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Ashmouth Assembly / Field Manual 03 of 11
Department of Residual Material / Regulation 03Identification label / detached copy
Operational Handbook on Making Art
LeaveFingerprints
Regulation Concerning Fingerprints, Recognition & Residual Material
- Document03
- Identification labelDetached
- Personal traceDetected
- Dog statusEscaped
Residual inspection / initial finding
You have made the thing.
You have stolen half the ingredients.
Good.
Now there is another problem.
It should not look as though it could have come from anybody.
Leave fingerprints.
Not your signature.
Not your name in the corner.
Not a watermark the size of Belgium.
Something deeper.
Every maker leaves traces in the decisions they make.
What gets exaggerated.
What gets cut.
What gets left rough.
What gets forgiven.
What gets pushed too far.
Where you stop.
Some are deliberate.
Others are habits.
A few are accidents nobody has successfully stopped you making.
Do enough work and these things begin to accumulate.
Not into a logo.
Not into a preset.
Into recognition.
Someone should eventually be able to encounter something you made without seeing your name and think:
That looks like one of yours.
Identification objective / accumulated
Your work becomes recognisably yours because traces of your decisions accumulate.
Not because you invented something from nothing.
Not because every work looks identical.
And not because you consciously designed a personal brand called MY STYLE™, despite what people might tell you to do.
The work should change.
The maker should remain.
Take your name off the thing.
Take the title off too.
Remove anything that explicitly tells somebody who made it.
Now ask:
Would anybody know?
Not everybody.
You are not Coca-Cola.
Calm down.
But somebody who already knows your work should have a chance of recognising that you were involved before they find the label.
Because labels are unreliable little bastards.
Captions disappear. Images get reposted. Prints get moved. Things are screenshotted, photocopied, badly photographed, cropped and detached from whatever explanatory furniture they arrived with.
The label is fragile. The fingerprints should not be.
Someone sees the thing and thinks:
I know who did this.
Useful.
No authorised representative need be present.
Evidence classification / ingredients insufficient
The fingerprint is in the treatment.
There is a difference between a recognisable ingredient and a recognisable maker.
A thousand people can use red.
A hundred people can draw a black dog.
Everybody remains legally permitted to draw a cat.
For now.
None of these things become yours simply because you use them.
What gives you away is how you handle them.
- Where you put the dog.
- What sits beside it.
- What you make too large.
- What you leave filthy.
- How much empty space you tolerate.
- How the language behaves.
- How far you push the joke before stopping.
- What you leave unexplained.
Someone else can use exactly the same ingredients and produce something completely different.
Good.
This is why imitation can look accurate and still feel dead.
The colours are there.
The subject is there.
The correct quantity of damage has been applied.
And somehow the body is missing.
They copied the evidence.
They did not reproduce the crime.
You can make something enormous, complicated, political, personal and full of carefully constructed meaning.
Somebody looks at it and says:
“I like the little dog.”
Excellent.
You may find this irritating.
The dog does not care.
The dog has escaped.
Something in the work got out without the rest of it.
More importantly, something about the way you made that dog may still give you away.
Do not immediately make the dog your official symbol.
Just record the evidence.
Ashmouth Assembly Notice 03/A
Identification label: detached.
Personal trace: detected.
Signature: non-structural.
Manufactured style: not required.
Operator: remains at large.
Dog: uncooperative.
Recognition hazard / self-imitation detected
Do not design a style.
A style can emerge.
That is different.
The dangerous bit starts when you notice what people recognise and begin manufacturing it back at them.
The same face.
The same colours.
The same composition.
The same brush.
The same trick.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Recognition is useful.
Self-imitation is not.
Your fingerprints should survive change.
Change the subject.
Change the medium.
Change the tools.
Change the scale.
Make something quiet after making something loud.
Make something ugly.
Make something that appears to belong to another project entirely.
Then look at what remains.
The things that keep turning up despite your attempts to escape them are much more interesting than the things you deliberately repeat because they performed well last Tuesday.
Do not protect your style.
Give it opportunities to die.
If something survives anyway, keep an eye on it.
That may actually belong to you.
Do not manufacture quirks because you think you ought to have them.
Do not wake up tomorrow and announce:
The triangle has done nothing to deserve this responsibility.
Look instead at what already gives you away.
Maybe you crop things too close. Maybe your faces carry the same peculiar tension. Maybe your jokes arrive half disguised as threats. Maybe you always leave too much room around the wrong thing.
Perhaps, despite all reasonable efforts, dogs keep getting involved.
Fine.
Evidence is evidence.
Notice it. Do not immediately legislate for it.
Some things will recur.
A shape. A colour. A particular ugliness.
Fine.
Recurrence may be evidence.
Deliberately repeating it because it performed well is something else.
Repetition is another department.
Witness testimony / statements admitted
The investigation continues.
Your recurring decisions will not all be flattering.
Some are strengths.
Some are habits.
Some are simply shit.
Fix those.
But if several people independently notice the same peculiar decision, record it before you sand it away.
Other people may see your fingerprints before you do.
Annoying.
Still useful.
- Someone says all your faces look as though they have just witnessed something terrible.
- Someone else notices the filthy marks.
- A third asks why there is another fucking dog.
You do not have to obey any of them.
The public has not been appointed to your management committee.
They are witnesses. That is all.
But if several unrelated witnesses point at the same peculiar quality, record the statement.
The useful question is not:
Wrong department
Do they like it?
Useful question
What gave me away?
Sometimes they will name something obvious.
Sometimes they will say:
“I don’t know. It just looks like yours.”
Good.
Some evidence is difficult to catalogue.
Stress test / costume change authorised
Recognisable does not mean identical.
Change the subject.
Change the material.
Change the scale.
Change the palette.
Change the method completely if the work requires it.
Make a painting, then a photograph. Make a song. Make something out of cardboard. Make a badly behaved website.
A familiar colour or object may come with you.
Fine.
But it should not have to carry the entire case.
The deeper giveaway might be the tension, the humour, the treatment of bodies, the handling of space, the way ordinary things become slightly wrong, or something nobody can quite put their finger on.
Allow some mystery.
The maker should survive the costume change.
Now remove some assistance.
Crop the work. Shrink it. Photograph it badly. Take away the caption. Separate it from the nice presentation. Put it somewhere it was not designed to be.
Then ask:
What still gives me away?
Not merely: What survives?
We are not testing whether the work survives yet. We are testing whether you do.
We are looking for evidence of the maker.
- The treatment?
- The arrangement?
- The language?
- The atmosphere?
- That odd decision somebody else probably would not have made in quite the same way?
If the obvious ingredient disappears and something of you is still detectable underneath, take note.
This is an inspection. Not a constitution.
Operation 03 / residual comparison
Change everything you can.
Source materialExisting work
01A different subject.
02Different tools, palette or scale.
03Different references or circumstances.
Choose three things you have already made.
They should be materially different from one another.
Do not make new work for this operation.
Do not choose three near-identical pieces to make the test easy.
That constitutes coaching the witness.
Comparison procedure / evidence only
Put all three together.
Look for what survived.
A shape.
A kind of mark.
A compositional habit.
A particular ugliness.
Something you always remove.
Something you never remove.
That is evidence.
Do not immediately turn it into a rule.
Just notice it.
Next time, change something else.
See whether the same troublesome decision follows you.
Operation complete when
- Three materially different existing works have been compared.
- The obvious identifiers have been removed.
- At least one recurring decision has been located.
- The evidence describes treatment, not merely subject matter.
- No personal brand has been declared.
Record of activity / witness language retained
Keep the evidence.
Write down what gave you away.
Use their language.
Not yours.
Maybe it was the faces. The filthy marks. The weird empty bit. The way everything looks as though something happened five minutes earlier. The joke they were not entirely sure was a joke.
Perhaps it was the dog again.
Keep the evidence.
Do not turn it into a constitution.
You have discovered traces, not instructions for how every future thing must look.
The work should change.
The maker should remain.
Leave enough evidence that when the name disappears, the thing does not become anonymous.
If the name falls off, something of you should remain.
Not necessarily a symbol. Not necessarily a colour. Not necessarily the dog. Something.
One final test / obvious evidence removed
Imagine the next thing you make contains none of the obvious evidence.
Different subject.
Different colours.
Different material.
No dog.
Could you still be found at the scene?
If yes, the fingerprint is probably real.
You have located the evidence.
Do not turn it into a rule.
Do not put the dog on the stationery.
Not yet.
Secondary identification test
Now remove the labels from this document.
No Operational Handbook on Making Art.
No 03.
No Ashmouth Assembly.
Imagine you found a loose page under a pub table.
Would you still know where it belonged?
The bureaucracy behaving badly?
The suspicious instructions?
The swearing?
The unnecessary concern with the dog’s legal position?
Good.
Whatever gave the document away was not the label.
It was the treatment.
If you remembered the dog despite it having almost fuck all to do with the argument, the experiment has worked.
It still gave us away.
Final finding / what remains
You do not need to decide what makes your work yours.
Keep working.
Change things.
Break things.
Make more things.
Continue the investigation.
Borrow new things.
Abandon old things.
Some habits will disappear.
Some will follow you.
Eventually there will be things you seem incapable of leaving behind.
Good.
Those are fingerprints.
Not a declaration.
Not a formula.
Residual material.
Leave them there.