WORDS, 1990

1. The Route You Take

The space between word and body is exquisitely small, more a sigh than a gasp: "One's feelings stir within (one's) breast, and take form in words. When words are inadequate, they are voiced in sighs. When sighs are inadequate, they are chanted..." This precious void is a site of inquiry without criteria, or a cry as if alone and naked and watching a slow somber silent dance, or allusive like an unfurling, a sexual drift. I will take pains to be clear, concise, the speaker says, because I'm digging a hole for myself; sensual speech is blurred (like perfume say), a wave on the shore, foam; then, leave the chair and walk in the cold air and wait for a little difference (perhaps guile instead of duplicity), or sleep - away from the cunning alphabet.

... the photographs- lush brown and grey, with male and female figures summoned from the spectrum, arrayed against drapes hung like memories of earth, sea, and sky, to enact their word, usually on pedestals - are records of time worked patiently through the body until inferentially, even reluctantly, they each declare themselves. The figures are effortless and resolute letters; bodies bend and lean and reach, but grace and ease, not ...

2. Lies Parallel To The Words

"Rereading these fragment from last year, I remember I felt death - a chill in my soul." The word's matter is mercury, or rather Hermes, the trickster, the slippery god who moves like the wind and disappears as soon as he is spotted, the dancer who travels ("the traveler who, wearied of travels, cannot remember which tourists' sight he has seen and whether he has been there before").  Hermes delivered Pandora's box. 

... athletism, issues from them. Sometimes caught moving, sometimes posing, they are round and fleshy not sleek and hard, modest not coy, justly private and/ or contained in their nakedness. The words they exhibit are: A, BRIDGE/BRIDE, DISPLAY, I, INFLAME, RATIO, VOID, WORDS, W /RITE. The woman with six arms raises them unmannered, her thick neck and broad face and muscular ...

3. Along These Walls

Butterflies in the stomach relate (o words yet unspoken; guilt is sometimes described as flutterings in the heart and chest. Then there is this: speech as a gift. ... legs do not conform to glamour, that which ascribes beauty to youth. And yet she 'raises hell', the heat begins near her groin and escapes from her hands: she is IN-FLAME. The woman with her hands cupped behind her ears stands lightly, as if she has come unwillingly to the podium. Now there facing the crowd though she wants and is keen to listen; or perhaps she is closing her ears, clamping them shut. She makes no attempt to show ...

4. You Slide Along

Speech is "the central operator in the power system of modern societies ... One's social reality is caught up in (the) shifting to and fro of the various aspects of the conversation at the dinner table".  The hospitality of the bowl can become the hostility of the word: the guests won't leave, the gift becomes a weapon, and a law /lore. Skin is coded by words like 'I'; the body wraps around ones it knows like the back of its hand .

... her body harshly upright, shoulders pulled back, stomach tightened. Her exceptional, ordinary face has been singled out as MIRROR. She looks out maskless and acknowledges sound, even if she can't or won't hear. In the figures a tenderness similar to Rodin's doomed reconciled statues is evident - down to their toes. They are not without tension, their ....

5. In Search

Still, I walk, talking to myself, turning and going over old ground, practising reversed order and conversation that shocks or incites me; I strive to be my own ghost writer, to bum up. "A text will not resemble what it is about, but be caused by it, the way smoke relates to fire." Or: "The skin takes on the mark of its locality, yet by participating in the expanded sensorium thaf ... is the product of the voyaging of life, the skin comes to be marked by the several voices, by the noises of the social". Or: "From birth to mourning after death, law 'takes hold of' bodies in order to make them its text''. All words are remembrance; I mean, I call upon my past to speak my present, or am I just romantic.

... delicate and vulnerable nakedness is about blood and marrow and muscle and sinew, about fluidity and dignity; a physical melancholic spectacle. Some figures shield their face - as if aghast at the look of life (or death). In each image: avoidance of the word's fact, fleeting blindness . These words should not be faithfully followed to their usual home; and yet ...

6. Of That Which Might Be Said

"He says: 'I know nothing about what you're thinking. I can't imagine you can suffer because of what I say. I don't say anything. I never tell the truth. I don't know what it is. I don't say anything to cause suffering. It's only after, when you do suffer, that I'm frightened by what I've said." The project is (or could be) to wilfully detour words, intercept their relentless march, their monumental journey, their passion to inform and control.

... their weight - here equated with the number of eyes looking out - will still mean as defined, e.g. void will mean: unoccupied, an empty space; no matter its swirling blackness, its echoing deafening voice; its desirability. The VOID Fiona Hall arranges her male figures against is malevolent, they hover near the edge, their splayed bodies renounce a last look. They will enter grimly and profanely, unheroic, respecting the power of depth. The figure most closely aligned with Rodin is that of the woman lying on her back, seemingly floating, with ...

7. Each Step Assured Or Bored Or Trembling

How to speak spacious words, irresolute ones that attend the body of the other moment to moment: the opposite of a-way-with-words; "But the effects are not located in one place or one instance, as if we could find the body located or represented in an image affecting something in the body of the viewer. Nor are they stable or uni-directional. ... A mutual violence is inscribed there .... And the viewer certainly is not in a secondary position to the work of art; because what takes place also structures the image itself. That is, iconoclasm that greets the work on the part of the spectator has already composed the image. The violence that greets it is the violence that it metes out. This active struggle is a fight to the death. One tries to overcome the other, the image overcoming the viewer, the viewer overcoming the image. Usually, we rest with the former, with the reception of the force of the image and rarely look at the return, which find its analogy in the violence of criticism." How to speak words that love the body. There is no outside, no way out, even when the letters are (em)bodied. I finish the text:" ... to discover finally that one foot has followed the other" , and I remember reading something that began 'Besides .. .' and finished' ... nothing to say', and I find it again in a notebook unreferenced: 'Besides, even if we wanted to reveal the secret we could not since there is nothing to say'. I wish I knew the next sentence. Bataille loved incompleteness: the aesthetics of formlessness: " ... come what may, the world has to be completed, although this is what's impossible and incomplete. Everything real fractures and cracks." These words sit like souvenirs on the page.

... 'bride' at her head and 'bridge' at her feet. Rodin called her 'Damned Woman' and she is said to represent a soul condemned to hell for eternity. Her face is recognized as the 'Martyr', another of his sculptured women. Just one letter makes bride bridge, or bridge bride, and yet in that incision language bares the breadth of attitude and the weight of intent; the associations engendered by the play of two isolated (away ...

8. To Discover Finally

Humpty Dumpty says to Alice: there's glory for you. Alice doesn't understand. Of course you don't, he says, till I tell you, I meant there's a nice knock down argument for you. Alice protests that glory doesn't mean that. When I use a· word, Humpty says, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less. The question is, says Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, says Humpty, which is to be master - that's all. But he has doubts. Later he says, They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs: they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs. Still, he claims mastery over words. "If, for example, he asks a word to carry a lot more meaning than it's used to, he will pay it extra and on Saturday night they \ i \ I all come around for their wages." Humpty, the egg, falls and is forever broken. His view of words shattered.

... from the pleasure and minimal safety of the sentence) words are considerable and even alarming. That she is placed at the top of the image somehow impels these words support her, prevent her descent, although she may have already landed. This labour assigned to the words is more crucial given the reference to Rodin's work. But, call it wishful thinking or naming, a search for rightness and realization cannot alter the ...

9. Only That One Foot Has Followed

There are floods of words like floods of tears. And someone says, I love you ... you know.

... actual arrangement of the image, the viewer's sense of it (and the others) is dependent upon circumstances, those close at hand. Thus speech, or here writing, enunciates disposition: "'Speech is used to give full expression to dispositions, and embellishments ... are used to give full expression to speech'. If one does not speak, who will know one's dispositions? And if one's speech is not embellished, it will not take one very far.'' The essay loves embellishment, moving this way and that, listening. But the essay also points, now and then at least. Before any concepts or constructs about meaning each figure must be seen for itself, as shaped ...

10. The Other

"All our words being polysemic to some degree, the univocity or plurivocity of our discourse is not the accomplishment of words but of contexts. In the case of univocal discourse, that is, of discourse which tolerates only one meaning, it is the task of the context to hide the semantic richness of words, to reduce it by establishing ... a frame of reference, a theme, an identical topic for all the words of the sentence." 'You know .. .': sobering thought ... Sense is left to the imagination, the imaginary, where the first act is deformation, perception becomes image: "If a present image does not recall an absent one, if an occasional image does not give rise to a swarm of aberrant images, to an explosion of images, there is no imagination.'' The imaginary is evasive:" ... we must patiently seek, in every word, the desires for otherness, for double meaning, for metaphor."

... by its own world/sound. The tactility of its metal form removed by photography is re-produced over and over in the frieze which reads: The route you take lies parallel to the words along these walls you slide along in search of that which might be said each step assured or bored or trembling to discover finally only one foot has followed the other. The letters, then words, gather and perform on the gallery wall for the viewer to pass, and remember the beginning at the end: 'Writing is a wager of presence in the semantic, imaginary and symbolic space. It prepares the advent of sense, and renders compatible the dreams and utopias that are grafted to our desires, giving them baroque forms, tragic or smiling forms. "The bowls provide no relief from language, instead they are vessels for messages, homilies, reminders, part of the surface, as they were in the past: 'Sweet, Oh! Sweet is that Sensation, Where two hearts in union meet. But the Pain of Separation, Mingles bitter with the Sweet' (1810, mug), or 'Prepare To Meet Thy God' (c. 1810, clock). The bowl suggests nourishment, a table, a vase of flowers, wine; with these bowls though one must look inside and out, follow curves. After all, language reveals, often the unexpected - rarely satisfying the quest for stability. "Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written ... , in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable." The words on the bowls lead astray, wantonly signalling textility, double reading: "it's not that I set out to disclose myself in a circuitous way, but each attempt to delve into my depths leads me further into confusion until at last I sink into a void filled with words". This endless struggle to speak oneself, to avail oneself to the other, involves deference: to defer means to postpone, but it also means to yield: to give deference to. "Deference is the means whereby one defers meaning". That is, meaning is postponed and established not by reference (by naming) but by yielding, a flexibility which respects resonances of past (tradition), present, and future: TAKE COURAGE, TAKE HEART, TAKE UMBRAGE; Your fingers slip over my mind like a stream of words, my words stream under your fingers like a slipping mind; I wander in a circle endlessly; my mind untangles these words entangle ... 

— Linda Marie Walker