Calligraphy for Exhaustion & Exuberance

Will Holder, 2008, ink and collage on paper, 51.5 x 35 cm

It may be that some of the oldest forms of creative manual labor, such as painting or writing, further the cultivation of a particularly intimate relationship to latent meanings. As you write or paint, words you have read or images you have seen elsewhere (including those which you have forgotten you read or saw) are present in your work as latent memories. The same latencies are at play in the moment of reading or looking at a painting as when the words of the pages you have read before reverberate in the words you presently read, or the images you have been exposed to resonate with what you see when you look at what you presently face. Explicating these latencies by forcing them out onto the page or canvas in their brute actuality would mean to obliterate the deep space of memory that the immanent echoes and delays of the medium generate. How can the potential of these latencies be activated? How do you open up the space of echo and delay? 

–“Exhaustion & Exuberance,” Jan Verwoert, Dot Dot Dot #15, 2008