Screen Savour

I savour my screensaver. But it is telling not only of my computer's inactiveness, but also my own procrastination. The screensaver ‘Word a Day’ available on my Mac floats random words mesmerisingly across a rippling blue background then reveals their definition. It repeats four new words daily, the meaning of which is usually unknown to me. Sometimes the four words it settles on evoke strange associations for me.

It comes up one day with the word 'Sere', which means dry or withered, conjuring up an image of an arid landscape, devoid of vegetation. But the next word to float across the screen is 'Patisserie'. In my mind’s eye the arid landscape has transformed into a counter of pastries, horribly dried up, sprinkled not in sugar but caked in salt. The word ‘Patisserie’ glides gently away to the left. The pace of the screen saver is quite slow, so you really have time to ingest these images, so take your time. Have a cup of tea if you feel like it, and put your feet up. Where was I? Oh yes. So the word ‘Patisserie’ floats slowly and gently away, you have the taste of a salty old dried up croissant on the tip of your tongue, nice that, and ‘Patisserie’ is replaced by the word 'Dystopia'. Now I begin to wonder what my computer is up to, and I give it quizzical side-long glances, but it invariably remains poker faced.

 Ok, so have it your way, I think. ‘Sere’ + ‘Patisserie’ +‘Dystopia’ = There is no more water on Earth and only one building left standing, a fully functioning Patisserie. As you enter the Patisserie, you see a delicious looking plump croissant and your heart rejoices. Behind the counter a pastry chef in a clean white apron welcomes you. But the pastry handed to you disintegrates into dust as you try and put it to your mouth. Whatever robbed the Earth of its water sadly hasn’t spared this croissant. As you demolish half the shop in a craze lunging at madeleines, profiteroles and petit fours you are blind to the fact that it is all in vain. All your efforts turn to dust. Meanwhile the pastry chef is ringing up a hefty bill. You are starting to feel that things are looking just a bit doom and gloomy right now and as you turn out your pockets you have to admit you are completely broke. The Earth isn’t the only thing that has been robbed, that pastry chef has totally fleeced you.

Then relief fills your heart as you notice the word ‘dystopia’ gliding gently away on your computer, exiting screen left as if butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth. You try and think of more positive words like ‘sunrise’, ‘dawn’ but to no avail. Just as you think it couldn’t get any worse, the word ‘dystopia’ which is still gliding gently away to the left as I write, dissapears from view only to be replaced by the word ‘inhuman’, which is actually really kind of upping the ante.

The world has already reached such a state of degredation that you can’t get a half decent croissant anywhere. Isn’t that enough? I begin to think my computer is a bit of a drama queen, it absolutely has a consciousness and it is trying to psych me out.

In the patisserie I realise there is one last chance, a cabinet full of the most delicious looking pralines I have ever set my eyes upon. But guarding my way is the pastry chef, who now looks cruel and barbaric, despite the formerly deceptively pleasing appearance in the white apron. But what I mistook as a friendly smile on closer inspection turns out to be a cruel sneer. My blood runs cold and I realise that no human being could make such an array of fancy pralines single-handedly. This person is inhuman, an automaton at best. I have been tricked. I turn to make a hasty exit but the door has vanished. I’m done for. Not only has the Earth been robbed of its water and you can't get a decent pastry anywhere, I have been robbed of my money, and now my life……

Thankfully I have to finally get down to some work, as the situation is getting pretty critical. I give my computer another side-long quizzicle glance. It, doing its part, gives it the poker face again. My fate hangs in the balance for quite a bit longer as the word ‘inhuman’ drifts balefully across the screen. If I wait a few more seconds then the whole sequence will start over again. I ponder how long the sequence will take? Maybe I should pop out for a croissant before getting down to work? Yes, I savour my screensaver. But it is telling not only of my screens inactiveness, but also my own procrastination. 

Narrative Takes: More Pictures in the World...

This is part one of a talk I gave at the Democratic Photo Club held at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh on November 6th. Members are invited to set a theme for others to interpret through photography with a talk, discussion and show of members work. For November I chose the theme of NARRATIVE TAKES and was interested in artists who create tensions between reality and fiction in their work challenging our conventional scripts. To introduce the theme I told two stories of my own inspired by the artist Thomas Demand. Here is the first story including a short intro on Thomas Demand.

I first saw the work of Thomas Demand at the Serpentine Gallery in 2006. Living in Berlin at the time, the fact that he was German and living and working there and of my generation were other factors that attracted me to seeing the show. Apart from that, London is my hometown and a gallery visit was a way for my Dad and I to spend time together, to structure and frame our somewhat difficult relationship. On a basic level it was something to do.

Staircase, 1995, C-Print/Diasec, 150 x 118 cm

When you first see a work by Thomas Demand, you may think it is a straight photograph of a scene or interior. As sources for his ideas he uses found or archive photographs and also personal memories. He constructs a life size model from paper and card which he then photographs again. After the photo is taken, the model is destroyed. It is only when you look closely that you realise the deception, that the photograph is lacking certain details or appears too perfect.

Klause/ Tavern 2, 2006, C-Print/ Diasec, 178 x 244 cm

You naturally begin to create a narrative from your own associations with the place/image in front of you. But even when you know the  story behind the image if there is one at all, you realise the world Demand has created doesn't exist, that it is fake and constructed. How reliable then are the narratives you choose in your everyday life and the ones you see in the media?

Office, 1995, C-Print/Diasec, 183.5 x 240 cm

When we arrived at the Serpentine, we saw that the walls of the gallery were covered in hand-blocked ivy themed wallpaper, in four colour tones to reflect different times of day. Normally you would expect art photography to be placed on a white wall. There appeared to be a deliberately stark contrast between the handicraft of the wallpaper and the apparent slickness displayed in the large photographic images.

Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, 2006 by Nic Tenwiggenborn

Copyshop 1999, C-Print/Diasec 183.5x 300cm

A 3 metre wide photograph in the exhibition called 'Copyshop' shows at first sight that: A ubiquitous space filled with photocopiers. There are no logos on the machines or paper. An impersonal space has been further stripped of clues. The photographic image of a photocopy room would appear to be the very antithesis of the process of handicrafts. Infact, by using the same material as a photocopier, paper, to make the somewhat banal scene in front of us Demand raises questions of reproduction, originality and the intrinsic worth of objects and images themselves. It is in itself a narrative that resounds through the gallery space, partly absorbed by the textured wallpaper, bouncing lightly off the glass surface of the photographs until it reaches us, where it will fall upon us to listen to our associations with the spaces that no longer exist or perhaps only once existed as an idea in paper that Demand once created. 

Hand-Blocked Wallpaper from the exhibition

After the show, I wanted to buy a book on Demand’s work. A disagreement began between my Dad and I about buying the show’s catalogue. My Dad thought it was too expensive and bought me another Demand book from a past exhibition:

 We had even walked away from the Serpentine  into Kensington Gardens and along the lake when I realised I really really wanted the exhibition catalogue as well as or instead of the other book. I was an adult but also the spoilt little girl with her Dad who felt she had to get what she wanted. Sometimes I hate this trait of mine, I get seduced by an exhibition and feel I must have “it”, whatever that thing is. I guess I am not alone in this as I have noticed the gift shops getting bigger in relation to art galleries and museums spaces. Anyway, I convinced myself that I couldn’t live without this catalogue, as it had pieces of the original wallpaper stitched into the book and was of the exhibition I had actually seen. Why couldn’t just seeing the exhibition be enough? I got my way, and we headed back and soon the issue of money seemed to loom up large between us. I felt embarrassed now as it turned out my Dad had only wanted to buy me something and he had. I also felt his dissaproval keenly that I wanted to spend more money which we both knew I didn’t really have on something that was in his eyes - unneccessary.

 In the midst of our discussion on the gallery steps, a man approached us and said he was a patron of the Serpentine and as such could get us a discount on the catalogue. (We must have been attracting attention). He accompanied me to the sales desk and I bought a catalogue for myself that my Dad still thought was too expensive even with a discount and was more expensive than the one he had bought for me.

It seems so poignant to me that this personal narrative has formed alongside the many narratives of the exhibition itself.

Now turning the pages of the book eight years later I see that the back of one piece of wallpaper has tiny circular ink flecks and mottling soaked through from the front of the paper itself.

This is echoed on the next page in “Constellation” an image of how the night sky would appear exactly 300 years into the future.

Constellation 2000, C-Print/Diasec, 130 x180

With this photograph, Demand defies the logics of photography that it is supposedly telling us a narrative that is always about the past. At every new exhibition space he reconfigures the image again so that it creates an image at that space exactly 300 years into the future. 

Images, whether taken by us or present in the media become part of the landscape of our past. Thomas Demand literally punches holes in paper to make this photograph of the night sky and in doing so he also punctures the façade of these narratives. A projected constellation of the skies has no stories only the ones we choose to project upon it. I see this photograph as something wholly unemotional. I think that is what Thomas Demand does with the photographs and constructions that he makes. He takes out the detail, creates a certain vacuum lacking in emotion. In doing so he reflects upon and lays bare our own personal and cultural associations and ironically, emotions.

Again, there is a twist to the story of this photograph. We are not seeing an image of the future at all but one of the past. The projected constellation is of light travelling towards us is from a million years ago due to the speed of light. We are not dealing with nice human distances of miles and kilometres either, or digestable human nuggets of time we frame our small stories within. Therefore to project any sentimentality, emotion or stories onto it is absurd.  Still, we do it.

I am writing this about eight years after visiting the Serpentine Gallery with my Dad. I can still touch and look through the catalogue in front of me. I am glad I bought it, as it brings back happy memories as well as being a beautiful object. This is even as I recollect with a certain embarrassment the situation under which the catalogue was purchased. This small story echoes many other stories that played out between my Dad and I, each incident not allowed to be isolated or played out alone but heavily loaded just like a Demand photograph. Now, just eight years later, a small human scale of time, I can only remember my Dad through the photographs and memories I have of him, and now this story.

(More images and information  on Thomas Demand available on his website)

Bubble

My 'Zentangle' otherwise known as a doodle

Last night I couldn’t sleep and I started doodling in a notebook which is solely for the purpose of doodling. The notebook is a Zentangle notebook. Zentangle is a registered trademark of a method of doodling, or pattern making as a form of meditation. This way of drawing is not really new to me, I sometimes draw pattern as a kind of distraction. Actually, I am pleased someone has registered the idea, as now I feel I am no longer procrastinating but involved in some kind of sanctioned Beschäftigungstherapie, or purposeful occupational therapy. I am not sure, however, if this type of drawing method helps allieviate my worrying and obsessive thinking, or reinforces it. I feel safe within the square and get caught up in  details. Straight after this drawing though I began playing around with words in a similar method. I started with a theme, played with and changed order, elaborated. This became a sort of zentangle poem about my obsessive thinking and its traps (oh and doing the washing-up).

The Zentangle notepad is copyrighted, or perhaps it is only the introduction at the front. In the notebook there are blank square templates. Four pale grey dots delineate the four corners of the square otherwise know as ‘the tile’ within which you draw. I started to worry whether the doodle I drew may no longer be mine but 'copyrighted' by the Zentangle method. The poem is also inspired by the methods restrictions and reliance on pattern, so perhaps that is also tangled up in copyright? Oh, well, one more thing to worry and obsess about…. Hope I don't sleep tonight so I can get to draw another one.


Bubble

Burst my bubble
Let me sink
Full of dishes
Let me think
Of something else
Not of you
Trap me in my bubble
Let me through

Let me through
Trap me in my bubble
Not of you
Of something else
Let me think
Full of dishes
Let me sink
Burst my bubble

Let through me
My bubble. Trap me in
You, not of
Something else of
Me. Think…Let
Full dishes of
Me sink. Let
My bubble burst


Burst me full
Of dishes
Let something
Of me through
Let me sink
Let me think
In my bubble trap


(I will update the Zentangle above daily on this post as I draw a new one)