-You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

-I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

-These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they
are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing, or next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant they are nothing.

(Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself, 1855)

I am at a park.
I am at the queen’s park.
I am at the park of the queen,
but I don’t see the queen.
I am told she is in the palace.
I see the palace.
I see the palace garden.
I see the guards of the palace.
I see the gardeners of the palace
garden.

I see the birds in the park.
I see the flowers in the park.
I see the winter trees in the
park.
I even see the mist in the
queen’s park.

But I don’t see the queen.

–

The Queen’s Painter Prize is about obscurity.
It is about the obscurity of the queen and the obscurity of the painting, {and the relation (indexical)
between the queen and the painter}.

–

Am I the obscured writer?
Am I a Camera Obscura?
Am I in the obscured kamer?
Is the kamer obscured from the rest of the world?
Is it a hidden room?
It is.
And from the darkness of the room comes light.
And the light is right.
And ‘the right’ writes.
And ‘the wrong’ remains obscure.
The obscured writer is ‘the wrong’ writer.
And ‘the wrong’ writer is always right. Always.
The obscured writer writes
with an obscured pen.
The pen is obscure.
The whole trick of writing is how to obscure the pen.
The whole ____ of _____ is how to obscure the ___.

See?

–

VerySmallKitchen writes:  The following notes are edited from emails between Ohad and VerySmallKitchen in November 2011.

OHAD: I have been playing with a few ideas in my head about my possible contribution to VerySmallKitchen..they center around my desire to figure out/’re’-search (even though I am a bit skeptical of the term ‘research’) the space between writing and contemporary art practice (including mainly performance and photography).

(Thinking out loud)

As a starting point I would situate the discourse involving writing and art practice, on the issue of Categorization at large..I mean to say..I think both writing and art practice as fields of interest, have a kind of dialectical character which begs the question of the attraction between them. Writing as a category may refer to 2 main ‘things’ – Writing as a noun, the ‘thing’ that is written, and Writing as a verb, which designates the ‘activity’ of writing…and of course the ongoing debate regarding genres, cross-genres, etc.

Contemporary art practices are also obsessed with categorization, with art historical references, art movements, mapping-outs, delineating, etc…and also in the more traditional artistic practices the obsession with object oriented art production…hence the connection I would speculate between thing (writing) – object (art practice).

A question to myself – Is writing really a medium or is it an inscription onto a medium?

…

I’m not exactly sure I understand what it means to be an artist in residency on a website…but I could tackle that question in my writing in a kind of self reflexive manner..For each post I would write a diary entry from a very specific and limited time/space…it would then be a kind of performance which I’m writing from… image and text as two separate and yet parallel language systems…

another more interesting option I’m thinking of now is to limit the space even more.. down to the level of an object… investigating how my presence on the object influences my writing..suggesting a diffusion of the subject-object dichotomy..how my physical contact with the object influences my writing… You could see it as a taxonomy of a sort.

…

I see these texts as drafts in the sense that they are instantaneous, like a sketch, of the moment. Usually drafts would mean something on the way to somewhere else, but for me this kind of drafting is more of the present, its not leading anywhere, only to its own reason to be.

–

More about Ohad’s work is here.