Nodes, Lists, Pants

Leslie Scalapino "Footnoting" in The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence in her own abstract way supplies me with an epigraph to my indulging in

To produce this impermanence by iterating dissimilarities until they become something else—is the opposite movement of (converse of) obsession or imitation.

serves nicely as an epigraph to this selection of quotations from the catalogue for works by Kai Chan Rainbow Lakes with essays by Stuart Reid and Robin Metcalfe

Robin Metcalfe "Synaesthesia" leads us on an etymological run

The word 'node' derives from an Indo-European root, gen-, which means 'to compress into a ball.' It gives us the words, 'knit,' 'connect' and 'nettle,' and once named several plants of closely related genera, such as the ever-useful hemp, that were anciently employed as sources of fibre. The same root provides sailors with the words 'net' and 'lanyard,' the name of that peculiarly nautical accessory, the knotted cord sailors wear around their necks.

Stuart Reid has constructed his essay around the theme of lists. Down the side of Metcalfe's and Reid's essays are a set of lists of which this is the first:

1. Synonyms for pants
Drawers
Underwear
Trousers
Dungarees
Pedal Pushers
Capri Pants
Bell Bottoms
Knickers
Cords
Bloomers
Pantaloons
Slacks
Flares

I first encountered his work at a 2011 show at the Textile Museum of Canada. I like that now I can think of "node" and "list" as elements of the work and know that what is at work here is neither obsession nor imitation.

And so for day 1877
02.02.2012