An Essay on Ignorance

Hall, John (2007) An Essay on Ignorance. Litter, N/A. ISSN XXXX-XXXX

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Abstract / Summary

Litter, ‘a magazine of poetry, visual art, essays and reviews’, has been running since January 2005. This outcome is an example of Hall’s visual poems, particularly those that take the form of ‘very brief essays’. These are often prompted by the gift of a small frame, in this case from the poet Lee Harwood. The frame (122 x 173 mms) is of enamelled metal with Chinese ideograms in relief. An enquiry directed to the sinologist and ‘programmatologist’, John Cayley, provided the explanation that is quoted in the second sub-frame. When relayed back to Lee Harwood this explanation prompted a card that contained the handwritten text in the third sub-frame. This exchange was part of an ongoing discussion about forms and modes of knowledge – what it is that an artwork can be said to know. The fourth sub-frame quotes from the Preface to Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Difference and Repetition’ (London: The Athlone Press, 1994; p. xx1). The four treatments were then placed in a composition both linear and symmetrical, reframed in a simple wooden frame with four apertures, and made as a gift back to the initial giver. In play is the category of gift as discussed by Marcel Mauss. Also in play is a related enquiry into an interplay of gift and image in the dynamics of domestic space: the notion that domestic images maintain familiar propositions about these spaces which they ‘perform’ within them. These ideas are touched on in ‘Time-play-space’ and were the topic of a contribution by Hall to the fourth Partly Writing Colloquium, held in Bury in June 2005.

Item Type:	Article
ISSN:	XXXX-XXXX
Depositing User:	John Hall
Date Deposited:	28 Aug 2014 13:38
Last Modified:	23 Nov 2023 13:13
URI:	https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/455

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