23 Variations for Texts on Invention

Following “Other Logic” (2006), and an intervening period of fairly severe mental distress, this was a work conceived as an attempt to make a comeback. The idea was to write an episode as a story (a comedy sketch) short enough to fit on a single sheet of A4 paper, structure it through repetition and shifts, and keep making more. For the first exhibition, the texts were printed out and pinned to the wall.

The vocabulary, concepts, and narrative structure used in one text reappear in the next, with repetitions, shifts, and leaps accompanying each successive development. “Invention” can mean inventing, ingenuity, or an idea, but, as in Bach’s Inventions and Sinfonias, it can also refer to a musical idea explored and invented in the course of composition (of course, if we recall that the Latin inventio originally meant both “invention” and “discovery,” it might also name the process of making a work in which the two are inseparable).

In other words, I would go so far as to say here that this work attempts to take methods of musical composition—inversion, canon, and retrograde applied to “a single” melody, along with variations on a musical idea—and bring them into the writing of stories that involve laughter.

Incidentally, although the title says “23 Variations,” there are actually only 22. The author believes the last one resides in the reader’s heart.

＊Exhibited again in 2017 as part of the exhibition “Match-Mismatch” at blankof5304. The texts were bound into a booklet on that occasion.