Residencies & Exhibitions
Jerwood Visual Arts Writer in Residence: a couple of intimate documents, no.1
1st April, 2015
Lucy Clout, ‘From Our Own Correspondent’, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.
1. A Letter to L, from your own correspondent
Dear L
I’m watching your film that begins in New York, and I thought I’d write to you about it, in a way that’s like talking. The film is full of conversations – it’s called From Our Own Correspondent, after all – so let’s chat too, in language that is ephemeral but embodied. Also performed. I’m going to write this epistle quickly, figuring it out as I go, like I would in an email. So sorry if it’s not all that tidy, or clean. Typing before thinking, just as Dodie Bellamy said in Sexspace (which I think you would love by the way). In this story-cum-manifesto for writing, she writes: Sexspace is the site where all impulses originate and return, byte to byte, where fucking is reduced to its barest, most efficient form – two lovers at monitors upright in their office chairs, their fingers scuttling across keyboards, their desire evidenced through fantasy and adjectives. If the digital unleashes lexical looseness, as body coagulates with machine, I wonder where this letter will take me…
That loud rustle at the beginning of the film is sort of exciting. It is the dawn movement of sheets, suggestive of a body, suggestive of desire. The sun creeps up, orange and lilac, behind the city’s apartment blocks and hotel penthouses. It is the start of a new working day. No time for morning sex when the Internet is 24 hour, and people are confessing and corresponding ALL OF THE TIME over sexspace.
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