Bright splinters – Shields reading
- Collage is a demonstration of the many becoming the one, with the one never fully resolved because of the many that continue to impinge upon it.
- Collage’s parts always seem to be competing for a place in some unfinished scene.
- How to deal with parts in the absence of wholes – fragments by definition are incomplete. How do we get over the fact nothing can be finished but create anyway? Maybe this knowledge is liberating? All we can do is simply create until we can’t anymore. Are we bound or freed by this idea?
- Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent fathomable whole. Life, though … flies at us in bright splinters.
- Plots are for dead people.
- Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.
- I can feel her breathe.
- A mosaic, made out of broken dishes, makes no attempt to hide the fact that it’s made out of broken dishes, in fact flaunts it.
- Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects, such as Duchamp’s “Fountain” – urinal as sculpture) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplaces is miraculous if rightly seen. Literary popart?
- You don’t make art; you find it.
- The question isn’t ‘What do you look at?’ but ‘What do you see?’
- Every fragment is a capsule.
- Materials yanked out of context.
- Take a source, extract what appeals to you, discard the rest – this is how I tend to do my readings when I’m being lazy… Can I take this as proof that that’s okay?
- There is no pure originality. All minds quote. … There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.
- Appropriation
- The gaps between paragraphs the gaps between people – the spaces between all things
- Webs look orderly, too, but unless you watch the spider weaving, you’ll never know where it started.