on listing (april 09)

I make mementos in order to forget.
It is about all I can do.

Trying not to make the work I would not have wanted to make, I articulate my way through each day. Keeping busy, even while idle. Forging object and image from various notions of response; fracture, ending, longing, and dispense. Sitting at the same overcrowded worktable I compile numerous lists. Meticulously list the irrelevant, draft plans unmethodical; just as before.
Starting with 001. I proceed to list, working from top to bottom in rows, I continue until I fill the space across an entire sheet of paper. One list ends and another one begins. Making note of the ordinary, thoughts and instances as they enter my head, and go again replaced by another to the proceed the next. The lists go on, one after another, and then another:

001. the new indulgence
002. value driven
003. can this really happen here
004. call me when you wake
005. before the depression
006. duck and cover
007. today it’s about waiting
008. not on a rugged coast
009. plain white sheets
010. tell me about it, not now
011. just about everything
012. one a week, only
013. showing her teeth
014. never looked back
015. the hit the air with
016. same old struggle
017. intense pressure

As Ben Highmore speaks of the troubling ‘transformation’ of “the most characteristic of everyday life: its ceaseless-ness” , through its attention, apprehension, and scrutiny; resulting in a division between content and representation. I attempt to transcend a similar desire for the preservation of this “ceaselessness” through habitual, repetitive modes of output, seeking to record, represent and constitute the everyday. In this way, moreover, I seek to provide possible points of common entry into the work and the process.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
i. Ben Highmore, “Everyday Life and Cultural Theory,” The Everyday, ed. Stephen Johnstone. Documents of Contemporary Art (London, Whitechapel & MIT 2008) 82