EVENT 8 – ANTEPRESS
Patrick Coyle and Tamarin Norwood present ‘Getting to the point’.
Friday 9th July
Patrick Coyle and Tamarin Norwood of imprint and project platform antepress presented Getting to the Point, comprising two live performances, each lasting approximately twenty minutes, for which the artists invited professional conductor Anthony Weeden as mediator.
The first performance saw Coyle and Norwood delivering two existing ‘readings’ simultaneously, entitled Alphabetes and What To Do respectively. Weeden, in casual dress and seated close to the artists, attempted to lead the two as though conducting a piece of music, although the question of ‘who was reading whom’ became gradually more intricate.
For their second performance, Coyle and Norwood had a semi-scripted conversation, this time leading rather than following Weedon’s conducting. This comparatively informal situation offered a deeper examination into issues around language deferral, transcription and pointing, and the semiotics of reading and writing as a score.
Antepress was set up in 2008 by Julia Calver, Patrick Coyle, Cressida Kocienski, Claire Nichols, Tamarin Norwood and Gemma Sharpe, who met through the Goldsmiths MFA Art Writing programme.
Alphabetes
Patrick Coyle
A••being Alphabetes, Alphabetes being the title of this talk and also being a splicing of two words from different windows From Wiki Wikipedia: those two words being the Ancient Greek alphabeos, being from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, and diabetes, being from the Ancient Greek diabaino meaning to pass through, referring to the excessive amounts of urine produced by sufferers.
B••being Backwords, Backwords being the way in which I spell the word backwards when I am referring to writing words backwards, rather than being the way in which I spell the word backwards backwards, which would be sdrawkcab, sdrawkcab being a word that encourages the thought of a thatched taxi being driven down a yellow brick lane by a scarecrow.
C••being me playing the word CHORD on my computer keyboard like a chord on a musical keyboard with my left thumb, middle and index fingers on the C, D and R keys respectively, with my right index and middle fingers on the H and O keys respectively, and with my right thumb on the space bar to separate the groups of letters caused by holding down each chord. Those groups of letters being as follows: DCROO CDOR OHDRRRRRRRRRRRC DHORRRRRC OHCRRD DHRO CODR OHRDDDDDC COHRRRRRRRD.
D••being dn, a lower-case two-letter abbreviation for the word down.
E••being ENJOY YOUR JOURNEY, one of my favourite phrases that sits above the doorway of WH Smiths in Liverpool Street station, the phrase being sort of symmetrically composed of two Es, two Ns, two Js, three Os, three Ys, two Us and two Rs.
F••being the worn-down keyboard from my iBook G4 entitled Five Years escaping five years of one two three four five nine and nought with their respective exclamations at signs pounds and brackets five years of my email address with an underscore in between my first name and surname backspace indent enter shift space and five years of more new blank documents than saves.
G being Goldsmiths College Art Prospectus, for which I submitted an image of the lyrics to a song I wrote to be included in the MFA Art Writing section, which was subsequently selected for inclusion, and subsequently treated as an image rather than lyrics, and cropped to the point of illegibility, understandably so to some extent as it is certainly not specifically one or the other, it being more imic or lyrage than anything else.
H••being how close other words get to the word here, for example in The National Lottery’s ad campaign where now here looks more like nowhere.
I••being ICONS in the window of a little antique shop on Great Russell Street which actually said COINS.
J••being James, or rather M.•R. James, not Mr. James but M.•R. James, the writer, whose face I merged with that of Mark E Smith and made in plasticine for an exhibition themed around a song about M.•R. James by Mark E. Smith, after which I noticed that the initials M. R. could spell two alternating letters of MaRk and the E and S of James could spell the E. and S of Mark E. Smith, and so I called their merged faces M.aR.k JAME.•Smith (pronounced M.aRk Jam.E. Smith).
K••being the first letter to interrupt the adapted version of the phrase DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES, TONIGHTS SHOW IS CANCELLED. WE APOLOGISE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE CAUSED. Taking this adapted phrase as a new language for other Wiki-Wikipedia definitions, one of circumcision would read as follows: Circumstance is surgery that removes some or all of the foreseen from the penis. The word “circumstance” comes from the Latin circum (meaning “around”) and caedere (meaning “to cut”). Circumstance predates recorded human history, with depictions in stone-age cave drawings and Ancient Egyptian tombs.
L••being the first letter of the first word sent over the internet, as described by Leonard Kleinrock: “All we wanted to do was log on. So Charley typed an L. “You get the L?” “Got the L.” “Did you get the O?” “Got the O.” Typed the G. “Did you get the G?” And crash! The system went down …” The end result being that the first word sent over the Internet was “lo” – Kleinrock says, “as in ‘Lo and behold.’ Truth is, we couldn’t have created a better, more concise message.” P.T.O.
M••being MONS, an upside-down glove being something that reminded me of The Battle of Mons and the mons pubis or pubic mound, and also being almost an anagram of the name SIMON, especially if the arrow passes for an I, and especially if the arrow passes through an I like a hot razor passes through the eye of An Andalusian Dog, although the dog has one I in French but is blind in English, and not an Andalusian Dog nor an Deleuzian dog nor a delusional dog going out in the midday sun with an Englishman’s middle-class son.
N••being evian backwords being naïve, which in its lower-case has had an arrow pass through the tittle of its ‘i’, which split it in half yet doubled it and gave the two worm-like parts little limited lives of their own like the independently moving eyes of a snail, although I should clarify here that they are not two ‘i’s they are two tittles. “Evian is naive spelled backwards.” also being a quote from Vickie, played by Janeane Garofalo in the 1994 film Reality Bites.
O••being OMNIS, OMNIS being the name of several different companies including a security firm looking after a building near my house, and also being an anagram of SIMON.
P••being the first initial of the name of my father, who had an acrylic plaque on the door of his office, and this also being my first initial, and P. Coyle also being Peak Oil, the term used to refer to the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline.
Q••being an attempt to make a cube from a chopped-up snooker cue and call it a ‘cueb’, which once constructed resembled a lower-case ‘q’, due to my not being able to cut through the metal core that weighs down the end using only a rusty wood saw.
R••being Reversed Reversed, based upon Ceal Floyer’s reversed photograph of a plastic ‘reserved’ sign entitled Reversed, my reversing of her photograph involving no manipulation to the object itself at all, and the fact being that if somebody chose to reverse my version, it would more closely resemble hers.
S••being SNAP AND STOP, SNAP AND STOP being a phrase from a dream I had about several pots and pans on a stove that were speaking from their opening and closing mouth-like lids, and all they were saying was “snap and stop”, “snap and stop”, and it was not until I had woken up and written down the phrase that I realised that SNAP + STOP is POTS + PANS backwords.
T••being This way down, This way down being the sign at the top of the stairs at Pimlico tube station that seemed to say This way clown, being partially down to the spacing of the typeface, but also being down to the way I was feeling at the time, which was a little dejected I suppose, or ‘clown in the dumps’ as I thought afterwords, which paradoxically was such a terrible piece of wordplay that it made me feel better about things.
U••being the realization of the word up upside-down being dn, the aforementioned lower-case two-letter abbreviation for the word down.
V••being an attempt to write the definition of a V-sign using only a V-shaped stencil over six pages of A4 paper, from which I also made a shorter version over one page of A4 paper entitled FUCK YOU.
W••being the website ‘who represents.com’, which lists celebrity agents and lawyers, being also mistakenly read as ‘whore presents.com’, and the R of represents being subsequently changed from lower to upper-case in the website title, but which would be an impossible change to make in the website address.
X••being a kiss symbolised by the letter X in a text from an ex, and therefore being an ex-kiss, or an ex-X.
Y••being Your call, Your call being the repeated response I heard from my housemate Richard when I asked him where he went to the gym. “It’s your call!” he kept saying. “I go to your call.” I worked out eventually that he had been going to York Hall in Bethnal Green, York Hall in Bethnal Green being also the same site as The British Stammering Association, according to Google maps.
Z••being Zup, Zup being the name that my dad thought Seven-Up was called when he was younger, when the red dot hid the bottom of the seven better.
The end
What To Do
Tamarin Norwood
Your first breaths should be warm enough to soften the air around your mouth. Try to keep your breathing steady so the sound can thicken evenly on contact with the air. Mov¬ing your head in rapid circles as you exhale should soften a patch large enough to contain most of the things you might choose to say. You should prepare the air in this way imme¬diately before you begin to speak, because as it begins to cool it will disperse your efforts and you will have to start from the beginning again. Since your breath will not accumulate for long in the open air, for more voluminous speech you should increase not the duration but the degree of your preparation. To more vigorously thicken the sound, move your head more quickly and in wider circles so a larger patch of air is soft¬ened. In this way greater speech can be accommodated, provided you keep in approximate proportion the relative volumes of air and sound.
If the movements of your head are still inadequate to your speech, you can make use of your hands to weave the air softer still, until it accommodates anything you should wish to say. It is most effective to splay your fingers and flick your open hands in continuous circles, keeping slack the joints of your wrists. You can develop efficient ways of accumulating great volumes of softened air by speaking and weaving concurrently, one excess giving form to the other.
Try to sustain these excesses in perfect proportion until their forms exactly correspond. When they do, the softened air should be thickened sufficiently to carry the articulation without the support of your accompanying voice which, during these periods of correspondence, you should refrain from using altogether.
