Alex Clarke’s work as an artist is closely connected to his lecturing at Central Saint Martins, and occasionally running a collaborative project space. His practice continuously engages with the dialogues, relationships, and forms of exchange that occur at the peripheries of a public-facing practice, and often features articulations of personhood in states of dissolution, drift, and plurality.

This conversation took place alongside Clarke’s recent solo exhibition, Audience, at Super Dakota, Brussels. Through painting, drawing, photography, text, and video, Audience considers how forms of social or professional withdrawal might connect practice with more critically intimate networks and gestures of exchange.

As my friendship of several years with Alex has taken place almost entirely through a back-and-forth of writing, the format of a published ‘In Conversation’ — a self-conscious re-staging or performance of ‘real’ dialogue — seemed like a strange but perhaps generative contradiction to his exhibition’s themes. We talk about proximity and distance, relational personhood, loss of self, problems of sense-making, postcards, spit, vectors, and Emily Dashes.

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I sat down to write you a ‘real question’ and had a thought that what’s feeling tricky about this ‘In Conversation’ is how it changes the way I use ‘you’. Or, — it changes how ‘you’ feels when I type it. It becomes unintentionally more direct, dominant, accusatory even, than the ‘you’ I use when we’re just chatting. (I think you in particular will understand this.)

It reminds me of when I’m running my reading group and I ask a friend to say what they think about something, because I already know, and I want them to say it for the others present. When I address them, my ‘you’ feels unavoidably loaded. I feel like I’m pointing a big fat Althusserian, interpellating finger, demanding the particular ‘you’ that suits my purposes, one that actually belongs to some non-public conversation that happened before, elsewhere.

What I’m doing here is a very similar thing because I’m asking you questions I sort of already know your answers to, so that we can publish it for an audience. And this is of course ironic because your exhibition at Super Dakota, Audience, is so much about the differences between a public discourse and a private exchange, between an anonymous audience and an intimate addressee.

Second-person-ing someone can be a lot. Here, turning our usually private conversations public, we’re caught you-ing.

In Audience, you’re particularly interested in what withdrawal (from more public, networked modes of being towards more private, intimate forms of exchange) does to identity and to practice.

I suppose artists use subjects like this to think through a problem. It seems to me that ‘withdrawal’ is a very distinct articulation and embodiment of critical distance.

I’m also interested in how the subject of withdrawal could respond to the problem of professionalisation of practice, how it might reveal something more complex to an otherwise rather flattened diagram of encounter and exchange between artist — artwork — audience.

Of course, the negation of a public and the negation of being public just doesn’t make sense… in relation to platforms, systems, and institutions of circulation and visibility, in relation to being there and being a ‘good artist’. It’s a very ‘un-powerful' thing to do. Because of this, it becomes something that might position ambivalence with more critical power. Reluctance. Non-participation. Decreation? Withdrawal from the terms and conditions of recognisability, from legibility being qualified quantitatively, and so on.

Perhaps it could also just be thought of in terms like ‘ascending negations’ instead of ‘descending affirmations’, the development of new dialogues rather than the learning of received existing discourses, systems and ‘sense’.

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Enter Emily Dickinson — famously reclusive, mostly unpublished during her lifetime, but a prolific writer of poems. You’ve collected first lines from her poems that begin with a pronoun and stuck them on the wall.

Emily Dickinson’s poems went through familiar problematics of ‘discovery’. The 1800 or so poems found after she died were all handwritten and she’d bound them into ‘packets’ or ‘fascicles’. As I understand, established male poets of influence came along and edited them to ‘make sense’ according to their own canon, changing words, grammar, punctuation, capitalisation. They got rid of her prolific ‘musical’ use of em dashes, drawn in the handwritten poems to connect and separate, to pronounce distances and proximities.

As its title suggests, Emily Dickinson, index of first lines containing personhood is an index I compiled from first lines used to identify the poems as they’re all untitled. The poems themselves aren’t shown or reproduced in this work. Instead, it consists of approximately 370 first lines beginning with ‘personhood’ – ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘our’, ‘I’ and so on. For Audience, all these first lines were then installed into the exhibition as a large-scale wall vinyl. To make this index, I referred to later transcriptions that are apparently closer to the handwritten poems and I returned the em dashes, capitals, grammar to those first lines.

It’s great how the sing-song meter of the lines makes them seem to stack into one long wonky new poem with all these pronouns as characters. Many of Dickinson’s poems were written as part of private correspondences — to an ‘audience of one’ — so while they represent her reclusivity from a ‘public’, they do also point to connection with others… both intimacy and distance…

There’s a tension of distance and proximity articulated by the personhood of those first lines and Dickinson’s own self-distancing. Despite her distance, knowing that the poems may have been part of her private correspondence and written for, as you say I say, an audience of one, frames them as a proximate, direct and connected exchange — dialogue. A dialogical binding of critical distance and critical intimacy.

I suppose I’m thinking of dialogue as a space of production, maybe as a more interesting creative labour.

If I think of making work through, with, or in dialogue, then that’s about trying to identify spaces and forms of exchange that are missed by something of the contemporary immediacy of making something public, being public.

The mode of simply attributing existing discourses to work might have effect in ‘attentional’ terms but hardly seems generative and is surely a toxic attachment style. Proposing dialogue as a generative space sounds more permissive of new emergent languages, ideas, ways of being an artist and so on.

In relation to dialogue, there’s also something interesting about being a lecturer. You’re being an artist, but not for a public or circulation, but with an individual or a group. More ‘LAN’ or something, but ‘local’ also means un or pre ‘professional’, part of the world rather than artworld. Instead of producing artworks, together you’re producing dialogue, knowledge, speculation and very real questions, which, in turn, is producing each other, which feels like more. More direct and realer in its exchange, a more durable ‘meaning’. More agility too. There’s more space for the first-person to be pluralised, as well as, crucially, the opposite.

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I want to come back to ‘first-person pluralised’, but first — the potential critical power of ambivalence towards a public/making things public feels interesting and conflicted to me. On one hand yes it’s about resistance towards systems and economies that demand demonstrable productivity — seeking ‘more direct, realer’ ways of relating to one another instead, as you put it. On the other hand, there is also undoubtedly much fetishisation of reclusivity; galleries and publishers feed and feed off this.

Yeah, ‘discovery’. Losing ‘elsewhere’ or unavailability. Despite network sprawl and speculation on de-centering, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ prove to remain pretty binary once consolidated into the public domain.

Maybe an audience’s fascination with withdrawn figures is symptomatic of a broadly felt desire to do the same — withdraw, quit, refuse to self-commodify — but there is surely also an element of voyeuristic pleasure. The fact that Emily Dickinson did not intend her poems to be seen by us undeniably lends them extra charm…

I have to think again of the Derrida Postcard/Telepathy text I keep messaging you about. He says something (I’ll paraphrase violently here) about postcards not being sealed like letters — that you know when you’re writing one that it may be read by various people along its journey to the real addressee, and that any of those readers will know that you knew this. The writing is therefore always somewhat ciphered with this mixed readership in mind. (At the reading group I ran in Braunschweig the other day on the Acker/Wark correspondence that we’ve talked so much about, someone brought up Derrida’s postcard text in a way that felt eerily coincidental to our conversation here now. This person suggested that Wark was always in some way conscious of the publishing potential of their emails — self-audiencing, imagining distant future spectators, while Acker was not.)

Also in the Derrida text — about an unintended reader feeling addressed by a text, feeling that the text has been written for them, even while knowing it wasn’t. But I think that being a reader always involves — more or less consciously — some contortion of oneself to fit the shape of the ‘you’ of the text.

But… back to your ‘first-person pluralised’, ‘agility’ and ‘producing each other’. I’m thinking about one of the many conversations we’ve had about ‘relational personhood’… The contingency/porosity/mutability of self when conversing/exchanging/being with another. Mutable, mutual.

Yup. With Dickinson that’s all happening at a distance — produced through the writing only.

True. It’s the em dashes (emily dashes) as musical notation that speaks to this relationality, I think. Dashes not only drawn to connect and separate phrases but also to help transfer the rhythm in Emily’s mind or voice to the mind or voice of her intended reader. Mutual embodiment of the text.

Yes. I guess if her poems were part of her correspondence, it might have not just been her ‘intended’ but known reader.

A method of being-with — to handily reference the Simon Critchley Heidegger podcast I just texted you about.

Thanks. I remember conversations we’ve had about a shared curious affinity for two people reading from the same book together and how it might offer a kind of image of reading as both an inherently individual thing and a site of exchange — how it might be an image of personhood drift or dissolution of self through reading between author — text — reader. I’ve worked with this into a collaborative photographic project of twins reading a book together called Reading Positions.

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This could be a good moment to bring in spit trails, kissing, webs. In the exhibition text for Audience you called them ‘vectors’…

Yes, vectors, and McKenzie Wark’s ‘vectorialist ruling class’ — owned and conditioned channels and networks along which language, information, images travel.

I’ve sort of forced an ‘idea’ that spit could be thought of as the first moment that language and communication are given material body. Spitty language where personhood might form and dissolve, spit trails that pronounce betweenness like those em dashes, a spit trail across a kiss as a motif of both vector and exchange. Dialogical. Your ‘mutual embodiment’ too.

All the paintings in Audience use vectors and are of vectors. There are some stretched cobweb paintings, but there’s no painting of the cobweb itself, they’re of condensation or dew around or dripping from a cobweb. Not a painting of an object but the vector and spitty language around and describing the object. There’s also a painting of spit.

The paintings are all painted onto the reverse side of a sheet of acrylic glass which is then turned around to show their interior rather than a surface. Their posture is turned away.

The way they’re made is very slow and laborious through these masking layers so they lie flat in the studio for a long time like tables collecting stuff. But then the application of paint happens at a different pace — poured, pooled, washed off. The paint kind of breaks down and separates into these nice blooms, then I seal it all in with more layers of paint.

Though you’re seeing directly into the painting, when you view it all in reverse order and through the lens of the 5mm acrylic glass, it makes them feel more like images than a painting. They’re also very reflective so at the same time as looking at them, you’re also seeing yourself looking at them. Ego. But, also, them being reflective makes them do your ‘mutable, mutual’.

<3 I love the idea of spit as language. Talking like kissing, swapping spit, borrowing each other's words and phrases, losing track of who’s who.

Losing track certainly happens in our google doc. This loss of self might attend to questions we share about how not only self, but also authorship is something that’s relationally formed. I guess we’re back to a pluralised first-person again… because what even is individual authorship?

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(I could go on a long tangent about the specific phenomenology of live google doc editing and the weird matryoshka ‘together’-ness it produces, but maybe that’s for another day.)

It is interesting though that our own friendship has been almost entirely a written exchange — we only really know each other through a back and forth of writing. It’s another reason why I felt it would be both fitting and ironic to do this ‘In Conversation’ with you. Re-staging our usual dialogues for unknown other eyes. A previous exhibition of yours, Snowballing, has a text about two people inventing themselves and each other via linguistic exchange, namely the rhythm of texting, which ‘aligned reading and writing and thinking and talking at their most proximate’. Like the process behind this google doc, I think Snowballing was maybe less about alignment than entanglement. ‘Loss of self’.

We share an interest in figures of self-dissolution, decreation — it's why I first got in touch with you about Homeopathy: another text you wrote about a boy who fetishises being crushed in a crowd until ‘ultimately, absolutely, he was absorbed into everybody’s body, disintegrating into integration in a subversion of expression, like sweat in reverse’. This, to contextualise for our readers, was a painting of a text you showed in Spit Trail, a solo show at springseason, London, and the origin of our friendship. I saw the show but wanted to read the text again later, so I emailed you asking if you’d send it to me.

Yes, I wrote this text, Homeopathy, which I then made into paintings on glass that looked a bit like book pages, then that text/painting was the basis for that show. Then we talked about the text. Then we met once. Then maybe two years later we met again for a show I was organising called Dear all.

For Dear All you asked a group of people to each show a suitcase filled with something that represented the ‘periphery’ of their practices.

Yes, and I also suggested that it should be ‘non-public’ material, possessions, research. Dear all was in the context of this project space I did with friends. The exhibitions we did were never fully public as we were interested in something more personal. Barely there, ‘unambitious and deprofessionalised’ was the description we’d give it if asked. So I guess I’ve been thinking about all of this for a while now.

Your suitcase for Dear all somehow really typified both that particular show, but also the project space’s whole overall… ‘project’.

That’s cool :-) I decided to fill my suitcase with clothes and things belonging to people I felt ‘influenced’ by — a collection of personas I’d like to ‘try on’ or ‘dress up in’. Some of these people had given me permission to display their things; others were unaware of my ‘borrowing’. Some of it was made up. I guess I saw the clothes as a kind of citation, or decreation, or displacement of self. Did your ‘Longsleeve Lilac T-shirt’ ever actually end up in there?

Nope, but it was ‘listed’. Maybe I wore it.

I don’t remember.

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Alex Clarke’s work as an artist functions across his own practice, lecturing and occasionally a collaborative project space. Through text and visual languages, Clarke’s work in each role engages with the conditions, politics and networks of relations between the personal and public; dialogue and discourse; meaning and legibility; research, practice and living. He is based in London.

Bryony Dawson is writer, curator, and sometimes-artist based between Berlin and Vienna. She runs the reading group ‘Non-Productive Readers’, as well as the reading series ‘Tribute’ and screening/performance series ‘Multiplex’. Her creative and critical writing has been featured in Frieze, émergent magazine, Motor Dance Journal, Common Pink, Corridor8, Sore, and on Montez Press Radio. She is currently undertaking a Masters in Critical Studies from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

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