Keywords:
Narrative of Things
Visual Relating
Haptic Vision
Visual dispersion
Surreal
My work is about how I feel about things being in this place when those things are out of function. What does it do? What is it like? And how does it relate to my sense of self? I am interested in the way in which people and things in the city are shaped by the space. As my practice goes, I become deeply interested in narratives behind our deep life or behind our consciousness. Those objects we meet and use become an essential part of constructing the narrative.
The photos taken by Richard Wentworth, show the ordinary objects that give a much more complex look into the human ability to adapt and create, problem solve and improvise. It shows the little things humans do that, although easy to overlook, represent the fascinating resourcefulness that we possess. And there are always story to tell behind those things.
‘And in fact, we read the world narratively all the time. Because ... it’s what actually gives us some sort of confidence in the world.’ (Richard Wentworth, 1987, P9)
“Certain arrangements of things appear normal, and we take them for granted. Or the contrary, like where you suddenly have that sense that you’re in a one-way street, and you’re going the wrong way. And sometimes the experience is actually wrong: you take a reading without meaning to. Which misinforms you, and then you have to go backwards through it, and that’s what I call a kind of narrative.” (Richard Wentworth, 1987, P9)
We have the ability to relate an account of the connected story， events in an uncertain way. And this kind of reading relating could lie in the visual. According to Patricia Allmer (Image&Narrative, 2011, Vol 12, P.5), the act and practice of relating is a critical element in developing narratives. In this article, there are some essential points.
First of all, this kind of visual narrative is similar to the principles of children’s picture books, artist books and scrapbooks. The reading methods when reading scrapbooks and reading printed books are very different. 'Linearity threads through the conventional printed book, from cover to cover, from the beginning of the narrative to the end. Lines and Linearity are stapled concepts in narrative.' (Image&Narrative. Image&Narrative, 2011, Vol 12, P.10)
However, ‘The scrapbook transgresses this linearity. Scrapbooks are sensual, haptic objects. They shift the focus of the conventionally printed book from text to its textures, cultivating a multi-sensory experience emerging from the unevenness of the page, the feel of different materials from different periods, and the noises and movements these different materials make when a page is turned ...... The book here becomes an exploratory space in which one can leaf back and forth’ (Image&Narrative, Vol, 12, 2011, P.10)
As mentioned, the haptic vision, means the vision does not move in only one direction, but is exploratory, is all-over-the place, focusing on the material details rather than the narrative line. This also reminds me the distractibility of human vision. The act of looking is not illustrative when I make images in my head. I suppose it would be my idea that the creative activity is actually taking place in peripheral space. And my memory is also shaped by how I observe the world. I look with multiple senses, joining things that do not originally belong together, separating those which conventionally are considered as belonging to each other.
‘I don’t think I ever hope for a complete narrative. What I do hope for is the poetic jump.’ (Richard Wentworth, 1987, P9)
Secondly, the article analyses the relationship between the working mode of the surrealist artist and tactile, haptic vision—the playful approach of surrealism and slight shifts of the constituent parts of objects. And incongruous combinations of them. In the exhibition, the Story behind Things, rules and instructions were recurring motifs in the playful environment. ‘The ‘things’ in the exhibition became communicating vessels’, mediating and fluctuating between interior vision and exterior fact, between imagination and the real.’ (Image&Narrative, Vol 12, 2011, P.15)
“Escape its naive purpose and lose its identity. It is passed from absolute falsness to a new absolute that is true and poetic’ (Image&Narrative, Vol 12, 2011, P.18)
Thirdly, the essay also mentioned the volatility of meaning assigned to ‘things’. The term ‘things’ is at once both entirely unspecific and yet totally specific. I don’t quite understand what this volatility of meaning here is, but I think it may be the ambiguity and uncertainty of the identity of the things themselves. People’s cognition of things is often answered in relating.
According to Richard(1987, P.20), ‘I am interested in the fact that we ourselves are spacial, and how we place something in space always conditioned by that. I like the fact that in French the word for to ‘Place’ is poser, which brings in the sense of stagy self-consciousness of posing.’
Artist
Richard Wentworth
Roman Signer
Shuangquan Bai
Martin Roth
Enli Zhang
Iain Baxter
Books and resources
Richard Wentworth, 1987. Richard Wentworth Sculpture 18th March to 12th April 1987. London: Lisson Gallery.
Richard Wentworth, 1984. Making do and getting by. Hans Ulrich Obrist ed. London: Koening Books, Lisson Gallery.
Patricia Allmer. (2011, August 11). The Story of Things: reading narrative in the visual. (Anne Reverseau, UC Louvain, Ed.) Image&Narrative, Vol12, 5-12. From http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/157
