Discussion on ‘Script for the playing of a 7″ phonograph record prepared for readthrough’ between Sarah Jones and Martin Westwood

ABSTRACT

This article records an email discussion between Martin Westwood and Sarah Jones the protagonist for which was the reading aloud of the ‘Script for the playing of a 7″ phonograph record prepared for readthrough’ at the symposium Headstone to Hard Drive 2 on 7 February 2015 at Central Saint Martins, London. The script that was read from precedes the print version of this article and online it is available as supplementary material. In identifying the potential of documentation, not in the realm of representation but as interception, the discussion posits how the protocols of a script maybe expanded as both a record and a proposition. It goes on to consider how the form of the riddle and riddling inhabits a double-mindedness of oral and aural register alongside the graphic, creating a doubled sense of hearing and seeing.

KEYWORDS:

• Scripts
• Anglo-Saxon riddles
• Bernhard Siegert
• documentation
• Earle Brown
• Gertrude Stein

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Jones is an artist. She enjoys listening to things, chancing on noises produced when objects are given a voice. Her work draws on legacies of minimalism and literal theatricality, embracing and ramping this up as a part of picture making. She completed her Ph.D. Moving Slowly or Not At All at the Royal College of Art in 2014 and is the current Resident in Critical Practice at the Royal Academy Schools convening the symposium An Aside to On Stage 2016. Recent exhibitions include Plucking Feathers and Precarious Pleasures, Westminster Waste, London, Studio, Hollybush Gardens, London, In the Silence of the Night, IMMA, Dublin, hmn, Holborn Library, London, Spoken Weird, Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Martin Westwood is an artist, Frank Martin Fellow in Sculpture at Central Saint Martins, Ph.D. researcher in Fine Art Practice at Kingston University, and in collaboration with Joey Bryniarska is a Van Eyck Academie NEARCH Fellow (a European Commission and French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) initiative building collaborations between archaeologists and artists).

Notes

1. The dates of the Riddles are unknown but are of an oral tradition in a time when the power of an object was given credence outside of human agency. The Book of Exeter is an anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry produced some time before 1072 when it is known to have been donated to the library of Exeter Cathedral.