My brother has made a bird table. It caught my attention because there was no table. Instead he had taken one of the many defunct, unwanted music speakers in his room and converted it. The speaker was an old wooden box-shape. He cut a whole in its side, removed the wiring and filled it with seeds. He then placed the box outside his bedroom window overlooking the garden. This caught my imagination because of the potential of an unlikely but charming situation. A small song bird might fly into this former speaker and begin to sing. In doing so the speaker would function as a speaker again.
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Monday, 25 May 2009
Inactive Building Sites
There are many inactive building sites across London at the moment. They are in a curious state of suspension - at the behest of a cash flow which for now has frozen. There are buildings sanctioned for demolition, waiting inconclusively to be turned to rubble, while buildings not yet erected remain the fantasy of their architects, just muddy bogs waiting for foundation stones.
Saturday, 7 March 2009
Bum Bum Train/ Cordy House/ 20.12.08
Cordy House on Curtain Rd in Hoxton, is a spacious art-warehouse-space with an eclectic programme: it hosts a mixture of cross genre music nights, street art exhibitions inspired by squat culture, installations and for four Saturdays last year (Nov 29th - Dec 20th 2008) the installation-cum-ride known as Bum Bum Train, the brainchild of Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd.
The queue for the ride snaked through sculptures and installations that evoke props and the leftovers of set from a series of low budget 80s sci-fi horror films, nothing to do with Bum Bum Train, but retrospectively strangely complementary.
Helen and Laura and I, approached the queue for a doorway from which a medley of pop music blared. A knowingly ramshackle sign, which at one point came unstuck from the wall signalled entry to the ride. On as a table beside this door was a bowl of satsumas for the audience to gobble as they pleased.
Entry was regulated by a compere-stroke-door girl dressed in garish face paint and a shiny blue and purple outfit… she came across like a seductively deranged elf. Entry was one at a time and only acceptable by mounting her for a piggyback ride in order to be carried beyond the threshold. This regression to childhood experience and the destabilisation - both physical and mental which comes with handing over your mobility in this way led to gratifyingly knockabout visual and physical comedy.
The first entrant was a middle-aged moustachioed man who had attended with a woman who was most likely his wife, he was very big, the girl petite, he wasn’t the most agile of men and it took three or four attempts for him to get on top of her. I felt like I was observing the unsuccessful mating rituals of two incompatible farm animals; say a pig and a pony. Eventually she staggered with the guy on her back out of sight, through multi-coloured strips of fabric, the sort found in the doorways of tatty sex shops.
I mounted her in a single leap. A microphone is thrust in front of my mouth calling for spluttered and ill-prepared words over the PA system. She asks me my name, I’m announced like debutante at a ball to those in the queue further behind me. I'm asked ‘is there anything I want to say to friends and family?’ Why does she ask this, will I not return in one piece?The entry itself (unbeknown to us at this point) was to be a concise taster of the tone and flavour of what was to come: the cultivation of anarchy, chaos and uncertainty, being thrust unprepared into a situation that could potentially and simultaneously embarrass and amuse, a collapse of physical boundaries and personal space, a comic surreality and ludicrousness - presented with the makeshift aesthetic of Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind’s ‘sweded films’ or the dream sequences of The Science of Sleep or the sets and costumes in the Mighty Boosh TV series), not to mention a playfully libidinal atmosphere caked in and deflected by the cartoonish scenarios.
On the other side of the curtain the source of the pop songs is revealed to be a karaoke machine. A platinum blonde stands with a new romantic quiff wearing a black blazer, a DJ with over sized glasses is selecting various tunes, a woman in a bloated snowman costume and burlesque make-up, shimmies and winks taking up a sizeable part of the room, a man in a 1970s-style-checked-knitwear-tank-top makes cocktails… I’ve entered an eccentric but charming nightclub. Another microphone is pushed in my hand and before I know it I'm singing "Talking about my generation...why don't you all f-f-f-ade away?". This ragtag ensemble encouragingly eggs me on. I try not to think about my vocal efforts being relayed across the ground floor of Cordy House.
Helen who has gone in ahead of me, sits in a wheelchair, by a door which is occasionally opened and swiftly closed by an orangey-red-dyed haired bouncer, who every now and again pops his head in the room, surveys the party scene and disappears. I try to fathom why she is in the wheelchair while trying and failing to keep up to speed with the karaoke monitor. Eventually Helen is asked to rise by the bouncer and goes through the next doorway as Laura is carried in. I knew Laura was next because the piggyback-giving compere woman had told the DJ with with comic-franticness... “we have a special request! Find a song by the Smiths!” (and Laura loves the Smiths). Laura duly enters, i'm now sat in the wheelchair in which Helen sat, I’ve knocked back a couple of tequilas. Laura stands in the middle room, looking slightly shell-shocked before breaking into ‘This Charming Man’. I'm not sure if she has finished her song before the guy puts his head through the door and asks me to rise.
As I descend the stairway I am accosted by people lined either side of the steps, aching to get into the party from which I have just exited. They ask me how it was, they tug on my clothes, ask how I got on the guest list and if I’m coming back. I apologetically brush past them. (Immediately there is a playful reorientation of our sense of space having gone from the rain of outside, to inside a real club to only end up on the outside steps of a fictional club.) These stairs to lead to a bedroom. An old man is in bed in stripy pyjamas. Lit by a beside he lamp, with an absent minded air, he asks if I have some pills to relieve him from pain, he mentions some medication he was expecting, he mentions his wife. I’m uncertain if I have missed something, if something was supposed to be given to me that wasn’t given, I check my pockets, perhaps one of the people on the stairs slipped his medicine in my pocket? I can’t help him and wander on.
A woman in an elegant gown stands in front of an industrial lift. ‘Do you have the password for the VIP lounge?’ she asks, I stutter something about not having the password but could she let me in anyway? I wonder if I was told something at some point that I misheard, if I wasn’t concentrating enough? She tells me if I don’t know the password I should go another path and listen out for it. So I go on.In the next scenario I find myself in a non-descript office and invited to take a seat, I am taken through a questionnaire, health problems? Heart troubles? Asthma? The man asking the questions is dressed in generic office wear: white shirt and tie, smart trousers. No sooner are the questions answered I’m thanked and ushered on.
A police interrogation room: there are two uniformed officers one male, the other female (wearing strong red-lipstick). She pings her rubber gloves, in doing so quoting numerous ‘Carry on’ titles and police comedy films. I’m asked to put both hands on the wall, ‘Do I have anything to declare I’m asked?’ As they frisk me they discover my wallet, which they whip out my inside pocket. It has a 100 quid in it. I can’t afford for it to go missing. I end up wrestling the male officer for my wallet back, the other officer joins in. After much sweat and loss of breath I retrieve it, I offer my toothbrush and notebook instead - the pair reluctantly accept and put both items onto a grey plastic tray as some kind of forensic evidence.
Onward I go, I’m sat down in a dental chair. Given a thimble sized cup of mouthwash, a dentist peers into my mouth. (I squirm at this point, acutely self conscious of the terrible state of my teeth, I wait for several seconds - but what felt like an age for a biting assessment, instead he flips my expectations and announces the wonderful state of my molars). An assistant brings out a warm self-mouldable gumshield - I sink my teeth into it, anxious about their sensitivity, the texture of my mouth against the plastic reminds me of the ritual of preparing for Saturday morning rugby fixtures at school a decade ago.I’m now walking down a catwalk runway, fashionistas pout either side of it. Some are taking pictures. Others encourage me. I’m too engrossed in the spectacle of watching them to perform being on the catwalk myself, and neglect to discover the inner supermodel diva within.
The catwalk segues into a tunnel and I push myself through a trapdoor to find myself in a boxing ring. My opponent is bouncing in his corner, throwing jabs shadow boxing - I’m pulled to my corner by my trainer, he gives me a Mickey/Rocky style psych-pump speech, I nod vigorously. I’m on my feet wondering how much I’m expected to fight, how much my opponent is intending to fight, is he an actor playing a boxer, have they invited a ‘real’ boxer as part of the experience, how seriously is he taking this and how seriously should I? I decide to be defensive, and keep light on my feet - arms up and close together like a Victorian pugilist. I survive the bout. I remove my gloves and chuck the mouth guard at the boxer. My opponent lurches towards me. I escape into the white room of a medical ward.
A small boy lies in a hospital bed, there are beeps and whirs, a matron keeps watch over him, he sits up excitedly: ‘Usher!!!’ he cries, ‘Will you sign my autograph book?’ I smile and ask him his name, it is Nat, I sign “Get well soon, Nat. Usher.” The matron asks me to leave now, explaining the boy’s had enough excitement for the day.
I stumble on in to a living room, I sit down on an armchair in the centre of the room facing a television. Within a second it becomes clear this is no ordinary television but literally live television, the shell of a TV acts as a frame for the performers to stand within, at such a distance that are proportionally the ‘right size’ (the visual gag again revealing a fascination with the manipulation of our sense of space). I catch the end of a weather update, followed by some comedy ident but before I can really engage with the content of the show three men in red lycra bodysuits burst into my living room and whisk me out my seat, they are shouting ‘Move! Move! Get up! Come on!’ Their arms half dragging me from armchair to wheelchair. I’m now in a long white corridor with a slopping floor. Along the right side of the corridor, behind a metal railing are enthusiastic onlookers. I’m part of a sleigh team. They give me an almighty push, I whiz down the slope, high-fiving the crowd as I fly by.
As I slow down, a suited woman wheels me into a conference room. It’s some sort of press briefing, journalists sit inquisitively, cross-legged, bespectacled, pens twirling in air. An African man finishes a speech in a tongue I don’t recognise. The entire room swivels to me. At this point it becomes clear I’m the interpreter of a language I do not speak: I improvise something in English, which has the journalists fooled for a bit, but when it comes to translating the journalists’ questions into (what later becomes clear is) Swahili - staged pandemonium breaks out, the journalists cry: ‘He can’t speak the language!’, the African minister shouts something which to my ear phonetically sounds like ‘juju Swahili’ - I am hurriedly whisked from the room for my own safety.
I am parked in front of a Perspex fairground booth containing the kind of cheap items found in such machines. In place of a mechanical arm is a man’s hand which needs verbal control: Left! Right! Stop! Release! the hand opens. I collect the prize, recognizing the items seized by the police officers now sealed in Clingfilm.
I wander into a familiar room. I am back in the old man’s bedroom, he’s still asking for his pills, I still don’t have them – I apologise profusely with feigned concern. I ascend some stairs, past the same lot who were queuing outside, a couple of girls ask if they can come in on my arm, I more than fine with this we get to the door, but the bouncer won’t have anything of it. I pass through the karaoke party (the snowgirl still bobbing enthusiastically) and out through the doorway from which I came on piggyback.
It is the kind of experience that easily could have been animated fragments of the old man’s delirium. I cannot vouch with certainty that the scenes I have described happened in the order I described them. It was as tumultuous mentally as physically, its unstable actuality lends itself to unstable recollection. This dreamlike intensity was partly born of the sensory overload. Whereas cinema through the darkness of the auditorium might captivate the eyes and ears, here the entire body was literally propelled through space - along the way you were touched, manhandled, speaking and spoken to, you tasted, you were threatened, made alert and ready. It became dreamlike not through lulling and approximating the comforts of a bedtime story or inducing a close to sleep atmosphere, but oppositely by being hyper-real and excessively present.
Tension was racketed up by removing my control and knowledge: no sense of the duration, of the limits of the performers, the number of performers, the size of the space, it was like being flung in the shoes of Alice or Dorothy navigating her way through Wonderland or Oz, slipping from one madcap scene to another, each completely confident in the rationality of its hermetically sealed world, while being the very opposite to the outsider.
The anxiety of ‘not knowing the rules of the game’, proves far more stressful than the game itself, continually trying to psych yourself for being prepared for anything is playfully enforced upon the participant. These perhaps worked best in the meeting with authority figures, the imperious doorman, the office boss/interviewer - the police officers in the interrogation room. Yet the ‘train’ never strives for a single storyline, this allows for the collision of the unexpected, or a logic based on spatial reorientation, or even the collage of experience as one might juxtapose tickets and wallpapers in a 2d artwork. I.e. contrasting the experience of being passive with being active, or of spectacle to being scrutinized yourself, sometimes the links operate across scenes creating irrationality in one instance that becomes perfectly sensible in another. For example the dentist fitting you with the unrequested gumshield- prefigures the boxing match. However the inexplicability of the scenarios and their collision gives the sense of being in a pinball machine - ricocheting through an artificial landscape. Bum Bum Train not only recognizes but conveys experientially the speed and compression of everyday urban experience.
No overt judgement is cast on this expression of experience - but perhaps it is enough to generate this chaos, for it to be played back at you. All the same this rich humour seems to garland a bleakness of sorts: it is hard not to think of having being expelled from the reality game show that is life, being sat on a movable couch and allowed to re-experience your ‘best bits’ that last one time.
The queue for the ride snaked through sculptures and installations that evoke props and the leftovers of set from a series of low budget 80s sci-fi horror films, nothing to do with Bum Bum Train, but retrospectively strangely complementary.
Helen and Laura and I, approached the queue for a doorway from which a medley of pop music blared. A knowingly ramshackle sign, which at one point came unstuck from the wall signalled entry to the ride. On as a table beside this door was a bowl of satsumas for the audience to gobble as they pleased.
Entry was regulated by a compere-stroke-door girl dressed in garish face paint and a shiny blue and purple outfit… she came across like a seductively deranged elf. Entry was one at a time and only acceptable by mounting her for a piggyback ride in order to be carried beyond the threshold. This regression to childhood experience and the destabilisation - both physical and mental which comes with handing over your mobility in this way led to gratifyingly knockabout visual and physical comedy.
The first entrant was a middle-aged moustachioed man who had attended with a woman who was most likely his wife, he was very big, the girl petite, he wasn’t the most agile of men and it took three or four attempts for him to get on top of her. I felt like I was observing the unsuccessful mating rituals of two incompatible farm animals; say a pig and a pony. Eventually she staggered with the guy on her back out of sight, through multi-coloured strips of fabric, the sort found in the doorways of tatty sex shops.
I mounted her in a single leap. A microphone is thrust in front of my mouth calling for spluttered and ill-prepared words over the PA system. She asks me my name, I’m announced like debutante at a ball to those in the queue further behind me. I'm asked ‘is there anything I want to say to friends and family?’ Why does she ask this, will I not return in one piece?The entry itself (unbeknown to us at this point) was to be a concise taster of the tone and flavour of what was to come: the cultivation of anarchy, chaos and uncertainty, being thrust unprepared into a situation that could potentially and simultaneously embarrass and amuse, a collapse of physical boundaries and personal space, a comic surreality and ludicrousness - presented with the makeshift aesthetic of Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind’s ‘sweded films’ or the dream sequences of The Science of Sleep or the sets and costumes in the Mighty Boosh TV series), not to mention a playfully libidinal atmosphere caked in and deflected by the cartoonish scenarios.
On the other side of the curtain the source of the pop songs is revealed to be a karaoke machine. A platinum blonde stands with a new romantic quiff wearing a black blazer, a DJ with over sized glasses is selecting various tunes, a woman in a bloated snowman costume and burlesque make-up, shimmies and winks taking up a sizeable part of the room, a man in a 1970s-style-checked-knitwear-tank-top makes cocktails… I’ve entered an eccentric but charming nightclub. Another microphone is pushed in my hand and before I know it I'm singing "Talking about my generation...why don't you all f-f-f-ade away?". This ragtag ensemble encouragingly eggs me on. I try not to think about my vocal efforts being relayed across the ground floor of Cordy House.
Helen who has gone in ahead of me, sits in a wheelchair, by a door which is occasionally opened and swiftly closed by an orangey-red-dyed haired bouncer, who every now and again pops his head in the room, surveys the party scene and disappears. I try to fathom why she is in the wheelchair while trying and failing to keep up to speed with the karaoke monitor. Eventually Helen is asked to rise by the bouncer and goes through the next doorway as Laura is carried in. I knew Laura was next because the piggyback-giving compere woman had told the DJ with with comic-franticness... “we have a special request! Find a song by the Smiths!” (and Laura loves the Smiths). Laura duly enters, i'm now sat in the wheelchair in which Helen sat, I’ve knocked back a couple of tequilas. Laura stands in the middle room, looking slightly shell-shocked before breaking into ‘This Charming Man’. I'm not sure if she has finished her song before the guy puts his head through the door and asks me to rise.
As I descend the stairway I am accosted by people lined either side of the steps, aching to get into the party from which I have just exited. They ask me how it was, they tug on my clothes, ask how I got on the guest list and if I’m coming back. I apologetically brush past them. (Immediately there is a playful reorientation of our sense of space having gone from the rain of outside, to inside a real club to only end up on the outside steps of a fictional club.) These stairs to lead to a bedroom. An old man is in bed in stripy pyjamas. Lit by a beside he lamp, with an absent minded air, he asks if I have some pills to relieve him from pain, he mentions some medication he was expecting, he mentions his wife. I’m uncertain if I have missed something, if something was supposed to be given to me that wasn’t given, I check my pockets, perhaps one of the people on the stairs slipped his medicine in my pocket? I can’t help him and wander on.
A woman in an elegant gown stands in front of an industrial lift. ‘Do you have the password for the VIP lounge?’ she asks, I stutter something about not having the password but could she let me in anyway? I wonder if I was told something at some point that I misheard, if I wasn’t concentrating enough? She tells me if I don’t know the password I should go another path and listen out for it. So I go on.In the next scenario I find myself in a non-descript office and invited to take a seat, I am taken through a questionnaire, health problems? Heart troubles? Asthma? The man asking the questions is dressed in generic office wear: white shirt and tie, smart trousers. No sooner are the questions answered I’m thanked and ushered on.
A police interrogation room: there are two uniformed officers one male, the other female (wearing strong red-lipstick). She pings her rubber gloves, in doing so quoting numerous ‘Carry on’ titles and police comedy films. I’m asked to put both hands on the wall, ‘Do I have anything to declare I’m asked?’ As they frisk me they discover my wallet, which they whip out my inside pocket. It has a 100 quid in it. I can’t afford for it to go missing. I end up wrestling the male officer for my wallet back, the other officer joins in. After much sweat and loss of breath I retrieve it, I offer my toothbrush and notebook instead - the pair reluctantly accept and put both items onto a grey plastic tray as some kind of forensic evidence.
Onward I go, I’m sat down in a dental chair. Given a thimble sized cup of mouthwash, a dentist peers into my mouth. (I squirm at this point, acutely self conscious of the terrible state of my teeth, I wait for several seconds - but what felt like an age for a biting assessment, instead he flips my expectations and announces the wonderful state of my molars). An assistant brings out a warm self-mouldable gumshield - I sink my teeth into it, anxious about their sensitivity, the texture of my mouth against the plastic reminds me of the ritual of preparing for Saturday morning rugby fixtures at school a decade ago.I’m now walking down a catwalk runway, fashionistas pout either side of it. Some are taking pictures. Others encourage me. I’m too engrossed in the spectacle of watching them to perform being on the catwalk myself, and neglect to discover the inner supermodel diva within.
The catwalk segues into a tunnel and I push myself through a trapdoor to find myself in a boxing ring. My opponent is bouncing in his corner, throwing jabs shadow boxing - I’m pulled to my corner by my trainer, he gives me a Mickey/Rocky style psych-pump speech, I nod vigorously. I’m on my feet wondering how much I’m expected to fight, how much my opponent is intending to fight, is he an actor playing a boxer, have they invited a ‘real’ boxer as part of the experience, how seriously is he taking this and how seriously should I? I decide to be defensive, and keep light on my feet - arms up and close together like a Victorian pugilist. I survive the bout. I remove my gloves and chuck the mouth guard at the boxer. My opponent lurches towards me. I escape into the white room of a medical ward.
A small boy lies in a hospital bed, there are beeps and whirs, a matron keeps watch over him, he sits up excitedly: ‘Usher!!!’ he cries, ‘Will you sign my autograph book?’ I smile and ask him his name, it is Nat, I sign “Get well soon, Nat. Usher.” The matron asks me to leave now, explaining the boy’s had enough excitement for the day.
I stumble on in to a living room, I sit down on an armchair in the centre of the room facing a television. Within a second it becomes clear this is no ordinary television but literally live television, the shell of a TV acts as a frame for the performers to stand within, at such a distance that are proportionally the ‘right size’ (the visual gag again revealing a fascination with the manipulation of our sense of space). I catch the end of a weather update, followed by some comedy ident but before I can really engage with the content of the show three men in red lycra bodysuits burst into my living room and whisk me out my seat, they are shouting ‘Move! Move! Get up! Come on!’ Their arms half dragging me from armchair to wheelchair. I’m now in a long white corridor with a slopping floor. Along the right side of the corridor, behind a metal railing are enthusiastic onlookers. I’m part of a sleigh team. They give me an almighty push, I whiz down the slope, high-fiving the crowd as I fly by.
As I slow down, a suited woman wheels me into a conference room. It’s some sort of press briefing, journalists sit inquisitively, cross-legged, bespectacled, pens twirling in air. An African man finishes a speech in a tongue I don’t recognise. The entire room swivels to me. At this point it becomes clear I’m the interpreter of a language I do not speak: I improvise something in English, which has the journalists fooled for a bit, but when it comes to translating the journalists’ questions into (what later becomes clear is) Swahili - staged pandemonium breaks out, the journalists cry: ‘He can’t speak the language!’, the African minister shouts something which to my ear phonetically sounds like ‘juju Swahili’ - I am hurriedly whisked from the room for my own safety.
I am parked in front of a Perspex fairground booth containing the kind of cheap items found in such machines. In place of a mechanical arm is a man’s hand which needs verbal control: Left! Right! Stop! Release! the hand opens. I collect the prize, recognizing the items seized by the police officers now sealed in Clingfilm.
I wander into a familiar room. I am back in the old man’s bedroom, he’s still asking for his pills, I still don’t have them – I apologise profusely with feigned concern. I ascend some stairs, past the same lot who were queuing outside, a couple of girls ask if they can come in on my arm, I more than fine with this we get to the door, but the bouncer won’t have anything of it. I pass through the karaoke party (the snowgirl still bobbing enthusiastically) and out through the doorway from which I came on piggyback.
It is the kind of experience that easily could have been animated fragments of the old man’s delirium. I cannot vouch with certainty that the scenes I have described happened in the order I described them. It was as tumultuous mentally as physically, its unstable actuality lends itself to unstable recollection. This dreamlike intensity was partly born of the sensory overload. Whereas cinema through the darkness of the auditorium might captivate the eyes and ears, here the entire body was literally propelled through space - along the way you were touched, manhandled, speaking and spoken to, you tasted, you were threatened, made alert and ready. It became dreamlike not through lulling and approximating the comforts of a bedtime story or inducing a close to sleep atmosphere, but oppositely by being hyper-real and excessively present.
Tension was racketed up by removing my control and knowledge: no sense of the duration, of the limits of the performers, the number of performers, the size of the space, it was like being flung in the shoes of Alice or Dorothy navigating her way through Wonderland or Oz, slipping from one madcap scene to another, each completely confident in the rationality of its hermetically sealed world, while being the very opposite to the outsider.
The anxiety of ‘not knowing the rules of the game’, proves far more stressful than the game itself, continually trying to psych yourself for being prepared for anything is playfully enforced upon the participant. These perhaps worked best in the meeting with authority figures, the imperious doorman, the office boss/interviewer - the police officers in the interrogation room. Yet the ‘train’ never strives for a single storyline, this allows for the collision of the unexpected, or a logic based on spatial reorientation, or even the collage of experience as one might juxtapose tickets and wallpapers in a 2d artwork. I.e. contrasting the experience of being passive with being active, or of spectacle to being scrutinized yourself, sometimes the links operate across scenes creating irrationality in one instance that becomes perfectly sensible in another. For example the dentist fitting you with the unrequested gumshield- prefigures the boxing match. However the inexplicability of the scenarios and their collision gives the sense of being in a pinball machine - ricocheting through an artificial landscape. Bum Bum Train not only recognizes but conveys experientially the speed and compression of everyday urban experience.
No overt judgement is cast on this expression of experience - but perhaps it is enough to generate this chaos, for it to be played back at you. All the same this rich humour seems to garland a bleakness of sorts: it is hard not to think of having being expelled from the reality game show that is life, being sat on a movable couch and allowed to re-experience your ‘best bits’ that last one time.
Saturday, 3 January 2009
Collage and the City
Yesterday evening, as the escalator ascended me towards the exit of Leicester Square tube station, a busker started a strained rendition of Lennon’s Imagine, accompanied by electric guitar. The fame of the song immediately elicited smiles of recognition and half-smirks between strangers. I was struck by the unintentional layering of this song with the experience of being on the escalator: going up, simultaneously watching (and being watched) by those on the middle escalator - also ascending, while on the escalator furthest from me people descended. In my mind’s eye this tableaux vivant became an unofficial music video for the song or saddened death knell for the city dweller: ‘imagine there’s no heaven its easy if you try / no hell below us above us only sky’ these lines emphasizes a classical theological space, but any Italian Renaissance depiction of Ascension and Fall is substituted by the mechanized steps of the underground... Almost with knowing contrariness, as the busker asks us to imagine no hell below us, people sink to the pit, the belly of the city, while those who 'rise' within this pictorial game - are not heaven bound, but bound for the rain and grot and cheap fairground attractions of Leicester square. And because it is my collage, my projection and my assembly of ideas and images to music, there is an explicable lack of awareness of my characters’ (fellow commuters) roll in this drama, and so their faces - oblivious to the mental contexts I place them, become all the more tragic - like lambs to slaughter or children and elderly on a one way train.
Thursday, 1 January 2009
Blindness (2008)
I recently saw the film Blindness (2008), directed by Fernando Meirelles based on the novel by Jose Saramago. Set in a modern day city, which could as easily be New York as London. An epidemic of blindness appears across the city. It is assumed by state authorities to be a virus, or something transmissible - those who are discovered to be blind are quarantined in a detention centre. The drama follows a woman, (played by Julianne Moore) who is not blind, who can see, who at one stage maybe the only person who can see, but who initially pretends that she too is blind, so that she can accompany her husband to this detention centre. She keeps the fact she can see a secret for as long as possible, eventually confiding to few she feels she can trust. The soldiers entrusted to regulate supplies, care and order are negligent; factions within the detention centre (a former hospital) become increasingly oppositional. As the centre overfills, we see Moore’s character increasingly trying to compensate for the lack of organisation the soldiers should be providing. Initially her impulse is to solely attend to her husband, but the circle of those she feels obliged to aid continues to increase. A close-up on her face as she surveys people in corridors: wandering, lost, pawing their way through a maze of bodies, vomiting, sleeping, pissing, shitting - captures her realisation and guilt at being unable to deal with this sisyphusian task. In Moore’s character I saw a metaphor for a model of a certain type of artist… who you might describe as being ‘blessed with a burden’, the burden is not providing aid to help those who are blind - such aid is presumptuous, unsolicited and not necessarily needed - it is the burden of making a personally satisfying choice as to how that sight is applied. None can see that you can see, the choices to be made are personal and interior, this lack of external judgement becomes the source of the terror.
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
The Wilhelm Scream
The ‘Wilhelm Scream’ is a recording of a man screaming in great agony. The Wilhelm Scream was first used in the 1951 film ‘Distant Drums’. However it takes its name from a film made shortly after - ‘The Charge at Feather River’ (1953); in which a character named Wilhelm is given this sound as his death cry in the post-production sound-tracking process. This recording has subsequently been used in over a 130 films right up to the present day. This sound effect has become iconic for the frequency of its use – as opposed to its singularity. The power of a scream lies in it being primal and pre-verbal, herein lays its universality. When one considers iconic screams or wails in visual media (Eve in Masaccio’s The Expulsion, Munch’s The Scream, the screaming nurse from the Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin, Francis Bacon’s Popes, Janet Leigh in Psycho, Rod Steiger in the Pawnbroker) it is the particularity of the situation that makes them memorable, while we recognize the anguish of that particular instant through the sound made. The Wilhelm Scream is perversely interesting because of it being divorced from its original context and author and repeatedly applied in different situations.
The Wilhelm Scream’s separation from its source, of course happened when it was first recorded on tape in 1953. Fittingly there is no conclusive evidence as to the originator of this sound. The disturbing aspect of the Wilhelm Scream is the dislocation of the individual’s signature: by effectively presenting a multitude of deaths with one anonymous wail, humanity is being constructed in representation as a mechanistic system, made of interchangeable parts, to be reassembled and dismantled as seen fit. This is horrifying enough to earn a scream itself (although not a Wilhelm one).
At the moment of being recorded it moved beyond being a live experience between the maker of the scream and the sound recordist, and became a unit of information in its own right. It might be useful to think of the Wilhelm Scream as a meme. [one website definition of a meme being: ‘an idea that, like a gene, can replicate and evolve. A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another, and subjected to mutation, crossover and adaptation. A cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behaviour) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); memes are the cultural counterpart of genes’, this term was constructed by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)].
This meme has been particularly successful and propagated by various ‘carriers’ which in this model are the sound engineers. One film historian described the use of the sound effect ‘in-joke’ between engineers as “a sort of way of communicating between ourselves and saying hello to each other”. This also points to the idea of a film itself being a communicative system in which minority or marginal discussions can occur that might be completely different (or even opposite) to the primary message(s) intended by the film’s central contributors (film studio, director, producer, screenwriter) – aimed at the cinema going public. Here is exciting example and potential model for the marginal operating within any communicative system to establish their own discourses ‘piggybacking’ / or encoded within a dominant message.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cdbYsoEasio
(a compilation of film clips which feature the Wilhelm Scream)
The Wilhelm Scream’s separation from its source, of course happened when it was first recorded on tape in 1953. Fittingly there is no conclusive evidence as to the originator of this sound. The disturbing aspect of the Wilhelm Scream is the dislocation of the individual’s signature: by effectively presenting a multitude of deaths with one anonymous wail, humanity is being constructed in representation as a mechanistic system, made of interchangeable parts, to be reassembled and dismantled as seen fit. This is horrifying enough to earn a scream itself (although not a Wilhelm one).
At the moment of being recorded it moved beyond being a live experience between the maker of the scream and the sound recordist, and became a unit of information in its own right. It might be useful to think of the Wilhelm Scream as a meme. [one website definition of a meme being: ‘an idea that, like a gene, can replicate and evolve. A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another, and subjected to mutation, crossover and adaptation. A cultural unit (an idea or value or pattern of behaviour) that is passed from one generation to another by nongenetic means (as by imitation); memes are the cultural counterpart of genes’, this term was constructed by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976)].
This meme has been particularly successful and propagated by various ‘carriers’ which in this model are the sound engineers. One film historian described the use of the sound effect ‘in-joke’ between engineers as “a sort of way of communicating between ourselves and saying hello to each other”. This also points to the idea of a film itself being a communicative system in which minority or marginal discussions can occur that might be completely different (or even opposite) to the primary message(s) intended by the film’s central contributors (film studio, director, producer, screenwriter) – aimed at the cinema going public. Here is exciting example and potential model for the marginal operating within any communicative system to establish their own discourses ‘piggybacking’ / or encoded within a dominant message.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cdbYsoEasio
(a compilation of film clips which feature the Wilhelm Scream)
Monday, 13 October 2008
Notes on Whitechapel Gallery artist’s talk between Jens Haaning & Nicholas Bourriaud / 11 Sep 08
Artists and Institutions and the changing nature of Institutional Critique
Bourriaud suggested that the kind of institutional critique that emerged in the 1960s has come to an end. He felt that art galleries were no longer considered as representative of an authoritarian political system as they once were, therefore, making them the subject of work has becomes less relevant for artists. He suggested that the art gallery was seen as ‘one more thing among many things’.
Also, such is the fluidity of galleries now in modes of presentation and engagement (e.g. smaller but no less institutions such as Gasworks, ICA (as seen in their recent Nought to 60 program and Whitechapel itself) means they often think with the contingency and lightness that would classically be the domain of the artist. In the past there has been more of a tension between the dense, heavy (both architectural and ideologically) institution and the nimble, protean artist. However as more and more gallerists, curators and creative producers adopt the mobility of thinking more commonly associated with the artist the innate antagonism between the two has lessened.
Working in/out an institution, working with(out) an institution
Asked how he dealt with the initial invitation to be part of Whitechapel Gallery’s project The Street:
(“Seven artists/artist collectives have been commissioned to take part in The Street, a year-long project by Whitechapel Gallery launched on 30 March 2008. Each were asked to develop seven week-long projects focusing on a disused shop space on Toynbee Street just off Wentworth Street, as well as to develop projects relating to the place on and around Wentworth Street, E1. Projects will usually have some manifestation throughout the rest of the year so that The Street will have an accumulative presence up until March 2009. Writers Lars Bang Larsen and Clare Cumberlidge from General Public Agency have been invited to contextualize The Street throughout the year. A publication will follow in 2009.” Curator, Marijke Steedman)
Haaning confessed to finding it quite difficult. The reason being that it was important to him that the decision to work beyond the walls of an institution is his artistic choice. Whereas with ‘The Street’ the work being external to Whitechapel Gallery itself was part of the structure of the project. From his perspective he felt the gallery had made inroads into the nature of the work, before he had even contributed anything. This stance became clearer in mind of his suspicion of artists who claim to work ‘outside of the institution’ he felt this was naïvely revolutionary, or at worst, a faux-stance of independence, he admitted the importance of, and attraction to, galleries for him, lay in the power of their networks, both in communicating the project to the public, media and others in the professional arts community.
‘Baghdad Time’ (2008) was the produce of Jens Haaning’s commission for The Street…A clock set to Baghdad time has been mounted to the side of a Brick Lane restaurant; “thus acting as a reminder of a situation occurring in another time zone – a situation that society has the power to influence despite its geographic distance… it highlights economic and diplomatic relations between the UK and Iraq - with British participation in the Iraq conflict acting as the main connection” (as described on the Danish Embassy website). This description and commentary complements what Haaning disclosed of his strategies on the evening of the talk.
Other works
Other works which Haaning presented included: “Afghanistan 5012 km” (at Leidsche Rijn, in Utrecht, The Netherlands). A piece commissioned for a new housing estate. The work takes the form of a road sign placed by the motorway, with the lettering ‘Afghanistan 5012km’. This functions as a joke while remaining factually true. Haaning talked about wanting people to consider why this road sign had been sited over any other, as a means of opening up broader considerations. He went on to explain that he saw the work as a response to expansive housing developments occurring in the Netherlands at the time, that were economically related to Holland’s military engagement in Afghanistan.
Another striking work was ‘Arabic Joke’ (2006); this work took the form of numerous posters disturbed throughout New York in October and November 2006: “interspersed among the movie and club posters, the typical joke offers a laugh to those who can read it, and may evoke feelings of dislocation and confusion among those who cannot”. (Who Cares? website). Bourriard talked about other contexts in which he’d seen this work and variations of it, in which the jokes are broadcast, for example. He talked about how ‘Arabic Joke’ created a micro-community for the duration of the joke’s presence in the cityscape – around which those who ‘were in the know’ could enjoy the work. By presenting the ‘insider’s joke’ with the insider being the ethnic minority or marginal community, subversions of the relationship between access to knowledge and authoritarian power were put to work. Finally in Redistribution (London-Karachi), 2003, all the chairs from the ICA, London were shipped to Karachi, Pakistan. They were then left on the street for passers-by to use or take as they wished. Haaning recounted how there had been great excitement at the Karachi end in the lead up to the project, at the prospect of ‘designer chairs from London’, however when the chairs actually arrived there was great disappointment with their aesthetic. He found it humorously revelatory about the expectations of one culture and its produce of another – and the notion of taste and fashion – how in this particular case it definitely did not translate.
One lens through which to view the works mentioned here is through their spatial-temporal-displacement strategies. Baghdad Time, suggest a mini-time zone in the midst of Brick Lane. This asynchronicity could be seen to mirror the culture of population demographic of the Brick Lane area in relation to London’s population at large. Likewise to make the link between the Dutch housing estate and Afghanistan may have had a real-time relevance at the time of its execution – but as Haaning himself said, he is equally interested in a motorist 50 years from now passing the sign and being curious enough to investigate a connection that has become historical, that is not ‘live’. Issues of displacement are explicit in Arabic Joke and Redistribution, in the former the artwork i.e. the poster activates and engages with those communities which have been displaced – alienating those who do not know the language, in the latter it is the objects which have been displaced: two simultaneous situations of the same logic – but not identical events had been created. Here the displacement is not loaded in one community’s favour, or to the exclusion of another. I was made particularly curious about the act of swapping, specifically the moment mid- swap when both parties have nothing and are awaiting the arrival of something.
Bourriaud suggested that the kind of institutional critique that emerged in the 1960s has come to an end. He felt that art galleries were no longer considered as representative of an authoritarian political system as they once were, therefore, making them the subject of work has becomes less relevant for artists. He suggested that the art gallery was seen as ‘one more thing among many things’.
Also, such is the fluidity of galleries now in modes of presentation and engagement (e.g. smaller but no less institutions such as Gasworks, ICA (as seen in their recent Nought to 60 program and Whitechapel itself) means they often think with the contingency and lightness that would classically be the domain of the artist. In the past there has been more of a tension between the dense, heavy (both architectural and ideologically) institution and the nimble, protean artist. However as more and more gallerists, curators and creative producers adopt the mobility of thinking more commonly associated with the artist the innate antagonism between the two has lessened.
Working in/out an institution, working with(out) an institution
Asked how he dealt with the initial invitation to be part of Whitechapel Gallery’s project The Street:
(“Seven artists/artist collectives have been commissioned to take part in The Street, a year-long project by Whitechapel Gallery launched on 30 March 2008. Each were asked to develop seven week-long projects focusing on a disused shop space on Toynbee Street just off Wentworth Street, as well as to develop projects relating to the place on and around Wentworth Street, E1. Projects will usually have some manifestation throughout the rest of the year so that The Street will have an accumulative presence up until March 2009. Writers Lars Bang Larsen and Clare Cumberlidge from General Public Agency have been invited to contextualize The Street throughout the year. A publication will follow in 2009.” Curator, Marijke Steedman)
Haaning confessed to finding it quite difficult. The reason being that it was important to him that the decision to work beyond the walls of an institution is his artistic choice. Whereas with ‘The Street’ the work being external to Whitechapel Gallery itself was part of the structure of the project. From his perspective he felt the gallery had made inroads into the nature of the work, before he had even contributed anything. This stance became clearer in mind of his suspicion of artists who claim to work ‘outside of the institution’ he felt this was naïvely revolutionary, or at worst, a faux-stance of independence, he admitted the importance of, and attraction to, galleries for him, lay in the power of their networks, both in communicating the project to the public, media and others in the professional arts community.
‘Baghdad Time’ (2008) was the produce of Jens Haaning’s commission for The Street…A clock set to Baghdad time has been mounted to the side of a Brick Lane restaurant; “thus acting as a reminder of a situation occurring in another time zone – a situation that society has the power to influence despite its geographic distance… it highlights economic and diplomatic relations between the UK and Iraq - with British participation in the Iraq conflict acting as the main connection” (as described on the Danish Embassy website). This description and commentary complements what Haaning disclosed of his strategies on the evening of the talk.
Other works
Other works which Haaning presented included: “Afghanistan 5012 km” (at Leidsche Rijn, in Utrecht, The Netherlands). A piece commissioned for a new housing estate. The work takes the form of a road sign placed by the motorway, with the lettering ‘Afghanistan 5012km’. This functions as a joke while remaining factually true. Haaning talked about wanting people to consider why this road sign had been sited over any other, as a means of opening up broader considerations. He went on to explain that he saw the work as a response to expansive housing developments occurring in the Netherlands at the time, that were economically related to Holland’s military engagement in Afghanistan.
Another striking work was ‘Arabic Joke’ (2006); this work took the form of numerous posters disturbed throughout New York in October and November 2006: “interspersed among the movie and club posters, the typical joke offers a laugh to those who can read it, and may evoke feelings of dislocation and confusion among those who cannot”. (Who Cares? website). Bourriard talked about other contexts in which he’d seen this work and variations of it, in which the jokes are broadcast, for example. He talked about how ‘Arabic Joke’ created a micro-community for the duration of the joke’s presence in the cityscape – around which those who ‘were in the know’ could enjoy the work. By presenting the ‘insider’s joke’ with the insider being the ethnic minority or marginal community, subversions of the relationship between access to knowledge and authoritarian power were put to work. Finally in Redistribution (London-Karachi), 2003, all the chairs from the ICA, London were shipped to Karachi, Pakistan. They were then left on the street for passers-by to use or take as they wished. Haaning recounted how there had been great excitement at the Karachi end in the lead up to the project, at the prospect of ‘designer chairs from London’, however when the chairs actually arrived there was great disappointment with their aesthetic. He found it humorously revelatory about the expectations of one culture and its produce of another – and the notion of taste and fashion – how in this particular case it definitely did not translate.
One lens through which to view the works mentioned here is through their spatial-temporal-displacement strategies. Baghdad Time, suggest a mini-time zone in the midst of Brick Lane. This asynchronicity could be seen to mirror the culture of population demographic of the Brick Lane area in relation to London’s population at large. Likewise to make the link between the Dutch housing estate and Afghanistan may have had a real-time relevance at the time of its execution – but as Haaning himself said, he is equally interested in a motorist 50 years from now passing the sign and being curious enough to investigate a connection that has become historical, that is not ‘live’. Issues of displacement are explicit in Arabic Joke and Redistribution, in the former the artwork i.e. the poster activates and engages with those communities which have been displaced – alienating those who do not know the language, in the latter it is the objects which have been displaced: two simultaneous situations of the same logic – but not identical events had been created. Here the displacement is not loaded in one community’s favour, or to the exclusion of another. I was made particularly curious about the act of swapping, specifically the moment mid- swap when both parties have nothing and are awaiting the arrival of something.
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