ALWAYS ON MY MIND

Platform Gallery, London
17 March – 16 April 2006

Press Release
ALWAYS ON MY MIND
Susan Morris
18.03.06–16.04.06

Platform is pleased to present new work by Susan Morris.

The exhibition will include a series of screen prints based on year planners, plus etchings of wordlists derived from contemporary news reportage. Morris’s work finds echoes in 20th century fiction’s exploration of the construction of the self. The invention of the lens had brought about the discovery of moments or places within which one could, as Proust affirms, become “witness… a spectator… of one’s own absence”. This paradoxical situation was also of interest to the novelist Virginia Woolf. In The Waves, one question is repeatedly formulated: “…how describe the world seen without a self?” This question, it has been argued, was prompted by the encounter with the photograph and in response, Woolf developed a new kind of sentence construction; one in which the ‘I’ is absent.

More recently, the writer Michel Houellebecq has identified another problem for the novel; that of expressing “the progressive effacement of human relations” – a side effect, perhaps, of digitisation. As freedom of choice multiplies, “disillusionment and disenchantment rapidly take over…”. We draw a blank. Despite sticking to the genre, Houellebecq concedes that the novel form “is not conceived for depicting indifference and nothingness; a flatter, more terse and dreary discourse would need to be invented…”

Morris’s practice of image making is related to that of the writers above, both in the exploration of a flat, absent minded, style and in the subject matter. How to understand why we behave, or feel, the way we do? Where to stand in relation to others, to ‘the world’? By collating information from notes in diaries, from chequebook stubs or medical records etc., and mapping them onto year planners, Morris has produced a series of prints that represent – or track – certain personal or characteristic ‘traits’. The information gathered, reduced to a simple transcription, drawing or chart, records incidences of repetitive, cyclical and often mundane behaviour such as spending patterns, periods of hypochondria, or visits to the hairdresser. In this way the year planner-based works could be thought of as being like body casts, or auto-portraits – their patterns dictated more by unconscious behaviour than an organising, centred, self.

The resulting images also take a form that is similar to writing. The attempt is to stage an utterance, to make a kind of picture: of habit, action or speech. This pictorial writing does not so much describe as communicate, so that the image appears like a coded sign or message. Yet what does it mean? When we feel unwell, what is wrong? When we are happy, why? What governs or regulates contentment, sleeplessness, compulsive behaviour, ecstasy? Why do we suffer from heartache, anxiety or the need to write? We know how pointless it is to appeal to the body of knowledge ‘out there’ in relation to these questions. What a waste of time it is to call on those who define themselves as experts, in order to ‘read’ this trace of the body – the imprint, notation or score of its desire. Nevertheless, as Proust reminds us, “nothing stops us from continuing to light candles in church or to consult doctors…”

Platform 3 Wilkes Street, London E1 6QF

ABOUT THE WORK

The personal “art coefficient” is like an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed. [1]

YEAR PLANNER BASED WORKS: (All 2006, Screen print on paper, Edition of three.)

Information that recorded the occurrence and regularity of various activities or events in my life during the year 2005 was collated and transcribed onto commercially available year planners forming, thereby, the basis for these more abstract screen prints; or autographs, which use colours derived from the original planners. These works are the record of stuff I did not know, or perhaps did not want to know, I was doing – usually repeatedly. Gathered in the aftermath of the event(s), the behaviour or activity represented appears like a kind of shadow of the self – the wake or aftermath of the self, perhaps – cast unconsciously. The four works exhibited here are part of a larger series.

ACTIGRAPHS/ NARRATION WORKS: Intermittence and Activity Narration (2006, archive ink jet, edition of three.)

Between March 21st and 10th April 2005, whilst staying in a village in the Swiss mountains, I recorded my body’s fluctuation between movement and stillness – by wearing a small gadget on my wrist called an actiwatch. The resulting actigraph, produced by the computer software El Temps, maps out periods and degrees of activity and rest, where the horizontal bands of changing colour each represent one day. Note that on one of the days (when I was sick) I spent most of the day in bed… sure enough, the colour black, which indicates ‘little or no activity’, extends across the diagram.

Over Christmas, I wore an actiheart, a similar device but more uncomfortable to wear – and positively pornographic to look at. It recorded my heart rate (graph not in exhibition). In the ten-day period during which it was plastered to my chest, I had an asthma attack. The attack, plus the drug I had to take in order to get my breath back, accelerated my heartbeat enormously, adding a big red streak to the diagram. Whether the asthma was caused by the usual triggers: ie stress, ‘flu-like symptoms’, dust, etc., or whether it was triggered by the actiheart itself – my anxiety over taking care of it, to ensure that it would make ‘a piece of work’, I have no idea.

I was able to use the actiwatch to make two actigraphs; one for a three week period under the dull grey skies of February in London (not shown in exhibition), and one that recorded my activity in the more intense light and higher altitude of the Swiss mountains in March/April. I imagined that the graphs would look dramatically different. Alas, however, it seems that I am such a creature of habit that the charts – as ‘footprint’ of my body clock – look almost identical. All that differs is the light intensity – represented by the little yellow line on the mountain-like graph in the piece Activity Narration.

Activity Narration reproduces the diary that I was asked to keep as part of the actiwatch monitoring process. All I had to do was wear the watch and to write down on a spreadsheet provided – divided into ten minute intervals – what I was doing at the corresponding time. Obviously, it was not expected by the scientists that I should write something every ten minutes, only when something I was doing changed, but once I started the ‘performance’ I began to feel extremely ambivalent towards the contract that I had with it; being sometimes perhaps too loyal, too bound by it, and at others wanting to rebel against the feeling of continually being monitored. Was there anything that could be hidden from both the watch and the corresponding written record or diary? I’m interested in ways in which the actiwatch/actiheart projects might raise the question, not only of whether or not I was lying, but also of how much I was prepared to submit to the process, to be assimilated into it, and ‘confess all’.

In contrast to the information used to produce the year planner pieces, the data derived from these little devices is gathered automatically. Designed for scientific/ medical research into various sleep-related disorders, these instruments became an alterative way for me of marking time, and of mark making – to produce a kind of automatic writing.

CONCORDANCES: Infinite Possibilities of Happiness, and Depression: As Far As The Eye Can See

(Both 2006, etching on paper, edition of three.)

Concordances have a history dating back to the middle ages when monks would spend a lifetime writing out these alphabetically ordered lists of, in their case, every word used in the bible plus its context. This both as a way of referencing certain passages but also as a process of ‘decoding’ the text. Early computer technology also turned its attention to concordances, crunching in seconds a wide range of texts from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf and even all the Beatles songs, with the similar idea that this would reveal or uncover something hidden within conventionally ordered sentence structure. I was interested in using this process to look at current newspaper reportage and, for this exhibition, chose two days worth of ‘copy’ from a certain (former) broadsheet: the ‘happiest’ day of the year and the ‘saddest’ (as reported in the chosen paper). I made a verb list out of each – a list of possible activity, suspended in the infinite. Obviously, words that make it into printed media (or don’t) shape (or limit) our own vocabulary. But this work also draws on a tradition within fine art practice of exploring the equivalence between language and the self/body, referencing Richard Serra’s (and, more recently, Francis Alys’s) verb lists, where the rules for structuring a sentence are directly translated into those for pictorial or sculptural construction or performed action, so that the verb becomestemplate for an artwork which may be made out of sheet lead (ie ‘to fold, lift, roll, etc…’), acted out as a walk, demonstrated through a set of photographs, choice of words etc.

Note: an academic from Cardiff University calculated the saddest and happiest days of 2005.

He was commissioned by Walls ice cream.

The ‘formulas’ are:

SADDEST: 1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA.

Where:

W: Weather

D: Debt

d: Money due in January pay

T: Time since Christmas

Q: Time since failed quit attempt

M: General motivational levels

NA: The need to take action

HAPPIEST: O + (N x S) + Cpm/T + He.

Where:

O: Being outdoors and outdoor activity

N: Nature

S: Social interaction

Cpm: Childhood summers and positive memories

T: Temperature

He: Holidays and looking forward to time off.

 [1] Marcel Duchamp.