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ТИм ечеЛС
tiM EtChELLs
76
Tim Etchells (1962) works in a wide range of formal
contexts spanning performance, fiction, theoretical/
discursive writing and visual art. He is well known as a
founding member and artistic director of the renowned
performance ensemble Forced Entertainment based in
Sheffield, UK. Since its formation in 1984 the group has
been presenting its groundbreaking work around the world
in festivals and contexts dealing with radical developments
in the performing arts. Alongside this collaborative practice,
Etchells has developed a unique voice in writing about key
issues in the field of contemporary performance, notably a
collection of essays and texts, Certain Fragments, published
by Routledge in 1999. Additionally, Etchells published a
short fiction collection Endland Stories in 1999, which was
followed in 2001 by The Dream Dictionary. More recently
he published his first novel, The Broken World (2008), which
takes the form of a guide to an imaginary computer game.
In parallel, Etchells’ visual arts practise has been growing
consistently since 2002, exploring in this arena as well
many of the concerns that have driven him since the start of
his career. Key preoccupations for Etchells across the many
forms he works in are the construction and negotiation of
presence, the dynamic forces of liveness, improvisation,
task and failure. Language itself often features as an
essential element and subject of his work, and the limits
and possibilities of language—as a constructed space and
as a structure for social negotiation—continue to fascinate
him at a deep level.
Indeed, in simple phrases constructed in neon and LED,
as well as in other media from banners to stencils and text
painted straight onto walls, Etchells often uses language to
summon miniature narratives, moments of confusion,
awkwardness, reflection and intimacy. Encountering these
works in the context of a gallery or city street, the viewer is
implicated in a proposition or situation that the text alludes
to, but does not espouse on or reveal fully.
Etchells’ sign works—such as neons Wait Here (2008),
Let’s Pretend (2008), Forever (2010), Please Come Back
(2008) and Fading Glory (2010) presented at the October
Salon, explore ways in which missing information can be
just as important as that which is shown or known through
text. Invoking a situation, or projecting an idea out-of-context,
‘apropos of nothing’, Etchells’ direct-but-puzzling
phrases certainly invite us in, but into what exactly we can
never be entirely sure. Narrative is clearly invoked in these
text works, as many of them suggest a supposed intimate
relationship between their author or their fictional voice
and the implied viewer/reader. Frequently offering specific
advice or demand for action, the details of the scenarios in
which the reader is virtually implicated can however never
be fully inferred from the information supplied. Instead, on
encountering the work, we are co-opted, pulled in as imagi-
native authors and collaborators charged with the task of
fleshing out or unpacking the minimal hints provided by
language. It’s precisely the focus on this act—the act of
collaborative ‘staging’ or performative encountering—that
often links Etchells’ work in visual arts back to the territory
of performance ‘proper’.
In many of Etchells’ sign works, a further tension exists
between the supposed urgency, emotion or narrative drive
of language on the one side, and the elaborate means of the
texts’ display as neon or LED on the other. In Wait Here
(2008) we encounter a text more appropriate for hurried,
heartfelt or handwritten private communication, turned
here into garish public statements. What we might understand
as intimate notes intended to convey danger or regret
become in Etchells’ work luminous pseudo-advertisements
placed in the public space of the city or the gallery. Such
translations of form and context confuse and amplify the
fragmentary and elusive content of the works, altering both
its status and significance, whilst also functioning as subtle
interventions in the city itself through which familiar
locations are made strange.
For October Salon, alongside a selection of existing
neon works, Etchells is creating a new work, Nightlanguage,
pursuing his interest in the structural possibilities and
restrictions of language. Etchells has long been fascinated
by the dynamics between the restrictiveness of a system or
rules and the generative force of language itself—especially
in works such as Nothing List (2006) and Starfucker (2001).
The former consists of a scrolling LED display of words or
phrases which start with the word ‘Nothing’ (Nothing For
You, Nothing to Worry About, Nothing Left, etc.)—turning
the viewer with the shifts of meaning on each phrase and
creating a catalogue of terms and utterances of denial, absence
and negation. Meanwhile, an earlier video work Starfucker
presents an unfolding sequence of phrases—simple white
text on black screen—each describing a Hollywood
celebrity in midst of some extraordinary violent, sexual
or banal situation. Mimicking the ubiquity and the formulaic
nature of celebrity reportage as well as the endless processes
of recycling narrative elements in movie scenarios, Starfucker
is both a kind of complex linguistic rule-based game and an
imaginary movie made without camera and realised in the
mind of the spectator.
In Nightlanguage, using text in the form of signs or
posters displayed in different areas of the exhibition space,
the artist returns to a rule-based game with language, crea-
ting a collection of invented compound words, each begin-
ning with the term ‘night’. Taken together, this partial
dictionary or catalogue of new words, by turns absurd
Pages 70–71:
Nightlanguage, 2010
Text installation
courtesy Tim Etchells
Pages 74–75:
Wait Here, 2008
courtesy Tim Etchells
Pages 78–79:
Fading Glory, 2010
courtesy Tim Etchells
Pages 80–81:
Let’s Pretend, 2008
courtesy Tim Etchells
Tim Etchells was born in 1962 in the Uk, where he lives and works. his work is diverse, moving from a base in performance into
visual art and writing fiction. working across these different media and contexts seems to open up new possibilities and allows
him to approach related ideas again by different routes, hoping to get closer to or maybe further away from the themes and
experiences that interest him—searching for a new perspective.
and clumsy and yet strangely poetic and evocative, stages
a collision between ‘night’ on the one side—with its
contradictory connotations of mystery, darkness, rest, sleep
and dream — and a range of diverse objects, occurrences
and events from daily life on the other side. In Nightlanguage
we are thus asked to imagine such things as nightbreakfast,
nightroads or nightterror, as well as nighthouses, nightvoices
and nightpicnics.
In constructing this incomplete taxonomy of nightthings,
Etchells emphasises the arbitrary construction of language
and its endless possibilities, repeatedly joining words to
make new terms—however plausible or implausible, con-
jurable or elusive the new compounds might be. In another
sense, Etchells invokes and celebrates the power of language
to summon meaning or invoke experience, no matter how
arbitrary its operations on a formal level. Individually and
collectively, the diverse objects, states and events proposed
by Nightlanguage invite the viewer into a place of imagining
—what experience or realities might these new words point
to? What world, aspect of the world or experience might
necessitate their invention? Is the world invoked by each
of these ‘new’ words the same world we currently inhabit?
On one level, each additional word speculatively expands
the frame of the perceptible in our own experience—naming
things, states or events which were previously un-named.
At the same time though, Nightlanguage leaves us guessing,
or wondering… As we encounter each new word construction,
and imagine its possible manifestation and meaning
—we are always aware that this meaning is held in tension
by the highly visible formal frame of Etchells’ project.
Celia Meadow
77