The Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt
The Way You Almost Wholly Omit to Flower
Q: How do you know when to write text and when to make a drawing?
JP: I think writing and drawing are linked together in an intimate way. Cartoonist Lynda Barry has presented interesting thoughts about how artificial the split between the two is, and how in early childhood, before a child enters the school system I guess, the difference between the two activities would be sort of meaningless. Both are a form of mark-making.
This of course has a lot to do with the analogue world, where having a pen and a piece of paper doesn’t pre-determine what you must do with them, while choosing what software you use often makes you think in a split way already (text vs image). I’m writing this on Google Docs and couldn’t continue this line of text with a drawing right now in an intuitive, easy way.
This being said, writing and drawing do have different strengths; writing being better at abstract concepts (‘dialectics’) and linear time (‘yesterday’), while drawing could be a great tool for recording what a specific dog or mountain or shoe looks like. For me it’s also easier to express emotions through drawing, possibly, while my writing often feels quite blunt and cold and non-descriptive, or something. Drawing is also possibly better at representing the way a gesture has been made, it seems like it would be easier to draw a ‘hesitant’ line than write a ‘hesitant’ sentence, maybe?
Q: You use the technique of mindmapping rather extensively. Why do you think it is such an important tool for you?
JP: Mindmaps are another great form that emerges from a pen-and-paper type interface, and which I can’t easily replicate in this document, although virtual mindmap software does exist separately. I like mindmaps because they are a kind of writing or note-taking that does away with linearity, which is the hardest thing about writing for me.
I see things more as patterns or fields than as sets of events set in an order from beginning to end, which is why writing can be difficult or unmotivating, as it feels arbitrary and annoying to have to write one sentence after another and have the sequence of words make sense from beginning to end. A mindmap feels like a more representative text-image of thought.
Corporate mindmaps are I guess more rooted to a certain logic, while my mindmaps often don’t make explicit sense, which I also think is more true to thought, and I enjoy playing with this expectation, an ‘informative’ format given associate, artsy content.
Q: How difficult for you was to know where to end the book?
JP: I usually end things when the material stops coming forth, like if I feel there is friction or difficulty, or this question arises of how to end it, I usually notice that I’ve already arrived at an end at an earlier point and have to just delete material until I find the ‘natural ending’. I don’t think about endings as that fixed though, because I see all of my work as one big piece, where things are overlapping and interconnected, so the end will really only come once I am unable or unwilling to make art anymore.
Jaakko Pallasvuo (b. 1333) is an artist. Pallasvuo makes videos, texts, performances and installations that explore the anxieties of being alive now, and the prospect of living in some possible future. In recent years their work has been presented at International Film Festival Rotterdam, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Kim? Contemporary Art Center in Riga and EKKM, Tallinn among other places.
Graphic design: Gailė Pranckūnaitė
ISBN 978-609-96044-4-2
PDF book, 68 pages, 2020.
Partially funded by Lithuanian Council for Culture.