On the Laws that Govern 'Straw and Order'

I’ve been away for a few days. When I got home this evening I found these ‘adapted pants’, pushed through my letterbox. Here, I made a few brief photographs of them, before stuffing them through my next-door-neighbour’s letterbox.

For some reason these unwanted ‘adapted pants’ (Outsider Art, inside my flat?) made me think of the French writer, Raymond Roussel. Roussel's writing often described peculiar artifacts (he invented some very strange objects and garments for which there was no name) - like a statue made from whalebone corset parts that traveled on railroad tracks made from calf's lungs. 

Roussel’s novels’, ‘Locus Solus’ (Lonely Place) and ‘Impressions of Africa’ (it’s not a travel book) have had a great influence on me at one time or another. I first became interested in Roussel when I read that he’d traveled all the way around the world in a very early form of motor home - a motorized ‘roulette’ (gypsy caravan) - from which he only very rarely alighted: to prove once-and-for-all that external reality had very little influence on his writing. Louis Aragon called Roussel, ‘The Emperor of the Republic of Dreams’. 

Roussel committed suicide in 1933, aged 56 (in relative obscurity). Two years later saw the publication of his ‘secret and posthumous’ literary testament’, ‘How I Wrote Certain Of My Books’. Shortly before his death Roussel had produced a text - a bean-spiller - explaining the ‘very special method’ he’d employed, to write such strange and poetic works. Here’s Roussel introducing 'his method':  

“I have always been meaning to explain the way in which I came to write certain of my books (Impressions d’Afrique, Locus Solus, L’Etoile au Front and La Poussiere de Soleils).

It involved a very special method. And it seems to me that it is my duty to reveal this method, since I have the feeling that future writers may perhaps be able to exploit it fruitfully.

As a young man I had already written stories of some length employing this method.

I chose two almost identical words (reminiscent of metagrams): for example, billiard (billiard table) and pillard (plunderer). To these I added similar words capable of two different meanings, thus obtaining two almost identical phrases…”

As Colin Raff points out: ' Here we perceive Roussel's basic paradigm: an image or idea generating supplemental material, which, through seemingly infinite in scope, will always resolve itself with the original subject'. 

Why am I telling you this? Because I’ve often adopted an adapted version of Roussel’s ‘special method’ when making of my own work. My last blog, ‘Straw and Order’, is an excellent example the ‘Rousselian technique’ – adapted to accommodate photographs - in action.

The Laws that Govern ‘Straw and Order’

I started off with just two initials, PC. I then looked for two opposing PCs, and came up with, Police Constable and Petty Criminal. To this I added similar, rhyming words that were often capable of being related to one another somehow: law and straw, arm and farm and sheep and sleep. Sometimes these word combinations suggested – gave birth to – new words. Restoring became re-strawing, which in turn conceived, thatching. This gave me the storyline; which is basically about, how in order to catch a criminal you have to act like a criminal. I made some linguistic adjustment (discussed above) to what is a very simple plot. ‘To catch a Petty Criminal’ became ‘to thatch a thief’. The actor Cary Grant stared in Hitchcock’s film, ‘To Catch A Thief’. Then I had to find a way of getting both PCs (the Petty Criminal and the Police Constable) into a position where they would ‘grant’ me permission to photograph them ‘clutching’ straw. Cary Grant came in very useful at this point. The straw was contained in a bin-liner – a form of carrier bag. This united Cary with Grant. The criminal and the policeman were thus, both 'carriers' and 'granters'. They were both seen to be literally, and physically, using the Long Arm of the Law, to clutch at straw.

The photographic illustrations were the most difficult part. I had to persuade a policeman, and a criminal, to clutch at the same straw. 

Strange Days Indeed

Got up, pulled-up, inhaled some white powder and photographed my nose. Yesterday, I had an out-of-focused nose (see: “On Powdering Your Nose”, 31/10/09). So this morning I straightened things out – I need to be focused.

Then I went out. But I didn’t even make it to the end of the road: Look at this.

Last night was Halloween.

It’s Sunday, so I fall onto my daybed with the papers. I look at this.

I’m going to bed early; Harry Houdini’s got me gripped (Brandon R, “The Life And Many Deaths Of Harry Houdini, Secker & Warburg, London, 1993). Houdini was a man of many obsessions. He specialised in death-defying escapes (for which his name became a byword); but what was Houdini really trying to escape from?

As for myself, I’ve spent the whole day trapped in yesterday’s blog – caught in its web. When I close my eyes I see my powdered nasal hair tangled up in the hedge. I'm even thinking of going back out and rearranging the Halloween decorations in my neighbour's hedge; in such a way that they mimic the peaks and troughs of the graph on the Business pages. AND ON THE SAME PAGE THERE'S A BUSINESSMAN PULLING - DOING PULL-UPS IN THE PAPER!

It’s been a funny Halloween and it’s getting even stranger. Houdini waged a long campaign against fake mediums (he fell out badly with his one-time-friend Arthur Conan-Doyle, a staunch believer in spiritualism). Houdini would often attend séances dressed in a “medium-trapping disguise”. I’m looking at a photograph of him wearing it; he looks more like Stanley Spencer, minus the pram. Here’s another image from the Houdini book. It shows ectoplasm emerging from a spiritualist’s nose. But this variety bears a remarkable resemblance to knitting wool (Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo’s was a dedicated knitter – he’d been keenly ‘casting off’ since boyhood.

No, I’m going to read some Duchamp instead. Oh no! All that dust breading on “The Large Glass” (dust preserved in Man Ray's photograph, 1921). And the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition, which opened on October 14, 1942 at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan, was both historic and peculiar. Duchamp had festooned the primary exhibition space (floor to ceiling) with a tangled web of sixteen miles of string!

At the show’s opening children ran around and played catch and some of the painters became annoyed because nobody could get to see the paintings.