It was supposed to be a writing day. I was going to start to write something about residency. It started off quite well, I did some reading and I filled in my RD9 which is an online form that records my supervision meeting. In the form I said I was about to start writing about residency. Then I went for a walk with the dog. When I came back I chopped some logs with my new axe and returned to digging up the tree stump in our new garden. If I was writing in mental jumps which I have begun to enjoy I would now shout "Shane come back - come back Shane" I would expect everyone to know that the removal of a tree stump figures centrally in the Alan Ladd cowboy Shane. On many levels I think it is rude not to know this indeed I waited until lunch when my muscles would be warm and ready before hefting my axe. How can I write for people who don't know about the tree stump scene in Shane,. If they haven't been infected by it ? Perhaps this is why I couldn't write about residency.
'Sir I was unable to complete the assignment when I realized that only me my brother and a mate I grew with with in Selby would have a clue what I am talking about - come back Shane come back.' We all know that the film is really about getting that stubborn stump out of the ground.
So at five I cannot start to write a new Phd chunk and my booster vaccine in combination with stump and rubble removal have combined to make me feel a little woosey. I did have a thought though and this blog has evolved into a place to log thoughts, it is like Bentos sketchbook something that can become anything once it's lost.
I read an interesting paper about residency by Karen Wall and Michel Lithgow. They talk and define what they identify as embedded residencies and they frame it in some Deleuzian concepts. I think they brought to text what I am thinking. The idea of nomadic thought and smooth and striated space and lines of flight basically residency as assemblage. As I said in the blog before I can't see in simple terms a residency as anything else but an assemblage of parts that become an event. Their writing was actually rather good which may be another reason why I had to go and attack my tree stump with my new axe. This was not in any way because I felt they had done what I was aiming to do better. It was more that in attempting to write this position well they proved how impossible it is to lay these thoughts onto something like the actual assemblage of a residency with words on paper and it not really saying anything, it always misses the point.
There are some simple errors in language - I am not keen on the idea of suggesting residencies are embedded as although this suggests deep connections it does also produce two different things one within the other with potential edges. It is useful when opposed to a residency that is superficial but not at all useful if we are to consider a residency as an assemblage or event, at the very least present it as singular and flat. This brings us back to removing the tree-stump which is stuck in the middle of our garden and half way through the film Shane. The tree-stump is embedded in the lawn and it can be cut out. The micillium of the Oyster mushrooms currently fruiting is now integral to the wood itself. We could say that it has embedded itself into the rotting wood but the reality is it has become one with the wood and changed it into something else, rotting but still useful.
The Deleuzian view of the artists residency in the paper is I think what Beth St Pierre would call the rush to application. It takes some concepts and applies them to the artists residency and this gets us to thiunk about things in a certain way. However that way is still a thinking of things in parts with edges. Art must holds its nomadic status and move through strited space and generate productive friction we are back to the grit in the oyster but this is not where I am. At least not today. All this said the problem is that to write in a languge of description about how concepts work within projects is the problem. The problem is not to attempt to do this better rather its about attempting to do something different.
The residency then operate as rhizome and assemblage and it can only enunciate itself within the singular event. The writing or diagramming needs to be from the middle. That's why I popped out to attack my immovable tree-stump. I don't really know how to write from the inside of something, not even my own skin.
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