Three Species of Circles (After Walker and Walker)
Brian Dillon
1. In Shakespeare, last words are rarely the last. “O, I die, Horatio,” Hamlet declares about fifty lines from the end of the play that bears his name, and six lines before his own finish. His actual end follows, famously: “ – the rest is silence”. Not quite, or not always. There are three variant texts of Hamlet, and in at least one the Dane dies differently: “ – the rest is silence. O, o, o, o.” What are they telling us, these four diminishing ‘O’s? (Or is it five? The full stop, you might say, is the last and smallest circle.)
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Brian Dillon
1. In Shakespeare, last words are rarely the last. “O, I die, Horatio,” Hamlet declares about fifty lines from the end of the play that bears his name, and six lines before his own finish. His actual end follows, famously: “ – the rest is silence”. Not quite, or not always. There are three variant texts of Hamlet, and in at least one the Dane dies differently: “ – the rest is silence. O, o, o, o.” What are they telling us, these four diminishing ‘O’s? (Or is it five? The full stop, you might say, is the last and smallest circle.)
Read on
Walker and Walker
Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith
It is thirty years since twin brothers Joe and Pat Walker began collaborating as Walker and Walker. Initially grounded in sculpture, their practice has expanded over the decades to encompass a range of other media, most notably film installation and variously manipulated found text. Drawing sustenance from a spectrum of sources, both literary and art historical, their work is also fuelled by a fascination with the ways in which we have come to negotiate space and time. One persistent tendency has been a reanimation, at once quizzical and melancholic, of the rich legacy of Northern European Romanticism.
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Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith
It is thirty years since twin brothers Joe and Pat Walker began collaborating as Walker and Walker. Initially grounded in sculpture, their practice has expanded over the decades to encompass a range of other media, most notably film installation and variously manipulated found text. Drawing sustenance from a spectrum of sources, both literary and art historical, their work is also fuelled by a fascination with the ways in which we have come to negotiate space and time. One persistent tendency has been a reanimation, at once quizzical and melancholic, of the rich legacy of Northern European Romanticism.
Read on
Who Has Acquired the Most Peradams...
Jörg Heiser
As I’m writing this, I’m listening to John Zorn’s album Mount Analogue. It was released in 2012, two years after Joe and Pat Walker issued their film Mount Analogue Revisited, based on French writer René Daumal’s Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing of 1952. It’s easy to picture Zorn’s album – with its enthralling, perfect stream of confluences from Jewish and Middle Eastern folk, Ennio Morricone and Lalo Schifrin scores, dramatic piano moments, sprinkles of exotica jazz and Minimalist music –
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Jörg Heiser
As I’m writing this, I’m listening to John Zorn’s album Mount Analogue. It was released in 2012, two years after Joe and Pat Walker issued their film Mount Analogue Revisited, based on French writer René Daumal’s Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing of 1952. It’s easy to picture Zorn’s album – with its enthralling, perfect stream of confluences from Jewish and Middle Eastern folk, Ennio Morricone and Lalo Schifrin scores, dramatic piano moments, sprinkles of exotica jazz and Minimalist music –
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Unfilmed Mountain - Mount Analogue Revisited
Fergus Daly
In The Logic of Sense Deleuze wrote that thought has a geography: "It appears that thought itself presupposes axes and orientations according to which it develops, that it has a geography before having a history, and that it traces dimensions before constructing systems." Deleuze goes on to describe the dominant image of the philosopher, head in the clouds, ever ascending in search of purity, truth and high principles, the movement of thought being one of ascension up out of the earth and into the world of the intelligible.
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Fergus Daly
In The Logic of Sense Deleuze wrote that thought has a geography: "It appears that thought itself presupposes axes and orientations according to which it develops, that it has a geography before having a history, and that it traces dimensions before constructing systems." Deleuze goes on to describe the dominant image of the philosopher, head in the clouds, ever ascending in search of purity, truth and high principles, the movement of thought being one of ascension up out of the earth and into the world of the intelligible.
Read on
Instead of an Object
Rebecca O'Dwyer
Being an identical twin involves an above-average amount of odd questions, with the strangest by some distance being put to me by a friend’s older brother, about sixteen years ago. If I went to sleep in my twin sister’s bed, he wanted to know, woke up and went about her duties for the day, could I then be my sister? How would I know if I wasn’t? Asked with a worrisome degree of solemnity, this particular line of questioning sticks in my mind even now because it is founded on a ridiculousness I cannot exactly rule out.
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Rebecca O'Dwyer
Being an identical twin involves an above-average amount of odd questions, with the strangest by some distance being put to me by a friend’s older brother, about sixteen years ago. If I went to sleep in my twin sister’s bed, he wanted to know, woke up and went about her duties for the day, could I then be my sister? How would I know if I wasn’t? Asked with a worrisome degree of solemnity, this particular line of questioning sticks in my mind even now because it is founded on a ridiculousness I cannot exactly rule out.
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Q&A
Benjamin Stafford and Walker and Walker
BS: You have spoken about “the undoing of that which is perceived to possess a singular identity”. How important is ambiguity in your work, both during the process of creation and in its public presentation?
W+W: Ambiguity is something we wish to avoid, insofar as it might be considered as being wilfull obscure. We would like the viewer to encounter something of an understanding of the work, but we are not didactic about the nature of that understanding.
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Benjamin Stafford and Walker and Walker
BS: You have spoken about “the undoing of that which is perceived to possess a singular identity”. How important is ambiguity in your work, both during the process of creation and in its public presentation?
W+W: Ambiguity is something we wish to avoid, insofar as it might be considered as being wilfull obscure. We would like the viewer to encounter something of an understanding of the work, but we are not didactic about the nature of that understanding.
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Two Point(s) North
Claire Daigle
Countless journeys have begun with the plotting of Polaris, the North Star, actually a double star, by which to navigate. The experience of the Walker & Walker exhibition at the Sheppard Gallery is no exception. As if wishing away the confinement of four walls, the piece, Northern Star, involves a pinpoint piercing of the gallery lit up from behind by an LED bulb at the precise spot where, night after night, Polaris appears in the sky. There’s nothing necessarily spiritual or natural about this vision, however: it stands as an example of second nature, a doubling, at which Joe and Pat Walker excel particularly.
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Claire Daigle
Countless journeys have begun with the plotting of Polaris, the North Star, actually a double star, by which to navigate. The experience of the Walker & Walker exhibition at the Sheppard Gallery is no exception. As if wishing away the confinement of four walls, the piece, Northern Star, involves a pinpoint piercing of the gallery lit up from behind by an LED bulb at the precise spot where, night after night, Polaris appears in the sky. There’s nothing necessarily spiritual or natural about this vision, however: it stands as an example of second nature, a doubling, at which Joe and Pat Walker excel particularly.
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Walkers above the sea of clouds
Simon Morley
Wer aber sind sie, sag mir, die Fahrenden, diese ein wenig Flüchtigern noch als wir selbst’/‘But tell me, who are they, these wanderers, even more transient than we ourselves.’ Rainer Maria Rilke, The Fifth Duino Elegy
The other day I dropped into Kehoes, and who should I see propping up the bar but Caspar David Friedrich, the celebrated German painter. There was an almost empty glass of Guinness in front of him and he was looking rather melancholy, so I offered to buy him another.
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Simon Morley
Wer aber sind sie, sag mir, die Fahrenden, diese ein wenig Flüchtigern noch als wir selbst’/‘But tell me, who are they, these wanderers, even more transient than we ourselves.’ Rainer Maria Rilke, The Fifth Duino Elegy
The other day I dropped into Kehoes, and who should I see propping up the bar but Caspar David Friedrich, the celebrated German painter. There was an almost empty glass of Guinness in front of him and he was looking rather melancholy, so I offered to buy him another.
Read on
The End of Light
Francis McKee
There is a scene in The Man Who Fell to Earth in which the main character, the alien Thomas Jerome Newton, is travelling across America in a limousine. At one point he glances out the window and sees 19th plains pioneers staring back at his vehicle passing through the landscape. This is perhaps the most striking moment of the film, certainly more remarkable and more memorable than the scenes in which Newton recalls life on his own planet. Those scenes are simply fantasy but the incident in the limousine reveals something essential about the medium of film in which Newton’s story unfolds.
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Francis McKee
There is a scene in The Man Who Fell to Earth in which the main character, the alien Thomas Jerome Newton, is travelling across America in a limousine. At one point he glances out the window and sees 19th plains pioneers staring back at his vehicle passing through the landscape. This is perhaps the most striking moment of the film, certainly more remarkable and more memorable than the scenes in which Newton recalls life on his own planet. Those scenes are simply fantasy but the incident in the limousine reveals something essential about the medium of film in which Newton’s story unfolds.
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Allegories of Reverie
David Beech
Within Romanticism, the unprecedented subjectivities of the Romantic sensibility were always already there, naturally present and (only) culturally repressed. However, it seems that the pictures and poems were necessary for this presence to appear. The techniques of negation that are central to Romantic art underwrite this un-innovated innovation of an always already individual subjectivity suppressed by the codes of mastery – it is as if the subtraction of all antecedent conventions leaves something that has been there all along. The Romantic subject is thus the mise en scène of reason and culture, the background which envelops everything to take centre stage.
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David Beech
Within Romanticism, the unprecedented subjectivities of the Romantic sensibility were always already there, naturally present and (only) culturally repressed. However, it seems that the pictures and poems were necessary for this presence to appear. The techniques of negation that are central to Romantic art underwrite this un-innovated innovation of an always already individual subjectivity suppressed by the codes of mastery – it is as if the subtraction of all antecedent conventions leaves something that has been there all along. The Romantic subject is thus the mise en scène of reason and culture, the background which envelops everything to take centre stage.
Read on
Unfilmed Mountain
Fergus Daly
"There's a temptation to show a mountain [...] then one fine day you realize that it's better to see as little as possible" Jean-Marie Straub
"Lord, we don't need another mountain, There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb, There are oceans and rivers enough to cross, Enough to last till the end of time." Bacharach & David
In The Logic of Sense Deleuze wrote that thought has a geography: "It appears that thought itself presupposes axes and orientations according to which it develops, that it has a geography before having a history, and that it traces dimensions before constructing systems."
Read on
Fergus Daly
"There's a temptation to show a mountain [...] then one fine day you realize that it's better to see as little as possible" Jean-Marie Straub
"Lord, we don't need another mountain, There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb, There are oceans and rivers enough to cross, Enough to last till the end of time." Bacharach & David
In The Logic of Sense Deleuze wrote that thought has a geography: "It appears that thought itself presupposes axes and orientations according to which it develops, that it has a geography before having a history, and that it traces dimensions before constructing systems."
Read on
Re:Reflecting Romanticism
William Fox
When the film Nightfall by the Walker & Walker arrives via Fed Ex from Ireland, accompanying the DVD is the requisite voucher assuring the United States government that the enclosed material is neither obscene nor immoral, and that nothing in it advocates insurrection against the country or threatens violence against any of its citizens. Under the synopsis of contents, Joe Walker has written: “A man makes a journey across a lake to the site of an echo.” I pause as I open the package, wondering what a customs official would make of such a description.
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William Fox
When the film Nightfall by the Walker & Walker arrives via Fed Ex from Ireland, accompanying the DVD is the requisite voucher assuring the United States government that the enclosed material is neither obscene nor immoral, and that nothing in it advocates insurrection against the country or threatens violence against any of its citizens. Under the synopsis of contents, Joe Walker has written: “A man makes a journey across a lake to the site of an echo.” I pause as I open the package, wondering what a customs official would make of such a description.
Read on