Continuous Text

Joseph Grigley Blueberry Surprise 2003

Blueberry Surprise is a piece of continuous text written from conversations the artist collected for over ten years, of 45,000 words and a change of colour between red, orange and black that signifies each 'new voice'. The way it was transcribed from written conversation makes it impossible to recognise handwriting and in turn, the author, but the piece does have the punctuation, imperfections, misspellings of the original writing. This piece reflects the continuous and fragmented reality of conversations

The way the small printed words weave around the exhibition space whilst consuming it make it difficult for the audience to read it in its entirety, even attempting to read from start to finish/top to bottom would be time consuming and almost possible. Like a lot of his work, this makes the details of the conversations unattainable, keeping the audience at a distance. This is similar to how I work, creating obscurity of who is speaking, when it was recorded or whether overheard/stolen or composed myself. He also uses other peoples words, and with the scale of his work and amount of accumulation, it is hard to imagine he has sought permission from each participator to display the words publically, commenting on consent and authorship. To me, I see it as a comment on how everything can be stolen, collected, listened to written about, that we are part of a communal experience that is rarely censored in the modern day.

Fiona Banner

Sean Landers

Dumb Dumb 1993

http://www.seanlanders.net/attachment/en/562161b36aa72c284fa9bb66/Press/569e761d59a837564a747b7a