Untitled (Philip Hunter)

Waking The land is covered in titles. In fact, all the land has been titled and there is not any land that is not titled. If this is how we wish to regard facts, though one person’s fact may be someone else’s temporary assertion. A title to land may be someone else’s mere piece of paper. Since settlement the land has been settled and settled, and in the process, titled and titled. Another word for settlement is titlement. If you are not with the title-makers then your idea of the land is different, since settlement. Titlement infers entitlement, but they are not the same. This sounds like semantics, until the boundaries are drawn, the fences built, the buildings realised, the roads reinforced. Places themselves are given titles and soon the process of naming has changed everyone’s perception of everywhere, even an innocent lake, even a line in the earth. Those who title the land give the same to their personal names. Mock crusaders who had claimed the land for a foreign monarch were, by that monarch, knighted. Rash dashers quarried the lot and landed themselves a gong. Square on posts to the horizon are fixed titles. Facts are facts, according to the latest opinion. Though any amount of assertion could change that by tomorrow morning. New titles in fancy new lettering could be posted, by special decree, and never mind those who cannot spell. But what if everyone and everywhere was still untitled? 

Dreaming Sleep was sized-up. Words of explanation were summoned. Approximate, but still words that helped toward a definition. Words of explanation became the definition. They started to determine the meaning of the sleep. Thus titled, they were hung in a large hall called a gallery. Although artist’s name, dates, materials used, centimetre edges, and other details were included with the title, far from make a distinction, they became part of the title. Brave exhibitors tried to buck this formality by calling their size-up ‘Untitled’. This was a futile farce, as people of all ages could see that ‘Untitled’ was a title. It didn’t stop these sleepers, who turned ‘Untitled’ into an approximation for any hanging to which they didn’t wish to give a name. Soon the approximation became a convention. Red dots started showing up. Visitors saw these as kiss marks, like the lipstick O’s found on cased relics of saints. Other visitors thought they were outbursts of a disease that any moment could become contagious. Whether a sign of adoration or fear, there was going to be a cost. Not that sleep is at all like this. It is more like a landscape, or cityscape, or housescape, or fire escape that is come across and could lead across those places without a signpost in sight. All dreams go untitled.

Untitled No. 4 Acheron (Philip Hunter)