Little Pieces Of Bread Once Eaten By Starlings (2000)

Please do feel free to download these pdfs.

I mentioned earlier that I’d had a bit of a sort through of all my old things. There’s quite a quantity of works that still need digitising, but I wanted to get these two done and dusted because they were really important in the development of my practice.

Thief is an album of polaroid photographs taken around Sheffield during the winter of 1999-2000. There was a point in my practice when I felt intimidated by being a photographer – there’s still an ambivalence ten years later. This work emerged as a response to that anxiety. I tried out doing something socially unacceptable (taking photos of people’s private domestic spaces without their permission) to confront myself with some of my fears. One night, despite having carefully turned off my polaroid flash, it went off anyway, and I was chased down the street by a man in a glorified nightie wielding a saxophone.  This is far from an exhaustive selection. My night-time wanderings took place over several months, and were carefully edited into this bespoke silk-bound foiled album (made by book-binder Heather Dewick). It was certainly the work of a collector, and evolved into a sequence of pieces including Tom and I, and Private View (2001). I was fascinated by the display that people made of their living spaces, knowing that they were open to observation by the casual passer-by. Lights on, curtains open, a come-hither for the greedy of eye. Tom and I (the reference to a peeping tom made explicit) is a more substantial collection of images taken on 35mm film. What they lack compared to the seductive colour qualities of polaroid film, they make up for in sharp detail. There’s something slightly nastier about them, a little grubbier, they start to cross a line by dint of their volume and repetition. I showed these pieces a number of times during my BA, and people were mostly bored by them. I let them roll in and out of my imagination for almost a year before I came up with a solution. I tried all sorts of permutations from creating a fake ‘private view’ in which what was on view was the participants (it was not well articulated enough) to installations where the viewer was complicit in the invasion of privacy by having to depress the image into it’s viewer to be able to see it. At this time I collected an image of a man masturbating in a bathroom. I started thinking more about the display than the viewing, and Private View fell into place. For one hour, every evening for a month, I opened the curtains to the sitting room in my shared house and turned on all the lights in very blatant display. I flash-photographed everyone who looked in the window with my polaroid camera, collecting moments of surprise when someone fell into my trap. This was a really important piece of work for me, as it demonstrates not only my growing obsession with viewer/viewed but also my developing methodology of inversion. This is when I invert a relationship in a work, and it derives from working with negative film in the darkroom.

The second piece of work Little Pieces Of Bread Once Eaten By Starlings has a very different root, but a similar process, and is equally important in pushing along my practice. Since childhood I have been obsessed by abandoned shoes, you know, the odd shoe that you find by the roadside, or – less usually- placed side-by-side in the outside lane of a dual carriageway. I won’t reiterate what I wrote about “Starlings” here- I’ll try and find a copy and attach it as another pdf in good time.  Combining these funny lost shoes with a sense of Hansel and Gretel- you must remember the story of the witch-infested ginger-bread house, though you may not recall how the two children were abandoned in the woods by their parents, their trail of breadcrumbs vanishing into the beaks of birds- I had begun to collect shoes and other items of clothing that I found abandoned. I washed and mended them, with the intention of installing them on rails in an exhibition space. But I wasn’t happy with that proposal and was close to abandoning the work when a chance evening out provided the impetus for revivification. I collected some clothing from a variety of sources (can you tell how I’m fudging the truth of this bit, unwilling to admit my crimes publicly: let’s just say the words ‘washing lines’ and leave the rest to your imagination) and decided to create my own trail of breadcrumb using these very loaded items. The work was installed on the Longshaw Estate in Grindleford, where I photographed the objects and retrieved them. It never existed as a trail per se, only in the photographic reconstruction. The final work (twelve polaroids and two objects) was eventually installed in the Small Gallery at Psalter Lane, Sheffield in a vitrine. I don’t really remember being happy with the work itself, although I have always loved the damaged magenta-tint of the photographs caused by a temperature abberation. I was very pleased with the process of the work, and that’s why I place these two pieces together.

Private View 2001, 1 of 30

Notes for the curious:

Reading: Susan Stewart ‘On Longing’; Bruno Bettelheim ‘The Uses of Enchantment’; Hans Christian Andersen ‘Hansel and Gretel‘; ETA Hoffman ‘The Sandman’; Jacques Lacan ‘Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis‘; Michel Foucault ‘The Birth of The Clinic’

Watching: Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’

random connections: Peeping Tom was written by Leo Marks, who worked with my SOE heroine Violette Szabo GC MBE and wrote her cryptographic poem The Life That I Have.

Heather Dewick, bookbinder can be found at http://heatherdewick.wordpress.com/

The Nutshells, for all their precision, aren’t puzzles to be solved; some don’t even have a “right” answer. More than anything, they’re occasions for observation, perceptual exercises. They’re laboratories for looking and thinking–not surprisingly, Lee would prickle when people referred to them as dollhouses–so it’s no wonder that they continue to intrigue people to this day.

Monroe, Rachel  “The Art of Murder”, Baltimore City Paper, May 5 2010[i]

 Last January, I became obsessed with The Wire. Every evening, I would scuttle home from the Library to my Columbia Heights burrow, where Richard would feed me and we would settle down to watch at least a double-bill of this most extraordinary television series. My colleagues and I spent hours rhapsodising about its brilliance: the plotting, the dialogue, the characterisation, the superb camera-work, and most of all, how we noticed our allegiances fluctuate. And then there’s the best swearing in any piece of film/TV work, ever. Such was our obsession that we decided to make a trip to Baltimore for a spot of Dark Tourism. At this moment I found out about The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, eighteen dioramas built by Frances Glessner Lee during the 1930s and 1940s that are held in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore.

The Nutshell Studies were built by Glessner Lee to teach her pathology students how to assess, approach and process a crime scene. They are not open to public view, and aren’t widely known outside of their community of interest, but the work of two artists – photographer Corinne May Botz and film-maker Susan Marks – have raised their profile. I have not seen Marks’s film Of Dolls and Murder, but I have read Botz’s 2004 book The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,[ii] and I have also seen the 2006 The Miniatures Killer episodes of CSI New York that were inspired by the models. Over the last two years I have been working with The Model in my studio, and the Nutshell Studies offered me a new way to think about that work.

Firstly, The Model is not a formal diorama. It is changeable in size, content, scale. It doesn’t always offer up a tableau for interpretation. It began during my Hadrian’s Wall residency after a trip to Segedunum, when I found myself unable to decide whether an artefact was Roman or a reproduction. I remembered visiting Xanten[iii] as a child, not knowing whether the architecture was old or new, and having a series of questions form around what that might mean. I took these feelings and tried to give them some sort of form using architectural model-making materials and light. Then, I photographed the results, always, but always getting lost in the capturing of light. The control of light in my work is a fundamental issue, in fact, I’m starting to wonder whether it may be the fundamental issue. It’s so perfectly expressed by Emily Dickinson in poem 258:[iv]

There’s a certain Slant of light,/Winter Afternoons –/That oppresses, like the Heft/Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –/We can find no scar,/But internal difference,/Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –/’Tis the Seal Despair –/An imperial affliction/Sent us of the air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –/Shadows – hold their breath –/When it goes, ’tis like the Distance/On the look of Death –

Sharing this poem with you is deeply personal for me. I rarely share my internal library but a growing sense of the literary basis of much of my work seems to make it necessary, and this is one of those texts that flickers like a pale fire beneath my skin (and that, of course, is another, although that’s my paraphrase of Sappho)[v]. A studio visit with an art historian seemed to confirm what I suspected “I particularly dislike miniatures, but it’s clear that you have built this model only in order to photograph it”,[vi] that is to say, The Model is nothing in itself: it is an occasion for viewing, an invitation to look. Some images from it in this first guise became The Telescoped World of the Geisha. I tired of it very quickly – it seemed to be something of an intellectual one-liner, and didn’t really support any further investigation. So I left it on a table for a really long time. At some point I added lead shot from the Somme battlefield to it. Gave it a reflective lid. Added some trees.

Wait a minute! I added some trees? What was that about? I think this was the point when The Model began to have a slightly different function, moving towards being an engine for thinking and acquiring sculptural concerns.

My attempts at model-making were very unsatisfactory when compared to other artists detailed reproductions, my handling of paper in my reconstruction of the Space Station and associated rocketry was profoundly clumsy, and not in a good way. Gradually, I understood this was not only due to my comparatively undeveloped technical skills, but also due to the function of the model as a tool for representation. What was being thought through in the model was always at a remove, it wasn’t narrative, but could still be deciphered in the same way as The Nutshell studies.

Anyway, I added some trees. Turned off the lights. Hid some large polystyrene balls within the scene, conjuring up a connection with the large geodesic domes – long-demolished – of RAF Fylingdales on the Yorkshire moors.[vii]

not my photograph, regrettably... I'm trying to track down the copyright holder

These polystyrene substitutes for radars worked their way into another piece recently, the as yet untitled Metraux Archive works. Here, the substitution is clearly evident and multi-layered, enabling multiple readings to be applied to and extracted from the work. But I’m getting ahead of myself, racing towards a project that emerged from These Strange Tableaux.

I’ve always avoided making work with dolls, dollhouses, toys of all descriptions, since I think they are largely over-worn and don’t really give me anywhere to go. And they appear on the Degree Show Clichés App for a really good reason. But I love plastic miniatures of all types, and I did try – unsuccessfully – to document my Polly Pockets with a macro lens. That was a disaster: I was completely unprepared for it technically, and the resulting images were so ugly and flat that I was put off both macro and miniatures for about ten years.

I had included a number of small toys (rockets) in the model during the summer of 2010, as somewhere I was thinking about the Blue Streak launch-pads at Spadeadam, and I took this theme up again in 2011’s The Ghost Army, where I used plastic toy soldiers from a French supermarket to respond to the contested landscapes of northern France. I had also used a model for my ‘holding’ imagery for New Battle Plan to relay the central concerns of scenario-building[viii] that I have been developing as a key thesis of my phd.

My visit to the Toy Museum had already been delayed twice – and once I had completely failed to understand where the entrance was located. But I finally made it, and from the collection there, a few things came together that started to make some sense, drawing The Model, modes of looking, scenario-building and The Nutshell Studies into a tighter embrace.

I had decided to visit the Toy Museum as I was looking for samples of mid-20^th century – Cold War era – toys that I could collect for a visual survey. Nottingham Contemporary’s exhibition Star City[ix] had a small collection of space toys, and the Metraux Archive referenced many others, and I had seen quite a few vintage re-issues, but not a broad selection over a from 1950-1975. The Toy Museum had all this and more. I had documented all of the toys that I found in this treasure trove of the vernacular and the domestic, when I noticed two things. One was the extraordinary range of dolls, and another was what amounted to a large wall full of small (but not miniaturized) furniture. The first photograph I took was of a male doll in an astronaut’s garb. I decided to make the images portraits, not only so that I could take advantage of the particular lighting but also so that I could reference current software for identifying faces within editing programmes. I was aware of projects in Victorian studies relating to the mean of images, and work by another artist using police facial recognition software to create a ‘mean’ image, and I responded to both of those by compiling a catalogue of dolls contained in the Tynemouth Toy Museum. By excluding the bodies of the dolls, I was able to see how the communication of faces had changed over 100 years or so. Fully absorbed in the work, I edged closer to the Wall of Furniture. Stopping to look at it in detail, I noticed that the randomness of the composition really lent itself to photographing small scenarios and situations.

These Strange Tableaux is the result. There’s more at stake in the images than the documenting of toys and fashions. There’s a gap for the imagination to dance an uncanny dance, to imply all sorts of things that are unspoken, to suggest something strange and deliberate.

I’ve decided to stop with this post right here. There’s a lot more thinking to come, but I thought it was time it had an airing… I’ve been revisiting Susan Stewart’s On Longing and PD James’s essays on the art of murder. So this isn’t my final word on this subject, keep tuned for parts 2,3,4 and 5!

"I learnt to drive so I could read Los Angeles in the original" - Reyner Banham

I can’t tell you how much pleasure it brings me to give this post the title ‘Five By Five’. Linguistic links are funny like that for me – I’ve written before about the delight I find in unexpected connections – and this is a lovely one.

I’ve been working hard this week at Grit&Pearl after the news that Richard has been shortlisted for the inaugural 5X5 public art festival in Washington DC. He’ll be flying out on Tuesday for a week in which he’ll be the eyes and ears for the artists that have been long-listed to submit proposals. I’ve been looking at sites that might interest people, all against the backdrop of trying to push forward with my own cherished DC project ‘Hawks and Doves’. I’ve finally got the paperwork ducks in a row (new passport, visa, letter of support et al), though I feel I have made too much of a meal of my audience development plan. I’ve also started designing logos to be printed on the skin of the zeppelins – maybe I will have something completed by next week… I’m very unsure of where I’m going with this, as my instinct is to echo the extraordinary-looking Montgolfiers, and my brain is telling me to look at modern signage and graphics or old aircraft logos.

Other excitements of the week have included: not going to the Turner Prize press preview; Jussi Parikka’s talk on Media Garbology at Culture Lab (and the subsequent Turkish lunch) which left me thinking about excavating projections of the future, and about the relationships between digital media and surface; having completed a second image of three for my Metraux archive project – so far I am thrilled with this stage of the images (they seem to hit the right balance of suggestiveness, technique, elusiveness, surreality and clarity, I’ll post them when I have done all of them); having made some resolutions about trying to put this audience development plan into place; and having finally decided how to use this studio diary.

My problem with the studio diary is that it becomes another chore. And I have quite enough chores in my life to be getting on with. So I plan to try and write something about the week gone by on a Friday afternoon, and then any additional posts – like the positively constipating These Strange Tableaux – can be a happy addition.

Now it’s time so say a little more about the connections spidering out from the title.

Five by five will be well-known to some readers as a description of signal-to-noise ratio in radio communications used by NATO. Loud and clear. It’s also the catch-phrase of Faith from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a television serial so key to my thinking that one day, surely, it will deserve it’s own post.* There are a lot of psycho-analytical readings of BTVS, but let me reassure you that my interest is in the linguistics of SoCal and the mysterious topography of Sunnydale (sparked in part by Mike Davis brilliant books City of Quartz: Excavating the future in Los Angeles and Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster).

As I write, it strikes me that mysterious topography is something I think about a lot. I can’t tell my left from my right, so other’s people’s topography is inherently mysterious to me. I never worry about getting lost as a result of never really knowing where I am, or where I am going.

* the other would be Twin Peaks.

DC Arts 5×5

www.jussiparikka.net

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” Jobs said. “Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

all images copyright J. Paul Getty Museum, Werner von Nekes collection

Of course, the great thing – easily forgotten – about a studio diary is that it doesn’t have to be a finished note or something polished and perfect. That’s what I’ve been trying to do during the last few weeks of chaos, over-polish. So instead of publishing my almost ready blog on ‘These Strange Tableaux’, I’m dashing off this little note and some images that don’t really match up. The connection is clearing out and moving on – these images have lain undisturbed and unprocessed for six months, and needed careful editing to play a role in my thesis.

Back in April of this year, I spent some time at the White Palace On The Hill (as I fondly call Los Angeles’s Getty Museum). I went to look at the Werner von Nekes collection of optical instruments and toys, used by Barbra M. Stafford in her fascinating text ‘Devices of Wonder’. It was an interesting experience in which my delight at the opportunity to see and interact with such unusual objects was mitigated only by my bemusement at the value afforded to objects. Seeing the von Nekes collection enabled me to ‘use’ the objects, which in turn suggests to me alternative uses and misuses. I particularly enjoyed using the Claude glass to subvert the photography regulations and capture images of the cctv. The special collections room is a glass panopticon, in which one is constantly aware of being the object of the gaze from both within the room and without. It was a very important visit for my research, but also important in that it gave me a little space to think more about my forthcoming proposal My Plan To Rob The Getty. Of which more some other, less-fine day.

Anyway, the images are from my photographic session there: a wonderful research centre with very efficient and generous staff.

I don’t particularly want to go off on a Los Angeles tangent, because I’m saving up to write about Norman Klein’s ‘Los Angeles and the History of Forgetting’ once I’ve finished reading it. Norman Klein is another of those curious connections who run through my life presently. I read a quote from him that I really related to on a colleague’s blog; discovered he’d written the foreword to The Coney Island Amateur Psycho-Analytic Society book by Zoe Beloff; spoke on a panel with him at MOCA LA all within a week.

The reason why I have no time for that tangent now, is that I’m trying to tell you that I have moved. After five years, I have moved out of my studio. Such a kerfuffle of sorting and recycling and dumping and feeling like the world was ending all finally resolved into a feeling of freshness and excitement. And then immediately I caught a nasty cold, which drained all my energy. And immediately I started to feel better, I needed to do things like earn money, in this new, post-research-award era. So I’ve been working on painting a school in Northumberland, and on processing hundreds of images for Grit&Pearl. I suppose that’s how it will be from now on. I’m looking forward to doing some work on a guerilla lighting festival during the autumn, and on a Wordsworth project (as research assistant to the lead artist) which will continue on through the spring.

Clearing the studio led to other clearing. I have cleared my physical files, and I am making inroads into clearing my virtual ones too. All of those pdfs to transfer onto the kindle (and actually read), and conference notes to write up (and images to drop into accounts of things). I’ve sorted through the linen, and the bags of clothes, shoes and other accessories (I will be running a series of three pop-up shops in the autumn- watch this space), I’ve cleared out the cloakroom, and at last I am clearing out the larder space and putting the remaining boxes in the attic. I think when these tasks are finished tomorrow night, I will call a halt to sorting and sifting, and enjoy having an order of things at last. It’s important to me, not only as a fine tool for prevarication and an equivalent to polishing spoons, but also because a little order surrounding me enables me to see and think a little more clearly.

I paid a visit to Hoult’s Yard today, and I felt so excited about the post-PhD universe. All those geeky boys on Macs, and squishy couches. It was like heaven. A heaven I’m far better equipped for now I’ve ditched off some of the accumulated detritus of the last five years.

“All this was part of Walter Benjamin’s world. The old revolutionary delighted in its variety at the same time as seeing that the citizens, spellbound by capitalism, were sleepwalking into inequality and injustice. The spell was first cast in the arcades. The Arcades Project is a book of counterspells, a way of waking up.”

The Independent, Sunday 10th July 2003

Images taken on a very hot August afternoon in Paris. As I wandered through one passage and into another and another, my eye was caught by a very strange shop, part hippy-boutique and part mortuary. I hesitated before crossing the threshold, conscious of the procession of capital. In the back of the shop amongst the old printer’s blocks was a shelf of glass eyes. They were made by a female ocularist  from 1917-18, for troops injured during the Great War. The shop-owner had acquired the collection from her grandson, who had followed her into the trade. These ‘eyes’ were not the prosthetic eyes themselves, but the original moulds. The eye that I took away with me still has a name-tag attached.

Exhibition note: thinking of Sharon Kivland’s work Mes Peripateticiennes at The Economist Building, London in 2000.

Bibliographical note: Walter Benjamin The Arcades Project transl. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin 1999, Belknapp Press Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London.

You can watch a video about Jost Haas here: The Glass Eye Maker

*I’m not promising