Ben Knight - Love is Coming: G. Lansard's Illustrations

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Love might arrive soon, and with it realisation – after its arrival I could rest my head on Lansard’s belly and warm my forehead. But the warmth of the body, this arrival of words is delayed. The illustrations could have brought familiarity: the felt-pen ‘wood cuts’, the recurring cooling towers, hidden jewels, the sometimes charity shop trawled granny-ceramics draw together a system, but it’s retaining Love. Somewhere in the fabric it is there but it’s still coming.

Non-arrival means continuation for the half dead scourging figures; they appear in formations of triangles, circles or enveloped in patterns mutilating their neighbour - farting, pissing and shitting on each other surrounded by Lansard’s ritual comforts. Look to the rope, smoke towers, and flagellated bodies with no promise. This is happening because it has to.

It is coming, I’m sure if I lay my forehead on Lansard’s belly I could hear the sounding of those figures: what’s whispered in the ritual is foggy, and what we are confronted with is the body we can smell, touch and hear, and not just see. If my forehead becomes warm it is a volley of life we are dealing with. Now if Love never arrives we’ll have its constituents in sound. Lansard’s accounts are the ‘schlupp’ of our bodies, our “primitive forms of language, before communication by expressive sounds become stereotyped into words, when the voice is richer in vibrations, more mightily physical”[1].

The language of the figures is richer in a particle state – cum, saliva slopped around the mouth cavity, and the primal animalistic sounds before words form, make up these incantations. These multiple threads of life-sound are dizzying, so try and create a whole from Lansard’s signatures, but it will only lead you to a dead end.

The belch of Lansard’s illustration is an intense body jerk feeling for reciprocity with the world – this formlessness and noise is not derived through hate or bitterness, but a need to reorder what has been represented for us. The placid environment is damaged by Lansard’s intuitive hand: a cock urinates on a tree, blood is spilt and both are absorbed, their gasses returning to the atmosphere through the cooling towers, and suddenly everything is interrupted by intestinal splup or the squeak of an arse.

Love finally arrives dripping down the fabric.

BLK, August 2008.



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[1] Bob Cobbing, form From Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, Underwich Editions, Toronto, 1978
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G. Lansard at Nog Gallery
15th August - 20th September, 2008
www.myspace.com/noggallery
182 Brick Lane
London
E1 6SA