Scans from my expanded notes on Jeremy Millar’s ‘Fischli and Weiss: The Way Things Go’ (2007), including digressions and links to thoughts I have had on my own works, as well as writers and artists heavily featured in my research:
Going into U3 I plan to distil/ digitise this note-taking and continue to make links between Millar’s references and wider research found in my U2 documentation. Having stumbled upon Fischli and Weiss ‘The Way Things Go’ (1987) on a chance visit to the Whitechapel Gallery, the discovery of Millar’s book has filled in cerian gaps between speculative tangents in my own research practice. Millar’s book exists in this particular time and space as a catalyst between many strands of research - disusing ideas such as Baudrillard’s ‘Functional transcendence’, Arthur Koestler’s theories of deconstruction through comedy in ‘The Act of Creation’ (1964), Mikhail Bakhtin’s critique of the ‘Epic’ in his essay ‘Epic and Novel’, and both Henri Bergson and Gaston Bachelard’s conflicting theories of duration and time.
I have begun to make links between said writings and the work of John Ruskin (The Nature of Gothic, 1892), Alejandro Jodorowsy’s re-interpretation of the Marseille Tarot in ‘The Way of Tarot’ (2009), as well as themes in my own work such as the motif of the Trojan Horse. I plan to continue this trajectory of link-making towards a distillation and organisation of this information, as it relates to my own physical practice and philosophy. This will be the first step in my research festival proposal towards hosting a screening & in-conversation discussing shared themes of ‘functional transcendence in Fischli and Weiss ‘The Way Things Go’ (1987) and the work of Canadian folk artists interviewed in Alex Busby’s ‘Folk art found me’ (1993).
