3D Bucket. Deadpan Manoeuvres

Payne, Antonia (2002) 3D Bucket. Deadpan Manoeuvres. In: 124 Minutes - John Wood and Paul Harrison. Cornerhouse Publications, Manchester, UK. ISBN 1872771645

Abstract / Summary

‘John Wood and Paul Harrison. Twenty Six (Drawing and Falling Things)‘ comprised boxed drawings and texts published by Picture This Moving Image, for the artists’ Chisenhale Gallery, London/Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art solo exhibitions. The artists commissioned twenty-six texts on twenty-six works from twenty-six authors; the box contained a preparatory drawing for each work, and its companion text.

Payne was allotted the work ‘3D Bucket’: a man traverses a space in a choreographed series of steps; ultimately he is positioned marginally to one side of a bucket of water suspended from the ceiling, which narrowly misses him when upturned. The commission provided an opportunity to extend Payne’s ongoing project of exploring artworks through writing that is predicated on, and emerges out of, ‘close reading’. The nature of the commission prompted an attempt to produce a compressed text whose form and writing style offer an ‘equivalent’ of the artwork and the artists’ preparatory drawing – a textual equivalent of the work’s ‘shape’ and procedures and Payne’s ‘felt experience’ of it. (In this latter regard, it built on experience gained through earlier writing, especially on Cornelia Parker (‘Neither From nor Towards’, in ‘Cornelia Parker: Avoided Object’, Chapter, 1996) and John Newling (output 1). Writing took place at the time of the first Gulf War, and the text also endeavours to enfold this aspect of the particular historical moment of its writing into writing the moment of the author’s engagement with Wood & Harrison’s work.

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