I first came across the technique of close engagement from textual analysis many decades ago in its application to literature. There the close enquiry revealed connections, references and meanings that were often not seen at first, and which through reference to later history or wider cultural and political context could easily not have been accessible to or perceived by the writer. Often there were complaints of ‘too much reading into’ the text, making something of it that was not there; this was countered by reference to the idea that literature was not just a set of words but the critical exploration of potentials in the meeting between what was written and the cultural experience of the reader, validating what the reader brought – reader response criticism. However, close critical textual analysis did run the risk of losing the whole in the attention to the detail, not seeing the wood for the trees.
Lying across the boundaries of examination of medium rather than message, playing with time, studiously refusing to engage with content, and obsessive compulsive disorder, the text works in Borderlines, Front Lines look at both the surface of the document, the statistics of linguistic communication, the spatial arrangement of text, and the specifics of visual information. The four works based on a letter from Molly English examine the relationship between formal and informal forms of writing, and the distribution of words statistically and spatially. In two works the replicated handwritten text occupies the same space as the same text printed, in one case using a typewriter from the same era as the letter, in the other a digital printer from the present; time relationships between different kinds of writing lie with the obsessive repetition of the text. The other two works based on the letter take the information down to word level, in terms of frequency and spatial form; meaning is lost but re-imposed in the application of deliberate misreading. The close engagement and repetition in these works mirror Molly English’s engagement with her own body and her retelling of her life.
The texts drawn from the photographs are also made using a typewriter from the period of the familial engagement with the scene. One describes the items shown at a level of closeness that changes the meaning of the engagement with what is seen, minute description of features displacing the historical engagement. The second work uses the process of inversion to support the observation of what is seen without the interference of what is known; the discomfort of reading the inverted text mirrors the discomfort of the removal of recognition, requiring closer engagement.
Our traditional engagement with archives proposes a hierarchy of ways of looking, content prioritised; the deliberate disengagement requires us to engage with the processes of our kinds of engagement.
The word ‘engage’ occurs 14 times in this text.
Text by Julian Walker