the Pyramid Piece. What was it that made me want to take a piece of rock? And how did that come to map itself onto my later interests between the Part and the Whole, the Souvenir and the Authentic? That first experience of the Pyramid was so fundamental, and taking the piece was an instinctive response. So the work starts with my own Personal Experience of an Object, used as a way to approach these things, but not as a way to ignore the material. DC: The acts of territorialisation in relation to the gallery are quite important then aren’t they? A side note, for another time. Three moments of territorialisation in the refrain: Drawing a Centre, marking an Inside and an Outside, and the Third one is Opening up to the Forces of the Cosmos, or acts of Deterritorialisation. The Domestic should be a sub-topic in this category. AH: I would like to show the sticker pieces, they are exactly exploring this theme. DC: They might make a good Poster... [long pause, Andy returns with coffee, they play a tune on the coffee pot and click clack track. The squeaky sound of a cork being plucked from a bottle.] DC: So, Territories. AH: Bird Song and Stickers. DC: That’s in the Refrain, ‘What is art? First of all it’s a Placard or a Poster…or a Sticker’. AH: In the Refrain they talk about Stickers?. DC: Well Posters and Placards, but Stickers can apply as well. AH: No 2: Interpretation. Structured as a Language, question mark. Sub-heading, studio as Unconscious. DC: Do we need to think about Things here too? But let’s bracket Kant out. AH: We need to distinguish Thinglyness from the Thing-In-Itself.
DC: That isn’t a sub-heading. AH: We’ve not got that Far, at the moment we’re just mapping out possible areas for further discussion. DC: So what is the advantage of thinking of something as a Thing as opposed to an object?. AH: Functions and use? DC: Sure. AH: I like thinking of what Huxley writes in the Doors of Perception, what he calls is-ness, when the Secondary qualities of things become Primary Qualities: “the folds of my grey flannel trousers were charged with is-ness”. The primary quality, or Use Value, is made invisible through taking the Mescaline. The Trousers are no longer just for covering his legs; the Folds become the Primary Interest. DC: Two other words to add to this. Haeacceity, which we come across in Deleuze, which is the This-ness, and Quidity which means What-ness. So you’ve got This-ness, What-ness and Is-ness. AH: This-ness, What-ness, Is-ness... DC: So an object, what shall we say? That an object is Exhausted by its Attributes or its Properties, whereas the Thing is what is left over? AH: The Surplus. DC: The Uselessness. But it’s not the same as the Substance. AH: No. DC: I mean as in the Metaphysical sense, the Unchangeable. Substance in Kant as a Regulative Thing. I can’t have a concept of something changing, without the concept of substance. The Sun heats the Stone. I can’t have the idea of the Cold Stone and the Hot Stone, without having the idea of the stone as a Substance, in which the predicates are continually changing. It’s pretty abstract, whereas a Thing isn’t Abstract, it has a Thinglyness. 57