INTRODUCTION

by Felicity Lunn, Director of CentrePasquArt

Self Moderation, the title chosen by Susan Morris for her solo exhibition at Kunsthaus CentrePasquArt, gives an impression of abstinence and sobriety that her colourful screenprints, abstract drawings and diagrammatic tapestries would seem to contradict. Although it is not immediately obvious what these drawings and diagrams have in common with a ‘self’, it is clear that something is being monitored. From working with conventional year planners, onto which she documented her daily routines, to using digital recording devices to capture unconscious bodily movement, Morris attempts to make a record of that part of the self that is difficult to visualise and over which she has little control.

By adopting contemporary methodologies of counting and tracking, Morris aims at a form of displaced self-portraiture which traces her physical presence via ethereal white line drawings printed on a matte black ground; records her fluctuating sleep/wake patterns through a series of large-scale tapestries; and documents her expenditure over the course of a year through the ordering of columns of receipts as a vast inkjet print. In these portraits of a moderated, controlled or observed self we learn very little about Morris’s appearance or character but are offered visual translations of meticulously recorded data on highly specific features of her life. These include her spending patterns, discipline in turning up at her studio or the frequency with which she is reduced to tears.

Morris’s interest in the systems that shape human beings, from calendrical and clock time to the technologies of communication and surveillance, is also apparent in several groups of work that examine how language, especially the expressions and clichés produced by the media, impacts on how we think. She mimics these systems in order to subvert them, from experimenting with the influence of alcohol on her ability to remember part of a song to alphabetically ordering lists of verbs drawn from newspaper reportage on the so-called ‘happiest’ and ‘unhappiest’ days of the year. The breathtaking originality of Morris’s work lies in the way it is both a commentary on these systems and a record of something that appears to operate outside of them.

It is an honour for the Kunsthaus CentrePasquArt to be able to present Susan Morris’s largest solo exhibition to date. I am deeply grateful to her for the consideration and dedication she has given to both this publication and the exhibition. I would like to thank the lenders who have made their works available to us. I am also extremely grateful for the generous financial contribution of the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation. Not least I would like to thank Briony Fer and Sadie Plant for their insightful texts and Fraser Muggeridge for his elegant design for this publication.

One-Twenty-Two

by Briony Fer (download pdf)

Perusing the paper sheets of departure and arrival times, Proust’s narrator, in In Search of Lost Time, insists that he takes more pleasure in a railway timetable than in a traditional guidebook. The tabulation of times and places allowed him to imagine himself exposed to a world outside himself, without necessarily even venturing into it. Endless columns of destinations tumbled down the page, read against a blizzard of digits expanding exponentially to break down the day into the smallest and most precise units of clock-time. He returned again and again to fixate on the 1.22 train to Balbec, the seaside town on the Normandy coast he frequently visited, but his imagination also travelled to Florence or Venice and other far-flung places. The railway timetable, Proust wrote, allowed him the possibility ‘by the most absorbing kind of geometry to absorb the domes and towers on the page of my own life’[1].

Embedded in that sea of numbers is a host of feelings – of longing, anticipation, loss, happiness and unhappiness. It is always the departure times that seem most intensely packed with potential affect: after all, a life is punctuated by small departures of all kinds, of leaving things or people or places, even in the minutiae of changing tack in mid-thought. Departures always involve leaving something behind, whether it’s a matter of those we love, of parts of ourselves, of new possibilities or the not-yet-known. Proust’s ‘observational geometry’ (if I can call it that) is intensely subjective, written on a ‘page of his own life’. It takes on its own shapes and patterns, dictated by the format and the pre-set rules of timetabling, but always throwing up chance connections. Proust was describing the effects of clock-time in meticulous detail, and with the kind of precision only made possible by the synchronization of universal time that took place in the latter part of the 19th century. This was the kind of time that regulated peoples’ lives according to the hours of the working day, (itself a relatively new construct) in order to maximize productivity.

Susan Morris has always been interested in train timetables, precisely because they both regulate our physical movements and contain the drift of our somatic and psychic life. It is the fact that these aspects cut against the grain of one another that make the blocks of typeset that format a timetable a useful instrument to think with. One could see in her work an ‘observational geometry’, in which the recording and collation of data in itself registers an almost impossibly nuanced anatomy of feeling, both physical and mental, conscious and unconscious, that is the complete antithesis of an expressive model of art. As with the work of the great conceptualist encryptor of life-time On Kawara, we end up exposed to what feels like everything but knowing nothing about her.

The Individual Observation Project, for example, consists of three ink-jet prints, each made at a five year interval in 2005, 2010 and 2015. The data records what the artist has described as her subjective environment: miscellaneous bodies of information including her weight, her temperature, her metabolic age, the phases of the moon, the movements of the tides, weather reports, lighting up times and so on. There is an allusion to Mass Observation, the documentary project launched in the 1930s in Britain to provide an anthropology of ordinary peoples’ lives. But Morris’s tabulation is deliberately obscure, concealing or encrypting the particularity of experience. Small details come to the surface like flotsam and jetsam: a run of numbers, the cadence of the words ‘rising’ ‘falling’ in a long repetitive horizontal chain. A mass of information on the conditions impacting the subject in her surroundings over the period of a year is both recorded and buried in an intricate grid, which also leaves many white spaces – as if the attempt to record so much data is always going to be incomplete and beset by gaps. Perhaps the truer record of somatic experience – of a body’s exposure to its outside – is precisely in that frenetic pattern of those holes.

There is a sense, in all Susan Morris’s work, that it’s simply not possible to hold in place distinctions between inside and outside. Her ‘instructions to self’ – often elaborate and arduous forms of self-documentation – construct an interior monologue, but one exposed to the vicissitudes of external conditions, a life exposed to its outside. Margaret Iversen has referred to this as her ‘diaristic method’[2]. But it is one that reveals no secrets. Rather it chronicles with minute precision the almost infinite points of contact, of exposure, of contingency of an inside with an outside and vice versa. A mass of data may be intensely personal but ultimately there is nothing behind it. It is rather, Morris has said, a matter of the symptom, a trace without a cause; where the cause is ‘unlocatable’[3]. All art, in this sense, is hypochondriachal.

Her work often takes the form of a graph or diagram – but again what the graph or diagram tells us is not necessarily the same thing as its underlying data. Or at least the artwork may be both more or less than the data that she has collected by, for example, using an Actiwatch, a device used by chronobiologists to study sleep patterns. Wearing the watch over long periods, Morris becomes a recording instrument. The recent tapestry Binary Tapestry (Sunshine) for example, is based on information collected over one year in 2012 of the daylight she was exposed to. That is to say, it is not a record of objective information but an intimate tracking of her light, that is, the light which cast her as its shadow. The anomalies are hers, such as the shift of time zone that creates a sudden deviation, a radical veering of a horizontal to the right.

But there is also more to a tapestry, or a print, than there is to a diagram. The schematic abstraction of information, embedded in the diagrammatic form, is made palpably material. The temporal rhythms of a corporeal subject are transformed into another, haptic register that is both schematic and somatic. As Sunshine hangs on a wall, It becomes exposed to new conditions. Susan Morris has often talked about the impact that Duchamp’s Unhappy Readymade (1919) had on her when she first encountered it. Duchamp’s lost work exists only as a photograph of a page of a geometry textbook left out on a balcony and exposed to wind and rain, creased and weathered in the process. The image denotes not so much a thing (the picture of a book) so much as calibrates that process of breakdown through exposure. Likewise, as with all her tapestries, Binary Tapestry (Sunshine) retains the diagrammatic idiom only to subject it to another technology: Jacquard. It falls vertically in a long drop, as if the woven light – using yellow and natural linen yarns – has itself become exposed to a frenetic field of interference.

I think it is important to note the strangeness of Susan Morris’s decision to work with a factory in Flanders to make tapestries, and how distinctive her understanding of the weaving process is. As an artist who works in many different media, her underlying method is exacting and constant, but the tapestries trigger new connections. She has noted a longstanding interest in the weaving metaphor that Walter Benjamin had brought to bear in his essay ‘The Image of Proust’, intrigued by his argument that Proust’s involuntary memory was more like forgetting (i.e. ‘blanking’) than remembering[4]. Benjamin’s elegant phrase, ‘the looming of forgetting’, suggests precisely the kind of complex double structure – one that is always in the process of undoing itself – that has fueled her work from the outset.

More salient still is the artist’s engagement with the writing of W.G. Sebald, and especially with his book The Rings of Saturn in which the loom functions as a key trope. In a vital passage, parts of which Susan Morris has underlined in her own copy of the book, Sebald described the way vast numbers of people ‘spent their lives with their wretched bodies strapped to looms made of wooden frames and rails, hung with weights, and reminiscent of instruments of torture or cages’[5]. The loom, an extension of the body, is not only one of the first inventions to mechanize human labour but a paradigmatic 3D structure (which is different from the singular modernist grid). The weavers themselves ‘tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it’ which was ‘understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit, bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created’[6]. The arduousness of the work, and of seeing the work make itself in long hours of looking, has a clear correspondence with the artist’s own methods: the work of the loom has become paradigmatic for her. Sebald wrote that the loom is a ‘particular symbiosis’ which demonstrates more vividly than any other the degree to which ‘we are harnessed to the machines we have invented’[7]. And given that the Jacquard loom, invented in 1800, utilised cards with holes punched in them, a binary system considered as precursor to the zeros and ones of computer technology, then the expanded sense of being held in the grip of a digitized world gives it even more urgency.

Two recent tapestries, Binary and Binary (Reversal), are based on her own sleep-wake patterns over a year, with every day substituted by a single thread. Again their orientation is vertical, suggesting, as the artist has described, falling rain. The second version is simply a mirror of the first, switching the black for white and white for black silk yarn. The schematic reduction to black and white is in experience very far form a reduction. Darkness, like sleep, is never empty or inactive, but everywhere flecked with a fine drizzle of white threads. Again, as in all of her Sun Dial Night Watch series, a field of interference is paramount – between the graphic and the chromatic, the optic and the haptic, the analog and the digital.

The same falling movement is repeated in Expenditure, the most recent work in the exhibition, which consists of all the artist’s till receipts over the course of a year. The 53Sixty columns cascade down in streamers of fading purple ink that are reminiscent of her earlier Plumb Line Drawings or the vertical columns of the verb lists in her Concordances. The length and number of the columns is entirely contingent upon uneven habits and rhythms of spending, mainly on eating, drinking, social interaction and travel. Reading across the rows, chance meetings of another kind occur in the coincidences of language and movement. An almost hallucinatory geography emerges, suggesting the association with purple rain is never far away. As you scan the tiny encoded lists , your eye moves between, and circles around, local haunts like the café near the artist’s studio, or hotels and restaurants in Bruges (Brugge) from her regular trips to the factory in Belgium where the tapestries were made. Expenditure is another kind of exposure, now threaded together by cups of hot chocolate and mint tea (L’eau a la Bouche, Broadway Market) and the abstraction of the monetary transaction (in various currencies).

In Robert Burton’s medical textbook The Anatomy of Melancholy, melancholy was the lens through which to dissect human emotions. Susan Morris’s anatomy of data and information is concerned with that same arena – with perturbations of mood, depression, elation, excitement, exhaustion, lassitude, anticipation, hope. The precise causes for the various ups and downs or ins and outs of the collated patterns of data may be, as she insists, ‘unlocatable’, but that is surely the point. As subjects inserted into that agitated field, we, as viewers, inevitably get lost in the process of trying to figure out the mountains of visual information surrounding us. Familiar formats that proliferate under the sign of digitization are transformed and made strange, often by being revealed in their most archaic form (for instance, the loom as a proto-computer, the concordance as an early search engine). At least one of the questions the work seems to ask is: if supposedly everything can be translated into data then what gets lost in the process? It becomes hard to distinguish the work of art from the work of life, but the exposure of one to the other takes on a vital if volatile energy.

[1] Proust In Search of Lost Time Vol 2 p.242
[2] Margaret Iversen ‘Susan Morris: Marking time’ in Sun Dial: Night Watch_Tapestry Dossier, 2015 unpaginated
[3] Susan Morris in conversation with the author, August 2016
[4] This has been discussed by Margaret Iversen, op cit
[5] Sebald Rings of Saturn p.282. Pages 282-283 are reproduced in Sun Dial: Night Watch_Tapestry Dossier, 2015
[6] ibid p.283
[7] ibid p.283

Compelled to Count

by Sadie Plant (download pdf)

Listing, counting, measuring: we live in a culture of compulsive counting, a society so obsessed with figures that if it were an individual, it would be seeing a psychiatrist. The news is full of metrics, indices, assessments: unemployment figures, inflation rates, currency levels, share prices, profit margins. These are all abstractions, but they are potent too. They are not simply passive indicators, ways of representing and perceiving the messy details of the concrete world: a downturn or an upswing in the figures might trigger a crash, start a war, or make a famine inevitable; even subtle shifts provide the basis on which deals are concluded, houses built, jobs created, art produced. We watch these figures closely, as people once sought clues about the future in the entrails of sacrificed animals, or desert dwellers scan the skies for signs of rain. And all this data needs to be constantly collated and compared, assessed and analysed, represented and visualised, some as images intended for human eyes, such as bar charts, histograms, scatter plots, streamgraphs, pie charts, flow maps, box and whisker plots, stem and leaf plots, scatter plot matrices, stacked graphs, cartograms, tree maps, and heat maps; others, like barcodes and matrices, to be read by machine.

Percentages, proportions, tables, ranks: on an individual level at least, this compulsion to count and record is regarded as pathological, an obsessive compulsive disorder which is widely understood as a kind of coping strategy, a way of quietening and quelling other unwelcome and obsessive thoughts. It even has a clinical name: Arithmomania. People with this disorder become fixated with numbers and calculations, and may even begin to assign spurious or inappropriate numerical value to people and objects and events. They may develop routines in which they have to do certain things a particular number of times; they may be simply unable to ignore the mathematical information around them – so that they can’t resist counting the number of letters in a word, or the number of full stops in a text, and become like vampires who, in (relatively recent) legend, can be escaped by throwing down a trail of rice or seeds: this will slow them down, because they have to stop to count the grains. Count Dracula: a name, or an instruction?

Capitalism makes such advanced Arithmomaniacs of us all: we too, like the vampires, try to run but are held back by the need to count and account for everything. Life in a capitalist economy is a matter of constant calculation: we spend our time weighing up pros and cons, memorising pin codes and passwords, budgeting and assessing, figuring out. Calories, cholesterol, blood sugar levels, heart rates, cell counts, pollen counts, pollutants, rainfall, temperatures, ‘likes’, friends, followers: there is no limit to what can be counted and made to count.
In clinical terms, compulsions are ways of dealing with obsessions which might be completely unrelated to the behaviour, and often have to do with dirt and contamination, violence and disorder, sex and religion: the wilds of experience. It is to keep all this at bay that counting is deployed: count your steps between the kitchen and the desk, and all those fears and longings will be quietened and repelled. But this can use a lot of time and energy: “In mild cases… there may be little encroachment on the patient’s work and family life. In severe cases, however, little time is left for other activities.” We are so busy assessing the statistics, counting our bank balances, comparing prices, hedging bets, making deals, hunting bargains, and seeking out special offers, that we have little time to do the living all this counting is supposed to facilitate, and even less to criticise this tendency.

In DSM-5, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a system of classification which itself displays a disturbing attention to detail in its attempts to organise thousands of supposed disorders as though they were books in a library, obsessive counting is classified under 300.3. This is the latest edition of a manual which has often been criticised by professionals as well as those diagnosed and treated on the basis of its classifications, which can seem to verge on… well, to be frank: the obsessive. Children no longer have tantrums, but suffer from Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder. When someone dies, people don’t grieve: they have Major Depressive Disorder. Generalized Anxiety Disorder is the new name for common everyday worries, a Behavioural Addiction is anything one likes to do a lot, and extreme hostility towards authority figures is now known as Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Since the DSM is largely only used in the United States, which is no longer the world’s policeman nor its psychiatrist, DSM classifications are now widely converted to the codes used in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, a system more widely accepted, not limited to questions of mental health, but no less bureaucratic in its approach. In this classification, our Arithmomaniac DSM-5 300.3 becomes ICD-10-CM F42, a condition flanked by ICD-10-CM F41.9 Anxiety disorder, unspecified, to one side, and ICD-10-CM F43.0, Acute stress reaction, to the other.

This is compulsive counting and ordering on a massive scale, driven by two main industries: insurance and pharmaceuticals. Doctors, lawyers, and adjudicators rely on ICD codes to assess the claims made by clients and patients who then become customers too: the pharma industry seeks to multiply its markets by encouraging doctors to find pharmacological solutions for what are often social ills. These ways of classifying and categorising do not simply represent or passively reflect pre-existing states: there’s plenty of data, but none of it is raw. Sorting things out is also a process of changing and multiplying them and, in the case of the psychiatric lists, which represent a particularly ironic level of meta-arithmomania, generating new kinds of craziness.

Can’t get to sleep? Maybe this will help:

DSM 5 307.45 ICD G47.20 Circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders, Unspecified type
DSM 5 307.45 ICD G47.21 Circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders, Delayed sleep phase type
DSM 5 307.45 ICD G47.22 Circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders, Advanced sleep phase type
DSM 5 307.45 ICD G47.23 Circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders, Irregular sleep-wake type
DSM 5 307.45 ICD G47.24 Circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders, Free running type
DSM 5 307.45 ICD G47.25 Circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders, Jet lag type
DSM 5 307.45 ICD G47.26 Circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorders, Shift work type
DSM 5 307.45 ICD G47.27 Circadian rhythm sleep disorder in conditions classified elsewhere
DSM 5 307.46 ICD F51.3 Non-rapid eye movement sleep arousal disorders, Sleepwalking type
DSM 5 307.46 ICD F51.4 Non-rapid eye movement sleep arousal disorders, Sleep terror type
DSM 5 307.47 ICD F51.5 Nightmare disorder

Still awake?

There are many kinds of lists of many kinds of things, and lists of lists, and lists of lists of lists; no end to the kinds of things which can be listed, counted, and analysed, drawn up, spun round, written down. The internet is fertile ground for lists of indices which pretend to statistical significance but in fact yield only blurry images.

10: the number of hours a night people slept before the light bulb was invented
7.9 million (up to): number of people in UK using alcohol to sleep
3: number out of 10 who have had their mattress for more than 7 years
6.8 million: number of people using prescribed medicines to sleep
82: percentage of those surveyed who felt going over their day and worrying what tomorrow would bring were the thoughts that kept them awake

There are 84 verbs in Richard Serra’s famous list of “actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process.” Others include to tie, to bend, to weave, to match, as well as 24 settings, or instances: of mapping, of location, of context, of time. The result is an image, a poem, a series of instructions, a finite list of infinitives. It’s a lengthy list, but it’s also very short, when one thinks of all the things there are to do. Lists are delimiting and limited, but the rich abundance of the world, what Michel Foucault refers to as “the wild profusion of existing things” is not.

10,000: the things of the Tao
1000: the names of Shiva
1001: the number of nights
100: the times I’ve told you
99: the names of Allah
50: ways to leave your lover
Countless: things to do

The alchemists’ pre-modern experiments led them to make countless lists of elements, attributes, and qualities of the natural world; distinctions which are rarely compatible with those made by the later scientific mind, and barely comprehensible today. As the art historian James Elkins points out, they too can also be seen to display “a neurotic tendency to count and name.” But their efforts, which were rather to embrace than to ward off the chaos of undifferentiated stuff, resulted in lists and categories so different from our own that they now tend to induce a kind of vertigo: the list of synonyms for Materia Prima compiled by the 17th century alchemist Martin Ruland includes Eagle Stone, Leafy Water, Flower of Copper, Shade of the Sun, and many other gloriously inconsistent and bewildering names. Such nomenclature is as incomprehensible to the modern scientific mind as the list of animals which Jorge Luis Borges claimed to have found in “a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.’ ” This was the list which inspired Michel Foucault to write The Order of Things: “In the wonderment of this taxonomy,” he wrote, “the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

Sei Shonagan’s lists are more familiar, but no less effective: take number 44, for example, Things That Cannot Be Compared: “Summer and winter. Night and day. Rain and sunshine. Youth and age. A person’s laughter and his anger. Black and white. Love and hatred. The little indigo plant and the great philodendron. Rain and mist”, as well as two scenarios: “When one has stopped loving somebody, one feels that he has become someone else, even though he is still the same person”, and: “In a garden full of evergreens the crows are all asleep. Then, towards the middle of the night, the crows in one of the trees suddenly wake up in a great flurry and start flapping about. Their unrest spreads to the other trees, and soon all the birds have been startled from their sleep and are cawing in alarm. How different from the same crows in daytime!” And one more example of a list which itself cannot be compared to those we make today: the index to Robert Burton’s amazing Anatomy of Melancholy, the 17th century book which makes its own compendious attempt to deal with “all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures” of the condition that was then known as melancholia and is now broken down into the orders of the DSM. Burton’s book considers melancholia “in three partitions, with their several sections, members, and subsections, philosophically, medically, historically opened and cut up”: he too wished to order and classify. But even a glance at his index confronts us with a radically different approach to classification: under A, for example, we find not only Air, Aqueducts, and Arteries, but also “All are melancholy” and “All beautiful parts attractive in love”; while “How to resist passions” sits alongside such items as Humours and Hypochondria under H.

To the modern bureaucrat, such listings are unhelpful, or simply wrong. The categories are mistaken, the metaphors too mixed, the levels inappropriate: like is not compared with like. But the illicit combinations and incongruous collisions present in these early lists are the very stuff of the life for which our own compulsive strategies of counting and ordering leave so little time. Borges gave Foucault a glimpse of the contingency and specificity of our own systems of counting and ordering things, and Susan Morris lets us see this too. Not by compiling lists alien to our own: she doesn’t seek to abandon, but rather to extend and intensify the ways we count and what we classify. She runs with Serra’s list of verbs, setting out to collect her receipts, to record her activities, to allow her movements to be traced, to keep track of her expenses, to note her emotions, to pore over the newspapers, to trace the rhythms of the body and the day. All this data she then processes, laying it out into a bloodless landscape of metrics and indices, abstractions far removed from their living, lively origins. The result is not a triumph of rational assessment, but a display of its limits, even its impossibility. The driest tables, charts, and lists begin to reveal and generate precisely the disorders they would keep at bay. The patterns and cadences which emerge confront us not with simplicity and order, but rather their opposites, or at least their challengers: the ebbs and flows, the gaps and knots of the messy, boundless, blooming world that lies beneath and runs between the listings and the codes; the automatic processes, coincidental trends, the subtexts, lakes, and rivers in our documents; the pulsing, bleeding, seething mass on which the data draws and which it multiplies in turn; the wilds of experience that run through our lives even as we count, compulsively, in an effort to hold them back.

Compelled to count verbs

to abandon, but rather to extend
to allow her movements
to assess the claims
to assign spurious
to be constantly collated
to be frank
to bend, to weave
to be read by machine
to be traced
to collect her receipts
to count and account
to count and name
to count and record
to count. In clinical terms
to count the grains
to criticise this tendency
to deal with “all the kinds
to display “a neurotic tendency
to do a lot
to do. Lists are limiting
to do certain things
to do. The alchemists’
to do the living
to embrace than
to facilitate, and even less
to find pharmacological solutions
to have found in “a ‘certain Chinese
to hold them back
to ignore the mathematical
to induce a kind of vertigo
to keep all this at bay
to keep track of her expenses
to match, as well as 24
to multiply its markets
to note her emotions
to order and classify
to organise thousands
to pore over the newspapers
to record her activities
to reveal and generate
to resist passions
to run but are held back
to sleep. 3: number
to stop to count
to tie, to bend
to trace the rhythms of the body
to verge on…well
to ward off the chaos
to weave, to match
to write The Order of Things

Compelled to count statistics

27.5: hours spent writing
14: cups of coffee consumed
66: full stops deployed
36: scrapped sheets of paper
7: sleepless nights
19: cigarettes resisted
4: hours spent with artist
2: meals eaten with artist
15: emails exchanged
9: works consulted
354,702: keystrokes
11: interruptions by telephone
418: tears shed
9: thematic approaches considered
8: thematic approaches rejected
24: mosquitoes found in apartment
8: steps from kitchen to desk
2,685: number of words
13,601: number of characters
2,545: number of spaces (do they count?)

Compelled to count resources

On arithmomania: www.mayoclinic.org
James Elkins, What Painting Is, Routledge, 1999
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, http://www.dsm5.org
International Classification of Diseases, 10th edition, http://www.who.int/classifications/icd
Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines, Gallimard, 1966
Richard Serra, Verb List (1967–68)
Sei Shonagan, The Pillow Book, Penguin, 2007
Sleep Facts, harleytherapy.co.uk