Rubbings (2018)
Rubbings investigates the textures found in and around the geographical site of my home. The piece considers the physical properties of the site in question, reanimating textured surfaces alongside interactions between my body and these textures.
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The site-specific piece is in conversation with Sianne Ngai’s theorisation of ‘stuplimity’, a term which Ngai establishes in order to define the specific ‘tension holding opposing affects together’ within a text.[1]Identifying these two affects as ‘boredom’ and ‘astonishment’, Ngai’s notion of ‘stuplimity’ understands the reader’s approach to a text as a weaving together of prolonged states of immobilisation with sudden moments of awe. Ngai attributes this sense of immobilised awe to the presence of ‘thick’, ‘muddy’ language intended to slow down the reader’s pace in conjunction with the shock of juxtaposed ‘frothing’, ’foaming’, restless language.[2][3]I am interested in how Ngai theorises affect in relation to the physical, rather than the emotive or psychological. She discusses patterns of language in terms of potential material qualities, reimagining the reading experience as a movement through language as a terrain. In response to Ngai, I have considered how language and structure within poetics can function as a conceptual surrogate for tangible textures and materials within a specific site.
Within Rubbings, I ‘jerk’ the reader back and forth between thickening language and thickening poetic structure.[4]These sudden movements establish friction. My thickened language is present within poems which fall on the right-hand side of the page, such as ‘1mm trough…’ (see Fig. 1), which narrates the physical interactions between my skin and a desk. The text reimagines the indentations within the wooden surface of the desk as waves, detailing the occurrences of indentations as peaks and throughs. Like Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget, a text which Ngai specifically identifies as a thick, muddy text, the right-hand poems attempt to create a sense of linguistic tedium through repetition, listing, moving back and forth, and simple observations.[5]
The poems within Rubbings are grouped into pairs, each falling on one side of a double page. Left-hand poems approach a texture from a physical or temporal distance, often considering the whole object, its wider location, or references to its individual history. For instance, ‘fed through a needle…’ offers the reader an anecdotal history regarding the unusual texture of the carpet:
[…] 14 ye
ars old – your brothe
r dropped an iron 4
years later our rabbi
t uses the impressio
n as a scratching post
In immediate contrast, the second poem of the pair is constructed through a very intimate interaction with the texture. ‘#9b858f…’ (see Fig. 2) is composed of a series of HTML hex colour codes, deconstructing the carpet into the colours of the individual carpet fibres. My process involved taking close-up photographic records of the texture, and then processing the images online through a colour pipette tool. Shifting from distanced to intimate, the text guides the reader into the textures. The presence of the tracing paper rubbings between each double-page supplements this movement forward. The codex form of the book gestures towards Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover, an image-based artist book depicting a body opening a door and entering through it.[7]Visually, the turning of the pages and the presence of Snow’s own hand within each image allows the bookwork to simultaneously perform the role of book and the role of door, wherein the reader ‘follows Snow himself through the space of the door/book which he opens as the pages turn’.[8]As a result of the presence of tracing paper rubbings, my reader is invited to approach and then move through each texture when turning the page (see Fig. 3-4).
Much like the images of cracked pavements detailed in Erin K. Schmidt’s Tiny Maps, I wanted my source textures to maintain a visual presence within the bookwork.[9]Rubbings featured on tracing paper stand as a record of interactions between my hands the textures I encounter. Literally, my rubbings exist as an inverted translation of a surface, which is then scanned and digitally resized before being printed and bound into the text. Through the presence of the rubbings, the reader holds a visual representation of the surfaces, which she can physically explore through turning the page, overlaying poems with the printed rubbings, and reading language which consequently ruptures through the prints. Exploration is key to the project, as the text was constructed through a journey (from my home to place of work) wherein these observations and interactions with textures had taken place. The landscape form of the text supplements the notion of exploration. When open, it is 58 cm wide, specifically mirroring the width of an AA Road Atlas. I want the reader to experience a physical familiarity with the text as an object, when reading feel like they are navigating a journey through a conventional road map.
[1]Sianne Ngai, ‘stuplimity’, Ugly Feelings (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007) p. 271.
[2]Ibid. p. 267.
[3]Ibid. p. 282.
[4]Ibid. p. 256.
[5]Kenneth Goldsmith, Fidget (Toronto: Coach House, 1994).
[6]Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (California: University of California Press, 1992).
[7]Michael Snow, Cover to Cover (New York: New York University Press, 1975).
[8]Joanna Drucker, ‘The Codex and its Variations’, The Century of Artists’ Books(New York: Granary Books, 1995) p. 124.
[9]Erin K. Schmidt, Tiny Maps (United States: Self Published, 2018).