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Emblems on the Streets

I'm doing a project at work right now involving transcribing and working with listings from old Bristol directories. My work involves looking for artisans and artists and creating relationships of place and time for various trades. However, one of the things I'm struck by is the vast variety of different shop signs there must have been.

green man

squirrel

ship

ring of bells

little tower

white hart

fountain

crown

hole in the wall

bear

white horse

black horse

etc, etc. Some streets must have been teeming with animals, ships, kings and miniature architecture of all kinds. It would be an interesting art project to realise a couple of 18th century Bristol streets by their shop signs alone. Especially when we consider what the urban landscape has become because of adverisements.

atwork

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atwork, originally uploaded by aesop.

In the absence of any patrons to bemuse with my library ways on this cold and wet November night (although my ride home was a marvel of smoothly hissing tyres, reflections of lights and creaking from my leathern carapace as I pedalled sedately home along the river path) I took to drawing as I answered sporadic enquiries on that crossword-puzzle-helpline that is the Reference Library telephone.

British Art Show

I looked in at the Arnolfini today at part of the British Art show that's there just now, and spent a few minutes looking at Ergin Cavusoglu's [apologies for lack of accents] film work Tahtakale, which seems to show men trading currency somewhere (Turkey?) on several screens whilst on others porters queue up near trucks to take goods into market. The currency traders are frantic, electronic, though still ad-hoc in every way: the market is just a street, the communications depend on bunches of mobile phones clad in a fist, sometimes bristling with unknown wires. Trading and conversation is boisterous, continuous, full of a sense of sharp practice, backed up by the scrolling screen of  transcribed sound bites that accompanies the films.

In contrast, the porters do something similar, but move the real rather than the abstract around, and where the currency traders are constantly, frenetically pushing information and rights to and fro, using language, the porters spend nearly all the time in the film waiting to collect another piece of merchandise to slowly move from one point to another: water, chemicals, boxes of goods. There seems to be a contrast between real and abstract commodities, between patience and impatience as twin virtues, stolidity and aggressiveness (at least in trading terms). The transcription of the currency trading scrolls very very slowly, partly, perhaps, to aid reading between it and the movies. One can look away and catch up. Partly it seems to be an exercise in patience itself, backed with powerul sound. The sound is some sort of Eastern-sounding liturgical-type music, but it certainly conjures a sense of tradition, of awesome history, etc. Also a sense of relating to a different sense of time, one that is based more on spiritual practice. One wonders how the time of history, the time of trading, spiritual time and work time relate to one another. Perhaps the artist wants us to consider how the present is composed of many different experiences of meaning, of transporting meaning over time, of meaning in place too. How long has trading like this happened here? Has it always seemed like this? Always as ad-hoc and insubstantial? Or does the substance of it lie somewhere other than appearances?

updates

I'm off to Edinburgh on Monday for a few days. This means I'll miss out on a meeting to do with Electric December, a project I'm undertaking for the library this year that has tenuous connections with my book art work (through narrative and animation). It's a chance to improve some existing skills and work on something new. A preliminary animation I've done with a 'librarian' character is working out okay. More work on this soon.

Anyway, I'll be passing on my draft storyboard to Andrew Cox, who'll be representing the library at this meeting while I'm in Edinburgh.

While I'm there, I'll be doing further research on Helen Douglas using the resources of the Scottish National Gallery Library at the Dean Gallery, having recently gotten in touch with Ann Simpson. I'm going to revisit the collection at the Edinburgh Central  Library, too.

Holden's silence

a slideshow of the images used in my book Hoden's Silence.

at Super Sari Sari

at Super Sari Sari, originally uploaded by aesop.

 

at Plan 9/LOT

at Plan 9/LOT, originally uploaded by aesop.

DRAWN preamble

It turns out that DRAWN, which is the show currently on in Plan 9 in Broadmead in Bristol is only open from Wednesday to Saturday, so my initial thoughts on coming to the space and finding it locked were out of place. ("Hmmm. Perhaps this is some sort of ironic statement about how the dominance of multinational corporations in our marketplaces essentially "locks us out" from the available cultural capital in our cities...or maybe the invigilator has a hangover") Er... I just turned up on the wrong day.

It was a wee while before I realised this however, and, thinking that they were probably just a bit tardy in opening up, I took myself off to the nearby Super Sari Sari Philippine Supermarket and Café for a cup of tea to see if someone would've turned up by the time I got finished. Whilst there, I wrote some notes about how difficult it was for artists to put on shows in cooperative or alternative spaces when they usually had to invigilate them themselves. Most artists, for better or worse, have other jobs that they need to take time out from in order to do this, so a lot of shows probably end up subsidised by people's holiday pay, despite the funding they sometimes receive. (This was based on my assumption that the problem with the DRAWN show was that noone could turn up. In any case, it's more of a residency thing there, anyway). What I realised was that the blurb about DRAWN "looping back to a 'perpetual state of becoming'" and "Eschewing the recent emphasis of product over process" (what, in pop surrealism or something?)- paralelled a shrewd bit of logistical planning. This 'perpetual state of becoming' is work that's done on site, and in the space (the artists are relating to their environment), and it also means that time spent on site is at least productive and that there is a minimum of work to do preparatory to appearing (though of course setting out a proposal is a bit of an effort in itself).

I wonder about the "process over product" thing espoused here. I'm all for us trying to peer inside artists' processes, but I do wonder how communicative this can be. One needs a specialised sort of curiosity, I'd argue, to be curious about what's going on. Am I wrong? Is this more zoo-like than I thought (with the artists playing the role of the beasties). I noticed a sign saying "do not feed the artists" which seemed to hope this would prove to be the case, but I have some doubts that will need to wait for a proper look for me to develop further thoughts on it.

I also wrote some notes up about Richard Serra, whose work currently is all about channelling people through a space and having them travel through it and around it: my interpretation was that the "perambulators"- the viewers- were the ones doing the "drawing as a verb" in this case. I have my misgivings about what we viewers, we perambulators, of DRAWN will be able to draw from the show that's on here, but I'll have to reserve judgement until I have a chance to see the show, which in any case is set to become more and more interesting as time goes on.

More on this when I have a chance to see the show.

from Southey diary

from Southey diary, originally uploaded by aesop.

 

"H. Roberts-Lewis"

"H. Roberts-Lewis", originally uploaded by aesop.