Yet Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves
Summary
« Yet Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves » alludes to three specific verses from « The Ballad of The Reading Gaol » by C.3.3 (Oscar Wilde), and that taken out of context, opens to other rooms. The whole poem consists of 109 verses of six lines each. I translated the poem into morse code. Morse coding consists of rhythmic combinations of dots, dashes and spaces. Through a necessary simplification of the process, the dots must be omitted, and left I only had the position of the dashes and the spaces in the lines to work from. For each dash in the morse code system, I fabricated a kind of coil. The position of the dashes in this code scripture indicates the placement of the coils in the design, without trying to aestheticize.
The work resulted into a spatial installation in relation to a specific room of 60 sqm. It is about 20 meters long, with all individual verses with its own assembly, where the longest measures approx 155 cm and the shortest about 80 cm.
Supported by
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (UD) and The Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts (NK)
Description of project
1898 a poem with the title « The Ballad of The Reading Gaol » signed C.3.3 was published in England. The signature stands for Section C, Hall 3, Cell 3. The poem was written by Oscar Wilde in exile in France, after his release from Reading Gaol in 1897. From the time he was arrested for sodomy, and eventually sentenced, he was first imprisoned in Holloway Prison, then Newgate, Pentonville and finally Reading Gaol, where he was serving a two-year prison sentenced for sexual offenses. To compare, the average atonement at Reading is said to have been about two months. « The Ballad of The Reading Gaol » is also almost the only Wilde writes of literary value, until his death three years later. He had been subdued, as an artist and as a person. As mentioned the poem is perceived as criticism of a very concrete system. Through « The Reading Gaol », I have sought to build a system of my own and consistently submit myself into it: I translated the poem into morse code. Morse coding consists of rhythmic combinations of dots, dashes and spaces. Through a necessary simplification of the process, the dots must be omitted, and left I only had the position of the dashes and the spaces in the lines to work from. For each dash in the morse code system, I fabricated a kind of coil. The position of the dashes in this code scripture indicates the placement of the coils in the design, without trying to aestheticize.
The coils (about 10 cm high) are manufactured in newsprint with a feltcore and has two different sides. From one side, you can only see the newspaper, with the paper's characters with textfragments and writing from about 20 different countries and languages. The opposite side reveales a small elypse in two colours on top, where the felt in 25 colours are combined with each other in all possible combinations. The dashes in the morse code system form a population of approximately 18.000 coils. My intention is to explore what kind of new drawings, associations and groupings can be found when randomly placing the coils in the system and submit them to it without aestheticizing.
The work resulted into a spatial installation in relation to a specific room of 60 sqm. It is about 20 meters long, with all individual verses with its own assembly, where the longest measures approx 155 cm and the shortest about 80 cm.
Type of work
Utställning (Konstnärligt forsknings- och utvecklingsarbete) Grupputställning; teckning
Installlation, Textil
Published in
Nääs konsthantverk
View/ Open
Date
2013-08-03Creator
Grüner, Alexander
Keywords
Textile Art
Installation
Alexander Grüner
Oscar Wilde
Ballad of The Reading Gaol
Yet Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves
Publication type
artistic work