12/2016
The Forgotten Communication Tool (extract)
It was once easy for us to draw without fear; when we were very small the pencil was the first tool we used to make traces of our actions and thoughts. When we grew up a bit we created forms from lines and shapes that resembled things that we didn’t have to look at to understand. We remembered what happened yesterday and drew the significant people and places, the neighbour’s dogs and characters from our favourite films. We made things up, they didn’t have to exist in real life for us to know them and draw them as well as the hidden areas of our back gardens. We created our own fictional worlds and safe spaces with pencils and yet now they can appear to us as tools to be feared. Just like our handwriting, our speech and our knowledge we are meant to have progressed away from our basic foundations; drawing is regarded as a skill and upon reaching a certain age it is expected that we can draw something that resembles a common understanding of reality. When we are unable to we often develop a negative relationship to drawing, we are frustrated by our inabilities and are jealous of others who seem to have this ‘talent’ that we were simply not born with.
For some this negative relationship to drawing doesn’t stop them from building a positive relationship to other forms of art and art making, but for many it does. By bringing artistic practices into communities that are not formed through the commonality of art, it becomes clear that one of the main reasons for a lack of engagement is based on concerns regarding technical skill. The excuse “I can’t draw” as a reason for non-participation seems far too common to be ignored; abilities to make or create art, whatever form it takes, appear undeniably bound with expectations of graphical mastery.
And yet we’re on phones to our Internet providers and whilst talking through the options we hold a pen in our hand and it moves across the newspaper. We don’t think, but we draw. We draw circle shapes around the headlines and fill in the gaps but it doesn’t mean anything. We’re not drawing, we’re just scribbling. We don’t even acknowledge that the possibility to draw or scribble is helpful in this situation, that it’s allowing us to process what they’re saying on the other end of the phone or that it’s calming us down as they speak of the rising costs of 4G broadband. Because drawing is so grounded in these ideas of innate artistic talent and technical skill, many are hesitant to find any value whatsoever in their thoughtless scribbles.
Full text: world-anthropology-collective.com/2017/01/05/drawing-forgotten-communication-tool/
06/09/2016
15 minutes free writing - a mobile object
It reaches down below the ground at least it thinks it's the ground at least maybe it cannot yet be sure.
It grows and strengthens with each tiny stretch, it gets bigger but it's not really sure where it's going yet, at least I'm not sure that it's sure that it knows where it's going yet.
We are not friends right now you see; I did not select it or choose it out of a wide selection of similar beings. It was chosen for me, and my job is now to maintain it, to watch it and to encourage it on its journey upwards and outwards. It is a process that runs in real time but the change can only be witnessed every once in a while, every few days and not every second. I must be patient, and I cannot speed it up; there is nothing I can do except give it what it wants. Maybe the plant doesn't want to get much bigger, perhaps it is happy just being the size that it is. But it has no choice, it cannot stop growing even if it wants to stop growing. It is not in control of its conditions. At least if I want to stop growing I can do something about it, I can run outside of real time. I can sleep to try and forget, to regress, to diminish, if that's what I want. It must be very hard to be out of control of your own growing, but we do seem to forget about the water.
Perhaps the water and the life within it knows what it best; maybe it just wants you to reach your full potential and you're just there, sitting there, trying to fight it.
Maybe once the plant gives up and gives in to the water and the spreading of roots it will be happy with how things look in the end. Maybe it will resent itself and want to go back to when things were small and it didn't have as much to cope with, but maybe it will be worth reaching out as far as it can reach to find the things worth reaching for.
10/07/2016
I'll never forget that time when I locked the door at 5am.
I slowly pushed the keys through my neighbour's letterbox, just like she told me, and I heard the dampened jangle of them falling to the floor on the other side.
I turned to walk down the stairs but the door opened suddenly. It was like she was waiting.
"Goodbye" she said as she looked at me in her nightgown, the lights of her apartment glowing warmly in the background. She had a look of sad grief and I will never be sure why.
29/04/2016
Unlearning
By looking back on the times where things might be uncertain, we forget the events that never happened or maybe will happen on this train.
We forget the writings of stories to visualise different areas we pass through and we cannot describe the events that may or may not have taken place there.
There might have been three trees standing around a lake but we cannot know that yet.
There might have been a small red boat floating gently in the middle of the lake and it might have been a sunny day, but then again it might have been cloudy and grey. There might have been rain.
There might have been a thick dark forest of tall trees and maybe the trees will be cut down one day soon. The trees do not know that yet and maybe they have already been cut, the trees will not know and it will only hurt a little bit while they sleep. The train doesn't know either, it just moves at a leisurely pace through them. We know that the trees have been cut down in the past to make way for the train, maybe this will happen again for a different reason. We see some yellow tractors with large trailers but we can only assume the worst, perhaps the process started long ago or maybe it is just about to begin.
There might have been three old ladies sitting on the other side of the train completing their magazine crosswords with glasses perched at the very end of their noses. Maybe they got some of the words wrong, maybe they don't know how to spell something. Perhaps she got her phone out to check the spelling of that last word and maybe it had too many letters to fit in the gap. She might deeply exhale through the small opening in her pursed pink lips. She stands up and makes a heart shape with her wrinkled hands to the man outside, I think the man will make the same shape back to her. He blows elaborate heartfelt kisses and waves as the train slowly pulls away from the platform. While she takes her seat he begins walking back to the stairs, his eyes fixed on the window where he saw her last. He might smile and sigh as he walks up the stairs, his emotional blindness causing him to miss the last step and trip on it. Maybe he falls down the stairs and sprains his right wrist trying to catch his own weight, maybe he falls into another man and causes a comical domino effect down the staircase, maybe he is able to reach the top unscathed. Maybe he then walks to the car with a limp and finds a parking ticket, maybe that's the reason he's angry. Or maybe it is someone else that she's on the phone to right now and someone else that she is trying her very best to calm down. We cannot know that yet.
She looks out to the trees that do not yet know their own sleeping pains and the small red boat passes by in the distance.
We try to remember where the train is taking us but it seems we have already forgotten.
04/2016
On the Unremarkable Similarities Between Birds
In the summer garden we raced to the swings. The grass was always more moss than grass and it was springy and spongy under our feet as we ran across it. We were there, you and I, sitting on our personal plastic platforms, and we clung on tightly to the white plaited ropes that smelt distinctly of horse and softly burnt our hands. We leant back as far as we dared and closed our eyes.
We would bet on:
- Whether there would be any birds when we opened our eyes
- If there were birds when we opened our eyes, how many of them there would be
- How many birds were in the sky and how many were in the tree.
The kind of birds we saw really did not matter, and it would be wrong of me to tell you that it did. Just seeing any kind of bird was better than seeing no bird at all.
17/02/2016
I go on a photography tour of an Indian city. There is a huge central square filled with people holding saws and trying to saw off the cameras of the tourists when they are not looking. I hide my camera in my clothes and pick up an abandoned saw so that I didn't look like a tourist. Next door to the square was a sort of theme park where the whole park was based around one ride. You sit in the rollercoaster and it takes you around a magical fictional fantasy land. You go underwater and swim with a giant squid, and suddenly you are eaten by a dinosaur. The landscape is incredible, and your journey is influenced by made up characters and situations. I take a lot of photos and feel excited to see the end result, but when I open up my camera once I have finished the film I only see the pitted green olives that I ate last night. The images have developed within the holes of the olives but they are far too small to be able to really see anything.
12/02/2016
At their wedding he put a plastic mouse on the organist’s chair; he asked if we could hear the foxes. He made dirty jokes to the waitresses and told the doctor it would probably be “for the best” if he just left the room - “we can accomplish more without him”.
He poured on the condensed milk liberally, and finished it all off with a heavy-handed sprinkling of salt. He used to look up from the bowl with porridge in his moustache and meet our giggles, I think now his gaze just gets a bit lost along the way.
10/02/2016
I was asked to write the date in the book but I wrote it down wrong.
I wear the gloves and choose between plastic and fabric. I choose the plastic and small drops of condensation slowly begin to form on my fingertips.
He had drawn the boat perfectly, and there was a written key describing what the different rooms were. It was all in pencil and he made fingerprints on the flimsy calendar paper. He didn’t have to wear any gloves.
09/02/2016
Your day could not handle you; it dropped you head first on to the floor and walked out of the door to find someone else. It did not want to be your day and it gave you no choice in this. It did not want to behave, it did not want you to do what you wanted to do, it did not agree with your plans.
It stopped being your day the moment it happened. There was perhaps a small window of opportunity where it would have stuck with you to the end, but it gave up, it was sick of you, it wanted to be someone else’s day instead.
I bet somewhere, wherever they are, maybe they are just down the corridor or maybe they are much further away, I bet they are having the best time with their day. Maybe they needed it more than you did; maybe this was somehow for the best.
07/02/2016
A fully functioning whirlpool hot tub of words. Let me weigh it all up, let me feel the cold metal coins in my hands heavy, let me smell the smell of brass.
Let us rip the pages out for you; you wrote the words in pencil but the rubber was not strong enough. Once and for all you can forget everything that was and everything that was not, none of that really matters anymore but of course you can’t be expected to see that when your eyes are barely open.
That expensive smell of Piz Buin sun cream in those little plastic pots with the spoon, and then on the way I smelt Mrs Johnson again, perhaps for the four hundredth time. If I could bottle that smell I would put it away in the back of my bedroom cupboard and only smell it when I need reminding that I am who I was and I’m from where I’m from.
04/01/2016
Man in a black mask with horns wears a sandwich board with blue crosses. He is drinking an elaborate drink. The grey men are surrendering to him with their vacuum cleaners but some of them seem to want to shoot him. Another man with an abnormally large right foot is dressed in bacon and washes himself in red confetti.
31/01/2016
I come back to thinking of my own dust that floats down onto the heavy fabric chair and wish it well in its interaction with the other dusts it will meet along the way.
29/01/2016
There’s a worm at the bottom of the garden
And his name is Wiggly Woo.
There’s a worm at the bottom of the garden and all that he can do
I would find the worms in the earth the earthworms and I brought them over to her when she was wearing the beige gloves. I asked her to tell me their story. Sometimes she really struggled to come up with the stories and she sighed a sigh that sounded a lot like frustration but maybe she was just very tired. Every worm always had the same name and I thought that was very unoriginal of their parents.
25/01/2016
A man walks into a bar.
Or, rather, a man walks into a psychiatric clinic.
He sits down at the table and talks about his thoughts. The barman nods apologetically and gives him some things that will make him feel better.
The man does not know about the art world or care about the art world.
The art world does not know about the man or care about the man.
23/01/2016
‘After a timed life locked up in the hospital and abandoned by all except the sacrificial attendants, they did not even have a decent burial. No name, just K for women and M for man. Many of those who lived at St Lars had been forgotten by their relatives, who were ashamed and did not want to know them.
The first to be buried was only 21 years. She was followed in the death of more than 2,000 patients to 1951.
Most bars have rusted through and disappeared. Most of the over 2000 iron rods are gone. Long as the grass grew high.’
- Sydsvenskan 09/04/07 Ingrid Nathell
08/2015
Last night you were on a huge exotic jungle island floating in the sky. The island was stuck in a permanent black cloud and the only way to get from place to place was by these old rickety wooden trains that stopped at various locations around the edge of it. The trains were always very busy so when they stopped you had to be very careful not to fall through the gap; the mess of earthy undergrowth and thick tree roots meant that it was important to wear sensible shoes but you never fell over. They used pangolin scales for cooking, apparently they were becoming a pest and the islanders didn’t like them. Mary was there too, and together you worked on a research project that investigated apple schizophrenia, the pathways of bees and how many balloons you can take on the jungle train before one of them pops.
07/2015
We arrived at the station at quarter to midnight to get the sleeper train. We didn’t understand the announcements but we gathered that the train was late, the announcements were making people angry. At one in the morning the train arrived, people rushed to the tracks, jumped across them and heaved themselves up to the platform on the other side. Big boxes of fruit, unidentifiable vegetables, animals and small children are all helped onto the train. We reached the door to our cabin and the ticket man tells us “No.” We show him our tickets and a dark shadow of embarrassed horror flashes across his face. We were not supposed to be on the train, let alone in this cabin.
For sixteen hours we attempted sleep on wooden benches with the broken fans and the sewage. In the morning an old lady and her grandson joined us in our journey, she gave us prickled fruit and taught us the proper way of eating it. She had clearly refined her skill over many years. He made origami planes and sang us an unchained melody of terrible pop songs. Then she threw all of the plastic containers out of the window.
05/2015
Eating banana pancakes in Ta Van village - turns out to be only a 5 min walk from our homestay. Arrived at 10pm, met by a little old man who speaks no English. Drink green tea with the friendly Xe Om drivers who told us about family tragedy and then they go and abandon us. The man mimes that we are locked in his house and we cannot escape. At midnight about ten Vietnamese people loudly come in - I am woken up by a stranger and asked to move. They laugh and shout for a while, I think they are laughing at us.
02/2015
Tet festival morning making square meat cakes (nasty). Everyone very friendly wanting to take pictures with me and introduce me to people. I was invited to mats to make the cakes. After the competition Hau took my arm and led me through the dry bogged straw wasteland to see them being cooked in huge pots. Her high heels sank in the sand.
(Orange peel drawing)
I tried the meat cake and now I feel sick. Hanh says with a smile that there's another one in the teaching cupboard just for me. I think I will give it to uncle or the towel lady who smacks me.
01/01/2015
A rushed scrambled egg sandwich, we stopped off at the marble disabled factory, there were loos with see-through side walls. Mike had been to 139 out of 198 countries. No children.
Welcome drink, lunch, fishing village. Little boys with games. The conical lady bashes me on the back with her rod.
07/2014
The life we live today is connected irrevocably to the things that we have archived consciously and subconsciously, internally and externally over our lifetime. The very act of remembering is often overlooked as being purely linked with nostalgia and reminiscence, whereas in reality the procedure of recalling memory plays a vital part in our everyday life and allows the most human of processes. Memory is ‘fundamental to the emergence of both order and complexity. Without memories, a being cannot learn and adapt to the demands of the environment… memories are our existence.’ (Dyens, 2001, p. 78). There is no denying that we are able to function because we remember, and yet the tools we have created to aid this instinctive ability of recall have in some ways taken us further away from the authentic memories that we previously stored interiorly.
Bernard Stiegler’s essay entitled Technics and Time is key in exploring our relationship to tools. In it he highlights the essential relationship between technology and our perception of time, ‘what phenomenology calls the human capacity to ‘temporalise’ – to organise its experience of the flow of time (…) constituted through, rather than merely supplemented by, mnemo-technical prostheses.’ (Bradley, 2011, p.120) Simply put, the technology we produce is what allows us to experience time and history as we do now; after all, time as we know it in hours, minutes and seconds is merely a human construct. And yet this is the most fundamental structure upon which we organise our lives – humanity is a slave to time and thus establishes a powerful sense of exchangeable mastery, ‘the human invents the tool which, in turn, invents him’ (Bradley, 2011, p.124).
As a result of our awareness of the power of technology we both retreat to our memories as a means of proving personal time and exteriorize our memories as a way of exhibiting mastery over time. In Arthur Bradley’s exploration of Stiegler’s thoughts on time and memory he says:
We are in the midst of nothing less than a war of, and for, memory. It is Stiegler’s contention (…) that the unique strength of the human race is its ability to exteriorize itself, we put more and more of our memory, knowledge and capacity into external technical apparatuses. At the same time, though, this exteriority is also humanity’s greatest vulnerability, because whoever controls such tertiary memory systems necessarily also controls the human experience of time. (2011, p.134.)
Our ability to preserve memories through ‘external technical apparatuses’ prompts an unnatural ability to recall, and yet even despite this artificially constructed reminder – be it a photograph on a screen, a written note, a video etc. we are often still faced with our own natural human weakness that will fail to draw a link between the pictured or written life we are viewing and the one we have previously lived.
07/2014
On the Archive
Modern memory, is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. No longer living memory’s more or less intended remainder, the archive has become the deliberate and calculated secretion of lost memory. It adds to life – itself often a function of its own recording – a secondary memory, a prosthesis memory. (Nora, 1984, p.13)
Whether or not our memories can be physically archived undoubtedly changes our perception of them and our ability to remember. Our reasons for taking photographs depend on the archive – the process of storing and recording what Pierre Nora calls the ‘materiality of the trace’. It is the archive that allows us to reflect on past memories in a way that does not require a naturally strong internal image.
The physical archive has been a key structure in the nature of memory ever since mankind started collecting. It not only came into play when we became able to basically reproduce an image, but arguably started through the exteriorization of internal thoughts. Writing on paper and filing away became the archive – simply an accumulation of material to be kept as a physical parallel to time. In Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, he describes the archive in its simplest form as an ‘accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place’. (1998, p.15) Taking the fragility of memory outside of an internal and personal space and storing it outside from its original context automatically displaces it and changes how we view the memory, particularly if it is on a public scale.
Museums and galleries can be viewed as public archives – bringing particular items or images out of a collection to be put on display for the public to see. This not only adds to the sense of constructing a collective memory as described earlier, by introducing new fragments from which histories can be pieced, but it institutionalizes the memory, if the object or image holds a memory. The memory and its true meaning is defined through its situation, and thus although the public gallery may act as a more selfless means of sharing the memory in allowing the growth of public knowledge, it also and importantly separates it yet again from its origin.
It is, however, the personal archive that is most interesting in exploring our current relationship to memory images. At the time of its advent the camera allowed a once-real scene to become a two-dimensional physicality; the analogue image had a certain novelty in that only through finishing the entire film and getting it developed were we faced with the initial scene we had once encountered, there was always a delay between real moment and captured moment. This image ultimately had (and still has) two destinies – in the life of the archive or in its destruction. Even in its forgetting, shoved to the back of a drawer or lost behind bookshelves, can it still be considered to be part of some sort of abandoned archive? Not destroyed but in a sense preserved, the image still exists as a certificate of time. The traditional personal archive comes in the form of photo albums, images placed in books to be referred back to time and again. This personal act of accumulation could be seen as an act of self-preservation, the very process of taking photos as a means of marking presence in time and place – documenting our travels and life events. These intimate testimonies of being hold qualities of reminiscence, looked back on to entice memory and to stop the natural processes of forgetting. There is something extremely sacred about the physical archive, they are purely sentimental constructions for the maker, and perhaps in their eyes there is a concern that the demise of the photo album would be the demise of the memory as they know it. The photograph could be seen as the life support for the memory, the most pictorial means of accessing the past and the person we once were. Barthes suggests that ‘when we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave; they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies’ (1993, 57). Is there, then, something quite morbid in the physical archive? Indeed the very process is intrinsically unnatural, replicating a visual scene through a non-living agent and storing it in a book to be placed on a shelf. Is this due to us not trusting our own natural memories, aware of our human weaknesses, or as a means of proof not just to ourselves but to other viewers – passing on our stories as we would like them to be remembered?
Indeed the same could be said for the digital archive – the archive that we are perhaps more used to using in our day-to-day lives. What is interesting about the digital archive is that the archive is still internalised, simplified and formatted for life in a digital memory rather than human memory. The life of the photograph in the digital sphere is endless, there is a seemingly infinite amount of storage available that goes far beyond the confines of bound pages, and we have learnt to use this to our advantage. The photo album no longer relies on a long process of waiting for images to develop and the labour of love in attaching each individual photograph to a page and annotating it; we can now view the image moments after it was taken, and, more importantly, we can digitally delete the image instantly if we deem it unsatisfactory, meaning it will no longer exist in physical or digital form. With photo editing software, we now have the godlike ability to aesthetically change a scene that was once before us; surely this capacity completely undermines the authenticity of the image that we now see as memory?
The memory image that we used to have to search for, or more likely come across by chance through a chronological system, can now be located at the click of a button. ‘The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen’ (Huyssen, 1994: 253.) Huyssen talks of the ‘simultaneity of all times and spaces readily accessible in the present’ (ibid.), this sense of a dual reality and being able to access a whole range of time periods at the same time. With the conversion of physical two-dimensional images to a digital existence made up of pixels on a screen so comes this sense of instantaneity. Photographs as an aide-memoire can appear to us at our wish, and more importantly, can be showcased on social media sites. The once revered photo album, in a book format that only a small number of people could view at a time can now be accessed by millions of strangers without us noticing. Due to the rise of the digital, could it be argued that our memories in this format have become far less personal? Do they not hold for us the same sentimentality? Instead of having a set number of possible images on film that we had to save for the ideal moment, we can now take thousands of digital snapshots at a time and instantly view them. With our known ability to edit, destroy, reproduce endlessly and broadcast to an unlimited audience we have surely become detached from the original printed image that we once so carefully preserved and cherished. However, it could be argued that the digital image now holds more power due to these very capabilities. As we are aware of the potential audience our image could be viewed by, are we therefore more likely to select and edit more carefully as a way of determining the way others will perceive us? These digital photographs can define us entirely; even those who know us outside of the online world will no doubt form an opinion which is based on our digital presence and the way in which we broadcast ourselves. The digital platform allows us to reinvent ourselves as we wish, ‘for the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity’ (Barthes, 1993, p. 12).
Could the act of archiving, both physically and digitally be seen as inauthenticity in itself? The collection of photos to piece together our lives both on a personal and public scale is far from the natural accessing and remembering of memories, and of course requires a degree of biased and artificial selection. We seem to be driven by this desire to archive, a means of documenting and preserving and as a means of beating our human cerebral weaknesses. In Archive Fever Derrida writes:
There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression. Above all, and this is the most serious, beyond or within this simple limit called finiteness or finitude, there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destructive drive (1998, p.19).
Derrida claims that we seem to be concerned with a ‘death drive’. In this sense, our current relationship to technology in terms of the archive means that we are still bound up with our original human fear of mortality, and the archive is therefore a desperate bid for the past; putting power in images that now construct our history for us and believing in their authenticity. However, ‘the archive always works … against itself’ (ibid, p.14). While we may see the archive as a solid base for our memories, an inner sanctum for sentimentality and a key basis of our identity, it is in fact encouraging the accumulation of artificial, staged and edited images that broadly deny and overwrite our own human limitations.
10/2013
Sea Breeze
Sea Breeze was first and foremost a performance piece set in the Winter Gardens Theatre in Morecambe – a building abandoned and frozen in time for forty years. Artists Raisin and Willow breathed new life into this abandoned building for a one time only performance in early September, influenced by the historic significance of the building to explore themes of memory and decay, and in turn discovered the captivating truths of the buildings past and evidence of decades gone by.
The exhibition at the Peter Scott Gallery is a product of their performance and findings. Through exploring this forgotten and decrepit building set between high barren landscape and the salty sea breeze, Raisin and Willow started to collect what they call ‘dust’; not just the stories that influenced their performance, but objects and ephemera that have lasted untouched since the theatre was plunged into seemingly conclusive darkness in the 70s.
The exhibition is a curious mix of objects worthy of a place in a museum and items that can only be described as rubbish. Sweet wrappers, used chewing gum, cigarette ends and ice cream scoops are wonderfully arranged and treated like art; their age indicative by the obvious contrast with contemporary packaging, and the sole reason for this attached grandeur to once throwaway objects. These fragments represent the lost, the forgotten and the left behind; once meaningless litter is now worthy of a place in a display case and deemed special enough to be archived. This is a process of collecting in order to preserve. Behind the glass lie tiny clusters of dead moths found on the windowsills, feathers and bones belonging to birds that died long ago, and even a pile of dust gathered from the floors of the building. It’s strange how things so banal can turn to be so poignant when exhibited; in meticulous arrangements with miniature labels even something so completely uninteresting as a pile of dust can turn into a worthy subject for contemplation.
We seem to have an infatuation with the past; of past lives and what happened, the stories of the people that lived and the stories of the places they lived in. The Winter Gardens Theatre was once a thriving and iconic Victorian building, with the likes of Sir Laurence Olivier and Laurel & Hardy taking to the stage. Thousands of people passed through its doors, thousands of tickets were sold and hundreds of stories were told under its spotlight, but now all that is left of this decaying building is its ties to the past. The Winter Gardens’ future is uncertain, and after being left in the dark, unused and seemingly forgotten for so long, it’s not clear whether or not the building can ever escape from the dust of its former life and start again. Maybe one day there will be a new performers walking its stage, and new audiences with their own stories that leave behind traces and memories to be forgotten and rediscovered by a new generation of strangers decades in the future.
03/2013
On Francis Bacon and Structuralism:
Francis Bacon was one of the most celebrated and yet notoriously difficult figurative painters of the twentieth Century. A key celebrity figure amongst the 1950s Soho arts scene, Bacon flitted constantly between lives of poverty and luxury, and a degree of this turbulent and extravagant life can be seen to resonate deeply within his paintings. Often depicting scenes of violence and primal anguish, Bacon’s paintings are undoubtedly dark, grotesque, and can be interpreted as windows to the psyche of a man disturbed and distressed.
Through attempting to interpret Bacon’s work in terms of Structuralism the question we must ask here is one of artist intention. What are the structures that Bacon has set up, so visible in his work and his life? What meanings did he ever want to convey, if any, and through what signs did he aim to do this? Of course Bacon is disputably most famous for his paintings of monstrous creatures and his portraits of others, but perhaps the most telling work that can be created and the one that is most easily considered in the context of Structuralism is the self-portrait. In order to attempt to find truth in the structures, or rather the real intention and semiotic value behind the façade that the artist has created, I will compare and contrast this with one of the many photographs of Bacon taken by John Deakin in the fifties; in a sense assessing the honesty of the face Bacon intended to project against the honesty of the camera lens.
The first example I will use in this exploration is a self-portrait produced by Bacon in 1971. Using Barthes’ notions of denotation and connotation as the two orders of signification, at the denotative, surface level, the image is a small portrait painting. It has obvious links to abstraction as the face is noticeably distorted and removed from photorealism. This image is the base structure from which we can make assumptions – the ‘signifier’. The connotative level, the ‘signified’, is what Barthes describes as the ‘myth’, a set of socio-cultural associations. In a work of art this becomes more complex. Barthes claims in Mythologies ‘we are no longer dealing here with a theoretical mode of representation: we are dealing with this particular image, which is given for this particular signification.’
Thus uncovering the connotative meaning and the ‘myth’ of the painting requires an attempt to understand the intentions of the painter. The painting itself is one of Bacon’s smallest works, instantly drawing links to something more intimate and personal. The painting is worked up on a black background, the movement and brush strokes highly visible and basic, with a limited colour palette of fleshy whites and greyed colder tones. The dry brush stroke technique is common in Bacon’s paintings, but where it is usually employed with a sense of impatience and immediacy, here there seems to be a melancholic latency, a delay. The face is sombre, decayed; it is manipulated and moulded as if made out of clay. It is incomplete; merely a construct of colour in shape and line, and the painting is based entirely on adding light to the dark, as if the artist himself is searching. There is an uncertainty and a lack of clarity, a blurring and a doubt. Martin Harrison, in his close analysis of Bacon and his stylistic development, claims ‘he conveyed his inner life without compromise, but in code, in his paintings'; that his paintings were ‘explorations of selfhood'. Deciphering this ‘code’ results in a creation of personal meaning, and the construct of reasoning behind the decisions of the artist. This is highly problematic, as Harrison continues ‘there’s a real risk that the myth of Bacon – albeit one in which the artist colluded – is all we will hand on to future generations.’ In dealing with such a deliberately evasive and difficult character, how can we view anything Bacon said or did as an honest portrayal of the structures he used to create his work?
In a similar manner, the connotations of John Deakin’s photograph of Bacon retain the same issues of assumption. Of course, on a denotative level the image is simple; it is a black and white photograph produced in 1952 and is a face-forward image of the artist. The photograph itself has notable tears, folds and creases, with some stains and tape still attached. At a connotative level, that of the signified, there are two levels here. Firstly, that of the subject of the photograph. The photograph is taken with a degree of brutality; every single imperfection is visible and the face is completely exposed. Bacon is wide-eyed, staring somewhat blankly into the lens but with an emotion that is simultaneously confrontational and submissive; there seems to be a sadness in his eyes, almost a resignation. The photograph itself is instead more telling about Deakin. The photograph has been neglected, crumpled and manhandled, reflecting the throwaway carefree lifestyle he and others like Bacon led in 1950s Soho.
On the chance that my personal explanation of the myth in Bacon’s self-portrait is in fact exactly what the artist intended, even then how can we be sure that this agreed projection is not just another construct masking the artist’s true intentions? He simply may have ran out of larger canvases on which to paint his self-portrait, his style may have been a consequence of a fleeting mood rather than a deeper emotional turmoil. Yet there is undoubtedly an element of honesty in Deakin’s photograph and in photography itself, given that there is simply nowhere for the subject to hide. However does this mean that the supposed ‘myth’ of the photograph is more honest than the personal assumption of ‘myth’ in the painting?
In Barthes’ analysis of Structuralism and the construct of signs he came to critique and expand on the work of Structuralist thinkers. In developing a Post-Structuralism, Barthes and other thinkers emphasised the role of time and history, and believed that the connotations associated with an object need to be queried in terms of the context they were produced in – ‘It is the responsibility of semiology to question its own discourse… to interrogate itself as to the place from which it speaks'. Derrida takes this further, claiming that ‘a context is never absolutely determinable, or rather, it’s determination can never be entirely certain or saturated.’ He outlines the problematic nature of a literal meaning as something that can often be contrived through semiology, taking inspiration from Condillac’s essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge to make links back to Egyptian use of hieroglyphics, ‘the first attempt at writing was nothing but a simple painting’. He continues, ‘Thus painting probably owes its origin to the necessity of tracing our thoughts…and this has doubtlessly contributed to preserving the language of action as that which is most readily depictable.’ Does this mean that this initial non-verbal means of communication is the most honest means of expression?
The question here concerns the nature of Bacon’s self-portrait. Did he intend his painting to be a ‘language of action’, a means of communication? Did he even plan out his paintings in terms of an initial idea and an initial message at all? Were his paintings conscious or unconscious ‘tracings of thoughts’, or simply not for us to understand? Bacon himself once claimed that “painting today is pure luck” and that “I can dream all day long and ideas for paintings just fall into my mind like slides.” And yet it is true that most, if not all, of his paintings were inspired by photographs. Evidence of photographic portraits creased and torn, much like Deakin’s, and books of preparatory work were found scattered around his studio in South Kensington after his death. He was evidently keen to create a myth on his own spontaneity, a desired communication of a nonchalant and effortless practice relying solely on chance. What does this mean then, for the self-portrait? If Bacon was so reluctant to reveal the truth behind his process how can we be sure that his self-depiction is anything but a façade?
In Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, he addresses the act of drawing and the sincerity of the self-portrait. ‘One must say of the self-portrait: “If there were such a thing…” “If there remained anything of it.” It is like a ruin that does not come after the work but remains produced, already from the origin, by the advent and structure of the work.’ Derrida describes the ‘ruin’ in the self-portrait as a ‘memory open like an eye… that lets you see without showing you anything at all, anything of the all.’ While this is quite a complex notion to understand, I believe Derrida is probing at the trace of the artist and the self-portrait’s ability to communicate. There is an element here of something almost lost in translation, a despondency in the self-portrait as the act of drawing is merely tracing something; a ‘ruin’ attempting to recall something that was never really there. Indeed, there is a strong sense of sadness in Bacon’s reasoning behind his self-portraits, as he revealed in an interview with David Sylvester in 1975, “I loathe my own face . . . I’ve done a lot of self-portraits, really because people have been dying around me like flies and I’ve nobody else left to paint but myself.”
The year that this particular self-portrait was produced was the same year that Bacon’s lover George Dyer committed suicide. Are tragedies like this, of which Bacon faced many, part of the structuring and process through which Bacon painted in this way? Or is it merely the case that such an emotive self-portrait causes the spectator to believe that there must be an underlying reasoning, an upsetting context through which it is painted; after all ‘the harm done to a person must also be visible in his portrait’.
The same could be said for the Deakin’s photographic portrait of the painter, and Barthes’ Camera Lucida certainly sheds some light here. Barthes questions the truth of identity in portrait photography, claiming ‘in front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art… I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity.’ Here it is easy to make links between Deakin’s photograph and Bacon’s self-portrait; Bacon’s ability to wear a mask even in photos makes accessing the truth impossible as we can never deduce whether this face, this look, was simply pre-planned and without true emotion.
Yet what Barthes offers is the suggestion that art transcends the merely communicative. He recognises that in both the artworks I have discussed there is something beyond semiotics and signs that has the ability to wound, to elicit meaning without necessarily understanding the artist’s intentions and process. The ‘punctum’, the wounding detail, is a personal communication, and for Barthes this has strong ties to time and transience. He claims that ‘every photograph is a certificate of presence’, that ‘the photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.’[18] Deakin’s photograph is trapped in history and tied down to the day on which it was taken; as the artist of the photograph he has taken the image as a means of preservation, to keep the ‘what has been’. In a sense, Bacon did the same through painting from photos. The photographs became Bacon’s memories of figure as he found ‘the presence of another person inhibiting’ in the studio, and saw photographs as more ‘intimate’. The photographs inspired his musings on transience and loss; Bacon himself said ‘One of the great fascinations of old photographs … is that you think, “Now they’re all dead”’.
There is a likeness between the face and composition in Bacon’s self-portrait and the photograph taken by John Deakin, and it is not unlikely that the latter was the origin of the former. This makes the truth in both images impossible to determine, as despite seeming to penetrate Bacon’s reality from both the inside and the outside they can no longer allude to any notions of authenticity or desired communication. Of course, as Barthes quite rightly claims, ‘there are so many readings of the same face’ and therefore a truly Structuralist interpretation of both images can only ever be subjective. To uncover the myth and to reveal the truth in Bacon and his work would be to remove the punctum that made him so famous, and, I believe, be somewhat contrary to what this frustratingly obtuse yet marvellous artist would have ever desired.
01/2013
A defining piece in the genre of site-specific installation art, Richard Wilson’s 20:50 was made twenty-five years ago and has been recreated in numerous galleries around the world. Due to the nature of the installation, a huge structure made solely of steel and used sump oil that fills an entire room, the very character of the work changes from site to site. This obvious reproducibility of the piece could be seen as corresponding to present modes of production, the sense of trickery and the disorientating experience of the work constant, regardless as to where it is situated.
The version of 20:50 in room 13 of the Saatchi Gallery is Wilson’s third version in London. In creating this work in different spaces and at different points in recent history, he appears most interested in the reaction and response of people. The changing connotation of oil, a particularly relevant topic in current affairs, draws upon this idea of waste, and could be see as a representation of present modes of consumption – the abundance of few while the many struggle. The title alone refers to the viscosity of standard engine oil, and has been described as ‘an elegiac embrace of industrial waste… encapsulating the tension between technological production and nature.'
The oil, which is observed from a viewing platform, takes on a reflective quality; mimicking the room in which it is installed and in doing so manages to create for itself a hyperreal state – a constant oscillation between presence and absence. Through being placed in gallery settings, 20:50 literally reflects what Marx describes as the ‘base’, the elitism of the gallery in which art is defined and determined by. This also relates to Benjamin’s belief that all art has an ‘aura’ that can never be entirely separated from its ritual function, forever confined to inaccessible ritual spaces such as the gallery. Benjamin believed in the unique value of the ‘authentic work of art’, and saw mechanical reproduction of art as emancipating art from this ritual function, withering its ‘aura’. With 20:50 it is difficult to say where the authentic work of art truly lies. In this case, 20:50 has been physically reproduced many times, taking the exact same idea in every setting. Yes there may be an original 20:50, the first one Wilson produced, but who is to say that any of his following 20:50 installations hold more or less visual power and value than the first? Furthermore, unleashing the installation from its apparent ‘inaccessible ritual space’ would arguably be to deny 20:50 of its conceptual power. The work relies on the space, the context and the ‘base’ in which it is situated in – steel and sump oil outside of the gallery rather than an ‘installation’ within would rarely be given the same artistic praise.
Benjamin believed in the power of mechanical reproduction. Indeed there have been photos of the piece that accurately reveal its quality as a work of astounding deception, a piece that confounds our preconceptions as effectively now as it did twenty-five years ago. What cannot be mechanically reproduced, however, a quality that forever will stay in the favour of the ‘authentic work of art’ and thus I believe is a radical exception to Benjamin’s theory, is the experience of the installation. The pungent smell, the sense of total engulfment and the perplexing dissolution of apparent physical boundaries can never be communicated through a simple computer screen.
The Forgotten Communication Tool (extract)
It was once easy for us to draw without fear; when we were very small the pencil was the first tool we used to make traces of our actions and thoughts. When we grew up a bit we created forms from lines and shapes that resembled things that we didn’t have to look at to understand. We remembered what happened yesterday and drew the significant people and places, the neighbour’s dogs and characters from our favourite films. We made things up, they didn’t have to exist in real life for us to know them and draw them as well as the hidden areas of our back gardens. We created our own fictional worlds and safe spaces with pencils and yet now they can appear to us as tools to be feared. Just like our handwriting, our speech and our knowledge we are meant to have progressed away from our basic foundations; drawing is regarded as a skill and upon reaching a certain age it is expected that we can draw something that resembles a common understanding of reality. When we are unable to we often develop a negative relationship to drawing, we are frustrated by our inabilities and are jealous of others who seem to have this ‘talent’ that we were simply not born with.
For some this negative relationship to drawing doesn’t stop them from building a positive relationship to other forms of art and art making, but for many it does. By bringing artistic practices into communities that are not formed through the commonality of art, it becomes clear that one of the main reasons for a lack of engagement is based on concerns regarding technical skill. The excuse “I can’t draw” as a reason for non-participation seems far too common to be ignored; abilities to make or create art, whatever form it takes, appear undeniably bound with expectations of graphical mastery.
And yet we’re on phones to our Internet providers and whilst talking through the options we hold a pen in our hand and it moves across the newspaper. We don’t think, but we draw. We draw circle shapes around the headlines and fill in the gaps but it doesn’t mean anything. We’re not drawing, we’re just scribbling. We don’t even acknowledge that the possibility to draw or scribble is helpful in this situation, that it’s allowing us to process what they’re saying on the other end of the phone or that it’s calming us down as they speak of the rising costs of 4G broadband. Because drawing is so grounded in these ideas of innate artistic talent and technical skill, many are hesitant to find any value whatsoever in their thoughtless scribbles.
Full text: world-anthropology-collective.com/2017/01/05/drawing-forgotten-communication-tool/
06/09/2016
15 minutes free writing - a mobile object
It reaches down below the ground at least it thinks it's the ground at least maybe it cannot yet be sure.
It grows and strengthens with each tiny stretch, it gets bigger but it's not really sure where it's going yet, at least I'm not sure that it's sure that it knows where it's going yet.
We are not friends right now you see; I did not select it or choose it out of a wide selection of similar beings. It was chosen for me, and my job is now to maintain it, to watch it and to encourage it on its journey upwards and outwards. It is a process that runs in real time but the change can only be witnessed every once in a while, every few days and not every second. I must be patient, and I cannot speed it up; there is nothing I can do except give it what it wants. Maybe the plant doesn't want to get much bigger, perhaps it is happy just being the size that it is. But it has no choice, it cannot stop growing even if it wants to stop growing. It is not in control of its conditions. At least if I want to stop growing I can do something about it, I can run outside of real time. I can sleep to try and forget, to regress, to diminish, if that's what I want. It must be very hard to be out of control of your own growing, but we do seem to forget about the water.
Perhaps the water and the life within it knows what it best; maybe it just wants you to reach your full potential and you're just there, sitting there, trying to fight it.
Maybe once the plant gives up and gives in to the water and the spreading of roots it will be happy with how things look in the end. Maybe it will resent itself and want to go back to when things were small and it didn't have as much to cope with, but maybe it will be worth reaching out as far as it can reach to find the things worth reaching for.
10/07/2016
I'll never forget that time when I locked the door at 5am.
I slowly pushed the keys through my neighbour's letterbox, just like she told me, and I heard the dampened jangle of them falling to the floor on the other side.
I turned to walk down the stairs but the door opened suddenly. It was like she was waiting.
"Goodbye" she said as she looked at me in her nightgown, the lights of her apartment glowing warmly in the background. She had a look of sad grief and I will never be sure why.
29/04/2016
Unlearning
By looking back on the times where things might be uncertain, we forget the events that never happened or maybe will happen on this train.
We forget the writings of stories to visualise different areas we pass through and we cannot describe the events that may or may not have taken place there.
There might have been three trees standing around a lake but we cannot know that yet.
There might have been a small red boat floating gently in the middle of the lake and it might have been a sunny day, but then again it might have been cloudy and grey. There might have been rain.
There might have been a thick dark forest of tall trees and maybe the trees will be cut down one day soon. The trees do not know that yet and maybe they have already been cut, the trees will not know and it will only hurt a little bit while they sleep. The train doesn't know either, it just moves at a leisurely pace through them. We know that the trees have been cut down in the past to make way for the train, maybe this will happen again for a different reason. We see some yellow tractors with large trailers but we can only assume the worst, perhaps the process started long ago or maybe it is just about to begin.
There might have been three old ladies sitting on the other side of the train completing their magazine crosswords with glasses perched at the very end of their noses. Maybe they got some of the words wrong, maybe they don't know how to spell something. Perhaps she got her phone out to check the spelling of that last word and maybe it had too many letters to fit in the gap. She might deeply exhale through the small opening in her pursed pink lips. She stands up and makes a heart shape with her wrinkled hands to the man outside, I think the man will make the same shape back to her. He blows elaborate heartfelt kisses and waves as the train slowly pulls away from the platform. While she takes her seat he begins walking back to the stairs, his eyes fixed on the window where he saw her last. He might smile and sigh as he walks up the stairs, his emotional blindness causing him to miss the last step and trip on it. Maybe he falls down the stairs and sprains his right wrist trying to catch his own weight, maybe he falls into another man and causes a comical domino effect down the staircase, maybe he is able to reach the top unscathed. Maybe he then walks to the car with a limp and finds a parking ticket, maybe that's the reason he's angry. Or maybe it is someone else that she's on the phone to right now and someone else that she is trying her very best to calm down. We cannot know that yet.
She looks out to the trees that do not yet know their own sleeping pains and the small red boat passes by in the distance.
We try to remember where the train is taking us but it seems we have already forgotten.
04/2016
On the Unremarkable Similarities Between Birds
In the summer garden we raced to the swings. The grass was always more moss than grass and it was springy and spongy under our feet as we ran across it. We were there, you and I, sitting on our personal plastic platforms, and we clung on tightly to the white plaited ropes that smelt distinctly of horse and softly burnt our hands. We leant back as far as we dared and closed our eyes.
We would bet on:
- Whether there would be any birds when we opened our eyes
- If there were birds when we opened our eyes, how many of them there would be
- How many birds were in the sky and how many were in the tree.
The kind of birds we saw really did not matter, and it would be wrong of me to tell you that it did. Just seeing any kind of bird was better than seeing no bird at all.
17/02/2016
I go on a photography tour of an Indian city. There is a huge central square filled with people holding saws and trying to saw off the cameras of the tourists when they are not looking. I hide my camera in my clothes and pick up an abandoned saw so that I didn't look like a tourist. Next door to the square was a sort of theme park where the whole park was based around one ride. You sit in the rollercoaster and it takes you around a magical fictional fantasy land. You go underwater and swim with a giant squid, and suddenly you are eaten by a dinosaur. The landscape is incredible, and your journey is influenced by made up characters and situations. I take a lot of photos and feel excited to see the end result, but when I open up my camera once I have finished the film I only see the pitted green olives that I ate last night. The images have developed within the holes of the olives but they are far too small to be able to really see anything.
12/02/2016
At their wedding he put a plastic mouse on the organist’s chair; he asked if we could hear the foxes. He made dirty jokes to the waitresses and told the doctor it would probably be “for the best” if he just left the room - “we can accomplish more without him”.
He poured on the condensed milk liberally, and finished it all off with a heavy-handed sprinkling of salt. He used to look up from the bowl with porridge in his moustache and meet our giggles, I think now his gaze just gets a bit lost along the way.
10/02/2016
I was asked to write the date in the book but I wrote it down wrong.
I wear the gloves and choose between plastic and fabric. I choose the plastic and small drops of condensation slowly begin to form on my fingertips.
He had drawn the boat perfectly, and there was a written key describing what the different rooms were. It was all in pencil and he made fingerprints on the flimsy calendar paper. He didn’t have to wear any gloves.
09/02/2016
Your day could not handle you; it dropped you head first on to the floor and walked out of the door to find someone else. It did not want to be your day and it gave you no choice in this. It did not want to behave, it did not want you to do what you wanted to do, it did not agree with your plans.
It stopped being your day the moment it happened. There was perhaps a small window of opportunity where it would have stuck with you to the end, but it gave up, it was sick of you, it wanted to be someone else’s day instead.
I bet somewhere, wherever they are, maybe they are just down the corridor or maybe they are much further away, I bet they are having the best time with their day. Maybe they needed it more than you did; maybe this was somehow for the best.
07/02/2016
A fully functioning whirlpool hot tub of words. Let me weigh it all up, let me feel the cold metal coins in my hands heavy, let me smell the smell of brass.
Let us rip the pages out for you; you wrote the words in pencil but the rubber was not strong enough. Once and for all you can forget everything that was and everything that was not, none of that really matters anymore but of course you can’t be expected to see that when your eyes are barely open.
That expensive smell of Piz Buin sun cream in those little plastic pots with the spoon, and then on the way I smelt Mrs Johnson again, perhaps for the four hundredth time. If I could bottle that smell I would put it away in the back of my bedroom cupboard and only smell it when I need reminding that I am who I was and I’m from where I’m from.
04/01/2016
Man in a black mask with horns wears a sandwich board with blue crosses. He is drinking an elaborate drink. The grey men are surrendering to him with their vacuum cleaners but some of them seem to want to shoot him. Another man with an abnormally large right foot is dressed in bacon and washes himself in red confetti.
31/01/2016
I come back to thinking of my own dust that floats down onto the heavy fabric chair and wish it well in its interaction with the other dusts it will meet along the way.
29/01/2016
There’s a worm at the bottom of the garden
And his name is Wiggly Woo.
There’s a worm at the bottom of the garden and all that he can do
I would find the worms in the earth the earthworms and I brought them over to her when she was wearing the beige gloves. I asked her to tell me their story. Sometimes she really struggled to come up with the stories and she sighed a sigh that sounded a lot like frustration but maybe she was just very tired. Every worm always had the same name and I thought that was very unoriginal of their parents.
25/01/2016
A man walks into a bar.
Or, rather, a man walks into a psychiatric clinic.
He sits down at the table and talks about his thoughts. The barman nods apologetically and gives him some things that will make him feel better.
The man does not know about the art world or care about the art world.
The art world does not know about the man or care about the man.
23/01/2016
‘After a timed life locked up in the hospital and abandoned by all except the sacrificial attendants, they did not even have a decent burial. No name, just K for women and M for man. Many of those who lived at St Lars had been forgotten by their relatives, who were ashamed and did not want to know them.
The first to be buried was only 21 years. She was followed in the death of more than 2,000 patients to 1951.
Most bars have rusted through and disappeared. Most of the over 2000 iron rods are gone. Long as the grass grew high.’
- Sydsvenskan 09/04/07 Ingrid Nathell
08/2015
Last night you were on a huge exotic jungle island floating in the sky. The island was stuck in a permanent black cloud and the only way to get from place to place was by these old rickety wooden trains that stopped at various locations around the edge of it. The trains were always very busy so when they stopped you had to be very careful not to fall through the gap; the mess of earthy undergrowth and thick tree roots meant that it was important to wear sensible shoes but you never fell over. They used pangolin scales for cooking, apparently they were becoming a pest and the islanders didn’t like them. Mary was there too, and together you worked on a research project that investigated apple schizophrenia, the pathways of bees and how many balloons you can take on the jungle train before one of them pops.
07/2015
We arrived at the station at quarter to midnight to get the sleeper train. We didn’t understand the announcements but we gathered that the train was late, the announcements were making people angry. At one in the morning the train arrived, people rushed to the tracks, jumped across them and heaved themselves up to the platform on the other side. Big boxes of fruit, unidentifiable vegetables, animals and small children are all helped onto the train. We reached the door to our cabin and the ticket man tells us “No.” We show him our tickets and a dark shadow of embarrassed horror flashes across his face. We were not supposed to be on the train, let alone in this cabin.
For sixteen hours we attempted sleep on wooden benches with the broken fans and the sewage. In the morning an old lady and her grandson joined us in our journey, she gave us prickled fruit and taught us the proper way of eating it. She had clearly refined her skill over many years. He made origami planes and sang us an unchained melody of terrible pop songs. Then she threw all of the plastic containers out of the window.
05/2015
Eating banana pancakes in Ta Van village - turns out to be only a 5 min walk from our homestay. Arrived at 10pm, met by a little old man who speaks no English. Drink green tea with the friendly Xe Om drivers who told us about family tragedy and then they go and abandon us. The man mimes that we are locked in his house and we cannot escape. At midnight about ten Vietnamese people loudly come in - I am woken up by a stranger and asked to move. They laugh and shout for a while, I think they are laughing at us.
02/2015
Tet festival morning making square meat cakes (nasty). Everyone very friendly wanting to take pictures with me and introduce me to people. I was invited to mats to make the cakes. After the competition Hau took my arm and led me through the dry bogged straw wasteland to see them being cooked in huge pots. Her high heels sank in the sand.
(Orange peel drawing)
I tried the meat cake and now I feel sick. Hanh says with a smile that there's another one in the teaching cupboard just for me. I think I will give it to uncle or the towel lady who smacks me.
01/01/2015
A rushed scrambled egg sandwich, we stopped off at the marble disabled factory, there were loos with see-through side walls. Mike had been to 139 out of 198 countries. No children.
Welcome drink, lunch, fishing village. Little boys with games. The conical lady bashes me on the back with her rod.
07/2014
The life we live today is connected irrevocably to the things that we have archived consciously and subconsciously, internally and externally over our lifetime. The very act of remembering is often overlooked as being purely linked with nostalgia and reminiscence, whereas in reality the procedure of recalling memory plays a vital part in our everyday life and allows the most human of processes. Memory is ‘fundamental to the emergence of both order and complexity. Without memories, a being cannot learn and adapt to the demands of the environment… memories are our existence.’ (Dyens, 2001, p. 78). There is no denying that we are able to function because we remember, and yet the tools we have created to aid this instinctive ability of recall have in some ways taken us further away from the authentic memories that we previously stored interiorly.
Bernard Stiegler’s essay entitled Technics and Time is key in exploring our relationship to tools. In it he highlights the essential relationship between technology and our perception of time, ‘what phenomenology calls the human capacity to ‘temporalise’ – to organise its experience of the flow of time (…) constituted through, rather than merely supplemented by, mnemo-technical prostheses.’ (Bradley, 2011, p.120) Simply put, the technology we produce is what allows us to experience time and history as we do now; after all, time as we know it in hours, minutes and seconds is merely a human construct. And yet this is the most fundamental structure upon which we organise our lives – humanity is a slave to time and thus establishes a powerful sense of exchangeable mastery, ‘the human invents the tool which, in turn, invents him’ (Bradley, 2011, p.124).
As a result of our awareness of the power of technology we both retreat to our memories as a means of proving personal time and exteriorize our memories as a way of exhibiting mastery over time. In Arthur Bradley’s exploration of Stiegler’s thoughts on time and memory he says:
We are in the midst of nothing less than a war of, and for, memory. It is Stiegler’s contention (…) that the unique strength of the human race is its ability to exteriorize itself, we put more and more of our memory, knowledge and capacity into external technical apparatuses. At the same time, though, this exteriority is also humanity’s greatest vulnerability, because whoever controls such tertiary memory systems necessarily also controls the human experience of time. (2011, p.134.)
Our ability to preserve memories through ‘external technical apparatuses’ prompts an unnatural ability to recall, and yet even despite this artificially constructed reminder – be it a photograph on a screen, a written note, a video etc. we are often still faced with our own natural human weakness that will fail to draw a link between the pictured or written life we are viewing and the one we have previously lived.
07/2014
On the Archive
Modern memory, is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image. No longer living memory’s more or less intended remainder, the archive has become the deliberate and calculated secretion of lost memory. It adds to life – itself often a function of its own recording – a secondary memory, a prosthesis memory. (Nora, 1984, p.13)
Whether or not our memories can be physically archived undoubtedly changes our perception of them and our ability to remember. Our reasons for taking photographs depend on the archive – the process of storing and recording what Pierre Nora calls the ‘materiality of the trace’. It is the archive that allows us to reflect on past memories in a way that does not require a naturally strong internal image.
The physical archive has been a key structure in the nature of memory ever since mankind started collecting. It not only came into play when we became able to basically reproduce an image, but arguably started through the exteriorization of internal thoughts. Writing on paper and filing away became the archive – simply an accumulation of material to be kept as a physical parallel to time. In Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, he describes the archive in its simplest form as an ‘accumulation and capitalization of memory on some substrate and in an exterior place’. (1998, p.15) Taking the fragility of memory outside of an internal and personal space and storing it outside from its original context automatically displaces it and changes how we view the memory, particularly if it is on a public scale.
Museums and galleries can be viewed as public archives – bringing particular items or images out of a collection to be put on display for the public to see. This not only adds to the sense of constructing a collective memory as described earlier, by introducing new fragments from which histories can be pieced, but it institutionalizes the memory, if the object or image holds a memory. The memory and its true meaning is defined through its situation, and thus although the public gallery may act as a more selfless means of sharing the memory in allowing the growth of public knowledge, it also and importantly separates it yet again from its origin.
It is, however, the personal archive that is most interesting in exploring our current relationship to memory images. At the time of its advent the camera allowed a once-real scene to become a two-dimensional physicality; the analogue image had a certain novelty in that only through finishing the entire film and getting it developed were we faced with the initial scene we had once encountered, there was always a delay between real moment and captured moment. This image ultimately had (and still has) two destinies – in the life of the archive or in its destruction. Even in its forgetting, shoved to the back of a drawer or lost behind bookshelves, can it still be considered to be part of some sort of abandoned archive? Not destroyed but in a sense preserved, the image still exists as a certificate of time. The traditional personal archive comes in the form of photo albums, images placed in books to be referred back to time and again. This personal act of accumulation could be seen as an act of self-preservation, the very process of taking photos as a means of marking presence in time and place – documenting our travels and life events. These intimate testimonies of being hold qualities of reminiscence, looked back on to entice memory and to stop the natural processes of forgetting. There is something extremely sacred about the physical archive, they are purely sentimental constructions for the maker, and perhaps in their eyes there is a concern that the demise of the photo album would be the demise of the memory as they know it. The photograph could be seen as the life support for the memory, the most pictorial means of accessing the past and the person we once were. Barthes suggests that ‘when we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not emerge, do not leave; they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies’ (1993, 57). Is there, then, something quite morbid in the physical archive? Indeed the very process is intrinsically unnatural, replicating a visual scene through a non-living agent and storing it in a book to be placed on a shelf. Is this due to us not trusting our own natural memories, aware of our human weaknesses, or as a means of proof not just to ourselves but to other viewers – passing on our stories as we would like them to be remembered?
Indeed the same could be said for the digital archive – the archive that we are perhaps more used to using in our day-to-day lives. What is interesting about the digital archive is that the archive is still internalised, simplified and formatted for life in a digital memory rather than human memory. The life of the photograph in the digital sphere is endless, there is a seemingly infinite amount of storage available that goes far beyond the confines of bound pages, and we have learnt to use this to our advantage. The photo album no longer relies on a long process of waiting for images to develop and the labour of love in attaching each individual photograph to a page and annotating it; we can now view the image moments after it was taken, and, more importantly, we can digitally delete the image instantly if we deem it unsatisfactory, meaning it will no longer exist in physical or digital form. With photo editing software, we now have the godlike ability to aesthetically change a scene that was once before us; surely this capacity completely undermines the authenticity of the image that we now see as memory?
The memory image that we used to have to search for, or more likely come across by chance through a chronological system, can now be located at the click of a button. ‘The more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen’ (Huyssen, 1994: 253.) Huyssen talks of the ‘simultaneity of all times and spaces readily accessible in the present’ (ibid.), this sense of a dual reality and being able to access a whole range of time periods at the same time. With the conversion of physical two-dimensional images to a digital existence made up of pixels on a screen so comes this sense of instantaneity. Photographs as an aide-memoire can appear to us at our wish, and more importantly, can be showcased on social media sites. The once revered photo album, in a book format that only a small number of people could view at a time can now be accessed by millions of strangers without us noticing. Due to the rise of the digital, could it be argued that our memories in this format have become far less personal? Do they not hold for us the same sentimentality? Instead of having a set number of possible images on film that we had to save for the ideal moment, we can now take thousands of digital snapshots at a time and instantly view them. With our known ability to edit, destroy, reproduce endlessly and broadcast to an unlimited audience we have surely become detached from the original printed image that we once so carefully preserved and cherished. However, it could be argued that the digital image now holds more power due to these very capabilities. As we are aware of the potential audience our image could be viewed by, are we therefore more likely to select and edit more carefully as a way of determining the way others will perceive us? These digital photographs can define us entirely; even those who know us outside of the online world will no doubt form an opinion which is based on our digital presence and the way in which we broadcast ourselves. The digital platform allows us to reinvent ourselves as we wish, ‘for the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity’ (Barthes, 1993, p. 12).
Could the act of archiving, both physically and digitally be seen as inauthenticity in itself? The collection of photos to piece together our lives both on a personal and public scale is far from the natural accessing and remembering of memories, and of course requires a degree of biased and artificial selection. We seem to be driven by this desire to archive, a means of documenting and preserving and as a means of beating our human cerebral weaknesses. In Archive Fever Derrida writes:
There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression. Above all, and this is the most serious, beyond or within this simple limit called finiteness or finitude, there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destructive drive (1998, p.19).
Derrida claims that we seem to be concerned with a ‘death drive’. In this sense, our current relationship to technology in terms of the archive means that we are still bound up with our original human fear of mortality, and the archive is therefore a desperate bid for the past; putting power in images that now construct our history for us and believing in their authenticity. However, ‘the archive always works … against itself’ (ibid, p.14). While we may see the archive as a solid base for our memories, an inner sanctum for sentimentality and a key basis of our identity, it is in fact encouraging the accumulation of artificial, staged and edited images that broadly deny and overwrite our own human limitations.
10/2013
Sea Breeze
Sea Breeze was first and foremost a performance piece set in the Winter Gardens Theatre in Morecambe – a building abandoned and frozen in time for forty years. Artists Raisin and Willow breathed new life into this abandoned building for a one time only performance in early September, influenced by the historic significance of the building to explore themes of memory and decay, and in turn discovered the captivating truths of the buildings past and evidence of decades gone by.
The exhibition at the Peter Scott Gallery is a product of their performance and findings. Through exploring this forgotten and decrepit building set between high barren landscape and the salty sea breeze, Raisin and Willow started to collect what they call ‘dust’; not just the stories that influenced their performance, but objects and ephemera that have lasted untouched since the theatre was plunged into seemingly conclusive darkness in the 70s.
The exhibition is a curious mix of objects worthy of a place in a museum and items that can only be described as rubbish. Sweet wrappers, used chewing gum, cigarette ends and ice cream scoops are wonderfully arranged and treated like art; their age indicative by the obvious contrast with contemporary packaging, and the sole reason for this attached grandeur to once throwaway objects. These fragments represent the lost, the forgotten and the left behind; once meaningless litter is now worthy of a place in a display case and deemed special enough to be archived. This is a process of collecting in order to preserve. Behind the glass lie tiny clusters of dead moths found on the windowsills, feathers and bones belonging to birds that died long ago, and even a pile of dust gathered from the floors of the building. It’s strange how things so banal can turn to be so poignant when exhibited; in meticulous arrangements with miniature labels even something so completely uninteresting as a pile of dust can turn into a worthy subject for contemplation.
We seem to have an infatuation with the past; of past lives and what happened, the stories of the people that lived and the stories of the places they lived in. The Winter Gardens Theatre was once a thriving and iconic Victorian building, with the likes of Sir Laurence Olivier and Laurel & Hardy taking to the stage. Thousands of people passed through its doors, thousands of tickets were sold and hundreds of stories were told under its spotlight, but now all that is left of this decaying building is its ties to the past. The Winter Gardens’ future is uncertain, and after being left in the dark, unused and seemingly forgotten for so long, it’s not clear whether or not the building can ever escape from the dust of its former life and start again. Maybe one day there will be a new performers walking its stage, and new audiences with their own stories that leave behind traces and memories to be forgotten and rediscovered by a new generation of strangers decades in the future.
03/2013
On Francis Bacon and Structuralism:
Francis Bacon was one of the most celebrated and yet notoriously difficult figurative painters of the twentieth Century. A key celebrity figure amongst the 1950s Soho arts scene, Bacon flitted constantly between lives of poverty and luxury, and a degree of this turbulent and extravagant life can be seen to resonate deeply within his paintings. Often depicting scenes of violence and primal anguish, Bacon’s paintings are undoubtedly dark, grotesque, and can be interpreted as windows to the psyche of a man disturbed and distressed.
Through attempting to interpret Bacon’s work in terms of Structuralism the question we must ask here is one of artist intention. What are the structures that Bacon has set up, so visible in his work and his life? What meanings did he ever want to convey, if any, and through what signs did he aim to do this? Of course Bacon is disputably most famous for his paintings of monstrous creatures and his portraits of others, but perhaps the most telling work that can be created and the one that is most easily considered in the context of Structuralism is the self-portrait. In order to attempt to find truth in the structures, or rather the real intention and semiotic value behind the façade that the artist has created, I will compare and contrast this with one of the many photographs of Bacon taken by John Deakin in the fifties; in a sense assessing the honesty of the face Bacon intended to project against the honesty of the camera lens.
The first example I will use in this exploration is a self-portrait produced by Bacon in 1971. Using Barthes’ notions of denotation and connotation as the two orders of signification, at the denotative, surface level, the image is a small portrait painting. It has obvious links to abstraction as the face is noticeably distorted and removed from photorealism. This image is the base structure from which we can make assumptions – the ‘signifier’. The connotative level, the ‘signified’, is what Barthes describes as the ‘myth’, a set of socio-cultural associations. In a work of art this becomes more complex. Barthes claims in Mythologies ‘we are no longer dealing here with a theoretical mode of representation: we are dealing with this particular image, which is given for this particular signification.’
Thus uncovering the connotative meaning and the ‘myth’ of the painting requires an attempt to understand the intentions of the painter. The painting itself is one of Bacon’s smallest works, instantly drawing links to something more intimate and personal. The painting is worked up on a black background, the movement and brush strokes highly visible and basic, with a limited colour palette of fleshy whites and greyed colder tones. The dry brush stroke technique is common in Bacon’s paintings, but where it is usually employed with a sense of impatience and immediacy, here there seems to be a melancholic latency, a delay. The face is sombre, decayed; it is manipulated and moulded as if made out of clay. It is incomplete; merely a construct of colour in shape and line, and the painting is based entirely on adding light to the dark, as if the artist himself is searching. There is an uncertainty and a lack of clarity, a blurring and a doubt. Martin Harrison, in his close analysis of Bacon and his stylistic development, claims ‘he conveyed his inner life without compromise, but in code, in his paintings'; that his paintings were ‘explorations of selfhood'. Deciphering this ‘code’ results in a creation of personal meaning, and the construct of reasoning behind the decisions of the artist. This is highly problematic, as Harrison continues ‘there’s a real risk that the myth of Bacon – albeit one in which the artist colluded – is all we will hand on to future generations.’ In dealing with such a deliberately evasive and difficult character, how can we view anything Bacon said or did as an honest portrayal of the structures he used to create his work?
In a similar manner, the connotations of John Deakin’s photograph of Bacon retain the same issues of assumption. Of course, on a denotative level the image is simple; it is a black and white photograph produced in 1952 and is a face-forward image of the artist. The photograph itself has notable tears, folds and creases, with some stains and tape still attached. At a connotative level, that of the signified, there are two levels here. Firstly, that of the subject of the photograph. The photograph is taken with a degree of brutality; every single imperfection is visible and the face is completely exposed. Bacon is wide-eyed, staring somewhat blankly into the lens but with an emotion that is simultaneously confrontational and submissive; there seems to be a sadness in his eyes, almost a resignation. The photograph itself is instead more telling about Deakin. The photograph has been neglected, crumpled and manhandled, reflecting the throwaway carefree lifestyle he and others like Bacon led in 1950s Soho.
On the chance that my personal explanation of the myth in Bacon’s self-portrait is in fact exactly what the artist intended, even then how can we be sure that this agreed projection is not just another construct masking the artist’s true intentions? He simply may have ran out of larger canvases on which to paint his self-portrait, his style may have been a consequence of a fleeting mood rather than a deeper emotional turmoil. Yet there is undoubtedly an element of honesty in Deakin’s photograph and in photography itself, given that there is simply nowhere for the subject to hide. However does this mean that the supposed ‘myth’ of the photograph is more honest than the personal assumption of ‘myth’ in the painting?
In Barthes’ analysis of Structuralism and the construct of signs he came to critique and expand on the work of Structuralist thinkers. In developing a Post-Structuralism, Barthes and other thinkers emphasised the role of time and history, and believed that the connotations associated with an object need to be queried in terms of the context they were produced in – ‘It is the responsibility of semiology to question its own discourse… to interrogate itself as to the place from which it speaks'. Derrida takes this further, claiming that ‘a context is never absolutely determinable, or rather, it’s determination can never be entirely certain or saturated.’ He outlines the problematic nature of a literal meaning as something that can often be contrived through semiology, taking inspiration from Condillac’s essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge to make links back to Egyptian use of hieroglyphics, ‘the first attempt at writing was nothing but a simple painting’. He continues, ‘Thus painting probably owes its origin to the necessity of tracing our thoughts…and this has doubtlessly contributed to preserving the language of action as that which is most readily depictable.’ Does this mean that this initial non-verbal means of communication is the most honest means of expression?
The question here concerns the nature of Bacon’s self-portrait. Did he intend his painting to be a ‘language of action’, a means of communication? Did he even plan out his paintings in terms of an initial idea and an initial message at all? Were his paintings conscious or unconscious ‘tracings of thoughts’, or simply not for us to understand? Bacon himself once claimed that “painting today is pure luck” and that “I can dream all day long and ideas for paintings just fall into my mind like slides.” And yet it is true that most, if not all, of his paintings were inspired by photographs. Evidence of photographic portraits creased and torn, much like Deakin’s, and books of preparatory work were found scattered around his studio in South Kensington after his death. He was evidently keen to create a myth on his own spontaneity, a desired communication of a nonchalant and effortless practice relying solely on chance. What does this mean then, for the self-portrait? If Bacon was so reluctant to reveal the truth behind his process how can we be sure that his self-depiction is anything but a façade?
In Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, he addresses the act of drawing and the sincerity of the self-portrait. ‘One must say of the self-portrait: “If there were such a thing…” “If there remained anything of it.” It is like a ruin that does not come after the work but remains produced, already from the origin, by the advent and structure of the work.’ Derrida describes the ‘ruin’ in the self-portrait as a ‘memory open like an eye… that lets you see without showing you anything at all, anything of the all.’ While this is quite a complex notion to understand, I believe Derrida is probing at the trace of the artist and the self-portrait’s ability to communicate. There is an element here of something almost lost in translation, a despondency in the self-portrait as the act of drawing is merely tracing something; a ‘ruin’ attempting to recall something that was never really there. Indeed, there is a strong sense of sadness in Bacon’s reasoning behind his self-portraits, as he revealed in an interview with David Sylvester in 1975, “I loathe my own face . . . I’ve done a lot of self-portraits, really because people have been dying around me like flies and I’ve nobody else left to paint but myself.”
The year that this particular self-portrait was produced was the same year that Bacon’s lover George Dyer committed suicide. Are tragedies like this, of which Bacon faced many, part of the structuring and process through which Bacon painted in this way? Or is it merely the case that such an emotive self-portrait causes the spectator to believe that there must be an underlying reasoning, an upsetting context through which it is painted; after all ‘the harm done to a person must also be visible in his portrait’.
The same could be said for the Deakin’s photographic portrait of the painter, and Barthes’ Camera Lucida certainly sheds some light here. Barthes questions the truth of identity in portrait photography, claiming ‘in front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art… I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity.’ Here it is easy to make links between Deakin’s photograph and Bacon’s self-portrait; Bacon’s ability to wear a mask even in photos makes accessing the truth impossible as we can never deduce whether this face, this look, was simply pre-planned and without true emotion.
Yet what Barthes offers is the suggestion that art transcends the merely communicative. He recognises that in both the artworks I have discussed there is something beyond semiotics and signs that has the ability to wound, to elicit meaning without necessarily understanding the artist’s intentions and process. The ‘punctum’, the wounding detail, is a personal communication, and for Barthes this has strong ties to time and transience. He claims that ‘every photograph is a certificate of presence’, that ‘the photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.’[18] Deakin’s photograph is trapped in history and tied down to the day on which it was taken; as the artist of the photograph he has taken the image as a means of preservation, to keep the ‘what has been’. In a sense, Bacon did the same through painting from photos. The photographs became Bacon’s memories of figure as he found ‘the presence of another person inhibiting’ in the studio, and saw photographs as more ‘intimate’. The photographs inspired his musings on transience and loss; Bacon himself said ‘One of the great fascinations of old photographs … is that you think, “Now they’re all dead”’.
There is a likeness between the face and composition in Bacon’s self-portrait and the photograph taken by John Deakin, and it is not unlikely that the latter was the origin of the former. This makes the truth in both images impossible to determine, as despite seeming to penetrate Bacon’s reality from both the inside and the outside they can no longer allude to any notions of authenticity or desired communication. Of course, as Barthes quite rightly claims, ‘there are so many readings of the same face’ and therefore a truly Structuralist interpretation of both images can only ever be subjective. To uncover the myth and to reveal the truth in Bacon and his work would be to remove the punctum that made him so famous, and, I believe, be somewhat contrary to what this frustratingly obtuse yet marvellous artist would have ever desired.
01/2013
A defining piece in the genre of site-specific installation art, Richard Wilson’s 20:50 was made twenty-five years ago and has been recreated in numerous galleries around the world. Due to the nature of the installation, a huge structure made solely of steel and used sump oil that fills an entire room, the very character of the work changes from site to site. This obvious reproducibility of the piece could be seen as corresponding to present modes of production, the sense of trickery and the disorientating experience of the work constant, regardless as to where it is situated.
The version of 20:50 in room 13 of the Saatchi Gallery is Wilson’s third version in London. In creating this work in different spaces and at different points in recent history, he appears most interested in the reaction and response of people. The changing connotation of oil, a particularly relevant topic in current affairs, draws upon this idea of waste, and could be see as a representation of present modes of consumption – the abundance of few while the many struggle. The title alone refers to the viscosity of standard engine oil, and has been described as ‘an elegiac embrace of industrial waste… encapsulating the tension between technological production and nature.'
The oil, which is observed from a viewing platform, takes on a reflective quality; mimicking the room in which it is installed and in doing so manages to create for itself a hyperreal state – a constant oscillation between presence and absence. Through being placed in gallery settings, 20:50 literally reflects what Marx describes as the ‘base’, the elitism of the gallery in which art is defined and determined by. This also relates to Benjamin’s belief that all art has an ‘aura’ that can never be entirely separated from its ritual function, forever confined to inaccessible ritual spaces such as the gallery. Benjamin believed in the unique value of the ‘authentic work of art’, and saw mechanical reproduction of art as emancipating art from this ritual function, withering its ‘aura’. With 20:50 it is difficult to say where the authentic work of art truly lies. In this case, 20:50 has been physically reproduced many times, taking the exact same idea in every setting. Yes there may be an original 20:50, the first one Wilson produced, but who is to say that any of his following 20:50 installations hold more or less visual power and value than the first? Furthermore, unleashing the installation from its apparent ‘inaccessible ritual space’ would arguably be to deny 20:50 of its conceptual power. The work relies on the space, the context and the ‘base’ in which it is situated in – steel and sump oil outside of the gallery rather than an ‘installation’ within would rarely be given the same artistic praise.
Benjamin believed in the power of mechanical reproduction. Indeed there have been photos of the piece that accurately reveal its quality as a work of astounding deception, a piece that confounds our preconceptions as effectively now as it did twenty-five years ago. What cannot be mechanically reproduced, however, a quality that forever will stay in the favour of the ‘authentic work of art’ and thus I believe is a radical exception to Benjamin’s theory, is the experience of the installation. The pungent smell, the sense of total engulfment and the perplexing dissolution of apparent physical boundaries can never be communicated through a simple computer screen.
