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ON ARTWRITINGSo words are supposed to pin down ideas, to extract the gist of an idea into amanageable amount of words, sentences, that kind of thing, this is how we as a speciescommunicate, this is how we try to take a stab at delivering our own personalexperiencing of the world to another creature. How then can we communicate the effectthat an artwork makes on us to someone else? Is it even possible to replicate the effectthat an object makes on me to someone else?Let us take this specific room that I as the writer of this short essay am sitting in.It is, of course, debatable whether this room is a piece of art. Given that someone wentinto a studio and put down the blueprint for this particular room as part of this particular  building, envisioned it in a 2-dimensional form, in lines on a piece of paper, as a map of where the walls should be, where the door should be, where the wiring goes, where thecomputers will be situated, in short all the projected layouts for the final execution, the physical, tangible, object, the space that the end user can move through, I would classifyit as a piece of art. Someone else would classify it as functional art, as a designed piece, but I would argue that that is merely categorization. What I experience here is a man-made structure, something that was developed by someone: some object. That is art,albeit functional. The deafening sound of the air conditioner is more powerful than acinematic piece, a film, I would see in a movie, it propels my writing in a certain way.This room, which is after all an inanimate object propels my writing in certain directions,it somehow weirdly, strangely inspires me to use a certain amount of words in a certainorder, with a certain syntax.The room itself is an amassment and assemblage of a myriad of smaller units,
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floor paneling, concrete, the red-brown grid on the floor that should have some kind of function that is beyond me. There are lamps on the ceiling. Some, silver-greyish pipes,lots of tables in beige, and computer after computer, grey, silver, white, with black monitors. And some other person is sitting here, too. This is what encapsulates me as thewriter and it kind of flows into my mind while I try to type up what I see, what I hear,what I notice. I try to put it into words, fragment all these experiences down into palpablewords and sentence bits to translate to others, to replicate this moment for later use. Whensomeone reads this long after this is written it will not be the same experience, it will bealtered, I use all these little units of language to try to explain these visual elements, that Iam experiencing at this very moment, all the sounds that are so very loud andoverbearing.I am using literary art to try to replicate the visual, the audio. Obviously I amaltering what I notice at this very moment.Using language to describe the Visual is what we do as a species, that is, as Istated before, how we communicate reality, realities, that is how we decipher the world. Itis a translation of reality, it is taking some certain aspects of reality and describing them.Giuliana Bruno postulates in her book” Public Intimacy” that “Pictures in motionwrite our modern history. They can be the living, moving testimony of the effects of duration. Moving images are modernity’s ruins. They are our kinds of monuments. A Freeand Anonymous Monument.” (Page 82}. Given that her expertise and her researchinterests lie in the similarities and dissimilarities of film and architecture, it is still veryinteresting for me when comparing art and writing and trying to come to term with therelationship that exists between writing and art. Writing, is in my mind time-based in the
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same way that film is, the only way that we experience language in a coherent, logicalway, is by being exposed to it in a chronological way, word after word, sentence after sentence. That is how a text is arranged, in the same way that a film is arranged,sequential, chronological. Time is the most defining element, that makes us “move”through a text, through a film, we experience a text word by word, word after word, andwe experience a film like that, frame after frame, scene after scene. That is how the entityof the message is conveyed: word after word, frame after frame. This is so very differentthan how we move around an object d’art, how we experience an image. Which is static.But once we talk about an image we replicate the static into something time-based,superimpose a narrative, try to explain the moments. To come back to my initial idea of trying to describe this very computer room, where I am typing up this essay. I can still notget over the disparity between my experience of this room, the spatial entity, and thetranslation into words. Something will go amiss. The text can never, will never be the realthing. Which brings me to the question whether it is even useful to write about art. To talk about art. To describe art. What are the tangible benefits of writing about art? Is it todescribe how to make it? Is it like a potter describing to a student of pottery what kind of clay to use to make a vessel? To impart knowledge, to share knowledge. To instruct afuture practitioner of the craft in the intricacies of material, the teaching of the “know-how”?Actually, that is not really what constitutes art writing. Art writing is more about putting an artwork into its context vis-à-vis history and vis-a –vis theory. When BernhardTschumi analyzes his own architectural practice in relation to Derrida’s literature theory,in relation to deconstructivism, one wonders, how much this is about comparing apples
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