Angus Carlyle

is a writer, artist and academic. In parallel to a long-standing critical engagement with contemporary photography, his writing has tackled subjects as diverse as the suicide of situationist Guy Debord and the sense of place experienced by long-distance truck drivers. At the turn of the millennium he edited the fashion and culture magazine, themepark, and has since edited the book Autumn Leaves: Sound and Environment in Artistic Practice for Double Entendre and compiled an award-winning album to accompany it.
His explorations of sound in artistic contexts have involved exhibiting at various galleries, appearing on CDs and performing. With Irene Revell, he co-curated the Sound Escapes show at Space in London in the summer of 2009. He works with Cathy Lane as a co-Director of CRiSAP at the University of the Arts London.

 

 

Kiyosumi

MP3

 

For me, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of a ‘language-game’ is a member of that exclusive little club of concepts that somehow offer so much more when they are misunderstood than when they are properly grasped. The idea of the language-game emerges as an opportunity for Wittgenstein to slough off the scaly approach to language that depends on teachers pointing and children learning. The language-game allows Wittgenstein to push isolation and abstraction to one side and make more room for context and actual use. “We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground! But when Wittgenstein maps the rough ground of his language-game, there is a lot of language but not much of a game. Better to misunderstand his idea and interpret it instead as an endorsement of the ludic in speech, as a claim that we are always playing with words and their rules.

 

Little Kiyosumi certainly reveled in the game of speech as we picnicked by the Saihoji stream in North-West Kyoto.