Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Sarah Riggs on plurality in Redell Olsen's SPRIGS & spots



The question of plurality in Redell Olsen’s SPRIGS & spots is pivotal
because of the text’s emphasis on reproduction, repetition, multiplicity of machines
with respect to the manufacture of lace.  I have decided to isolate the aesthetic
sibilance  and slip-sliding of plural nouns detached from hands as they recur in varieties
of printed fonts (though her historic fonts are not reproduced here--only some of the emphases). I want  to underscore how Olsen is doing important work with respect to plurality and hierarchy—that the machines that liberate also generate an anonymity of labor—and the relative anonymity of a “speaker” in this text resonates with the sense of an assemblage of parts which obfuscate and render dense any notions of individual writers.  It is in this
spirit that I do one patterned assemblage of words from SPRIGS & spots:

SPRIGS   spots  Weavers  SPRIGS  spots
Bodies  Sleeues  Skirts  Knots  Roses  Gloues
Lace-Chambers  landscapes  seascapes activities
spots  sprigs  motifs  ruffles  years  spots  sprigs
props  spots  sprigs  sprigs  spots  paintings
periwinkles  Subjects  arches  executions  colours
oils  pastels  hands  shoulders  grounds  f r a m e s m i t h s
operations  years  spots  thirds  heads  Red-Coats  hands
years  spots  motifs  sides  loopes spots  sprigs  machines
hangynges  arms  operatives  legs  backes  doublets
dubles  spots  sprigs  workers  complexions  splashes
spots  troops  revolutions  stones  shoulders  shrouds
words  sides  sides  convertors  lines  parts  insides
0’s  strips  cards  Sprigs  improvements  bars  threads  note-
books  Sprigs  leaves  fibres  patterns  flowers  leaves
spots  honeycombs  stoppages  worts  spots  sprigs
Sprigs  edgings  machines  holes  instructions  disks
quantities  forms  threads  bobbins  bands  intricacies
advertisements  lacers  breadths  cards  advertisements
appliances  standards  times  insides  edges  breadths’
symbols  results  operations  numbers  operations
advertisements  communications  rollers  appears 
Workers  Makers  carriages  patterns  makers  parts 
postures  garments  parts  sprigs  spots  spots``



Sarah Riggs


No comments:

Post a Comment