im-material

The Wilderness of Stories

2011-11-13T12:42:00.005Z

An Illustration by Jim Kay, from the novel A Monster Calls. Written by Patrick Ness from the ideas of Siobhan Dowd.

The novel tells the story of Conor, a school boy and his mother who is suffering from terminal cancer. The novel is accompanied by utterly beautiful illustrations. I felt they concentrated the pain and emotions of the story in a completely graphic way.

There are further illustrations, by Jim Kay from the book here

note to self

2011-01-29T12:19:00.006Z

I got a letter from myself this morning. I wrote it in 2006 in the G39 Gallery in Cardiff as part of a work by artist Jennie Savage. I vaguely remember I had gone into the gallery to meet someone and come across the exhibition by chance. I scribbled the letter out as I was waiting for them. I didn't know how long I would be waiting. The letter ended abruptly when the person arrived.

I wrote whatever came to mind in those few minutes. It's a strip of consciousness cut out of five years ago and delivered to me on a cold Saturday, after breakfast. There are two other strangers in the room with me. They seem to be nervous. One is playing with their mobile phone. They look at the exhibit but don't write a letter. I'm aware of them, and a list of other jobs that flit through my memory. Always lists of jobs to do. Flowers. Jobs still at the back of my memory-list five years later.

I photograph the letter this morning: the stamped impression, the fragments of the text. Photographing it makes me start to read down the text in columns rather than in a linear way. It goes like this:

downstairs
he's talking
downstairs
present this

when I go and put some
yesterday. Why
the text

I spoke
some flowers
Why

In the five years since I created the letter I have thought about that afternoon several times and waited for the letter to return. It surprised me this morning. I thought it would be longer coming. 2015, or something like that. I think I liked it more as an im-material memory than a material object sitting on the table in front of me.

Maybe it's time to throw it away.

This is no reflection on piece itself, Savage's work has created a longevity of reflection for this participant, I have returned to the idea time and again to since its creation.

A couple of years ago when I found fifteen-year-old undeveloped rolls of film hidden amongst a drawer of detritus, I realised that here was another time machine waiting to suprise me. I blogged the photos here. Since then I have been occasionally stashing rolls of film about the house to be found and developed at some undecided point in the future.

Note to self: must take some more films and add them to the pile.

For Jenny's reflections on the project look here.

Calle

2011-01-21T20:21:00.004Z

The character of a city can always be seen in the style of street signs. London signs them in monotonous block capitals embossed on iron. Madrid on tiles with beautiful images recalling the name. Bogota street signs have the drama and romance of magical realism. Letters dance across the stone. Sloping tails of letters sweep into their neighbours. Letters merge with each other to create ideograms. I wanted to stop on every street corner.

dsc

2011-01-21T19:05:00.003Z

my first digital camera, shortly to be made redundant.

jardin

2011-01-18T21:22:00.002Z

I love signs in the sky.

not books

2010-12-11T12:31:00.004Z

I reckon I must have kept notebooks from about the age of 13 until a couple of years ago. Somehow at that point a personal notebook seemed less important. Maybe these blog things were the surrogate. Anyhow, I still find these things knocking about occassionally and flick through them. (Before sticking them in the bin. I know. It's brutal. Creative destruction.)

Unfortunately, they don't have the comic cringe factor of Richard Herring's adolescent notebooks so I can't make a stand-up career out of reading them. They do contain the odd gem in them. One thing I always did was draw. Not from real life but instead of painting, photographs or by pausing a DVD and drawing the still. I liked the way which a picture or a piece of art revealed itself when you forced your hand and eye to follow it.

Then a bit later in my notebooks there are lots of these.

guides from the darkroom. Hours spent mucking about: burning and dodging.

Glastonbury: the invisible city

2010-07-02T15:59:00.005+01:00

Robin tells me 'I spend a lot of time thinking about being at Glastonbury when I am not here'. Likewise, I think I will spend much of the coming year drifting through it's fields.

Glastonbury is not the name of a festival but a city that emerges from its visitors' dreams and desires for one week each year. As walked through the festival site for the final time, at about six am on Monday, it was covered in an ethereal, thick fog. It seemed that this place was already losing it's material form and returning to dream and memory.

(C) David Foster 2010

no more football related posts... ever.

2010-06-18T22:58:00.000+01:00

numbers from the people

2010-06-18T16:11:00.003+01:00

Umbro's 'Tailored in England': Instead of spending millions on a campaign showing David Beckham shooting an Ewok (or something) why not show the glory of Beckton, Bow, Wortley or Wallsend. You can kinda see why England's best players have come from these places... Basically there was fuck all else to do but play football in the car park or down the recky.

http://www.umbro.com/englandwalls/

Good luck lads for tonight. I'm hoping for a semi-final, at least.

Umbro's campaign also reminds me of Lee Friedlander's excellent 'Letters from the People'. A symphony of unbound phonemes.

library

2010-06-12T15:50:00.005+01:00

I've been working in a library which has the rare luxury of too much space. The result is that endless volumes of journals sit on the shelves instead of being hidden away in the stack below.
Presumably many of these will never be read again. So this is my elegy for all these hours of study.

(C) David Foster 2010

photocopier malfunctions

2010-05-29T19:14:00.004+01:00

syllabus

technique

(c) David Foster 2010

screen grab

2010-04-09T14:49:00.003+01:00

Science and Industry

2010-04-04T22:53:00.002+01:00

screen grab

2010-04-04T22:48:00.003+01:00

don't forget to go home.

2010-01-24T17:00:00.002Z

2009-11-19T20:34:00.001Z

Nights are drawing in.

screen grab

2009-07-31T18:28:00.002+01:00

point and shoot.

2009-07-08T23:21:00.000+01:00

Gerhard Richter: Portraits

2009-03-23T23:27:00.003Z

Gerhard Richter: Portraits
National Gallery, London
27 February - 31st May 2009

Razor sharp focus. It’s a prerequisite of the photography industry. The images that surround us offer the eye the illusion of every detail. For this reason viewing Gerhard Richter’s Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery challenges the eye.

The hallmark of Richter’s portraits are paintings that subordinate the photographic image for very different ends. The canvases offer the shapes of figures which on closer inspection break up into flat layers of paint. Richter’s most striking technique, which is in evidence throughout this retrospective, is to rake a brush across the damp canvas smudging the tones together. The result gives an appearance of automatism to his images; As if they had been produced by a period photocopier or printer. These surfaces are Richter’s tool to inhibit the viewer’s attempt at interpretation. From a photograph we expect a copy of reality. However, here the viewer is required to consider a number of visual contradictions: paintings that appear to be photos, figures that remain illusive, canvases that have the appearance of mass produced objects.

The exhibition contains further illuminating contrasts in Richter’s work. The atrium of the gallery is filled with Richter’s monumental 48 Portraits a work which dryly offers us a canon of great white males looking down on the viewer. Take the elevator to the upper galleries and you rise up through the ranks. However, the prevalent subject matter here is not the iconic image but the family portrait. This is an object that he describes as a modern ‘devotional picture.’ With these images Richter offers the viewer a chance to glimpse into personal relationships while emphasizing their conceal realities. Richter portrays his daughters in a way that both captures personality and side steps it by hiding the subject’s face of using an unusual angle. In a small self-portrait Richter appears to be emerging from deep inside the picture. Coming into focus, but looking away from the camera as if to resist its gaze.

The final surprise is Richter’s installation of a mirror in the gallery as the exhibition’s final work. Richter compares the mirror to one of his paintings, suggesting that it offers a semblance of the thing without showing us the object itself. Seeing oneself staring into the mirror with the traffic of the gallery behind offers exactly this experience. It reminds me of Velasquez’s Las Meninas; suddenly we’re

Lowlands

2009-02-11T20:43:00.007Z

I travelled to The Hague and Delft, home of 17th century painter Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer's archetypal image is that of the figure at the window. An interior flooded with cool light. They offer a naturalism pregnant with allegorical possibility.

A girl in servants clothing looks over her shoulder, exposing a pearl earring. The iconic image resides in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, concealing a mystery that rivals the Mona Lisa's smile. It's miniature size and canvas stripped bare of context gives the image the quality of a deftly executed part work. The floating fragment of a unrealised idea.

My travel photos also offer a speculative narrative . I went looking for the quality of Vermeer's light, falling through the curtains, through the blinds. Here are some fragments. I'm putting them together to see if they might suggest a story

images (c) David Foster 2009

The 76

2009-01-22T23:22:00.006Z

Angry and frustrated by London Transport I aimlessly start snapping from the top deck. The result is immediately captivating.

I had been trying to work out a way of visualising London for ages. And suddenly here it is. Monotonous chaos in the patterns of grey paving stones. Concealed figures. A view combining surveillance and vulnerability. Just photos from my everyday life.

I can already imagine a number of way I can develop such a series of images. I think I will probably start a London blog to accommodate them. I'll post the link when I get it sorted.

Bassaleg School rugby tour 1992

2009-01-18T19:22:00.006Z

Implausibly I have two rolls of film which I managed to keep about 17 years without developing. I Found them in a box of old film at Christmas. They are photos from a school rugby tour I went on in 1992. (That's me down at the bottom there.)

The effect of keeping them hidden for so long made the final result more exciting than simply looking at old photos. The film stock has aged, darkened round the edges and taken on ghostly tints.

I have decided to take a couple of rolls in the coming weeks on film stock that is likely to age badly. I'll hide them away in the film box and come back to them in 5 or so years. See you in 2015.

Dream Landscapes (2)

2009-01-11T00:21:00.011Z

19/10/08

rock of ages
read the fall out
in the bar:

travelling on from vienna
'Where do you want to go?'
'To a city with a Cathedral.'

sitting on bar stools
bacon & eggs
translations
kissing together
routemaster through Islington

*

8/10/08

I look at them
I thought they were screaming at me

(knock. knock.)

the cyclonic version
'I know'
it gets confused

*

9/1/09

Obama on the radio
resigned yesterday.

whatever. whatever. whatever.

warms up when. glue in the bike shop.
need some time. jumpy end.

zip lines. miniature horses.
waves on the coast of Venezuela
the woman carry goods on their shoulders

James in a model village
dad calls it over
loyalty card
smells strangest at my home.

Time remaining: 5min

2008-12-14T16:14:00.003Z

32 Postcards

2008-10-14T20:54:00.005+01:00

Cacao live at the placard headphones night in Cafe Oto, Dalston. My headphone splitter was playing up, but it still sounded great.

Follow the link for field noise, postcard nostalgia and some nice vectors.
http://quotesque.net/cacao/32postcards.html

Cheers Anil and Miranda.

Capture More

2008-10-04T17:35:00.006+01:00

To check or send a message on my new phone I click the control to the right. However, by pushing upward the camera phone mode is initiated.

I took a photo each time I accidentally entered the camera phone. The images quickly built up a picture of my domestic geography. The places where I was intending to write or read a text.

The story is ongoing.

Images (c) David Foster 2008

Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard.

2008-09-29T23:36:00.007+01:00

Gerhard Richter 4900 Colours: Version II, 2007
Enamel paint on Aludibond
49 Panels, each 97 × 97 cm
La Collection de la Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création
© 2008 Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter:

4900 Colours: Version II

Serpentine Gallery, London

23^rd September – 16^th November 2008

German painter and photographer Richter is exhibiting 49 paintings at the Serpentine which are composed of hundreds of blocks of flat colour. They were composed by a computer programme which calculated created an entirely chance configuration of tones. The gallery note informs us that a dice was then rolled by Richter to choose the orientation and positioning of the works in the gallery.

Standing in the central space of the Serpentine the blocks of colour give me the sense of being in a nursery. The statistical operations they represent lead me back to thinking about the power of number crunching data to rip huge wormholes in national economies when put into the hands of investment bankers. It also reminds me of a title: ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard.’

Richter’s dice operation makes me think about Stéphane Mallarmé rich and strange poem. I don’t pretend to understand it but I looked it up this evening and was stunned again by its beauty. It's criminal to try and typeset it or translate extracts out of context so here are a few pages from the original French booklet:

A THROW OF THE DICE

NEVER

even when cast in the eternal circumstance

of a shipwreck's depth

You can see the full image of the book here:

http://www.my-os.net/blog/index.php?Graphisme/2006/11

The full text in French and English here:

http://www.tonykline.co.uk/

David Foster Wallace 1962-2008

2008-09-14T21:15:00.014+01:00

David Foster Wallace: Courtesy Little, Brown

Writer David Foster Wallace, my (near) namesake, was found dead in his home in California on Friday 12th September. It seems that he committed suicide. He was 46 years old.

I spent most of January this year reading his 1000+ page novel Infinite Jest. It is probably the most technically virtuoso modern novel I have read. Set in a near future Boston it intertwines the stories of a school for young tennis prodigies and a halfway house for recovering addicts. The book presents these strangely parallel worlds in psychotic, breathtaking and humorous detail.

I don't feel any sense of closure about the book. It's a bundle of live wires sparking all over the place. Across the thousand pages it is Wallace's beguiling prose style that kept me wrapped. It is this that will also ensure that I will return to his writings again and again. The prose style is so personal that I feel I spent pretty much every spare moment in January with Wallace as my companion.

I usually keep notes in the back pages of books I read, but the complexity and length of Infinite Jest made the labour near impossible. Nevertheless I kept a few notes on themes that interested me: addiction, gaming, illness, dreams and some of the wonderful linguistic constructions Wallace uses in the novel.

One of the great Wallace phrases used throughout the novel is 'The Howling Fantods' a comic coinage that characters use to gloss a genuine and absolute terror. Looking up this reference it is used by addict Kate Gombert to describe her gut feeling when hearing the banal, incomprehensible stories of other suicides (p692). I guess this is how a lot of David Foster Wallace readers are feeling now. Suicide: always irreducible to the rational.

I wanted to quote one of the dreams I just read from Infinite Jest. This is a dream of the novels main protagonist, the young tennis player Hal Incandenza:

In this dream, which every now and then still recurs, I am standing publicly at the baseline of a gargantuan tennis court. I'm in a competitive match, clearly: there are spectators, officials. The court is about the size of a football field, through, maybe, it seems. It's hard to tell. But mainly the court’s complex. The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net. I stand there tentatively. The whole thing is almost too involved to try and take in all at once. It’s simply huge. And it’s public. A silent crowd resolves itself at what may be the court’s periphery, dressed in summer's citrus colors, motionless and highly attentive. A battalion of linesmen stand blandly alert in their blazers and safari hats, hands folded over their slacks’ flies. High overhead near what might be a net-post, the umpire, blue-blazered, wired for amplification in his tall high-chair, whispers Play…

…We sort of play. But it's all hypothetical, somehow. Even the ‘we’ is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.

p67 Infinite Jest (1996)

A great blog for information on David Foster Wallace is also named 'The Howling Fantods'. This will be a good place for updates on the details of Wallace's sad passing away.

Summer Lightnings

2008-09-03T09:52:00.003+01:00

video stills, Summer Lightnings, 2004, (c) Victor Alimpiev
All images taken from http://www.ekaterina-foundation.ru/eng

Encounters: Victor Alimpiev
Modern Art Oxford
15th June - 31st August 2008

Whose is this Exhalation? The title suggests a whodunit. A group of eight performers bunch together before an evacuated space. They sing: an improvised series of ascending chords. Yet one of the group remains silent, holding their breath and resisting, until their body propels them into a desperate life assuring exhalation. Each phrase of the music climaxes with this release. We watch the group comfort the sufferer whose face moves from agony back to composure. This member of the group will now join the seven singers and another member will gather their reserves to deprive themselves of air. The delicate combination care and suffering within the situation that make the work utterly compelling.

Summer Lightnings takes me back to the class activity of creating a rainstorm by scraping, scratching and knocking on school desks. Here we see a young class performing this same communal effect before the video cuts to the lateral bursts of lightening across cloud burdened skies.

Together the two videos show Alimpiev working with a diverse and intriguing vocabulary consisting of ideas of community, abstract sound, silence, and sinister or powerful natural forces.

I am curious by the idea of silence in both video works. Summer Lightning offers us an audible event that we perceive as silent. We know the violent crack of lightening but disassociate it to the name thunder. Effectively we silence the lightening.

In Whose is this exhalation? Although we are listening to the singers ascending octaves they emerge as a cruel taunt to the silence that forms the vertebrae of each phrase. We watch and listen for silence amongst the sound. Silence is more verbally potent than the prattle of sound in both pieces: it measures and orders the other forces at play.

---
For a short clip of Summer Lightnings go to http://www.videoartworld.com/beta/video_59.html

Video Stills, Whose is this exhalation? , 2008, (c) Victor Alimpiev

The Other Day

2008-09-01T12:50:00.004+01:00

Richard Prince - The Other Day 1988-99
(c) Richard Prince

From Continuation - The Work of Richard Prince
The Serpentine Gallery, London
26 June - 9th September 2008

The text reads :
'A girl phoned me the other day and said come on over nobody's home. I went over. Nobody was home.'

Other exhibitions visited through the summer:

- Chantal Ackerman / Anya Gallaccio - Camden Arts Centre - til 14th Sept

- Street & Studio - Tate Modern - A bit scrappy!

Had some images and texts by Laurie Anderson. She used cat calling in NY to dictate the people she would photo. Interesting approach to chance operations, with a sense of risk. The project also realised the camera as a tool to turn the tables - make the victimizer into a victim. hmmm.

- Victor Alimpiev - Modern Art Oxford -

Summer Lightenings (2004), Whose is this exhalation? (2008) The titles say it all. I'm going to put up some pictures from this. It was utterly beautiful.

new term

2008-09-01T12:41:00.002+01:00

Oli told me that the Japanese have a word for discarded blogs. It translates as 'pebbles'.

This is not the fate of im-material! I'm back after a summer of discontent for more obtuse blogging.

To get this clear - I'm interested in any collisions/experiements/adventures that involve the eye and the tongue.

I also post other stuff here because it's like my blog yeh?

Any contributions welcome:)

Cy Twombly

2008-06-29T14:47:00.010+01:00

Images: Cy Twombly
Text: Cy Twombly with errors, emendations, inclusions, and collaging by David Foster

Cy Twombly , Ferragosto V 1961

Please remain behind the line. cross the line. line of trees. line drawn up.
letters wake, shake out the sleep begin to resemble

Ferragosto paintings

touching flesh
body tastes
water interludes
U U U days age
131415

globes
fruit juices
wanton sky
feria lights
ache
crusted

hardly a
noun all
summer
touching
big sex
huge cunt
fruits
almost waking
lift my head

Cy Twombly, (Untitled) Bolsena 1961

Bolsena Series

cloud 9. sun. bulb. 335. 3 1/2. 1 67. 144. 17 ½ . 2. by 2 by 3. number II. CT. 67. 2. 3. 7 ½ . 92. void (3) (3) w. w. w. bulb. sum.

38. 2 ½ . 4. just. 1 ½ . 7 – 11. 3 ½ . brushing. orbits. 124. 200. 126 – 700. 180.214. overlay. clearing 14 O E. 12662870. error 0 3 x.

sssssssswch. ssssssssssswch. 2/8. 2 over 1 2 2 stage 2 4. 1964. raise vertical. N028. ½ . 3 4 2. 4 < 4/5. 1801. 224. 14x20. 18x20 lay. stem and out

Veil Paintings

shuttle. rails. convey.

sheets along the plain

one moment also proceeds

conveyance purring trail. chalk grates

mail pouring. commute

inside the falling veil.

*

Untitled 1971

roomful and not even . so

rain . rain from the east

rain through the day. rain at dusk.

Cy Twombly, The Wilder Shores of Love 1985

Shores

grid bubbles sur-wake
as if glass mirrors. the surface of the
scatter. In the hall. rain leaks
pigment. braile. sur-wake. drowns
breathing. tow gondolas through the. rake sifting
channel dredge up. notes scatter. window
blows open.

Cy Twombly, Quattro Stagioni: Primavera 1993-5

Quattro Stagioni

1. And you who thought of happiness fleeing would feel the
illumination that almost overwhelms and will.
motes suture happiness pulling little falls

2. goodbye cumulus. high on light and white youth. forever touching it melts and faints. goodbye Catullus. you made me realise.

3. Autumn sweet breads. passenger, you’re Priam B.S.E.E.M.S you beetroot fog.
and yet in the south and exceeding moon like

*
Cy Twombly, Cycles and Seasons
At the Tate Modern , London
19th June - 14th September, 2008
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/

Here’s an introduction to Twombly’s work
http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue13/cytwombly.htm

Left to Care for Themselves

2008-06-26T06:54:00.004+01:00

Mae Almonicar - Nurse, Hamilton.
Copyright David Foster 2008

If you spoke to Mae on the phone then you’d simply assume she was Scottish. Her vowels are rounded with the familiar warm tonality. She’s actually Filipino, and arrived in Scotland for the first time in 2001 to work as a Senior Carer in private nursing homes where she has worked first in the Highlands and later just outside Glasgow. It takes listening, practise and patience to adopt a foreign accent. It’s a signal of her deep seated desire to really integrate with the surrounding culture.

Yet her experiences in the UK illustrate the vulnerability of an overseas worker: ‘When I went to sleep I had nightmares. I was a mess wasn’t I?’ She says to Shelly, her Scottish friend who has accompanied her. ‘Crying all the time. Just the thought of losing my nursing registration, losing my job. 2007 was the worst, worst year of my life.’

Mae moved from a staff nurse position in the Philippines and arrived in Scotland for the first time in 2001 to work in as Senior Carer in private nursing homes, an occupation that was, until 2006, on the government list of occupations suffering a labour shortage.

Like so many of the 80,000 Filipino nurses and health staff working in the UK. Mae initially arrived in the UK, hoping to find economic and social security in her new role.

‘I worked in this nursing home in Hamilton for over two years, everything was fine until at one point summer last year there were three new staff who, how do you say it, made stories about me, about things I haven’t done.’

On her morning off, after working six night shifts in a row as senior sister Mae was called in to defend herself in front of management at her care home.

‘There was a major complaint against me. And it was about abuse. They accused me of twisting this man’s hand on a regular, regular basis. This man is a very physically aggressive man but he never had any bruises. It took two or three staff just to get him ready for bed, just to put on his pyjamas, you know and seemingly it was me who abusing this man. There was no report of any injury but the management threatened me saying that it was a police matter. I never got any support from them, I was guilty in their eyes.’

Despite Mae having permanent residency and over 5 years UK work experience, on the basis of these accusations Mae received a letter of dismissal, was threatened with the loss her UK nursing registration for gross misconduct and was told she would not be paid. At no point was she advised that she needed representation or told about the procedure for appeal. It was only as a result of her membership to the trade union Unison and a independently organised off-shoot group, the Overseas Nurses Network that she was able to get advice and backing to fight her case.

A clear picture of the prejudice surrounding Mae’s dismissal is given by the surrounding events. Mae tells me ‘During the accusation another staff member from the nursing home phoned me… It went through my voicemail… racist remarks. My managers said she couldn’t help me so we went to the Police with the concrete evidence that it was all about racism.’ It was only at this point that the nursing home reluctantly started to pay Mae again. Mae tells me that the man in question was taken to court and found guilty of racial aggravation. He was sentenced to a fine of £400 by Hamilton Sheriff Court.

‘They offered me the job back. I said ‘I’m sorry I don’t want the job back.’ When I applied for another agency my manager gave me a bad reference. So how am I gonna start work?’ With her nursing registration and a leave to remain Mae has all the necessary requirements to work in an NHS position. Mae clearly is the type of person whose determination is only magnified by the tribulations she has faced.

From the article 'Left to care for themselves' Published in Bad Idea Magazine Summer 2008

trans - sylvania

2008-06-14T14:00:00.007+01:00

I am travelling on an eight hour train journey where the carriages are separated into compartments, a type of train I have not travelled in since childhood.

In my compartment a foreign conversation ebbs and flows between two women. I try to catch words of their conversation. It is difficult to establish if they are colleagues or strangers who have met on the train.

The train climbs along the base of a sheer walled valley before opening out into rolling, verdant hills. With the heat of the day and the rhythmic lullaby of the tracks we all drift from reading to gazing out of the window into sheets of sleep.

I am watching the woman opposite curled up with her eyes closed. Is she sleeping? Should I take I photo of her? Would the shutter wake her? Is it wrong to steal the moment? Will the photo really retain the moment? Perhaps my memory will retain it without the need for a photograph.

The moment reminds me of a Cartier-Bresson image of a young couple sleeping in a train carriage. It is one of my favourite Cartier-Bresson photos because it voices the paradox of stolen intimacy. Intimacy is further confounded by the man’s grasp of his partner. Is this affectionate, protective or tyrannical? The image offers us the prospect of intimacy but conceals its true narrative.

In the compartment I sit in the combination of the afternoon sun outside and the shady interior will make the moment impossible to capture. I take separate photos of the exterior and interior with the intention of stitching them together later.

Here I am working away at the image trying to recover the memory. But as usual my haphazard post work botches the job. The memory reasserts itself in the unlikely cleave between the two layers. The final image does not co-here. It has the logic of a dream.

The Seats Opposite, Romania 1975
Courtesy of Henri Cartier- Bresson, Magnum Photos
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/04/europe_the_work_of_cartier_bresson

Monvmentvm MM by Tim Sullivan

2008-06-03T16:59:00.004+01:00

Image Tim Sullivan copyright 2008

A family of Megalosaurus amble through the overgrown parkland of a Welsh visitor attraction. Sullivan’s camera captures them like the breathless wildlife photographer hidden amongst the foliage. The Jurassic Park moment is short lived. These are one of the many regional edutainments funded by the millennium commission. These extinct dinosaurs were surely deemed suitable millennium monuments in their embodiment of the transitory nature of time in an aura of non-specific reflection.

Looking through the Sullivan’s findings reveals the beguiling variety of monuments and projects deemed suitable to impress upon the viewer a similar sense of nostalgia. Sullivan’s photos allow us to reassess this recent historical spectacle. The millennium commission may have invested somewhere in the region of two billion pounds on countrywide initiatives but after eight years many appear discarded and forgotten. In this way an image of drab plaster dinosaurs re-casts itself into an elegiac narrative to a spectacle driven culture. Extinct creatures left to inhabit the corners of the country parks in South Wales.

In the same image tree buds begin to blossom. Nature continues the same perennial cycles regardless.

---
Tim Sullivan's project Monvmentvm mm is exhibited in London as part of the University of Westminster's BA photographic degree. For info see http://www.wmin.ac.uk/mad/page-1864

BA PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS
Free Range
T1, Old Truman Brewery
Brick Lane,
London E1

Private View: 19 June 6pm-10pm
Exhibition Continues: 20-23 June 10am-7pm (weekdays) 10am - 6pm (weekend)

Bad Idea Publications

2008-06-01T23:21:00.010+01:00

My article 'The Architecture of Illness' is now published in the Bad Idea anthology. A new piece on the experiences of foreign nurses and care workers in the UK is in the new economics issue.

Both available now in bookshops or here www.badidea.co.uk/shop

I'll put some extracts from these pieces on the blog shortly.

Bucharest Biennale: In-Between Cities

2008-06-01T22:49:00.004+01:00

Sabine Réthoré, Lovely Romania, 2008, color print, 135x135 cm. Courtesy the artist. A map of Romania turned on an East - West axis.

Bucharest Biennale

Various venues
23rd May - 21st June 2008
www.bucharestbiennale.org
Information Point: Sos. Nicolae Titulescu nr. 1 (Piata Victoriei)

Entering the Unibank Pavilion at the Bucharest Bienniale I am greeted not by the smooth interior of a commercial gallery space but by a series of gutted rooms. Walls are stripped to bare brick work and electricity cords hang down from the ceiling. The space has just been given to the biennale organisation group, a signal that Bucharest is beginning to emerge as a commercial location for art. Speaking to Ravzan Ion, Biennale director, I comment that I like the sense that this gallery is an in-between space. He responds: ‘It’s an in-between city.’

It is suitable then that the subject of the Biennale should be mapping and cartography. A theme devised by the Biennale curators Jan Erik – Ludström and Johan Sjöström. It’s a theme made very real to me as foreigner who has not visited Bucharest before. Like any tourist I am consistently gazing at walls to look non-existent street signs, trying to figure out the tangle of bus routes or looking for conference rooms that doormen and receptionists have no knowledge of. It’s impossible to create a map of an in-between space; the map will almost immediately be outdated.

Books, posters, documents, websites all find a place in the materials on exhibition across the city. This both adds variety and suggests that curation was dictated by what was available.

My impression is that the work roughly divides into artists either approaching mapping in a personal, speculative manner or in a research led 'objective' approach. For the first group there are maps in rugs, maps made from food or distortions and reshaping of maps. Lukas Einsele’s extensive One Step Beyond project would be a good example of the second approach.

In One Step Beyond Einsele has documented the experiences of civilian victims of landmines in a number of war torn countries. Photographs and testimonies of victims are placed next to personal maps that eloquently describe the arbitrary geography of their tragedies. Lukas has also created his own map of Angolan capital Luanda from his memories. He described the map as full of mistakes where he had forgotten details. The work combines to make an engaging illustration of the fallibility of mapping in a location where uncertainty is always there in the ground beneath one’s feet.

Lukas Einsele, One Step Beyond, texts images and multimedia formats 2005. Courtesy of the artist. An illustration by 12 year old Angolan landmine victim Rebecca Mujinga. The picture illustrates where she stood on a VS50 anti-personnel mine.

The Biennale director Razvan Ion tells me that the Unibank gallery will endeavour to be a research led space, commenting that the people of Bucharest need to be involved in the art to be exhibited in the gallery. The scene in the city is clearly at a stage where it needs to build an audience and develop debate. It will be interesting to see if the city and its artists can use the generic moment and the weight of a troubled history to produce engaging work and new propositions.

Links:
Lukas Einsele: One step Beyond, The Mine Revisited

Sandy at Ilfracombe

2008-05-15T23:31:00.003+01:00

Ian Brimble, Actor, Stroke Sufferer

2008-05-15T23:10:00.003+01:00

Ian Brimble was a actor who appeared in a number of TV dramas when in December 2005 he suffered a Stroke while shopping in London. The stroke was treated in the National hospital in Bloomsbury, London, where Ian spent two weeks in intensive care and a month in a wheelchair.

The stroke has left him with chronic disability in his left hand and Aphasia; a loss of speech and short term memory. Ian doesn't feel he can return to acting but thanks to Interact Reading Service, Ian now reads to stroke sufferers in the hospital where he was treated.

Interact Reading Service are a charity founded on the belief that a key aspect in the well being and recovery of stroke patients is mental stimulation. To achieve this Interact send professional actors into hospitals across London to read to Stroke sufferers. To find out more about their work follow the link below.

www.interactreading.org

Photo taken by David Foster in The Royal National Hospital - April 2008

dream landscapes

2008-05-04T22:53:00.004+01:00

*
if you go into that cloakroom,
are we ready to start?

International bastard!

Sitting at the carnival, knowing its got to matter
Will this happen? Blatantly not.

*
throws washing powder over his shoulder
hits a glass and spilts across the kitchen top.
Scouse boys

platform above
the foyer waiting by coaches
a place in the sun
with the family
view of montserrat
I'm on duty.

*
real & present evidence
there's something going on
surrounded by wooden TV sets
opportunity gateway
start, a wake.

*

An ongoing project. For more visit
http://www.dpfoster.co.uk/slideshow.html

shweta

2008-05-04T22:41:00.002+01:00

Stock photos with Trevillion Images
http://www.trevillion.com

Nude

2008-04-15T23:33:00.003+01:00

Could only be the Edinburgh Festival. Ciaran and Owen's show 'Nude' will be on at The Pleasance Attic throughout August.

Roses: small £3. large £5.

2008-03-26T21:10:00.008Z

After taking this photo the woman offered me a banana. I returned later to give her a copy of the photo, but she's never been there since.

document type: reflective

2008-03-26T21:07:00.001Z

2008-03-25T21:46:00.002Z

I’m doing a photo project about healthcare workers for a UK magazine called Bad Idea and I’m looking to follow it up with further stories about the UK healthcare community.

I ring the communications officer of a brain injury charity who I’ve had some contact with. He tells me that the only projects that he would be interested in would be those that would get the charity national media coverage to his target audience.

I can see his point – that’s the economics of running a small media office for a national charity. It’s good to be immediately asked ‘What’s your target publication?’ ‘Who have you contacted so far?’ It’s a good way to identify what a weak or a strong project is. However, it does mean your juggling external interests right from the inception of a project - It needs to be sufficiently justifiable to both the news outlet and the charity on their differing criteria.

The problem is that the photo story is pretty much extinct in this kind of national context.

If I’m going to do a self-initiated project then it’s got to stay true to my trusty question : ‘How can I see this subject in a unique way?’ – ‘Why does this project belong to me?’ Keep to this and the strength of the pitch should see it’s way through any obstacles.

Night London

2008-03-25T09:51:00.003Z

2008-03-21T08:25:00.000Z

Progress - Healing - Cancel

Atlas

If shampoo gets into the eyes, rinse well with warm water.

London to Newport, South Wales

2008-03-21T01:55:00.001Z

2008-03-20T22:01:00.000Z

The blog title, stolen from the poet Adrian Clarke:

'I continue to struggle with your melting borders and fluid saying, your texts, nets and (k)nots; with my nomads, robocops, cybershysters and the Nova Mob, pagani and peasants, dwellers, potential neighbours and bedsit plotters, benign or not. And I am all too aware that the demon lurks... tempting me now into taking my moment to freeze frame a trick angle on an accelerating complexity it is beyond my ability to schematize, even in fragments. But still insuficently chastened, I'll make my pitch DEMATERIALIZED IS IMMATERIAL.'

From Foil: defining Poetry 1985-2000 ed. Nicholas Johnson (Etruscan)

im-material

The Wilderness of Stories

note to self

Calle

dsc

jardin

not books

Glastonbury: the invisible city

no more football related posts... ever.

numbers from the people

library

photocopier malfunctions

screen grab

Science and Industry

screen grab

don't forget to go home.

screen grab

point and shoot.

Gerhard Richter: Portraits

Lowlands

The 76

Bassaleg School rugby tour 1992

Dream Landscapes (2)

Time remaining: 5min

32 Postcards

Capture More

Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard.

David Foster Wallace 1962-2008

Summer Lightnings

The Other Day

new term

Cy Twombly

Left to Care for Themselves

trans - sylvania

Monvmentvm MM by Tim Sullivan

BA PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTSFree RangeT1, Old Truman BreweryBrick Lane,London E1Private View: 19 June 6pm-10pmExhibition Continues: 20-23 June 10am-7pm (weekdays) 10am - 6pm (weekend)

Bad Idea Publications

Bucharest Biennale: In-Between Cities

Sandy at Ilfracombe

Ian Brimble, Actor, Stroke Sufferer

dream landscapes

shweta

Nude

Roses: small £3. large £5.

document type: reflective

Night London

London to Newport, South Wales

BA PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS
Free Range
T1, Old Truman Brewery
Brick Lane,
London E1

Private View: 19 June 6pm-10pm
Exhibition Continues: 20-23 June 10am-7pm (weekdays) 10am - 6pm (weekend)