ashortdescriptionofmypoo

Booze

2012-01-30T08:49:00.000Z

A quick one.

For the past few weeks I haven't been drinking. Hangovers were getting to the stage where they were impacting on my life in a truly negative way, so I thought I'd have a few weeks off and try and work out a better way of doing things.

Physically, I don't feel different - apart from the no hangovers thing. And mentally I don't feel better, but I do feel stranger. Life feels a bit more distant - like I'm holding it at arm's length. Things don't seem so urgent, or exciting, or terrible. I feel like I have more time to respond, like everything has slowed down just the tiniest amount.

The main feeling is one of ownership - everything I do and say is mine.There is no external influence. And if I do or say something ridiculous, then I don't feel worried about it, because I was bound to do or say it anyway.

It's a sober shrug. A sort of dry determinism.

Under

2012-01-17T12:10:00.000Z

On Sunday, I braved the cold to drive out to the edge of London with Tim Bowditch and Nick Rochowski.

Tim and Nick have been taking photos of the M25 - or, more specifically, they have been taking photos underneath the M25.

(A quick note to say that [obviously] these aren't Tim and Nick's pictures - these are, as always, low quality digital photos from my phone)

All around the motorway are underpasses - some of them are small tunnels that allow the road to cross streams, others are more traditional underpasses that bridge small roads or footpaths, and some, like in the above photo, are for farmers to drive tractors between their fields, divided by the M25.

This tunnel had some unique graffiti with a big focus on anal concerns.

And the usual hastily sketched cocks.

Tim and Nick are trying to avoid the graffiti - their photos will highlight the material, abstracted nature of the architecture.

But Nick said something which, for me, connected the graffiti to the architecture in an interesting way. He was trying to rub off a chalk mark on one of the walls and he said that the tunnels were like the surface of the moon - any human trace would be preserved for many years, protected from the elements that would normally wash them away.

I was also thinking about "bad" graffiti (tags, lewd comments, drawings of cocks), and how it tells you a lot more about the social history of a place than "good" graffiti (skilful spray-paint work, big colourful letters etc.). Like the EUROZ tag in the photo above. When did the tagger choose his name? Surely before the crisis in the Eurozone? Or is it a comment on the economic situation? If I was a tagger I'd go for RENMINBI (the Chinese currency) in the current climate.

We ended the day here, a large underpass over a river and public footpath. These triangular areas of negative space caught our eyes immediately - unintentional masonic symbols brought about by the extreme functionalism of the architecture.

These are the sort of dead zones that feel almost haunted - the M25 is right above you, you can hear the suspension in the bridge working constantly - echoing, clunking, swishing noises.

From far away the road sounds like the sea. Up close it is more like factory - the noise never ceases, inseparable from the functioning of the motorway. Maybe the noise is the product? Or maybe it is a symptom? The tinnitus ridden ear canal of a giant.

The camera Tim and Nick are using for the project has an achromatic digital back. That means that it can take photos in almost total darkness because it picks up the whole light spectrum, including infrared waves.

The camera takes in a huge amount of visual information, with the surface of the concrete rendered in textural detail that is breathtaking - zooming in on a few hi-res images on the computer is like taking a magnifying glass to the surface of another planet.

The downside (on a cold January night) is that the photos need long exposures - up to an hour. And this is then doubled by the in-camera processing.

On the other hand, this long, enforced habitation of dead space becomes an extreme meditation on the built environment. Squatting in the cold, on a muddy bank, for two hours, certainly focuses your mind on what's around you.

This focused attention is always there in photography - especially landscape or architectural photography. Noticing and planning and understanding the shot you want to take is as important as your technical skill with the equipment.

I suppose it is a sort of enforced mindfulness, or this idea of 'the importance of paying attention' that I have written about before.

Also, the language of photography allows Tim and Nick to talk about embarrassing, romantic ideas like beauty or the sublime in technical terms. The need for a certain depth of field or exposure time is a technical appreciation of the task of capturing such a landscape in one image.

We had to give up on the last shot, it was getting late and they couldn't get the angle that they both understood to be the essence of the picture they wanted. Nick said, 'it's so frustrating - you can see it in your head, but it just isn't there'.

I'd say that this ability to conceive of a unified image that isn't there is one of the basic functions of human understanding. Without it we wouldn't be able to think about ideas that we couldn't directly perceive: like the idea of 'London' as a single place; or 'Me' as a single identity; or the M25 as a single road, circling the city endlessly, chasing its own tail. Round and round and round.

Lars Iyer

2012-01-14T11:15:00.001Z

Here is a brilliant extract from an interview with Lars Iyer. It perfectly captures the sense of total impotence that encompasses contemporary creative activity, and then turns it on its head, making it the only reason anyone should carry on creating.

Lars Iyer's new book Dogma is out in Febrary. His first book, Spurious, is a masterpiece of adolescent humour and philosophy and you should read it if you like that sort of thing.

---

Have you found it possible to make a living by writing the sort of thing you want to, without other work? Do you think there is a place in our current economic system and climate for literature as a profession?

Making a living by my writing? No! I have a job, and the writing I do is a sideline, a hobby. I use this belittling word on purpose. My literary endeavours bring in no more than pocket money… In some ways, I deserve to be mocked, not because I carry on writing literature without understand its posthumousness, but because I go on regardless of the very real material proof of its posthumousness!

There is something glorious about Kafka’s night-time writing in his room in his parents’ flat. Something wonderful about his obscurity, about the fact that he published so little when his friends published so much. We can read his diaries and letters and think: there’s a man of integrity! That’s what it means, really means, to be a writer! But our impression is dependent on Kafka’s eventual success, and on a culture, his culture, where there was a potential audience for his work all along.

There is, by contrast, something pathetic about my obscurity. The blog, Writers No One Reads, celebrates forgotten writers whose work is barely known in the English-speaking world. But I’m already a Writer No One Reads, whose work didn’t register sufficiently in general culture to be forgotten. I say this without self-pity, rather with a certain amusement. Nevertheless, it is pitiful in some strong sense. I really am wasting my time... Why bother?, I ask myself. But the challenge is to pose that question in the work itself.

How is that possible? It means, for me, the foregrounding a kind of imposture, not only in what the characters say or do, but in the form of the novel, too. For me, my novels mustn’t look like literature in the old sense. I’m not aiming at producing meta-fiction in the manner, say, of ‘60s American ‘high’ postmodernists. Their work, for me, still shows a belief in the novel. It is still supported by the collective fantasy of the novel, of ‘literature’. There was still a crowd before which they performed their hi-jinks. The experimentalists produced tolerable perversions of the still-sacred Novel, and their works could still be taught in the university.

For me, what needs to be exposed, laughed at, is the fiction of literary autonomy, of l’art pour l’art. For me, the literary novel itself is a fiction, existing through a kind of collective fantasy. In our time, the literary novel has to show its efforts to be itself – its sweat, so to speak. The literary novel must show how it hustles for itself, promotes itself. Because it’s become increasingly apparent that there is no ‘itself’, that the collective fantasy which sustained the novel is breaking down.

It might be objected that this breakdown reveals what was always the case: that novel-writing has always involved a performance of novel-writing — an act of belief, a kind of ritual on the part of literary reviewers, literary publishers, etc. This is true. But, still, it is the moment at which this fantasy reveals itself, the moment at which it breaks down, that is crucial. For me, this is what has occurred since the ‘high’ postmodernity of the 1960s, when it has become clear that all the ludism in the world cannot by itself expose the literary imposture. There is a terrible melancholy to this realisation, I think. It opens no new horizon, no fresh world for literature to conquer. Something really has been lost …

This is what, for me, career literary novelists, who understand literature as a profession, never understand. They believe in what they write, and their publishers believe in what they sell, and the reviewers believe in what they review. Good luck to them! The ‘current economic conditions and climate’ will allow them to thrive for a little while yet …

MILLENNIUM

2012-01-06T17:46:00.000Z

I'm finally getting down to do some real research for this project at The Royal Standard. I've started reading Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory. Which charts a series of walks done by the writer across London in the mid-nineties.

It's good. He seems less angry than in London Orbital, which was written much later, in 2002. But then again, by 2002 Labour had been in power for five years. Tony Blair was about to throw us into a nine year war in Iraq, and, for a resident of East London, such as Sinclair, the Millennium Dome was there, just waiting to bring the bile up to the back of one's throat.

Sinclair references the Dome a lot in his writing. For someone interested in the city as a mystical place - with city politics as black magic - the Dome is an obvious touchstone. The Dome is something that everyone remembers for the wrong reasons, and as a signifier for corrupt and pointless acts of government expenditure, you can't get much better. Well, not yet anyway. London 2012 awaits...

Anyway, as I'm reading a lot of Sinclair, I thought I'd walk to the Dome and see if I could sense any of the dark energy being picked up or sent out by those yellow metal struts.

---

To get down to Greenwich foot tunnel I have to walk through Canary Wharf. That place is mystifying. It has its own security force. Not the people in the orange jackets - sure they're paid to stand around and look at you with a beady eye as you take photos. No, the real security are the joggers. The infinite lunchtime joggers.

As I approached the roadside security hut (private land - if you're driving you get checked on the way in. No undesirables - not that anyone would know what Canary Wharf desires, apart from incredibly fluid capital, but how do you fit that in your car?) I saw a guy jogging up and down the road beside Billingsgate Fish Market. Back and forth. Sprinting slowly. He would hit a wall as he got to the edge of the land owned by LDDC (London Docklands Development Corporation). Perhaps he was trying to escape. Needed a run up. Maybe he had one of those metal tags in his feet, like a supermarket trolley with a magnetic security feature. Everyone gets one when you work here.

As I took this photo (there is the Dome, lurking in the background, behind the masonic pillars that mark the edge of the territory [maybe they send out the magnetic signal to stop escapees?]), two more joggers passed me, on lunchtime patrol. Australians. Talking about their Olympic tickets. I imagine Olympic tickets raining down on Canary Wharf like confetti, or torn up £50 notes.

Here is a nice dead zone across the water. I think I can get onto there - maybe something to try when Colin Dilnot comes down to visit me for more research. What would I do there? Perform shamanistic rituals? Sacrifice a Pret a Manger sandwich? Gymnastics? How long would I last before the joggers dived in, swam over and escorted me from the property? Is it in their jurisdiction, or would they bounce back off the LDDC's force field, and watch me from the edge of their Zone, wondering what on earth I was doing and how I could possibly monetise it?

As you get across to South Quay, the money starts to fade away. More fencing, less security. Less brand names. More independent (read: weird) retailers. Faceless warehousey-offices designed by no-namers. Here is a nice altar upon which to perform for passers by - mostly lost tourists and shame faced Canary Wharf workers who live the wrong side of the South Quay footbridge (because who else would live here? Why?).

And here is some fake grass around the base of a tree.

---

Greenwich Foot Tunnel. The lift is out of order (has been for at least a year) - so it is stairs down, and stairs back up the other end. I'm surprised by the amount of drain covers in the tunnel. What are they for? Surely we want to keep the borders pretty tight on this place? And why are there puddles on the floor? Is there something we should be told? Occasional light rain perhaps. Spilled bottles of water. Dogs who can't wait. We hope.

Then along the Thames path for a while, From Greenwich towards Blackwall Point (Points and Quarters, very regeneration-y terms. Don't see them much outside of the yellow signs that attempt to navigate you around a blank world of new build houses and empty streets). Many diversions, because of all the developments - thousands of empty flats. Sorry, luxury riverside apartments. Almost as many flats as there are pubs called The Cutty Sark. Maybe someone should call a meeting. There should be a catchment area around the ship which gives pubs the right to call themselves The Cutty Sark. It gets confusing.

---

As I approach the Dome from different angles, I keep seeing the big hole that pierces the side of the tent (For that is what it is, a big tent. Let us not forget.) like a trepanated skull. Maybe it lets all the bad vibes out. The sad John Prescott energies. It lets all the good energies in. The O2 energies. The branded energies of well known food chains. The Cineworld vibes.

I get to the Blackwall Tunnel underpass.More Dead Zones to colonise. To inhabit. Good places to drink tins of super strong lager and howl at the sky. Exorcise New Labour with Big Society street drinking and sick up the life blood of Peter Mandelson into a discarded traffic cone. Carry it around like an Olympic torch. Pour him back into the river.

To walk to the Dome is to miss the point entirely. Why do you think we built all the roads? What was the Jubilee line extension for?

I'm on Millennium Way here. A begrudging pavement finally accepted me after a haphazard road crossing. I went over the roundabout, climbed it like a shit mountain, and dropped onto the traffic-less approach to the Dome.

Fenced off water feature. Everything is still being built. All the time. For ever. Nothing has been finished here since they started building it.

These water features are on Peninsula Square, in front of the entrance to the Dome. They look like they are a mistake. Bad plumbing. Oozing filthy water up from the Thames. Maybe from the drains of the Greenwich Foot Tunnel.

I don't know what this is, but it was humming and no one else was looking at it. Does the Dome have its own power station? Is it sentient? Maybe it creates the Millenial force field within which the correct '2000' style conditions are maintained in order for the Dome to stay erect.

---

I went into the dome, got my bag searched (Standard. They should have done it when I crossed the border into Canary Wharf). The whole place was empty - it being a Friday morning in January. No big shows. No summer crowds. Putting on a brave face. It was me, the security guards (no joggers), and a few more lost tourists.

There is a big sign advertising the opportunity to download a Kasabian gig that took place on New Year's Eve (2011, not 1999). The band look sad in the photo. Like they know that they are stuck within the Millenial force field, forever failing to create music that sounds like the present. Retro-necro at the Dome. Maybe they never played on NYE. They just ran a tape from a gig in 2000, did some video FX to make them look a bit older and fatter. Richer.

And that was it really. A lot of empty restaurants. A few bars. Oh, and a Nissan promotional 'Experience' where you got to pretend to drive an electric car.

And design an electric car.

And have your picture taken in front of a green screen with an electric car. You got to choose what caption went on your picture. Mine says 'grim'.

Memory Waves

2011-11-05T16:28:00.000Z

I was in Newcastle for a few days, working on an ARKA group project and surfing the alternate waves of fear and nostalgia that always threaten to drown me whenever I visit the city. Every time I go there it seems smaller. Clumps of memory held together by threads of physical movement.

I am getting ready to do some work in Liverpool with Colin Dilnot, a historian and psycho-geographer who I'll be meeting later this month. We'll be knocking around some ideas for Dialogues, The Royal Standard's education/free school program. Everything is in its embryonic stage at this point, but we'll be thinking about the Situationists and the notion of the Dérive.

I suppose my first connection with psycho-geography (apologies for those who don't like the term, but it is a useful description) was through the works of W. G. Sebald. The Rings of Saturn is my favourite book because it was the first Sebald I read, but also because it dragged me through an East Anglian landscape that I knew from my childhood. This is the natural territory for Sebald's strain of memory travels. Movement is the physical connection of ideas, and walking through your own history (or, having Sebald walk through it for you) is the most obvious way of demonstrating that mode of connection.

So what about Liverpool then? Colin is from Liverpol, and so is David Jacques (an artist from Liverpool who spends a lot of his time surfing the city's great waves of history). Even Daniel Simpkins and Penny Whitehead (who I collaborated with as part of my Royal Standard residency) have lived there for long enough to weave themselves into the fabric of their adopted home. I spent three weeks there in 2010.

How do I access that privileged realm of history when I have so few of my own memories of the city?

After taking part in three residencies (Birmingham, Liverpool, Gdańsk) in the past few years, I've had to think about that question a lot. Why should an outsider get a voice, and what can it say? What is the conversation, and who sets the parameters of the discussion?

I've dealt with it in a number of different ways, but the successes always involved collaboration with the people who know more than me, and are happy to share. I like to piggy back on other people's histories, then mesh them with my own. Maybe that's why I like the techniques of psycho-geography: walking, talking, remembering. Just as you lock in step with the people you walk with, you might lock in step with how they think and start making sense of your journey.

S W I T Z E R L A N D

2011-11-02T15:49:00.000Z

My new Dogtanion e.p for Tape Club Records is called S W I T Z E R L A N D and it is out now.

You can download it for free from the Tape Club Records website.

And you can come see me play tracks from the album at Catch in Shoreditch on November 9th.

And below you can watch the video for the first track from the e.p, called Cheap, featuring Kerry Leatham.Enjoy.

More Drawings

2011-10-24T17:02:00.001+01:00

Power Cup, pen and pencil on paper, 2011

Chilli Pepper 3D Logo, pen and pencil on paper, 2011

Neon Cross, pen on paper, 2011

Rhomboid 2, pencil on paper, 2011

Recent Drawings

2011-10-23T22:00:00.001+01:00

Black and Yellow Circle, pen on paper, 2011

Black Cylinder with Yellow, pen on paper, 2011

Black Glove with Yellow, pen on paper, 2011

Hindu Peace Sign with Shading (Swastika), pen on paper, 2011

Just a Little Hindu Peace Sign (Swastika), pen on paper, 2011

Mobile Phone, pen on paper, 2011

The Number Five, pen on paper, 2011

Medical Robots

2011-10-15T12:52:00.000+01:00

Recent Drawings

2011-10-11T18:24:00.000+01:00

British Medical Association, pen on paper, 2011

Feather Ball Flesh Tunnel, pen on paper, 2011

Rhomboid, pen on paper, 2011

Cube with Blue, pen on paper, 2011

Feather Ball 2, pen on paper, 2011

DEEP MEMES

2011-09-21T11:51:00.003+01:00

I've been thinking about the utopian elements of technology. Open access to information. Total choice. The ability for individuals to produce content that can theoretically be as easy to find as content produced by large companies. Connected, distributed communities. Non-hierarchical forms of communication.

And I've been talking to people about left politics, and how increasingly, the word most associated with political action is resistance rather than progress. Resistance is reactive, and conservative (in a pure sense of the word).

And I've been thinking about language and it's limits, and about the power of writing to create worlds that are beyond those limits. Using words to describe the indescribable.

And I've been laughing (along with a lot of people) at Blue Labour, Labour's short lived attempt to woo floating voters with a regressive stance on crime and immigration.

And I've been thinking about some previous artworks and describing them as being about the links between political ideology and shame.

And I've been thinking about 'Market Realism' and it's dominance in political discussion. The assertion that market led societies are a reality that can't be challenged along with a simultaneous embrace of thinking that gives more power to the market within society.

And I've been researching into photophobia in plants and in humans.

And I've been searching for pictures of David Cameron next to Thomas the Tank Engine and the bloke from Keane. But all I found was this.

Sorry I haven't Posted in a While

2011-09-20T08:30:00.002+01:00

This is both an honest recognition that I haven't written or posted much for a while, but I've been busy in the real world so I think that's ok.

Anyway, this is also a chance to post a link to Cory Arcangel's project called,

Sorry I haven't Posted, "Inspiring Apologies from Today's World Wide Web"

Which is a blog that re-blogs other people's blog posts that have'Sorry I haven't posted...' somewhere in the text.

Ironically, the the Sorry... blog hasn't been updated since November 2010. I think it's time Cory wrote an apology.

Jennifer Aniston

2011-08-22T09:58:00.003+01:00

A while back I wrote a story called Friends. The TV Show and it got posted up on the Foolscap Journal.

The story is about a re-make of Friends starring a mixture of real cast members and look-a-likes.

Someone got in touch via the comments at the bottom of the blog post.

> Author : Jennifer Sullivan
> E-mail : jenniferanistondouble@yahoo.com
> URL : http://www.facebook.com/JenniferAnistonDouble
> Whois : http://whois.arin.net/rest/ip/99.41.93.113
> Comment:
> I am a Jennifer Aniston double/look alike. I will play Rachel Green. Cast me.

Check the Facebook page. She is an amazing double. Now I just need look-a-likes for the rest of the cast, a studio and about £100,000 and I can make the artwork described in the story.

The Pale King and the Importance of Paying Attention: PT 2

2011-08-14T22:14:00.002+01:00

I possibly had a thought which might link the ideas of paying attention and duty, for which if that makes no sense then read yesterday's post.

So, an e.g.

In The Pale King there is a long section where an IRS employee describes in detail his growing up and being a classically disaffected college student who takes drugs and embraces a sort of affected nihilism that probably is recognisable to all people who have ever been young. The relevant part of this story is that he constantly disappoints his father and also doesn't respect his father's way of life - which is to say conservative and structured and regular and dutiful.

A particular part of the story takes place while the character is staying at his father's house, in between college courses (which he variously fails, or drops out of, or is asked to leave) and his father goes away on a business trip and the character and his friends smoke a lot of weed and watch television and eat junk food and disrespect various wishes of his father re: treatment of furniture + use of kitchen + general cleanliness and the father comes home early and walks through the door and looks around and is obviously disappointed but doesn't say a word and only later on in the character's life does he decode the meaning of his father's face as he (the father) walks in the door and takes in the fact that his son has disrespected all of his wishes.

There are various elements in the 'journey' of the character in this section of the book, but essentially the story is that of the character working out that his father's way of life is not illogical and repressed and ridiculous to the extent that the character thinks it is. This realisation comes about through the character (with the help of recreational amphetamine use) concentrating, thinking directly about, and paying attention to things in the world, out there, beyond his own self, and then using these observations to try and think objectively about the set of assumptions and prejudices that he has mistaken for his own beliefs for such a long time.

And in this section of the book the explicit subject is not only the act of paying attention, but being aware of your own attention, and choosing what to direct it towards. And this perhaps is the thrust of my argument. Wallace, here and elsewhere, is using a post-modern sense of self (a sense of being a fixed consciousness with no direct access to an objective world, along with an acute awareness of how you are seen by other people, whose inner states you cannot confirm the existence of or ever understand, and then the paradoxical sense that you yourself are a construct of your environment - which is the very world you can't really access) to re-appraise the idea of a good, functional society that has supposedly been destroyed by post-modern conceptions of self-hood and individualism.

Wallace seems to be getting at the idea that all this crippling self-awareness that we are lumbered with, which makes us all so cynical about the possibility of, say, altruism, or honesty or even the idea of society itself, is the very thing that keeps the possibility of these things alive. By being truly self-aware and really trying to understand the way things are in the world (not just the limited self-awareness of cynicism and aimless, endless irony), you can reach through and beyond your subjectivity and to the idea of other people's inner states and needs and wants, and the idea of having obligations to those other people, i.e. duty.

For a long time I thought of post-modernism as anti-modernism. A set of ideas that were purely critical and not constructive. More recently I've been trying to understand what a constructive post-modernism might be. Maybe if Wallace had lived longer than he did, we might have seen him map out another way of escaping the impotent cynicism of post-modernism; a constructive use of a deconstructive mode of thought.

The Pale King and the Importance of Paying Attention: PT 1

2011-08-13T18:02:00.005+01:00

There are, obviously, many sad things to be said about David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel, published from manuscripts and notes collected and edited after his death - mostly things that are obvious re: unfinished novels in general; suicide and long term depression; genius and/or excellence and expectation.

But there is a smaller, less obvious thing - or perhaps, and at least for me, it is less obvious in that I have just thought of it (whilst reading Oblivion, a collection of short stories from 2004, which is extremely good [so good that in a weird moment of self-reflexive panic at the idea that I was some kind of DFW obsessive {which, I am aware, that by using the acronym DFW I am, obviously, a DFW obsessive to some degree, but then I haven't had a literary crush for some time so I feel like that is ok, ok?} I sort of forcibly criticised the idea of his genius by thinking 'Yeah, not every thing he has ever written is genius, some of it is only excellent'].).

And that thing is that I think I have just clocked what Wallace is describing, or getting at in almost every piece of fiction and non-fiction that he wrote. And also that isn't the thing, really. Really the thing is that The Pale King feels like the novel that could have addressed this thing (that he was getting at) directly, head on, with Wallace realising that he was addressing the thing, and really doing it in a purposeful way, and that the direct addressing of the thing would have been so wonderful to read (in its completed form - which is certainly not what The Pale King is.) and also would have made the next period of Wallace's writing so exciting to read.

And the thing that The Pale King addresses directly, and all his other writing addresses in some way or another is this: the importance of paying attention.

What's funny (for me, not for you, and even for me only funny in a sort of 'revelation of ignorance' way rather than 'enlightening and humorous' way) is that it was only half-way through a story in Oblivion called, Good Old Neon, that I realised the thing about The Pale King and paying attention, which means that I probably wasn't paying very much attention when I was reading The Pale King.

So in Oblivion there is a passage about a man who is going to kill himself and he keeps having these profound/banal thoughts about how this is the last time he will ever look at such and such a thing before he dies, and how this is the last time he will do such and such a thing before he dies etc. etc. And this passage, obviously, is about paying attention to things, but is also handled by Wallace in a way that belies the amount of attention paid by Wallace in the writing of the passage. And this confluence of subject matter and style made me think about The Pale King again and about how some of the more... dense sections of the book are about people whose job it is to concentrate on things for long periods of time and how this ability to concentrate on things is the product of/creates the conditions for, psychological states which are possibly the nearest thing to transcendence or a full expression of human consciousness or something equally spiritual sounding that probably no-one wants to talk about directly because of possible cringe worthy implications of talking about things like spirituality and transcendence and full expression of human consciousness.

There is a morally conservative nature to a lot of Wallace's writing, which before now I think I forgave him for because I enjoyed reading him so much, but, actually maybe it is this morally conservatism that is central to his writing, and maybe I only noticed it when I disagreed with it's conclusions, or perhaps when I thought he'd pitched it a little bit too sentimentally for my tastes or whatever.

And this attention he pays to paying attention is, I think, the core of that moral conservatism (we don't have to call it that, if you don't want to - discomfort with the idea of conservatism [rather than the detail of proposals that are properly defined as conservative] is understandable. I'm sticking with the phrase moral conservatism, but if you like you could call it a 'respect for traditional values', or a 'defence of political and societal proposals stemming from enlightenment thought'), because Wallace seemed to be writing towards a 1:1 authentic depiction of society, which is to say, an honest appraisal of what societies (such as America. I hope it goes without saying that Wallace would [hopefully] have never dreamt of believing he could write for that which he does not know) need in order to function, and need to be honest about needing, in order to progress (with all the caveats about the ideas of 'function' and 'progress' that obviously come along with these words).

As in, in The Pale King, he is trying to describe and depict the total denial of individualism that bureaucracies like the IRS have to impose on their workforce in order for their workforce to do the work the bureaucracy needs them (the workforce) to do. And how for some people this sort of work is a calling of some kind, as in, they feel themselves drawn to work which is totally necessary and incredibly boring. And but for some/most people it is not a calling, but it is still totally necessary (the job's existence is) and incredibly boring. But either way the work needs to be done for society to function and if we want to be 'good citizens' who can constructively criticise the society we live within, then we need to recognise that certain things that are necessary to society will always be anathema to Modern and Post-Modern ideas of the centrality of the individual. This is the idea of duty. Something that needs to be done, not for personal gratification or self actualisation, but for other reasons. Reasons you possibly don't understand, and are possibly questionable (and part of duty is to question the reasoning of the reasons the dutiful act needs to be enacted).

Now I'm finding it hard to reconcile these two ideas of duty and paying attention, which seem to be the core things I'm writing about. And maybe this is because this is what Wallace was struggling with in The Pale King or maybe I just haven't got the intellectual machinery to work it through.

And actually, I think I'm going to leave it there

a) because I want to think more about these two ideas of duty and paying attention before I write any more.

b) because part of thinking about these ideas is the recognition that perhaps they don't coincide with any sort of concluding, revelatory force and that drawing a conclusion right now, simply because this is the sort of time where I would normally draw a conclusion would be a classic case of not paying enough attention.

Read Part 2 of this post here.

Borges - lectures and film

2011-08-04T11:02:00.000+01:00

UbuWeb have put up a series of lectures given by Jorge Luis Borges in 1967.

By then he was almost totally blind, so he gave the lectures without notes. He holds the audience rapt, making jokes and constantly referring to his limited knowledge (which makes him sound graceful, if a little disingenuous).

There is also a documentary film about Borges, made in celebration of his centenary. It looks awful.

The player will show in this paragraph

More Recent Drawings

2011-06-25T17:02:00.000+01:00

Design for Pissing Machine, Red and Blue, pen on paper, 2011

EXCLAIM, Totem, pen and correcting fluid on paper, 2011

Feather Ball, pen on paper, 2011

Old Man with Flowers, pen on paper, 2011

Pyramid, pen on paper, 2011

Recent Drawings

2011-06-06T08:22:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I found a pile of drawings that I'd made before I left for Poland. I scanned them in, cleaned them up and uploaded a few. Some might eventually appear on dekersaint.co.uk.

Cylinder Slice, biro on paper, 2011

Delicate Trumpet Amoeba, pen on paper, 2011

Facial Cylinder, biro on paper, 2011

Hammer, Nail, Wood and Void, biro and paint on paper, 2011

Hypothetical Monument with Debris, pen on paper, 2011.jpg

Head Wound, pen on paper, 2011

Let's go to the Club, biro on paper, 2011

PMAM, pen on paper, 2011.jpg

Practical Flow Diagram #1, pen on paper, 2011

Practical Flow Diagram #2, pen on paper, 2011

Trench, pen on paper, 2011

Running Hat and Arrows, pen and pencil on paper, 2011

Post-Industrial Revolution: Thanks

2011-06-05T18:01:00.001+01:00

I am home now.

It is raining.

I have spent today scanning old drawings and trying to get something out of my teeth.

When I have images I will put documentation of the work up at dekersaint.co.uk

Thanks to Roma, Kate, louie+jesse, Aliceson, Marta, Weronika and everyone at IS Wyspa for their help with the project and the exhibition.

Post-Industrial Revolution: Info-Dump

2011-06-02T16:15:00.000+01:00

I've made a new video for the Post-Industrial Revolution show. It will be called The Politico Sexual History of Patrick Anthony Harrington.

It is a new work, but in a style I have used before.

Here is a previous example of this style of work, it's called Oh Sah Mah (2009).

I think of these works as Info-Dumps. They are made entirely of found material. In Oh Sah Mah, the videos are from Youtube, the text is from a book by John Gray, and the voice is an online text-to-speech reader.

Although I've re-edited these components and put them together as a (vaguely) coherent piece of video work that I see as art. I feel like I'm doing similar work to countless, unnamed (well, I don't remember their names...) Youtubers who have been re-mixing found material for years.

Here is a 10 minute(the maximum length allowed on a regular Youtube video) loop from an episode of The Simpsons, uploaded by ashwilliams123 in 2009.

The arbitrary nature of Youtube videos reminds me of private jokes - shared memories of things that were once funny. That's why I started making the Specific Cultural Reference series of videos. Like this one.

This is like a private joke that no one ever made. I just thought it was weird how Frankie Dettori used to have a branded line of tinned goods - tomatoes and chickpeas. You don't see them in the shops anymore, and you can't find any reference to them online. So I made this video as a sort of monument to what seemed like a weird moment in the history of a public figure. (See more of the videos here, if you google hard enough you might be able to work out the references).

Again, the idea is to act as an observer and editor, selecting references and source material according to a set of obvious search terms and a knowledge of my subject.

The obviousness of the material, colliding with the obscurity of a lot of the narratives is important. Here is a video I made last year with Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins called Disruptive Histories: Tatlin Tower

This is less of an Info-Dump - i.e. the story being told was based on real events, told by Penny and Dan and edited by myself. But the video is interesting.

When I show this video, people often ask if I made the inflatable Tatlin Tower. To me it is pretty obviously a video from Youtube. If you search 'Tatlin Tower' on Youtube, it comes up on the first page of results - but people don't necessarily know that.

The internet makes information completely available for those willing to seek it out. Otherwise, information just sits there, like dirt or rocks. Information is an object, it has depth and weight and just like an object it exists without us needing to observe it.

Sometimes I feel like the guy out of Nausea, but instead of being made to feel sick by the sheer physical presence of objects, it's all the information I could be accessing that makes me feel sick.

When I start a project I like to research, but research is endless - the internet makes it theoretically easy to access information, but sifting through that information and putting it together as a coherent history is incredibly difficult.

So that's where an Info-Dump comes in handy, just select the weirdest shit you can find, and mash it all together.

And if all else fails, just watch all the remixes of 'Keyboard Cat' (after watching the original of course).

Post-Industrial Revolution: Notes

2011-05-31T12:31:00.003+01:00

I've been making notes on my phone while I've been in Poland. I thought I'd outline their context, and then just present them without any edits.

Here are a few points to consider while reading the notes:

I've been on a bus for at least two hours everyday.
I've been reading a lot: Metamorphosis by Kafka; The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov; Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami; and currently, The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy.
Poland is very flat and that makes me think about dying a lot. I don't know why.

A story is a promise that this is how it was.

The Pope's big hat.

He is still a hero.

A well as deep as the earth.

Jean-Michel Jarre's relationship with Gdańsk (played 25yr anniversary of strikes, 'Very warm feelings for Gdańsk).

The horses are still there, chewing bark right off the tree.

What do they want from us? The mosquitoes. What can they be doing out there?

Other people's stories are other people's stories.

Non-descript 'American style' pop on the radio. I swear the guy just sang 'dream of vaginas'. I could be wrong.

The dry limitless expanse of capital

A long part of our bus journey is filled with the stink of human waste.

Zdzislaw Marchilewicz swore on the cross.

Videostudio Gdańsk.

Memory not history.

Zbigniew Stefanski - singer/violent extremist

It's so big that everything on it looks abandoned.

An amber chapel stolen by the Nazis.

Bar owner crying on the street after Jan Pawel II died.

God was asleep or dead for the Holocaust

p272. first and only time I remember seeing the word 'good', or any positive description in Kafka's writing.

Apocalyptic though? The head as metaphor for Rome.

Bus to airport: 210

Minimal techno edits of protests.

Comedy: The idea of picking something out and calling it absurd, in a world that is totally absurd is total hubris, and therefore the joke is always about the pointlessness of human endeavour, particularly the endeavour of the comedian. This is a way of turning towards nihilism and welcoming its logical consequences with arms open, flailing.

Film steam coming out of the ground.

Backlit nostalgia.

Two things about my trip back to the U.K
1. My room was totally infested by moths. Unwelcome invaders, eating my clothes.
2. A Polish shop had opened near my house - selling Polish beer, pickled vegetables and sausages. All the other shops in the area are run by people from India and Bangladesh. There was a sort of opening party at the shop, and we went in to have a look.

An overturned lorry in a field by the side of the road. Smashed window. With what we can only presume is the driver standing behind the truck; hands in pockets, looking sheepish. Advert for Oreo cookies on the side of the lorry.

Hotel Gryf: Totally Lynchian. Red carpets. Wide dark corridors.

Hand ball is like a pretend sport, but all the players are pretending to play it as if it is a real sport. Like they've been threatened that someone is closely studying the footage and if they are not playing it with enough conviction then someone will kill their family. but instead of this inspiring total commitment, they all just look scare like they know in their hearts it will never be enough.

There are men who are more like dogs than men.

The slow process of selling cosmetics to men.

Possibly we are the only animal that needs to believe it comprehends the world in order to act within it.

Dogs barking in rhythmic phase, like indicators blinking in a traffic jam.

It would be wonderful to have death carry away all your actions and possessions, useless and flapping in the wind.

Post-Industrial Revolution: Supersam (short story)

2011-05-30T10:13:00.001+01:00

I just went down to the Supersam to buy some butter and water and oats and beer and this thing happened so while I wait for the beer to cool down I'll write this. Incidentally my vision feels strange like the world is a screen and green lines appear without my agreement to their appearance.

So on the bus I sat down behind a man with wounds all over his head. Some fresh, some scabbed, some old and scarred and gnarled, some scarred but smooth as though from wounds made before he grew skin.

I stood waiting for the doors to open and let me out to go to the Supersam and as they opened with all the grace of a broken plate I allowed for some old women to demount before myself. They were not old, close up. They were not young but they were not old. One of the women had her face split in two by a deep scar that looked like a chink of time had fallen from her flesh. Like a perfect razor had told her that she no longer owned this particular part of her body that had before seemed so integral.

I stared at her and then looked away, conscious that she was conscious of my staring. Why this bothered my I don't now. But there it is, I stopped looking and then I got off the bus.

I did my shopping at the Supersam, slowly and steadily, but always with one eye on the time because the bus finishes its journey a few stops from the Supersam and loops back around like a cow and drives back the other way so that if one is careful, as I was, with the time, one can gather one's shopping and say thank you in a broken language that no one really understands, and certainly no one likes to hear, and arrive at the bus stop in time to get back on the bus the other way.

And on that return bus the woman with the scar was, but I don't know how, for she had gotten down before me, after which I had gotten down, at the Supersam. Me, to do my shopping, and her to go to where I did not know and did not presume to guess at, being a stranger in this place.

And when I sat down, facing her across the bus, she looked at me with eyes that said 'do not look away now'. Eyes that urged me to examine her more closely and I did, because to not do so would be rude, and in this place rudeness is a serious thing. So I followed the clean line of the scar up to her hairline and saw that it carried on over and across her head and as she saw me following the scar up on her head, she tilted her head down so I could follow the scar that cut through her hair, parting it at an unfamiliar angle and then she started to spin around so I could follow it down the back of her head and neck and she lowered her pastel and dirt coloured coat down her back so I could follow the perfect scar to where it ended just next to the edge of her shoulder blade.

She pulled her coat back up around her shoulders and turned around so she faced forward in her seat once again and nodded at me and looked out of the window. I looked around the bus and the other people who had seen what had happened were pretending to look out of the window and I could not say now if they were really pretending or were just looking out of the window.

It is known that I am foreign to this place, and so perhaps I thought, as I got down from the bus and arranged my shopping in my hands, it is that everyone stares at her the first time around and she has developed a way of helping those who stare and in a way it is quite beautiful but in another way it makes me hate this place all the more.

Post-Industrial Revolution: The History Process

2011-05-27T16:36:00.005+01:00

I've been thinking for a long time about how an event becomes part of history. I think it was probably inspired by a blog called 'The Awkward Interval' by Momus on his Click Opera blog a few years ago.

In that blog Momus talks about how in fashion/style/music/art, we mine the past, looking for objects and ideas to re-invigorate in the present. The recent past becomes an 'anxious interval', a place that has lost its novelty value but is not yet old enough to be retro. Here is the excellent diagram Momus created to illustrate his idea.

Ironically it was made in 2009, so the references are a bit out of date, i.e. the 80s (illustrated by Buggles in 'the goldmine' era) aren't the height of retro fashion anymore.

I'd like to push this idea a bit further, in order to think of this time line as a process of effecting paradigm shifts, as well as controlling trends.

Let's use the sections of Momus' diagram to track the history process of the 1980 Solidarność strike

The Present

When the strike was happening, it was important as an event with an undecided outcome. No one could know whether they would be successful, and no one knew what their possible success might eventually lead to. Apart from the Communist government (and perhaps a few strike leaders jostling for future positions of power), no one was thinking about the way the strike would be perceived as a historical event.

The Anxious Interval

After the fall of Communism, Solidarność doesn't just disappear, many of its big players make the move into politics. The most famous of these is Lech Wałęsa, President of Poland from 1990-1995. The scramble to turn Poland into a market economy involves privatising, and then shutting down the very shipyards from which Wałęsa came. A lot of people feel betrayed by the outcome of the events, and the success of the strike suddenly means something very different.

The Battleground

After Wałęsa goes, there comes the time when people are jostling over who owns the history of the strikes. Most people involved in politics at this time were somehow involved with Solidarność and the meaning of the strikes becomes a battleground - used to justify different ideas by different people.

The Goldmine

The beginning of the goldmine is probably Poland's full membership of the EU in 2004. It is a sort of vindication for all the pain of the switch over to a market economy. A European centre for Solidarity is established (currently building a huge new headquarters next door to the shipyard). 2005 is the date of a paper I have read about the 'Young City'. The Young city is the name of the proposed cultural regeneration of the shipyards. In the paper, the hypothetical future of the area is laid out - full of bustling consumer zones, cultural quarters and pedestrianized boulevards. It has, at the time of the paper's writing and (I think) the time of this blog's writing, no confirmed investors.

The Anxious Echo

I'd say that Poland may well be coming towards the end of the goldmine era. Having spent only three weeks here, I already feel totally overwhelmed by the volume of strike history. And not only by official history and plans for the city that reference the strike's history, but also by critical engagement with the strikes. I mean this in no bad way (as I'm involved in exactly the process I'm describing...) but Wyspa has exhibited a lot of work about the shipyards and the history of the strikes. It feels critiqued out. The more I talk to people about it, the more I realise that the history is saturated, it can't be used to support any more plans - political, economic or artistic.

The Historical Past

This hasn't happened to the strikes yet (if that makes sense...). It's a quieter place, and I'm not sure when the strikes will become part of it. Unlike the other eras, slipping into the historical past might be a slower process, and different people might find that it happens at different times for them. Talking about the strikes will become less contentious, and less relevant - because to talk about the strikes will not be a way of talking about the present.

Post-Industrial Revolution: Gay Skinheads

2011-05-26T14:36:00.000+01:00

Last night I was thinking about the links between nationalism and homophobia.

It seems to me that national identity is hard to define. The matter of who gets to (wants to?) call themselves English is debatable. Is race relevant? What about heritage? Or self-perception versus the perception of others? National identity is a relative state. It is hard to demonstrate your Englishness without simplifying it.

Sexuality too is hard to demonstrate. Outside of actively demonstrating sexual preference, there isn't really much to differentiate, say, a gay man from a straight man. The only way to display straightness is through anti-queerness (queer here as understood in terms of the re-appropriated term for non-hetrosexual), which is nothing to do with sexual preference really, it's more like an aggressive social conservatism.

Maybe people who are desperate to demonstrate their national identity through race, are also desperate to demonstrate their straightness through acting as non-queer. A fear of being understood as different spirals out into prejudice and anger at those who display difference.

A lot of the far right comment boards are full of accusations of other people being gay. I found a brilliantly vitriolic story about Martin Webster performing oral sex on Patrick Harrington (of the Solidarity trade union) in the 1980s.

Here is Martin Webster (joint head of the NF in the 80s) talking about his 'bit on the side' relationship with Nick Griffin. This almost turns my theory on its head, almost.

And here is Nicky Crane (security guard for the band Skrewdriver) talking about gay skinhead sexuality. He came out in 1992, after 20 years as a violent neo-nazi, before dying from an AIDS-related illness in 1993.

And here is Sacha Baron Cohen's character - the Austrian television presenter and homosexual caricature Brüno - visiting 'Evil Fest' and chatting to some skinheads.

Apart from the guy Sieg Heiling after he has observed that Brüno has a 'bender's moustache', I end up feeling sorry for the skinheads, made to look foolish because they have no room to manoeuvre within their idea of correct sexuality.

And here is a sad, strange video called 'JOIN THE GAY BNP'

Below it on the youtube page was a comment from 'Merseynational'.

Which is interesting because in one way it endorses a liberal, Third Way style of 'lifestyle choice' politics, where nationalism and homosexuality are just personal choices, and simultaneously jumps right into the paranoid fantasy that every anti-fascist statement is somehow linked to the UAF which the BNP consistently claims to be funded by MI5.

Post-Industrial Revolution: FUCK

2011-05-25T11:57:00.000+01:00

Today is not a good day. My video editing program has packed up so I'm desperately fannying around on the internet in an attempt to fix it.

While I download another useless driver, why don't you look at these videos?

This is nick Griffin having eggs thrown at him.

And this is Bob Bailey getting a kicking.

Post-industrial Revolution: html

2011-05-23T16:06:00.002+01:00

As part of my research for a video I'm making about a nationalist trade union in the UK called Solidarity, I'm spending a lot of time in the far flung corners of the internet, looking at far right websites.

They are almost universally badly designed. I suppose the 'best' is probably the British National Party's site.

They have definitely had a brand make over and the website pushes this new, friendly BNP. The stories on the front page are fairly mainstream (for a right wing organisation) and the imagery is homely and comforting. Their logo appears to be a combination of a heart, a British flag, and a scratch-card.

At the bottom right of the page you can see an advert for their online shop, Excalibur.

Here you see the populist sheen slips a bit. Along with the England flags and BNP t-shirts, you have an 'ASYLUM: Don't Unpack, You're Going Back' flag, and a book called,'The Lie of Apartheid and other true stories from Southern Africa'.

The Excalibur logo is pretty classic far right stuff. The implication being that real British people are all descended from King Arthur and wield swords.

This is Solidarity's site. Even though most of their funding comes directly from the BNP, and in their official accounts they put over £1000 a year on 'maintaining' the website, it looks like shit.

The National Front's website looks like it was designed in 1996. All it's missing are a few animated gifs. You can't see in this picture, but all the images are pixelated and there is scrolling text across the top of the page. Someone has definitely got a cracked copy of Photoshop by the look of that gradient on the main logo.

At this point I think the design actually adds to the desired effect for a group like Combat 18/Blood and Honour. I'm scared shitless already, just because of the layout of the page. Also, they have a quote by Ian Stuart Donaldson (former Skrewdriver frontman who died in a car crash in 1993), but they've spelt his name wrong.

This is Blood and Honour Serbia. If that strangely off-centred web page doesn't scare you then I don't know what will.

Maybe this photo of some Blood and Honour Serbia members.

This says ~~'Kosovo is Serbia'~~ 'Serbia for the Serbs'.

And this is the British People's Party. It has a similar design to the National Front page. Not quite as 'fancy', but it gets straight to the point,

We represent the interests of the ultra Nationalists of Great Britain

Right then.

There is another interesting quote from this page,

With the advent of "Populism" into the edges of the mainstream of British politics, there are many of us who refuse to compromise our principles and strategy.

This is a direct reference to the attempt by Nick Griffin and others in the BNP to break into the mainstream of British politics. I presume that the British People's Party is annoyed that Griffin has had to keep quiet on relevant, contemporary issues like Holocaust denial and the Zionist conspiracy.

Almost all the websites I've visited manage to insult another right wing organisation, there is an incredible amount of in-fighting and denouncing. It is a bit like being a communist - on all the message boards people are constantly accusing each other of being 'wreckers', which is a term for a saboteur that was used a lot in the Soviet Great Terror.

Political Soldier is the NF splinter group that Nick Griffin and Patrick Harrington started in the 80s. Harrington left the group after falling out with the other members and now runs the nationalist trade union Solidarity. Nick Griffin joined the BNP and eventually became its leader. He is seen as a moderniser, attempting to make the party popular through moderating its more extreme tendencies.

You can see three questions on the front page of the site. 'Come here to be informed?' above a link which takes you to the main site. 'Come here to shop?', above the link to their online store, and 'Just come here to complain?'. When you click that you get taken to www.israel.com.

Post-industrial Revolution: See You Soon

2011-05-19T12:00:00.023+01:00

I'm not here today. I'm in Sopot, a seaside town just north of Gdańsk.

I expect that as you're reading this I will be eating a massive ice cream, like this one. I think it might be a sign of a decadent capitalist society to be advertising ice creams like these (the ice cream:cone ratio in the real ice cream really is this disproportionate) but I'm going to eat it all in my face.

Then maybe I'll buy a cool hat, to protect me from the sun. Perhaps a hat like this '@ Hat'. Practical and ICT aware.

Then perhaps, former Pope Jan Paweł II (R.I.P) and myself will take part in some fun times down on the seafront.

Hey Jan, where's my hat!

Then I might come back to Gdańsk and sample the nightlife. Hey look, Bez, off of the Happy Mondays is playing.

Happy New Year Bez!

But then I'll see this graffito and I'll know the truth. Art is a lie. And I'm a liar.

Post-industrial Revolution: The Third

2011-05-18T12:10:00.001+01:00

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were both advocates of the Third Way, a political position that tries to reconcile right and left wing politics, and sees itself as beyond both. In the case of Clinton's Presidency and Blair's time as Prime Minister, this manifested itself as attempting to mix a liberal approach to capitalism with a progressive social policy.

Nick Griffin (seen in the photo on a National Front march) and Patrick Harrington (far right [of photo, and politics]) helped split the National Front in the 1980s with their creation of the Political Soldier group, which advocated the Third Position. The Third Position is a political concept that sees itself as beyond left and right wing politics, insisting on its opposition to both Communism and Capitalism.

This is a Buddhist swastika, a symbol of good fortune. Buddhism says that there are Three Marks of Existence. The third mark of existence is Anatta, or, Not-Self. Buddhism rejects the statements, 'I have a self' and 'I have no self' as statements that bind us to suffering. Buddhism sees itself as being beyond ontological commitments - beyond naive realism and beyond nihilism.

This is a weird drawing of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche studied Buddhism, and at first saw it as a reasonable alternative to Christianity. However, he ultimately rejected it as a passive form of Nihilism. Its attempt to deny ontological commitments was, for Nietzsche, just another way for humans to distract themselves from the harsh reality of acting as a free individual in the world.

Post-industrial Revolution: His body hit the ground so hard it began to hum

2011-05-17T15:19:00.000+01:00

I've been reading The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

It has a pretty fascinating history. Bulgakov was a Russian writer working in the 1920s and 1930s. He wrote various plays and books that were refused publication or damned by Soviet critics - even his play glorifying Stalin's early revolutionary activity never made it past the censors.

The Master and Margarita is about Satan appearing in Moscow during a time of state imposed atheism. It weaves together this contemporary satire (skewering Soviet bureaucracy, hypocrisy and ideology) with a thoroughly researched - though historically speculative - tale of Pontius Pilate in the days before and after the execution of Jesus (called throughout the book by his correct title of Yeshua Ha-Nozri).

Bulgakov worked on the novel for twelve years, from 1928 right up until his death in 1940. At one point, he had to re-write the novel from memory. He had burned the first draft because he was so scared of being uncovered as an 'anti-revolutinary' by the authorities. A burned manuscript features in the storyline - one that haunts the character of 'The Master', and finally, sets him free. "Manuscripts don't burn" is a famous quotation from the novel.

No one dared publish it until 1966 - and even then it was heavily censored. The first full length version - assembled from the censored version along with secretly published notes and additions - was printed by a samizdat publishing house called Posev, and a complete version wasn't published until 1973.

One of Woland's (Woland is the name of the devil in the book - taken from Goethe's Faust) associates is a giant black cat called Behemoth. He is a central character, and pretty easy to describe in visual terms. Hence all the pictures of black cats on the various versions of the book.

It is a clever way of criticising the government - though not clever enough to have ever been published while he was alive. The Moscow storyline works as an allegory for the life of Jesus, and all the condemnation of a totalitarian society, where people are 'disappeared' on the whims of powerful men, is displaced to the time of Pontius Pilate.

It is interesting to read a book like this in Poland - one of the most devoutly religious countries in Europe. A country whose shift from Communism to Capitalist Democracy was underpinned by a Catholic trade union (Solidarność - see yesterday's post for more details), and whose politics is still now heavily influenced by the Catholic church.

Before World War II, Poland was pretty diverse with big Jewish, Protestant and Orthodox communities, as well as the majority Catholic population. After the Holocaust and the flight and expulsion of the German and Ukrainian populations, Poland became almost totally ethnically and religiously homogeneous. 88.4% of the population belonged to the Catholic church in 2007.

In The Master and Margarita religious ideas are subversive and signify free thought, much in the same way that Solidarność's Catholicism was once seen as a unifying force against the Communist government in Poland.

Solidarność flaunted religion like a weapon. Here is Lech Wałęsa signing an agreement with the government using a giant Pope pen.

But now, instead of being a force for freedom, the Catholic church stifles debate in Poland. It strongly influences the main parties' social policies, and - as I'm finding out from people in Gdańsk - engages in its own form of censorship when people don't accord it enough respect.

In The Master and Margarita the ideological atheism of Soviet Russia is confronted with the undeniable, physical presence of the Devil (and therefore, the existence of God). In contemporary Poland reading this book takes on a new, strange, dimension. The ideological domination of the church in everyday life and political decision making is undeniable, and appears to be a corrupting element, but the history of democracy in Poland is tied up with Catholicism, and most people in the country are Catholic.

The question is how I can start to unpick it and understand its influence without reducing it to the simplistic religion=bad form of so much left wing thought.

Post-industrial Revolution: SOLIDARNOŚĆ

2011-05-16T14:31:00.002+01:00

The main bulk of my research in Poland concerns a British trade union called Solidarity. This is their logo.

And the reason I'm researching a British trade union while I'm in Gdańsk is because Solidarność (which means Solidarity in English) is a Polish trade union which has its origins in the city. This is their logo, which inspired Solidarity UK's logo.

Solidarność are famous here for their strikes in 1980 which allowed independent trade unions (i.e. not the state controlled, Communist union) to operate. Well, for a few months at least, before martial law was introduced in 1981.

Eventually, in 1989 when the political situation changed, concessions were made by the Communist ruling party and limited elections were held. With Solidarność backed candidates taking almost all of the available seats, the Communist party realised that they had no mandate to govern. The first presidential elections were held in 1990 and the leader of Solidarność, Lech Wałęsa became president.

Wałęsa wasn't a terribly successful President, he was a symbol of the turbulent struggle of the 80s where oppositional politics was simple and unified. The move to a free market was economically difficult for Poland and he lasted for one term. After he lost the 1995 elections, he went into "political retirement" and apart from an unsuccessful run in the 2000 Presidential elections (he scored 1% of the vote) his role in politics has been increasingly marginal.

He finally left Solidarność in 2006, because Solidarność had supported the right wing 'Law and Justice' party in the 2005 elections. Law and Justice were the Euro-sceptic (and homophobic...) party that the Conservatives cosied up to in the European parliament a few years ago.

As far as I can tell, it wasn't the social conservatism of Law and Justice to which Wałęsa objected, rather it was just another feud in the long history of splits and arguments within the union.

More recently he was accused of having worked with the secret police in the 1970s. His codename was Agent Bolek, which is also the name of a cartoon character from around that time.

Post-Industrial Revolution: WESTERPLATTE

2011-05-12T11:47:00.000+01:00

Over the weekend we went to Westerplatte, a peninsula north of Gdańsk. It is famous for its part in the beginning of the Second World War. The Battle of Westerplatte, which pitched a German battleship and 3500 Soldiers against 180 Polish Soldiers has attained mythological status in Polish history.

This is a sandstone monument, erected on Westerplatte in the 50s (I honestly can't find a precise date, Polish Google isn't playing ball today) dedicated to those who died to the battle. To me it looks like a totemic face, but actually what look like eyes are soldiers, and the nose is where their guns meet.

You can't quite see it in this picture, but the writing on the monument is made from this specific font that seems to appear on all Polish monuments - or at least all the monuments from the Communist era.

Here is a sandstone monument to Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) in Gdynia (where he was born) in the same style, on the back is the same blocky font.

Roma said that Joseph Conrad was her hero because he was a famous European writer who came from Poland, and he was very famous in Britain. Marta asked whether he wrote in Polish or English, and when Roma said that he wrote in English Marta said he was a traitor.

Here is another sculpture from Westerplatte. It is a text piece and it says 'No More War' in Polish. It seems a little hopeful as a statement, but then again the change over from Communism to Democracy was famously bloodless here, so in a way I suppose you could say it was right.

Post-Industrial Revolution: KREDYT

2011-05-11T10:54:00.001+01:00

This guy is haunting my dreams at the moment. He advertises cheap credit for the WBK bank in Poland.

There is something a bit pre-recession U.K about these images.

He is literally giving money away.

Here is a youtube video of the TV advert. Same idea as all the credit adverts you see: buy now, pay later, enjoy a new big screen TV, a holiday, sexy ladies and money raining from the ceiling.

While I was looking for these, I found a few adverts made by Danny DeVito advertising the opportunity to win a million Zloty with the bank.

And a John Cleese advert for a loan, which is surprisingly funny considering how often he offers himself up to advertising 'opportunities'.

Poland didn't suffer as part of the global recession of 2008. It was the only member of the EU that didn't have a decline in GDP.

The reasons for the recession are complex, as are the different effects in different countries. For the UK, the collapse the sub-prime mortgage market in America started a credit scare which pushed interest rates up on loans and credit cards, which in turn, hit individuals who had taken out money when credit was cheap and could not afford to pay it off at a higher rate.

Poland is an economy on the rise - you see it everywhere in Gdańsk, clean streets and shiny malls, building work everywhere, a bid for the Capital of Culture 2016. For me, all I can think about when I see adverts like the ones above are pre-2008 economies based on a credit bubble - like the UK's, or a property bubble - like Ireland's.

It doesn't bode well that they've chosen an actor who looks like a 70s pimp.

Post-Industrial Revolution: John Paul/Jan Paweł/Karol Jozef Wojtyla

2011-05-10T15:12:00.001+01:00

The last pope, John Paul II (or Jan Paweł) was born in Poland. John isn't his original name though, he was actually called Karol Jozef Wojtyla.

He is everywhere - his face is all over the churches and on every object in all the little gift shops (pens, candles, badly photoshopped pictures of Jan with dove/dolphin/eagle)

He is all over this gate to the Gdańsk shipyards. Actually, this isn't just any gate, it is the famous Gate Two, which was where the civilian population came to support the striking shipworkers in the industrial actions of the 1980s. Interesting to note a Black Madonna image on the left of the gate as well - an unexplained phenomenon in Christian iconography.

I think this particular instance of Jan Paweł's image is to do with his recent beatification by the Catholic church.

Solidarność was/is a union strongly based in the Catholic faith. Jan Paweł visited Poland a few times in the 80s and spoke in veiled language, supporting the union's actions.

A few days ago I asked Roma whether part of Solidarnoś's campaign in the 80s was for freedom of religion, and she said no, it was for freedom of Catholicism.

---

Coming from a comparatively secular country like the UK, it is surprising how deeply religion permeates Poland. Everyone gets confirmed whether they are Catholic or not. Most kids just do it so that they fit in at school.

In Puck we visited a church and it was full of Byzantine style iconography - painted sculptures and all seeing eyes. I wasn't able to get any photos because I felt bad snapping away while people were praying inside (that was another thing - I've never visited a church where people were actually praying as I walked in).

Here are some shots from the entrance hall.

They've really gone in for the man of sorrows thing here, with JC all sad and bleeding, and yet his pose isn't quite right. Maybe he has a headache, or he has forgotten his keys.

Post-Industrial Revolution: Welcome to Heel

2011-05-09T11:50:00.000+01:00

Hello from Gdańsk.

I've been without internet for a few days, doing tourist things and enjoying the weather, so this is the first post.

---

Whenever I go to a new place, I'm overloaded by differences between where I am and where I've come from. Inevitably, I'm drawn to the uncanny rather than the overtly unfamiliar. At first the feeling is one of recognition, but then, as I begin to understand what I'm looking at, dislocation creeps in.

This is near Modelarnia, the project space in which we will be exhibiting. 'Slayer!' I shouted, when I saw it.

I asked whether Slayer had ever played in Gdańsk, and Marta said they hadn't. Apparently an artist had painted it for a project that no one could remember.

Here is Slayer guitarist Kerry King playing with Pantera, a few weeks before Dimebag Darrel was murdered on stage...

Around the corner from this building I found this warning sign.

Which is pretty much a ready made thrash metal logo.

It's funny, because Roma was saying that the first thing she noticed when she moved to the UK was our obsession with health and safety, but when we were investigating the shipyards, we found this warning sign.

It is an old health and safety sign from the Communist era. It has pictures of goggles, gloves and a hard hat, and the text says something like, "without these, accidents can happen". Which is quite similar to this.

Although, a little more home made.

---

More graffiti from the shipyard.

Not quite sure what they meant by this, maybe that we must never forget our own mortality, and that the utopias offered by political ideologues ignore our essential humanity, or maybe it just looked cool.

And here is a nice one from Puck, 'WELCOME to HEEL'. There is a place called Hel near Gdańsk, though I don't this is what they're talking about.

Hi Ronaldo.

On the same wall there was this

Actually, it was all over the walls. It means '21 x yes' in English, and it refers to the 21 demands of Solidarność, the trade union based in the shipyards of Gdańsk. More about them in a future post, but as far as I can tell, this graffito is a celebration of the success of Solidarność, which eventually went on to form a coalition government in the democratic elections of 1990.

I picked up a copy of the demands, and what's interesting is that most of the demands are pretty standard - extra pay for shift work, maternity leave, etc. Nowhere does it call for democracy or free elections. Solidarność are famous because their strike action is linked to the collapse of Communism, but the '21 x Tak' graffiti suggests that their relevance to contemporary Poland might be more to do with their practical demands than revolutionary change

---

And, one more, this time from Stansted airport. A nihilistic warning sign.

Post-Industrial Revolution - From May 6th - June 5th

2011-05-04T17:50:00.001+01:00

This Friday morning, at around 3am, I will drag a suitcase full of audio equipment, a few clothes, and a wallet full of zloty to Stansted airport and get on a plane to Gdańsk. I will be living and working in Gdańsk for the next month as part of Post-Industrial Revolution, a residency and exhibition at Modelarnia, run by the Wyspa Institute of Art.

I will be making work about the shipyards of Gdańsk, which was where Solidarity (Solidarność) - the first non-communist trade union in Poland - was founded. I'll be exploring the political history of the shipyards, and trying to find out what that history means in a post-industrial society.

I'll be keeping a daily blog - right here - from Saturday until I leave Poland in June. Check back every day for a new post. If you followed the last few residency blogs you'll know these posts can vary from exploitative youtube videos, to ad hoc reviews of whatever I'm reading at that moment, to short essays about horses.

See you back here on Saturday.

Concerned Horse Towel

2011-04-29T20:48:00.000+01:00

It's a towel with a concerned looking horse on it. Sometimes a blog just posts itself.

From togallavant.com, which is (or, was - it's just finished) a webcomic documenting the travels of Kayla Marie Hillier.

The Black Umbrella

2011-04-23T17:25:00.000+01:00

In my parents’ garden there is a big black sun umbrella. Sunshade? I don’t know the correct term. You know what I mean.

It is huge. My dad has had to put two paving slabs across its base (which is formed of four metal legs at right angles to the thick round stem that supports the umbrella) to stop the thing toppling over.

It has two locking mechanisms with which you secure the height and angle of the umbrella, plus a winch-style handle that opens and closes the umbrella (but the diagrammatic instructions on the side of the handle show your options as ‘up’ and ‘down’, which is sort of misleading).

It is meant to shield the garden table from the sun, that is, it is positioned as if its function were to provide shade for those sitting at the table.

It is almost impossible to position the umbrella in a way that provides shade for everyone sitting at the table. Also, at this time of year, the sun seems to move quickly, so that even the small amount of shade provided by the umbrella is in the wrong place after ten minutes or so.

And, I forgot to say, my dad has had to attach two bungee ropes to the top of the umbrella stem, to stop the wind from knocking the umbrella over. Although, I think actually that the umbrella wouldn’t be knocked over by the wind, but it is quite disconcerting when it moves above you like a leaden kite, rocking back and forth on its stand.

Post-Industrial Revolution

2011-04-17T21:09:00.000+01:00

I have been selected to take part in POST-INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, a residency at the Wyspa Progress Foundation in Gdańsk, with a exhibition opening in June at Modelarnia gallery in Gdańsk Shipyards.

I'll be making work about the shipyards of Gdańsk, creating story-sculptures from conversations I have with local people.

I will be posting regularly on here, so check back from the 7th of May for updates.

The Man Walking Home From the Tube

2011-03-18T09:00:00.154Z

The man walking home from the tube has heard that it is a classic sign of paranoid schizophrenia to think that you have shit yourself and to think that everyone can see that you've shit yourself and to keep checking - with surreptitious hands and straight-ahead eyes - as to whether or not you can feel a wet patch on the back of your trousers (for though the man walking home from the tube has never actually shit himself, he imagines that it would be a wet shit that would be the culprit if he were not to realise that he had shit himself when he had. The first warning sign would be a feeling of dampness on the material of his trousers, between his cheeks.). This is not true. It is not a classic sign of paranoid schizophrenia to think that you have shit yourself.

But, shit himself he has, he thinks, or at least he thinks the possibility that he has shit himself is a definite possibility. That is, having shit himself is a possible possibility. So check himself he does, with his shifty hands and his forward facing eyes that give him away (he thinks).

For a moment he imagines himself as a police horse trotting and shitting without regard. How sweet, he thinks, to have the authority (for even when horses are not police horses, they seem to have authority: over the people that ride them, and over the other animals in the farm [an imaginary farm, that the man waking home from the tube has imagined. In this farm are only animals about which the man walking home from the tube has strong{ish}opinions, such as but not limited to horses, cows, dogs, pumas and dolphins.]) to shit as and when you decree, directly on to the street. The very pavement is the police horse's toilet. But, he thinks, their shoes are nailed into their feet, so it's not all fun and games.

Just to confirm, the man walking home from the tube has not shit himself.

The man is holding a satchel in one hand, and with the other he sort of slaps the back of his trousers, trying to find the tell tale wet patch that will confirm his suspicions. If he finds a wet patch, it will confirm his suspicion that he has shit himself. If he cannot find a wet patch it should confirm that he has not shit himself. But, a positive re: the wet patch can be 100% confirmed via the method of slapping the back of his trousers, where as, an 100% confirmation of the absence of a wet patch can only be established once back at home, via close examination with eyes, nose and fingers.

The contents of the man's satchel are as follows: a banana that has blackened, a free newspaper, an empty bottle of water, an ID card + lanyard that he uses to enter the office building which contains the offices of the call centre at which he works, a plastic sandwich bag containing a sock encrusted with semen that he carries to and from work (washing, singly, that is, on its own. A single sock for a whole hour long wash [quick wash, 30 degrees, still takes an hour], just because he is scared that if he washes the crusty sock with the rest of his clothes then he will smell of cum all the time and everyone will know that he is a compulsive masturbater) in order to masturbate more quietly and/but with the required amount of friction in the toilets of the office building, an empty lunch box (with crumbs and fluff and a crisp packet and a thin metal fork from his home's kitchen), some papers that relate to his job but that are not necessary for him to keep copies of, several biro pens that do not work and one 3B pencil that he ends up using every time he goes in to his satchel to look for a pen, a tie that he is required to wear at work but does not wear on the journey to and from work.

And so he slaps the back of his trousers, checking for the wet patch, and stares ahead and tries not to grimace (and doesn't, grimace, but imagines he does) and tries to stay on the same side of the road for as long as he can stand it, before he simply has to cross the road, even though he knows this makes him more susceptible to the paranoia that someone weird or scary or crazy or violent will suddenly appear on the new side of the road and he will not be able to legitimately cross the road (as he would have been able to, on the old side of the road) in order to avoid them.

And as he crosses the road he thinks he smells the smell of rotting leaves, which always reminds him of the smell of cum and he wonders perhaps if he smells of cum, despite washing the crusty sock on its own in the washing machine. Perhaps, after masturbating in the toilets of his office, he wiped his hands unthinkingly on his trousers, and now the wetness of the shit that he perhaps has done has perhaps activated the oderant molecules in the cum that he perhaps wiped upon his trousers.

But even now, in this moment of complex, colliding paranoias (that to us maybe looks like a low point, but to the man is neither a low nor a high point, but simply one of many such points of contemplation that he reaches whilst walking, or working, or reading, or talking to people, or watching television, or masturbating) he can laugh at this strange idea, for he masturbates at work with his penis through the flies of his trousers, and the sock covering his penis. And even when he ejaculates with enough force for cum to make its way through the fibres of the sock, he folds the sock carefully and puts it straight back into the plastic sandwich bag, and therefore he would not be able to get any cum on his hands and wipe it on his trousers.

It is not a classic sign of paranoid schizophrenia to believe that you have shit yourself and that everyone knows it.

Works in Video

2011-03-08T20:22:00.001Z

Disruptive Histories: Tatlin Tower, 2010, a video made by Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau in collaboration with the artists Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins will be screened as part of 'Works in Video', 17th March 2011 at Space in Between gallery in London.

17/3/11 6pm - 9pm

Ben Jeans Houghton
TSU
Luke Montgomery & Josh Alexander
Untitled
Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau with Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins
Disruptive Histories: Tatlin Tower
Nicole Morris
All the different ways I love you (endlessly)
Simon Linington
Cliff Hanger no.14

Space In Between
Unit 26 Regent Studios
8 Andrews Road
London
E8 4QN

info@spaceinbetween.co.uk

Firedive Trailer

2011-02-28T23:39:00.001Z

Last September I went out to Guernsey with David Angus and Tim Bowditch to work on the production of Tim's film, Firedive.

Well, now the real work has started. Jonathan Gales is sorting out the editing for us. Sound tracking the trailer was a good test of the recordings I got while I was over there. I think we going to be ok.

Enjoy.

Applications

2011-02-28T13:02:00.000Z

I'm writing several funding applications at the moment. This post is a both a way of thinking about the process of applying for things, and also a way of taking a sneaky break.

When you apply for funding to make new work, your function as an artist is reduced to the hypothetical: what you might do in the future if you are given some money. Strangely enough, I find it easier to write applications if I use the future progressive tense (I will), as opposed to the future conditional tense (I would). It shouldn't really make much difference, but it feels more definite when I write about something I will do, rather than something I would do.

Also, for the proposal I am writing at the moment, I am representing the ARKA group, which means I can use 'We' instead of 'I'. Again, it shouldn't make much of a difference, but it does. If I write 'we', it feels as though the decision has been made for me, like it is more objective (or at least inter-subjective).

Actually, my favourite way of writing applications is using 'The ARKA group will', instead of 'We will'. This makes me feel like I'm the head of a secret institution that uses art as a way of influencing governments. That makes me feel more able to make complex theoretical statements and connect ideas that seem strange or unlikely.

---

Often, in applications, I use this blog as an example of my self-reflexive practice, and the way that I try and apply critical thought to every day life. So, just in case any of the funders are reading this, can I just reassure you all that I am not the head of secret institution that uses art as a way of influencing governments.

Poetry makes more sense/when quoted and/put between slashes

2011-02-14T22:28:00.000Z

I subscribe to the London Review of Books, and it publishes new poetry, which I never read. But when a writer quotes poetry I'm always desperate to read the rest of it (that I never actually go and find the rest of it is perhaps quite telling).

It is the sense-making that I am looking for. I want to understand the poetry, rather than admire it.

More and more I find art is about clarification and description (even if the description or clarification is of an unreal thing).

I am just about to give some tours for the Hayward Gallery, of the British Art Show. I think my tours will be about the act of storytelling, and how for the artists in the BAS it seems like storytelling is analogous to the process of making art.

I see the process of talking about art to be analogous to the process of making art, and I also see a big part of talking about art as telling a story - talking about discontiguous ideas as if my words could connect them.

For me, description and interpretation are another form of artistic production. So really, when I'm talking about the artists, and the way they use storytelling to make art, I'll also be telling a story. And when I'm talking about making art, I'll also be talking about talking about art.

ARKA: Blog

2011-01-04T00:26:00.000Z

I'm currently making a film with Ben Jeans Houghton under the ARKA name for a Cornerhouse commission. I'm writing a blog for us at arkaanalysis.com.

I probably won't post anything here for the next ten days, so go there if you want to read anything about what I'm up to.

Naps

2011-01-02T09:00:00.000Z

I’ve been taking naps. When I wake up, I have to go through a routine. A nap is a very disorienting procedure to undertake. When you wake up, you don’t feel rested or good, like you do when you wake up from a full night of sleep. When you wake up, you feel chewed, or chewy. You feel like thick spit or stale bread.
So when I wake up from a nap, I try and remember my name. That is the first part of the routine. Once I’ve remembered my name I take off my socks (the socks I’ve been wearing for the nap) and put on new socks. That is the second part of the routine. Once I’ve changed socks I try and remember an interesting story about my life, the sort of story you would try and remember for a job interview or a first date, i.e. funny and broad in its appeal, but a story that expresses your individuality and intelligence. That is the third part of the routine.

Toothpaste

2010-12-31T15:39:00.000Z

As I was brushing my teeth, I noticed that my parents have changed the brand of toothpaste that they use. They’ve switched from non-fluoride, Aloe Vera based toothpaste, to a fluoride toothpaste for sensitive teeth. I remembered that as a child, if I stayed round a friend’s house, and they used a different toothpaste to the one my parents bought, the flavour seemed radically different to me, and often disgusted me so much that I could only use a tiny bit on my toothbrush. Now - using this new toothpaste - I could barely taste it at all, let alone differentiate between it and the brand that I use at my own house. I decided that it must be something to do with the amount of salt I now use on my food.

Baby Dream

2010-12-22T09:00:00.000Z

I’ve been having dreams about a baby. It isn’t mine, but it looks exactly like me. And although it is a baby, it can talk, and it basically has my personality. Which is annoying, in the dream, because it took me my entire life to develop my personality to what it is now, but this baby has just picked it up straight away. That seems convoluted, but in the dream, that is a really specific emotion, and that is what the dream is about.
I keep trying to trick the baby in to doing something that I wouldn’t do, there aren’t any specifics to how I do this. In my dreams I don’t think there are ever any actual words, just flowing thoughts and immediately understood conversations. The baby is also angry at me, which is consistent - if you think about it - with my personality. I think he is annoyed that the future version of himself has not developed a different personality. It is complex, this shared anger, because as annoyed as I am at what I feel is an overly developed sense of self for a six month old boy, he is equally as annoyed for what he sees as my failure to move on from fairly immature concerns. Not that he sees himself as immature, but he also recognises that he is young, specifically, younger than me. I’m disappointing his sense that as you get older, you get wiser, and he is doing the same for me, but in reverse. If that makes sense.
Basically the dream goes on until I wake up needing a piss. There is a causal relationship between the need to piss and the dream. I can’t work out what it would be.
When I go for the piss I’m always half-asleep and in my head I’m still battling with the baby who has got my personality. It makes me really angry and it is only when I’m washing my hands afterwards that I realise that what I’m thinking about doesn’t really make any sense.

Cornerhouse Commission for the ARKA group

2010-12-17T15:52:00.002Z

from www.arkaanalysis.com

ARKA has been commissioned to make a film-work as part of Manchester Cornerhouse's Micro-commission program.
---
The film will focus on the travels of a biology Professor at Newcastle University, recorded on VHS tapes which have been passed on to the ARKA group.

ARKA members, Ben Jeans Houghton and Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau will spend ten days in January 2011 researching the circumstances of the recording of the taspes, taking field recordings and interviews, and editing the hundreds of hours of footage to create a short film exploring the oneiric journey of the Professor who shot it.
---
More information about how you can follow the progress of the film will be posted here in due course.
---

The disappearance of a relevant quote

2010-12-13T12:13:00.002Z

Liverpool Fugue, the performance lecture that I gave as part of my residency at The Royal Standard, was inspired by my reading of The Rings of Saturn, by W.G Sebald.
I've been thinking about a film I want to make, about the train journey from my home town of Colchester, to London Liverpool Street station. This would be an exploration of a landscape that has shaped me. Me and a friend would spend a month riding the slow train back and forth, stopping at each station to walk, film and take notes.

Colchester
Marks Tey
Kelvedon
Witham
Hatfield Peverel
Chelmsford
Ingatestone
Shenfield
Romford
Ilford
Stratford
London Liverpool Street

They are places that I know intimately, in the sense that I have traveled through them hundreds of times, and I know exactly how long it takes to get to each one, and I have spent time in every one of them, either waiting for a connecting train, or a rail replacement bus. They are also places that are totally alien to me. Places that I have never purposefully visited, places I have never walked around. They are markers towards a confused idea of 'home', rather than places in and of themselves.

I will again use Sebald as a reference point for this project. I want to explore the reality of walking around these towns and villages, but by creating oneiric histories for each of them - mixing fact and fiction to create narratives that link them together and allow them to become players in a coherent, if somewhat discursive, thread of ideas and inferences.
The irony is that the specific passage in The Rings of Saturn that has inspired the idea is one of the few entirely factual parts of the book. In it, Sebald describes his train journey from Norwich to London Liverpool Street (the route stops at Colchester and the other stations listed above), gazing out of the window and watching the landscape shift from rural, to light industrial, to suburban sprawl, to city.

I will write a proposal for some funding for this piece - I need some money to cover costs and the time it will take me to produce - and I thought I could begin the proposal by directly quoting the passage from the book. Strangely, I can't find it. I thought I had already quoted the passage for the blog I wrote whilst on The Royal Standard residency, but I can't seem to locate it online. I quickly scanned the chapter in which I thought it appeared, and then re-read it closely. Finally, I went through the whole book, page by page, looking for any reference the Norwich-London train route.

Have I just missed the quotation, or did I imagine the whole thing? I was reading several books at the time, perhaps it was from somewhere else. But I remember Sebald's distinctive narrative voice; at once authoritative and distracted, dreamlike and concrete.
Maybe when I thought of my film idea, I shot a glance back through my memories to see if I could link it up with anything that I had been doing, to find a causal connection between my reading and my practice. Perhaps on finding nothing, I created a passage that Sebald could have written, in order to link my ideas with his.

---

As I was flicking through the book, looking for the non-existent passage, I realised that the story he tells in the last section, concerning national silk production in France, is obliquely referenced throughout the earlier chapters. Silk worms are used as metaphors, or written about in passing, as well as being explicitly referenced in shorter narratives concerning historical figures. This idea of the silk worm producing a thread seems to me to be an internal metaphor, or a synecdoche, for Sebald's writing. He produces imperceptible narrative threads that link together ideas that are almost unbelievable - that these ideas are untrue is made irrelevant by the lightness of his connections and the understated nature of his writing.
Silk worms can only be bred domestically, they do not exist in the wild. They are, in a very real sense, a human construct. Not just dependent on humans for their continued existence, but also rendered functionless without human desire for silk. The thread they spin is for us, they are not objects beyond our perception, like other animals. They fail to exist without us. They, like us, are meaningful because of the thread they leave behind them. Our thread is that of memory, or history - but like the silk worm, we do not know why we produce this thread, and so, in our ignorance, we must apply our own meaning to it.
---

As a postscript, I did try to search online for the passage concerning the train journey, I couldn't find it, but I did find a nice Susan Sontag essay on Sebald. Read it here.

Curriculum Vitae

2010-11-24T10:25:00.002Z

I got an email from a work colleague this morning. He claimed that I had altered his CV, which he had saved on a communal computer at work. I hadn't done it, but I got him to send it to me. I thought it was quite good.

---

Statement
I make work and like making artwork. Mostly the work I make is art and some of it is also sculptures. Making more work, art and sculptures, as well as artwork itself, is what I hope to make more of in the future hopefully.

Education
11 GCSE’s at C or above
3 A levels
1 Foundation course
1 BA in artwork
1 PG Dip in artwork and sculptures
1 MA in artwork and more sculptures

Exhibitions
I have done upwards of 6 different shows, some of them were attended by people.

Relevant Experience
Full, clean driving license
Full, clean underwear
Small, empty brain
Cute dimples

The Five Coffee Shops

2010-11-06T00:26:00.001Z

In the suburb of a small town in Essex where my Aunt lives, there are five coffee shops. I find this absurd. There is no way they can get enough custom to make them economically viable. I visit her from time to time; to cut her grass and fix things. She would rather throw things away, but I like to fix things. I feel as though older people have lost their respect for objects.

I don’t remember when I first noticed the five coffee shops. They aren’t new. They have names like Melanie’s Coffee Shop and Frothies. They have brown awnings. No one ever seems to be in them. There aren’t many people on the street, and there certainly aren’t any in the coffee shops.

I work freelance so I suppose I visit the area on ‘off’ days. I haven’t really been there on a Saturday. Still, some weekday custom would be expected.

My Aunt had asked me to visit her house whilst she was away seeing my brother in Austria. She has the odd habit of turning off the water mains when ever she is away for more than a few hours. I think it is something to do with lightning or council tax, but I can’t be sure. I do know that she pushes all the furniture away from the radiators so that it doesn’t catch fire, even though she turns the heating off when she leaves the house.

On my second visit, after checking that everything in the house was as it should be, I decided to go to one of the coffee shops. I had the vague notion of eating a cooked breakfast. When I walked in to the coffee shop nearest my Aunt’s house, the lady behind the counter greeted me warmly, though not without surprise. She was obviously unprepared for customers at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday.

I asked for a full English breakfast and a black coffee. She told me that breakfast had finished and that lunch started at twelve. I abandoned the idea of food and resolved to stop at somewhere on the way home. I told her that I would just have the coffee. She smiled and walked back in to what I assumed was the kitchen.
I took a seat and read the paper. I hate reading the paper, it all seems so irrelevant once it’s written down. After five or so minutes I stood up and walked to the counter. I craned my neck to see the woman, but the kitchen was round the corner of a passageway. I called out, but received no reply. Sighing I was just about to leave when I heard a whimpering sound. I walked slowly around the counter and through the entrance to the kitchen.

As I turned in to the room I saw that there was no coffee machine. In fact there was no kitchen equipment of any kind. The space was almost entirely bare with just a cheap looking table and a plastic chair. The woman sat on the chair, crying, with her hand over her mouth. She looked up at me and let out a gasp. I asked her what was wrong and she gestured to the room as if it was obvious. I got down on my knees and she fell in to my arms. She held me close and sobbed in to my shoulder.

We stayed like that for what seemed like a long time. It was uncomfortable, but having made the decision to comfort her, I had to see it through. Eventually she quietened down. Her breathing relaxed and as I made to move away from her, she put her lips to my ear, “You’ve done it now”, she said.
I stood up abruptly. I told her that I had to go and she nodded. As I left I turned and told her that I was sorry. She smiled weakly.

I walked out of the shop and towards my Aunt’s, where my car was parked. Frankly, the whole thing seemed more than a little strange. I resolved to bring a thermos on my next visit.

After Pete Hindle - petehindle.com

Found things

2010-10-27T23:47:00.000+01:00

I've just finished writing an application, and in the (incredibly long) application form, I had to define what it is that I do in my art practice. Weirdly, that isn't something you get asked a lot when you are an artist.

You are often explaining why you have done a particular thing, or what it is that you intend to do, but not what it is that you do. A general, rather than a specific question.

From what I wrote (it's all a blur right now, I've just pressed the send button...), and from the work that I submitted, I realise that a lot of my work is based on things that I find, rather than things that I create. Here is a little selection of my favorites. They are all from my website, but I haven't ever thought of them as similar before now.

Eiffel Tower with Americans, colour photo, 2009

I saw these American tourists having a Segway tour in Paris. One of the group member's scooter wasn't working properly, and when they left she was left stranded in front of me.

Martin Heidegger, Looking Suprised, scanned image, 2009

This is from a book on continental philosophy by Simon Critchley. The caption for the photo is sort of a philosophical joke. Well, I think it might be. I don't really understand Heidegger's philosophy, but I like the picture.

Portrait of a Young Flying Tourist, colour photo, 2008

I saw this tourist staging this photo and managed to catch him as he jumped in the air. I was surprised at the good timing of my picture, I probably have a better photo than he does.

Woman With Glasses (after Martin Creed), colour photo, 2008

I unloaded my bag on my bed, and realised that it had made a perfect little image.

Fixed Shoes (Wooden Legs), colour photo, 2008

I was fixing my shoes (it didn't work) and had knocked up this informal arrangement to facilitate the (ultimately pointless) process.

Pragmatic Sculpture, colour photo, 2007

I saw this bin arrangement in Tynemouth and thought it was both practical and ridiculous.

Played by Gentlemen, colour photo, 2007

I don't know who kicked this football in to the sea, but I'm glad they did.

Spilled Lunchbox, colour photo, 2007

How many jam sandwiches can someone have about their person at any one time?

Builder's Merchant

2010-10-21T23:59:00.001+01:00

I’ve been dreaming about it, or, it dreams me. A logo, three cylinders in a perpendicular projection. I’m not sure if this style of projection would ever be used for plans or designs. The front of the cylinders are circular and the lengths -the tubular parts of the cylinder - stick straight out sideways. It looks strange. Flat and depthless. Sort of impotent.

One day I’m walking past a builder’s merchant on the outskirts of the town in which I live. Next to the builder’s merchant, positioned over the pavement, but really aimed at the cars, is the sign that welcomes you in to the town - the official edge of the town is marked by this sign, and I’m thinking that I must have walked past this sign a lot, but not an incredible amount of times. Not like the amount of times that I’ve walked past, say, the road sign for the road that I live on. So maybe, one thousand times? A lot, building up over the years. But not regularly, but still a lot. Seven hundred to one thousand times? I think this every time I pass the sign.
I look to my right, towards the builder’s merchant, and I see the logo that I’ve been dreaming about, though it is only looking at the sign that alerts me to the dreams, if you see what I mean. I mean I haven’t ever remembered dreaming the logo, but as soon as I see the logo I know that I have been dreaming it.

The projection of the cylinders is more ridiculous than I remember, though I cannot be sure that I remember it clearly, seeing as I’ve only just realised that I’ve been dreaming this logo, and I suppose this image could have supplanted the image that I can’t quite recall but know that I have dreamt. But then how would it be more ridiculous than how I remember it? No. I must remember it, because it certainly does look more ridiculous. Laughable.

No matter. It must be of some importance so I decide to go inside. I go through the yard, past piles of timber and parked fork lift trucks. I go to the office and look inside. No one is around to speak to. I would ask them about the logo, who designed it maybe, or what it is meant to be. Probably just cement tubes, or scaffolding. The cylinders are too thick (in the logo) for them to be scaffolding. In one of the covered sheds (for really, a lot of the builder's merchant is just covered sheds, full of wood and metal and polystyrene sheeting and plastics) I can see some men talking, and I can vaguely hear a radio playing a song I can’t make out. I decide against approaching them. I look around to see if the logo is anywhere else in the builder’s merchant. It is not. It is only on the sign outside, next to the gate.

The whole idea of entering the builder’s merchant starts to feel pointless, there was never going to be anything of interest in here. I leave the yard and don’t even stop to look at the logo. I walk past here a lot. Not regularly, but a lot. I’ll come back another day.

2010-10-18T13:59:00.003+01:00

I've been thinking about ideas for the artwork on the debut Dogtanion album, PSYCHOSES. The title and concept for the cover art is taken from a Buddy J. Finowicz novel I've read. The art work will be made up of pictures of me reading the book in a library.
I was walking through Didsbury (a suburb of Manchester) and popped in to their library out of curiosity.

From the outside it looks like a tiny Neo-classical cathedral, but inside everything is 60s/70s utilitarian, with laminated A4 paper signs, tough wearing carpets and standard issue wooden chairs. This is how I remember libraries, full of plastic covered hardbacks and students and older men with shopping bags. This is the taste of nostalgia.

I want the pictures to look how reading a B.S Johnson novel feels: quiet rage, inadequate jumpers, thermos flasks and dissent. The overriding colour scheme is brown and no one speaks louder than a murmur. A time when public buildings were (begrudgingly) for everyone. Tramps escape the cold, drunks pretend to read the paper, the poor soak up free information and free heat. No more, libraries have changed in most places, especially London. Our new idea of inclusiveness is the internet and Idea Stores.

I can't afford to bring the photographer to Manchester, so I'll have to find an equivalent somewhere in London. Where should I begin?

Pineapple Chunks and Shoe Polish

2010-10-11T16:32:00.001+01:00

I buy tinned pineapple chunks, and then I paint them black. Normally with shoe polish. Then, once the pineapple chunks are dry (which doesn't take as long as you'd think, as long as you follow the instructions on the polish i.e. dry the chunks before painting, in an airing cupboard or on a south facing windowsill, removed from juice), I put them back in the tin (sans-juice), reseal the tin and take them back to the shop.

I won't buy the shoe polish and the pineapple chunks in the same shop. No reason, really, but I do like to use new shoe polish each time, and it's best not to give them any way to establish a causal connection.

Once they are back on the shelf (it is actually quite easy to tell a resealed tin from a factory sealed tin, even though my equipment is catering grade) I tend to loiter around the tinned fruit section for a while, reposition my tin at the front of the stack, label first. I take a picture on my mobile phone, then email a copy to myself and erase the original photo. If no one has picked up my tin within the first half an hour, then I have to leave. I've established the amount of time you can stand in one section of a supermarket without the security starting to get suspicious; half an hour is definitely the upper limit. Normally, I'll take a walk around town, and pop in on my way back, just to check that it is still there. Often, if I've positioned it well, it will be gone. If so, I can go home and make a note of it on my Excel document. If it isn't, then I will return the next day, and on consecutive days, but only to check. I can loiter for half an hour, without the instantaneous appearance of a security guard, about every one and a half weeks (because of shift patterns, and security hand-over briefings and possible print outs from CCTV cameras of certain persons faces, and available space for said print outs on the security guard notice board in the little office with all the televisions).

I have only had a confirmed hit i.e. a viewed (by me) purchase, twice in the time that I have been doing this properly i.e. not just for a laugh, but seriously, with the spreadsheet and distribution pattern. Fairly early on, once in Morrison's and once in Waitrose. In Morrison's I found the resealed tin and stood there for two or three minutes max before someone came along and put it in their basket. I followed them to the tills, picked up some chewing gum and a copy of Take a Break (for Denise, but also by accident, and also because it had Tamzin Outhwaite on the cover, and I like Tamzin Outhwaite, always have.), and watched them pack the tin in to their bags. There was a problem at the tills once the lady had left, with the tin, and I had to wait for the girl behind the till so I didn't manage to follow the lady out of the shop. Once I had got to the exit, she had gone. Probably on the bus, or in a taxi. A lot of the poorer people get taxis from Morrison's, which I always find fascinating.

The other time, as I mentioned, was at Waitrose. I had loitered for my half an hour on the first day, come back for three days in a row for a check, and on the fourth day I arrived at the tinned fruit section (quite small in Waitrose) and thought the tin had gone. I moved a few tins around to look for mine (often it can be shuffled to the back by an overzealous assistant, rotating stock by sell by date) but it wasn't there. I looked down, and clocked the tin (the resealing is really quite obvious, if you know what you are looking for, but obviously, most people are looking at one tin at a time, and even if they are not, shop workers are either not bothered if they notice, or can't be bothered with the hassle of trying to remove stock from the shop floor and pointing out what is - once you take it up to middle management - quite an insignificant aesthetic problem) in the near empty basket of a man, about my height and build. He walked towards the checkout and I followed discreetly from behind. At the tills, I picked up some chewing gum and a paper (no Take a Breaks in Waitrose, well, not by the tills anyway) and put down a little plastic separator, to separate his shopping from my incidental purchases. I allowed myself a quick look at his face. He was looking about the shop, glancing at other customers and trying not to smile. I looked back down at the conveyor belt and saw three tins of pineapple chunks and a small round tin of black shoe polish.

Bastard Son by Dogtanion

2010-09-29T00:17:00.000+01:00

I have been a busy bee. First I went to Liverpool for The Royal Standard residency, then off to Guernsey to make a film with Tim Bowditch, and then off to Devon to record some music with Tape Club Records. The debut album from Dogtanion, PSYCHOSES, will be out early next year, and the new single, 'Bastard son', is out on October the 11th. It Drew Itself (which is an excellent blog featuring various other Tape Club Records artists + other videos about people who I don't know and cannot therefore list right here and now) filmed us playing a live acoustic version whilst we were down in the Devon cottage.

I'll let you in to a little secret, we were dru-unk when we did this. Everyone. Cameraman, sound man, everyone.

Dogtanion / Bastard Son from itdrewitself on Vimeo.

This is the AM

2010-09-09T19:00:00.000+01:00

Early blogging today. We're off back down to the pools for a final swim in a minute, then we have to pack up and get back on the slow boat. 13 hours to Portsmouth.

We filmed the sunrise over the pools, which was at 6:38 if you're interested.

Tim took some portraits of us as the tide rose. It looks like I'm deep in thought, but actually I'm still trying to work out why I'm awake.

---

We were looking through the photos for yesterday's blog and trying to work out why there weren't more pictures of Dave pulling stupid faces. He's good at those.

This one is for Bella.

Squinty

2010-09-08T23:03:00.000+01:00

We had a busy day today - our last day. We had four interviews and an early morning filming session. Tomorrow we have decided to wake up at six so that we can film the sunrise over the pools. I think it was my idea, but I'm not feeling the logic at this moment.

We won't have time to blog tomorrow, but to keep you all sweet, here are some softcore photos of Tim. If skinny men squinting in to the sun are your thing, you're in for a treat.

2010-09-07T19:16:00.001+01:00

It's not all been hard work on Guernsey. We've been having a right old laugh over here. In lieu of getting T-shirts printed, we thought we'd present a few pictures of 'The Lads' when we're 'off duty'.

Work hard, play hard, as it were.

Dave 'The Slag' Angus

Matt 'Big Hands' Giraudeau

Tim 'Sir Hiss' Bowditch

Wehey, etc.

2010-09-06T22:09:00.003+01:00

Hello!

This week is SOUND week. My favourite week, because I'm doing it. As well as interviewing people about the pool and the night time galas, we are recording samples so that we can weave them together for the soundtrack.

As this is a blog about sound, we thought we'd put some sound in it. This is the sound of the floodlights being set up and turned on.

---

Like I said, we are recording interviews with people who were involved with the night time galas and the firedive. Today we spoke to Heyward Quevatre, a 94 old former diving instructor who still goes swimming every day (weather permitting. He gave us almost two hours worth of stories about the galas and showed us these photos of him diving at the pool.

When he found out we lived in London, he also told us this joke.

White card

2010-09-05T20:47:00.001+01:00

To get a white balance for video you hold up a little bit of card in front of the lens, take a picture, and then tune the image accordingly.

Then we realised that we couldn't tune the image if we completely covered the lens.

The card covers the central point of focus in the shot.

We couldn't work out whether the card should be in focus, or the rest of the scene.

It's been a learning process.

2010-09-04T19:32:00.000+01:00

I'm not sure what to write really. I'm not very good with success. Failure seems more tangible, easier to digest/dissect. Success always seems like too much good luck to me, and last night we were lucky.

We set up early, laying out the cables and lights methodically so that we didn't put too much power through any of the plugs. We brought down another generator to power our spotlights and had a mountain of fresh fuses at the ready.

The volunteers that had been corralled in to holding the torches for us by Tim's Mum - Jess - started arriving from seven. Andy and Matt, Tim's brothers, lit their torches and directed them around the pool as it was getting dark.

At one point the generator blew out - probably a power surge from a loose connection - and we thought we were in trouble, but when we reset the trip switch, it was fine and chugged away happily for the rest of the night.

When it was almost completely dark we had another run, and when the flaming torches were doused in the pool, we turned the floodlights off. Andy and Matt got the timing perfect and the whole scene tumbled in to darkness just as the torches went out.

I followed the torch holders, recording them as they did their first run. They spoke about the pools - I overheard one of them saying that the last time they had been here was 1968. The kiosk above the pools stayed open late, and gave everyone free coffee when we finished.

The volunteers left at around ten, but we stayed until midnight, getting close ups and different angles. We got home at one and fell in to bed at about three. Today, all we've done is eat a large breakfast and fall asleep on the beach.

Thanks to everyone who came down, and all of Tim's family who provided manual labour, transport, food, drink and patience.

--

Next week we'll be interviewing people who were involved with the night time galas, but don't expect a blog tomorrow. We're off out for a booze. If there isn't a club called, 'Gurners' in Guernsey, I'm going to be very disappointed.

2010-09-04T11:14:00.000+01:00

This was going to be a blog about failure and about how events beyond (or, technically, within) your control can bring the most carefully planned project to its knees.

---

We were fully prepared for filming the pool under lights last night. The floodlights were delivered and in place - after only a slight incident where they almost rolled down the hill and in to the pool. We had about twenty extension cables, a set of two kilowatt lights, three smaller 'redhead' photography lights and three halogen builders lights. We had a plan - floodlights overhead, builders lights providing fill for the water in front of the camera, the two kilowatt lights spotlighting the diving board, and the redheads providing any extra fill that we needed.

We got them all in to position, flicked the switch and blew the fuse.

We had no access to the fuse box and no way of getting access, short of kicking a door down. Tim looked like his head might explode. He has been doing this weird nervous yawn thing since we got here, and I thought this might have pushed him over the edge.

We fannied around for a while, and then decided just to film what we could under the floodlights, which were powered by their own generator. We got some amazing shots, but from what we could see on the camera's screen, the diving board wasn't visible which meant that we couldn't do any of the shots we had originally planned.

We called it a day at about eleven o'clock, packed up our kit and drove home. Tim was tired and didn't want to look at any of the shots that we had taken, but we had a beer and decided to see what we had.

The video was beautiful. The light was golden, with strong shadows. You could see bugs scuttling across the floor, the rocks around the pool became almost luminescent and in the background of the shots, you could make out the diving board. It haunted the shots - invisible to us as we filmed but now, clearly defined and lending its presence to everything we watched.

---

As well as the night shots, we got some great footage of the daylight fading away with a still shot of the diving board, and various dips and pans with our new favourite bit of kit - the jib. Dave was the undisputed jib master, and if it didn't cost about £5000 to buy one, then I'd get two - just for round the house. Serve drinks with it.

We caught a few early evening swimmers in our early shots, and Tim took some photos of this guy who we have seen a few times since we started going down to the pool.

---

This was going to be a blog about failure (and I like failure, so I was quite looking forward to it), but if the lights hadn't gone then we wouldn't have got the shots that we got, and we wouldn't have had to work hard to find the details that we found. I feel like the film will be a portrait of the pool, and last night we had to get up close to the pool in a way that we wouldn't have been able to, if everything had gone the way we wanted it.

2010-09-03T19:00:00.000+01:00

I'm writing this blog in the past, (like a ghost, or mystic meg) as tonight we will be busy filming down at the pools until late at night.

We picked up the tripod, camera head, jib and 8 kilowatts worth of lighting this morning, but last night we went down with a few halogen lights and tested out some shots with close lighting.

The light moves quickly on that side of the island, as the setting sun is shielded by the high hills behind the pool. The halogen bulbs gave everything a golden light, eerie and absurd.

I like the idea of having lights in shot, the technical viscera of a film set lingering in the edges of the frame.

Production shots are intriguing and mystifying - the camera you can see is pointing at something else that you cannot.

These remind me of a nativity scene, or byzantine paintings where gold leaf signifies the shining light of God. Light in darkness is always meaningful, or at least, potentially meaningful.

---

The interplay between sound and the image will be essential to how this film is perceived. That seems like an obvious thing to write, but we'll be using field recordings from around the island, some of which will be at odds with the visual element of the film. This disjoint between what you see and what you hear is something I want to play with, so we are getting as much recording done as possible to give us a wide range of textures and timbres to play with once we start editing.

Here, we are recording the sound of the flaming torches as the wax melts and burns; it gives off a low rumble with pops and crackles, unfortunately it can't compete with the sound of passing aeroplanes and the occasional car.

I don't know how we decided that the film should involve using expensive equipment near fire and water.

Here I am, looking pissed off that Tim has ruined a good recording with the sound of his shutter.

2010-09-02T00:22:00.000+01:00

Here is a link to a BBC Radio Guernsey program featuring Tim. Click through to 1 hour and 35 minutes to hear the interview - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p009lr19

Being interviewed alongside Tim is Heyward Quevatre.

Heyward is veteran of the outdoor pools, and a 94 year old Sarnian who swims in the sea at the same beach on the north-west coast of the island every day.

Tim popped over to pick up Heyward before they went to the radio station. Heyward chatted about the pools, told a few stories, showed a few pictures, and demonstrated his tuck dive.

Next week we'll be going back to visit Heyward, Tim is going to swim with him (in the sea) and I'm going to record him speaking about the pools (in his house, hopefully).

2010-09-01T00:18:00.002+01:00

I forgot to say yesterday, in the first blog, exactly why we were travelling to Guernsey, which seems ridiculous now, but at the time I didn't think about it.

We are making a film about the outdoor swimming pools on the east coast of Guernsey. On Thursday and Friday night we will film the pool under floodlights, and recreate a procession of torches that were part of the night time swimming galas that took place there in 1960s/70s.

---

Today we drove around looking for a microphone cable; getting stuck in traffic jams and staring at people with bad tattoos. We picked up our flaming torches and then spent some time wandering round a builders merchant. I like builders' merchants, and this one was a classic. I saw two well thumbed soft porn magazines, a man calling another man a gaylord, and a machine that sold coffee and tea for 15 pence a go.

Later on we went down to the pools to test out some shots and see if we could get any audio recordings.

We had also been told about an excellent vantage point from which to film the pools so we carried all of our equipment up several hundred stairs and got some amazing shots of the pool.

We waited for the sun to set, hoping to catch the moon. Eventually we settled for some long exposure shots of the pool in the dying light.

Text by Matthew Giraudeau
Photos by Tim Bowditch and David Angus

2010-08-30T22:29:00.000+01:00

This is a blog by Matthew Giraudeau with photos by Tim Bowditch. Over the next few weeks these will occasionally appear on our respective blogs, so take a look at my/Tim's blog if you haven't seen it already (delete as appropriate depending on which blog you are reading now…).

Monday: Mile End to Guernsey

We woke up at three this morning, waited for the saddest taxi driver in the world (twenty minutes late, broken sat nav, every traffic light red, Irish and apologetic) to drive us to Waterloo, got on the slow train to Portsmouth, enjoyed the fragrant smell of young people returning from Reading festival and finally arrived at the continental ferry terminal so that we could get on a seven hour freight ship to Guernsey.

As you can see from these pictures of David Angus, we had a beautiful day. What could have been a really nasty trip turned in to a nice opportunity for Tim and Dave to take some pictures, and all of us to drink quite a lot of cheap booze.

At one point, early on, I was laying on a bench, shielding my eyes from the sun and trying to get some sleep. I heard a trickling sound from above me getting louder and suddenly my crotch was soaking wet. I jumped up from the bench and swore. The cleaners were above me, rinsing the floor of the upper deck.

This is Alex. He approached us with a handful of money while we were on the deck outside the bar and asked me if I would buy him some cigarettes from the duty free. He explained that the staff members could only buy two hundred cigarettes every two weeks (at the time I was outraged but I've just realised that is quite a lot of fags…). Anyway, I don't smoke and it was something to do so I bought him the cigarettes. About fifteen minutes later he came back out and asked Tim if he would buy some for his friend. We laughed and Tim said he would do it in exchange for a few photos.

I thought the crew were Russian, probably through a mixture of assumption and prejudice, but it turned out they were mainly Ukranian.

Alex told Tim that the crew worked in twelve week cycles where they didn't really leave the ship. Last night was an exception - they were allowed off at nine and had to be back on board at seven. A night off. They went out in Portsmouth and got slaughtered (I paraphrase slightly).

Their shift starts at seven, the ship leaves Portsmouth at nine in the morning, sails to Guernsey and then Jersey before it makes the return journey to Portsmouth, arriving there at about six in the morning. That is twenty three hours on board ship, for what is, essentially, a single shift. We tried to work out how they took their breaks, and when they slept. Tim said he sees the same people working every time he takes the ferry, to or from Guernsey.

Later on, once we were at Tim's place (enjoying the kind hospitality of his family with much barbecue and beer), I realised that Alex must have been on his break when he came to ask us to buy his cigarettes, and that he was almost definitely the cleaner who had soaked my crotch that morning.

2010-08-12T10:41:00.001+01:00

Well that was fun.

Thanks very much to the Royal Standard for having me. I had an amazing time in Liverpool, met some incredibly interesting people and (I think) made some great new work. I think the performance lecture (as of yet untitled) I gave on Monday night has really changed how I think about my live work, and how my writing relates to my art work.

I will have full documentation of the video pieces and performance on my website very soon, but for now here are some photos of the exhibition.

Thanks again to everyone at the Royal Standard, I look forward to returning to Liverpool - possibly for the Biennial shows that the Royal Standard are putting on, Hierarchies of Allegiance and Deadpan.

The Festival, multi-channel video installation with drawings, 2010

Disruptive Histories, series of digital videos, made in collaboration with Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins, installation shots, 2010

Oblique Monuments, series of drawings, pen on paper, 2010

2010-08-08T14:30:00.001+01:00

I've finally finished writing my performance. I was really worried yesterday, I felt like it wasn't hanging together at all. Today it feels different - maybe because I read it out loud. The reason I enjoy the lecture format is because, when spoken aloud, ideas are more easily related. When you are speak with someone, the conversation naturally jumps around; trains of thought are allowed to run on, and intimations of meaning or association - inflexion, physical gestures - are just as important as the words you say.

Although a lecture isn't a conversation, it allows for the same thing to happen. Ideas hang in the air, waiting for something relevant to give them meaning. I'll have images (my incredibly bad powerpoint slide show) that give space to the words spoken over them, a pictorial space that both pins down what I'm saying, and yet adds more context that frees up possible associations.

---

All I have for you today is some pretty bleak Wikipedia links.

The Behavioural Despair Test. A really unlikely way of testing anti-depressants - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced-swim_test

and

The Pit of Despair, which pretty much does what it says on the tin. A sure fire way to create psychosis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_of_despair

I don't want to get in to a debate on the ethics of animal testing (because it is a complex debate and I don't have time, not because I'm not interested in it), but I find it fascinating that these tests were/are deemed to adequately replicate human psychological conditions, and in the case of the Behavioural Despair Test, to prove the worth of drugs

---

And just as an afterthought, here is the youtube video of the paragliding donkey that was in the papers a few weeks ago. The image of the gliding donkey inspired a work that will be in the show on Monday, so I've been following the story with some interest.

I was going to post the original footage, but I prefer this version, because it has bad metal and pointless extra editing.

2010-08-07T18:18:00.000+01:00

I used this image as the basis for a proposal for a piece of public art.

It must be the best 'silly-season' picture of 2010. A paragliding donkey in Russia.

I'm fully writing my performance for Monday now, so not much time to blog, but here is an interesting link to a follow up story about the donkey that appeared in the photo.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/06/the-sun-russian-donkey-stunt

I like the duplicate donkeys - the faked identities of animals with no interest in identity. W.G Sebald would have liked it, very Borgesian.

2010-08-06T17:05:00.000+01:00

BLOODY HELL.

I've only got two days of writing/practising before I present all my work at the Royal Standard on Monday.

I was back in London yesterday playing a gig in Kilburn. The name 'Kilburn' sounds sort of pathetic. I wrote a poem about Kilburn once. Here it is, for reference.

Kilburn

I've got this new toothbrush.
It's like cleaning my teeth with a razorblade;
but in a good way.

“Where are your shoes?”
Says a girl opposite me on the bus.
I nod towards the bus driver, who turns, smiles and winks.
“He has them” I say
“I swapped them for this toothbrush”

“Where are you going?” She asks.
“Kilburn” I reply.

In normal circumstances that would have killed the conversation,
but luckily my gums were bleeding;
she was intrigued.

We spoke for a while,
until we reached Kilburn.
I stood up to leave,
but passed out,
before I could get off the bus.

I have faint memories of her stealing my wallet,
but obviously,
as someone without any shoes,
she didn't find much.

She did however,
steal my toothbrush,
which, though the root of today's problems,
was the only one I had.

------

I'd never been there before, but it's quite an accurate portrait of the place.

Actually that isn't true. I quite liked it. We ate noodles at a place with formica tables, and then we drank in a beautiful pub (actually, we drank rum that we bought from the offy, but we did drink it in the pub). And we used the Overground to get there, and as I may have mentioned, the Overground is my favourite mode of London transport. It's for poor people who want to get round the city without going through zone 1 and it goes to semi-ridiculous places and it's a bit slow and annoying and always busy but without anyone ever understanding why. Fantastic.

Kilburn High Road reminded me a bit of Green Lanes between Manor House and Wood Green. Good kebab houses and a constant stream of human traffic - it's a mainline between two stations (Brondesbury and Kilburn) and it feels like it is both a destination and also a pit-stop between places.

And, obviously, it is home to the 'Kilburn Bandits'.

2010-08-04T15:14:00.000+01:00

I went to the Walker gallery the other day. It wasn't great, though it did have more pre-renaissance painting than I was expecting, which was good to see. I liked the room of sculpture and plaster casts - how they were all shoved together in one space, flailing limbs and frozen screams.

They had a few of George Stubbs' paintings. I like it when people paint animals, especially horses. There is something absurd about horses.

This one particularly caught my eye. If you can see below, Stubbs was responsible for bringing a new genre, 'Animal Terror', to British painting.

The human-faced-Lion doesn't look very terrifying. It looks like a teddy bear.

"Stubbs borrowed one of the King's horses and produced the expression of terror in the animal by pushing a brush on the ground towards it".

Terrifying.

2010-08-03T14:45:00.001+01:00

I just had a trip to A Foundation. I saw three good exhibitions.

Artur Zmijewski has an exhibition called Following Bauhaus, in which the artist known for his creation of situations in which conflict arises and is then examined, set up an art school based on the Bauhaus school that operated in inter-war Germany.

I might come back and write some more about Artur. I was interested in setting up a free art school, and I like the idea that someone so hyper-critical could suddenly begin to make productive (as opposed to deconstructive) art.

Tatsumi Orimoto is exhibiting a wealth of photos relating to his singular practice in a show called, Live In Translation. I like that he uses his Mother in his work, it is sort of sweet/disturbing. There is something alluring about his bread man persona. I'm instantly reminded of Bedwyr Williams.

Jon Fawcett also has a show there (it's a big old gallery - comprising an old furnace, knife factory and coach shed).

Jon's work explores techno-mysticism, science-fiction made real and unreadable functions. I particularly liked Wheel, a video of an overtly technical machine being assembled in paradoxical locations by a group of men.

I would love to write about Jon's work more - I love all the references to conspiracy theories and writers like JG Ballard. The work has this hyper-finish that brings to mind Heideggerian techno-fear and prelapsarian longing.

But I don't have time. I've suddenly realised that I have loads of work to do and I've not even had lunch yet.

2010-08-02T11:46:00.002+01:00

As I've finished making the videos for my presentation on the 9th, I thought I'd present a load of the source material here, in its original form, as well as related videos that I looked at but never used.

Obviously, this isn't representative of Liverpool. It's more representative of how Youtube operates as a filter. The stranger the title of the video, the higher up the listings it comes on a generic search term like 'Liverpool' or 'Toxteth'. The shorter the video, the easier it is to watch and comprehend. And the weirder the content, the more I'm drawn towards it.

2010-08-01T22:19:00.000+01:00

I've been alone all weekend, it's taken me about three hours to get the wi-fi working, I need a wee and I'm sitting on the side of the table which means that I can't stretch my legs. I'm having a bad day

I've been working until late in the studio since Friday. I finally met Harry Lawson - I think he is the only one of the Royal Standard crew that I hadn't already met.

He wears a fine moustache, and when I met him he was also sporting this rather brilliant space shuttle t-shirt.

What a fine shirt.

I was going to write about the exhibition at A Foundation, which looks really interesting. It was only when I got down there today that I realised (by virtue of the sign on the front door) that A Foundation is open Tuesday - Saturday.

Yeah, it's been a real shitty day. I'm drinking wine and soda in pint glasses.

So, instead of that, I'm just going to present this documentary on Paul McCarthy .

A fair amount of the work I've been doing over the past two weeks has used the Viennese Actionists' various events and performances as source material. I feel like Paul McCarthy was the American inheritor of their disturbing and anti-value approach to art making. He feels like a 90s artist to me - even though he has been making his performance to camera stuff since the 70s. There is something very post-modern and self-reflexive about his approach to his art work as 'psychological', or 'cathartic'. But the ironic finger flex quotation marks are only in the telling of it, when I watch his films I'm genuinely filled with horror and sickly fascination.

Anyway, here is the link. I can't embed it because my computer keeps asking me to install Quicktime so I can't check if it's working. Yeah, it's been that sort of shitty day.

http://www.ubu.com/film/mccarthy_destruction.html

2010-07-31T17:25:00.000+01:00

Most of my childhood memories are based on television. Forgotten television programs/films/adverts form a substantial part of my sub-concious. I was speaking to someone about psychoanalysis the other day, and I got on to the idea of nostalgic group conversations ("Oh, you mean The Raccoons? [sings theme tune] What about Trap Door? Do you remember that? NO WAY!!! Knightmare? Yeah of course!! etc. etc.) as a form of naive psychoanalysis, or group therapy.

We root around in our childhood, dragging half-buried ideas and images from our long term memory, we parade them around and re-position them as value-objects. We assign certain images trauma value, holding others to us like comfort blankets or pop-culture mascots.

Turns out I'm not the only one to think of this...

kindertrauma.com is a website which encourages people to send in 'Traumafessions' about things that scared the shit out of them as children.

"KINDERTRAUMA is about the movies, books, and toys that scared you when you were a kid. It’s also about kids in scary movies, both as heroes and villains. And everything else that’s traumatic to a tyke!

Through reviews, stories, artwork, and testimonials, we mean to remind you of all the things you once tried so hard to forget…"

Like most websites recommended in the Guardian Guide, it sounds way funnier than it actually is. It is interesting to see how this idea of the trivial-as-life-forming is being played out online. I agree with the essence - that trivial things can have meaningful psychological impact. It is strange how these things become a form of 'sharing', where discussing your suppressed memories is deemed necessarily therapeutic, even if the therapy is based in humour.

2010-07-30T14:22:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I made loads of work in the studio - it was raining and I got soaked on my ride to town, so there was no way I was going back in to the city with wet thighs - that is risking some serious chaffage.

So, seeing as I didn't do anything of blogging value yesterday (I'm trying not write about the work I'm doing - I'm scripting a performance so it gets a little self-referential if I write about writing...), I thought I'd put these photos up. I took them on my trip down to the Albert Dock.

If I looked up from here, I could see the Liverpool Big Wheel

When I looked down I could see this ominous black buoy, covered in tires and held together by chains. It looks like a naval mine, or a giant floating punch bag.

I like it when developed, tourist centred zones have 'wrong' elements in them. They look so out of place in a polished, clean, cultural attraction, and at the same time somehow manage to be made invisible to visitors through their incongruity.

I love the attitude of the placement of this tape. Firstly, there is no step, secondly these things are surely their own warning - their very presence tells you that you should not walk directly in to them.

They are objects deprived of their obvious meaning, and given a new, visitor concious meaning. These functional objects have been re-interpreted as obstacles to tourism. They have been de-objectified and reconstituted as referential signifiers; their meaning is subject to our presence.

Quantum objects, post-modern objects, impotent objects.

2010-07-29T11:59:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I went to meet David Jacques at his studio.

All images are from his website, and the videos are from his youtube channel.

Penny and Dan were interested in seeing his new work, and thought I might like to speak to him - he deals very much with the edges of the city, the abandoned non-places that used to have meaning, such as the docks and industrial estates north of the centre.

His latest work, North Canda - English Electric, documented in this video (in two parts), deals with just such places, and has just won him the Liverpool art prize. He has also been nominated for the Northern Art Prize.

We spoke about the ownership of the city and private spaces (Liverpool One, Grosvenor, the church, university campuses). We also spoke about a collaborative piece of performance he is working on with two other artists and a drama group. The piece is inspired by Hansel and Gretel, and a book by W.G Sebald called, Austerlitz.

I won't say too much about what David told us about the piece, as it is being performed as part of this years Liverpool Biennial. It was a strange coincidence that the piece of work I'll be performing on the 9th of August at the Royal Standard will be loosely based on ideas contained within another of Sebald's books, The Rings of Saturn.

2010-07-28T12:31:00.004+01:00

I went home for the funeral of Keith Colquhoun, my girlfriend Jessie's Father. I arrived back in Liverpool yesterday, with a throbbing headache and an unshakable sadness. Funerals are cathartic, but that sense of relief doesn't last for long.

Before I got my train (actually, I missed my train by about 30 seconds, which meant that I had to wait at Liverpool Lime Street for an hour, staring at the giant electronic billboard across the street), we went down to Crosby beach to see Another Place by Antony Gormley.

The piece consists of 100 cast iron figures, spread over two miles of coastline. They face out to sea, and, as per usual with Gormley, are cast from the artists body.

They were meant to go to New York in November 2006, but after a petition by local people and Another Body Place Ltd, a charitable body set up to campaign to keep the iron men on the beach, they were granted a reprieve and will now be permanently posted at Crosby.

I can't find much info on Another Body Place Ltd. Perhaps that might warrant some extra research in to exactly who set up the lobbying body, what funding was needed, and where it came from. Antony Gormley certainly benefited financially from Crosby keeping hold of the statues.

Crosby is pretty bleak. It was so windy that our mile long walk along the beach completely knackered me. Richard took his shoes off and almost instantly his feet were covered in a thick, black sludge. You could see the edge of Liverpool's industry, towards the south, and wind farms out to sea.

You could also see these, which I thought were much nicer than Gormley's men.

Maybe there should be100 of those.

I'd heard that the men closest to the shore had smooth heads and smooth penises, from where visitors rub the statues.

I like the idea that this could become the function of the men. Good luck talismans for a post-industrial mythology. Maybe in a post-cultural landscape, this could become their meaning. For now they are unmistakably linked to Gormley. A large sign at the entrance to the beach explains exactly how they came to be here, and what the artist was thinking when he proposed the idea.

As the tide comes in and out, the figures are submerged at various heights. It is both affecting, and also slightly absurd. People sometimes dress the figures up - one iron man we saw had gold underwear spray painted on him.

This is a jelly fish we found on the sand. Andy is poking it with a stick. This is the colour and feel of the British coastline: rubbish, dead jelly fish, mackintoshes, dog walkers, wind. The iron men fit in somehow. I'm not a fan of Gormley as an artist, but maybe public art requires a different sort of language. His work is certainly basic enough to acquire meaning without too much trouble. You can ignore it or place it within the landscape without having to modify what you are looking at.

Hamish Mclain mounted a man halfway down the beach. He didn't look too comfortable.

This is the local swimming pool as seen from the beach. It looks like a space craft. Maybe they could convert it in to a UFO museum if tourism picks up as much they hope it will.

This is the Lee Shan Kung Fu Club, as seen on the way up from the beach to the town. You can't quite make it out on the picture, but he teaches many styles. Impressive.

When I was finally on the platform for my train, (after a good breakfast, a missed train and an hours wait) I saw a glove on the roof of the station.

I suppose it got there from someone working on the roof. It's funny how the trace of something we recognise as human always intrigues us.

2010-07-27T18:04:00.000+01:00

Right, I'm back in Liverpool. I'll do a proper blog tomorrow, featuring Antony Gormley's smooth penis. Until then you'll have to make do with this.

It's Sigmund Freud doing a wheely.

2010-07-25T10:25:00.000+01:00

I'm off to Crosby Beach today, and then I'm going back to Essex until Tuesday. I haven't really got time to blog, so you'll have to make do with these pictures.

This is a girl in a brain costume.

This is a girl in a brain costume on my bike.

2010-07-24T14:48:00.002+01:00

A few additions to yesterday's post on the Beatles: Alan's surname is Williams, and you can see his artwork here. Kevin Hunt also sent me a link to this page about the Beatles' homes across Liverpool, which clarifies a few things.

I promise I won't write about the Beatles any more, though they do have a habit of creeping up in conversation. I was in the pub last night having a huge conversation about the Beatles with Dan, when we both suddenly realised that neither of us either a) cared about the Beatles or b) knew very much about them.

This is Superlambanana.

It is a piece of public sculpture, designed by Taro Chiezo, commissioned for the Art Transpennine Exhibition of 1998. It is seventeen feet high, and made of concrete and steel. I found all that information at the Superlambanana fansite.

The site promotes products related to Superlambanana, mainly mini-replicas, including this Beatles design...

Tasteful no?

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself really. The reason that there are products to buy, and people who would buy them, is because in 2008, a project called Go Superlambananas was launched by the public art production company Wild in Art as part of the Liverpool's year as the European Capital of Culture.

This is from the website.

"For ten weeks during this summer, hundreds of thousands of tourists, visitors and residents had fun exploring the city and discovering 125 Superlambananas, beautifully created by artists and communities from Liverpool."

And I must also say that most of the information I have about this is from a piece of writing by Penny and Dan called Mutiny on the Periphery, which is published in Culture and Agency, Contemporary Culture and Urban Change, ed. Monica Degen and Malcolm Miles, University of Plymouth Press, 2010.

So basically, a load of fibreglass copies of Superlambanana were placed around the city, artists were paid to decorate them, and companies sponsored them, and were allowed to wrap them in company colours. They formed a sort of trail around the city, and people would walk around the city 'discovering' the mini-superlambananas in different situations.

Most of them were auctioned off - with a lot of the money going to local charities, but a not insubstantial chunk going back to the organisers, Wild in Art. Wild in Art are not a charity, and, I presume, were already paid for the production and management of the superlambananas.

Wild in Art have produced and managed several other events along the same lines as Go Superlambanas. Including Go Elephants in Norwich, another event in Merseyside called Go Penguins, and my personal favourite, a project with pigs in Lalin, Spain, called, Lalin Pork Art.

Here is another quote from the Wild in Art website, about the Go Penguins project.

"Liverpool’s Go Penguins event was a huge success, with over 500,000 people visiting the trail over the ten weeks, plus a further 4,000 more coming to bid a fond farewell to their beloved penguins at the special auction preview at St George’s Hall. Generating a whopping £5.6 million in media stories, the event enjoyed incredible celebrity support, with Paul O’Grady, Johnny Vegas, Graeme Le Saux, the cast of Hollyoaks and Liverpool legend Ken Dodd among those getting behind the event."

There are a few things I don't like about that statement. Firstly, when did getting Graeme Le Saux and Ken Dodd involved in a piece of public art ever make it successful? Secondly, what does '£5.6 million in media stories' mean? Those figures, at best, are invented, the worth of the project to the city is overblown, and the idea of parades of fibreglass animals being distributed around a city for seemingly no reason is presented as an intrinsically good thing.

Superlambanana was not a brilliant piece of art, but it did have a critical function - it was designed as a comment on the genetic modification of food (lamb-banana, fish-tomato). The Go Superlambananas 'event', and the other replicated Go events have no such critical basis. Wild in Art have taken a piece of art and turned it in to a palatable piece of marketing.

Ironically, the Go Superlambanas have become an unofficial, and unlikely, icon of the city. A few of them were 'generously donated' to local charities or community groups by Wild in Art (a direct quote from the website - by generously donated I assume they mean paid for by the local council and centralised government funding), so some of them are hanging about, generating publicity for the company who were paid to make them.

Liverpool council must have bought one for Liverpool Parkway (which I wrote about yesterday - sort of a fancy bus shelter-cum-train station for people travelling from the airport to the city).

I suppose I did take a picture, but hopefully it won't become part of Wild in Art's perpetual marketing cycle.

Later on, we were in a take away, and I noticed this.

I did actually have that deal. I also bought some chips, but I'm not sure how relevant that is.

I suppose all this sounds a bit curmudgeonly (I always wonder where that word comes from, is the curmudgeon a medieval grumbling bird?). I'm not trying to shit on the superlambananas, or their adoption by the people of the city as a mascot. It just seems unfortunate that the way the 'events' were managed benefited Wild in Art - a private company - in real, monetary terms, way more than they benefited the city, despite all the talk of 'media value'.

2010-07-23T14:59:00.005+01:00

Yesterday, Richard Proffitt gave me a Magical Mystery tour of all the Beatles' related sites in the city. Sam Venables drove, and Kevin Hunt and Alan Williams came along for the ride.

On the way to pick up Richard and Alan from Tesco (egg and cress triple sandwich + tropicana), we saw the actual Magical Mystery Tour bus. People pay a lot of money to get on a bus and drive round suburban Liverpool. But we did it for free (apart from Sam's petrol, and the fact that Richard had previously done the Magical Mystery Tour so that's how he knew where to take us...).

First off we went to George Harrison's house in Wavertree. I didn't take any photos because, frankly, I was scared of the children.we stood there for a minute and Richard told us about a childhood friend of the Beatles - when they became successful, they bought him a supermarket somewhere down south. After a while, they could afford to give him a job with the band, but he freaked out and went back to running the supermarket.

Next stop was Strawberry Fields. Again not much to see. Richard had brought a stereo and played the relevant song as we drove up to the gates. There was quite a lot of bad graffiti, and it looked as though people had stolen parts of the gate, which reminded me a bit of the guys who stole the Auschwitz sign, only less impressive.

Through the gates we could see a development of new build homes - yellow bricks and uPVC windows. It was hard to get excited. I'm not a big Beatles fan anyway, but it must be pretty depressing to travel from Japan or Brazil just to stand next to a red gate next to a busy road.

Next up was John Lennon's house (at no point did we get from one place to the next without missing a turning or having to perform a dangerous/ridiculous manoeuvre in the car). John's house, as you can imagine, is better kept that George's, and definitely Ringo's (I still can't work out whether or not it's been demolished). It is owned by the National Trust, though someone does live there. We saw an old man peeking through the curtains, and there was a Ford Fusion in the drive. Just like the one John drove.

We saw this woman outside the house. We were at a bit of a loss as to what we should have been doing when looking at the house. She seemed more dedicated to the task, but after a minute or so of reverential looking, even she gave up. She walked across the road, probably to Paul's house, which was also our next stop.

I'm already really bored recounting this. It was quite enjoyable, but probably only because we all recognised that the whole thing was completely absurd. Also, Richard promised us that in Paul McCartney's house, there lived a camp alcoholic, who not only regaled tourists with invented tales of the Macca's last visit ("he brought his own PG Tips, he likes to check up on the place" etc. etc.), but also looked exactly like Paul McCartney, if Paul McCartney was a camp alcoholic.

He didn't appear, and again, we were left wondering what we were meant to do. Luckily a car full of tourists turned up and asked us if we knew which one Paul McCartney's house was. We pointed at the sign and told them that John Lennon's house was much nicer. He had a Ford Fusion.

This is the topiary sculpture of the Beatles that stands on a roundabout at Liverpool Parkway. We probably wouldn't have bothered, but it was close, and I wanted to see how Ringo's head was doing since a vandal had decapitated it last year. Poor Ringo. I'm not sure if you can see from the photos, but instead of growing a new head, the gardeners have just chopped off a bit of his shoulders and sculpted a new head from what was his neck. It looks totally insane, like they hired a Goomba to play them the drums.

The sculpture (or feature, or whatever. What do you call it when it's made out of hedge?) also had a single CCTV camera pointing directly at it. I'm assuming it has been installed since the vandalism attack, but it seemed like overkill. I suppose the tourists won't notice just one more camera.

Actually, the whole Liverpool Parkway development seemed absurd, it is such a small interchange, but such a huge building. So much technology for what is essentially a bus shelter. I suppose the idea is that tourists are impressed as they are carried seamlessly from the airport to the city. Lots of metal and glass and automatic doors.

Finally, we went to Penny Lane where we startled a man and his child by playing the song Penny Lane at full blast from the car window. We were meant to be playing it at a group of lost looking tourists, but they didn't take any notice. Sam thought they weren't Beatles tourist, and might just be looking for the carvery.

With our last job finished, we drove to the pub and talked about non-Beatles related things for a while. Then we noticed that the whole pub was covered in bad oil paintings of the band. It is hard to escape their presence here. Richard spoke about how they overshadow the city. He spoke about how no one from Liverpool will ever be as famous as the Beatles were. He is right in a way. The shifting economics of pop music mean that no musician will dominate western music in quite the same way. And, as Richard said later in a different pub, with less Beatles paintings, but more alligators on the walls, the Beatles were actually a product of the last phase of Liverpool's industrial period. They were a product of a city that had wealth, before the bad old days of the 70s and 80s. They were confident and able because of Liverpool's success as a city, and in a way that is why people are still so reverent of them. They are a hangover from Britain's industrial past.

The Beatles: A story of Victorian Britain's industrial prowess.You don't hear that very often.

2010-07-22T14:59:00.004+01:00

On the 10th of July of this year, my girlfriend's father, Keith Colquhoun, died at the age of 82. He was an incredible man, full of facts, fictions, and tales of his journalistic travels. He also sported a particularly fine beard, and though it took me some time to gain his approval with regards to his daughter, he always appreciated my attitude to facial hair.

His wife, Sara, has written an obituary which appeared in the Guardian. There is also an obituary in The Economist, where he had worked on the Asia section and where he had also been, strangely enough, in charge of the obituaries.

As well as a journalist, Keith was a novelist - his most successful being Goebbels & Gladys, first published in 1981. You can buy his latest book, Five Deadly Words, published just before he died, on Amazon.

Whilst I was reading Goebbels & Gladys, I used to read Jessie my favourite lines from the book. She asked me if I could remember any of the passages that I had quoted from. I couldn't. So, today I have been going through the book finding bits that I like, in the hope that I'll stumble upon the quotable quotes that I discovered on my first reading. I thought I'd present a little selection here.

"Noel looked particularly pink this morning, although it might have been the light. I wondered if I would be doing him an ill-service if I took him to the pub this early. It would probably make little difference. Only an expert could tell Noel pissed from Noel unpissed. It would be a rare chance for Noel to do something useful for the newspaper. I raised my eyebrows interrogatively and made a drinking gesture. I don't know why I didn't just ask him to have a drink. I suppose television has made all of us visual."

"The operator said she wasn't getting any reply on Brooke-Kate's extension and she put me through to the features department. I spoke to one of the subs and asked him to tell Brooke-Kate that I was off to Tunis and would call him on Monday. 'My name is Verity, V as in virtuous. That's right. Thanks.' I hung up. To phone someone you don't want to speak to and discover he is out is a timely piece of luck."

"On the way back to the hotel I had a thought as we passed the crowds of Tunisians watching the caravan of cars. I said to Paul, 'A couple of owls like us have just shaken their president's hand and regarded it as part of the day's work. Yet had it happened to any of them they would have remembered it all their life.' Paul didn't say anything. He probably thought I was being facetious, but I wasn't.
Smith said, 'I think that is a noble thought, Mr. Verity.' I hadn't meant it to be noble either. I sometimes feel I am misunderstood."

"Experience is pretty humdrum. It is art that gives it glamour. The spacemen made the moon sound like Little Rock. H.G. wells never went there and made it sound like Arcadia"

"Each one of us survives at the expense of others."

"The confidential euphoria inspired by alcohol is best left until the evening."

2010-07-21T11:43:00.000+01:00

This is a photo of some road works near The Royal Standard.

This is a photo of some dirt in a box in the gallery space I'm using as a studio. It is left over from the last show they had here (an exhibition inspired by Robert Smithson - hence the dirt). I've positioned myself right in the corner of the space; jammed up against a window, back to the door like some Feng Shui nightmare.

The rest of the gallery is empty apart from the box of dirt. I'm in opposition to it. It feels notionally more real than me. Like a memento mori; dirt, burial, graves, etc. But maybe it's not a metaphor for death, maybe its just a metaphor for itself - like all objects, they just are what they are. We attach the meaning, the signifying arrows. In that sense all objects are metaphors for death, because when you die you become an object - you become meaningless to yourself, incomprehensible.

An obsession with truth is an obsession with objectivity - how do we see things as they are, not as we think they are? The thinking is inextricably bound up with the seeing - the perceiving. Objects inhabit truth, human subjects fail to perceive it. Once you die, you become an object, and you inhabit truth. You fulfil the dreams of scientific enquiry and cross the border from subjectivity in to objectivity.

I always think that ideas of God are bound up with philosophical ideas of truth. The very impossibility of knowledge is a direct reference to our belief in knowledge; our belief in the existence of objects, in the stability of physical laws, etc.
For those who believe in God, the very incomprehensibility of an infinite, omnipotent being predicates his existence. One of Descartes' proofs of God's existence hinges on the definition of God as something that necessarily exists. The whole rationale of scientific enquiry is predicated on our definition of truth as something that exists, outside of our definition of it.

What I'm basically saying, is that I might keep the box of dirt.