Wednesday 14 April 2010

The marathon that is the PhD and words of encouragement from Iain Sinclair

Right now I am thinking that doing a PhD is how I imagine running a marathon to be. You set off, the sun is shining, the adrenalin is pumping, you are surrounded by your fellow runners and everything seems possible and achievable, probably even in a personal best time.

Then, after about 20 miles, wracked with total body fatigue, unsteadiness and possible light-headedness, you hit an invisible wall, an apparently insurmountable physiological barrier which stops you in your tracks.

This sounds familiar to me and seems to be happening around the same time. 20 miles is pretty much 75% of the way there. I am in month 29 of, hopefully, about 39, so similarly 75% of the way there. I think the only thing that can get me through is to grit my teeth and get on with it. It is all about getting over the finish line for a while. Making lists, crossing things off, seeing tiny achievements within the bigger, as yet almost incomprehensible, picture. The personal bests have gone out of the window, good enough will do. Maybe through this the rhythm will return to the running and the sight of the finish line will dredge up some better spirits. On the other hand, with the PhD, the sight of the 39 month finish line seems to be coming a bit too quickly, almost as if I am trying to do a marathon on a treadmill and someone has ramped up the speed button and I can't quite keep up! Hey ho...

A bit of passer-by encouragement probably helps and I have to say it was nice to receive this recently from Iain Sinclair.

Dear Alison -

Thank you for letting me know something about your various assaults on the culture. The use of the Hackney Gazette headlines was especially inspiring: I've been collecting them for years. I think they are a great artform. And your use of them is on the money. The weight and range of activity, seen and unseen, around the branded emptiness of the Grand Olympic Project, confirms me in my conceit of this area having a perverse and unquenched spirit.

with my best wishes,

Iain Sinclair


So, I must take heart and get back on the road to oblivion, I mean enlightenment...

Tuesday 13 April 2010

An urban Richard Long?

A while ago, after seeing some of my letterpress prints, a friend of mine said to me that she thought I was a kind of 'urban Richard Long.' Whilst flattered to be held in comparison, or perhaps parallel, I wondered what the similarities or disimilarities might be.

In basic terms I suppose I do undertake a lot of walking, I do take photographs and I do use type—all seen in the work of Long, though his journeys are more often undertaken in the open spaces of fields and mountains, not the urban confines of Hackney.

For me, however, the walking is a prelude to the work, it is a method for exploring, experiencing and thinking about place. For Long, the walk is the art, as much as the documentation of it that appears on the gallery wall. He assigns each element equal and complementary status, seeing his art as the essence of his experience not a representation of it. Apparently he was inspired by Lawrence Weiner's work and the idea that 'a work need not be made,' that one can replace the object with language. Hmm, nice idea, maybe, I could just submit a thesis and scrap all this practice...

Seriously though, I feel there is another overlap here. What I am trying to do with my research and practice is generate a geo/graphic design process that enables the development of visual design work that offers the reader an experience of place, one that goes beyond the geometric concerns of the traditional map, or the 'skeletal landscape of statistics.' This shift from representation to experience is something the Fluxus artists explored with their Fluxkits, attempting to sidestep the problems of representation and the instability of meaning—this is not something about a thing, it is the thing itself. I guess this also links to the previous post about the use of / and the way it might change the interpretation of re/presentation as opposed to representation.

Long seems to have developed a bit of a system for his visual re/presentation. He usually documents his work/walk with an image of the location and a text work that records selected facts or experiences of the walk. The majority of these share a simplicity of form using a single typeface (predominantly Gill Sans), with words usually set in caps and either centred or range left. The type is usually printed in a combination of black with one other colour, more often than not, red, blue or green.

As a graphic designer—and one who is persistently pondering Mermoz's idea of 'working at the level of the text'— this seems a little problematic. Why Gill for starters? Was he aware of any connotations (bestiality or otherwise)? Yes I can see the logic for the English walks, it is associated with the identity of the BBC, Gill was a pupil of Johnston who designed the London Transport face, and the visual references are obvious, but what about the walks in other countries. What about the difference between a walk in a field of corn and a boulder strewn desert? The walks and the experiences on them are clearly different, so why is the type so systematic? It seems to bear no relation to the content. Maybe the 'Englishness' is about Long himself, but then the art doesn't seem about him—as much as his body is a tool in its making—it seems about the experience he has within the landscape.

Perhaps Long is attempting to find a 'neutral' form, to allow the words to express themselves somehow free of their visual form? But surely the two are inextricably linked and, as Robin Kinross noted, this is really just a 'rhetoric of neutrality', therfore it is in fact a style in itself, with its own connotations.

As an artist, I suppose Long has had to build up a body of work over a period of time that becomes something of a 'signature' that is instantly recognisable. Essentially Gill Sans is as much a part of the Richard Long brand identity as it is the BBC's. To that end the type is performing a role, but it doesn't seem to be one that is actually about each specific work or walk itself.

Monday 12 April 2010

-/: Little lines, big shifts?

OK, so unwittingly I have just created an emoticon of a top hat wearing person, but I'm more interested in how these innocent looking glyphs, characters, lines, or whatever you like to call them can change emphasis and meaning with their use.

At my confirmation/upgrade meeting it was pointed out that the proposed title of my PhD contained at least 3 words with potentially contentious or unclear definitions—landscape, the everyday and geo/graphic. I have been using geo/graphic for a few years now, probably since 2005, and it has gone down well, particularly in Geography circles. So well, perhaps I should ™ it! However, as yet, I have not specifically defined it or explored how and why I am using the / character. So here is a bit of a stab at this...

A literal translation of the word geography is earthwritings, coming from geo—earth and graphy—writing. By taking the word geographic and inserting the / between the two elements of the whole word I wanted to re-emphasise its constituent parts—geo and graphic. Graphic these days is perhaps associated more with pictures than with words and, as a graphic designer, graphic also obviously relates to my home territory. This hopefully shifts the interplay of meaning to a more visual end and points towards the cross disciplinary nature of the study. It is this visual side of things that geographer's seem uncomfortable with—as Chris Perkins says, geographers don't make things anymore; they are very good at deconstruction, but not so good at construction. Incidentally, this sentence was probably the starting point for my PhD.

This is quite a literal description of the use of the / so far, but taking it further, I remember reading an article a while ago called A/r/tography as living inquiry, by Springgay, Irwin and Wilson Kind. The article is about the potential for using 'arts-based' research within an educational research context and it is a bit 'out there' in my view, but it did contain the following that is interesting in relation to my idea of geo/graphic and the use of the /.

The slash is particular in its use, as it is intended to divide and double a word—to make the word mean at least two things, but often more. It also refers to what might appear between two points of orientation, hinting at meaning that is not quite there or yet unsaid. This play between meanings does not suggest a limitless positionality, where interpretation is open to any whim or chance. It is the tension provoked by this doubling, between limit/less that maintains meaning's possibility. The slash is not intended to be one or the other term; it can be both simultaneously, or neither. The slash suggests movements or shifts between the terms. For example, the term un/familiar is a movement between the familiar and the strange. The slash makes the terms active, relational, as they reverberate with, in, and through each other
(Springgay, S, Irwin, R & Wilson Kind, S, 2005: 904)


This research is cross-disciplinary, and in talking about interdisciplinarity, Phelan and Rogoff (2001) describe it as a place of being 'without'. That one leaves behind the certitudes of previous work and processes without yet having found a new methodology to replace them. So perhaps the use of / also highlights this gap as a productive new place to be found between the discplines of geography and graphic design?

The / could also be seen as a kind of fold, with graphics and geography folding into each other, around each other, etc. Springgay et al quote Meskimmon (2003) in relation to folding:

Folding holds out the potential to diversify endlessly without falling into the logic of binary oppositions. This sense of the fold thinks matter as doubling back upon itself to make endless new points of connection between diverse elements.


This idea of a productive interplay between the two elements also makes me think of the idea of montage and the 'charge' that can be created by the coupling of two diverse elements or images.

So, it would seem there are a multitude of powers hidden within the humble /.

Does the - offer the same potential? Whilst contemplating the problems around representation, I had moved to thinking of a re-presentation, rather than a representation. This perhaps shifts the reader into active mode—they are not passively accepting a representation of something. Or maybe it makes the author/designer more active. The difference between a drawing and an illustration for example... But, would it be more productively stated as re/presentation?

I guess with a - I was trying to imply that the artefact in question was a new or different presentation, not a stab at creating some kind of visually replicable 'truth'. However, taking the previous thinking about the / on board, the - perhaps is a little one dimensional in its effect. It literally makes a simple, direct connection between the two things. The angle of the / allows for more changes of direction, each word seems to move both towards and away from the other—a more interactive coupling, with the / acting as a kind of fulcrum. So with re/presentation perhaps it brings into play the obvious idea about a new presentation, but perhaps also alludes to the question of the word representation in a more dynamic way. It also could be seen to be highlighting the question of presentation itself by reading the re as in 'about'.

I guess this kind of discussion can get lost in itself, or perhaps up itself, but I think it is kind of interesting to think about the potentially powerful semantic changes or possibilities that can be gained by the use of a humble /!

Wednesday 7 April 2010

The liminal space of the page

I love the word liminal. Maybe it is a bit poncey, but I have been quite taken with it since I watched a documentary about the British and their relationship with the beach. In it some academic described the beach as a liminal space—not quite land, not quite sea, a threshold between the two.

Re-reading Species of spaces by Georges Perec (1999) I noticed he makes various spatial points about the page.

I write: I inhabit my sheet of paper, I invest it, I travel across it.
Perec 1999: 11

This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page.
Perec 1999: 13


So, what does this have to do with liminal? Well I was wondering whether it is the page that acts as this threshold. Indeed, for Perec, it seems that the page is where the words are read and come alive for the reader. This is in direct contrast to Ingold (2007: 26) who thinks the space of the page has been 'silenced' since mechanical print.

This reminds me of Saussure's idea that sound and thought cannot be divided. He uses the image of a sheet of paper as a metaphor for this—one is not able to cut the front without cutting the back at the same time. They are inextricable linked, interdependent. Perhaps the same could be said of typography and the page. In a simplistic sense, the type literally becomes part of the fabric of the page as the ink bleeds. One becomes part of the other.

Beyond this chemical reaction I would also suggest something more alchemical is possible. The page is not, in a traditional sense, a physical landscape, but it can act as a gateway to place in the mind, an it is the possibilities offered by a holistic approach to typography, content and form (perhaps another indivisible pairing) that can open up such a space. The page is therefore the threshold between words and the imagination. I think this is regardless as to whether the typography has been executed by hand, digitally or using letterpress—it is the fusing of the pairs: type and page; form and content that is key for me, not the link between the hand and the page as Ingold believes.