Commonplace Highlights: Jean Luc Nancy

 

Steve Stelling, Commonplace Highlights (Nancy’s Monstrous Openings)

 

A few years ago I put together a commonplace book.  The quotations and excerpts I collected are unified around my interests in critical theory (so-called!) and perception. So there’s that. I’ve also got a surplus of orphaned drawings that haven’t been adopted by any of my own words. Pages like theseare the results of grafting these things together with an eye toward their associative potential.  In a way, I suppose these are my “process” drawings; this is my thought process. If I were to make an aesthetics textbook, this is how I'd want it to look.

Louvered hideaways

Fraught with What's Wrought

Grates Mark the Spot

Buried Treasure: Call Before You Dig

The Shelf Holds My Interests

These are drawings I made between a few trips I made this past year to help my parents move and sell the house I grew up in. I salvaged a few forgotten belongings but these indecipherable scrawlings are largely devoted to reflections on a handful of objects that I've been carting around since childhood. Bidding this home farewell, put me into meditative high gear. That's what's happening here.

What's there to know about it? Wood, wrought iron, joinery, reappropriation of salvaged building materials: those materials and compulsions were synthesized into an idiosyncratic stew by the men in my family: my dad especially--but my grandfather and brother too, no doubt.

Work Gloves Work

Know It When You Hear It

A Simple Ass

Omaha Bodies, Rub the Lamp