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Do Something Wrong

A call to action.An invitation to play.A dare to be disorderly.

This month’s 12-Pages Online Project Space exposes the combined transgressions of TBC Artists’ Collective’s members and associates. In this issue artists James Tuitt and Alex McIntyre present their process-led wrongdoings, where error and chance become constructive elements in the creation of new works. Paul Mendez, Laura Davidson and Charley Peters record their misdemeanours through confessional documents, making private thoughts and actions public. Elizabeth Oniri and Beverley Bennett deconstruct the language of correctness through interrupted text works. In short, lately TBC have been bad, careless, destructive and altogether wrong.

The Archive of WrongsP.02 Paul Mendez Another False StartP.03 James Tuitt Venus, PleaseP.05 Laura Davidson Make a MistakeP.06 Charley Peters Artificial IntelligenceP.13 Alex McIntyre All My WrongdoingsP.15 Elizabeth Oniri DyslicxaP.17 Beverley Bennett Wrong

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TBC Online Project SpaceDecember 2010WRONGEdited by Charley PetersAll content is copyright of the individual artists and TBC Artists’ Collective

ANOTHER FALSE START

You should not write about yourself.Your first book should not be written in first person.What makes you think your life is so great that other people will want to read about it?I, I, I, I, I. Me, me, me, me me. My, my, my, my, my.

I’m not a theorist; I’m a dreamer. I am back at where I was at the beginning, begging, selling my dick so I can write. I therefore have my narrative, where I am now and how I have sold myself into slavery.

I wish I had a new pair of headphones so I could listen to Joy Division in perfection to myself – the spatial whooshes and whirs of ‘Disorder’, the petrified pop of ‘Isolation’ and the controlled avalanche that is ‘A Means to an End’ – but I will always lack something in this life. I will always be a little bit ‘off’. Perhaps my denial of that is what makes me miserable. The fact that I cannot be perfect is killing me, when perhaps I once was.

I shouldn’t be interested in why I do what I do, but just do it. The best things, as far as my actions are concerned, come from spontaneity. If I think about what I am doing it doesn’t happen. That’s why I’ve always been so bad at planning things, and even worse at sticking to my plans.

So here I am again, advertising, trying to convince potential clients of my merits and why I am the man for the job. Trouble is, I’m lazy. I could be doing so much more than what I am. I don’t need to be in bed right now, for a start. I could be doing something proactive. There is so much wrong with the world, yet it is men like me, who, instead of getting out there and making our voices heard, and trying to change things, sit in bed, reading and writing about a world that is about to collapse. To what end is great art when the bottom of the planet is about to fall out?

I was taught morals, and prophecy, by the Bible, as a child, so I know what’s going on. When old Jehovah’s Witness friends write to try to save me one last time, as if the act of crossing the threshold of a Kingdom Hall itself will be enough to redeem me, they assume that I have somehow forgotten all that I learned and that I am ignoring – from the very streets of London where I can see much more clearly than them – that we are in ‘the last days’. Perhaps I am. Perhaps that is why I am in bed, because I am so powerless to stop whatever is going on from going on.

If you want the world to change, then you have to take control of yourself, first of all, then your situation. But where will it stop? I can’t control all six billion-or-however-many-there-are people in the world, and their attitudes and activities. It is a fact of life that whoever is in power and says anything will be rebelled against by someone. Who has the willpower, and sheer arrogance, to believe they can actually take on the world? He who does not fear failure, therefore he is not me.

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On Friday 26th November 2010 I entered a university library in London and took a copy of John Berger’s influential text ‘Ways of Seeing’ from the shelf. During the next two hours I cut out all the references to sight, seeing and the visual from Chapter One of the book, rendering it meaningless. I replaced the book on the shelf and left the library.

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7 Document I: What Is

8Document II: What Was

9 Document III: What Remains

10Document III: What Remains (Detail)

11 Document IV: (Re)Affirmation

12Document V: The I with which I see / Conversations with Berger (Helvetica 60pt)

All My Wrongdoings

Inevitably I am fallible, a bruised stone, my translucency marred by hammer blows bleeding white, like

cowardice, beneath the surface.

I begin to make a piece of work inspired by ideas of serenity and compassion, by a living embodiment

of these values and someone I will never meet. An aspiration.

I forget to put a mask on and sand, breathing fine chewy powder.

A knock at the door tells me I have to go outside, the strike of mallet and chisel is going to tear down

the house.

I graze the wooden bars of a table and allow a channel of anger to direct each blow, lending me power

and energy when my fingers numb and my hands slip to land a smack on bone. Repeatedly.

I find a power tool and each stroke is a barbed wire caress.

Revealing the form, I lash and scar, reduce, erode, expose.

I ‘forget’ to clean up

I clean up.

My eyelashes are white, red rimmed, hair a chewy knot rigid to touch.

I sand, I polish, I allow hands and eyes to travel, mapping the form in short connected movements.

I become still.

I listen.

Pause.

I soak the piece, wrap it in beeswax, place it in sunlight and see

the stone sing.

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