possible remedy: Rosario must join the ranks of the consumptives who go at dawn to the abattoirs to drink lukewarm blood freshly taken from the calves which are bled to make veal.
On the first few occasions the Marquise had taken it upon herself to lead the child down into the abattoirs; but the horrid odour of the blood, the warm carcasses, the bellowing of the beasts as they came to be slaughtered, the carnage of the butchering… all that had caused her terrible anguish, and had sickened her heart. She could not stand it.
Rosario had been less intimidated. She had bravely swallowed the lukewarm blood, saying only: “ This red milk is a little thick for my taste.”
From The Glass of Blood by Jean Lorrain. Trans. By Brian Stableford. Quoted in The Decadent Cookboook by Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray (Dedalus)
Post 1: 11 January 2007
Pale Carnage. In the beginning was the exhibition title. Before we have seen anything, we have begun to read.
April
Three spirits came to me
And drew me apart
To where the olive boughs
Lay stripped upon the ground:
Pale carnage beneath bright mist.
This poem was published by Ezra Pound in November 1913. I am no Pound scholar.
Carnage has such a fleshy quality. maybe bleeding through from ‘carne’, the Spanish word for ‘meat’. It comes to sound like a conflation of ‘carna(l knowled)ge’, or as J.H. Prynne has it, ‘a bleached surrogation for sexual violence.’ Lying stripped – the aftermath of battle? Rape?
April, the title of the poem, is most famously the ‘…cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, …’ The opening line of Eliot’s The Waste Land, edited extensively by Pound himself and published in 1922. Lilac – pale purple flower. Pale carnage of olive boughs. There is some ambiguity here. ‘Pale’ also refers to a ‘stake’. Is it intended to stand as a noun here, rather than/as well as an adjective? The stripped stake?
Past Visiting Writers
Richard Dedemonici - In Between Time Fesitval of Live Art & Intrigue Feb 06
You can access Richard's blog by going to www.dedomenici.blogspot.com
An Acrobat pdf is available to download here of November and December 2005 Visiting Writer, Nicholas Johnson's Starting at Zero Review
