I have only one objective, overarching, imperative, and unequivocal: to create a book. [1]
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The physical book is a haptic seduction. Its material presence offers a fragile promise of a literal and psychic binding; an ordered narrative of a secure creative self.
 
It is (for the subject) the object that performs the act of what Lacan described in relation to the mirror phase as ‘imaginary capture’. The image I wish to capture is the image outside of myself: the image of an artist / author as an object-fetish validated by an internalized external gaze: the image that I see in the mirror of fulfillment, not that which is reflected by the mirror of lack.
 
Inside of myself there is an un-writable absence, but if I look at a book and see that I have created it, then I will know that I can create it, and that the words I cannot write can be, and have been, and therefore will be written. I attribute to the object – ‘Le petit objet d’autre’ – those qualities, which I imagine I desire, but which I fear to attribute to myself. The book is the fetish-commodity through which, by proxy, I relate my value as an artist to myself and to the world.
 
 
 
 
 
 
I knew what my book would be.
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
Everything would make sense. And all my actions would be the size of pages.
 
But the material will not obey, resisting linear narrative, insisting on an aberrant and scattered codex.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Both in the studio and in gallery, scraps and scrawls and fragments intrude upon considered aesthetics of drawings, essays and photographs, in a re-enactment of the unpredictable process of research.
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
The work that had started with a book, that was to become a book, will not be a book.
 
 
 
 
 
 



 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I might adopt the strategy of the boxed codex as used by B S Johnson for The Unfortunates, which, in theory, would seem to offer freedom and fluidity of content that the material requires, and a level of agency which a viewer / reader might require to experience it. The reader is instructed:
 
 
This novel has twenty-seven sections, temporarily held together by a removable wrapper. Apart from the first and last sections (which are marked as such) the other twenty-five sections are intended to be read in random order. If readers prefer not to accept the random order in which they receive the novel, then they may re-arrange the sections into any other random order before reading.
 
 
But I find this codex forbiddingly fixed, its impenetrability increasing with each physical encounter. Despite its intention of openness, when I hold it, I feel only a sense that it is locked.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
And so I am ambivalent. I cannot bear the thought of completion. The box or indeed any material constraint (for perhaps in a Lacanian sense all books, for me, are boxes) is too much a symbol of putting a lid on things, of putting things away. A house with bricked up windows. That which I imagine I desire is that which I most fear. That which I imagine I fear is that which I most desire.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
I will still make a book; or I will make work about becoming a book.
 
 
 
Imagine a space as a book, turning walls into indices, appendices and covers.
 
 
 
What is a book if it will not be a book?
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
//
 
 
 
 
NOTES
 
 
[1] ‘The relation to the image, will be structured by the language.’ Jacques Lacan
 
[1] ‘At the level of the scopic, we are no longer at the level of demand, but of desire.’ Jacques Lacan
 
[1] A book is a sequence of spaces – Ulises Carrión
 
[1] The laws of language are not the sequential laws of books – Ulises Carrión
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Photographs by Emma Bolland or Tom Rodgers for Milky Way You Will Hear Me Call.