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Love’s Secretary 2002
Auckland University of Technology, Bachelor
of Visual Arts – Graduating Exhibition.
Fax-paper scrolls, with oil stick and pencil
drawings.
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Love’s Secretary has a song
and a map.
…lost within himself, searching for the
points at which his inner life intersected the
life of the greater world outside, and calling
those points of intersection “songs”.
[1]
- Salman Rushdie
A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts
himself by singing under his breath. He walks
and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter,
or orients himself with his little song as best
he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a
calming and stabilizing, calm and stable centre
in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips
as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But
the song itself is already a skip: it jumps
from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos
and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment.
[2]
- Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guatarri
The song is a story that tells where we’ve
been. We make a song as we journey, composing
and re-writing as we go. We memorise how certain
songs go, then abandon them for something different.
As we grow, we learn and adapt. Maybe we won’t
sing that line again, but the chorus still comes
up from time to time. Always positioned and
always moving, we map our selves – our
territory – with intersections of memory
and experience, creating stories and songs of
our lives.
But necessity requires that this autobiography
is edited. Life is never lived as a narrative;
life is messy, full of false starts, repetitions,
unsatisfied foreshadowings, deflated climaxes
and inexact resolutions. We can’t take
a day to write a day verbatim and we can’t
map our world with a map the size of the world.
So we edit things out until we have the crucial
elements to tell a story and cut shapes on the
map to show where we’ve been. They can’t
really tell us where things began, or where
they may end, but they give us home for the
moment.
So love’s secretary sings and walks. The
performance of creating and occupying a territory
– deterritorialising then reterritorialising
– plays itself out over and over. Always
in between, love’s secretary makes a map
of half-drawings and mini-dramas, finding relationships,
degrees of intimacy, which multiply the multiplicity.
Then finds something that changes everything.
Slightly. Completely. Slightly.
Damen Joe, November 2002
1 Rushdie, S. (2000). The Ground
Beneath Her Feet. London: Random House
2 Deleuze, G & Guatarri,
F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism
and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
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