DISINTEGRATION Loop 1.1
SVILOVA | WILLIAM BASINSKI DISINTEGRATION LOOP 1.1 WILLIAM BASINSKI JUNE 18–JULY 31, 2014 www.svilova.org 1 SVILOVA | WILLIAM BASINSKI SCALE BE THY KING: THE BLACK Mirror OF William Basinski By David Keenan 1. Scalle Bee Thie Kynge. There is a magical idea, rarely articulated, that imagination is the world-creating matrix of desire, in other words that imagination is what translates a sensation into a thought. Disintegration Loops, still the central, emblematic work of the artist and composer William Basinski, conflates the biological with the constructed, the historical with the personal, by a creative act of imagination that would attempt to mimic the function of memory via accidental processes of auto-forgetting while connecting it with historical trauma –the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers as a head wound – and romantic portraiture, through the back cover recreation of Henry Wallis’s 1856 painting, The Death Of Chatterton, with Basinski posed as the dead 18th Century English poet, who poisoned himself in 1770, aged 17. Thomas Chatterton’s reputation as a forger of mystical poetry is of note here. From the age of 12 onwards he produced a run of strange, visionary verse that he claimed was the work of a 15th century monk of his own invention, Thomas Rowley. Indeed, a particular adjective, “Rowliean”, has been coined to describe the works of this historical figment, this shade birthed of an intoxicated imagination. Rowley’s verse is difficult, its language being largely derived from Chatterton’s study of the English philologist John Kersey’s Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, “comprehending a brief explication of all sorts of difficult words”.
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