johnny & roland
Part 1. Presentation, 2011
Part 2. Computer, Projection, luminous paint, 2011
Part 1
This was presented as a pecha kucha and like previous text-based work has a performative narration over the text. It was in response to 2 very different pieces of work that affected me; Johnny Cash singing San Quentin (Cash, J. 1969) and Roland Barthes’s essay, The Grain of the Voice, (In: S.Heath, ed. 1977. Image, Music, Text)
Like Kris & Georges Talk, it is intended to be, if not exactly absurd, then incongruous. The lyrics to San Quentin are projected line by line - black on white (apart from the middle verse which is not included), interspersed by quotes from Barthes’s text - white on black. They relate to each other, but only because I have edited heavily and been subjective with my selection.
Unlike Textual Porn, I did not want to confound / blast the audience. It is intended to be quieter, more understated - it is monochrome, has no soundtrack and only quotes from two sources. The intention is to seduce rather than to strip.
Part 2
In response to being advised to ‘take my work out of the computer’, I projected the first line of the song San Quentin onto a white wall painted with luminous paint where the text would fall. It was not a resolved piece of work and I see it very much as the start of something that attempts to connect the analogue with the digital (our generation is in crisis trying to negotiate the two), as a future piece I envisage spending more time on the painting; picking out the individual pixels with better quality paint. Nevertheless, my key themes of the frozen moment and duration / temporality are present.