This is the catalogue of the 1971 exhibition of art and objects associated with Tantra. While I work on this site I’m borrowing a copy that was annotated by the exhibition’s curator Philip Rawson as he prepared his Thames & Hudson publication of the same title.
Rectangular folded sheet (depicting a version of Durer’s solid), originally an index card containing notes about the creation of this website (dated Thursday, 25th November 2021). Verso: undated notes about the oldtantracatalogue site. Used as a bookmark on page 1029 of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, volume 2. This page contains the reference to travelling by automobile discussed by Sara Danius (see blog post here).
Rectangular index card containing notes for my reading on Thursday, 8th December 2022. Verso: notes for Wednesday, 7th December 2022. These cards often double up as bookmarks. This one was used to mark page 30 of The Times Literary Supplement, December 2, 2022.
Rectangular board containing my notes for Friday, 3rd March 2023. Verso: attached drawing on an irregular folded sheet of lightweight paper. Used as an oversized bookmark in Philip Rawson’s 1966 publication Indian Sculpture (see associated post). The drawing opens out beyond the format of both the book and the bookmark.
Rectangular sheet (perhaps depicting an auspicious shape) removed in June 2021 from an A5 sketchbook (archive no. 6169.10). Verso: red rectangle. Used to bookmark page 270 of W. G. Hoskins’s The Making of the English Landscape.
Trimming from a larger folded drawing (unknown). Includes embedded metal eyelet and lead weight for exhibition display. Both sides have textual jottings in pencil as well as rectangular blocks densely shaded with graphite crayon. Used to bookmark page 87 of Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmananalysis: space, time and everyday life.
The basic shape is a trimming from an unknown drawing which has an added section so that it opens out into three flaps. Includes an eyelet for display purposes. Used to bookmark page 32 of Philosophy of Care by Boris Groys and page 87 of Philip Rawson’s Drawing.
Originally an A5 index card on which lines from William Empson’s poem Autumn on Nan-Yueh had been printed and then redacted in soft pencil. At a later stage the card was trimmed and three other small drawings attached to form an extended, single-fold item with a large eyelet for display purposes.
The original drawing was used as a bookmark in the Tantra catalogue during the planning of this website. At that time it looked like this and had an accompanying video.
This folded item was first used as a bookmark whilst reading Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway during the first Covid lockdown. It has been exhibited with a related folded piece entitled ‘Open Letter’ and the video that can be viewed below. ‘Open Letter’ has been sold but this item is still at work bookmarking pages 106-107 of the Tantra catalogue.
Exhibition statement: My folded drawings can be included in art exhibitions. There’s always a small hole punched in one corner from which it is possible to hang them on a wall. Very few are rectangular and so each one dangles in an unpredictable way. The effect is awkward, as if the drawing doesn’t really want to be exhibited. It doesn’t – the primary experience is in the action of unfolding and refolding. I got this idea from the mysterious Tantric diagrams one sometimes comes across in UK museums. These were folded because, having been created as magic charms, they were kept privately about the person rather than openly displayed. Another influence was Laura Marks’ essay A Noisy Brush with the Infinite (2015), which also explores the aesthetics of ‘enfolding-unfolding’.
Exhibition statement: I make short videos too. This one documents what happened as I worked on the drawings I’ve submitted to the Northern Lights exhibition. You hear lots of ambient noise and encounter my connection-building during lockdown. For example, an article in the Times Literary Supplement made me re-read Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. Some of what passed through Clarissa Dalloway’s mind that June day nearly a century ago was triggered by the 1918 influenza pandemic. As I folded up my drawings for this project, Woolf’s stream of consciousness haunted every move I made.
I’d forgotten about this drawing. I thought it had been sold along with Open Letter. Glad to see it again.
Trimming from a folded drawing (archive no. 6113) which was reduced in size for exhibition purposes in early 2020. Includes an eyelet for display purposes. Both sides have calligraphic flourishes in soft and hard pencil. Verso: red crayon and soft pencil blocks added November 2021. Used to bookmark catalogue pages 54-55.
Triangular offcut (perhaps depicting an auspicious shape) detached in May 2021 from a larger folded drawing (archive no. 6168.19). Used to bookmark catalogue pages 108-109 (see interactive PDF below). Verso: blank
Rectangular sheet (perhaps depicting an auspicious shape) removed in June 2021 from an A5 sketchbook (archive no. 6169.10). Used to bookmark catalogue pages 64-65. Verso: red rectangle.
Small pencil drawing somewhat like a 45 rpm vinyl record. Verso: blank. Used to bookmark the page I most often return to in the catalogue.
Look at this gramophone record I’m holding. It dates from 1946. The material is acetate. I know that a message was recorded on its surface. These grooves still store those sounds, sounds that in the 1940s made gramophone needles vibrate.
The message was a verbal one, but even when nothing was said, needles vibrated. Like non-coding DNA, ambient noise influenced the transmission of information by shaping the way the record was heard. Inactivity is more active than we think, the geneticist was right about this.
It’s my record. I inherited it when my father died twenty years ago. It was one of his postwar projects. Following demobilisation, he and his brothers set up an ‘audio letter’ business. They built their own recording equipment and throughout my childhood, test samples like this were stored in the loft of our family home.
On rainy days I would play them on a wind-up gramophone and hear my father speaking before I was born. Sadly, they’re unplayable now. The acetate is turning to powder. In places, you can brush it away with a finger.
Even so, they’re not junk, are they? Then they’re not synergistic either. They’re non-coding. My father’s voice is still here [holds record higher], although no gramophone needle will release the sounds inscribed on the acetate again. Thus, this object endures, it’s vividly present, but without a function. Unless that is, its presence in my hands today, the hands of a contemporary artist, heralds something new and different. Imagine coming across this unfamiliar thing in a museum store. It would function like an artwork, an artwork that is seen rather than heard. Try it out. Here, now, before your very eyes, synergy might go to work again. Something we can’t quite imagine yet could be coding soon.
Thank you
It’s Not Junk – Where Museum Archives Meet Genetic Science | Chris Dorsett | TEDxBanbury – YouTube
See ‘red to black’ blog post here. Click the image below to view the interactive PDF
Click the image below to view a preliminary interactive PDF
Click the image below to view the interactive PDF.
Drawing for a seminar entitled: Rebellious Graphics: replacing repatriated prophecies
For those members of the Pitt Rivers Museum community who would like to debate the shared opportunities that the repatriation of museum artefacts signals for both artists and anthropologists. The example we have in mind concerns a set of notebooks containing indecipherable hieroglyphic messages from the Naga prophet Gaidinliu (1915-1993). The Pitt Rivers could return Gaidinliu’s belongings to Nagaland in the future and, as a matter for open-ended speculation, our seminar would reverse the usual direction of decolonising attention in order to explore how her enigmatic notations could be creatively replaced if the notebooks left Oxford. Her elaborate mark-making invites discussion on the conceptual distinction between writing and drawing. Consequently, our seminar would debate the kinds of contemporary drawing practices that could occupy the museological gap created by repatriation.
Gaidinliu said the contents of her notebooks were dictated by spirits, explaining that the symbolic notation she used would only become comprehensible when the time was right for the liberation of the Naga people. In Gaidinliu’s youth this meant independence from British rule and the notebooks came to the Pitt Rivers following their confiscation during an unsuccessful rebellion she led in 1932. More recently, the anthropologist Arkotong Longkumer took photographic reproductions back to Nagaland where, for Gaidinliu’s present-day disciples, even facsimiles can be valued as bearers of her encrypted prophecies. These days they are said to predict secession from the Indian State.
The prospect of the notebooks actually reappearing in the Naga homeland will surely interest a wide range of artists, most obviously those active in northeast India today. But their simultaneous disappearance from the Museum’s archives will be of significance too. The Naga will rightly want this space used for updated representations of their own and facilitating interactions like this is already a well-developed part of the Pitt Rivers curatorial work. However, other visual arts communities may perceive a different archival absence. The political imagination at work in Gaidinliu’s mark-making has created a placeholder in the Museum for diversely rebellious graphics, for drawings envisioning all kinds of postponed emancipations.
This folded drawing was made on a printout of the title page of Arkotong Longkumer’s 2016 article ‘Lines that speak: the Gaidinliu notebooks as language, prophecy, and textuality’, (Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6 [2], pp.123–147).
When enquiring about this item use the tag ‘Camus’ daughter’.
This is number one (archived in folder 6202) in an ongoing series of folded items addressed to the Art, Response, and Responsibility panel convened at the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists held in March 2021. It is formed from two sheets of paper that have been folded together in overlapping and manoeuvrable sections. These are covered with textual and pictorial jottings made during the panel presentations. The image encountered on the last fold (used as the main photograph here) is based on a photograph of Albert Camus and his daughter.
When enquiring about this item use the tag ‘harmed calf’.
This is number two in an ongoing series of folded items addressed to the Art, Response, and Responsibility panel convened at the annual conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists held in March 2021. They are all archived in folder 6202. This item is a single sheet of paper which has been folded and cut seventeen times. Its overlapping and manoeuvrable sections are covered with pictorial jottings made during the panel presentations. The paper is attached to, and folded into, an archival four-flap folder. Various creaturely likenesses appear at different moments, reappearing upside down or on their sides as the overlaps are disentangled. All this imagery refers to Holly Dugan’s 2019 article Early Modern Tranimals, which prompted my ‘irresponsible’ use of hinges and ties made from the skin of a ‘harmed calf’. The following video responds to Dugan’s description of a 17th century vellum manuscript as an ‘operational animal thing’.
Single-fold sheet. The drawing includes an extended circular motif in soft and hard pencil with traces of asemic writing. Verso: black rectangle. The item has a glassine envelope.
Small single-fold sheet with two eyelets for display purposes. The drawing depicts a truncated rhombohedron (Dürer’s Solid) with asemic writing on the verso side (archive no. 6197.14). The item has a glassine envelope.
Multi-fold sheet with reinforced eyelet for display purposes. Circular motifs drawn in soft pencil with numerous radiating flourishes. Verso: blank. The item has a glassine envelope.
A £10 note has been bundled up with some tiny drawings in my wallet throughout lockdown. Somehow this unintended assemblage is now an artwork (its studio reference no. is 6168.19). The following videos demonstrate how this two-part folded item is operated by the viewer. The item folds into an archival lanternslide envelope.
When enquiring about this item use the tag ‘5 auspicious shapes’.
Multi-fold sheet incorporating a flat cardboard box which can be folded into a cube. Once the item is unfolded, five shapes are revealed that have been drawn in pencil. Three are filled with dense graphite shading, two have been left as empty outlines, although one of these has touches of body colour. The verso is blank except for a vague sketch on the rear facet of the box. There is a reinforced eyelet for display purposes.
The item has a glassine envelope.
When enquiring about this item use the tag ‘three Tanagra figurines’’.
Multi-fold sheet with reinforced eyelet for display purposes. Figure motifs and numerous radiating lines drawn in soft and hard pencil on both sides
The item has a glassine envelope.
This item has two parts (both boxwood) articulated like a clasp knife
Something carved ‘seen’ on the bonnet of a parked car. Items can say very unfamiliar things and these descriptions of fetishised mobility are as good as others.
This item lacked a blade-like part. It was only a ‘handle’. However, as of March 2023 it is now two smaller ‘ferruled items’. A ferrule is a brass ring that strengthens the end of a handle.
This is a new category of item in which no other parts will be needed because fitting a ferrule stands in for finishing the piece.
The drawings will render the Carousel projector functionless. The slides will no longer project.
NOTES: In slide shows, writes Robert Harbison, ‘the audience is presented with an image, and held for a moment in suspense as it wonders how this will be linked to the theme, so there are anticipations and resolutions as the talk progresses’ (The Times Literary Supplement, Friday, Dec. 26 1997). See associated blog post here
The drawings will render the Carousel projector functionless. The slides will no longer project.
NOTES: In slide shows, writes Robert Harbison, ‘the audience is presented with an image, and held for a moment in suspense as it wonders how this will be linked to the theme, so there are anticipations and resolutions as the talk progresses’ (The Times Literary Supplement, Friday, Dec. 26 1997). See associated blog post here
Putting drawings in slide mounts renders the Carousel projector functionless.
NOTES: In slide shows, writes Robert Harbison, ‘the audience is presented with an image, and held for a moment in suspense as it wonders how this will be linked to the theme, so there are anticipations and resolutions as the talk progresses’ (The Times Literary Supplement, Friday, Dec. 26 1997). See associated blog post here
The drawings will render the Carousel projector functionless. The slides will no longer project.
NOTES: In slide shows, writes Robert Harbison, ‘the audience is presented with an image, and held for a moment in suspense as it wonders how this will be linked to the theme, so there are anticipations and resolutions as the talk progresses’ (The Times Literary Supplement, Friday, Dec. 26 1997). See associated blog post here
For another example of ‘Dürer’s Solid’ see here. Click the image below to view the interactive PDF
The studio is full of small blocks of wood in anticipation of the new ‘handled items‘ I’m going to make.
This small carving has been taped to an old fruit knife
