handlingen is thus - collaborating w/ Lone Eriksen

Lone Eriksen is a Danish photographer of some wonderful capability and skill. She and I met a few years ago before she moved back to Copenhagen, and since then has been a valued link to that city. We first collaborated for Rattle magazine, and then did so again, for our longer piece Brumhold's diary, which took in notion's of photography about photography, novels about novels and which appeared in the following issue of Rattle, and will feature in the Enemies book with penned in the margins.

Recently we have often been in touch and have collaborated once again. Lone has a photographer's sense of depth and space, and seems to pick up on my methods before I do, and thus was born a project which involved me eating into her beautiful critical commentary blogspace http://theactionisthus.tumblr.com/ and fashioning from it a poem, mulching text to become a new.

the poem http://theactionisthus.tumblr.com/poem & from Lone on the piece ... 

"The text, that is written in relation to the artistic work in the blogposts, should be seen as an approach to photography rather than absolute statements. I like the idea of disturbing the curatorial text and wanted to mimic the way that power is distributed on the internet through a textual dialogue. I contacted Steven, who I have collaborated with before and we agreed that he should use the text on the blog to create a new lyrical work. Here I should add, that the title on the blog point to a visual/textual collaboration we did a few years ago, in which the poem that Steven wrote starts out as follows: The action is thus - an icon is painted before us (...)

The poem title what photography is: light, colour and form completes the title of the blog, which now reads The action is thus - what photography is: light, colour and form.

The poem is made up entirely of words and sentences from the blog posts about Qiu-Yang, Gina ZachariasBoris Mikhailov and Tereza Zelenkova respectively. The textual fragments from the blog posts are highlighted in pink and linked to the poem page. The contrasting colours, blue and pink halt my reading process.  

The curatorial text is cut into pieces, pasted back together and presented in a new lyrical form. Although the poem is also talking about photography it seems to be talking to the senses rather than trying to make sense. It has a mysterious performance quality similar to that of the photograph; I can talk about what the poem is doing, but I cannot determine and fix it's meaning. It's doing depends on the person facing it and the context of the encounter.

If writing is authoritative, then the poem present the curatorial text as staged and ideological. The dialogue between the poem, the text on photography as performance and the artistic works is playful, yet it is a power struggle." 

a privilege to work with such a mind and such an eye www.loneeriksen.com