Friday 23 October 2009

Sophie Calle at the Whitechapel

Sophie Calle 'Talking to strangers' opened at the Whitechapel last week. I went twice over the weekend—it is that good (in my humble opinion). Calle's thought processes and methodology have their roots in anthropological work and her repeated concerns seem to be place, memory and identity. The show both inspired me because of these processes (many of which are participatory) and subject matter, but also because of the graphic and typographic nature of the majority of the artefacts on show. There is a huge amount of text, and it comes in all shapes and sizes. From letters, to books, to journal type entries to repeated large visual explorations of the word 'souci', which is French for worry. There is text everywhere. The interesting thing for me was that this isn't just any old text, it is text that has been clearly thought about as part of the process, not just as a by product or afterthought appearing at the end of the project.

Gallery 1 houses 'Take Care of Yourself' (2007) a project inspired by the receipt of an email from her then lover terminating the relationship. Calle has sent the email to 107 other women of a variety of ages and professions—from schoolgirls to mothers, from actresses to psychologists, from rifle shooters to accountants, and so on. The responses cover the gallery wall and are in the form of a photograph of each woman reading the missive alongside their response.



Each response is produced in a very visual, and often typographic way, for example, the rifle shooter has shot through the three instances of the word love and the email is displayed with a small white light sitting behind each of the holes; the children's story writer has interpreted the email in the form of a fable and it has been set as a children's book, complete with appropriate sized text and drop caps at the beginning of each paragraph; and the accountant produced a balance sheet of the relationship. Each of these responses is relevant to the position or role of the participant and to their interpretation of the text. This for me was an incredibly obvious demonstration of the reality of Barthes' notion of the 'death of the author' and the 'birth of the reader'. The words only became truly active through the reading of the text, and they acted in 107 different ways as each person brought their own set of experiences—personal, professional and cultural—to bear on the text. For example, the linguist highlighted the fact that the email began 'sophie', not 'dear sophie' or 'hello sophie', just 'sophie'. This, from a British perspective, was interpreted as a curt, somewhat sharp, opening gambit—one which the linguist wasn't sure would be read the same way in its original language. If anyone is reading this who has also read my recent post on the PhD design list that included comments about tone of voice, it was probably this tactic of starting emails 'Alison...' that I was referring to—it definitely makes me sit up straight and adopt a defensive position. But that is an aside... There is much more to say about this work I am sure, but go and see it for yourself.

A couple of other projects that really caught my eye dealt with absence and presence in terms of place and memory. Projects in Berlin and the Bronx inspired by residents' responses to place—in Berlin to symbols of East Germany that had been removed but that were still present in the minds of the community.



In the Bronx sites of personal meaning that people chose to take Calle to are documented with the execution of image and text done in what might be considered as a traditional field note diary form—images of the people at their place of choice alongside notes of their reasons for taking Calle there, their memories and notes of the exchange between the artist and participant itself.



This style is repeated in The Gotham Handbook (1998), another fantastic idea, that I don't have time to talk about here. But I wonder whether the move away from this traditional form of representation to a more expressive use of text was triggered by a realisation of the potential of text in the work or a simply a desire to escape the repetitive nature of the visual 'capturing' of the projects. I am not familiar enough with Calle's work to know her position on whether the work in the gallery is the 'art' or whether the engagement with people and place is the real art. It brings to mind the contrast with the work of Richard Long—another in the queue of blog posts awaiting to be made—who seems to have a very clear 'formula' for his use of text and image in the communicating of his walks. A bit more reading is in order to find this out...

I think one of the things that also caught my eye, and it perhaps links to this idea of Long's 'formula', was how strict Calle was about setting her guidelines and how short, in terms of time, some of the experiences were. For example in the Gotham City Handbook, often her observation of the phone box would last only 1 hour, during which a huge amount of things happened. I guess when one is dealing with the minutiae of the everyday even five minutes can provide meaningful encounters.

Lastly, in response to my own thinking about my practice submission, it was interesting to see how a range of projects came together under one roof, and functioned both as separate entities, but also contributed to the whole. There are definitely obvious central themes that are being explored, even though they are some differences in methodology and execution. This is something that I need to think about right now, and perhaps I could nail my themes as the 4 Ps: Place, page, process and pause.

Monday 19 October 2009

Drains and chewing gum



I noticed this drain and the rather nice yellow line and number 12 as I walked out of Walthamstow tube station a couple of weeks ago. Actually what I noticed most was the huge number of grey blobs to the right of the drain - the remains of chewing gum. I am wondering two things... presumably the chewers were aiming to pitch their gum into the drain, so are all chewers of gum in Walthamstow really bad shots and, perhaps more seriously, why on earth do they think it is ok to chuck their chewing gum in the drain anyway? Morons.

Wednesday 7 October 2009

The Muriel Lake Incident (1999), Cardiff & Miller

About ten years ago I saw what I now know to be The Muriel Lake Incident by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller at Tate Modern.



The memory of it (unlike the name) stayed with me. A few months ago I did Janet Cardiff's audio walk The Missing Voice (case study B) from Whitechapel Art Gallery. Not only did I put two and two together and remember the work from the Tate all those years ago, but I also got a bit carried away and wrote shed loads about the walk in my thesis draft. Honestly, go and do it, it really is great.



Now clearly I am interested in exploring place through the medium of print not sound, so my enthusiastic writing has since been cut, but I still think there are some useful parallels and differences that could be worth exploring both theoretically and practically. Having now read the essays in Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: The Killing Machine and other stories 1995-2007, I can even articulate what some of those things might be. The walks engage one via a 'soundtrack' that has both real and 'artificially' constructed elements, blurring the distinction between the world outside and within the headphones. By following the 'score' (as in music not football) the walker becomes a participant, rather than a spectator, acting out or performing the walk and realising its potential. In the book, Mari (p 15-16) puts the roots of this type of work in the Fluxus movement.

So how does this relate to my work? In order to translate the experience of place into print one will need to engage the reader in a pro-active, interactive way. There needs to be an element of the reader taking control, and literally taking a journey through the work (and therefore the place) themselves. In effect the reader (to get into Barthesian territory) needs to become the author in the way that in Cardiff's work the spectator becomes the actor. What I think will differ from Cardiff's work is how that is scored, scripted or dictated. The idea of a score implies something that is written down and has very clear parameters in terms of timing and execution. Even with the possibility of interpretation through a conductor, this seems too fixed for what I am trying to achieve. Cardiff's walk is very clearly scripted. One literally follows the pace of the footsteps on the recording and the verbal directions as to where to cross, where to turn right, and so on, and really it could be no other way or the narrative would not work. However, my work needs to encourage greater exploration of place. The parameters need to be wider. If its music, perhaps it is a riff that is then explored in a more freeform way? What a revolting analogy, but do you see what I mean? How one does this I don't know, though I am pretty sure one can experiment physically with the form of a book to speed up/slow down the reader. I was thinking of flicking through the pages of a magazine as being like getting from A-B in the fastest way possible, disinterested in twists and turns that are off route. Could it be possible to slow people down, or encourage them to explore via the design? I think it could, so I need to explore these ideas physically AND STOP JUST TALKING ABOUT THEM!

Monday 5 October 2009

Well St 1


Well St 1
Originally uploaded by abarnes4

Just uploaded a new batch of Hackney shots - mostly of a typographic nature.