Metafiction, Myth and Language: A World in Words (and Pictures)

 Yesterday, I collected the 5 copies of the printed, bound Gyldlandsaga books from the printers and examined them...it's always nerve-wracking to open up that first copy and peer inside at how it's turned out. But the books look very fine - they have good, solid (even monumental) weight and physicality, and the steel spine adds excellent durability. The lack of "real book" textualities such as copyright bibliographical data, page numbering, ISBN etc., I think, help to enforce the 'art object' aspect of them and take away the 'mass production' aspects of cataloguing and data storage: as far as the international records are concerned, this book does not exist as such (cf Hannah Arendt's idea of refugees with no identity papers etc. being classed as 'non-people by 'the authorities' - i.e those whose rules constitute being or non-being). All the Old English texts on which this is based exist only in unique manuscripts, allowing these very

In putting together the narration for a 'work in progres' disscussion of the project for tomorrow, I realised this made a decent summary of the project to date, including some new thoughts and research. So here goes:    And here is the text of the presentation (with a few extra explanatory points): This project explores the relationship between word, image, object, and idea, and the representation of a non-existent place and time in a very specific space of bounded, physical place/time. Deconstruction has become the theme of this project, via growing reference to the ideas of Derrida and Foucault, as well as a breakdown of binary oppositions, upon which much structuralist theory is founded -  as well as certain social, cultural and political restrictions which persist today. Originally influenced by the mythological research of levi-Strauss, it was created as a fictional myth system – a body of knowledge concerning gods, their origins, and tales – and their representations – bo

 A most excellent curatorial tutorial today pulled things in a totally unexpected - but possibly inevitible - direction, given the themes of deconstruction, subversion and metatextuality which have been at the forefront of things lately. It all started when we dismantled the glass display case to get some stones inside...and then we started moving things around... Currently it's all about utilising the space, and subverting the expectations of what a traditional museum ought to look like, even down to whether the explanatory texts ought to be placed alongside their corresponding exhibits - and in a sense also echoing early 20th Century criticism of Beowulf  (which Tolkien confronts in his famous essay The Monsters & the Critics ) that the 'marginal elements' (i.e the monster fights and the dragon) are given centre-stage (because, obviously, any 'serious' epic must not trouble the reader with such trivia - despite the plethora of sea-monsters, one-eyed giants and