Preoccupations

The certainty of chance

From the Economist's obituary of George Melly:

As a lifelong Surrealist, he was sure that the bizarre and marvellous lay in wait for him everywhere, and carried in his head a Surrealist motto, “the certainty of chance”.

'The 'certainty of chance' was', James Boyle says, 'the phrase André Breton used to describe both modernism and his own philosophy of life'.

Earlier this month, the TLS reprinted George Melly's 1991 review of A Book of Surrealist Games, in which he concluded:

It may puzzle the more pompous as to why this body of men and women, these ardent revolutionaries of the spirit, spent so much time engaged in occupations usually considered more suitable for bored children on wet afternoons. The answer is, to quote the preface, that “Surrealist play is more like a kind of provocative magic”, that it “breaks, the thread of discursive thought” and, above all, helps to confirm the primary Surrealist belief in what they called “objective chance” or “the certainty of hazard”. These games will prove to you that not only was Lautréamont justified as to poetry; one could add a rider: “Surrealism too can be made by all.” 

Of the cover, George Melly wrote:

… a bourgeois interior, painted with the minimal realism of early Magritte. Seated opposite each other in identical armchairs, a young father is engrossed in his newspaper while his wife is teaching their son to read. Something is mildly askew. Is it because, while it is dark outside, the curtains are undrawn, or that the room is lit by anachronistic Victorian oil lamps, or that the newspaper, despite the completely Western ambience of the decor, is printed in oriental typography?

The origin of this illustration is unrevealed. I suspect it may have been an advertisement for a pre-war European product aimed at the Japanese market, or vice versa, but it is a brilliant trailer for the displacement on offer within. In a balloon-shaped inset, replacing perhaps a commercial slogan, is a quotation from Lautréamont, the nineteenth-century writer so revered by the Surrealists: “Poetry should be made by all.”

Amazon carries an "editorial review" (cited as Amazon.com): 'Surrealism is far more than some dead art movement: it is also a collection of tools for perceiving and representing the world in ways that transcend normative perspectives. … If you have any spark of creativity, you are strongly encouraged to get this book to help loosen the holds of quotidian existence on your craft.'

I see Anne's been here before — and quotes more of the preface to A Book of Surrealist Games than George Melly did:

Surrealist games and procedures are intended to free words and images from the constraints of rational and discursive order, substituting chance and indeterminancy for premeditation and deliberation... In one particular and important respect Surrealist play is more like a kind of provocative magic. This is in its irrepressible propensity to the transformation of objects, behaviours and ideas. In this aspect of its proceedings Surrealism makes manifest its underlying political programme, its revolutionary intent.

Before going on to put some surrealist games online, Anne also quotes Philippe Audouin:

It is not to belittle Surrealist activity to consider it as a game, in fact as The Great Game, whose prizes in the eyes of those who played and lived it, can be calculated in promises of freedom, love, revolution, and in anything else that intransigent desire can aspire to.

Unsurprisingly, various things here made me think again about the aleatoric. 

Technorati tags: George Melly, André Breton, surrealism, chance, aleatoric, play, magic

Ice Age art

Something beautiful …

Archaeologists at the University of Tübingen have recovered the first entirely intact woolly mammoth figurine from the Swabian Jura, a plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, thought to have been made by the first modern humans some 35,000 years ago. It is believed to be the oldest ivory carving ever found. "You can be sure," Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J. Conard told SPIEGEL ONLINE, "that there has been art in Swabia for over 35,000 years." Spiegel Online

Universität Tübingen 

The figure of the woolly mammoth is tiny, measuring just 3.7 cm long and weighing a mere 7.5 grams, and displays skilfully detailed carvings. It is unique in its slim form, pointed tail, powerful legs and dynamically arched trunk. It is decorated with six short incisions, and the soles of the pachyderm's feet show a crosshatch pattern. …

The geological context of the discoveries and radiocarbon dating indicate that the figurines belong to the Aurignacian culture, which refers to an area of southern France and is associated with the arrival of the first modern humans in Europe. Multiple radiocarbon dates from sediment in the Vogelherd Cave yielded ages between 30,000 and 36,000 years ago, the University of Tübingen reports. Some methods give an even older date. Spiegel Online

Universität Tübingen 

These tiny artworks, recently unearthed, are among the oldest examples of figurative art ever found. (For comparison, the oldest known cave/rock paintings go back to 32,000-40,000 years ago. The paintings at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain are somewhere around 15,000 years old.) Thinking Meat

via 3 Quarks Daily

Technorati tags: Ice Age, Swabia, Homo sapiens, Man

London (week two)

 

 

Celebrated this, the second week of living in London by dashing off to the Velázquez at the National and the British Library's London: A Life in Maps.

The painting shown above, An Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618, oil, 100.5 x 119.5 cm, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh), is my favourite of those on show. I love its colours, its use of light and shadow — and its striking use of a double perspective: I didn't buy the catalogue, but I browsed it and recall it as talking quite excitedly about how we look down on the eggs, the bowl, the knife, the knife's shadow … and directly at the boy and old woman. Fascinating. The small, free exhibition guide takes a rather different view: 'he is not able to fuse the independently studied parts to create convincing space'. The boy-painter, just 19, may well have struggled, but I still find the painting utterly memorable and the two angles of vision are part of what makes it stay in my mind. That, the colours, light … and the humanity of the two figures.

Rod's piece about the Velázquez is here, says many good things and makes many good links. More about the maps later — I've got Peter Barber's book to read and I want to get hold of Peter Whitfield's London: A Life in Maps.

Technorati tags: Velázquez, London, maps, National Gallery, British Library

YouTube

Be it Frank Zappa specials, such as I am the Slime and Mike Nesmith and Frank Zappa on 'The Monkees', or Captain Beefheart — Lick my decals off, baby … or the loftier heights of The Hearts of Age (Orson Welles) and Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren), YouTube is going to become compulsive viewing. (All links via del.icio.us, the first three via Merlin Mann, the last two via Warren Ellis.)

Wikipedia on The Hearts of Age:

The Hearts of Age is the first film made by Orson Welles. The film is a four-minute short, which he co-directed with William Vance in 1934. The film stars Welles' first wife, Virginia Nicholson, as well as Welles himself. He made the film while attending the Todd School for Boys, in Woodstock, Illinois, at the age of 19. The plot is a series of images loosely tied together, and is arguably influenced by surrealism. The film is rarely seen today, but many point to it as an important precursor to Welles' first Hollywood film, Citizen Kane.

Meshes of the Afternoon, to my shame, is a discovery. Better now than never. Wikipedia here. An Uruguayan site here (Spanish). (Both these links via absurdita, who uploaded the film to YouTube.) IMDb entry here.

Technorati tags: Orson Welles, Maya Deren, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, YouTube

Culture catch-up

The last few days:

• To the Oxford Playhouse to see the ETT in Hamlet. It left me unmoved — a decent, clean and clear production with Ed Stoppard in the lead. A BBC page says of the ETT and this production: 'ETT is renowned for the clarity and style of its work … This new production of Hamlet will stay true to the company’s ethos of producing raw, direct and passionate theatre'. I agree with the clarity bit, but no, there was little that was 'raw' or 'passionate'. I couldn't find any review of the production last week (when I went), but Michael Billington panned it on Friday in The Guardian:

… the English Touring Theatre offer us a middle-of-the-road, Jacobean-costumed version that has nothing fresh to say about the play. I have no problem with the period setting; it is the failure to investigate either the human relationships or the political context that troubles me. … this is set-text Shakespeare shrouded in decent dullness. When you recall that ETT began 12 years ago with Alan Cumming's capriciously eccentric Hamlet you feel that the company has dwindled into respectability.

There was an interview with Ed Stoppard in The Independent (conducted prior to the production).

• I finally got around to watching the film of The Madness of George III, The Madness of King George. I always feel with Bennett that there are much greater dramatic depths to be plumbed than he permits himself to look into. I saw the original stage production and prefer that greatly for its tightness, focus and energy — the central performance of Nigel Hawthorne being allowed to occupy its proper place.
• Robert Crawford came to read at school on Wednesday evening and stayed the night. It was a good reading to which some of those present responded warmly. Robert opened with 'Chaps', of which the Literary Encyclopedia says:

In the militaristic-toned poem “Chaps”, Crawford uses repetition and language reminiscent of the stiff-upper-lip Englishman to convey a sense of how maleness has historically been perceived as both macho and a necessary element in the constitution of the British imperialistic project:

With his Bible, his Burns, his brose and his baps,
Colonel John Buchan is one of the chaps,
With his mother, his mowser, his mauser, his maps,
Winston S. Churchill is one of the chaps.

Even the rhyme scheme and parallelism in this poem seems to play into the requirements of an essentialized British Empire. The regimentation of language is one of the dangerous consequences of imperialism and one that denies voices from breaking through and interacting with others. The refrain that Crawford employs has a similar effect: “Chaps chaps chaps chaps/ Chaps chaps chaps chaps”.

The marching regularity is emphasized but so too is the gender. A “chap” is not just any old male, it is a male who has been shaped by a past that requires that he behave in a particular way and communicate his gender in a fashion that must reflect the superiority and power of the state.

A concern with language, communication and identity marks much of Robert's work.

Later that evening, we joined up with Jamie McKendrick for supper. Conversation naturally focused on poets and poetry, but Jamie and Robert are both interested in the visual arts. Jamie spoke of his admiration for Plath's drawing of Ted Hughes, recently sold by Bonhams.

Copyright © 2002-2005 Bonhams 1793 Ltd

• Friday saw some of us go to catch Seth Lakeman on tour (St Mary's Church, Marlborough). I'm not in to English folk music much, but Seth Lakeman came to prominence earlier this year when he was nominated for the Mercury Prize and we felt we should go and hear him. (He also hit the headlines last year when he launched his new album at Dartmoor Prison.) He is a fine musician, the solo pieces he played being exceptionally powerful. As a trio they worked very well together, with marked mutual understanding, and his drummer proved a great hit with our party — photos. If he's to gain more fame and following, his music will inevitably have to shift somewhat. Acoustic now, he is already being described on the web as 'folk-rock' and on his own website as 'indie-folk'. One to watch.

Oxyrhynchus: against divided art & audiences

The name of Oxyrhynchus meant little or nothing to most people (myself included) until 1990 and the production at London's National Theatre of Tony Harrison's The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. One of the best things I've ever seen in the theatre, I went with some students of mine — and then returned very quickly, with another group, for a second serving. Time Out described it as "total theatre" (see Faber's Trackers page — click on thumbnail) and the nearest I've come to experiencing anything as visceral since was in the (quite different) Tropicana production currently running in London (which my students also enjoyed …).

In the programme for the 1990 production, Professor Parsons (at the time, Regius Professor of Greek, Oxford) noted that 'the traditional classical world has left us no books: all the contents, say, of the great Library of Alexandria, or of the 28 public libraries of imperial Rome, have disappeared without trace — fire and damp disposed of them. What we possess of the literature of the Greeks and Romans we possess because a selection of works were copied and recopied, first on papyrus and later on parchment, through the Roman Empire and then through the Middle Ages — Latin in the West, Greek in the East. In the Renaissance, the surviving manuscripts were hunted out; and the invention of printing meant that works which had survived up to then would go on surviving. But it was a chancy business; for example, just one copy of the poems of Catullus survived to this point … (and) even surviving authors survived only in part. Sophocles wrote 123 plays; of these seven were transmitted through the Middle Ages, because in the late Empire they were chosen as set books, and all the rest disappeared. … These losses seemed to be final — until the Egyptian rubbish (at Oxyrhynchus) came to the rescue, for the dumps included, sporadically and in fragments, books which were circulating before the great massacre of the Middle Ages.'

Harrison's takes the 400 lines of Sophocles' satyr play, Ichneutae, discovered in 1907 at Oxyrhynchus by Grenfell and Hunt (Oxford University) — the pioneers of a new branch of Classics, papyrology — and around them and through them, with the aid of be-clogged satyrs, weaves a play for our own times. Harrison, steeped in classical literature, finds in Greek culture a wholeness of imagination, an 'essential catholicity', a 'unity of tragedy and satyr play', which was subsequently betrayed — divided into 'high' and 'low'. This division perpetuates 'divided audiences, divided societies' (introduction to the Faber edition of Trackers).

With the loss of these plays we are lacking important clues to the wholeness of the Greek imagination, and its ability to absorb and yet not be defeated by the tragic. In the satyr play, that spirit of celebration, held in the dark solution of tragedy, is precipitated into release, and a release into the worship of the Dionysus who presided over the whole dramatic festival. (ibidem)

Teachers and "guardians of culture", beware. In a Daily Telegraph interview (February, 1990), Harrison said to Trevor Bates:

The play is part of my slow burning revenge against the teacher who denied me an opportunity to read poetry and take part in plays because of my accent. We chose Salts Mill [where the production visited in April 1990] because we needed a venue where the ghost images of the past were strong. Clogs are one of the principal expressions of the rhythm of life and they gear the satyrs into action.

Barrie Rutter and Tony Harrison during rehearsals at Delphi. Photo Sandra Lousada

*****

The Independent recently ran a story (purchase necessary) about the reserach being done on Oxyrhyncus material by contemporary Oxford academics working alongside specialists from Brigham Young University (BYU), Utah. Hailed in The Independent as a collaboration 'likely to increase the number of great literary works fully or partially surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth', there was then a strange silence, and, finally, a sceptical posting on Ars technica. Dirk Obbink, papyrologist at Oxford and the academic at the heart of the new work on the Oxyrhynchus material, has attempted to clarify the picture, e-mailing by proxy on the papyrologists' discussion group (registration required), and some of what he had to say can also be read here, at the Oxford Papyrology site (POxy: Oxyrhynchus Online):

We scanned portions of the unrolled Herculaneum papyrus in the Bodleian Library and experimented on problematic carbonised and non-carbonised samples in the Oxyrhynchus collection in the Sackler Library (including documents), some of them for final checks in texts scheduled for publication in the next two volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. The results … were of mixed success, revealing many new readings and confirmation of uncertain readings in some problem areas, none at all in others, depending on settings and surface type. In some ranges and surfaces even less writing could be read than with the eye or none at all. As usual with the Oxy. papyri a number of new identifications emerged of literary and documentary texts not previously made by the usual means, together with the isolation of four or five different types of surface and obscurity that respond well or not well to the BYU process. … The process seemed to work best on darkened, charred, or stained surfaces, and can image through some surface materials, but sees nothing through mud, clay, or silt. It produced excellent results on palimpsests, cancellations and damnationes memoriae, and on disintegrating surfaces where the ink has settled deep into the fibres. It was least successful on surfaces that were partially or entirely washed out. … Surprisingly, in one trial the process successfully imaged through painted gesso, revealing a previously unknown document … on the papyrus cartonage surface underneath. The London press got wind of this … and reported enthusiastically, if selectively.

More details about the processes involved and their results are available in Dirk Obbink's email and POxy posting, and also here.

Tally of extant & lost plays (using Professor Parsons' figures)

Aeschylus: 7 extant; 83 lost (including about 20 Satyr plays)

Sophocles: 7 extant; 116 lost (including about 30 Satyr plays)

Euripides: 19 extant (including 1 Satyr play, The Cyclops); 61 lost (including about 15 Satyr plays)

Lytton Strachey @ QI

At the QI Club (Oxford) last night for a party and dinner to celebrate Paul Levy's edition of Lytton Strachey's Letters. Great fun and a pleasure to meet so many people — old friends and new.

I thought I'd read just about most of what there is to read about the Bloomsbury group, but there are many new things in these letters. (Times review here, Observer review here.) This is what Paul also discovered when he started on the project five years ago. For one thing, as Hilary Spurling noted in the Telegraph, what 'a comprehensive sexual odyssey' this selection of letters presents.

The last four paragraphs of Hilary Spurling's Telegraph review capture much of my own, far from straightforward reactions to Strachey and the Bloomsbury group (though this was too varied and complex a network to be intelligently subsumed under one umbrella title):

Strachey's contempt for women and his predatory accounts of children make dismal reading. So does his emotional amnesia in the 1914-18 war, when the sense of moral superiority engendered by his own and his friends' struggles to avoid serving in the Army seemed to blank out any sense of the illimitable catastrophe engulfing their contemporaries. Strachey spent the war carrying on pretty much as usual; reading, writing, visiting friends and doing the rounds of country houses ("Altogether it's been more like a campaign in Flanders than anything else," he wrote after a hectic social weekend at Garsington Manor in the summer of 1916, midway between the battles of Verdun and the Somme.)

His gossip is priceless. No one can pinpoint human failure, pretension or pomposity more brilliantly than Strachey, although it often takes close study of Levy's copious and complex notes to work out exactly who is up to what. Literature comes in a poor third. Strachey read voraciously all his life in French and English, and the relatively sparse comments included here are almost invariably spot-on. "It's the lack of copulation - actual or implied - that worries me," he said of Virginia Woolf's novels, and, of another old friend, E M Forster, "there always seems to be a touch of Weybridge in his style, whatever the subject may be".

Strachey himself became a celebrity overnight in 1918, when Eminent Victorians articulated the revulsion of a whole iconoclastic generation in the final convulsive stages of the war. Duchesses took him up, the Asquiths invited him for weekends, and a tea-party in Grosvenor Square with Mrs Astor struck awe into his heart. Someone even suggested summoning him to explain himself to the House of Commons ("I suppose I should be met at the door by the Speaker and Black Rod," Strachey wrote with satisfaction: "And the House of Lords. Are they doing anything? And His Majesty? Not a word from him.")

Nearly 40 years after his death, he became seriously famous for a second time, when Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey initiated a golden age of biography in the 1970s. Strachey himself may have hoped that publication of his letters would enhance his reputation further still, but the tone of this correspondence - catty, heartless, knowing, hugely entertaining and relentlessly flip - has more in common with Piers Morgan's The Insider than with the warmth, humanity and the subtle depths of feeling revealed in Holroyd's extraordinary biography.

SMS Guerrilla Projector

'a home-made fully functioning device that enables the user to project text-based, SMS messages in public spaces, in streets, onto people, inside cinemas, shops, houses …': Troika — art/design collective (London).

(Link via New Art)

White Horses

via Google Sightseeing:

This one is in Mexico! The original is at Uffington, near me.

(Info about Wiltshire White Horses here. The nineteenth century copy at Marlborough looks like this:

… and can be read about here, which is also from where this photo originates.)

Google Sightseeing ('Why bother seeing the world for real?') link via Digital Musings.

Making sense of limits

Rowan Williams (Easter Sunday address), focusing on ageing and mortality but lending his remarks a wider range of reference:

'Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old … A healthy human environment is one in which we try to make sense of our limits, of the accidents that can always befall us and the passage of time which inexorably changes us' … He says an 'unhealthy' environment is one where people look for 'someone to blame and someone to compensate us, and struggle to maintain fictions of our invulnerability to time and change'. The Archbishop will say the message of Easter offers a new vision of life by proclaiming that 'we shall not find life by refusing to let go of our precious, protected selves.' BBC News

Listening to the extraordinary voice and songs of Antony and the Johnsons, originating out of the alternative cultures of New York, I came across the above and then these articles in the latest issue of the LRB:

• Here's Jenny Diski, reviewing The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade by Piers Morgan, on Tony Blair and Piers Morgan (the disgraced former editor of the Mirror):

Blair comes out of this as Morgan’s twin brother. Mirror images you might say. Blair, like Morgan, promises and evades, sulks and blames others. He cajoles, whines, ducks out of sight and makes threats based on his position. Blair and his advisers might as well be Jordan, Fergie and Patsy Kensit flirting with Piers in the hope of getting more of the right kind or less of the wrong kind of coverage. They might as well be editors of tabloid newspapers offering perks to their mates and doom to their enemies. I had thought that the obsession with celebrity and PR was just the idleness of the newspapers and television providing what was easiest to sell for an audience who wanted what was easiest to absorb. I imagined that there was some more solid substance beneath the mental lassitude. But it seems from these diaries that it is actually the way the world is. It is the real world. I do live in cloud-cuckoo-land. Politics and reality TV are one and the same at present, if the Piers Morgan experience is anything to go by. Popularity is the only thing. Numbers are what count. Getting elected, getting the paper bought by as many people as possible, is all that matters. The readers are always right whether or not you think them repulsive, racist and ignorant, so policies and front pages will be tweaked to give them what they want. There’s no point in having unpopular policies, I remember being told by Paul Boateng before the 1997 election: Labour would never get into power to put them into practice. What he didn’t go on to mention was that if you have popular policies that get you into power, you have to keep them, in order to stay in power – that votes are the same as newspaper circulation figures and profit margins. He was the one who told me I lived in cloud-cuckoo-land.

• To be closely followed by John Lanchester, reviewing David Blunkett by Stephen Pollard:

In a few weeks from now, Labour will have been in office for eight years, and we will be in the middle of an election campaign which seems certain to win it at least four more. The party’s record in government evokes a range of responses on the left – from mild gloom to clinical depression, from irritation to rage, from apathy to horror – but one of the most consistent things it provokes is disorientation. This is a Labour government? This is what we were looking forward to for those 18 years of Tory rule? War, tuition fees, house arrest, wholesale subservience to American foreign policy, talk of services being ‘swamped’ by refugees, the deliberately manipulative use of fear, the introduction of ID cards, the suspension of habeas corpus – and these are the good guys. What happened? …

There is no contradicting Blunkett’s talents, or his determination, even his heroism. He is one of the most remarkable people ever to have achieved high office in Britain. This makes his record in office all the sadder. Here are some of the things Blunkett did. He announced a state of emergency, as he legally needed to do to suspend the rights of the Belmarsh internees; prevented the publication of the names of the detainees, the nature of the evidence against them, and the nature of the charges; declared that concern for civil liberties in the current climate was ‘airy-fairy’; announced the abolition of the double jeopardy principle that defendants can’t be tried twice for the same offence; advocated extensive use of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, which among other things employ hearsay evidence of a kind hitherto forbidden in English law; extended the abolition of the presumption of innocence, by allowing judges to tell jurors in certain types of case about the defendant’s previous convictions; announced that the children of asylum seekers would be taken into care when the parents had exhausted all chance of appeal; spoke of his wish to ‘open a bottle’ to celebrate the death of Harold Shipman; announced new restrictions on demonstrations outside Parliament; extended the powers of Police Community Service officers to tackle beggars, and angrily denied that this meant people would be being arrested for dropping crisp packets; said that failed asylum seekers would be put to compulsory unpaid work in return for the right to claim benefits. … No home secretary since Roy Jenkins, and hardly any before him, has presided over an extension of our liberties. Blunkett did not buck this trend. At a time when, it turned out, Britain needed a home secretary with a keen understanding of the balance between liberty and security, we instead got an instinctive authoritarian who seems to have no conception at all of the importance of liberty.

… it’s going to be a strange election. Labour looking likely to win will cause people to be tired of Blair, which will cause a swing towards the Tories, which in turn will cause a swing back to Labour. Either party’s strongest issue will cause a backlash in favour of the other party. And we have a couple of months of this still to go. Invited to choose between a sensible but unelectable party of the centre, a nasty and (please God) unelectable party of the right, and a party of the centre right whose only function is to get elected, it’s hard not to wonder: is this what democracy is meant to be like?

• And then there's Rory Stewart's appraisal of the state of affairs in Iraq ('No foreigner really knows what is going on in Iraq') in a review article entitled 'Degrees of Not Knowing'. And Thomas Jones on Michael Jackson:

… the contradictions of being both a star and a human being, in terms not only of what constitutes the good – dying young v. living an ignominiously long life, for example – but also of the expectations of the crowd, who want their (our) heroes to be above common human frailties, but all the same can’t help probing for weaknesses, and are both sorely disappointed and gleefully reassured when we find them. This isn’t a new phenomenon – look at Ovid’s Metamorphoses, full of unedifying and salacious gossip about the sex lives of the gods (who are explicitly compared in the poem to Rome’s ruling elite) – though there may be more appetite now than there used to be for scandal about those who are famous only for being scandalous.

British politics and public life seem very, very mediocre right now: not a lot here about recognising limits, errors, truth … I'm going back to Antony's haunting, unworldly voice and riddling songs (part proffered, part withheld) which evoke a world I can believe in — something both about limits and loss, in the midst of a troubling sense of transcendence and ecstasy:

When the swan flies to heaven
Soaring through the utmost fear
There's a feeling that lingers in the afterwards
Will you ever return?                                           ('Twilight')

In love with London

London is just so exciting. It's completely transformed from the city I knew as a teenager. Teeming with colour, creativity, variety and life, its energy is infectious. Twenty or thirty years ago, I couldn't see why Johnson said, 'when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford'. Now, it simply seems true.

Eboy has a new poster celebrating the capital. I bought it. It's nearly 3 foot by 4. I just need to find some … wallspace.

Eboy joins forces with Paul Smith to create a very special version of London, previewed not in London, but in Tokyo, at Designer's Block. The cityscape will be used throughout Paul Smith’s Spring/Summer 2005 collections. Eboy previously collaborated with Paul Smith at the Milan furniture fair in April of this year to design a concept restaurant.

Based in Berlin and New York, Eboy was founded in 1998 by Steffen Sauerteig, Svend Smital, Kai Vermehr and Peter Stemmler. This Eboy ‘graphics band’ have committed themselves to high end pixel art and take their inspiration from pop culture, shopping, toys and computer games.

"I discovered Eboy's work and went to visit them at their studio in Berlin. I was delighted that they agreed to work on an exclusive project for us. This is their first and only collaboration where their work is used on fabric and clothes. The 'London Cityscape' is amazing and you can find it throughout the collection, from a large holdall, a women’s t-shirt, to the shoe lining on a pair of trainers!”

Paul Smith embraces the digital world with a pixel designed image of London. Famous landmarks: Tower Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, 10 Downing Street and the Millennium Wheel sprawl across a scene which highlights iconic double Decker buses, black cabs and red post boxes. The bustling metropolis has a mischievous edge with astronauts, green dinosaurs, cowboys, rock bands and the Eboy team dancing outside the Floral Street shop.  Magmabooks

Belatedly, I'm about to start on Ackroyd's London: The Biography. On another occasion, Johnson also said: 'if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists'. Footwork and Ackroyd lie ahead.

Banksy Graffiti Gallery

via Metroblogging London, a link to Banksy Graffiti Gallery:

This is not Banksy's website, if you want that go here. This is a collection of his graffiti taken all around London, Brighton and Bournemouth.

A whole load of new pictures were added in Jan '05.

Links also to other London graffiti artists.

Banksy goes Stateside

via Jason Kottke, news that Banksy has installed 'four pieces in New York's most prestigious museums - The Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Natural History' — Wooster Collective : A Celebration of Street Art.

The Brooklyn Museum:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art:

The Museum of Modern Art:

The Museum of Natural History:

Staff at the New York Met discovered and removed their new aquisition early Sunday morning while Banksy's discount soup can print took pride of place in the MoMA for over three days before being torn down. As of now, the other two pieces currently remain firmly in place...

Photos of Banksy installing his works ('This historic occasion has less to do with finally being embraced by the fine art establishment and is more about the judicious use of a fake beard and some high strength glue') at Wooster Collective.

Graffiti Tags & Street Memes

via Paul Golding, this link to John Geraci's Grafedia:

What is Grafedia?

Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content - images, video, sound files, and so forth. It can be written anywhere - on walls, in the streets, or in bathroom stalls. Grafedia can also be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers "click" on these grafedia hyperlinks with their cell phones by sending a message addressed to the word + "@grafedia.net" to get the content behind the link.

What Kinds of Things Can I Do With Grafedia?

You can make street art with grafedia, or just leave behind simple calling cards for others wherever you go. You can have running dialogues between authors, or create interactive narratives or poetry in public spaces. Grafedia is a boundless, interactive publishing platform, base, cheap, and easy to use. It is an open system - the places and ways to use it are limitless. With grafedia, every surface becomes potentially a web page, and the entire physical world can be joined with the Internet.

How is Grafedia Made?

Grafedia authors can make hyperlinked text at any time in three easy steps. Simply: 1. Choose a word. 2. Send a media file from your cell phone to that chosen word plus '@grafedia.net', e.g. 'myword@grafedia.net'. 3. Write that word anywhere in the real world in blue with an underline. That word will then be linked to the media file the author sent to grafedia.net, and viewers will be able to retrieve the file. You can also upload media from your computer directly to the grafedia.net server here in order to create grafedia with more precise images.

Also via Paul Golding, a link to Tristan Manco's Fotolog. Tristan Manco is a graphic designer and partner of Tijuana Design in Bristol; he is also the author of Stencil Graffiti and Street Logos, and editor of Graffiti World.

Paul Golding has posted about the graffiti recorded in Street Logos ('an absolutely wonderful collection of graffiti art. Unlike other books on the topic, Tristan has documented a very diverse set of styles and concepts'):

Some of the graffiti work definitely inspired connections with mobilisation. I am attracted to the idea of marking meeting places with graffiti as a kind of "war chalking" tag. However, instead of marking open WiFi access, the points would mark virtual meeting places. At each tag, users could "log in" and download, or exchange, information.

What really excited me were some of the graffiti styles and concepts that seemed to lend themselves to this idea. For example, the floor-based renderings of a compass by L'Atlas would make excellent visual markers for meeting places and allow directional information to be included, perhaps to the whereabouts of the next tag. This would blend well with the location-based potential of modern mobiles.

Other tag schemes had a very distinct style that in my opinion seemed to allow for a socially acceptable, or ascetically possible, use of graffiti for mobile communities. The Space Invader invasion is particularly interesting in this regard. Interestingly, the website contains invasion maps. This reminded me of war chalking maps, but is representative of the location theme that is already strong in this particular graffiti movement.

Finally, a third key link via Paul Golding, to Julian Bleecker and his project, Street Memes:

"street meme": a sticker, stencil, or poster that can spread a single image around the world. Unlike traditional graffiti art where each piece is unique, street memes can be copied repeatedly, taking on a life of their own, and spreading through the collective effort of people scattered around the world.

"meme": A term coined by Biologist Richard Dawkins to describe self replicating ideas. Read more about the concept of the meme here.

Jyri spoke about graffiti tags last November at the 2004 Radley conference (see here), and a (zipped) pdf file of the same is available: 'Free Speech in Urban Space: Past, Present and Future'. The talk was fascinating — and now I have a lot more to follow up on and to play with. My own (as yet very small) collection of 'graffiti'-tagged Flickr photos is here.

Rock Art

With the news that more than 250 new prehistoric rock carvings have been discovered in Northumberland, it's the perfect moment to link to Northumberland Rock Art:

This website is the celebration of rock carvings made by Neolithic and Early Bronze Age people in Northumberland in the north east of England, between 6000 and 3500 years ago. Over 1000 carved panels are known and most of them are still located in the countryside.

The website is also a celebration of the work of Stan Beckensall who has spent 40 years finding and recording this ancient rock art. For many years Beckensall shared his knowledge and recordings of Northumberland rock art through public talks, conference presentations, and richly illustrated publications. Now we have the World Wide Web!

Robert ParkeHarrison

My thanks to Dickon for this link.

All images © ParkeHarrison 

He [Robert ParkeHarrison] comes down on the side of lamentation but expresses it with an unusual combination of poetic license, laboriously constructed props and a wry and melancholy, vaguely allusive sense of myth. He appears in every picture, in a black suit and white shirt with no tie, a kind of Everyman or a minor employee of the universe, patiently, dutifully doing a job that’s too big for him. That job is essentially to take care of a devastated Earth with inadequate equipment. He works or performs obscure rituals in large and empty landscapes beneath gray skies. Perhaps this is one man’s private way of saying that neither pollution, global warming nor digitalization can entirely extinguish the hands-on experience and human desire to create. New York Times (Feb 4, 2000)

Trained as a photographer, ParkeHarrison did not follow in the well-practiced wake of environmentally charged photojournalists or social documentarians. Theirs was a cautionary tale fixed in the present day; it did not always project a future. Instead, ParkeHarrison conjures up a destiny in which humankind’s overuse of the land has led to environments spent and abandoned. The veracity of the photograph, from which all his images are constructed, provides the convincing backdrop for narratives of separation and loss. And the influences from literature, theater, cinema, and painting enrich the work with symbols supportive of the artist’s universal subjects, particularly the struggles of the Everyman… Curator’s Comments on ‘The Architect’s Brother’

St Rad of Wary

'How St Rad found enlightenment and denounced 16.7 million colours', by St Mo of No

St Rad was once a very colourful character: he spoke and talked like a film star. When he walked into a room, everything stopped. Friends and strangers both hung on his every word. His character was so great he could wear colourful shoes, clothes and dye and change his hair at will. Before his vision, St Rad could have talked birds from the trees, girls from the convent and men into battle. He wore the most ludicrously stylish outfits with such confidence everyone he met was completely convinced by him. All this had made St Rad a rich and celebrated man: whatever he wanted, he had.

One day, I was lucky enough to be with St Rad when we visited a friend with little or no possessions at his small flat in Walcot Heights. We were offered some drink and sat down to watch TV, and then the transformation occurred. The screen was black and white, no colour: while watching the football game, you couldn’t tell who was on whose team. Such shock and the taste of cheap, barely alcoholic beer forced Rad to make excuses and leave. I followed, apologising to our friend (now Brother Fortnight), who was surprised and upset for this was his special night in. On leaving, I could only see a speck in the distance: Rad was running. He ran all nine miles home. When I got there, rubbish bags were on the lawn full of all his worldly things. He sat in what is now our sacred home, surrounded by nothing but a cardboard box and his shorts, tee shirt and running shoes. There was a noise outside. I turned and watched the neighbours rifling through the rubbish bags. They were excited, laughing at first and then started to fight over stuff by the end. It was then I saw for myself the vision of St Rad: everything around him was black, white and shades of grey. He sat exhausted, the colour of his clothes was dripping in sweat from his body. I collected his sweat and put it in a bottle, now a sacred relic. I then sat down to wash his feet and it was then I noticed the stigmata on his feet. St Rad was now destined to run for the world in black and white and I was to follow him.

Ray Ward (2004)

Ray's installation in the heart of Swindon (Wiltshire, UK) was a temporary shrine in honour of the little known mystic, St Rad of Wary. To find out more about him, 'see relics, taste holy water or even join the order (no pressure)', we visited the shrine last Saturday and our earthly progress is recorded in this Flickr set. Ray told us that this article in Harper's Magazine, 'The numbing of the American mind: culture as anesthetic', by Thomas de Zengotita, 'seemed to touch on many of my ideas for St Rad'.

Swayed by the aura of evident holiness, our senses lulled by the effect of the holy water and overwhelmed by the playing from the altar of 'Like a Puppet on a String' (slowed so much that a visiting child thought Sandie Shaw a man), we joined the order …  I suppose we should now be running, too …

Rockism, Modernism & Post-Modernism

Facsinating post on AIGA Design Forum. Some pickings:

An article appeared in the New York Times recently on an issue I've long found fascinating: Rockism. The word comes from the British music press in the early 80s. It demonizes a conservative and Romantic ideology of authenticity often encountered in rock and pop music. Here are some of the core tenets of the “rockist”:

* Rock music should be bass, drums, guitars.
* It's about artists and songs, not about production.
* A good artist 'keeps it real'.
* Some artists are more 'real' than others.
* Good songs are timeless.
* At some point in the past they “got music right”.
* Music has value to the extent that it's one person emoting sincerely.
* Although the real is very important, the real is today absent (metaphysics).

… is there a form of “rockism” in design? Is there an appeal to authenticity? I think there is. How many times have you heard designers say they design with pencil and paper rather than a computer? Isn't that just like those 1980s rock bands who wouldn't use synthesizers, or painters who think that video artists aren't 'real' artists?

Rick Poynor recently described, at the Design Observer blog, a “difficult month” at London's Design Museum:

“At the end of September, James Dyson, design entrepreneur and inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, accused the museum of ‘ruining its reputation’ and ‘neglecting its purpose’ and resigned as chairman of the board of trustees. He claimed the place was ‘no longer true to its original vision’ and lambasted it for becoming a ‘style showcase’. His company website spells out his own engineering-led conception of the design process in no uncertain terms: ‘design’ means how something works, not how it looks – the design should evolve from the function.’”

But the form-follows-function argument is a Modernist one, not a Postmodernist one. It fails to take account of the following:

1. We live in an increasingly post-industrial consumer society, a 'society of spectacle'. It's not enough for things just to be functional; they have to be funky too. Sure, a vacuum cleaner must suck up dust efficiently—must 'function'—but it must also look funky. Dyson's did, and that's a big part of why it became a consumer success story. In cultural terms, you could say that Dyson is listening enough to the Bauhaus, but not enough to the Surrealists.
2. Functionality, in a post-protestant culture, is a moral value in itself, and makes a covert appeal to authenticity. What's functional is good to the extent that we value the utilitarian, the empirical, the pragmatic. These are core metaphysical values in protestant and post-protestant cultures. The value of things working is all tied up with the value of work, the 'work ethic'. Values like decoration and aestheticism are seen as 'Catholic', indulgent, feminine, subjective.

… Functionality is also an aesthetic value. When people say design is about 'what works', we should ask 'What works where?' and remind them that one of the locations where design has to do its work is the human soul, a place we need Blake, Freud and Dali, not Newton, Brunel and Brockmann, to explain. And if that's a somewhat 'rockist' argument for expanding the definition of functionality into non-rockist areas, well, shoot me. Preferably with a non-functionalist gun.

Giles' Gallery

Giles Wood (a friend of mine) is a painter of landscapes and interiors. Recently, we set up a simple weblog gallery to display and promote his work on-line.