The experience of greatness is one of a-falling-away. Great works, whether in art, literature, cinema or elsewhere, seem to “fall away by the very strength that they engage: the movement that they create through them”. And so it is that we pass through them and they us. Though the book that we have wandered is set aside, the gallery or cinema image we have inhabited is left behind, the bodily memory of them remains. Then, when we come across other instances of such power reminding us, once again, “here is life!”, we sense those same contours, the passageways of making that transport us and so ground us in being.
The understanding that this provokes, that things are connected by their kind, rather than simply their form, finds a spiralling woman resembling a spiralling constellation more than she does a static woman, a lucid book resembling a lucid image more than it does an inert book.
This presentation proposes a poetic and critical journey through “the force of things”, the phenomenological experience of words and images in time and space, the point at which they breach their own fabric, and some other becoming takes place. Using visual documentation and textual citation,
I re-present a number of as-yet-unrealised metamorphoses: books become art works and vice versa. The presentation also looks at an art installation that was created as a homage to the work of the author Kurt Vonnegut
(d. 2007), and explores the process of translating his work into spatial, image and object form.
