Irreversible Steps

https://www.flickr.com/gp/darren_eve/43fqZB

Thoughts on Irreversible steps.

Impetus

Recently, I have been working with a photocopier to produce and manipulate
images for a booklet of lyrics I am working on.

I've been really enjoying this process and wondered why.
I had originally started planning the book on the pc, spending a long time
in photoshop, moving things about, changing fonts, trying to get the images
to look the way I was inexpertly visualizing and generally getting a sore arse
and a frustrated head.
I must first explain, I am no designer. In fact, I'm worse than a non-designer
in that I still try to design my own things in the full knowledge that it's going to be
an unfulfilling and ultimately unsuccessful experience.

Backstory

It wasn't always thus.......my mind started to recall a time,
back when I was a teenager, when I used to play with images, draw and paint
etc. and not focus predominantly on the outcome.
Among my friends were and are some talented visual artists. This meant that:

a. there was, in the days when we had time to hang out together often,
a general atmosphere of creativity and encouragement

b. not having much in the way of gear or money, most output was created
with whatever materials and equipment were at our disposal.
This often meant 'borrowing' things from our beloved institutions.

I felt a freedom in visual art with no pressures of commerciality or delusions
of professionalism. A happy amateur. As opposed to an unhappy one.
Now, this period was the early 1990's. I mean, some of us had computers, and
even a printer but it was still fairly laborious and expensive.
We had little to no money. We were at school/college.

Imagine you wanted to publish a comic or a zine or make a gig poster.
You used to have to create a physical 'original' somehow.
Drawing, letraset, painting et al. And then you had to find a way to duplicate it.
Offset printing wasn't something you could even consider.
Screen printing took skill, time, gear lots of ink and help from grumpy art teachers,
though was (and is) the pre-eminent method  for t-shirts and posters (to my mind).
So what could the proudly independent, cash strapped runt use?
Yes....the photocopier. A means of reproduction you could get access to.
Even for free with a bit of ducking and diving.

The lamp moves

This was obviously crying out for experimentation.
I'm not sure if we knew about the huge and exciting body of xerox/copy art
that had begun over a generation before (see links at bottom of post) but I'm pretty sure that,
I at least didn't, perhaps I had a dim awareness at best.
So what happens after the initial urge to make copies of different parts
of your body up against the glass?
Well, there were the punky collages of a decade or two before.
Cool and easy to emulate. Then there were distortions from moving things or
images on the platen glass. Then, copying onto already printed images, maybe
several times. Enlarging and decreasing in size, darkening and lightening
contrast, the use of books to appropriate images (particularly in the library),
copying and recopying to create abstractions and distortions aplenty.

Recopy

So there's me, sitting on my arse at a computer when I remembered all this.
Where can I find a photocopier...at work! I am sure I could probably get in trouble
which adds a frisson but I could perhaps talk my way out. Fuck it, most of the other
teachers copy pointlessly all the time, I prefer the whiteboard in class. There we are,
justified.
Off I went, forth with some photos, text and images that I had printed out, and
multiplied. Well.....copied.
What fun! I was overtaken by a kind of fervour, reinserting images
back in to the copier, swirling them on the platen, zooming and playing with
contrast, all fearless of paper jams - nowadays I know how to solve them.
It had a physicality to it, the heavy clunking loading drawers, the smells of
toner and hot paper, mechanical noises and that wicked moving lamp.
I make no claims that I've produced 'art' but at least I
have enjoyed doing it. This non-designer has rediscovered his rightful place.

Your point is...?

To return to the title of this piece, 'Irreversible steps'.
I think part of my enjoyment springs from the lack of reversibility.
Not being a complete arsehole, I didn't want to waste paper or toner in
throwing the stuff away, so I re-used everything. If I wasn't happy with an image,
I put it back in the copier and continued with it or used the other side of the paper.
It demanded a respect for the physical world, forcing me to accept and adapt.
For an untrained 'artist' such as myself this is a boon.
This inability to click 'ctrl z' forced me to work and make decisions.
But it's not the whole story

An old chestnut

There was a flow from the start stage through to the finish.
I had to pre-visualise and think about how the copier worked to get close to
what I wanted but the copier still intervened with its own contributions.
It is what it is.
This copier induced imperfection is probably what I'm after as opposed to
the design prowess which for me as a non designer is close to unobtainable.
The copier colludes with its ever simplifying, tone destruction. It gives me a sense
of legitamacy, however deluded, that it was made outside of a software package.
This is quite a silly distinction I suppose but one I intuitively feel rather than think.

It's a well rehearsed cliche that one medium is more real
or authentic than another but I can't get away from the fact that the process
seems as important as the result and can even be perceived in it.
When 'designing' in photoshop or similar, I try it out, I go back,
I move things and change fonts, try hideous filters and generally fart around
until the farts don't smell so bad anymore.
I'm well aware that this is my own fault but remember that I have no discipline
or trained foundation to work from.
There is no flow.
For me this is not really a simple question of analogue v digital (many copiers
now use digital technology anyway) but one of methodology and technological
interaction.
These kind of processes protect the undisciplined maker from the predesigned
'art' features that are found in software packages and force him/her to act.
A pen and paper has a very open manifesto. You can use it to make marks,
the rest is up to you. The copier was designed to make copies of documents.
The rest is up to you. The synthesiser was designed to produce sound through
synthesis. The rest is up to you. And so it goes on.
But the closer you get to presumptive 'features' the further away the amateur user
gets from making their own 'art'.

Can I go now?

In conclusion, to my arty friends, thanks so much for unknowingly giving me
the permission to enjoy 'making' and to my fellow non designers, my advice
is either, have enough money to pay someone else or go into the physical world.
Paint or screen print, copy or draw etc.etc. and you will come up with something
that has something more visibly of you in it. Protected from hackneyed filters and actions!
If it's for publication you'll still probably end up finishing that output in a software
package but it will just be a quick tidy up stage and you'll have had a messier experience
that you'll enjoy and remember and may even take you somewhere else.

links

http://www.clubcopying.co.uk/photocopier-glossary.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_art

http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-role-that-copy-machines-have-played-in-moder-1295212435

http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/news/zines(part1)/zines1.html

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/xerox-art

The Difference Alarms

A bit of prose. Tut!

The difference alarms

Cough cough cough goes the diesely grunt and grind,
A lowly way to ride along the coast of our stony inheritance but so satisfying in its wooden carriaged, uniformed and peak-capped, pink ticket stamped day.
Colourful posters that demonstrate that we are still somehow fighting a war supposedly won decades ago.

Before we were properly connected.

Elsewhere, in another place I knew, a copper kettle is all that fires and fumes, boiling water and leaves. Pounced upon and polluted with milk, and sweet crumbs.

"Have you got the time, please", I asked and the reply given scratched my head.
"No, nobody has anymore", spoke quietly the gentleman, ready to enlighten me.

I didn't understand, I just needed a practical response. Reflection on the past wasn't my game, in those days.
No, in my mind, all the rain macs and umbrellas and weepy countenances, the metal lighters, ties and habitual smoking of cigarettes whose names sounded royal and historic, amounted to a previous world.
Yeah, now I know that it co-existed with mine, tracksuits, breakdancing and top of the pops nestled up to action man, the Dandy and Beano and meticulously drawn stories of Australian units in the jungle.

This must be how everyone feels - no one is a generation.
Time is surely not so simple. Bridging, ebbing and flowing, its effluence impossible to track, allowing each of us to only catch the odd, glinting reflection of the sun on its surface.

It's from those pieces that we think we know the world.

But those pensioners, they were defined by what happened in their time and lest we forget.

Schools of red poppies and rememberance services more frequent than the calendar allows. Oh, and God and Jesus were there too but somehow transformed into British army generals.
Very different from the other, the primary school, 'where have all the flowers gone', love and 'give peace a chance', flared trouser version.

And now of course, its life has begun to extinguish. A dead history, marked by assembled and crappily reassembled documentaries, watched by perverted cravers of explosive, blood and secret evils/evil secrets.

Now our wars are lived by other people. People whose broadband connections are unreliable. People we would care about if we could relate to them from our isolated, weather-beaten mound.
Foreigners are liked when they are nice to you and preferably providing some kind of service....when they admit their position and are submissive - a long, long tradition in the Anglo-Saxon myth.

Now I wish they had all listened to the old man, the one who had the lowdown on what it's like to suffer and scream and lose over and over again, then to be told that you have won and it's time to go back home.

I have the feeling that with his comfortable accent and fair skin, his words may have slipped right through the
difference alarms of those who do not compute that he is me and I am her and we are they and you too.

The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman by Aldo Busi

The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman by Aldo Busi - a defence and appreciation.

A visit to Bookman's Halt in Hastings when we were last in the UK allowed me to get my hands on some books in English for little money. Hurrah. 

Ironically, most of them were translations from Italian - a language with which I am regretfully unendowed other than the Latin from school, from speaking English and French (a bit) plus a few remembered phrases - I have to do something about this.....maybe next year.
Anyway, I chose stuff from Alberto Moravia that I had wanted to read for a while, some detective novels to keep me going and a book I had never heard of that had a groovy title and cover. Yes, I am that superficial.

The book was and is called 'The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman'. It's by Aldo Busi and translated by Raymond Rosenthal. My particular copy is published by Faber and Faber, 1990 and looks like this:

The inside cover reads:

Aldo Busi was born in Montichiari, Italy in 1948. He has translated Goethe, John Ashbery, Christine Stead and J.R Ackerly into Italian as well as Alice in Wonderland. He is the author of 'Seminar on Youth', and 'The Standard Life of A Temporary Pantyhose Salesman'. English translations of his other works; 'La Delfina Bizantina', and 'Sodomie in Corpor II', are forthcoming.

Aldo Busi in 2008

The synopsis tells us:

Angelo Basarovi is drifting into his thirties. By day he writes his thesis, by night he cruises the homosexual beaches of Lake Garda. He is also employed as a salesman by Celestino Lometto, magnate of the underwear trade. Together they set out on a series of hilarious sales trips and have adventures as improbable as those of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

On the surface, most of that information in the synopsis is correct but really does very little to explain what is novel about this novel, and the Don Quixote reference is quite disingenuous and lazy.

I'll have a go at explaining what I found in it.

The way the book started had me worried, I was finding it difficult to follow. The narrative seemed to jump around and events weren't clear as events but seemed like memories that might even be mixed up or misremembered. People arrived and left. I began to enjoy this style after the 4th page and to follow it well after about the 10th. It seemed that we were dealing with different times here - now, a time of reflection; a recent past fairly connected to now; a crucial,eventful past and a developmental pre-past. No future though.
There was a sense of bitterness, loss and worry. Talk of revenge and spite. A sadness that seemed to have deep roots and because 'cruising' around in the homosexual scene at Lake Garda was being decribed, it seemed, as in the synopsis and in other reviews I have since read, that these feelings were simply a result of the lifestyle being described. I was glad to find out that this wasn't the case at all.

Angelo is indeed moving into his thirties and seems older. He has a biting sense of humour, sharp and witty, intelligent and wounded. He seems irreverent and sassy, emptily arrogant perhaps but ultimately lonely and unhappy and it takes the whole book to find out why.

Meeting Celestino is the first identifiable big moment - and is gloriously funny. It begins the 'road movie' element of the novel which kept me gripped. Celestino Lometto's entrance is one-dimensionally absurd, as many of the characters are until we learn to see them. This is one of the things I really enjoyed, that like in life, we can laugh and choose to keep people as a set of characters but we know very well how things can be if we dare to involve ourselves deeper.

As all unfolds, we learn of the dynamics in these relationships and come to learn that Angelo considers and strives for responsibilty, love and morality a good deal more than most.

I don't want to describe in detail what happens in this book because I want people to read it and discover it for themselves. Suffice to say that there is murder, sex, love, hate, fear etc. etc. so don't worry about a lack of action.

I have read other reviews that describe it as a parody of Italian life or even, 'homosexual literature'. I wanted to refute these labels.

The first - Italian parody; this book goes way beyond a simple parody of one country although that, and some of Europe and a bit of America is its setting. It deals with the personal politics, moral choices, inherent chracter and beliefs of a person. How that affects our interaction with the world and its estimation of success, wealth and happiness. It's a fairly practical look at human philosophy and some of the types of people we may meet along our way.

The second - Homosexual Literature - this tag just annoys me in general. It makes me want to go round tagging 'Heterosexual Literature' on other books. I know it may help someone find the genres that they are interested in but it will also serve to limit the span of this book. Sexuality is core to the book because the gay narrator, Angelo, is core to the book but the sexuality and sexual life of other 'heterosexual' and 'homosexual' characters is also discussed. Sex is not particularly erotically described, it's not exclusively homosexual, it is part of Angelo's and the character's lives and just as interesting, funny and pertinent as all the other factors in this novel.

The book also is responsible for teaching me some new English words eg. 'propinquity' - you can look it up if you need to!
It is very eloquently written, even sometimes decorated and I appreciated learning a thing or two. I would love to be able to read it in Italian, alas....I'd have to actually get off of my arse and study!

So overall, a great read, I think that is one of those books that will stay with me for life.
Unless I really do have such idiosyncratic taste, (not likely), then this is a book that is grossly misjudged and unjustly ignored.
I hope you will read it and enjoy it as much as I did. I also hope that Aldo himself knows how good it is.

šunga lunga fest 2013 - the poster

A quick post to kick off with:

šunga lunga fest 2013 - the poster

We are putting on a mini festival in the village of Petrov Nad Desnou this coming weekend. 17.8.2013

Now I'm no designer but somebody had to make the poster.

The idea came from circus posters which I suppose is fairly common as an inspiration and, I admit it, I nicked the Lion which really is the crux and feature. Now where did I find it?

I found it here european circus posters

In the right hands that image would be much better than I managed! 

So the site aqua velvet is just bloody great at collecting just the kind of images/works I love - like I said, I have only a layman's interest in design but I can quite happily look through the whole site - I wish it were a book though.

The other elements are the fonts which were freely downloadable:

egyptienne zierinitialien

bosox 

So there you are. Well I hope the poster and the festival go well and if you are around the Jeseniky area of the Czech Republic next Saturday, 17th August, 2013 - then come and see us.