Michael Punt, The Double Life of Things - (Project) | PLACE - Revue d'Art / Art Magazine #4

#4 – Février / February 2022

Michael Punt

The Double Life of Things

(a fiction in stories and objects)

This project follows on from my previous contribution to Place, The Silverfish and the Broken Planets and Place Anecdote, Theory and Practice and a Young Princess. In both of those contributions I presented a fictional text alongside images of artworks that I had made as an integrated work. The Double Life of Things: A fiction in five stories and a collection of objects borrows the same form but in a rather different way. The stories and the objects offer a commentary on the developing speculation that things might, simultaneously, have multiple forms. I was inspired by the ordinariness of Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories as they conjured the mirror-image of the journeyman typesetter arranging moveable type to produce an obverse version of Kawabata’s stories in the composing stick the palm of his hand. Worrying at this idea of the double form I began casting and recasting some ordinary objects so that neither the pattern, the mould nor the cast could be clearly identified as the ‘thing’. They were photographed and the images assembled as both clusters and a single line of argument. Simultaneously I wrote a series of five short fictions dramatizing objects under the title of The Galley which collectively would make sense as a single story regardless of the order in which they were read.

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