The measuring of object against object is in a sense pointless and profound. It calls us to question the assumptions we have around ‘stuff’ how one thing is seen as more important more profound, more useful, more reliable, worthier, more functional, more beautiful, more nostalgic, more personal, more throwaway, more kitsch, more contemporary. When stuff butts up against stuff all these object assumptions come into play. The Zizek book was equalled in weight by satsumas and shuttlecocks but they are surely less profound than his thoughts on framing, re framing, enframing on page 7 -32. Whilst not as profound but can they be seen as equal in any way? To question this means asking what an equal experience is or may be, what is significant and how do we measure. As the balancer of these objects I was immediately conscious of the choice of objects that balanced Zizeks’ book. I hadn’t chosen stones or cans of tomatoes but shuttlecocks and satsumas. This was already a narrative about play, the shuttlecocks without the racket and satsumas that became like orange ping pong balls. The objects provoke a reaction that draws from what their physicality affords. Their physicality becomes ludicrous and playful in comparison to the form of the book. But they start to illustrate the title of the book ‘Event’. This is another event or at the very least the components of one. Could the book become the racket that would hurtle the shuttlecocks away from the measurement of the scales. This is all absurd but the objects have started to gain a new significance a new potency through their affiliation with the zizek book. The colours of everything hum, connect and pull the register of thoughts and connections. The red form within the cover of the book that I assume is a phone seems phallic within the image we are presented with and the shuttlecocks lean and protrude upwards mirroring the red phone image. The materials balancing the zizek outnumber the text, pith and peel, juice and flesh, segments, rubber, feathers and plastic all sit alongside in their own balancing trough. How random was I with the choice of materials how led had I been with the image on the cover the title of the book. What event did I imagine, had I presented? I read the images and I read the objects before I had completed reading the book. I am questioning how without noticing we cannot notice. Our attention move away towards the main characters and the main stage. In the wings the props and models, setting and costumes enable the main character a context. These mountains of material identities can be ignored but they are pungent in themselves. They can take centre stage at times and by so as viewer or as participant we can suddenly see everything. We see it all differently, vitally. Consuming an experience is to allow a fully formed encounter that is sticky and cumbersome but embodied and processed. Mortimer J. Adler writes about the consumption of a book, the possession of it, he states ‘Full ownership comes only when you have made it part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself part of it is by writing in it.’ (Adler 1940, 1) Making it part of yourself is the experience of knowing and owning and whilst the writing within the book seems a light engagement he goes on to explore how this operates at a deeper experientail level. ‘These marking devices constitute the biting, chewing, and digestion of text and the book in which it is printed, a process of embodiment.’ (p122 the prosthetic pedagogy) I weighed a book on new materialism, I weighed ‘carnal knowledge’.
Someone once mentioned to me that as an avid reader they wondered how many words they had consumed, what was the weight of the experience of that said reading. Does that weight offer anything? If we know that ‘the speculative Turn- continental materialism and realism’ weighs 640g do we have a different relationship with it? The 640g certainly doesn’t allow us to access the complexities of the books contents and the meanings detailed inside. So why would we do this, what does the book become? We become more aware of its body, its form, its physical presence. Maybe the space it takes on the shelf becomes a little more relevant. We may look at it and suddenly try and gauge whether its neighbouring book is heavier than it and if it is what do we learn? Do we investigate further by looking at the number of pages and seeing how many there are… including the ones unnumbered. 6 unnumbered and 430 numbered. Why are the unnumbered pages not included they buffer the real contents the serious thought held in by 6 pages? But then there is the cover or as it can be called the jacket. The jacket. An item of clothing is introduced to our investigation. We may look up jacket in the dictionary, do we look online or in the pages of a real dictionary. We may wonder how much it weighs? The definition reads ‘an outer garment extending either to the waist or the hips, typically having sleeves and a fastening down the front.’. We may question that this jacket has no fastening at the front. We question the word ‘sleeve’. Do we think of the hips or waist of the book or disregard the human possibilities of the object in front of us? We may return to the numbers of pages and calculate the 1.55 grams per page. This may cause a problem as we don’t know the weight of the cover and that could ruin the truth of our calculation. We may pause, look back at the book flick through the pages and scan the odd word or chapter title. What do we want to do, what do we want to know? Slowly we may ease the book cover away from the spine seeing how easily it will be removed from the body of the book. As we ease the thicker card of the cover we may become aware of it having a spine. A spine that was hidden in its jacket. We can slowly feel the release from the book and by getting a scalpel we pick it away conscious of the glue and possible rip to the cover. After a few minutes, we have separated the parts and can weigh the cover. It is just under 3 grams. The book is now in two parts; the naked unclothed contents and the jacket that was once protective and authoritative that is now slightly limp. Have we uncovered something, have we ruined something? Did we gain something? We can’t weigh the gain from our small investigation in comparison to the gains of reading 430 pages. This has obvious and different rewards but the books affordance allowed a separate encounter. Badiou is interviewed within the book in question by Ben Woodard and gives his position on Speculative Realism he states ‘..that it investigates different forms of knowing and action outside empirical and transcendental norms’ (p.19) The action of weighing the book has given a very different form of knowing – a material knowledge. This is not a lesser action but it temporarily overlooked the contents within to understand the form itself, the materiality.
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Kimberley FosterKimberley's practice as an artist is pedagogical, it doesn’t just reference learning, it plays with, embodies and encourages learning at its core. The objects consider ideas of collaboration and authorship, discussions about touch and encounter, and bring into active consideration issues of learning within social and participatory practices. Archives
October 2018
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