He Wore, He Might Find, & He Moved

Nick Thurston

Price contact simon [at] informationasmaterial [dot] com for prices and availability
Format triptych of two-colour screenprints made with archival and lightfast inks on Somerset White Velvet 300gsm paper
Year 2009
Edition hand-numbered
Dimensions 1000 x 650 mm

This series of fine prints invokes the last novel that Samuel Beckett wrote in English, ‘Watt’. The literary manoeuvres Beckett explores find, what he himself called, an “unsatisfactory” fictive embodiment in the narrative of ‘Watt’. But his displacement of conventional noevlistic priorities allows the book to operate as an exercise in form and a formal play with classic modernist themes (i.e. rationalism, negation etc.).

Among its most distinctive motifs are long lists of choices faced by the main character, Mr. Watt. The scale and structural repetitiveness of these lists present hyper-exaggerated combinations of choices by reducing each option to a permutative unit held between a tightly strung syntactical pattern:

As for his feet, sometimes he wore on each a sock, or on the one a sock and on the other a stocking, or a boot, or a shoe, or a slipper, or a sock and boot, or a sock and shoe, or a sock and slipper, or a stocking and boot, or a stocking and shoe, or a stocking and slipper,or nothing at all. And sometimes he wore on each a stocking, or on the one a stocking and on the other a boot, or a shoe, or a slipper, or a sock and boot, or a sock and shoe, or a sock and slipper, or a stocking and boot, or a stocking and shoe, or a stocking and slipper, or nothing at all…”

Mr. Watt is the consistent ‘He’ through Thurston’s series. Each of Thurston’s three prints intervenes in one directly quoted list from ‘Watt’. Using shallow parsing – a technique of linguistic analysis – Thurston has reduced the language tokens that represent the possible choices implicated by three simple actions (wearing, finding and moving) to their simple grammatical function (as noun, adjective etc.). The three resultant poems switch the reader’s attention to the slight nuances in Beckett’s connective patterns – the conjunctions, punctuation etc.:

As for his feet, sometimes he wore on each a noun, or on the one a noun and on the other a noun, or a noun, or a noun, or a noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or pronoun adverb. And sometimes he wore on each a noun, or on the one a noun and on the other a noun, or a noun, or a noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or a noun and noun, or pronoun adverb…”

The uniform layout of Thurston’s prints undesigns the iconic book cover of the John Calder edition of ‘Watt’ by appropriating its tripartite structure, bottom-up information flow, colour-scheme and font set.

Sets of He Wore, He Might Find, & He Moved are available, price on request.