The Word and Image

Locus

2011-03-17T16:20:00.001-07:00

January Prints

2011-02-13T08:24:00.000-08:00

"I walked out of the airport into one of those clear, sharp-edged January days... The light had such a physical presence; it looked as though you could lean against it"

- Henry Wessel

Unfortunately I haven't had light this good since mid-January when I only had time to shoot one roll of film.

'Concept'

2011-01-10T07:55:00.000-08:00

I am currently working on an exhibition, Locus, which will take place in February. A lot of finer details are still being ironed out, but here is a working 'concept' for my contribution to the show:

"For the past five months I have been photographing Anglia Square, a shopping centre in Norwich due to be demolished and replaced by a new shopping precinct. Through the premise of documenting its current state the themes and boundaries of what my work really concerns have emerged. I am interested in the evocation of place using referential forms; photography and (through collaboration with Mike Saunders) field recordings, as opposed to representational forms such as painting.

Photography’s mimetic qualities are representative of a constrained perspective. To this end, there is a narrator present in most photographic images. My work aims to evoke a sense of place which exists independently of the artist, in the unoccupied perspective where the artist-narrator’s presence is covert. His hand is only noticeable by its absence; he is a ghost who releases the shutter.

The strategy I have devised in order to achieve this, firstly imposes physical boundaries which define the area I am working in, stipulating that (within reason) all equipment used has to have been purchased within the limits of Anglia Square. To this end I have been using equipment which provides little artistic control, such as fixed exposure cameras from charity shops. To further the loss of control I have made a conscious effort to shoot objectively and unemotively, avoiding the inclusion of people, before rewinding the exposed film to the beginning of the roll and exposing it again so that any unconscious aspect of the natural gaze is removed.

What we are left with then is perhaps less a fragment of what we see and more a reflection of how we think and remember; a non-unilinear evocation, a trace of something which has existed, presented in a way closer to how we remember it than traditional documentary photography."

The work will be presented with Mike Saunders' field recordings/sound maps, which ever label you deem appropriate, and a selection of work by Sarojini Lewis.

I will document further developments here, including experiments with 35mm slide projections which will also feature in the exhibition.

Magdalen Street Celebration Exhibition

2010-10-03T05:12:00.000-07:00

I had not initially intended to frame my work; I have discussed at length the panoramic border, which is in itself a frame. However, I was not allocated a space until I dropped my work off a week before it was shown and as such thought it would be safe to frame the work. Like much of the progress in this project I was pleasantly surprised with something I felt was out of my control; the black frame I used compliments the images’ borders without being too heavy handed in its reflection of them.

When I dropped my work off I was able to choose a space; a rectangular annex room, about 10ft x 3ft with a window at one end, roughly A4 size. The room is in a semi-derelict state. It has gallery-ness (it has been painted white and has a framed piece of work in it) but it retains the feeling of a post-functional space. It is neither a gallery space, nor a room and this state of flux becomes a metaphor for Anglia Square itself.

One reason I was apprehensive about using a frame is that I often feel frames are with the work and not part of it, but here the frame not only complements the photographs’ borders but the glass also acts as a catalyst for the potential reading of the images as reflections. The window, which is opposite the frame, both literally and figuratively reflects the overlapped images; the outcome is one of duplicity and layers.

Another layer, or indeed series of layers, is present in the sound-map created by Mike Saunders which is playing simultaneously through speakers and headphones. This has the desired affect in-situ which I had hoped for: blurring the distinction between naturally occurring noises from the outside world with the carefully mapped audio arrangement. The presence of the sound-map and the window provide the reader with options as to how they choose to read the work; whether or not to wear the headphones, whether or not to look through the window and if so, from which side?

The fact that the images are printed on standard 6x4 paper and that they are mounted using photo corners gives them an ephemeral quality which acts as a doorway to the theme of memory but not to a specific or personal memory. Both the images and the audio play with each other, are fragments of context arranged in a para-surrealist manner to optimise the space for subjective readings for the viewer. The layers of sound and image become the strands in the diagram I previously referenced by John Berger representing the non-unilinear process of memory.

Further Experiments with Multiple Exposures

2010-09-20T03:14:00.000-07:00

After my initial experiments with multiple exposures I took my Wide Pic Panoramic camera on holiday with me; this was when I realised that the Wide Pic Panoramic is not really designed for rewinding a frame at a time. I lost half a roll of film attempting to create some double exposures when the teeth stopped winding the film on. It seems I was lucky when I created my initial multiple exposures at Anglia Square and would have to re-think my work process. These new images were created by exposing the whole roll of film, rewinding it completely and then exposing it a second time.

I have said before that the equipment I am using takes a lot of control away from the artist; fixed shutter speed and aperture, a machine in the chemist prints my images automatically. Exposing the entire film twice in this manner also means I have no control over which images are overlapped, or even if the frames lie cleanly over the top of one another, indeed some of the images have two overlaps. The resulting images could perhaps be described as para-surrealist; the loss of control providing free associations between frames. And while perhaps not ‘semi-conscious’ image making, I tried as much as possible to free myself of as much responsibility as possible. To this end my only concerns were finding compositions with strong horizontal lines to complement the ‘panoramic’ view, providing a vague uniformity in the images so that where they overlap they would hopefully complement one another, and also to try not to take the same photo twice.

Some of these images are more successful than others – echoes in shapes and overlapping text for example are very pleasing – but I still feel the images are a series, regardless of whether or not one is stronger than the other. I have been given the opportunity to exhibit some of my work in an empty shop unit in Anglia Square as part of the Magdalen Street Celebration and would like to exhibit a series of images. There is an unconscious relationship between the overlapped exposures in the individual images, the next stage is to find a way in which to arrange these chance pairings as a collective group.

Sean Edwards, No Dust Adheres

2010-08-13T05:50:00.000-07:00

Stills from No Dust Adheres, Sean Edwards (2010)

In February I went to see No Dust Adheres, a film by Sean Edwards which explores social histories around urban commercial space and architecture through a melee of tracking shots of a soon-to-be demolished shopping centre near his home. Looking at my panoramic images after revisiting Sean Edwards' work has affected the way I view them. The cinematic framing I previously mentioned has become far more pronounced and I find a real sense of movement comes about from the overlapping frames and the merging of images. Through this merging of images a panoramic landscape is created and we are forced to read the work in a set order, to move through the frames as one continuous image, much like Edwards' film which moves along a set horizontal line. However, by using still images the pace of movement and reading is set by the viewer, not the artist.

The overlapping in Edwards' work is the result of shop window reflections; showing my images to a friend recently she thought my multiple exposures were reflections. I am happy for that reading/implication to lay latent in the images. My reasons for using multiple exposures, as I previously mentioned, were to represent a non-unilinear thought process but the implication of reading them as reflections is relevant too.

The press release for No Dust Adheres describes 'the camera's lingering shots of the building's interior alluding to film genres such as science fiction or the haunted house.' Indeed there is a hypnotic effect to the work; I remember watching the film sat on a cold floor in Outpost gallery alone wondering if the natural sounds of traffic and life outside were part of the film. I am still unsure whether or not the film has any audio.

I have recently been talking to a friend of mine about creating a 'sound map' of Anglia Square to accompany a forthcoming exhibition of these images. In writing about his love of Noise music, Mike Saunders says: 'I am constantly interested in it in a way that is either completely visceral or indescribable... it is so ready, so malleable for questioning.' Mike recently conducted a walk from Norwich to Cambridge. Reading through his notes regarding the affect Noise music had on him during this expedition (which can be read in full here) it seems his journey is more of an experiment than a hike. During one section of his walk across the Fens Mike describes 'the surreal remove that this music inhabits the landscape.' What I hope to achieve by making use of sound recordings in the exhibition is the blurring of natural and recorded noises, to recreate the unknowing I felt when watching No Dust Adheres.

Wide Pic Panoramic Camera

2010-07-30T12:06:00.000-07:00

Today I collected the first batch of prints made with my Wide Pic Panoramic Camera. The first and most striking thing about these images is their letterbox 'panoramic' border. The thick, black wedge divides the image (the borders are part of the image not external to it) clearly into thirds and makes horizontal lines of composition immediately more potent and arresting. The border here must be considered a part of the image as it qualifies the composition. This is more or less subtle depending on the strength and darkness of the lines in the middle section of the image.

The border invites a particular way of seeing and a uniformity within the images. Sifting through the prints it feels as though each image is part of a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces tessellate and can be arranged to create a new landscape.

Another effect of the 'Panoramic' view is its cinematic framing. To arrange them in this jigsaw manner where there is no right or wrong progression creates movement in and between images as they are placed in succession. I wish to expand upon this process later by mapping a journey through Anglia Square.

This roll of film also marks my first tentative experimentations with multiple exposures. Due to the simplicity of the equipment I have been using, coupled with the fact I am not well acquainted with it, the effects created by these multiple exposures were barely in my control; I wound the film back what I believed to be roughly a frame and took the next image.

Fellow NUCA graduate Jo Surzyn uses multiple exposures in her work to create a landscape which 'is an abstraction, suggestion, representation and even perhaps provocation... [which] represents a single location but points towards a larger context.' Where information is lost or blurred the reader is asked to make their own interpretation. It is like seeing the sketch from which a painting is made. Here the image's subjective margin is opened up and the reader is required to project their experience into this space. John Berger explains that;

Overlapping images and grouping them as above provides a wider context for the overall image and better represents the way our memories are formed and recalled. The multiple exposure images simultaneously provide a greater context while remaining vague , insofar as giving a sense of place as opposed to a definite trace. I intend to expand upon these experiments in multiple exposures and mapping/merging images in the coming weeks.

PACT Animal Sanctuary

2010-07-08T02:35:00.000-07:00

The experience of browsing in a charity shop, of this charity shop in particular, is a curious one. It is an attic for the community where unused picture frames, video cassettes, exercise bikes, cameras and old clothes are stuffed away. The shop unit is arranged like a sitting room with sofas facing the centre, china dolls on sideboards, picture frames on the walls; it is a shop disguised as a house.

It is furnished with weightless mementoes. By this I mean there is a sense of nostalgia and time-passed but the reader is aware these items have been discarded; the nostalgic reading is undermined and there is no weight of history in the objects.
In arguing the case that photography should be considered as separate from fine-art, John Berger explains that ‘The good photograph is the well-composed one. Yet this is only true in so far as we think of photographic images imitating painted ones.’ While painting’s strength lies in the arrangement of objects within a frame, photography relies on what is excluded from the frame.

The objects in these images have been arranged to create a pleasing composition by the shop staff. This composition is perhaps more so dictated by practicality than aesthetics, but the latter is clearly also a consideration. In photographing these ready made pseudo-domestic compositions what is excluded from the image is, ironically, any genuine sense of an ephemeral history. This creates friction between the objects as they are somewhat forcefully arranged.

People and Places

2010-06-22T12:23:00.000-07:00

Using old film and cheap cameras imbues the images with a certain sense of nostalgia; as the digital image has become omniscient, the reading of images which are consciously presented as analogue images changes. That is to say when we are aware that we are looking at images made through dated processes this alters the perceived meaning of those images.

It is important that this effect is created through analogue processes rather than digital manipulation; the flat tones in these images, the dust and scratches are akin to the crackle and hiss of a vinyl record which can be reproduced artificially but is never quite the same.

As I previously mentioned, the lack of sophistication in the equipment I am using creates a loss of control over almost everything beyond the composition of the images; I do not even have complete control over this as there is a parallax view in a lot of cheap and disposable cameras. As my degree of control over the images is lost, the Square itself takes some authority over the images; the psychogeography of the place determines the ways in which I walk through it, how I see it. The effect of this is that the role of the photographer becomes minimal in order to maximise subjective narrative space for the reader.

I had initially intended to photograph people as part of the series. This began with experiments sat in Café Rendezvous with a disposable camera rested on a coke can. Having considered my approach I decided it would be best to try and steal images, to catch the unconscious gesture in order for the subject to surrender something of their soul to the image. This of course is something which a photographer may take years to achieve and is largely reliant on chance.

Looking through my first batch of prints the images predominantly of people felt in opposition to those which were predominantly of place; of course I anticipated that they would be different but not to the degree that they opposed one another. It is a question of time. If we are concerned with photographing people there is an inherent temporality; this is a fraction of a second in a lifetime. While spaces have their own lifespan, they age differently and so the same fraction of a second may be reproduced at a later stage. This is an impossibility when photographing a person. To this end the images of Anglia Square and the people who occupy it do not belong together as they command different lines of thought in their reading. I am happy for people to have a presence in my images, but not for their dominance; I will no longer be photographing people in Anglia Square.

Anglia Square

2010-06-15T03:32:00.000-07:00

Since plans were announced to demolish Anglia Square and build a new shopping mall in its place, the shopping centre has become a more frequent subject for photographers. I walk past the back Anglia Square every day and at least twice in any given week I see the site being preserved by photographers.

In undertaking this documentary project I decided to only use cameras I have bought from businesses in Anglia Square. Practically, this means I have been using disposable and compact cameras bought in second hand shops (Vivitar 35mm Slim Camera, various generic brand disposable cameras and a Halina MW35e which refuses to relinquish the film I have exposed in it).

This constraint, if it is a constraint, removes some technical burdens and to this end the control I have over the images’ formal aspects centre on composition.

A clean, simple objectivity; taken from a middle distance with a clear focal point dominating the centre of the frame. In framing my images in this way I was very conscious of mimicking Eugéne Atget. On some level this comparison could be seen as a parody when considering the scale of Atget’s efforts to document an entire city but this is not the intention of my work.

Eugene Atget

Rue du Maure c. 1908

Like Atget I intend to compile an apolitical catalogue of images to document exactly how a place stood. The Square is seen by many as an eyesore; a failed development of the 1960s, which was planned in three phases of development but left as it is seen now with only the first phase completed. From what I understand there was a lack of funding due to an economic relapse as we are experiencing now; one can only wonder how much of the new development will be completed before funds run out again. This context is political enough in itself and to strive to find a viewpoint that might bring this out in the composition would be too heavy handed; for better or worse Anglia Square in its current condition is part of the fabric of Norwich.

A more impulsive set of images do not strictly follow this objective Atget style and although these images were found inadvertently and commanded my camera, perhaps on a subconscious level they were informed by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s film Manhatta. The film is composed of industrial and urban scenes of geometric precision, making heavy use of shadows. Strand described the process as the ‘abstract organisation of reality.’

Paul Strand & Charles Sheeler
Manhatta (1921)

To be free from one way of seeing is important to me as our perception and reading of a place is easily changeable. I want the images to be read as a series; there is a degree of uniformity endowed by the cameras - the quality of the lens and film - and as such it is possible for these images to have a slightly differing compositional style and still belong together.

Towards an Outcome

2010-03-18T05:25:00.001-07:00

These images are not twins. What I mean is they are not identical and they are not so inextricably linked as to exclude the possibility of pairing them with other images. They have been paired in much the same way that twinned cities are paired; through formal qualities.

The images can be read as vignettes where both cities are presented as foreign; they are not leaden with identity yet there is a sense of familiarity brought about by the incidental things that occur in them.

There is a feeling that they could be paired again, that there is another man fishing somewhere who could arrive at any minute. In a sense, reading the image achieves this. What we learn about the places in these images can only be defined by what we know about other places, by off-setting them against our existing knowledge.

We are given the impression that the images occur simultaneously and continually. They have been taken from different cities at different times and through this act of twinning a new place and a new moment is created. As Dyer notes, ‘photography, in a way, is the negation of chronology.’ Its great power is not to freeze time; it is to make it malleable.

A

Colour Considerations

2010-01-20T02:38:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in a previous entry - I have been exploring colour processes other than RGB, as well as beginning to understand the use of curves in editing my images in Photoshop. I liken this search for a unique process to the poet’s search for his voice; it is the struggle for an artist to find his idiolect.

In the early days of colour film art photographers were by and large resistant to working in colour. Mary Weston writes; ‘[Edward] Weston’s anxiety about colour film was grounded in what he perceived as its greater realism – that is, its more comprehensive resemblance to the world of experience.’ This greater realism however, is what interests me. It takes the reader as close as a still image possibly can to experience but it can never match it; tones and textures reproduced on paper will never fully replicate the way a human sees. Colour photography subverts realism in its shortcomings, by coming so close to replicating it and failing.

These developments and ideas are going to have to be suspended for the time being; Laura’s pamphlet will be a black and white publication. This is a constraint which I have largely ignored as both Laura and I are of the opinion that the work will not end on the page; we intend to look into venues where we can exhibit the image on a larger scale, in full colour and the poems can be performed.

A

Familiarity

2009-12-08T03:14:00.000-08:00

I wish to seek foreignity in both cities. This is problematic in Norwich, a city I have lived in for years and photographed extensively. Graham Clarke talks about the vantage point in Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of New York as having a de-humanising affect. I have begun scaling buildings in order to find a perspective from which I can see Norwich with unfamiliar eyes. At street-level I find myself afraid to take images in case they have been made before, worry that I will create an image which is too heavily rooted in Norwich or

Britain

. From this higher view I have more information to read, it becomes more confusing the city becomes strange.

On Writing

2009-12-01T04:41:00.000-08:00

I am currently undertaking a project which involves travelling between two specific locations and documenting the conversation between the two places in poetic form. This idea expands on previous poetry collections I have written, and serves as a continuation of a process I find increasingly interesting. I focus very intently on the poem as a journey and compile the writing according to a distinct set of ‘rules’. For example, my writing technique involves taking notes throughout the day and night of anything interesting I have seen, heard, read, eaten, smelled – any external sensory activity may be included within the body of the notes and later incorporated into a written piece. I therefore create context and imbue it with meaning along the way. This is a very developmental way of working as it involves a particularly responsive method with clearly defined stages and practises –the documentation process must take place before the writing of the works as it is the experiential component which will determine the creative outcome. The collected notes are later filtered for imagery and concepts and are creatively reconstructed to form a first draft of a poem, thereby creating a third place within the space of the writing.

I define the third place as contained within the sphere of the poem itself, in the language and imagery constructed, or the formation and development of signifiers. The first place may be considered as the origin of these concepts, so the direct environment and external stimuli or signs. This is then processed into the understood meaning, or signified, before undergoing transformation into written or spoken language – the signifier. My poems therefore represent the culmination of a cognitive system of semiotics in order to fully actualise in language a physical surrounding or sensation.

It is important to acknowledge the unique technique behind the writing as this process is vital in understanding the contextual foundations. The initial practise of note taking relies heavily on the Situationist theory of the dérive which propagates that one must expose oneself to encounter in order to actualise inspiration and therefore creative freedom, to play within an environment. By walking through a place with no set orientation or direction, one is able to more fully interact with the space and use it, reconfigure it in language and metaphor. All of the imagery and events within my poetry are true to experience and in this way it may be approached as documentary poetry. The only aspect of my writing that may be fictionalised is the order of events or the relationship of each component within a scene. For example, I may juxtapose a series of images within one poem or scene, but in reality each image may have been encountered on a separate occasion. This is the right of the poet. The creative construction comes from the poets’ ability to manipulate her notes into separate pieces whilst retaining visceral meaning.

In my project, I have explored the twin cities of Norwich and Novi Sad, in particular focusing on the symbol of bridges as a unifying concept. This is relevant as both Norwich and Novi Sad have long and significant history revolving around the bridges within the city. It has furthermore brought the two cities together as Norwich now currently holds a bridge named after its sister city Novi Sad, serving as a symbol of the bond between the two places. I have undertaken creative practise within each city and have produced poems which reflect these experiences. I believe that the physical act of moving through each city with the dérive intention brings the two places closer to one another as they are therefore represented by the same technique. The practise draws out similarities and differences between them both, and more significantly allows for personal interpretation of experience. Eventually this will mesh them together in the form of a book.

The final book is also planned to contain photographs taken by Angus Sinclair. This adds a further dimension to the work that is important to discuss. Angus has been my partner in all of the dérives and experiences within both cities. He has therefore been exposed to the same influences and able to interpret them in his own way. The images he has captured respond to his impressions of place, as my note taking responds to my own. The two forms originate from the same sources and therefore pair together within the book. The word and image are inseparable.

L

Twins

2009-11-21T09:55:00.001-08:00

These recent images on my blog are the development of my work towards Laura Elliott’s pamphlet commission. Laura is writing approximately thirty poems in response to her travels between Norwich and its Serbian twin, Novi-Sad. I have been asked by Laura to create a set of images to accompany her book.
For me the most interesting photographs and indeed poems are full of kinetic energy. What I have attempted with these images is to create a series of little dioramas in response to Laura’s writing style. I want the images to be beginnings, rather than endings. For example in this image, for me the interest lies in the empty seats next to the male figure, rather than the man himself.
A recurrent theme which has emerged is the juxtaposition of industrial or man-made elements and nature. This is something which is quite commonplace in smaller cities like Novi-Sad and Norwich and especially in agricultural counties. How the composition draws attention to this is key, at worst this could become an explicit Man versus Earth narrative. I feel I manage to avoid this however and what the reader is left with on a narrative level is a context.
In terms of formal qualities; Novi-Sad is a larger city than Norwich and this has enabled me to develop my style of image-making by allowing me a greater depth of field and in turn a larger stage for my images to play out in. Laura’s work is influenced a lot by Situationist theory and the urban dérive provides a structure for a lot of her note-making and my images are also created on these walks. To take my images further and reflect this way of working I intend to find higher vantage points and create images with a larger physical depth when we return in December.

A

Novi-Sad

2009-11-20T14:16:00.000-08:00

Novi Sad

2009-11-15T14:36:00.000-08:00

Novi-Sad

2009-11-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

Final Submission - Critical Self-Appraisal

2009-06-04T13:18:00.000-07:00

Image 1 – The Form as a Window to Narrative.

Photography is a language. We look at an image, it is a sign, we understand the sign and therefore the image becomes classifiable. What I have constructed over the course of this year is an awkwardness within this understood language; I have attempted to disrupt the harmony of ostensibly pleasing geometric compositions.

Sontag tells us that ‘the formal qualities of style – the central issue in painting – are, at most, of secondary importance in photography, while what a photograph is of is always of primary importance.’ This idea is an inversion of the sensibility I have been exploring; what I have attempted to create are images whereby the formal aspects act as a window to narrative.

Image 1 we first notice the formal qualities, in terms of the image as a pair, because of the strength of the composition. The images have been put together in such a way that the stronger compositional lines run between images, creating an asymmetrical composition. By this I mean there are enough reflected shapes and forms in both images to hint at symmetry, but it is not a perfect symmetry by any means. This disruption in the composition gives a sense of perpetual movement in the image.

Derrida’s notion of difference is relevant here; the images are defined by their opposition to each other, yet at the same time there is a strong likeness in their composition. The problem with some of the pairs in our Lines exhibition was that the symmetry was too strong to arouse much more than what Barthes refers to as studium interest; ‘a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment’. Some of the Lines images were too harmonious and lacked the disruption in the composition which is necessary for the reader to pause long enough for the narrative elements to materialise.

The increase in the scale of the prints here, as opposed to the exhibition at Stew has been perhaps the most important part of the development in the work. The larger scale highlights some of the smaller details as well as retaining the overall quality of a luminous object with a distinct colour and tonality, which the smaller prints at Stew had. My initial instinct to use backlit film also made me apprehensive that my work might be seen as a pastiche of some of the artists I had been researching [see above] and that I ought to stick to a smaller scale to differentiate my work. I feel however, as the project has gone on there is a notion of voice in my work. What I have honed is not a language, but an idiolect; a distinctive application of language.

In these final prints there is more room for the lines to really create some movement within the frame. This movement guides us around the image and the narrative qualities begin to surface in the image as we take more time to absorb what we are confronted with.

Walter Benjamin wrote that the photographs of Eugène Atget were ‘like crime scenes.’ His deserted compositions almost seemed as though they were photographed with the purpose of establishing evidence. The form then, acts as a window to the narrative, which is comprised by the images’ lack. This is borrowed from the theatrical notion of the mis en scene, where what occurs off the stage is as important as what occurs on it. In both Image 1 and Image 2, we are guided around the image like investigators, seeking out narrative clues. The punctum effect, Barthes’ ‘prick that wounds me’, is this investigation.

Image 2 – The Narrative as a Window to Form.

Sontag writes that photographs are ‘clouds of fantasy and pellets of information,’ indeed the reader of images looks at the elements within the frame and decides what they mean, he/she is not told. Photography has largely failed to as a device to capture beauty, as it can never match experience; photography however is a tool for creating beauty. It is a peculiar unnatural way of seeing, with the potential to make us pause over a simple composition such as two sheds and make us consider the scene, perhaps endow it with poetic value.

The aforementioned idea of an investigation is arrived at somewhat differently in Image 2. The composition is not disrupted in the same way as Image 1, therefore the image is more easily understood as a sign and the reading is not immediately snagged on the formal qualities.

When considering an image in a gallery context ‘photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have the right to observe.’ As such the reader is more willing to actively seek narrative. Here, in contrast to Image 1, we are immediately approached by the narrative of the image.

Because the image is immediately classifiable the narrative aspect causes our initial pause, producing this studium effect. In this small pause it becomes apparent that the formal qualities of both Image 1 and Image 2 speak a very similar language; they are a similar size, feature triangle shapes in the roofs, the shapes of the windows are similar, both have blanched skies and make use of imperfect symmetry. In noticing the similarities however, the reader is simultaneously inclined to notice the differences between the images. This brings in Huyghe’s notion of the Third Memory.

Huyghe juxtaposed the same story told by two narrators, using similar but varying language. The effect of this was to imply that these texts are what we might consider translations of the event and that the third memory is the world in which these two applications of language belong and collide. This idea is similar to Tomas Tranströmer’s notion that the poem exists independent of language, that all poetry is an act of translation. The idea of the third memory comes into play in my work in the unexplained elements of the images. There is a distinct idiolect which draws the images together, informs us they are related, but at the same time the narrative elements are sparse and the reader is left to create the third memory based on this desired investigation.

Full Show Documentation

Angus Sinclair
04.06.09

New Images

2009-05-19T07:49:00.000-07:00

I have been trying out new combinations of pairs today, including trying to use new images. I feel that the set of pairs I have already exhibited had been developed so much, not just in terms of individual images but also the time I spent getting the pairings to work as hard as possible, that at this late stage there isn't enough time to create new images. For documentation purposes however, here are the images I took today.

The light today has been peculiar, it's been torrential rain then really bright sun and try as I may, these just don't work with any of my existing images. What I need to spend my time doing between now and the degree show is choosing the best existing pairings and working from scratch with the RAW files to blow them up to approx A0 size. The scale of the piece will effect the tone, highlight smaller details and make the images as bold as possible in the context of a show where the rest of the work will probably be on quite a large scale.

Lines Exhibition - Evaluation and Documentation

2009-05-18T04:31:00.000-07:00

Documentation of show on Flickr

Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory juxtaposes a dramatised account of a real bank robbery (the motion picture Dog Day Afternoon) with a re-enactment of the events orchestrated by John Wojtowicz, one of the robbers. We must remember that Wojtowicz’s account of the events is a narrative, not documentation of the event; it is representational. Huyghe’s idea of The Third Memory can be interpreted as Wojtowicz’s memory of the events which has been skewed over time, romanticised by the film and the media attention the story got.

the third memory, (huyghe),
Uploaded by zohilof. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

There is another interpretation here too; it is the memory the reader creates by comparing the two. When we are presented with two narratives simultaneously we instinctively try to find this third narrative which links the two. I have spoken before of the strong compositional synergies in the paring of my images perhaps becoming a barrier to narrative aspects in my work. The Lines exhibition gave me the opportunity to see my work in a fresh context, show the work to new eyes, see how the images were working as a set and ultimately if this third memory was materialising and indeed if it mattered.

Huyghe’s Third Memory addresses ideas put forward by Barthes in The Death of the Author. Barthes says of the poem that ‘it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it. The poem belongs to the public.’ I am a believer in this idea of maximum subjectivity in work; the crafting of my work is not concerned with directive narrative, but the cohesion of elements which may suggest a narrative. As such I chose to use a poem on the handout which accompanied my work to retain the ambiguity, rather than solve a riddle.

The poem is reflective of the photographs in imagery, tone, sparse use of language and the use of space on the page is in sync with the use of space in the gallery. The poetic term stanza, the Italian word for ‘room’, describes my intentions in the spacing of my work. If a poem is built of stanzas, we move from room to room; each one is a function in a cohesive unit. Here each image can be seen as a stanza, it has its own room to breathe and stand alone, but it guides you into the next image and is a functional unit in the overall syntagm.

This brings me back to the composition of the pairs. How arresting the images were in terms of composition seemed effect the speed with which people walked around the room. The blockier images such as this are self contained in terms of the movement created by the symmetry and lines, whereas the back three images in the exhibition all have very strong horizontal lines causing them to almost run into one another, hurrying the viewer along to the next image. I feel that this was unavoidable. There is a degree to which one can curate a space and a degree to which we are dictated to by a room’s structure. I felt the first images in the room had to be placed where they were because there was a certain symmetry with that corner of the gallery; the yellow lines on the floor, the white rectangle of the curtain were echoed in the images. Once these were in place the room all but dictated the positioning of the rest of the images.

I had discussed with Amy the possibility of integrating our work, but we felt that while there were similarities between the work, to put them shoulder to shoulder would clutter the space. This would also have meant compromises in lighting coupled with the fact that I felt my images were working well away from the wall, whilst Amy’s work was better hung on the wall. After so much experimentation with lighting throughout this project, I feel the use of halogen lights in the gallery was perfect. There is an industrial feel to the lights which compliments the work well, they were strong enough to give the work the energy I had hoped for and brought the sheen of the images up perfectly. My only disappointment in terms of the lighting was that the first two images in the room had to share a light and this isolated them somewhat.

Martin Figura came to see my work and pointed out that some of the images I have taken more recently do not share the ‘flat light’ that had made the earlier images so intriguing. This is not to say the more recent images which often have a lot of directional light are any less interesting, but rather they do not share the same language as the rest of the images. I have created a set of rules in terms of the language I am using here and I need to stick to them. Bernd and Hilla Becher (above: Cooling Towers, 1972)are a perfect example of what I am striving to achieve; the harmony of composition and use of repetition to craft something suggestive of narrative. I have spoken extensively about the idea that what I have honed over the course of this year is a kind of visual idiolect; there is a distinct voice in my work. What the strength of my work boils down to is this crafting of this idiolect and to take my work forward in preparation for my final show I feel I need to increase the scale of the work to highlight some of the nuances of the images, creating an easier passage to the narrative elements and I also need no more than two images. Two images are enough to show the similarities in language; any more is simply bulk.

The Plan (Revised)

2009-04-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

Now I have decided not to use the lit frames, I no longer need to hang the images so close to the wall. This gives me the freedom to experiment with space. What I intend to now do is hang my images in clear Perspex sleeves with fishing line (or some such barely visible wire) at differing depths and heights in the room, illuminated by two large directional lights as illustrated below.

This will force the viewer to engage with the work in a different way than if the work was hung on the wall. Here the viewer may see the images in whichever order he wishes and indeed may duck, crouch, stand on tip toe in order to see images more clearly forcing him to be more active in viewing the piece. There is also potential here to extend the movement from inside the pairs to outside the frame, into the neighbouring piece and so on, by considering how the eye is guided around the images and placing them next to each other. This way the viewer is guided by the movement in the images rather than of their own volition.

This small scale version gives a very rough idea of my vision. I have access to enough of these Perspex frames, but I am at a loss the facilities to print new images and trim the frames down to size due to it still being the easter break. I intend to retain the width of the frames I have available to me (42cm), but the proportions of the images may alter the height. What I can do for now however is prepare my images and hone down the pairs I wish to use for my exhibition and carry on taking images.

Frames and New Images

2009-04-11T08:13:00.000-07:00

Having hung, photographed and considered my scrap-wood frame, I have decided not to frame my images. I feel it is important to not only create but also to consider works outside the gallery context, which O’Doherty tells us is a ‘space where powerful ideas about art focus on them.’ In a bleached gallery space an atmosphere is created in which objects become mystified; O’Doherty describes how a firehose can become ‘an esthetic conundrum.’ To see my frame on a wall in my home, a space in which I am so familiar I ignore entirely without trying to, is to see the piece for exactly what it is. There is relevant theory behind my ideas in using a frame, but in terms of aesthetics and the way in which the images have evolved through pairing; the frame is a distraction. I have stated many times that the way in which we see differs from the frame imposed on us in photography where ‘the frame … is as much a psychological container for the artist as the room in which he stands is for the viewer… the frame acts like a grid,’ in this way the image is framed automatically and requires no external framing.

In this bleached context ‘art exists in a kind of eternity of display, and though there is lots of "period" (late modern), there is no time’ and indeed the same can be said of my images; there are periodical clues in the architecture and even perhaps the fact they are colour images, but there is no real sense of time. The movement in the images comes from the strength of the lines, and flicks about inside the frame eternally; there is movement but no time.

Early in the project in a tutorial with Regina Šulskyte I was asked why I had taken the images I had. At that stage I had given little real thought to why and was motivated more by a general pleasing aesthetic. The images can be looked at in terms of what Augé would refer to as place or non-place. Most of the images are non-places i.e. are not born by means of cultural development but a functionality. The fact that many of the sites are abandoned however, takes the images outside the realms of place and non-place as they are no longer functional and this redundancy renders them often simply as nothing more than a location. To this end they become an abstraction based around the idea of place and location, as Shaun put it in an email about my work, ‘by combining the two, you change each image - it becomes less and less about the sense of place, both geographical and in terms of the past/memory, it becomes about the dialogue between the two.’ What the images have become through pairing is a display of the kind of movement more commonly associated with painting or poetry where ‘there is a sense of flux… because no one aspect of the image settles.’

Carpentry

2009-04-05T06:28:00.001-07:00

This is my first attempt making a frame myself. It is made from scrap wood, found at one of the sites I photographed, using borrowed tools and was cut on a kitchen chair in the absence of a proper bench. As such there are a few drill marks and the lines aren’t entirely straight. This is in contrast to the somewhat neater (though not entirely without fault) MDF frame I had cut for me. I feel the less than perfect nature of my frame compliments the images’ content and while I will undoubtedly get better at cutting frames, I don’t think I will develop the carpentry skills to escape this scruffy feel. There is a dialogue created here between the neat prints inside the frame, the brand new light fittings and the shabby wood and content of the images. My previous frame had wood blocks to attach it to the wall. I have decided that this distracts from the otherwise striking frame. If I am looking at the frame in Derridan terms as I outlined in my previous post the frame needs to be more or less rectangular. Instead I have decided to experiment with hanging my frames from the ceiling about an inch away from the wall. This will hopefully create a slight amount of movement, giving more of a sense of what it I like to be in the location the images have been taken in; quiet, bright and still but for the slightest of movements.
I also have a couple of new pairs. I feel as though I have reached a stage with the photography aspect of the project where I have my processes honed and I just need to continue photographing and finding the best combinations of images to exhibit.

Frames

2009-03-31T06:03:00.001-07:00

Some of the more grandiose ideas I have had about presenting my photographs have been put aside in favour of this back-lit frame design. This change of ideas was also partly due to cost and time constraints. In tutorial time with Graham Giles we discussed the idea of having the images set back slightly in the frame to create an allusion to windows. This is an idea I have taken forward in this design as it ties in with my interest in realism; the frame is an unnatural way of seeing but the window is a frame we encounter daily. The window is also a recurring theme within my poetry, if not literally then as a metaphor for the distance between the reader and the scene itself. The same can be said for my photographs; the images are little dioramas, the depth of field keeping the viewer at arms length.
This preliminary box has been cut from MDF and uses two 60w bulbs. The bulbs have been placed above the images to give a spread of light representative of the light coming down from the sky. This has failed in the top instance however, as I have done nothing to mute the light seeping up from the lower bulb. I had decided to use two pairs as the initial symmetry of the images renders them as one, and so by having two pairs, there is both a pair of pairs and a single pair at the same time. This has not really worked in actuality; there is no real dialogue between the pairs. The viewer would be expected to work too hard, seeing the pairs as a whole, then individually, then the dialogue between images and pairs. This is too much. There is also an issue with the size of the frame, which is competing with the image somewhat and the use of MDF is rather plain.

I am however pleased with the spread of light on the walls, which acts as a secondary frame, quietly mirroring the pairing of images. The spread is also effected by the amount of light in the room and in turn the time of day, further reinforcing the idea of the frame as a window and effecting the reading depending on what time of day it is seen, which is an aspect I was worried I would lose by exhibiting indoors.

Future frames will address the issues outlined here. In addition to this I have decided to use only scrap wood I have salvaged from the sites I have photographed. I have been adamant that this project is a continuation of my work in Budapest in which we used elements associated with the gallery in an urban context; by taking elements of these urban spaces and putting them in a gallery context a similar effect will be realised. Derrida considers the frame as a parergon, translating literally as outside the work. The frame to Derrida is both essential as a means of highlighting the difference between what is the work and what is not, but it is also unessential to the work. The context of photography creates an interesting dialogue if we consider the work in Derridan terms. The frame is not only outside the work in terms of its use as a device, but if I am to use wood from the sites in the images, the frame then also comes from the work; thus the frame is both inside the work and outside it. Furthermore, the work itself is representation and therefore also exists outside the work. This will be interesting in the context of exhibiting in Stew gallery as until recently is was a derelict and redundant site, not dissimilar from the scenes I have been photographing.

Symmetry

2009-03-10T12:02:00.000-07:00

I came across this piece by American artist Bill Beckley today and it caused me to think about symmetry in my work.

This ‘apparent symmetry’ is both what draws me towards the image (by this I mean the three images as a whole) but at the same time prevents me from seeing much else in the piece. The somewhat clichéd title might have been justified if it were not for the dry technicality of the piece. Despite the fact the symmetry is not prefect; it is none the less close and as such too much a distraction, as I agreed my pairing of the sheds and the house were in my previous entry.

What I might strive for then is an imperfect symmetry or an allusion to symmetry. This pairing has a peculiar non-symmetry as well as horizontal lines which run through the boundary in the centre but this is then contrasted when we begin to examine the image on a narrative level. They are paired by the sky and negated by the weather amongst other elements which are pushing and pulling. The pairing is grounded however by the fact that this is not a perfect symmetry; the elements are not all contrasting, they are not all complementary but both are present.

New Images

2009-03-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

These images were taken at a site in Norwich which has been demolished and flattened out for redevelopment. The space has enabled me to experiment with longer depths of field than in my previous work. The tone provided by the floor is extraordinary and with this space on a clearer day I could have drawn some really interesting comparisons to the sky. If I get the chance I will return on a clearer day.

I have been paying greater attention to the histograms given by the camera and playing with exposure to have a more evenly toned image when I begin the editing process. This means I have been able to find the tone I am looking for during the editing process with much more ease, these recent images achieve this through correct exposure, rather than extensive editing in Photoshop.

Three Pairs

2009-03-07T03:46:00.000-08:00

The pairing of images has brought up issues regarding what is the most prominent quality of the pairings as a single image; the compositional aspects or the narrative aspects and is it important for both to be present? The short answer in regards to the latter question is yes. In terms of the development of my work, which has thus far been largely dependant economic use of elements to imply narrative, it would be a shame to lose this quality.
However in pairings such as this with such an overwhelming similarity in the upside-down V shapes, it is hard to see past the compositional similarities and find any further dialogue between the images in terms of narrative. There is a degree to which this may only be the case because I have spent so much time looking at the images on their own and suddenly placing them in this context changes the relationship I have with the image.
There are other images such as these which I feel have benefited from being paired. I was never particularly gripped by the left-hand image, but here there is a strong dialogue caused by over-running horizontal lines and the square shapes. In this instance, to refer once more to Barthes, it is the compositional similarities which grab our attention at this studium level, but then this relationship between the square shapes is lighter than the strong upside-down V shapes in the first image and our curiosity moves from form to content and we look at the image in terms of narrative, this further level of intrigue providing Barthes’ punctum.
What makes a good pairing then is the length of pauses between the form and content. In the ideal instance the form has the same weighting as a comma, allowing us to move on to the content which ends with a full-stop, where we can then absorb the image as a whole. In pairings with such an overwhelming sense of formal similarities, we are faced with a full-stop when we are struck by the form; providing us with two independent clauses rather than the structural harmony I am striving for.

Recent Images

2009-03-06T10:13:00.000-08:00

These images were all taken as RAW files using a digital SLR. I found the editing process of RAW images in Photoshop CS4, as opposed to the method I had been previously using to edit JPEGs in Photoshop 7, to be more intricate; the size and quality of the images has enabled me to acquire the tonality which has become the hallmark of the images I have been creating with ease and perhaps create a more polished finish.

The images required different exposures for the sky and the foreground; this is the first time I have blended two images together. I feel this better represents the the way the eye sees, as opposed to the way the camera records, and relates to my earlier research into Jeff Wall's compositions, in which a seemingly ordinary scene will have been comprised of many different images.

Pairing

2009-02-26T06:46:00.001-08:00

David Bailey’s book ‘If We Shadows’ places images opposite each other based seemingly on their structure and geometry. This linking through geometrics effects the reading of both images. The above image for example one can’t help but look at both these images as one due to their pairing through the glasses and milk jugs. We can apply Barthes’ theory of the studium and punctum details here. The pairing of the images on this technical level is that which engages the viewer on a basic level, it holds their attention, which is what Barthes’ describes as the studium quality of the image. This is of course if we are to look at the pairing as a whole in itself. It is the technical likenesses then which causes us to then almost without thinking compare them thematically.
This is the point where the narratives of each image converge, causing what Barthes refers to as the punctum quality, ‘that accident which pricks me.’ Barthes refers to single images when he makes these assertions, but as I have mentioned we cannot help but to look at the images in the book as one. This punctum quality has much more of a wounding presence in the above image, due to the humanity in the images.
To pair my images would be to imply a quiet world, not just a series of instances; the implication would be that these scenes were occurring simultaneously.

Printing

2009-02-23T08:04:00.000-08:00

During tutorial time I agreed that the size of my prints should not be dictated by the size of the light-boxes which are at my disposal, however, I have also stated that I will not be able to judge what size my prints should be until I have seen some prints. As such I have made my first print to the size of a 60cm x 100cm light box which I already had access to.

In my previous entry I stated that I might want to use natural-light bulbs to replicate daylight, however here the yellow tones are complimented by the regular light tubes inside the box. What I wanted to avoid by using natural-light tubes was associations with shop signs or advertising boards, but I feel here the light works with the tone of the print.

I was made aware, by one of the university’s photography technicians, of some technical problems I might face with some of the images I have taken on the compact digital camera I have been using. These issues revolve around the way JPEG files are compressed when saved and in real terms will put limits on how large I can print some of my images before they become grainy. In tutorial time with Graham Giles we discussed how a grainy quality would suit some of my images such as this one, however there are others which I may have to consider printing smaller. This raises the question of the effect of presenting large and small pieces together; does it imply one is superior? This is another question I think I will only really discover after printing some more images.

During tutorial time we also entertained the idea of the light-boxes as windows. The light coming from behind the images does give this impression as well as the glossy image resembling glass, however the scenes themselves in terms of form and tone again subvert this realism. To exhibit these in a gallery space then, would be to create a series of windows with peculiar views; they are real scenes taken out of context and re-presented.

Considerations for Printing

2009-02-10T10:23:00.000-08:00

I have been considering how I will present my work this week. I have previously expressed an interest in using lightboxes as many of my images have a bright, glossy quality to them which I feel needs to be supported and fully realised in their presentation. Maha Maamoun’s work has a particular vibrancy which she exaggerates in the presentation of her work by using lightboxes, lights and often inkjet printing on vinyl.

If I am to use lightboxes to replicate the brilliance of the day on which they were taken I need to consider the type of light I am using. Regular light bulbs may give the effect of a shop sign for example. Most of my images then are going to be best suited to using bulbs which replicate natural daylight, or perhaps I might look at using a glossy surface on which to print and then lighting my image from above with a sodium bulb to replicate street lamps.

Earlier in the project I tentatively looked into using a light box I already own. I have decided against using this box because the curved shape towards the bottom will effect the reading of the images in a way I’m not sure I like. The proportions of the box also mean that if I were to use an image which covered all of the Perspex I would have to make some compromises to the composition of the images. This has however caused me to pay more attention to cropping some of my images. In this image (right) for example, the narrow composition heightens the dialogue between the subjects.
Many of the artists who I have looked at throughout this project present their work on a grand scale; Andreas Gursky, for example is renowned for the size of his work. I have previously stated that what has set my work apart from the artists I have been interested in is the depth of field in my images. Many of the photos are very shallow, and as such I think this needs to be reflected in the scale. If my aim, as I have said, is to have a realist stance, but to subvert this, then the images need to almost become caricatures of life; the depth of field and subject dictating the size. This image (left) for example has characteristics which would be better suited to a large scale print. This then raises the question of exactly how large is large? With the majority of my images I am restricted somewhat by the technology I have used if I am to avoid pixelated prints. This will probably become the biggest problem at the upper end of the scale, at the lower end I feel the images must be bigger than the standard 6x4 scale prints. This size image carries with it associations to family photographs, holidays etc. which I would like to avoid as the reader as a voyeur doesn’t sit well with the themes I have been exploring. The only way in which I will be able to start making these decisions however is through experimentation, which will follow.

Interim Appraisal

2009-01-22T06:05:00.000-08:00

My work this semester has been a continuation of themes I explored with Laura Elliott in our Word & Image collaboration; as such I have chosen to carry on using our blog to document my work. At the core of the work was an exploration of subjectivity within readings and notions of defamiliarisation. The medium of photography was chosen as a natural progression from the exploration of the potential of the frame in our work last year. My work is concerned with the ways in which photography can be used as a realist tool and, paradoxically, the framing of the photograph, which is itself unnatural as it does not accurately represent the way we physically see the world. By framing in this sense I mean composition; the notion of the frame as a physical object and the implications of this are to be a concern later in the development of my work.

Early on in the collaboration we were influenced by a quote from Charles Sanders Pierce in which he refers to a reading as being dependant on the ‘cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs.’ I have taken this idea forward this semester by looking at ways of creating images where this cooperation is present in such a flat way that it invites what Barthes refers to as myth. For example, this image (right) is, on a basic level, a house with no roof, a bush and a steel barrier. This overtly literal aspect in the work creates space for a totally personal and subjective reading; when we remove something from its context, when we frame it we are inclined to seek myth within it. The reading then is dependant on a variety of social, political and personal backgrounds. As I have stated in the development of my work, some photographers have used similar images to make comments on a variety of subjects (modernity, the social effect of urban redevelopment).

Roland Barthes writes that modern poetry resists myth. I believe poetry, if anything, invites myth because it is a form. I outlined some ambitious ideas to link my poetry and visual work in my learning agreement which I abandoned early on as they felt restricting. I have however maintained a dialogue between my poetry and my visual practice. This has been through the method of composition I have applied to my photography, which indeed is a combination of aspects which Barthes outlines in Camera Lucida and poetic methods. In a recent workshop with George Szirtes he put forward the notion that a good deal of poems are comprised of three parts, which can be likened to Barthe’s idea of an image’s studium quality. Firstly there is a location, secondly there is something inhabiting it which creates a dialogue and thirdly there is an absence as a result of this conjuncture. This is the basis on which I have been creating my images.

As a further continuation of my previous work I chose the urban environment as my subject, with the intention of presenting the familiar in a peculiar way. The aforementioned paradox of photography has enabled me to do this, as the viewer is forced to look at something familiar in an unnatural way. The frame/composition aspect of photography also highlights the geometric aspects of the urban environment which we may not notice on a day to day basis as the human eye has a two-hundred degree viewing angle in stark contrast to the nature of the photograph. This is also complimented by the tonality of the images. I have said that I am interested in realism, but I am also interested in slightly undermining it to create something true, but strange. The colour and tonal quality in my images do not fairly represent what the eye sees, but rather what the romantic or nostalgic mind sees when one stops to pay attention to these every day scenes. This renders the images as more of a document of memory than actual physicality.

For my work to go forward in the coming semester it needs to be taken out of its current digital proxy-state and become something physical. I have already mentioned my interest in light boxes to compliment the slick, glossy aspect present in many of the images. This is not to say I should not, or will not experiment with other methods of presentation. I recently attended an exhibition of one of my peers at NUCA which involved the projection of images which is a medium I had been considering. I feel the projection of images keeps the image in this proxy state; it still has the feeling of being a duplicate rather than an object in its own right. This is why the light box has interested me; it has the potential for the image and the box to be one and the same. For this to work it requires careful attention to the scale of the object and the printing materials used as these are elements which will undoubtedly effect a reading. This, of course can only occur through considered experimentation and development.

Last year this notion was tied in with an anti-gallery space ethos, however I wish to later contrast this by looking at the potential of presentation of work in internal spaces. I maintain my opposition to bleached, open, portentous spaces and so will be looking for a location in which to display my work which will impact on the reading of it. Derrida’s idea that a frame denotes that what is inside it is different to what is outside it will be a playground in which I can play with the meaning of the piece simply by what context I put it in. As well as looking at various internal spaces, I wish to look at various external spaces to decide where my work is best placed. This could include presenting some of the images in the locations they were taken or where other images were taken. It would also be useful for the development of my work to exhibit my work prior to my final assessment to see how people engage with the work.

To summarise my current situation; I have created a set of digital images which serve to give a reader a few scraps of information which invite the creation of a narrative. In order for my work to progress I must explore the implications of turning these images into physical objects and the potential of this.

Struth and Douglas

2009-01-13T06:55:00.000-08:00

In talking about his work in the late 1970s photographing urban spaces, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York spoke of Thomas Struth as having ‘catalogued with clarity and dispassion the unselfconscious structures that characterize a culture—that irreducible mélange of textures, shapes and the scale of its streets.’ Struth’s work

is on such a grand scale, the cityscapes he photographs are so big that they almost buzz with the absence of the human. I have said of my work that I wanted the absence of human figures to be a presence in my work, but that the work still needed fragments of humanity to ground the work in the world we live in. This image of Struth’s (left) for example has the buzz of absence I mentioned a moment ago and it rings louder through the presence of cars and residential buildings. This is an idea which can be seen in some of my images; this photo (above right) for example can be compared to Struth’s unrelenting geometric qualities as well as being an image in which one can see a lot, but nothing is happening.

One can read further into this idea of seeing such a wide, empty space as being representative of isolation. I have said I have been looking at constructing photographs by means of poetic composition; in a poem there is always a speaker present and we can liken the photographer to the speaker in a poem. As such in images such as these the speaker is a figure alone in a busy world.

There can be a lack of subjectivity in images which are so rigid in their technicality; this image of Struth’s taken in Naples, 1988 retains the same formal qualities but there is a degree of humanity caused by the natural elements of the photograph as it becomes endowed with a sense of history and therefore more of a sense of location. This gives the viewer a little more evidence of the place and in turn more to process when reading the piece.

This idea is taken further in the photography which Stan Douglas took to accompany his film Win Place or Show. Douglas creates similar images to comment on the effects of urban regeneration and modernity. These are themes which can be found in my work though it was created in a contrasting manner to Douglas’ work, which been composed with a specific intention and reading in mind. I have composed my work with the intention being the potential for a reading which comes about through the curious vacancy of destitute urban space.

London and Paris

2009-01-11T05:07:00.000-08:00

In my last entry I wrote about the processes I have been using in Photoshop. I have continued working in this way and the result is that the images are beginning to look more like a set of images than individual pictures. The images are all bright, almost over-saturated, yet the colours themselves are dull. The image which is standing out is the foyer image. I was hesitant to take this image because I have been working outdoors, but it reminded me of Marc Augé’s ‘Non Places’ in which Augé describes the ‘anthropological place’ which are ‘places of identity, of relations and of history’ in contrast to the non-place. The foyer here has experienced no real sense of cultural development or evolution; it is a static, functional space. This speaks of the ‘ambiguity of location’ I have talked about in my images and the idea of the ‘presence of absence’, that what is quite apparently missing in this image is any sense of identity. In contrast to this, my box image is firmly rooted somewhere in Britain by the paving stones and road markings. This is a shame as I think the box and the woman walking out of the frame gives the image a good amount of narrative element; it is just enough information to suggest there is a narrative, but it is not loaded and as such there is a good amount of space for personal interpretation. This narrative aspect is undermined by the location as it is one more piece of information to process and on creating a reading we are to assume every paradigm is relevant and meaningful.

I had similar problems taking photographs in Paris because it has such a unique and recognisable identity. The images here have a voyeuristic feel which is providing the narrative element while the rectangular shapes in the images are in proportion to the frame, giving a sense of harmony and technicality, which is important in such minimal images. The windows image however is not quite perfect due to the angle I was forced to take the photo from.

In the appraisal for my poetry work this semester I wrote about my photography work and the effect it had on the aesthetic of my poems. Similarly I would like to mention here the effect my poetry work has had on the volume of my photography. I described my poetry this semester as ‘deliberately quiet’ as a means of giving a reader the silence in which he can engage with the work and create a personal reading. I likened this to Charles Simic’s 1979 collection Dismantling the Silence in which ‘Many of Simic’s poems create a silent atmosphere immediately and it is in this silence that the speaker, and in turn the reader has the space to ‘dismantle’ what he is presented with, to re-assess the world in front of him.’ I think the same logic can be applied to my images and perhaps in the coming weeks as I begin to experiment with the presentation of my images I could incorporate sound into my work.

Rooftops, rain and a Wall

2008-12-15T08:54:00.000-08:00

I have been fortunate with the weather this week. The light has been excellent yet at the same time the sky has been overcast, as a result of this I have a bright, bleached sky in my images. I feel this complements my themes perfectly and does not detract attention from what my images are really about; these faceless yet lyrical and ambiguous locations. In addition to this I managed to miss the rain, but the floor was still wet, which has given this set of images an excellent glossy quality. I think these will look excellent presented on a light box, this has become something I have been taking into consideration as I make my images. Another thing I think is worth mentioning about these images is that I was accompanied by a friend of mine, Sarojini Lewis who is a BA Photography graduate. It was good to be out working with somebody again so that there was a person to bounce ideas off, assess whether an image was working and look for locations with. I have mentioned earlier in this blog that I feel I work best when I have somebody to discuss my work with and I intend on working with Sarojini again in the coming weeks. In editing these images in Photoshop I have begun to adjust the Red, Green and Blue levels separately and then the brightness and contrast, whereas before I would edit the layers as one. This is to better replicate the darkroom process and I think there is a richer depth of tone in these more recent images than some of my earlier work.

I have also rather belatedly been looking at the work of Jeff Wall (above). I found his work disconcertingly similar in terms of tone, composition and the vacancy of much of his work. The Tate Modern website describes these types of images as a “quieter mode of engagement” Wall takes his work a lot further than mine however; the image below is a composite of approximately 75 images taken over three locations to meticulously structure something which has a poetic candour, yet seems to be an everyday scene. This relates to my earlier entries regarding the construction of images being treated the same as the construction of poetry, Wall has chosen his elements carefully. The images used to make this scene were likely to have been similar, but the better parts of each has been used to make the perfect composition in much the same way a poet might use a thesaurus. This kind of experimentation is premature for my work at the moment, I feel I need to continue defining my themes and find a way to make the best use of the light box I have, but I will bear this in mind for later development.

Light-box

2008-12-02T06:32:00.000-08:00

Today I began to play with a shop sign I have turned into a light-box of sorts. The motivation behind this came out of a discussion with one of the university's photography technicians about how I wish to present my photographs. These images are JPEGs laser-printed on to acetate and the light box is a sheet of perspex lit by LEDs

The images looked more seamless stuck behind the perspex (see right), it was less apparent how everything was put together; however the thickness of the perspex and strength (or lack thereof) of the LEDs meant the image looked blurry.

I also tentatively looked at attaching poetry to the images. This brought with it a lot to think about in terms of typography, framing and placing in relation to the images. As this is such a 'can of worms', I have decided to research around the ideas of graphic and concrete poetry before I go any further with attaching words to my images.

I think the next steps in this process will be to hook up some stronger lights inside the box, perhaps to think about painting it a colour other than the garish red tone it has at the moment and making some higher quality acetate prints.

Snow

2008-11-27T06:11:00.000-08:00

I didn’t want to take photos in the snow, but there was work needed doing so I braved the blanketed streets of Norwich. The reason I didn’t want to take photos in the snow was semantics; there is so much meaning and romanticism attached to snow. I have said that what I am looking to do is take photographs of good poems; I think it is hard to put snow in a poem and get away with it, so photography should be no different. I feel these images almost marry the human and technical aspects I have been speaking about. There is a lot of repeated rectangles and straight lines, as there has been before, and the human aspect is endowed by the semantics of the snow primarily and by things such as bicycles, closed doors and windows secondarily. As I have already mentioned however, I feel these don’t quite hit the mark.

Tutorial time this week was also spent discussing the quality of light and tone in my images. There is a marked difference between the light in my photos taken in Britain and Germany, and looking back at other photos I have taken in various countries, there is a shift in the quality of light in these too. Even in spite of the snow this week, the images I took belong with previous images taken in this country. It was mentioned however that I have been using a variety of equipment and file types (this latest set of images were taken as Canon RAW files and converted to Jpeg) and this will obviously have an effect on the light and tonality of my images. In order for my images to be less sporadic I need to begin using the same camera and file type.

Photos from Munich

2008-11-21T10:16:00.000-08:00

There's not much because my camera was misbehaving, but here are the few decent images I managed to make in Munich:

Consolidation

2008-11-21T09:24:00.001-08:00

A few weeks into my project now, I feel the need to consolidate and collate what I have done so far in order to move my project further. It seems my images can be separated into two categories. The first are those which can be appreciated for their formal aspects; by this I mean their composition, tonality and colour. These images are interesting in a technical and perhaps geometric sense, although they were criticised during tutorial time with Regina Sulskyte for lacking any sense or suggestion of the human and therefore not raising questions; these questions of course are where we create narratives in our readings of works.

I have said that my work is intended to be linked to my poetry and I have been creating this link through means of composition, looking at constructing a photograph in much the same way I would construct a poem, and this is the position of my second category lyrical photography. These images seem almost in opposition to the first group; they have more of a sense of place, they feature the human more predominantly and have more space for the reader to create a narrative.

What I am striving for is the point where these two categories intersect. The former group of technical images can be likened to the formal aspects of a poem, the structure, metre, form etc. The latter group can then be seen as the content of the poem; the metaphors, similes and images we are presented with, from which we create a narrative. This likening to poetry is part of the reason I feel it is important to have some hint at the human in my photography; in poetry there is always a voice, a speaker and in turn a human present in the piece. When we are faced with the kind of landscapes I have been photographing without any trace of the human it is hard to look at it as much more than a technical display. These are a couple of images which I lay in the middle of this venn diagram of themes:

Lecture and Tutorial with Regina Sulskyte

2008-11-06T09:06:00.000-08:00

The lecture was concerned a lot with the suppression of art during the post-war Soviet occupation of Lithuania. I found that when looking at images of a happy Soviet state in the context that there was a photographic reality being kept from the public eye, one begins to find a certain eerie quality, and exaggerated happiness in certain images. This image by Antanas Sutkus, for example, becomes quite unsettling, more so than perhaps it already is. The shift towards minimalism as Lithuanian photography approached the 1990s was what interested me particularly. This image by Vytautas Balčytis is made intriguing by the sense of a location with little identity. An image which is somewhere and nowhere at the same time, but is made peculiar and interesting by the strange luminous congregation of light in the centre. Later in my tutorial it was concluded that this is what is lacking in my images. It is inescapable the fact that a camera works by opening a shutter for a few fractions of a second, as such this needs to be reflected in the image, i.e. the photo should be as unique as possible. In the image below, for example, I have tried to condense the opposition of natural and man made elements, and perhaps this is achieved, but I could go to this place tomorrow and take the same photograph. There is nothing human about the image, something as slight as a bird flying past or a piece of paper on the wind gives the image a place in the world. I have noted in previous tutorials the inability to escape this opposition, or perhaps even intertwining, of man-made and natural elements as long as I am in a suburban city like Norwich, and as such this is something I would like to play up to in my photography, but I need a suggestion of humanity. This image for example was praised for the ability of the composition to create some interesting geometric shapes and lead the eye towards the tower block, which of course contain people and gives the location a place in the world. Although I want my photographs to have their location shrouded, they must be rooted in this world and associated with the human. This brings in a sense of narrative as well. The images below for example; the first is spoilt somewhat by the half-inclusion of the sign on the right hand side, but is improved when this is excluded in the image below it and replaced by a man. By introducing a person in the frame we are able to ask questions about where he is going, drawing our attention to composition, but also creating space to construct a narrative as a viewer.

Moving Photographs

2008-11-02T06:55:00.000-08:00

I took these images and videos with little in mind other than the fact the videos had to be very still, that they had to have as little movement as possible so that they might be considered ‘moving photographs’. Upon looking back through what I had photographed I realised there was a sense of man made objects and natural objects playing off one another. This was entirely inadvertent, though it does tie in with themes I have been exploring in my poetry work. Another thing that struck me was that the compositions reminded me of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, in which two men are guided round the perilous Zone. During the journey the men must throw a bolt so that they take a random and unpredictable route through the Zone. This ties in with Situationist theory and the random journey I took earlier in this blog, though these photographs were all taken in familiar locations. I have taken these using a digital camera on a tripod so that the video and its corresponding photograph are the exact same composition.

The rest of the videos can be found here.

The Fiction of the Holiday Photographer

2008-10-23T07:36:00.000-07:00

Seeing as I mentioned it in my previous entry; here is my essay The Fiction of the Holiday Photographer

The Fiction of the Holiday Photographer.

In this essay will examine the holiday photographer in two sections. The first deals with the construction of images in terms of the photographer as an author creating a fiction. I will examine how this is shared and used as a tool to evoke, if not create nostalgia and memory. The second section assesses the value of the photographs we take on trips away; how the way we look at the world is affected in unfamiliar environments. I will question what we deem significant, what we feel is worthy of keeping in our memory through documenting it. Much of what I discuss may be applied to personal documentary photography in general (family photo albums etc), but I have chosen to focus on the holiday photographer as I am interested in how we are affected by unfamiliar environments.
In his essay The Tourist Gaze, John Urry notes that ‘There is no single tourist gaze,’ (1990: 1) indeed everybody looks at the world in different ways. I will be referring to my own recent three month trip to Budapest and the photographs my companions and I took there, this is to avoid generalisation and because I feel drawing on personal experience will help illustrate my arguments in a more articulate manner.

Authorship and Fiction

Barthes describes the photographer as an ‘operator’ (1980: 9) in a rather dismissive manner, but for this essay I shall give the photographer more artistic merit in referring to him as the author. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word author as ‘the writer of a book or article.’ (2001: 52) Both the author and photographer use signs to create a narrative, the holiday photographer is an author writing the story of his experiences. This narrative, despite being representational of real events, is one I shall refer to as fictitious because holiday photographs, as much as any other genre of photography, are constructed with an intended reading, or one personal to the author. As Barthes explains, ‘Pictures become a kind of writing as soon as they are meaningful: like writing, they call for a lexis.’ (1957: 110) Photographs are a text which demand to be read as much as books, each with their own mythology, each with their own narrative.
The narrator of a photographic image is not the photographer. Where the author of a story uses a narrator as a device to frame what we are told through inclusion and exclusion of details, we can equate this to the photographer’s composition of an image. The holiday photographer has a duty to ‘construct idealised images which beautify the object being photographed’ (Urry 1990: 139), he also has the task of ensuring nothing creeps into his narrative that might contrast or undermine this beauty. Drawing on a personal example: we arrived in Budapest during the tail end of a bitter winter and I took a photograph of a friend of mine standing on a frozen lake. The actuality of the situation was that the lake had dried up and my friend was stood on a large frozen puddle surrounded by dirt and rubbish. As such the holiday photographer is an author of fiction, framing what he wants an audience to see.

This brings me to the holiday self-portrait. It is a contradiction in as much as the subject has asked somebody to photograph him (it is unusual to see the holiday photographer with a tripod and shutter release button), with something he deems significant, yet it is a self-portrait as the subject (who is incidentally also the author) has arranged the composition. The person who releases the shutter is not the author; Barthes’ notion of the operator seems more appropriate in this context. The holiday self-portrait then, creates a kind of meta-photography in which the author of the piece is involved in it.

Although I have described these photos as fiction, we generally believe photographs to be ‘true’ as we would believe the definition of a word in the dictionary. Liz Wells proposes that photography’s ‘authority [is], founded in realism, [and] has come to be taken for granted in the interpretation of images made through the lens.’ (Wells, 1997) As such, photographs become the definition of a trip away and create proxy-memories for ourselves and others. For example, there is a photograph of me aged two outside a hospital on the day my sister was born, something I could not possibly remember, yet I feel as though I can remember it vividly. This is perhaps because I am familiar with the sensations of each paradigm that makes up the image: I know what grass feels like, I know what the drink in my hand tastes like, etc. Whereas there may be a dim memory in the back of my mind, it is illuminated by the photograph, constructing a proxy-memory.
Thus is the importance of the holiday photograph, it will outlast our genuine memories and build new, idealistic ones. This is the reason we construct our holiday photos to tell a fairy tale narrative of our trips to utopia. It will not do for the holiday photographer to be seen to be having a bad time. Digital photography has become an excellent tool for the holiday photographer, as he can see the image immediately and if it is not ideal take it again. This means any genuine emotion that may have been contained in the original image could have faded by the fourth or fifth take. To use an example which also draws on the meta-photographic self-portrait; I was in a park recently and a holiday photographer asked a friend to photograph her under a blossom tree. The author went to great lengths to gather up blossom petals and throw them in the air so she could be seen in a beautiful whirlwind of blossom on a sunny day. The photograph had to be re-taken at least three times by my count before the author was satisfied with the image. In between poses the author was frustrated that her perfect image was eluding her, but as she threw the handfuls of blossom she would beam.
I must note at this point that the sole motivation of the holiday photographer is not merely the construction of memories. Along with the actual experience of holidays comes an aspect of ownership. ‘To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power.’ (Sontag: 1977) We have a tendency to put almost as much value in the photographs we take on trips away as the actual experience itself because it is a way in which we can own the experience. ‘Not to ‘go away’ is like not possessing a car or a nice house’ (Urry 1990: 4); holiday photography provides us with proof of experiences, they are objects we accumulate to attain a certain social status. Holiday photographs can be displayed and shown off in much the same way we might brag about a new car.

Significance and Familiarity

The holiday photograph is an immensely personal artefact. Barthes talks of the arresting value of photographs as either studium or punctum (1980: 26). Studium is the combination of two or more opposing units, which Barthes feels can stir interest, invite a reading but only ever be assessed as good or bad. Barthes feels we cannot love an image without the element which he describes as punctum, the ‘accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’. The holiday photograph is generally composed of two units, a person with something of beauty or interest. They are opposing units because the person is outside their usual environment; this is the level on which we can make a reading at the studium level. The punctum of the image however, is derived from the personal experiences and history of the reader. The combination of opposing units, the overall syntagm, has the potential to contain the spark which ignites nostalgia and memory. Generally with holiday photography this is something that only the author, or perhaps other people who may have been present at the creation of the image experience.
For example, during my trip a friend who came to visit took a photograph of me and two of my companions in a café looking quite worse for wear. I would go as far as to say this would not arrest any viewer on a studium level. There is no peculiarity in the image, no juxtaposition, even the composition is nothing worth mentioning. This photo is perhaps the epitome of the throw-away digital snap, a thoughtless push of a button. My experience however, causes the overall syntagm to have a punctum effect on me. This is because I know the entire history surrounding the photo; the night before, the feeling sitting in a café on a sweltering day, that I booked in for a tattoo moments after the photograph was taken. This careless act has the punctum effect, the accident that pricks me comes from my personal history and a random, brief moment in time holds in it a powerful resonance. Barthes’ notion of punctum is independent of the artistic value or intended reading of any given piece, it is solely based on the personal history of the reader.

Photographs are documents explaining who we have been and what we have done; they are part of the definition of our past. Wells describes ‘the time-specific characteristic of the photograph. It deals with what was, regardless of whether the terms or conditions continue to obtain.’ I would go further and say the purpose of the holiday photo, or indeed the family album is to document the fact these terms and conditions have not obtained. We would not photograph something mundane or a daily occurrence as this documents the fact we have not changed as people, that we have not progressed. We need these documents as assurance we are making the best of our lives, that we have changed.

Urry describes the experience of trips away as to ‘gaze upon or view a set of different scenes, of landscapes or townscapes which are out of the ordinary.’ (1990: 1) With the spreading of globalisation the make-up of cities is becoming more and more uniform. Plato puts forward the notion that every physical thing is a unique object in its own right, that the labels and stratas we apply to objects are only forms. This can be seen in cities; Budapest and London, for example, are both defined as cities, yet are completely different places. Plato describes the similarities in form as their ness. London and Budapest are individual places, but both retain the idea of cityness. When we visit a new place we seek to look beyond this idea of cityness and notice the acute differences in the make-up of cities. These are the things we feel the need to document, as such what we deem significant is determined by our level of familiarity.
On my trip to Budapest I was fascinated by the architecture. The buildings in the area I was staying in bore resemblance to Parisian architecture, but were cracked and peeling, there were bullet holes in the walls. When I arrived in Budapest I was looking at her with a romantic gaze brought on by my unfamiliarity and felt the need to photograph everything. I live in a built up area of England, in a terraced Victorian house, which may well be an interesting architectural artefact but I see it every day of my life. I am familiar with it and as such any charm or beauty that may fall on foreign gazes is lost on me. I stayed in Budapest for three months and as my stay lengthened the frequency and volume of photographs I took diminished. This is because what I deemed significant changed due to my familiarity.
There is a balance in the unfamiliar romantic gaze in which we can notice truly intriguing or beautiful scenes on one end of the scale, and on the other; we can over romanticise. Trips away are ‘one of the defining characteristics of ‘being modern,’’ (Urry, 1990: 3) it is the ultimate leisure activity. The holiday maker is determined to have a good time, to see something beautiful, this is what gives him an over romanticised view of his experiences. As I mentioned earlier, it is not the business of the holiday photographer (or perhaps the documentary photographer in general) to take photographs of things that will not change. Upon my arrival in Budapest I was affected by this over-romanticised gaze and took a photograph of myself cooking in the kitchen of the apartment I was in. The value of this photograph diminished every time I used the kitchen, to the degree that by the end of the trip the photograph held no value at all. Had I been on a shorter trip, perhaps when looking back on it Barthes’ punctum may have flown out of the photograph and tugged on my attention and memories with the nostalgia I had hoped when constructing the photograph.

In conclusion, it is said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder but true beauty is more than that, it arrests all senses. During my stay in Budapest I walked home every night over a bridge that crosses the Danube. It looks over the blinking lights of the city, the dramatic and historic statues illuminated from underneath by floodlights, and the silhouette of the parliament building on a bruise-purple sky. In three months it never failed to overwhelm me but I could not bring myself to photograph the view. A photograph is purely representational; it cannot ever fully describe the true experience of scene. This is not to diminish the power of the photograph. Photography has the power to suddenly arrest us, to act as a mental trigger and remind us of who we have been and what we have done, whether images are idealised or not. The photograph of me in the café will prick the skin where my tattoo is every time I look at it, it has permanent resonance. The photograph of my friend standing on the frozen lake, or the tourist with the blossom may well be staged, but the truth and the constructed-truth are equally entertaining realities.

The Potential of Photography and the Gallery Space

2008-10-23T06:50:00.000-07:00

Looking through a book called “Art Now” I came to a page about Andreas Gursky, whose work I’ve always enjoyed, and part of the text really stood out; this idea that he ‘draws attention to the camera itself, which is still able to capture the individual while the bare eye has long failed to do so.’ This is what I was concerned with in Budapest, the idea that we do not notice these everyday peculiarities or fragments of beauty. There is a photograph Gursky took of a valley in which he did not notice a group of hikers until he was printing the photograph. The power of realist art is getting us to notice these things the human eye often fails to. To condense this idea; realist art is the utilisation of composition, to frame what is already there in order to shine light on its beauty.

In my work last year there was a lot of focus on art being situated outside the gallery walls, that the gallery should not be an exclusive space, it should be out in the environment, however my work this year is to be created specifically for presentation at the degree show and as such this will affect the way in which I present my ideas and findings. Because my work this year is being created for a show I am forced to explore the potential of the gallery space and what I can do with representational forms. In an essay I wrote entitled ‘The Fiction of the Holiday Photographer’ I questioned photography’s ability to capture beauty, in response to this and to my previous visual project I want to see just how close photography can take us to beauty. There is a paradox here – on the one hand I have suggested that we need beauty to be framed, composed, pointed out to us; yet on the other hand I have suggested that representational forms cannot do this. I am put in a situation where I am prohibited by the fact that my work must be presented in a gallery space, but at the same time this is the challenge, to explore the potential of photography.

At the moment I have this vision;

Three identical television screens (or monitors of some description) showing the same composition, but presented in different ways.

The first acts as a light box, illuminating a still image printed on acetate.

The second is a light box as well, but the photograph has been taken on a long exposure so there is some suggestion of movement.

The third is the composition filmed with no camera movement.

All the images are the exact same composition, taken on the same tripod and, as much as possible, in the same space of time.

This is just a rough idea for the exploration of the form at the minute, something I can use as a starting point.

Alchemy

2008-10-15T10:04:00.000-07:00

Alchemy was the Medieval forerunner to chemistry primarily concerned with discovering a process of turning base metals into gold. The term was used by Charles Simic as a metaphor for Josephs Cornell’s process of rummaging through junk shops to accumulate a mass of peculiar objects, which he would use to create curious little compositions in small boxes. In his introduction to ‘Dime-Store Alchemy, The Art of Joseph Cornell’ Simic explains Cornell’s methods then modestly states that in writing about his compositions he ‘hoped to emulate his way of working…’ I would argue that this idea of alchemy is prevalent in all of Simic’s work. Simic’s poems are compositions pieced together from scraps of everyday life, where there is always a familiar artefact, something tangible to which we can relate, though it is not uncommon to see this situated next to some oddity. These peculiarities in Simic’s work, like Cornells have been ‘shuffled… together [until] they composed an image that pleased him’

Poetry at every stage is an uncertain chemical reaction. A combination of elements on a page might take a lot of drafting before the poet is happy with it and then who is to say the elements will come together to create gold when it is read by an audience? This is what they call ‘context’. Poetry, and all art is like alchemy; an imperfect science which is effected heavily by context.

Task #1

There is a junk shop on Magdalen Street I must have walked past over a hundred times, but never been inside. As a response to the methods of Joseph Cornell and Sohpie Calle, I intend to make my way to said shop using, as much as possible, roads I have never walked down before and try to find a few interesting objects. This is not as a means of imitation, rather using the methods of other artists to try and inspire a written response as opposed to a visual one.

Familiarity

2008-07-26T04:39:00.000-07:00

In the east by the river
bluebottles and grey pinstripes
swarm the banks.

A boisterous calamity
tumbles over cobblestones.

In the west: closed off by warped
girders and cinder blocks

white ants drip from stalactites
and black ants are blown

by a wind which pulls a cloud
off the sun, a spotlight on the scene:

Hundreds of insects organise themselves
into rows and columns.

Between: a cow floats down stream
and you can hear all the small noises -
the current, your breath, the insects.

............................................

Cages Brambles and poppies
a tongue poking out of cracks
in a concrete mouth.

A single drop of water
an eye on a stalactite
glimmers with light then falls.

Crumpled tarpaulin skin
catches tears
holds on to them.

An empty bird’s nest
inside a wheelbarrow
a heart dismantled gradually by wind.

............................................

A lot of previous work on this blog has attributed defamiliarisation as a catalyst for creativity. There is certainly some weight in this, but on a recent trip to London I noticed a padlock (no larger than a matchbox) had been attached to the Millennium bridge.

During my trip to Hungary I learned the padlock is symbolic of a love that cannot be broken; lovers put the lock in a public place and throw the key away. There is a famous wall of padlocks in Pécs, South Hungary. It is not unheard of for people to travel long distances to attach a lock to the wall at Pécs, to consolidate a marriage.

There is also weight then, in derives to places which we are familiar with. Where every building has a personal history and the smallest thing, even amoung hundreds of people on a busy bridge, can stand out to the familiar gaze and bear such significance.

This week I have planned derives to familiar places in order to hopefully discover a poetry in these alien elements.

Angus Sinclair 26.07.08

Constrained Experience

2008-06-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

“Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image;
everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”
- Karl Marx

Artist Sophie Calle was used as inspiration for a character in Paul Auster’s novel Leviathan. In response to this, Calle asked Auster to create a character for her to step into and live her life in accordance to the boundaries this character imposes on herself. The result of Calle’s project is Gotham Handbook.

The use of tasks, constriction and rules are recurrent in Calle’s work; in her project The Bronx she went to the Fashion Moda Gallery every day between the hours of 2pm and 5pm to ask visitors if they could take her on a journey to somewhere in The Bronx. The collated journeys were presented as photographic documentation accompanied by a brief written account of her journey.

In The Bronx Calle acts merely as a means of transmission; by this I mean there is no sense of authorship in her work, no sense of response to her journey. This gives her work a voyeuristic quality in which those who view her work have no sense of agenda or message imposed by the artist and can read what they like into each small narrative. I feel however, that the project could have been taken further, that Calle might have reacted to her journeys, responded to the experiences of being taken on random trips.

To do this is to touch on the Situationist notion of the dérive: the act of ‘drifting, a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.’ [Debord: 1958] In Debord’s Theory of the Dérive he notes that ‘the dérive includes both… letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities.’ With Calle’s work she is lead, placing her in the middle of this contradiction; on the one hand she has no preconceptions, no history in regards to her journey, yet on the other hand she is being lead by somebody who has ‘deeper motives- the motives of [a] person who journeys into the past, rather than into foreign parts.’ [Benjamin: 1929]

I intend to explore these themes of attachment and dis-attachment, familiarity and unfamiliarity in my poetry by planning a series of my own dérives and experimenting with the aforementioned notion of constrained experience. I hesitate to call this constrained writing; my experiences will determine what I write, but I will impose no restrictions on the actual act of writing. The fruit of these experiences will be documented on this blog. I intend to work alongside other poets and artists with similar interests in accordance to Debord's opinion that a dérive is more productive in the company of others. As I have mentioned previously on this blog, I have found discussing ideas with other collaborators to be inspirational and encourages development through what is almost a sense of one-up-manship.

Angus Sinclair 19.06.2008

Critical Self Appraisal (Laura Elliott)

2008-03-15T07:54:00.000-07:00

Our initial approach to the Word and Image theme was to deconstruct the relationship between them. Our experience of being in Budapest highlighted the separation of word and image through language. The defamiliarisation of words led to a disattachment of the word and its relating object or concept and we wanted to present this in a visually engaging way.

Research on Magritte, Plato, Kosuth and Pierce significantly shaped our creative and critical thinking. However we found it difficult to think of original ways of expressing our ideas that were not directly imitative of the work we had looked at. We felt that the process of applying labels to contradict or undermine familiar objects and scenes was strong and this became a continually developing theme throughout our project. We progressed from handwritten paper labels to Dymo labels which were more authoritative and allowed for spontaneous first impressions, more significant to our ideas. A strength of our final labels is that they remained ambiguous and therefore avoided telling the viewer what to see - their interpretation could be more personal. When working in a public environment this is important as it means that the work is open to everyone.

From a visit to Ecseri Piac we became aware of the use of a frame as a device. This corresponded with ideas we had of bringing tropes of the gallery into the street. We wanted to challenge the sanctity of the gallery and make art public. The combination of frames and labels was a lot stronger than our previous working process as it made the area fixed and therefore bolder and more directive. It was also visually more engaging, creating a dialogue that invites an audience to engage with the work. It’s simplicity made it more effective.

One problem of working in a public environment was how easily the work could be interfered with. For example, if the composition relied on certain objects that were not static, the removal of this object could destroy the piece. However, I liked the risk involved and found it forced me to be more initiative and tested my ability to adapt ideas. Relying on found compositions also presented a problem in that on some occasions we would spend whole days walking and not find anything interesting. This was quite frustrating.

Working in collaboration with another person increased my motivation as we could bounce ideas back and forth and this helped to develop them both faster and in more critical depth. It also increased the opportunities for intervention as one person may spot something that the other may have overlooked. All posts on the blog were written together and this has strengthened the quality of our work through the combination of two perspectives. The blog itself was extremely useful as well as it has made the presentation of our work clearer and more organised.

Our final ’living photographs’ or interventions are a strong end result of a progression of creative thinking. We responded directly to a great deal of other artists work and critical theory and used it to contextualise our ideas, but were careful to produce original work that we were excited about. For the moment I intend to use this project as a starting point for a critical studies essay, but in a more general sense, the concept of making art public has inspired me and I intend to continue working in this way, perhaps even more ambitiously.

Critical Self Appraisal (Angus Sinclair)

2008-03-15T06:40:00.000-07:00

Critical Self Appraisal
Angus Sinclair

Our starting point for the project was simply to explore the theme “Word and Image”. We wanted to focus on the separation of the word and image, paying attention to the fact we were working in an unfamiliar environment (Budapest), with a language barrier between us and the locals.

In tutorial time before our departure, I discussed initial ideas with Graham Giles and Rebecca Wigmore. The discussions concluded that perhaps the strongest way to articulate our ideas were through processes, rather than a single physical object. This has been the main strength of the project I feel. We found a process early on in our labels and honed it and changed it continually, based on influences we encountered in everyday life abroad and research. I feel we responded to research, rather than including it for the sake of it. Rectangle for example, is a direct response to Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs but the process we were using was still uniquely our own, it was not an imitation. We were careful throughout to be influenced by others’ work, but not to imitate it.

I found working with a partner sped up the creative process and having another person to discuss the work with had almost the effect of permanently being in a tutorial situation, where ideas are shaped by others’ perspectives. Where sometimes it is difficult to fully articulate an idea, having a person on the same wavelength as myself meant we could almost finish each others’ ideas. This continual discussion of ideas has given our work a critical depth that might not have come about, or if not have been so fully developed, working alone. This is furthered by the use of our blog, which encourages text and makes it easy to copy and paste research and respond to it. Another advantage of having a partner, is that because our process relies on spotting subtle obscurities that can easily be overlooked, a second perspective means more framing opportunities are likely to be spotted.

In terms of how our work is displayed, I had wanted to display my work for this unit in the street since before I had started it, to oppose the bleached and private spaces often used for visual practices projects. This idea developed further from gallery trips in Budapest, and from suggested reading. The idea of opposing these kind of spaces and our “gallery in the street” is the strong critical backbone of the work and challenges our peers. This is again an example of where we have used an idea as a starting point and honed it through responses to research.

One thing I have learned as part of my Creative Writing degree is to communicate ideas in as simple a way as possible, to continually strip away anything that is not needed for this communication. What our project has achieved is a process of creating simple metaphors. There is just enough in the coupling of our labels and frames to invite a viewer to create a reading. This is surely what any piece of art sets out to achieve. If our process were more complex it would distract from its purpose, if it were more simple it would be ineffective.

Our Final Outcome and Conclusion

2008-03-13T06:38:00.000-07:00

The following are the better interventions we have created. We wish them to be regarded and assessed as works in their own right - as opposed to a piece of photography. The images of our work are only documentation. The weight of our work lies in the trail of frames and labels we have left around the city of Budapest.

Cellar Door & Through the Looking Glass:

Leftovers:

No Sugar:

View Through a Train Window:

Conclusion

We were asked to explore the relationship between the word and the image. Our initial response was destructive; we wanted to separate the word and the image. As we put it, "It is only through recognition that objects and words acquire significance and through interpretation, their meaning. " We wanted to challenge the everyday attachment between the images we see and the labels we attach to them in our minds. We found this difficult to articulate and lacking in depth, so our work took a shift in the opposite direction. We wanted to lead people through the marriage of word and image.

We used labels as a device to contradict and undermine the visual. However, labels alone were not strong enough to demand attention and were easily overlooked. At Ecseri Piac we were struck by the containment of objects within cages and the effect this had on the overall composition - we were able to see artistic value within found assemblages. This related to Louise Bourgeois' Cells. In order to make our observations more potent, we were aware of the need to draw more attention to our found compositions and therefore had to frame what we saw. In the same way the cage acts a device, "frames... create a fixed composition and invite the viewer to see exactly what we have seen."

Additionally, we had a parallel line of exploration that addressed issues to do with the context in which art is displayed, whether in a gallery or in public. We wanted our work to be public but incorporate tropes of the gallery, thereby bringing the gallery into a more open environment. We feel a gallery space is as much a 'frame' as the border around a piece of artwork. In Inside The White Cube: Notes on The Gallery Space, Brian O'Doherty discusses how "We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first". This affects our interpretation of the work and also its accessibility, when we take into account people's preconceptions of the private gallery.

We have chosen to label our work in English because there is something exotic about foreign languages, coupled with the fascination Budapest's inhabitants appear to have with England. A piece of art in a gallery by a German artist would be titled in German, a French artist in French, etc, and so therefore we felt it more appropriate to title our work in English. The majority of Hungarians speak English, so our work is not exclusivist.

The work we have created takes the form of interventions spread around the city of Budapest. In order to present this we have taken photographs for documentation purposes, but it is the actual physical compositions that are the work. What we have created are living photographs within a living gallery, isolating a view and presenting it as art. By placing a frame around the physical thing and giving it a title, the viewer can see exactly what we saw in its real life context and is invited to consider it in a certain way. Jacques Derrida said "There is frame, but the frame does not exist." The frame marks a differance between the inside and the outside of the frame, simply by it's relationship to it.
Although the works are titled, they retain an ambiguity that makes the work more open and the viewer is therefore able to interpret them in their own personal way. This is important because we did not want to tell the viewer what to see, but to suggest that there was something to be seen. We are simply asking people to engage with the environment and works and we feel the process we have used to achieve this is simple yet effective.

Wooster Collective: Watching Banksy

2008-03-13T06:03:00.000-07:00

We came across an article at Wooster Collective about a man who filmed passers by looking at a Banksy piece: here

"For over an hour, Jeremy Gibbs stood across the street from a fresh piece by Banksy on Essex Road and filmed people who stopped to look at the piece and take photos.

What we find to be most important about the video is the diversity of the people who stopped, noticed, and most importantly - appreciated - the work. The video is a terrific testament to the 'value' of street art." WoosterCollective.com

This relates to what we have been exploring in terms of the notion of the gallery. Public art reaches a diverse audience and is stumbled across - the fact the viewer has 'discovered' a piece of art makes it exciting.

Framing the Environment

2008-03-07T10:42:00.000-08:00

In our Propositions post we suggested that "By bringing some aspects of the gallery into the public then you may give some authority to the piece ... and it may therefore be more readily recognised and considered." This has taken the form of framing the environment. Combined with the labeling we have created a series of little invitations around Budapest, invitations to see something more than what the eye is immediately presented with.

Our labels by themselves are subtleties, like the scenes they are attached to, our frames however create a fixed composition and invites the viewer to see exactly what we have seen. This is bolder, more directive and firmer than what we have previously been doing with labels alone.

The labels and the frames are interdependent. Without the frame, the label could easily go unnoticed, while the frame on its own has no title or meaning. The titles of our compositions retain the same ambiguity they have had previously so that the viewer is still invited to derive their own meanings and narratives. We want to avoid telling people what to see, rather we want to suggest how we can become too familiar with our environment and miss everyday oddities and beauty.

The rest of our frames are in with our Urban Labels images at Flickr (near the end)

The Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art

2008-03-04T05:28:00.001-08:00

Gusztáv Hámos and Katja Pratschke - Transposed Bodies. Hámos and Pratschke use 294 photographs to tell a surreal story which explores and questions our physical versus our mental attractions to people. The narrative is only in a rough chronological order and some of the photographs are supported by short sentences, "Jan's father was a butcher" for example. This makes the narrative more difficult to understand and as such the viewer (or indeed reader) is forced to really engage with the piece in order to fully understand it.

Bertien Van Manen - Give Me Your Image. Give Me Your Image explores the private display of images. Van Manen takes photographs of photographs in their found environment. Most of them were from within Eastern European immigrant family homes. The series makes a statement about the importance of photography, about sentimentality and nostalgia. Van Manen's photographs are not important because they are displayed in a gallery, they are a visual anthropology - 'With the advances of digital or mobile-phone camera technology, this means of keeping private photos and retaining memories and histories is slowly disappearing'. This is particularly pertinent to our work because it is placing every day scenes in an artistic context, creating a composition amongst normailty.

Accidental Decollage.

2008-03-04T05:04:00.000-08:00

Whilst applying the urban labels we became aware of some areas in which posters and flyers had been torn from the walls and this had resulted in some really interesting collage/decollage effects. It made us think of the Thoughtless Acts images, but perhaps in this case is more unconscious than thoughtless. Any composition that we have found within the decollage is totally accidental, to anyone else it may be entirely insignificant.

In some of the images we have applied urban labels such as 'Collage with Paper and Glass' which instantly announces it as art rather than fly posting. This piece in particular was also framed and mounted above the ground thereby adding to the gallery intonations.

This particular group of images vary slightly from the labels we have previously been applying. Though this is an interesting new way of looking at our environment and could develop in a more creative way, I am not sure whether it is as effective as the more straightforward urban labels.

The rest of the images can be found on Flickr.

Through the Eyes of a Child

2008-03-03T09:40:00.000-08:00

Today our labels had a child-like quality. This was initially accidental, but upon reflection entirely appropriate. Children are inevitably more receptive to their environment through a lack of experience. Even in our context - being in a foreign cityscape - a child has fewer preconceptions and is able to absorb more of the environment than an adult. Their thinking is less constrained by experience and familiarity and they are therefore more playful in their gaze. Through familiarity parts of our environment become invisible, but to a child everything is new. By labeling the familiar as something else, it is transformed and we have reverted back to the youthful gaze, more inquisitive and creative.

Labels like "Sand Pit" also create a contrast or an irony. By putting a child-like label on a dirty unkempt environment we are challenging its state. This in itself is childish - to boldly ask questions with no tact whatsoever.

The rest of today's images are in the Urban Labels section of our Flickr

Urban Labels

2008-02-26T11:17:00.000-08:00

Our thinking has moved in another new direction. We are now looking at the idea of the urban gallery in a 'found' context. By titling every day scenes they are put in an artistic context and given significance. This has included creating puns or enticing a line of thought through loaded, yet ambiguous words. The 'significance' of labeling a scene invites the public to become defamiliarised with their environment, to remove themselves from a scene and become reacquainted with the city. Being visitors in Budapest gives us a different outlook on the city and there is much we notice that perhaps the residents takes for granted. We have also taken photographs bought from the Ecseri Piac and paired them as diptychs to invite a narrative or relationship. This effect is furthered by leading and loaded language applied at the scene.

Art in a gallery context is permanent. It is an asset, continually sold, presented and represented in a bleached environment. Our project is temporary, almost disposable and challenges the price tags put on art in galleries. It means a piece can only be viewed for a limited amount of time before it is eroded, destroyed, vandalised, stolen etc. It also means that it can be added to and interacted with by the general public. However, this freedom and open environment can also be the downfall of a piece, for example when we were sticking the words 'The Apology' to the ground, our original composition was destroyed as it relied on the presence of a cart which was removed by the shopkeeper because it was closing time. We therefore had to adapt and change our original idea.

The main difference between what we are doing now and how we were previously working is that our connections between visual imagery and words is more instantaneous. Whereas before we were taking photographs and adding language to them later upon revision, now we are applying language (written and visual) to the environment as we find it. This is a much more spontaneous way of working and means that we are more alert to our surroundings and our connections between word and image are based more on first impressions. This means we don't always necessarily have our own interpretation on the 'meaning' of a piece. The weight of our work is in the ambiguity of the labels and the meaning is created by the viewer. Ultimately this can make the piece more personal (see Propositions entry ).

The rest of today's images can be found on Flickr.

Thoughtless Acts

2008-02-22T06:59:00.000-08:00

"The images in Thoughtless Acts organize evidence of our subconscious engagement with the world and the objects and spaces that define it. The photos define a small universe of action, a taxonomy: reacting, adapting, co-opting, etc. Ways we engage thoughtlessly."

This line of thinking has entered into our work in as much as finding significance or beauty (as we have previously put it) in the scenes and objects found at the Ecseri Piac. Not only this, but looking at the way we interact and use our environment, the almost appropriated ergonomics of a place, and treating it as art. Above a clothes rail has been used to frame an image. There is nothing to have stopped anyone seeing this scene for themselves, perhaps in the live context it is something we would miss, but by documenting it in this way it is given importance.

Willie Doherty - Same Difference

2008-02-22T06:40:00.000-08:00

This is just a quick cut and paste reference to Willie Doherty's gallery installation, Same Difference. It is relevant to the ideas that we are exploring.

'On 19th November the British Government imposed the Broadcast Media Ban on Sinn Fein and seven other proscribed Republican and Loyalist organisations. The ban was justified at the time as a necessary measure to starve the IRA of the oxygen supply of publicity.
However in the absence of media exposure the IRA has not disappeared and the media has become the site where long-standing and entrenched attitudes are reinforced and go unchallenged on a daily basis. This comes at a time when the IRA has escalated its campaign in Britain and Europe and is intent on sickening British public opinion, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, ‘Bringing it home’.

Same Difference, Willie Doherty’s new work for Matt’s Gallery, is a slide projection piece with text, which uses four projectors, projecting a static image with changing text onto two of the gallery walls.

Same Difference uncovers the emotive use of language which surrounds the media image of Ireland and the IRA in the propaganda war for hearts and minds. This work attempts to break the silence of the media ban, which as a solution ends up evading the very issues which have caused it to be a problem in the first place.'

Ecseri Piac - Waiting

2008-02-22T05:55:00.000-08:00

This is a poem that came out of my visit to Ecseri Piac. It was written for my poetry portfolio, but is obviously relevant to my visual work as well. Our next stage in the project is to apply words to the photographs and postcards we bought from the Piac, as well as to our own photographs. It would be interesting to try to blend the work we are creating in poetry with our visual project.

Waiting

I rode a red 54
away from the city’s saturated

colour to the faded outskirts.
It began to snow.

I found a guitar
in the rubble
of Ecseri Piac
and sliced my finger
on the rusty top E.
‘For decoration’

This place
is: a gas mask,
a machine gun,
car parts,
a rocking horse,
medals, photographs,
confiscated violins
lined up in silence.

Ephemera,
tessellated and locked
inside a cage.

Angus

Louise Bourgeois: Cells

2008-02-22T03:45:00.001-08:00

Louise Bourgeois
Uploaded by vodeo

We both visited the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Tate Modern in December/January. One of the most memorable features of the exhibition were the cages or 'cells'. They evoked a strong sense of place and atmosphere and were extremely emotive. A contradiction is created by putting personal objects inside a cage, locking them away, yet they are displayed in a public gallery. The artist is exposing her deeper emotions whilst making it clear that it is still not for the viewer to participate. In this way the viewer can be seen as voyeuristic or even forced to become a voyeur. In some of the installations the viewer has to go inside the piece in order to see the contents, but even then is still stopped from getting too close.

By constructing a cage around the objects and sculptures, by incorporating it into the piece, the insides of the cage become significant. The cage acts as a device, symbolically and metaphorically of entrapment by the external world, as much as a guard against it. During our visit to Ecseri Piac, we were struck by the remnants of a broken nation. Because the market was only partly open, many of the stalls were closed and their contents locked away in cages, though still on display. The resemblance to the works of Louise Bourgeois was striking and we took photographs to document this.

In effect Bourgeois' cells and the Ecseri Piac cages are the same thing, only in different contexts. The Ecseri Piac cages are people's personal affects, locked away while on public display, as much as Bourgeois' cells are. Further than this, there is a melancholy atmosphere surrounding the Piac because we are aware these affects are to be sold off. The main difference between Lousie Bourgeois' cells and the cages at Ecseri is that whereas Bourgeois has deliberately arranged the items within the cage to intentionally portray an emotion and evoke a response, the Ecseri cages were constructed through practicality and any effects upon the viewer are accidental.

However, this also poses the question of attributing significance to an art piece simply because it is in a gallery environment. What makes the cages at Ecseri any less significant or artistic? I think that in a way they could be considered more so because they are accidentally beautiful, less contrived, and are haunting through their context in reality and social and historical relevance.

Lost and Found

2008-02-18T09:21:00.000-08:00

Today we came across some unexpected inspiration from a flea market on the outskirts of Budapest. Being a Monday it was partially closed and the sense of distance it gave - the closed doors, the caged off articles, the language barriers between the merchants and ourselves- was immensely photogenic. This, coupled with the discovery of a box of old postcards and photographs, has pushed our interests towards photography. Not just from the aspect of taking, but also finding photographs. We have been interested in some critical essays regarding photography and the significance of photographs, but that will be a post in itself. Rather than creating sculpture and undermining it with language we are now interested in achieving the same effect with photography. Previously the language we had been interested in were concrete nouns, after a discussion today we have decided there is more depth in abstract nouns and adjectives. For example words like dark and love are more leading.

The rest of today's images are over at Flickr and there are more to follow.

Propositions

2008-02-17T09:57:00.000-08:00

So far, our project has revolved around questioning form and language and the relationships between words and images. This has progressed further into questioning the nature of art and its context, whether in a gallery or in a more public environment. Up to this point we have been using labels and tags to demonstrate our thinking. To take this further we would like to be confrontational - rather than suggesting at contradictions and separations between physical objects and spoken or written language, we want to outright challenge this.

Rather than labeling every day objects we wish to create objects and challenge or undermine a conventional reading of them. For example, a crafts enthusiast might make a plane from matchsticks, but it is not really a plane, it is a representation of a plane, embodying planeness. One idea that we have is to make sculptures or assemblages out of found objects. For example, if we were to construct a pyramid using glass bottles, the overall composition would take the form of a pyramid but would in fact still just be bottles. We could then title this as 'glass' or 'bottles', thereby any notion of art derived from the whole will be constructed by the audience. If we have said it is simply 'glass' and they see anything more then the interpretation lies with them and therefore the art is created by the audience. Obviously this is quite simple, but could be developed by creating larger, more complex sculptures and title them with a list of all the components or ingredients used to make it. You can also do this to undermine everyday objects such as a lighter by listing its separate parts eg. plastic, gas, spring, flint, etc. In this way you can potentially reduce something beautiful to something more mathematical and less exciting. 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder'.

Another idea we have is to use words to create sculpture or compositions. However, the words used would need to be chosen specifically for the purpose because the they will ultimately affect the interpretation of the piece. For example, using leading words such as pain or dark could either reinforce or contradict the intended meaning and therefore would have to be carefully considered. Visual puns can be created purposefully in this way; for example making a lamp using the word dark. This is quite an easy concept however and we would like to explore it in more depth.

We are also interested in the idea of the gallery. We want to question the notion of the gallery by creating our own forms of gallery or exhibition in public spaces. We do not want to create art that is street or gallery oriented. Instead we want to combine the two to make a hybrid. By taking tropes of a gallery context into an outside environment, you bring the two together. It is not enough to create street art and expect it to be acknowledged, equally it is not necessarily true that all art within a gallery context deserves acknowledgment. If we are questioning and perhaps undermining the objects we create, this needs to be applied to the context in which they are shown. If we saw a strange animal we wouldn't know what to call it, but if it had four legs and a tail we might say it looks like a dog. This relates to Plato's dogness again. If we saw a sculpture on the street made out of junk we might ignore it, but if it had a red rope around it and a placard next to it (if it had galleryness about it) then it might receive some attention. By bringing some aspects of the gallery into the public then you may give some authority to the piece (you also may not but that is another debate) and it may therefore be more readily recognised and considered.

This is just a record of ideas - now we will create.

The Gallery or The Street

2008-02-13T09:30:00.000-08:00

The top eight photographs were taken in a courtyard outside Csendet Kerunk. The artwork was all anonymous . The ninth photograph down is of Vaszary Janos's Nude in Studio taken at the Hungarian National Gallery. The final photograph is part of a public design project 'Design a Cow' and was found in the commercial district of Budapest.

We have included these photographs as a consideration of the differences between public and private art. We want to make our art public because it is more exciting when you bump into art. When art is displayed in a gallery context, such as the Vaszary exhibition, it is only going to be seen by a select audience, people who have chosen to view it in this environment. Street art however is more accessible and open to a much wider spectrum of people. We believe that art should have complex thinking behind it but be presented in a simple way so that it is not inaccessible. Many people are put off by the stigma attached to galleries and are therefore less inclined to make the effort to visit them. The gallery environment is often sterile and silent, and appeals to a majority audience of middle class, educated people. Art should be more widespread, free from constraints and inclusive. You should not need an invitation to see it. If art is displayed publicly in the street or in parks or on buildings then it is unavoidable and thus has the potential to be more confrontational and have more of an impact.

We are interested in creating public art as part of our project. So far we have explored this in a very subtle way but we would like to be more blatant with our ideas and creative actions. This is more than art; it is part of a movement to invade consciousness and challenge existing ideology and stereotypes surrounding creative thinking and methods of display.

Magritte, Plato, Kosuth and Pierce.

2008-02-13T06:50:00.000-08:00

The top image is René Magritte's The Treachery of Images. The text reads "This is not a pipe" and indeed it is not - it is a representation of a pipe.

Plato's theory of forms are developed in a similar way, proposing that there is no such thing as a pipe at all; every single physical thing exists in it's own right. There is what we consider to be the form of a pipe but there is no real pipe, only pipeness. The physical, changing appearance of the pipe (for example) is described as its Substance. This presents 'The problem of the universals - how can one thing in general be many things in particular'? Plato solved this by 'presuming that Form was a distinct singular thing but caused plural representations of itself in particular objects'. Form is the essence of the object, what characteristics accumulated cause it to be that object. Therefore a pipe as an object can be a pipe, a drawing or photograph can be a pipe, and words describing a pipe may also be a pipe.

Joseph Kosuth presents this literally in One and Three Chairs. This shows us that language is not as black and white as word and definition. The viewer is presented with the idea that all three representations are chairs, but perhaps that only one of them is truly a chair. The Oxford dictionary definition of the word chair is offered to us to imply that words and images are two entirely separate things. This is what we have been attempting to show in our work. Word and image are signs that are connected through an interpreter. As Pierce explains:

"(semiosis is) cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs."

It is only through recognition that objects and words acquire significance and through interpretation, their meaning. The differences between language can fragment this reality or meaning and cause the familiar to be unrecognisable, for example in written and spoken language the connections between objects and their labels can be lost and distorted. This is what we are exploring initially in this project.

Initial ideas

2008-02-09T07:51:00.001-08:00

We have been asked to explore the links between the word and the image. The extra dimension to this exploration is that we are working out of Budapest, Hungary. This presents us with a language barrier on a day to day basis, putting us at a distance from spoken and written language.

What we are interested in looking at is the separation of the word and image.

Ferdinand de Saussure said: "A sign is the basic unit of language (a given language at a given time). Every language is a complete system of signs. Parole (the speech of an individual) is an external manifestation of language."

What we have begun to attempt to do as you shall see below is remove the links between written language and the image. We want to emphasise the separation between (spoken and written) languages and the alienation of being in an unfamiliar environment, ultimately portraying our feelings of defamiliarisation through methods of deconstruction and disattachment.

By labelling everyday, familiar objects with random nouns (both English and Hungarian), the object is undermined and reality contradicted. Attention is drawn to the connections between words and images and a statement is made about the familiar transforming into the unfamiliar.

See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23636788@N06/ and the below video for progress.