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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.
You may not be able to see this in one thing.
You may not even see it in three.
You are too close.
Pull ten things together. Twenty if you have them. Put them on a wall, spread them across the floor, open a folder of photographs, make a grid on your screen.
Then step back.
Things start repeating.
Not necessarily the same subject.
Not necessarily the same colour.
Not necessarily some clever little symbol you have accidentally invented.
It might be the way you crop a figure.
The amount of empty space you leave.
The way faces disappear.
The kind of marks you refuse to clean up.
The way something ordinary becomes slightly threatening.
The point where you always seem to stop.
One piece might tell you nothing.
A pile of work starts talking.
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
Pull back. Look at the evidence.
Source materialExisting work
Choose 10–20 things you have already made.
More is fine.
Do not make anything new for this operation.
Do not choose only your favourites.
Do not choose twenty near-identical things because you already know what they have in common.
That constitutes coaching the witness.
Choose a decent spread.
Different subjects.
Different periods.
Different materials if you use them.
Finished things. Rough things. Things you had almost forgotten about.
Now get them into the same field of view.
Put the physical work against a wall.
Lay it across the floor.
Photograph it.
Open twenty photographs on your computer and make a rough grid.
Scroll back through your gallery.
The presentation does not matter.
The distance does.
Step back.
Stop looking at each individual work.
Look at the group.
Do not ask:
Do these all match?
They probably should not.
Do not ask:
What is my style?
Wrong department.
Ask:
What keeps happening?
Look for recurring decisions.
- How you use space.
- Where you put things.
- What you crop.
- What you exaggerate.
- What you leave unfinished.
- The kinds of marks you make.
- The things you repeatedly obscure.
- The things you make too large or too small.
- How you treat bodies, faces, buildings, objects or landscape.
- How clean or filthy you allow the surface to become.
- The kind of tension, humour, sadness or threat that keeps appearing.
- Things you repeatedly leave unexplained.
- Decisions that another person might not have made in quite the same way.
Some things may be obvious.
Others may only appear across five or six works.
They do not need to appear in everything.
This is not a uniform.
You are looking for family resemblance.
Record what you find.
Write down three to five things that seem to recur.
They are suspects.
Not laws.
Maybe you discover that figures are nearly always pushed towards the edge.
Maybe ordinary places keep becoming uncomfortable.
Maybe you keep destroying faces.
Maybe everything has too much empty space.
Maybe you constantly leave one awkward object sitting somewhere it apparently should not be.
Or perhaps it is the same sort of doorway.
Or a particular kind of brick wall that apparently exists everywhere.
You did not declare this a style.
It kept turning up without permission.
Maybe you still cannot see anything.
Fine.
Add another ten works.
Pull back further.
Look again.
Bring in a witness.
If you can, show the group to somebody who has seen your work before.
Do not ask:
Do you like these?
Ask:
What keeps happening in my work?
Or:
What makes these feel like mine?
Do not explain first.
Let them look.
They may notice something you have completely missed.
Record their words.
You do not have to agree with them.
The witness has not been appointed creative director.
They are providing evidence.
Operation complete when
- At least 10–20 existing works have been viewed together.
- You have looked at the body of work rather than judging individual pieces.
- A few possible recurring decisions have been recorded.
- At least one concerns how you treat something, not simply what the subject is.
- Other people’s observations have been recorded if available.
- None of this has been converted into a compulsory personal brand.
You are not trying to discover the formula for making more of your work.
You are trying to notice what is already there.
Record of activity / witness language retained
Keep the evidence.
Write down what you noticed.
If somebody else noticed something, write that down too.
Keep their language if it is useful.
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.
Some of them may disappear.
Some will become stronger.
Some will turn out to have been nothing more than a temporary habit.
Fine.
The investigation continues.
The work should change.
The maker should remain.
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, 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.