✕
As if the proposed eventfulness is more valid than what will be apparent four short calls by the comedian bird are introducing the scene:
Tuning in with the trajectories of the logic that a whirl has or has to have or always had a core or a center, plunging beneath some surface. It is like the ground had made way, like virtuality adapting an infiltrators enthusiasm to describe its compounds. Conduits become knowable being covered with silvery tracks; residues of intent where there is no other rubble. The atmosphereis generally divided between wishing to spend a day outside and gaining authority withinThe first character is patiently observing the correlation of preliminary setups and their complementary extensions. The second character is politely demanding movement through stressing tempting relevances. The third is breathing normally. The fourth is articulating lack by blinking the eye, suggesting that there is no appropriate tool to address the problem
Held in place by the correspondence intensities latent scope, wondering if the lights are signaling some kind of pledge, they might not realize that evidence for conclusive statements is fading
- Felix Riemann
I was thinking about dry honey so I asked my friend who is a Butoh dancer to be honey as subtly as she could in a chair opposite me and a man I’d never met, while I asked him to stroke the back of his head whenever he thought someone was behind him and a boy dressed as spiderman sat between us and stared
- Sarah Boulton
Chairs
Jogging briskly beats up the tempo, takes control of the beat, releases fluids, exchanges thoughts. Hold on a little. What matters at the end of the day. It’s a question, which you ask yourself, more often, more more, more over, over and over. Whenever the question appeared before you were simply another. Another other. Any other. Accidents must happen in order to justify any planned events. You reflect on a chair. You reflect on another chair. You reflect on another person on the same chair. One reflection on an other another person is that once this year has come to pass, it might all be forgotten. You get up from the chair,because the thought scares you. How come such a thought has no given body, but hurts like a double plated plate of steel thrust against your head once it suddenly hits you. At least a chair gives you the feeling of being seated. A mirror catches your reflection, but only for a brief second. The next second you chose to be somewhere else. A mirror might be a larger event than a chair, but even smaller life events are not to be taken for granted. Wishes might come true, but this depends heavily on your level of income. Low magnesium levels increase feelings of fatigue and inadequate feelings. Tried and tested on rats. Tried and failed on cats. Both species were equally hungry when the tests began. Feeling feelings. Feelings that feel like feelings increase a whole range of other feelings. You want to reflect on a chair again, but someone has removed it. You sit down and nothing and fall flat out on the ground. That’s the thing with furniture. It’s never there forever. It’s never there when you need it, it’s only there when you prefer to stand. But if you can, take a seat, by the table, and realise, there never seems to be enough chairs for those who come later, when the show is already on. In life there is only later, once the then has been done. You say your own name, again, but this time you’re alone. The passing reflection is a second too long. The door is not shut, but empty, so you jog on.
- Hanne Lippard
In the quiet coach she has reserved a seat for her rabbit and then I wet my hands so that I could put them out the wound-down window to dry them
- Sarah Boulton
[You will eat dinner from a disposable foil platter in order to avoid washing up.]
You will be faced, ostensibly, with two options, but in reality you know which one you will take. It is the same every time. It is the same every morning, when you rise, and enter the room: you know which chair you will choose to sit upon.Taut black leather, slightly aged, two button-backed cushions in a scissor-like formation. Across its cold metal frame run supportive straps like a sling: sometimes you think there is something strangely surgical about its design. You will have purchased B in anticipation of a lifestyle that you are sure you will one day lead, once you have caught up with yourself. Once you have cleared all of the overhanging tasks and got everything out of the way, and you have space to become the person you know you are. B is a chair for reclining, but it does not offer comfort. It will offer a temporary pause, poised, alert: you will be this person, who takes efficient breaks then continues to produce. The chair is beautiful, it sits in your living room unused. You will despise yourself for not using it.
[You will notice that the crumbs from your croissant, eaten two hours and twenty-six minutes previously, have spilled from the plate and are scattered across the table top. You will lick your finger and pick them up, and eat them, in order to avoid sweeping them up.]
Ergonomics versus style. Comfort versus aspiration. Touch versus Vision. The chair you will choose instead is ostensibly designed for office use: one who will be sitting at a desk for prolonged periods of time, and requires a seating arrangement that facilitates such an unnaturally sedentary lifestyle. Indeed when purchasing this chair you will, out ofembarrassment, cite a workplace environment as the reason why you require a chair designed to hold a body for such extended periods. I work from home, you will hear yourself lying. I need something that will allow me to remain stationery for long periods of time without being so aware of my body. It is an awkward phrasing, an account of embodiment too intimate to disclose to the salesperson. He, slightly shorter than you and with rusty hair oligeanous with product, will tell you that O offers the ultimate arrangement for streamlining your work place and allowing you to optimise your output, avoid repetitive strain injury or back pain, engineered to make your desk space as dynamic and productive as possible.
[You will start to grow cold in your seat through lack of movement. The thermostat is on the other side of the room. You will picture yourself rising, and turning up the temperature on its dial. Forty-three minutes later you will rise and turn up the temperature on its dial.][You will not clean the toilet: it will only be used again.]
He describes the use of this chair, this workplace, as a production line, the bodily body negated, joints and limbs and fingers rendered machine-like. But then also, in his terms, sedentary work sounds almost as an extreme sport, as though sitting still were a labour.
This is not entirely untrue. You will realise that, indeed, this unchanging position does take its toll on the body. Pressure points begin to ache, as though the bones are sagging ever downwards through sheer weight alone. You will feel the interior of your buttocks as two angular planes pushing into soft flesh, creating this dull ache whoseexact origin cannot be pinpointed. Your spine, unhealthily bent in a curve, will feel like an elastic band pulled too tight then left unshapen, unformed, uncomfortable, slack. And so you will decide to come to this shop, to purchase an ergonomically designed chair, this two-word adjective instantly belying any visual pleasure you might derive from this object.
[You will wear the same pair of underwear for three days consecutively in order to reduce your laundry load.]
It is too much to admit that you intend to be sedentary with no intention towards work. For along time prior to this purchase, you will have been deceiving yourself that this inertia is a pause. It will take an enormous amount of energy to get going again, but you will; this is not the structure of your future, this is a respite, a temporary break. Eventually, joints will creak into gear, the grinding of friction giving a fullness of resistance, but you will fight through, and movement will become less strained as your own momentum starts to carry you. The purchase of this chair, whilst an active movement, is an acknowledgement of and investment in a future of inertia. This lack of movement is a permanent state. Slovenly. Still, it is too much to purchase something that would more openly acknowledge your failure to move; the La-Z- Boy, for example, concedes that one has given up.
[You will not wash any laundry for twenty-two and a half days, until your washing basket reaches full capacity with the inclusion of a pair of black nylon tights.]
[After your laundry basket has reached full capacity with the inclusion of a pair of nylon black tights, you will continue to stuff clothing into it, compressing it ever denser, for a further three days, until you are required to remove the lid and place it on the floor next to the laundry basket.]
So you cannot tell this salesperson that you intend to sit, for extended periods of time, watching Sky News and endlessly consuming biscuits, small cakes, the occasional meal, and drink cup of tea after cup of tea until you can feel the fluid sloshing about your ankles, you will consume and consume and not produce, and you have accepted, finally, that this is to be your fate. It will be shameful enough to carry out this activity: to state, openly, that you are intending to enable this future activity through the purchase of ergonomically designed furniture is too much. This is shameful, it cannot be admitted.
[You will drink from the same mug all day, without rinsing or washing it out.]
[You will drink from the same mug the next day, without rinsing or washing it out.]
[You will drink from the same mug the day after that, without rinsing or washing it out. The boiling water of the tea provides sterilisation.]
You are being soft on yourself, and you are becoming soft.
The lifestyle you are choosing to lead will be one that cannot be seen, one that cannot be enacted or acknowledged in public, but must take place in the privacy of your own domain, this chair becoming the locus. Your body will puddle and melt in to its grooves until O, ergonomically shaped to fit you, will begin to shape your own flesh in return.
[You will observe that a brown rim of scale has built up around the inside of your bone china mug, and it is now permanently stained. There is no purpose in ever rinsing or washing it out.]
So you will tell this man that the energy you consume will be expended on some nameless work when in truth you will not work, the energy will gather and pool within you, starting to stagnate. This energy will prevent you from sleeping, but still it does not rouse you, it does not make you wish to rise from your newly purchased chair and walk, move, leave the house, walk to the shops, go and meet people, enter into the exchange of everyday life. You feel your own body is pulling you down into this chair and a surfeit of energy causes only a grogginess about the head, a fog about the eyes, a weight about the joints. A fear of leaving the house, a shame of being seen.
[When sitting in your chair you will observe two crisps on the floor. Without leaving the chair, you will reach down and pick them up, and eat them. They will be stale, with a softened texture.]
You will feel ashamed at yourself, angry at yourself, but the newly purchased O really does make your pattern of behaviour more comfortable, your lifestyle of inertia more manageable.It is a plastic frame, with a foam seat and back, covered in a polyester-blend imitation wool.The whole chair is black: a small attempt to make the object look more sleek. Black like theleather of B. It is nothing like B.
The base has five spokes then a rod up the centre: the more you look at it the more it will remind you of a starfish that has been speared. At the end of each spoke is a wheel, or castor(also black). The height of the chair can be adjusted up and down, and you can swivel 360 degrees. Movement across all planes and dimensions of space can take place without everneeding to leave the chair.
[You will unbutton the closure on your jeans for comfort. Then, later, you will change from taut denim to soft jersey cotton of pyjama trousers. You will remain in these pyjama trousers for six days.]
Each day you will rise and you will be faced, ostensibly, with a choice. O or B. You will know, from the outset, which one you shall choose.
You will look at the porridge in your cupboard and tell yourself that this shall be your breakfast on a day when you are happier, a day when you feel more balanced. Currently, distress levels run high. You will deserve the fondant fancy for breakfast, and as you shall be eating you will not sit on B because you will not want to get crumbs on it, or worse a small amount of this sticky icing. In fact, as you will be sitting on the office chair, a quarter of the
cake will crumble off, and you will attempt to flick it to the ground, unaware that there is a small amount of icing on its outer. And so in your attempt to bat away this crumb you will
mash the cake into the fabric of the chair. You will–grudgingly, loath to be interrupted this morning pleasure–rise and get a damp dishcloth, yet in the tight grain of the fabric there will
remain small traces of this sugary slime, white against the chic black. Ruefully you will acknowledge, to yourself, that such a spillage on button-backed leather could perhaps be
more easily cleaned.
The interruption of this pleasurable event will require you to begin again, that is to say, to eat another cake. Your eyes will coast over the button-backed leather and you will think that
later, you may briefly recline in this chair and read a book, a challenging yet stimulating theory text that will nourish your mind. Turning back to Sky News you will think that your
attention levels are dwindling daily, and you must implement a stricter regimen for which B will be intrinsic, essential.
[You will not wash in a shower for ten days. When you realisethat your underarms are requiring a wash, you will smear on antibacterial hand gel, then splash it off over the sink.]
You will feel the softness of the foam merging withthe softness of your flesh.
When Perseus descends to the underworld, Hades traps him there by inviting him to sit on rock: the rock begins to fuse with his buttocks and he is trapped. Sky News will run a side story of the death a man, morbidly obese, who has not moved from his chair for two years, defecating and urinating where he sat. Upon dying his body has to be torn from the seat.Supperating sores developing scabs that knit over wound, blending the fabric into their structure. You will be horrified, and immediately rise form your chair to inspect O, as though unawares the seat of your buttocks have begun to melt intothe seat of the chair. Happily you remain separate, though this story will loom in your mind for many days hence. Cheap imitation wool and flesh remain discrete, though you fear it is a matter of time.
[You will open a packet of rich tea biscuits. You will eat the entire packet of rich tea biscuits.]
Each day you will rise and you will be faced, ostensibly, with a choice. O or B. You will know, from the outset, which one you shall choose.
You are horrified at the thought of a full day in this chair: nothing but this chair and your thoughts, time dragging itself along like a dying slug. You are horrified at the thought ofeating so many little sweet things that you begin to feel nauseous, yet the thought of doing anything else is repugnant. You are horrified at the prospect of inertia, yet the prospect ofmovement is more horrific still.
[You will wear the same pair of black nylon tights for six days consecutively, in order to reduce your laundry load].
[You will throw out the par of underwear you are wearing in order to reduce your laundry load.
- Rebecca Jagoe
Snow leopard vodka and I trying to work it out. I found one in one Waitrose after a long search and it felt intended and not subject to, not object. I took a sip and went to the hills and crawled with it through the snow.
- Sarah Boulton
I was sent a photo from the inside of a forest looking out and I knew the bed was in there because the light was so strong through the trees outside, And I waited and saw from a tiny window at the very back of an aeroplane some shadowless woodbeds or woodblocks.
- Sarah Boulton
When there is an opening there is an opening
now in ten thousand off settings
in their manmade varieties
echoes only ever
of that to which she tuning reaches
the net works
we still know breathing
it called it
sprung from the ground
it was found there
it shone
it flowed
it held a (w)hole
facing sunwaysshe reaches
the new new tender(s)
there is
every likelihood
that she will get it wrong
what is a well?
what is a port?
and considering knots
and that which is neither zero nor one
watches the heron
we find a way or make one
- Lisa Radon
~
Sarah Boulton
Rebecca Jagoe
Hanne Lippard
Lisa Radon
Felix Riemann
Conceived as a foreword to both future publishing and our upcoming summer/fall programme in London, this project unfolds as a response to a series of scenarios drafted and exposed as points of departure by Jupiter Woods, implying intuitions and sensations relating to (re)engagement and navigation of interior spaces, both architectural and psychological. The practices of the invited artists often dwell on the intersection of writing and objects, so too this project distributes itself between an arrangements of texts online and sporadic interventions in our London space over a weekend. During these two days, intermittent 'events' will unfold as points of concentration, aiming to cultivate a specific sensitivity towards how aspects of an artistic practice become visible or, inversely, remain withdrawn, as well as how the space of language may translate or deliberately reject a transcription into the domain of objects.Unveiling (you embrace me, as I am) marks the beginning of Jupiter Woods’ upcoming programme, which focuses on the affective realm of the individual, while exploring the formation of interpersonal dynamics. This programme is composed of various degrees from performance-based residencies to exhibitions and events, carefully fluctuating between the public and private, displayed and withdrawn.