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For the next twelve days I will be placing a rose somewhere in the city began as an email request to friends, asking where in London they would like me to place a rose for them. I had been thinking about Paul Auster's request to Sophie Calle to make phone boxes in New York friendlier places, which she responded to by leaving gifts (including flowers) in them. This site-specific project involves multiple stages and materials of documentation (a notebook of observations made to and from rose-placing locations, photographs of the roses left, emails from participants, and a resultant poetic text) which led to two final pieces: the digital piece submitted and a limited edition hard copy book made for participants in the project.
The multimedia form of the work allows the writing to appear in different stages of process, foregrounding the processes, not the polished products of writing. The digital piece shows writing in draft form (scanned images of my handwriting) and an image of the back of a polaroid photograph of a deposited rose, while the book features the front of the photographs and an additional poetic text. The relationship between text and image is central, and Andrew Wilson's discussion of photography's power as documentary evidence in relation to Hamish Fulton's work provides a useful commentary on this relationship: the picture made during a walk is a single slice selected and isolated from a larger whole. In this way the photograph Photographs in the book fulfil a similar function, showing one aspect of the project (the deposited rose), but not revealing the full extent of the writing process. Wilson also discusses how in the 1970s, Fulton began to counter the legitimacy of the photograph as documentary evidence by placing the written word on a par with it, and by the early 1980s, using only words in his artistic responses to his walks. I have taken a similar approach in the digital piece, removing the photograph as (documentary) image by using the back instead of the front of the picture but keeping it as a framing device for the words and as a visible marker of the blank, of the unintelligibility, of all that is left out when constructing a narrative. The procedure for obtaining the text was as follows: 1. Place photograph over a page of text from my notebook. 2 Write down the words that appear along the edges of the photograph. 3. Do the same with a photograph placed over a copy of the email sent to me by the person proposing a location for a rose. 4. Weave the resulting words together as I choose. Performances of the work continue the invitation to collaborate that began the piece, and investigate how the reciprocal nature of the gift can affect audience response. |