Local Velophobia

Walworth Road, London SE17, 20th May 2008.

Egg in my Office; Office Egg

Very busy, not paying much attention to my surroundings as the office fills up with reams and reams of paper, shifting in the Spring breeze. What everyone, even me, now refers to as The Document edges closer and closer to completion. One morning I have time enough to notice a scrawny pile of twigs poking out from underneath a chair in the corner. Pick them up, look at the ceiling, wrinkle my brow, put them in the bin, forget about them. On another, as I return from the latest meeting, there's a kerfuffle of wings at the open window. Then at last, it's over. Success. Relief. Beer. The next day, tidying the office, I notice the twigs have returned and get down on my hands and knees to look under the chair. Its only then I realize why the same mute pigeon has been visiting my sill almost every day for the last two weeks.

A Thousand Gateaux

October 1865. The Schopenhauer experience. "A need for self-knowledge and even self-doubt took hold of me with great force. My troubled, melancholy diary entires of that time with their pointless self-accusations and desperate search for sanctity and transformation of the entire core of mankind are testimony to that entire outlook." Founding of the "Philological Club". N. gives up tobacco and alcohol, but becomes a regular at the pastry shop, where he consumes large numbers of cakes and pies.

from 'Chronicle of Nietzsche's Life' in Rudiger Sanfranski's Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, p. 356.

Smeared into Gleam

Isa Genzken's wall pieces, some of which are at Hauser and Wirth, refer fairly clearly back to the late Robert Rauschenberg's screen-prints and combines, not least in her use of the astronaut motif. But where Rauschenberg, through a process of superimposition and collage, forged a means of mapping a culture supersaturated with visual imagery, Genzken, through her seas of shining steel, dotted here and there with tiny archipelagoes of coherent imagery, does something else. Rauschenberg attempts to grasp the experience of the society of the spectacle, but Genzken is content with a notation precisely of the failure of such an attempt. The passage of the eye across the work is thus a constant glissement: the burnished steel notating nothing more than the opacity of Capital's global flows, an infinity of images smeared into a single gleaming surface, in which we think we sometimes glimpse ourselves.