Tropes, Elasticity

Looking forward to the upcoming, big V&A show on Postmodernism — and making adaption, account of it in our Camberwell programme-to-be. Just read Ryan G. — or R. Gerald —Nelson's DDDDoomed — Or, Collectors & Curators of the Image: A Brief Future History of the Image Aggregator (2010). Now reading Jan Verwoert's Apropos Appropriation: Why stealing images today feels different (2007), published here. Early in the piece, he describes the act of appropriation as a 'radical temporal incision', in the context of the late 1970s, by artists whose "works convey an intense sense of an interruption of temporal continuity, a black out of historical time that mortifies culture and turns its tropes into inanimate figures, into pre-objectified, commodified visual material, ready to pick up and use."

Spike Jones' Cocktails for Two (1945).

I'm gathering interest in the 'trope', as a form and a gesture. Certainly in drawing reductively, there is a queasiness that comes with use of a spiral or an oval. Others, such as the stack of three tapering, lozenge-ended lines or an upward-widening arc, appear so often in tattoo or moulded relief on household object, as something parked between euphemism and aspiration. Classically, in grainy pastel Eurocoach livery. But then also a set of properties, borne of boiling something too long.

Two Cooks and a Cabbage (1941), directed by Alex Bryce.

A farty, khaki-cooked elastic slapstick. I think given its hue by late 1970s powercut, candlelit readings of Whizzer & Chips comic. And the puce-face of Windsor Davies against a bobbled, electrostatic mustard poloneck squeezed into a caravan with Bernard Breslaw, leering through the condensation out onto a damp squib campsite of late, tired Carry Ons.

Tom Paterson's line — and roll-call of wafting sock, bulging pocket, belching orifice — made an impression lasting to date. Each prop described as if held, with special attention on how one thing plugs itself in another. Not so tricky to unpack, I guess.

It took me (via Sonic Youth's Dirty) to looking a lot at Mike Kelley in the early 1990s. This, Ectoplasm Photograph 10 (1978, 2009), via.

But I enjoy how solid, satisfying the tics and devices are, even when isolated.

The elasticity of everything.

St. James' Infirmary, from Snow White (1933), sung by a rotoscoped Cab Calloway; animated by Roland Crandall for (Max) Fleischer Studios.

I know that I LIKE ... my O.W.L. – a lot!!! .HH.

In fact dark shadows were gradually falling over the little wood.

The birds were growing quieter.

The flowers were closing their petals.

The insects were flying more slowly.

Night was not far off.

Enough for Something

For the last few weeks I've been organising material as customary — but now editioning three of decision. Positioning judgments are made by eye.

Using sunlight and poundshop sugar paper as a first markmaking stage. To be followed by some cuts and application to the peg boards.

The elements are disparate at the moment but certainly it is the intention that is editioned, rather than the action, which encapsulates flaw.

Grip, fill

From The Measure of Man; Human Factors in Design (1960) by Henry Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss can be understood as an antecessor of user–centred design, his practice predicated by the fitting of products to human scale. His ubiquity, for me, epitomised by the chiselled handpiece of his Western Electric Model 500 telephone. Never held-held but only beholden–held in past US drama, the squared haptic misfit in a sweaty, harrowed hand.

Or held to the ear by another: Klute (1971), via. Dreyfuss engaged with and extended the application of 'human factors', ergonomics, anthropometrics (as seen in The Measure of Man).

Arzberg by Udo Koch (1991)(coffee pot, plaster, wire), via. Only ever seen one piece first-hand by Koch, at the Goethe-Institut in about 1995. It comprised a group of coffee pots, the plaster nullities spun on an axis and wired together, in and around the form. Around the same time, perhaps a little later, I'd seen the cold turkey mechanical ceiling baby in Trainspotting. Over a longer phase, Michael Powell's mechanical-tangible fantasy sequences. The point being the visible invisible. Hallucinatory ordinary.

A Family of Three at Tea (c. 1727) by Richard Collins, via V&A. First seen in Early English Porcelain by Bevis Hiller (Walker Books, 1992). The cup grips are indicative of both wealth and fashion.

Man and Child Drinking Tea (c. 1720), via.

Matthias Müller's Alpsee (1994), via.

The book Milk and Melancholy (2008) by Kenneth Hayes "considers milk as corporate advertising's moustache of health; as the antiwine; as a complex mixture of fat, protein, corpuscles, lactose, chyle, and plasma that lacks darkness but lacks also the morally pure transparency of crystal; and as the luminous middle term between mercury’s glare and water's transparency". Published by The MIT Press.

MIT Professor (1948–1977) Harold Edgerton's milk drop captures, regarding the iconic Milk Drop Coronet (1957).

De la serie Trautes Heim (1985-86) by Anna and Bernhard Blume, via, where they describe "victims of a sort of ‘medium assault’ by commonplace objects and artefacts".

Richard Serra's Hand Catching Lead (1968).

From Selle (1988) by Udo Koch, again via.

Wilder Shores of Love

Cy Twombly has died, age 83. For such an idiosyncratic, he is held as a standard by many I've known or taught, in their reaching for a way to make. He showed a way to make work from narrative without being literal. He showed that the history of a drawing is the drawing. He showed that no work is definitive. Latterly, at the Tate's retrospective, the revelatory sculptures. Today, finding some of his photographs; stand-alone in a way similar to Tarkovsky's polaroids. This, 'Yard Sale' (1993), via. Nearby, Dulwich Picture Gallery have just opened 'Arcadian Painters: Twombly and Poussin', with the 16mm Tacita Dean film Edwin Parker. Rest in peace.

Box End

An edition of five boxed works are with Partners & Spade, New York and will be in the space and on the website in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, my set of five packing tapes are now available at Chandelier Creative's Limited Editions shop.

The boxes have been more or less a year in the making, tracked through this blog. As a consequence, a document of cul-de-sacs and iterations. The piece is sequential, fiddly in the way it pieces together but also in the way it was conceived. Maybe the most significant outcome for me is quite a changed methodology — or one that taps a more natural vein.

This was the last decision, like each previous in its way realigning the perceived function of the box. Spares, by-products, leftovers to leave with the user but also to take into the next one. This one, I recalled at the end, was dimensionally conditioned by the found envelope. These envelopes were purchased from Inno twelve years ago, when we lived in Brussels. I've used them here and there, feeling they were always important. Only have a few left and need to replenish. Odd how cheap, ephemeral items can assume such indispensability.

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Forest Marks, Love is Enough, Utopia

A month or so ago, my Camberwell group visited the London Metropolitan Archive, the Guildhall Art Gallery and library, brokered by Adrian Holme. A day leafing through and opening up fascinating documents of — and belonging to — the City of London.



The LMA is, simply put, London's archive. Kilometres of shelving in strong rooms, holding miscellany reaching back to a small piece paper, a 1067 decree by William the Conqueror (or the Bastard as he was known at the time).



We spent some time with boxes brought up from the archive, related to Adrian's seminars this year. What became clear, is the impossibility of a definitive record. Through the conservator's studio and here, we handled Victorian concertina'd paper viewfinders of the Crystal Palace, a scrapbook belonging to an employee of Horniman's Tea, photographs of crowds esconced in banter and singalong, in Bethnal Green tube station during an air raid, hand-coloured architectural plans and sections of a works. It's clear there were reams of more linear records but the unpredictable truth-telling of these things detained us.









I enjoyed the Epping Forest box.



The Guildhall library presented an opportunity to handle two amazing, original Kelmscott Press editions in a limp vellum binding. This, Morris' Love is Enough (1897), with illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones. A full 100-page scan here.



And Thomas More's Utopia (1893). Note the yapp edges. Also seen here.

The stick that moved on its own

A new work, He dared not tell them about the stick that moved on its own. Dimensions 420 x 300 x 20mm. Plywood, four-colour risograph print with die-cuts and found fixings, shelves, erasers. It's exhibited as a part of Questioning Print, now at Kemistry Gallery, curated by the very good 40/04 — Alex Hough, Jake Hopwood and Charlie Abbott.



The title follows the work's bitty ethic, taken from the 'Golden Pleasure Book' series of 'The Gold Star Library', 1967. I'm wanting to find each time something insolubly wrong in the pulling together of title, print and things on a kind of peg-board which would suggest compositional harmony.



The picture element is intended to be explanatory of something incidental or unimportant or ephemeral or momentary, observed first-hand.



I'm thinking about how these can operate on a wall, at different proportions and scale. The shelf aspect is particularly interesting at the moment.

Run Back Chain Brick Rope

Sally is making good progress, stitching the Flotta Chair. This time, before each element, we are looking at new kinds of what essentially are the fundamental running–, chain–, rope– and back–stitches. Also, for the fills, weaving and couching in a number of ways.



So here, two mixes of a sage green and dusty, dijon yellow. Whipped and threaded backstitches for the radiuses; couched lines for the angulars. At the drawing stage, I pay a lot of attention now (in translating the original hand drawings to more 'stable' — for the overstitching) screen drawings) to a muscle memory of each form. This then is a guiding logic to the character of each stitched line and helps us navigate the array of unfamiliar options.



It also gives me a clearer idea of where to stop, in making the artwork.





So, to an extent, each chair is a sampler. On this note, we are preparing a sampler for The Idler Academy. Sally will be running an embroidery workshop; I'm making drawings, to adapt as artwork screened onto linen, for each participant. Returning again to notions of 'kit', Froebel's Gifts and Occupations, Bauhaus preliminary exercises. I like the idea of an underprinted structure that allows for some improvisation, even by the novice. Not sure yet whether this is sufficiently simple and practicable but will try.