Broodthaers, Marcel. Un Coup de Dès Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard. 'Exposition Littéraire Auteur de Mallarmé' at the Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp, December 1969.

VERSUCH. Church entrance facade, Rome, 2010.

SONGS : 1. SKY/SEA/SAND, 2. SKY/ICE PLANT/GRASS (DETAIL), 1973
COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS, CHALK, PENCIL, TEXT
3.5 X 5 INCHES EACH
VARIABLE INSTALLATION SIZE

1. Sky/Sea/Sand
2. Sky/Ice Plant/Grass

JOHN BALDESSARI

Original Plan: To use certain geographical areas as visual surrogates for music staffs.

For example, one of the areas chosen was a frontal view of the ocean at the beach. Such a view was chosen in that it would easily subdivide into three zones, in this case sky, ocean, sand, and for the purpose of this piece, high, middle and low (in the sense of a musical register). Next, a person was given a simple red ball, (the musical note) and was asked to throw it high into the air (against the ocean background). With each throw, the person was asked simultaneously to shout “high”, “middle” or “low”. This notation would be the evidence of a secret melody being composed by that person.

The job of the cameraman was to freeze the ball/note in the proper zone that was called out with each throw. The melody would be limited to the number of frames in a roll of film, or multiples of that number. Thus 36, or 2 x 36, etc. The resulting photographs would then be numbered in the sequence in which they were taken, and situated on the three-line staff in its proper location.

The problems: Of course chance enters in here. A perfect answer to that problem would be the image of the ball appearing in each photo in its proper zone. This photo then would be placed on its proper line, with the line intersecting the ball. There is a small element of time entering into this musical piece in that the ball would not often be centered in the photo but would be skewed to the right or left.

So a longer note could be a photo where the ball was skewed to the left. All of the successful shots (or proper notes) are marked with a red (x). A missing photo, so noted on a blank white card and located below the staff. Photo-processor error. Duplicate photos of the same shot. Photo-processor error. The extra photos located below staff. Ball in wrong zone. The photo is located on its proper staff line, the staff line aligned with the zone boundary line; the zone falling below the staff line. These shots are bracketed.

No ball appearing in photo. The photo is located on its proper staff line, its bottom edge aligned. These shots are circled. Split zone. In these photos where the shot is clearly not of one zone, the photo is placed in the category of that zone the photo indicates by more than fifty percent. Perhaps all the problem shots can be seen as missing notes, wrong notes and similar drop-out.

Baldessari, John. Sourced from www.htvdeijsberg.nl/80-toonbeeld/john-baldessari/

"Here form IS content, content IS form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to read - or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. [Joyce's] writing is not about something; it is that something itself. . . . Here is a savage economy of hieroglyphs. Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th century printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way onto the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear."

Beckett, Samuel. (Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, (Paris, Shakespeare and Company, 1929). Reprinted in I can't go on, I'll go on: a selection from Samuel Beckett's work. Ed., Seaver, Richard (New York, Grove Press, 1976), p. 60.

"I wrote my friend a letter using a highlighting pen but he could not read it. He thought I was trying to show him certain parts of a piece of paper."

Hedburg, Mitch. http://www.tv.com/mitch-hedberg/person/15114/trivia.html

"Every time some piece of the puzzle begins to come into focus, it fades away in a blur, evaporates in a wisp of thin and dubious haze, or gets bogged down in paperwork without sense or substance. Interrogation follows interrogation, statement follows statement -- and each one brings more tiny contradictions to light which further obfuscate the ungraspable, unseeable reality which the investigators are trying so hard to reconstitute."

Perec, George. 53 Days. Eds., Harry Mathews, Harry and Roubaud, Jacques, trans., Bellos, David (Boston, Verba Mundi, 2000), p. 33.

"This was the beginning. They are self-portraits. I percieve myself as being behind a hood. In a new series of "hoods" my attempt was not really to illustrate, to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me, and rather like Isaac Babel who had joined the Cossacks, lived with them and written stories about them, I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and plot. Then I started conceiving an imaginary city being taken over by the Klan. I was like a movie director. I couldn't wait, I had hundreds of pictures in mind and when I left the studio I would make notes to myself, memos, "Put them all around the table, eating, drinking beer." Ideas and feelings kept coming so fast; I couldn't stop, I was sitting on the crest of a wave. In the picture Cellar I wondered what it would look like to have a bunch of figures, scared, diving down into a cellar. I painted it in about four hours without any erasures. And when it was done I said, "Ah ..., so that is what it would look like.""

Guston, Philip. "Philip Guston Talking" (lecture at the University of Minnesota, March 1978), in Philip Guston. Ed., McKee, Renee (London, Whitechapel, 1982), pp.49 -56

"Notes on Writing a Novel
An Essay

Plot.—Essential. The Pre-Essential. Plot might seem to be a matter of choice. It is not. The particular plot is something the novelist is driven to. It is what is left after the whittling-away of alternatives. The novelist is confronted, at a moment (or at what appears to be the moment: actually its extension may be indefinite) by the impossibility of saying what is to be said in any other way.

He is forced towards his plot. By what? By the ‘what is to be said.’ What is ‘what is to be said’? A mass of subjective matter that has accumulated—impressions received, feelings about experience, distorted results of ordinary observation, and something else—x. This matter is extra matter. It is superfluous to the non-writing life of the writer. It is luggage left in the hall between two journeys, as opposed to the perpetual furniture of rooms. It is destined to be elsewhere. It cannot move till its destination is known. Plot is the knowing of destination.

Plot is diction. Action of language, language of action.

Plot is story. It is also ‘a story’ in the nursery sense = lie. The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie.

Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable."

Bowen, Elizabeth. Notes on Writing a Novel (Orion, II, 1945), p. 18

Marcel, Yvonne and Magdeleine Duchamp. Erratum Musical, (the Green Box, 1934)

"My only thought during the editing was that certain things existed which had been filmed, that some film existed and that editing consisted in knowing not what you would like to have said but what the film itself said, which might bear no relation to what you had planned. Editing is seeking the affinities which come to exist between those various moments in film, which exist completely on their own. The fact that at one time there was a camera in front of some people, which made them act in a certain way, and everything they may have thought or said or done at that time no longer has any importance. It is dead and gone; the only thing that counts is what remains, and what remains is a crystallization of it, which is the rushes. And I never tire of looking at the rushes; I can spend days and days with them before I start to edit, and the first splice always feels like a sacrilege. Because we are doing them violence in forcing them to be set out in one order rather than another. That's also why I like to take a very long time editing so that there is time to go round and round it and to go back to the shots which have been cut, the re-takes, the out-takes, and to try to understand what they have to say as well. It's the moment when you pass from the stage of raw recorded reality into the dimensions of a film: that's the point where you have the greatest responsibility, because that is when the film -- whether you like it or not -- is going to start to 'say' something. But it, itself, must say it, not me nor anyone else."

Rivette, Jacques, 'Time Overflowing'. Interviewed by Aumont, Jacques, Comolli, Jean-Louis, Jean Narboni, Jean and Pierre, Sylvie. Trans. Amy Gateff. Cahiers du Cinema 204, (July 27, 1968).

"Note for Performance

For the theater, a single set consisting of the hotel dining room and grounds outside, separated by a window that can be raised and lowered.

An abstract decor would be best.

The whole depth of the stage should be used. A plain tarpaulin could represent the forest.

No attempt should be made to represent the tennis courts. Only the sound of balls.

No need for any people but the main characters. The others can be suggested by the light falling on various objects: chaise-longues in a circle, or separate, facing each other, empty. In the dining room, white cloths on the tables supposed to be "occupied."

The music at the end is fugue no. 15 (in some recordings 18 or 19) of J. S. Bach's "The Art of the Fugue."

The play should be performed in a medium-sized theater, preferably a modern one.

No public dress rehearsal should be held.

Alissa is of average height, petite if anything. Not childlike: she is a child. Very easy in her movements. Blue jeans and bare feet. Thick untidy hair, blonde or brown.

Stein and Max Thor are about the same height, and both wear ordinary suits. Neither is careless in his dress.

Stein has a long rapid stride.

Max Thor walks slowly, and talks much more slowly than Stein.

Stein is transfixed with knowledge. Knowledge comes to Max Thor only through Stein and Alissa.

No one actually 'cries out," even when the words are used: the words indicate an inner reaction only."

Duras, Marguerite. 'Note for Performance', Destroy, She Said. Trans. Bray, Barbara, (New York, Grove Press 1970) pp. 87 - 88.

"FILM SET A: SPINNING SPHERE

A steel ball placed on a glass plate in a white cube of space. The ball is set spinning and filmed so that the image reflected on the surface of the ball has one wall of the cube centered. The ball is center frame and fills most of the frame. The camera is hidden as much as possible so that its reflection will be negligible. Four prints are necessary. The prints are projected onto the walls of the room (front or rear projection; should cover the walls edge to edge). The image reflected in the spinning sphere should not be that of the real room but of a more idealized room, of course empty, and not reflecting the image projected on the other room walls. There will be no scale referents in the films. "

Bruce Nauman, "Notes and Projects", Artforum 9, no.4 (December 1970), p. 44.