Poem by George Szirtes responding to Helen Rousseau's drawing

Limit Frame


Nothing is limited, there is only a frame
that is endless and not without character,
such as chequers or diapers or neat folds
and knife creases, such as one finds
on a tablecloth or a pair of pressed trousers,
say, on a gentleman of advancing years
whose last recourse is elegance, because
nothing remains, and nothing is limited.

And, say, you took graph paper, and limited
yourself to forty-five or ninety degrees because
there must, after all, be a rule to govern the years
that remain, and you hitch up your trousers
in a businesslike fashion that nobody finds
peculiar, you discover that everything folds
back on itself, even your undoubted character
which is seeking its own unlimited frame.

So there you stand in your unlimited frame
that nonetheless frames you, with a character
others perceive as character, though the folds
of the skin deepen into a condition one finds
intolerable, tucked into dogtooth-check trousers
of which this ribbon is earnest, and so the years
pile up, folded over like skin, limited because,
something must, at the last count, be limited,

because only the frame can ever be unlimited,
so one, meaning you, is still framed, because
the limit is in you not in the frame, and years
resolve down to this, to years of old trousers,
to several millennia of archaeological finds,
to knife-blades, knife-marks, elegance and knife-folds,
a timescale utterly beyond framing or character
where the only character permitted is that of the frame.
Cloudscape


Look, there are clouds - or is it waves? -
pulsing through a medium, beneath plain paper
and air, something billowing, and, breathe in,
or breathe out, they are still there, those clouds –
or are they waves? – like a gentle washing away
or washing within, such as you feel on the road
in summer when walking down towards the lake
in your head where the grass pulses like water,

and you think of the paper rising through water
within its own frame, the pulp and the lake
and a sieving out, an opening of the road
onto whiteness, that takes you back or further away
into the distance, jostling with the clouds
that are forever inventing images lodged in
vapour and mind, or just on a piece of paper
where even faint shadows resolve into waves,

and here there is nothing but paper unfolding like waves
blown by the air that moves through all paper
that is something you draw on but also draw in,
just as the mind will constantly picture in clouds
a face, a body or land that is further away
that it can imagine, in which the limits of road
meet at infinity or at the nearest unruffled lake,
though there is no such thing as wholly unruffled water,

no character, no years, nothing, only the water
that billows through paper as if it were a lake,
as if elegance was water pretending to be road,
a road on which there is no walking away
only towards the thing on the paper that is like clouds
that cannot be framed because they’re what we’re framed in,
and so depicted, as things are depicted on paper,
steadily mounting like all-but-invisible waves.

Poem by George Szirtes responding to Caroline Wright's drawing Postcard (swan)

Postcard 5: The Swan’s Reflection

Cygnus

I am calligraphy. On salt marsh, on the village pond,

I write my name in arabesques. I speak white

To the cloud and the clouded water.

I am the furthest quarter

Of the starless night

And beyond.

I am breast

And wind and moon

And the sheer distance

Of constellations, the persistence

Of desire, the nebulae of systems soon

To vanish: cry and echo, curvature and rest.

Reverse side

Call now.

The phone is on mute.

There is no speech, no language

Lodged in those empty spaces, no gauge

That can measure a distance so silent and absolute

We cannot address it in words, because we don’t know how.

Listen to the street. The voices in shops, in the bus queue,

On the platform. Something curves back at us,

Some echo, arabesque, a kind of pageant,

Like the rhythms of an imagined

Language: sign, Cygnus,

Me, you.

Hattyú*

*Hattyú (Hutt-you) is Hungarian for swan.

Writing - Phyllida Barlow

Writing work – a project with Helen Rousseau and Caroline Wright.

There is a problem between words and work – and by work I mean making art and looking at art and understanding its processes of production. To begin with, why do we call the art we make ‘work’...how would someone else who works in some other profession, or with some other activity, understand this rarefied naming of art as ‘work’?

Is the naming of ‘art’ as ‘work’ a kind of avoidance of what art is? Art’s reality as a distinctive, often elitist pursuit can be troublesome, and naming ‘art’ as ‘work’ locates it , art, as a generic activity, something quotidian and on a par with what everyone does on a daily basis. Or is it to claim and make known the endeavour which making art involves: the hard slog and struggle which so often accompanies the processes of production, the thinking and the bringing to a final realisation of an art work?

Even more confusing is the expression ‘it works’ used when looking at a work of art, or when finishing an (art) work, or during its production, and frequently when teaching in tutorials when discussing a student’s work. Does this expression –it works- have its origins, for example in the industrial revolution, in relationship to machinery, and also to craft, when it was, and is, essential that things intended for use worked efficiently, without breaking down? What do we mean when we say ‘it works’, ‘it’s working well’, ‘I like the way that works in the space’, ‘That works much better like that’, etc., etc.

The drawing and writing project proposed by the artists Helen Rousseau and Caroline Wright offers an opportunity for me to locate writing at the interface between doing, looking and words. I will be given their drawings to study. I will equate my act of looking, seeing, observing, watching, scrutinising, glimpsing – so many words to describe the act of seeing and looking – with words... the drawings will equal how I write and how I use and construct with words.

I will not write ‘about’ these drawings. That is, I am not interested in the description which might match the image. Or so I think now. Instead, I will write ....what? As yet, I do not know. Perhaps I will begin with a listing, or indexing, of my responses. I know I do not want to use the words ‘drawing’, or ‘work’, or ‘paper’, or worry about how the drawings are made, or what they are of...I want to see these drawings as if they are inseparable from my experiences of the sounds of traffic, the smell of coffee, the view from this window in front of me now, the muddle of domesticity, the demands of my work and studio activity, the interruptions and anticipations of daily life...for words to be from the sentient world around me. Phyllida Barlow. June 2009.

early visual and written material

The project is now established and material is being generated at a regular pace, both drawings and writing. The next posts include a selection/extracts of some of this material. it is not chronological but illustrates the early stages of the project.