the persistence of vanity

the persistence of vanity, originally uploaded by aesop.

 

the persistence of vanity

the persistence of vanity, originally uploaded by aesop.

 

bz

bz, originally uploaded by aesop.

soon to be realized as a gigantic steel sculpture over Bristol.

Nah, just wishful thinkin'.

We only get ships'n'engineerin'n'ships hereabouts. How about a monument to CIDER?

from Southey diary

from Southey diary, originally uploaded by aesop.

 

phoenix

phoenix, originally uploaded by aesop.

locusts!

locusts!, originally uploaded by aesop.

from the Nuremberg Chronicle at Bristol Central Library. It'll be on show on our Doors Open day on Saturday 10th September.

"H. Roberts-Lewis"

"H. Roberts-Lewis", originally uploaded by aesop.

 

at Bath

at Bath, originally uploaded by aesop.

 

at Blaise Castle

at Blaise Castle, originally uploaded by aesop.

Photos from the collection recently discovered at Bristol central Library.

tea at Tranquility

tea at Tranquility, originally uploaded by aesop.

snowdome Paris

snowdome Paris, originally uploaded by aesop.

bronze box

bronze box, originally uploaded by aesop.

Flying carpets, dissolving woodlands and French curses

I was able to get to the RWA (the Royal West of England Academy) in Bristol on the 22nd to see a show I'd seen some notices for some time ago, and thought I'd try to get to see before it ended up as another Fruitmarket scenario. An exhibition of the work of members of a group called "Lan2D" was on, which is a group working on art's relationship to the landscape, and the various cultural and philosophical offshoots of that. It's coordinated by Iain Biggs, who's one of my PhD advisors, and it features the work of several people I've been taught by or worked alongside, so there was a feeling of familiarity about the show which was only dented a little bit by having to pay to get in to see it.

It's been a while since I've been into the building, which was refurbished last year (parts of the interior are still looking a bit imperfect, but I think the way it is is sort of characterful, like the desk fans screwed to the wall to provide ventilation on the admittedly rare hot days).  There was quite a lot to see here. I'm not going to write about all of it, because I could go on for ages.

Mick McGraw's work first. I met him a couple of years ago when my friend Andrew Atkinson had a residency at Glasgow School of Art, where Mick McGraw runs Printmaking. I had a chance to review one of this books for the artists' books yearbook a couple of years ago, but despite my writing admiring things about his book, the copy got lost somewhere between my writing it and the printing. Mea culpa, most likely, but it's a shame. The book I reviewed, Three Fifths Fluid, seems to fit in well with the work I'm seeing here. There's a relationship with the Scottish landscape that's partly personal, partly historical. partly scientific (geological), and partly mythical, I think, too. The creation of myth around landscape is always a conflation of these different human approaches to the world, layering the experiences and thoughts of others onto the world we experience. This is a theme that comes up again and again throughout the exhibition, not just mythical, but all sorts of cultural overlays. In fact "Overlay" might have made a good essay title for the show. Returning to McGraw's work though, there were a series of large stretchers with letterbox-format photos and prints on them. These have a theme running through them- different images of the ancient remnant forests of Scotland. If memory serves, these are patches of forest that survive from a time before Scotland's forests were largely coniferous, so there are lots of different species of a less Scandinavian character. They're like little islands. I can't remember clearly enough to say what their relationship to glaciation is, but there is one, so that the forests themselves share the timescale of the land they're growing in: the events that shape the rocks around them have also shaped them. In a sense, there is a "culture" a relationship, anyway, here, that isn't human- it's an older relationship where the trees overlay (that word again) the land with their ecological culture. This changes, different events and forces drive away the old culture and replace it with the new (coniferous, human) cultures.

There are senses in which trees, forests, capture human culture, too. The growth rings of trees capture data about air quality, holding it under the trees' skin like a tattoo, and the macroscopic scale of the forest carries traces of habitation and industry. ( I can remember being in such an ancient remnant forest, years ago, where charcoal works had served a foundry. The forest held this archaeological data, too) The remnants hold out, are islands in a sea of change that can't be absorbed (like the early charcoal workings), waiting for the axe to fall- or more likely to be swept aside by the bulldozer. Well, maybe not. At least some of these sites are protected. They remind me of a passage in The Child That Books Built, by Francis Spufford. Spufford is talking about the character of the forest in story. They stand for wild places, inhuman, or maybe just soaked in primeval humanity. Spufford talks about the notion of an untouched piece of forest down a ravine somewhere in Britain where noone has ever set foot. I don't imagine that this could be true of our Ancient remnants, but they hold that sense of time just the same.

McGraw's photos and prints look at these patches of forest and individual trees, surveying land and tree together and showing the tenacity but fragility of the forests' hold upon the land. It's patchy, windswept, hemmed in by roads and civilisation. It's a rich resource though, a hidden archive, a holdout that has been overlaid so long but used so natively, that one might never know it was there.

I walked on, by now glad of the desk fans screwed to the wall. It gets rather warm in this gallery.

Paul Gough's work here consists of a series of studies for "Southern Region". Gough's work has been rooted in war imagery for a long time. Memorials and landscape and story come together in maps, grounds, structures and masses, weaponlike, fortresslike forms that rise up almost heraldically out of the ground. One of these pastels is a sort of x-ray of a tunnel, a sapper's hole with an entrance at one end and a crater at the other. The land bearing the traces of the event. And the traces marked and encoded here as a memorial of the event, but made unspecific. There's a symbolic and spatial shorthand here, the cutaway view, the x-ray, that simplifies and dramatises the event so that we can approach it, and the events it relates to, as a story.

I really started to get the sense of 'Overlay' as a theme, when I looked at Jane Millar's work. Several pictures, painted and pastelled- in, literally overlaid with lines of beadwork. Three sets of pictures: some based on pictures from a Mars Rover, one at least of a mountain scene, and several of a tornado. The concerns of these groups mesh with one another. In the "Mars" pictures, the desolate Martian surface hosts the proxy human gaze of the camera, taking the photo the picture is based on. There have been several points over the last couple of decades where evidence seems to have been found for the presence, at some point in history, of microbial life on Mars. We still don't know. But the Rover's job is to find out, and to send us back images of our new lands. They're already mythologized. The map of mars is covered with names, (Who gets to pick them?). The surface of Mars, depicted in this picture, at least, sports carpets. These carpets (products, traditionally, of desert cultures on Earth), lie in the dust of the Martian desert here. As the rover's lens pulls them into focus, they're literally embroidered onto the surface of the image. The strings of beads, themselves resembling mats of microbes, are overlaid onto the desert ground. The surface of the planet is covered in a culture like the surface of a Petri dish. The carpet implies both the presence of life, and the codifying presence of the human gaze, filling the land with stories.

The "Mountain" sequence, though recognisably Earthlike, shows a snowy mountain scene, with the summit of a mountain and a small Alpine settlement below, separated by a forest and the towering bulk of the mountain. The small house and the peak are embroidered. I'm starting to read the embroidered parts at this stage as a cipher for human presence. The picture’s called (I think) "So where are you now?". The options seem to be- either cosily ensconced in the lodge at the foot, or shivering at the top. There seems to be an implication of a 'phone conversation, so there may be a pair of mobile-equipped people, with one in each location, but which one's doing the talking, I don't know. Again there's a sense of human culture moving across the landscape here- at the summit and the foot of the mountain. No in-between here, only destinations, with the invisible words communicating across the distance. Beamed across the landscape's intervening darkness and confusion of the natural world, just as the Martian carpets fly across the vacuum between the planets. Both are digital, both quantizing the world into short, separated statements. The pixilation of the beads recapitulates the "pixilation" culture imposes on the world.

Finally, there's the "Tornado" pictures. These look like weather, with the pastelled cone of a tornado whipping across a horizon just out of frame, or a square the colour of overcast, stormy sky. Here the beadworks seem less human, I think. There's a sense in which they resemble a very definitely human overlay- systems of pressure and ionisation, metaphors for understanding the forces at play in this natural phenomenon. There's also a sense in which they portray (and so I suppose, to that extent, they still are a cultural portrayal) actual patterns of pressure and charge. There may be channels for lightning here, there may be hanging sheets of charges locked into the atmosphere. There is dust swept up into the vortex, or perhaps, here amidst the destruction, the threads of human culture are swept up and separated- perhaps the embroidery we see here is that of a pattern being torn apart and redistributed by nature. There's an irony at work here- the closer we get to a depiction of a peaceful, habitable landscape ( From Mars, down to the arable plains that Tornadoes frequent), the more violent the image becomes. Mars is peaceful: our gaze weaves complexity here, and we can hold out on the rugged slopes of a mountain, but at home on the farm everything's gone wrong. The best we can see here is the gaze of scientists trying to hold the smallest ideas in place amidst the maelstrom. I'm not sure if this is intentional on Millar's part (nor, of course, am I sure of any of it- I am merely working my own embroidery across the surfaces her work provides), but there seems a strong comment about where our intelligence turns its gaze, its effort, its humanity. To Mars, or to shanties and trailer parks?

Sian Bonnell's "Serving Suggestions" are photos of food made up as landscapes. Again we've got the humanisation of landscape going on. Here, perhaps literalized in agricultural terms: a field could raise so much beef or so many potatoes. A chalk cliff is a face of mashed potato fringed with the green of peas. The cultural significance of food (bully beef for Britain, boiled beef and carrots to see us through) is played on, with the humour of the images patching into the nostalgia their depictions suggest. The raw material of the land is transformed through enculturation into the "cooked" material of the landscape, here quite literally.

Iain Biggs' work is represented here too. Quite a lot of his work recently has centred around material collected and inspired by Borders history and culture. It's a bit too close to my own projects in Whistling Copse for me to see it very clearly. Biggs has approached the material from a number of different angles, mythical and historical and even musically examining the subject, which shines out cryptically.  There are series of related images forming a semantic field that tells us something over time and examination, like the interpretation of x-ray crystallography that allowed researchers to interpolate the structures of molecules. The images themselves are like unknown hieroglyphs, hovering on the edge of meaning, but with a definite syntactical relationship with each other. My own approach to similar material ( at the moment everything's a bit quiet on this front) has been more literal, possibly more textual. There may be something to be said for this less literal imaging, something which I'll be thinking about over the next few days.

Dan Shipsides' work comprised a number of photos of large, old looking boulders somewhere in France, and a video piece. The video showed people climbing on these rocks. Not easy climbs by the look of them, but one which can be taught, codified, tried against and eventually overcome. A climber tries and fails, tries and fails, tries and finally makes it. Climbers falling the few feet to the ground utter FRENCH CURSES as their grip gives way. Diagrams appear on the screen, showing the diagram of the climb: climber's notes and the special marks indicating holds and positions appear on the roughly depicted anatomy of the boulders. It made me think of one of the first stories I read, of the discovery of the caves at Lascaux by children. These boulders, so old and French, seem to have been 'peopled' long long ago, so worn and smooth are they, presumably by some geological or water effect, but seemingly by being immersed in the intensity and relentlessness of human habitation and human regard for so long. Not to mention being scrambled over by wiry French guys with moustaches. There's a sense in which the access we normally make with our gaze/intellect to the landscape, is here dramatised physically. Rather than tracing a contour or balancing along the line of a shadow by eye, our protagonists here are physically engaging with the big rocks, enduring the agony and the ecstasy of getting to the top the hard way. This is paralleled in the text which come up on screen, a long text of Cézanne addressing Basquet ( I'm sorry to say I don't know who Basquet is). The gist of the text is about the difficulty of capturing images of the real world, the difficulty of addressing one's gaze, one's concentration, to the subject just right: "if I pass too high or too low- bang", paraphrases a passage. As if Cézanne is shuffling along the ledge himself, gripping tightly but trying to stay nimble. Even the end of the ascent is difficult. The final few feet over the curving lip of the edge are deceptive- finishing the climb and finishing the picture are difficult.

Another part of the gallery was showing the work of Michael Garton, a member of the RWA who died recently, and whose later work was concerned with landscape. The standout pieces for me were a pair of diptychs with a high horizon, showing a piece of forest in summer and winter. I met Peter Reddick, the printmaker, as I was looking, and found out from him that Garton would go to a place and leave his equipment there for a long time, as he visited and revisited, looking and looking and looking, climbing slowly towards the picture. They're monumentally observed. The depth and form of the trees, stacking themselves off towards the horizon with twigs flaring and boskiness rampant, is realised far better than any photo could in this subject. There's a depth of formal realisation here that takes on the formidably abstract drawing problem presented by a bunch of trees and works with it on terrifically brave terms. These images interrogate the landscape closely, and above all, personally. Although the style and handling couldn't be different, I'm reminded of Ivon Hitchens, toiling away in his wood, trying to capture something of the place. What I think Garton found, and which is here in his work, is a kaleidoscope of change and fixity, painting that is firmly realistic, but goes so deeply into the seeing that it becomes abstract. Working in these spaces, returning and returning, and getting closer and closer to the land itself. Imagine returning and having to clear away the ivy twining about the easel.

Like all the other work I saw that day, there was a human gaze working on a landscape, finding there not only the plants and animals and earth, but the dreams of everyone else as well.

A Discovery

I work at the Art Library here in Bristol, where we've made a discovery in the stacks.

Buried in a secure stack were about 250 paste-up cards with photos layed out for rephotographing for publication. They've got bits of retouching and printer's notes, and many of them are signed H. Robert Lewis or monogrammed H R L. I haven't been able to examine them all yet, but they are all from the 1920's, seeming to be mostly between 1923-28. There must be well over 1000 photos in all, all of them of West Country scenes and buildings. Anthony, the librarian, discovered them a few days ago. This library has seen several generations come and go, and it still has some secrets to yield. It looks as though this deposit was never catalogued. We've already seen it yield some results. Anthony had a visitor from Tyntesfield House (a National Trust property nearby), which was recently restored. Photographs discovered at random in this pile of cards were of Tyntesfield and yielded hitherto unknown details of the interior and the presence of a tennis court on one of the lawns. We've been trying this afternoon to research their provenance: they must have appeared in some local publication in the 1920's. We've found some trace of the photographer: he worked in Bristol as a photographer in the 1930's being last listed in local directories in 1940 (we idly speculate that he may have been killed in the Blitz). We'll certainly catalogue this collection, and hopefully go on to digitize it. It's been exciting and enchanting looking at these- I still haven't had a chance to peruse them at length- it's like something out of Shooting the Past. I'm sure (I think)no one will mind if I get a snap of a couple of the pictures next week and post them here.

On Carrión

Ulises Carrión's The New Art of Making Books first appeared in 1980. It's a sort of manifesto for artists' books, made up of a series of statements contrasting the "Old Art" with the "New Art". It's split into a number of sections; What a Book Is, Prose and Poetry, The Space, The Language, Structures, and The Reading. It has a slightly polemical style, comparing the virtues and values of the new art to what are portrayed as the staid, static, didactic values of the old art. In this, Carrión is poising his arguments on the new art's ability to be inclusive, to be intersubjective- not to be dominated by its' author, not to be didactic. There is a thread running through this piece about intention, a notion which is one of those I'm using to examine artists' books myself. I have some of my own ideas about how it can give us a way to understand artists' books, and I have some other reading to bring to my relationship to it. However, though I've known about Carrión's text for several years, I only read it through for the first time a few days ago. I'm going to set out some remarks on it now to try to establish my relationship to some of the points in it.

Having read it, I think I can agree broadly with Carrión about the much greater role of interpretation in creating meaning in artists' books, (the New Art) and with the importance of structure in creating a space within which this interpretation can take place. However, Carrión implies a shift in the expressive qualities of media embodied in artists' books that I don't think I could agree with. I certainly see a sea-change in the role of the reader here, but stories, narratives, have always had an implicit structure that is made explicit in artists' books. Artists' books make concrete the metaphorical space of reading, they make concrete the containment of an artwork's notions, they make concrete the elaborate array of intention the artist is working with. I'm inclined to view the artists' book as having the properties of concretizing the metaphors that artists' use all the time to deal with the notions they manipulate to produce their work. Artist's work is informed by strategies: techniques of thinking about and doing their work: these are metaphors and the heuristic yield they produce. Which is to say, ways of seeing and doing. I think they have always been part of creativity and that books simply make some of it more obvious, more self-aware, more self-referential. Carrión would, I think on the basis of his essay, disagree with me, in my saying that there are- and always have been- multiple ways to read the old art, and that this is something that is multiplied and enhanced in artists' books, rather than being a different experience on the order of a paradigmatic shift, as seems to be implied here.

"A book is a sequence of spaces"

Comparisons with metaphors of memory come to mind: memory as a sequence of quasi spaces, with the artists' book making this metaphor concrete, and signifying consciousness' traverse of memory in the form of narrative recollection. The metaphor of the book form recapitulates the convolutions of recollection. St Augustine's remarks on memories as being

"retained in the great storehouse of the memory, which in some indescribable way secretes them in its folds".

Introspection, recollection, both take place in these quasi spaces: the reader has always had to construct them to understand the plot of a story or the abstract encounters of argument, played out on inner stages. Carrión's assertion that the book is "a series of spaces" fits well into this traditional metaphor, with the book transmitting the metaphor in concrete rather than strictly narrative form. The book is a series of constructions, too, each unfolding and blossoming from the last, like a series of logical connections, or the tangled connections of brain cells that must ultimately be the keepers of such spaces, in all their richness. Augustine himself wondered at this, holding in his mind the awesome scales of mountains and rivers and stars, all contained within the circumference of his own skull.

"Each of these pages is perceived at a different moment- a book is also a sequence of moments"

Again, much as memory unfolds as an episodic rebus, so books unfold their constructions in a sequence of representations. Books, as I have said, could be considered as similar to the model of memory as a storage space. To simulate the unfolding of memory, or of introspection of other sorts, we would want books to enfold a series of relations, a series of moments, happening in time as well as in space. As Carrión says, a book is "a volume in the space", it is also a span of time.

"Written language is a sequence of signs expanding within the space; the reading of which occurs in the time.

"A book is a space-time sequence."

But just as our memories and our store of impressions and thoughts remain available for us for purposes of introspection, just so are books: holding patterns, temporary constructions of idea. Where memory brings with it attachments, trails, traces of other recollections associated with what we have sought, the book will do the same, its allusions reaching beyond itself. In our minds our memories are in constant flux, each recollection, fading, changing, attached to new chains of recollection, altering and shifting. It is the same with all representations. We can look on memory as a representation, too: it takes consciousness to turn the biology of memory into meaning. And as for books, Michel Foucault, in The Archaeology of Knowledge says this,

"The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. "

Just like memory, our book is part of life, subject to the same stresses and strains, the same changes in meaning. Our questions about what the book means are directed in two directions: what was the author's intention? And, what does it mean to me? We might ask our memories how sure we were of their accuracy, and try to be aware of the quality of our introspection in a similar manner. Books need be no more didactic than memory: we may trust it or not, we may interpret it one way or another, just as we wish. And this interpretation is, argue philosophers like Ricoeur or Kearney, a continuous process, one which constantly refigures identity and relationships to memory and outside materials. Identity itself is subject to emplotment, to entanglement in the stories (and, I think, to the structures of representation at large) which embody human culture. Artists' books make some of these processes concrete, they set out metaphors of interpretation and creation in their construction: in this they do something ordinary artifacts do not. They ask us for interpretation, and they model our processes of introspection in a structure.

"To make a book is to actualize its ideal space time sequence by means of a parallel sequence of signs, be it verbal or other."

The sequence is a sequence of relationships in syntagmic and paradigmatic array. This is the "plot" envisaged by Peter Brooks in his work Reading for the Plot: it is at once a series and a space. It is a series of events in syntagmic order, and a series of allusions and echoes in time in the paradigmatic order. And it is also a space: the arena within which the events take place. Read, take part in this story, and your life is part of this plot, the space and time of it are those of your life. Our relationships with plot are sympathetic because we feel that they are part of us, part of our memory and our future. This is because we recapitulate the space of the plot in our minds, in the space of introspection, to work with, to percieve and understand the ideas of the plot. Books actualize the space of the plot, making concrete the whole of the work, reinforcing the structured entity that is the work, holding, keeping, containing, enveloping.

"In the new art (of which concrete poetry is only an example), communication is... intersubjective, but it occurs in a concrete, real physical space- the page...

"A book is a volume in the space

"It is the true ground of the communication that takes place through words- it is here and now."

Books are both physical and refer to a mental space. The "ground" they offer is a concrete metaphor, made of paper and binding, of the semantic field that "grounds" all representations. As Foucault notes, and I have repeated above, such a ground is slippery at best: the ever-shifting labyrinth of allusion and connotation makes any construction into a shadow-play, lit by ever-changing lights. Nonetheless, we are talking here of temporary structures ( a notion I have brought into my writing before, and one which seems to gel with similar notions of social constructions (John Searle) and presuppositional frameworks. These are spaces to enact, to represent intention. The similarity to the "inner stage" of introspection, the "storehouse" of memory, remains striking. They are places where we can explicitly examine relationships between notions. When we stop to think of the implications of a scene in a novel, we jury-rig one in our mind's eye. Artists' books do something similar with the ideas they contain. They are spaces where our incredulity about the author's intention is set aside, where we pursue the meaning of the construction against the odds that we may never discover what it means. But simply trying to do so, simply understanding this freedom is, Carrión says, to understand the work,

"In the new art the reading itself proves that the reader understands."

Understands, that is, that one has been drawn into a perfomative space.

"In a book of the old art words transmit the author's intention.That's why he chooses them carefully.

"In a book of the new art words don't transmit any intention; they're used to form a text which is an element of a book, and it is this book, as a totality, that transmits the author's intention."

I would disagree with what Carrión seems to be saying about the "Old Art" here. He seems to be saying that there is no other order to the old art: that the transmission of intention occurred solely through the words, and that reading them creates no intersubjective occurrence. I would try to argue that one's involvement in reading is always intersubjective, and I would carry on with the ideas of emplotment of several paragraphs earlier. I would also allude to the performative space that exists literally in artists' books, and point to their function as a concretization of the metaphors of introspection. This introspection is going on in the old art, too. Reading demands it. Nonetheless, the new art makes it more explicit, and the new art turns in on this process consciously: it may not be about intersubjectivity and all that, but the subjects presented in an artists' book do presuppose a particular awareness in their readers, "the reading itself proves that the reader understands". I wouldn't draw a line between the old art and the new, here, though.

The book is a holistic entity, not a textual communication. How does it stack up against a notion like "story" which is performative, and intersubjective wherever it occurs. Kearney's book On Stories, is all about how they permeate our societies and our minds, indeed, they form the core of how we describe ourselves to ourselves- we have a life-story, after all. Story, too, is in the here and now, continually shuffling between teller and listener, author and reader, history and the present, and just as continually shuffling the meaning and the identity of all of these. What books can do is like the form of the story: they can contain it. Books can suggest a certain structure, a certain way of assembling the story, a certain metaphor for examining the notions contained, and an associated heuristic yield from that way of thinking. Bruno Bettelheim writes of "The Uses of Enchantment": how stories provide templates and ideas for dealing with life, for thinking about identity, for working-through one's emplotment in the real stories that comprise our human world. Artists' books place artists' work within similar boundaries, which may, as Foucault points out, be ever-shifting, but which allow the artist to work-through the story of their work as a maker of ideas.

The Scottish Poetry Library

The Scottish Poetry Library, originally uploaded by aesop.

There's an artist's book event there in early October. I don't know if I will be able to make it, since I'm going to be in Wexford in September and in Amsterdam in October- and I haven't booked any of it yet. Hope I can go.

red man

from the bus..., originally uploaded by aesop.

At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, originally uploaded by aesop.

Phantom Work

Today has been one of those days occupied by turning around in various directions wondering what task to take on. Thus it was I found myself reading all about phantom limbs and bits of neurology and cognitive science (Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain, a bit of a sidetrack that has come out of my recent reading on imagination and the unconscious. I feel that I've probably come a bit too far away from my central reading at this point, though Draaisma's Metaphors of Memory has been a really excellent, highly recommended read with material on the epistemology of representations as they impinge on the phenomenalism of the senses. And how these representations are modified by their media and the metaphors that grow up around them. But it's time to get back to artists' books- so Tuesday will see me getting back to Artists' Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook. There are already some notes I want to draft about Ulysses Carion's use of "intention" in his writing, so I'll be posting about the book shortly.

Nuts

Nuts.

An Aside, the exhibition curated by Tacita Dean finished on Tuesday. I'd really have liked to have seen it. I wonder if it will end up anywhere else, like the soon-to-be-reopened Arnolfini for example. That would be good. ( I hope the Arnolfini can resurrect its once mutually beneficial relationship with the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. They used to co-publish at one time. At any rate, I've missed this show here in
Edinburgh. I've had a sort of on-off relationship with the Fruitmarket:
as a teenager I used to really love the shows they had here which I
would come to in all naivety with no inkling at all about what was
happening, and maybe a more honest reaction (sometimes I have to
remember to laugh at the funny stuff these days- or maybe it's just not
as funny as it thinks it is). As an art student I used to come and look
at the shows more carefully, trying out my critical claws, and feeling
more detached from the program. I feel that things have drifted more my
way again, now. The last couple of years has seen me try and place work
in their bookshop- unsuccessfully. This rankles with me because the
books produced by some of my contemporaries are there, people I've
shared exhibitions with, people whose work I've reviewed for goodness'
sake. The truth of the matter is that it's a production problem. My
books are made to order, pretty much, and I don't have the
wealth/credit/patience with the byzantine strip-the-willow of arts
funding to finance a larger, cheaper edition in more recognisably trade
materials. I'm not inclined to believe that the quality of my work is
in doubt, and the representation of artists' books there is wide enough
that I don't think I'm offending against a house style too egregiously.
One day- sigh. In the meantime I have books to make, which is the main
thing, even if I end up turning into a sort of Emily Dickinson and
keeping them to myself. I did get to see one of the pictures from An Aside
as the gallery assistants toted it downstairs. It was a landscapey
screenprinty sort of thing in muted greys and greens, sort of like
Sigmar Polke on tranquilisers. I looked up from having a coffee and it
sailed past into the darkness where there was packing and dismantling
going on. One is tempted to look on it as some sort of ominous metaphor
for my fitful imago of a career, but such melancholic entertainments
are probably not a good habit to encourage. I was more successful
seeing some of the other shows I had set out to see.

My memories of Edinburgh's City Art Centre
include two spectacular shows they had there in the 1980s: The Gold of
the Pharaohs and The Emperor's Warriors were massive, blockbuster
things of great prestige that filled the whole building and brought the
whole city filing in. I've not lived in Edinburgh for a long time, and
these exhibitions bask in the rosy glow of childhood recollection, but
I can't recall such shows having been there since. Not that the Centre
has an empty calendar. Far from it. But the shows it has hosted, whilst
of value in their own right, and I'm sure many were excellent, don't
seem to have measured up to the splendour of the Centre's heyday. It
was nice to go back there: it must be five years since I've crossed the
threshold to do anything other than have a cuppa at their excellent
cafe. However, there were three shows here today which held my
attention.

On the lower floors a show about 150 years or so of Scottish Art was
set up, so the place was full of colourists and vaguely arts and
crafts-y Glasgow Style stuff and neatly done Kailyard
bucolic scenes with nifty brushwork. The temptation, almost inevitable
with a show like this is to attempt a generalisation, to try to take a
reading on some sort of national character, whatever that might be.
It's not as absurd as all that, although far more fleeting and
changeable a thing than the sort of lumbering ur-style that lets one
say "The Scots are a dour race of farmers". Whilst this might have
certain useful things to say about Scotland's history and prove a
useful stereotype to deviate from, it's far easier, in this show, to
track the waves of different influences and the emergence of different
schools. Each of these, subtly modified and interpreted in the hands of
individual artists, might tell us something about what was happening
then. To chance a metaphor, looking at this show, we can see a shifting
kaleidoscope (Scottish invention, by the way),
lots of the material is shot through with undercurrents of class
awareness, even sentimentally, and a certain interest in national
identity (though this may reflect the purchasing criteria of the
various public bodies doing the buying more than anything else). It's
difficult to make anything much out from the patterns this kaleidoscope
produces, but one can see certain bits of material floating by
repeatedly.

While I was sitting in the Fruitmarket cafe before this show, I was
looking around me and seeing various books blaring their titles at me,
including one about "New York Architecture". One seems to see New York
everywhere, and sitting at my brushed steel table, sipping a cappuccino
and listening to the be-bop the cafe chaps have put on for our
education and dubious enjoyment, I can see a certain amount of
aspiration to an international style represented by New York here. Paul Gray's show up the road at the Stills
shows how the Heart of Midlothian football ground, Tynecastle, shows
how a place's character can be deliberately swathed in the charmless
but slick high standards of style associated with, say, a football
boardroom or an arty cafe. What would the place be like if it were not
for these universal influences? I don't decry global styles or global
culture outright. I just wish it was a bit easier to modify, a bit less
based on inalterable materials and unhackable structures. The joy of a
universally available technology like printing, for example, is that
itís different in different countries: different technologies,
different inks, different artwork, emerging from the one particular
understanding of the technology that arises in that one place. Can one
imagine a national style of computer operating system emerging? But
perhaps itís too early to tell. Maybe different people will see fit to
use the new tools the new styles, the availability of blond wood and
brushed steel to do their own thing. Meanwhile, the same sort of
espresso machine on this countertop continues to multiply across the
face of the earth.

On another floor of the Art Centre, an exhibition about the new
Bibliotheca Alexandrina was doing its thing. I was disappointed in
this, essentially a large corporate display with the expected custom
display stands and promotional videos. The building itself had
something to say, and this exhibit is primarily one about the
architectural design of the place. As to the history of the library of
Alexandria and their aspirations for the future, only the most tired
and anaemic trot through the past and future is possible with this sort
of exhibition ( a couple of art objects commissioned for the building
are trapped in amber, entirely ineffectual). The new library itself is
a sort of giant tilted circular tablet, bout the proportions of an
extra strong mint 200m wide and tilted at an angle of about 15 degrees.
The circumference that sticks up as a result is one huge wall, which is
covered in a gigantic stone relief covered in alphabets and writing
systems from all places and times. This is just about the only
interesting or informative thing in the show. A shame, really. Finding
out about the struggle for the library's emerging identity might have
been fascinating, but one can see the deadening swathes of corporate
homogenaeity falling in great drifts over the project. However,
libraries at least have the virtue of being purpose built, and use will
soon batter the place into some sort of character.

More about Looking Both Ways, One For All and Hateball later.

 

Films and Plans

After my visit to the Bacon exhibition I went with my family to see the new Spielberg War of the Worlds and go on for something to eat. Movie was okay I guess. Stuff blowin' up. Aliens. Kids with big eyes. Misunderstood guy turns out to be a hero. People vaporized by aliens, turn scarily to dust. Which settles all over the city. (I think someone did an artwork about the dust that came down all over downwind NY from the incinerated paper from 9/11, (what on Earth could Spielberg be referencing this for? Cruise comes away looking like some No ghost.) but anyway...) People finding various ways to fight the bad guys &c &c. The things that went boom were great, the tension of the story was pretty good. Didn't care about the characters (but hey, can't have it all, though I thought Cruise's leather jacket was pretty cool). The story itself, based of course on Wells' original is pretty much intact: bad guys- check. Red weed- check. Richard Burton...Richard Burton...? Oh well. Tom 'Bob' Cruise is okay, but Bob is working with a story that has to cram in quite a lot of material that doesn't really belong there. It's nice to have the elder-son-wants-to-give-the-martians-some-welly bit and the developing father-son thing, but there really isn't enough time to develop the theme, and the bit about getting stuck in the basement could have been cut out completely with no bearing at all on the plot. But it was a good whiz-bang nonetheless. Bob manages to surge meaningfully enough through the motions, but there isn't enough subtlety in the role to tell if he's acting or not. The effects folk made a nice movie though. I liked the lighting too. I thought the sound design was pretty crummy though, and it seems to be a movie without a soundtrack (maybe a result of an attempt to simplify the movie?).

Tomorrow Iím going into Edinburgh to have a look around. I'm planning to start off at the Fruitmarket Gallery to see the exhibition curated by Tacita Dean- An Aside, which includes work by Lothar Baumgarten, Joseph Beuys, Rodney Graham and Gerhard Richter. I'm keen on Dean's own work, particularly her book/film Teignmouth Electron, so I'm looking forward to seeing what she's brought together and what she has to say about it.

Thereís also an interesting-looking thing on at the City Art Centre, The New Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which is about the creation of the library. I want to see what sort of things come out here and what metaphors are used to describe the library and the knowledge it houses. There's also Looking Both Ways, by African artists living in Western countries. Let's see what happens. Nearby thereís also Hateball (yikes). Nathanial Mellors is a new artist to me, but the Collective Gallery is only up the road on Cockburn Street. I wonder if there's anything on at the Stills? There also used to be some interesting things on at the Netherbow arts centre. Years ago I saw Ralph Steadman's illustrations for Treasure Island there. I don't see anything in the listings. I wonder what became of it.

I thought I'd get some lunch at Henderson's veggie restaurant where I have some fond memories of great food and company (though I'll be getting to the table on my own this time). There's loads more I'd love to see, but so little time. There's a big Gauguin show on, for example, which, though likely costly and crowded, is something I'd like to see. I've long admired Noa Noa ( I wonder if it'll be there) which is a sort of prototype artists' book, far removed from livres díartiste or editions de luxe, produced in hand-coloured relief reminiscent of Japanese folk printmaking. Gauguin, presumably, is angling for a Polynesian feel here. Gauguin and Stevenson are having a meeting in my imagination now, talking it over.

Anyway, all that done, I'm planning to get over to see my old friend John Paul, who's recovering from a broken collarbone and needs someone to help him lift a couple of beers. I felt it was only fair to volunteer.

Douwe Draaisma's Metaphors of Memory

I'm reading Metaphors of Memory by Douwe Draaisma just now. I was excited to hear about it. I had been reading a couple of other vaguely related books about consciousness and media: Guy Claxton's The Wayward Mind is about how the changing consciousness of humans can be reconstructed from the various artworks (including books) left behind by particular cultures. Claxton look at the various ways people have addressed the idea of  'the unconscious' (to use the general term that Claxton employs), so I might describe Claxtons work as relating to Metaphors of Memory by renaming it Metaphors of the Unconscious. The other book is Francis Spufford's The Child that Books Built, which is an examination of the formation of certain aspects of contemporary consciousness (as exemplified by the expressed contents of Mr Spufford's head) through reconstructing the child's passage through the books they grow up with. As one might expect, various psychological references emerge, amongst the most telling being those to Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. Both books include material about how books themselves affect and reflect consciousness. For Claxton, books contain material that are the expressions of Romantic or Freudian (to give two examples) images of the unconscious. For Spufford, learning through books of the concept of the city or the forest, they are the building blocks in fathoming an extended understanding of the world. In both Spufford and Claxton's works, books are channels through which new ways of understanding the world and the mind are expressed.

Draaisma's Metaphors and Memory is a history of the ways in which memory has been expressed and explored through different metaphors. These metaphors are often linked to the emerging technologies of the time, be they wax tablets, books, the discovery of phosphorous with its 'light-recording' properties, or those of photography, and so on. Perhaps the most useful areas for me are the sections on Draaisma's approach to metaphor itself and the section on The Book as Memory, the Memory as Book.

In his section on metaphor, Draaisma explores various definitions of what metaphor is, starting with classical definitions and moving towards more contemporary definitions that describe metaphors as the combining of two semantic fields. (Ironically giving us new ways to think about metaphors by employing new metaphors for their description). Draaisma also pays attention to the heuristic properties of metaphor: that is, how the modelling of metaphor gives us clues in the production of hypotheses. This is how, for example, metaphors used to explain neurological functions set up models that inform hypotheses bridging gaps in our knowledge about the positively observable mechanisms of neurological function. My interest in Draaisma's work has been to see if I can use any of his ideas to inform my own about artists' books. It seems to me that the heuristic function of metaphor- its tendency to form useful structures that can enable further hypothesis- has something in common with the heuristic function of working-with-books. In my view, this doesn't simply stop short at being a comparison between two heuristic tools. I think that there are further correspondences too. I have written at other times about how artists using books are using them to solve problems of practice, amongst which is the problem of the representation to oneself of what one is up to, what one's work means. It seems to me that the form of the book as an enclosure, as a narrative, as a structure, is not only a physical medium with certain properties, but also a condition of practice that artists could employ as a metaphor for their work, with the heuristic benefits that accompany metaphors. The identity of being a book artist, then, sets up the possibility of structures of identity that belong to the metaphorical structure of the book. What do I mean by these 'metaphorical structures'? Briefly, and obviously, the book is a physical enclosure, but it is also an enclosure for ideas. It is a sequence of pages, but it is also a sequence of metonymic and metaphorical relationships- a plot both physical and temporal and narrative-  that the artist can exploit. It is possibly a form which combines different media, and which combines different roles for the artist, and these too have internal echoes where the artist can compartmentalise and cross-fertilise different parts of practice. I've characterised Claxton's book as Metaphors of the Unconscious, Draaisma's work is entitled Metaphors of Memory. I might characterise my interest in artists' books as an interest in them as a Metaphor of Practice. Artists frequently discuss their practice in terms of strategies: ways in which they see their work, organise their work, challenge themselves. I think that each of these strategies will be found to be explained via a metaphor, whose mechanisms and heuristic potential are exploited to some extent by the artist.

Draaisma also includes a section on the book's own heyday as a metaphor for memory. Memory's place in terms of what was regarded as intelligence is discussed as well. In St Augustine's day, memory is regarded as the wellspring of intelligence, with imagination taking a back seat- a reversal of our contemporary evaluation. Nowadays we depend to a great extent on external means of capturing and organising memory and prize flexibility , quickness of mind and 'inspired genius' most highly. It was not always thus, as Draaisma's extensive quotes of people praising the memory of St Augustine attest. Contrasted to this, the intelligence Einstein exhibits is far more to do with originality and imagination. Succinctly, Draaisma puts the difference in views of memory thus; in St Augustine's day we would say 'I must remember this so that I can write it down.' Today, we would be more likely to say that we would write something down in order to remember it. Draaisma notes the transience of human memory. The magnificence of St Augustine's mind would have died with him if it were not for his writings and those which attest to his brilliance. Books harbour and preserve that brilliance to an extent. In an age where generations succeeded one another far more quickly than is today the case, a book- most likely a family bible, would span many generations and form a link between one's ancestors and one's own time. The book is a metaphor of continuity, and a very real ark through time for the intelligence of the writer. Draaisma tracks the decline of the book's cachet too, as they became more widespread and less valuable, and as the wilderness of writings became vaster and vaster, more secular and more various. I don't entirely agree with the simplicity of this diagnosis. There is still something about books which gives one cause to believe their contents will be preserved somehow, even if only temporarily. This accompanies the physical setting-aside that enclosure within covers gives, and, I think, cannot be wholly explained by the book's physical seperateness. They are still arks of intention to some extent, an idea I hope to examine in greater detail as my research progresses.

Draaisma's other chapters (so far- I'm about half way through) deal more explicitly with various metaphors of memory that occur as new technology and paradigms of though sweep through culture. I think that my main interests in his book have already been addressed, and that further reading will only inform my ideas about memory, rather than about books. I've also benefited from his early discussion of metaphor. However, I will continue, since there are chapters on, for example, the metaphor of memory as photography that will be of interest simply for their relevance to visual culture at large.

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads

I have a long(ish) personal acquaintance with Baconís work. First introduced to his work at school by Mr Turpie, my art teacher, because of his painterly ways and his ways of organising space- still things that are relevant to my ways of producing work now- I have been looking at Bacon's work since I was 15, This is the first time I've had a chance to see a large number of pictures by him at once. I think this is a highly successful show. There must be some 50-70 odd pictures here, along with photographic materials from Bacon's studio- scraps, folded and torn and paint-besmeared. Working material, of course, rather than jewels from the dragon's hoard, but one can't help seeing a certain amount of theatricality and disingenuousness in Bacon's mounds of paint and scraps, the painter himself squatted amongst his misunderstood midden. As fascinating as theatre too, these thumb-folded, torn remnants that have seen action at Bacon's hand. As have his subjects. One feels Bacon's relationships to these sitters strongly. For all that there is a depersonalising undercurrent to Bacon's reducing the figure and the face to torrid chunks of swimming-in-and-out-of-focus meat, one nonetheless is under no illusions when Bacon knows the people he is portraying. It is as if the violence of Bacon's methods of depiction depend on his knowing them well enough to know the meaning of his transgression. And it's not all violence, by far. There are tender portraits here too, where the dissecting and refashioning gaze that gives us Bacon's howling popes can also pass across the face of a lover, sometimes elegaic, sometimes joyfully. Bacon is never triumphant. There are no pictures here that announce his mastery of the depiction. He is successful, even in his own words, at coming closer to his portraiture, but it remains an approach to grasping an evanescent impression.

There are images that don't depend on Baconís recognition of the figure, and indeed, he's always shoehorning in resemblances to other, impersonal, sources and studies. Bacon's series Man in Blue is here too, and whatever resemblances there may be to lovers lost and found, known or fleeting, there is above all the sense of a stranger in these pictures. Perhaps they are linked to people Bacon knew, but they are those people made strange, made once again into strangers. The Men in Blue lean against bars in the dark, their suits supporting heads that testify to Bacon's handling. They are marginal likenesses, smears that coalesce slowly and in the corner of the eye into faces one might know. This is a lonely nightclub, with this man's pale face alone in the darkness. The bar is a place intended for meetings and conviviality, a man alone because he has remained stock still like a man getting a shoeshine in an early photograph, visible only because he has stayed still. The man in blue is lost, and perhaps he is also a man whom Bacon has lost. Still there, at a bar somewhere, waiting for god knows what. The same might have been said of Bacon.

Another room includes a late self-portrait. A triptych of 1979 shines with mirror light. The theatre of Bacon's studio again, with the mottled disc of his great mirror swinging into view for us as we contemplate this work. Bacon's face, still, examined. His eyes do not meet ours. The face holds together, not energetically lensed and smeared like many other pictures, but held almost tenderly in the coolness of the painter's gaze. The blurb accompanying this picture says something about the emphasis on bone structure, on the skull. I don't see this. But a different memento mori does seem to be there. This face seems to house an intelligence that is trapped, that cannot comprehend the way the light reflects back from this casing, the sort of meat that Bacon has been fastidiously seeing through for years. He doesn't look at home.

Upsidedowner

Upsidedowner, originally uploaded by aesop.

It's summer, so that must mean it's time to get Nephewed. Kept to a minimum just now, sadly, since my brother's family are off for their annual retreat to a caravan somewhere in Berwick, so I've only been able to see them for a few hours when I arrived on Sunday. However, we made the most of it, with a good lot of clambering about and eating. Robbie (pictured) reminds me that there is one Cornetto left in the freezer, and that I should eat it before someone else does. Rest easy Robbie, I have taken your sage advice and it was tasty.

Not much posting for a while since Mom & Pop's interweb is a bit "ball of string" and tends to require hours of coaxing to work.

Creating Artists' Books

I finished reading Sarah Bodman's Creating Artists' Books today.

This book is described as a handbook for the "student or practised printmaker who is experimenting in a new area." As such, it's an overview of the main points of the medium (if we are to describe artists' books as a medium), surveying briefly its immediate art-historical antecedents (livres d'artiste, livre de luxe, the Kelmscott Press, et al), and spending longer on a thematic survey of contemporary practitioners. Bodman's descriptions of these illuminate her subject headings:  using text... collaboration between artists and writers...printmaking process for artists' books... digital output... making book with limited materials and equipment..multiples and 'zines, et cetera. Under each of these headings she has elaborated descriptions of the work of book artists. For instance, John Bently's collaborations with five Dundee residents provided the text for A Handful of Memories, Dundee, is given as an example of artists  working with others who have textual input (and who often provide materials, handwritten or otherwise- including ephemera, photographs) which complicate the artist's role as a collaborator, editor and as a designer for material which already exists. Bodman's chapter on unique books looks at (among others) the work of Guy Begbie and Miriam Schaer, with descriptions of how these artists use unusual materials and interrogate the notion of the book. The chapter on digital book production includes work by myself, Andrew Eason, and by Douglas Holleley, Underpinning the organisation of the chapters, and culminating in chapters on display, marketing and exhibiting, is an undercurrent of the artists positioning themselves vis a vis the difficulties, (both technical and financial) of production using the various media, establishing a working practice, and ultimate intentions for the book.

Each chapter also includes advice on the pitfalls and positive characteristics of different production routes. The organisation of the chapters, from the history of the form, to chapters dealing with collaboration and content, to those on design and output method, then through sections on design intention (eg 'zines or those works intended to avoid the usual art institutions) describes what might be seen as a journey through an artist's encounter with the book form. Moving from contextualising the book by historical references, to the practicalities of production involving medium and content, and finally to the fate of the book in exhibition and distribution, it presents all the various aspects of the form someone with minimal knowledge might need to begin: there is even included a chapter on simple binding methods, with the redoubtable Tom Sowden demonstrating stitching methods in a series of detailed photographic steps. Lest I should imply that Creating Artists' Books  is organised in a simply programmatic way, let me also note that despite its' modest length at 128 pages, the complexity of the relationship between material, technical/financial capability, intention and design is indicated from the outset in the chapter entitled Form Follows Function. Thus the arc of the chapters, whilst describing the evolving interest one might take in book works does not neglect the relationship that's constantly moving backwards and forwards through the medium between materials, history, content and intention. As an introduction it does not lean too heavily on the theoretical checks and balances this implies, but it is nonetheless evident in the identification of the different strands of book working identified in the chapter headings.

Creating Artists' Books has a good balance of instructional material, introductions to techniques and processes, and examples from contemporary practitioners. The book is illustrated in colour throughout, with many excellent examples shedding light on areas of contemporary practice that would be difficult to describe in words alone. Bodman's use of illustrations for this purpose is strikingly effective- no less than one would expect from someone whose own artists' books are such good examples of careful and engaging design. Unfortunately, Bodman has been too modest and has denied us the chance of seeing examples of her artworks here, but Creating Artists' Books is nonetheless a richly rewarding introduction to the form.

Finally, appendices include  substantial material on galleries, shops, collections and websites relevant to the subject of use to anyone with an interest in the subject.

jolly tug

jolly tug, originally uploaded by aesop.

I'm off to Edinburgh for the week. Back Mon 18th or so.

inside my head

work in progress, originally uploaded by aesop.

Yesterday I had to give a presentation to the other PhD candidates. It was a mixed bag. It was good to see what others were doing, and realise how various a group we were, but disheartening to me not to be able to join in with the discussion- I didn't feel confident in any of the comments I felt were coming to me. I don't seem to handle the intensity of these sorts of situations very well. Perhaps it's something I'll get used to. On the other hand, I've already mentioned how various a group we seemed. Maybe there are things I'm good at too.

me shoes

me shoes, originally uploaded by aesop.

pillow study, originally uploaded by aesop.

cricket- now in colour

cricket- now in colour, originally uploaded by aesop.

for illustrationfriday

mmhmmm

I've been working today on putting together some notes for the presentation I have to make to the other PhD candidates. It's gone quite well today, with the notes completed and looking mad and scribbled in my super-bland Muji notebook. I put today's success down to writing my preliminary notes outside on North Street,  having a cappuccino at the local fancy-foods store, sipping every time I have a bit of a mental disfluency.  I also loaded up on veg this morning, meaning I've just had a late lunch of plum tomatoes and cucumber on a three-seeded loaf, which was right good.

Illustration Friday is a site where  every week a topic is nominated and people post their  responses. In line with my current efforts to keep the pictures flowing, I posted to it today, on the subject of "Sport", my contribution featuring a cricketer menaced by a robotic wicket keeper.

Also started using the podcasts bit on iTunes 4.9, listening to Momus arguing with his ex-wife and visiting galleries and stores in NY, and various other things.

The Morning News - Roman Palimpsest, by Anthony Doerr

Link: The Morning News - Roman Palimpsest, by Anthony Doerr.

Chiamate subito Rambo, which means “Call Rambo immediately."

sketchbook entries

sketchbook entries, originally uploaded by aesop.

L's little Rupa, White Tara.

making book

making book, originally uploaded by aesop.

Decided to use up a tiny linen sample I had, to make a book. I still need to make and bind the bookblock. I was thinking about a multi-section kettle stitch. I have more samples like this, and I bet they'd make a lovely set of mini-books. I also keep threatening to use a much-loved shirt which is long past its best to cover a book, this keeping something of it with me.

I'm away for a couple of days now. Might blog Sunday night though.

making book

making book, originally uploaded by aesop.

making book

making book, originally uploaded by aesop.