At least one

Catalogue text for Charlie Donaldson, Art crimes: The 1E.001 archive, STABLE Artspace and Metro Arts, 2020.

I also held a studio in this building. Or, at least, I held a studio in a building more or less similar to this building and so, strictly speaking, entirely dissimilar to this building.

It was four windowless walls lost inside the building’s four perimeter walls. Perhaps in a homeopathic effort to prevent its occupant’s cabin fever, the studio’s entry was lined with a semi-transparent acrylic that did little but emphasise the isolating interiority of the space, broadly diffusing the surrounding fluorescent lights and blurring the occasional, often lost passerby. Similarly isolating were the studio’s sidewalls which did little but impart a slight distance between myself and my neighbour, a woman whose voice was constant though was never addressed to me. I don’t expect she came to know much of me through our common wall — I dislike talking on the phone and was mostly alone in that space — however I was able to discern in abstract that she managed a musician of some national or even international renown. Without any intention, I overheard one side to countless one-sided conversations dictating to acquiescent others an apparently ceaseless touring schedule that included performances both solo (‘So-and-so’) and with band (‘The So-and-so Quartet’).

Unobserved and unheard in my own studio, I, however, was struggling to work. Perhaps exacerbated by the constant movement of the theoretical musician, the studio had begun to seem a static singularity around which the world turned indifferently in perpetual and constant change. So, without expectation, I began a series of work — all of which are now lost — for the purposes of simply working, of making something, a measurable something by which I could confirm my reality.

George Brecht, Egg from Water Yam, 1963. Offset card, 3.9 x 6.6 cm, from cardboard box with offset label, containing sixty-nine offset cards.

The series, entitled At least one, was instigated by George Brecht’s Water Yam (1963), though, according to my notes from the time, was also motivated by George Bernard Shaw’s Advice to a Young Critic (1955), Ed Ruscha’s Room (1963), Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (1964), Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three series (1965), Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies (1975), and, by some conceptual step that I can no longer reason, the dedications of Robert Macpherson’s paintings. Responding to the Egg card from Water Yam I made a series of paintings using nouns that have the same form in both the singular and the plural, for example, “at least one”:

sheep
fish
deer
offspring
moose
grouse
series
species, et cetera.

For each word I made a composite image using the typographic variations available within a particular font family — roman or italic with all differences in weight and width — so that each individual word came to contain itself in plural. Where a word is soft and indefinitely full of meaning until refined by the pressures of grammar and syntax, these composites were set misshapen in oil on canvas with double-headed ‘i’s and awkwardly protruding serifs to be defined, instead, by their own indefinite plurality.

Study for At least one, n.d. Graphite on paper, 25.0 x 18.4 cm.

I don’t believe the works individually comprising At least one were ever hung on a wall outside the four walls of that studio. Never exhibited, never sold, never seen by eyes other than my own, and, now lost, never likely to be seen again or for the first time, the works have effectively never existed. They are physically neither here nor there. But what effect has this writing? Is At least one made further misshapen and multiple through this remembrance? Or, instead, is it made hard and definite through the utterance of these words? If so, where lie its other occurrences? Its other other meanings? Do they lie dormant? (Do they lie? Can they lie?) A word has at least one meaning, a studio at least one occupant, and a building — perhaps one more or less similar to this building and so, strictly speaking, entirely dissimilar — at least one history, whether seen or unseen, heard or unheard within its four walls.