Chuckle Chuckle Brothers

This is the second time I've tried to post today - my last one didn't appear and boy was it good - full of wit and intellectual rigour. I had to do it again as it refered to a Chuckle brother tribute act who are infact Barry and Pauls real life brothers. It sparked me thinking about authenticity and the ideas of copies and fakes and tributes. At the Prada last week a lot of the major canvases were been copied by what appeared to be museum attendants. They all had easils and were repainting the classics. Whats all that about then I thought to myself. Goyas black paintings are stuck in my head for ever. There was a picture of two blokes buried up to their knees in the ground beating the shit out of each other with paddles - it reminded me of the Chuckle Brothers and rival museum attendants from Rotherham and Donny battling over who has the rights to a rare bird skin.

I'm going to try and go to scotland to the birth place of Chalmers I've felt a need to combine the old story with the new one. I think this is a progression of the idea brought about through talking to Karl who's got me interested in the paddles actual story rather than my new one - I like these kinds of surprises.

Found out yesterday that there is a Chuckle Brothers tribute act. It's infact Barry and Pauls brothers but they are not in real life called Chuckle I was thinking that perhaps they could feature in the work with a fake reproduction paddle thus questioning the nature, power, and use of the authentic. I nailed my list of demands to the door of the museum yesterday. I'm going on a pilgrimage to scotland to visit the birthplace of Chalmers and reconect the paddle to a statue of it's owner. I'm also hoping I might get to the National museums of Scotland to visit an ethnographer who is friends with Francis the curator at Rotherham - museums are a small world it's sort of 2 degrees of seperation. Anybody is welcome to come along apart from the person who posted the comment about the free games consul - I hope this is some kind of Phising spam thing and not a random person. My pictures refuse to upload - could it be because they are all 8 mega pixle - do I have to resize them - help from the seasoned Bloggers is required.

Madrid

Back from Madrid and the Rene Sofia workshops. Fantastic time but left feeling a bit confused over contemporary practice. Saw Gurnica and Goya's black paintings and the garden of earthly delight and felt tired out by authenticity. Liked reading peters musing on the Doncaster discussions Blog - do you think he would have a fight with paddles with Karl from Rotherham. I think there was a time in my recent past when I would of found this blogg impenetrable I'm not sure if the fact it makes complete sense is a good thing or a bad thing. Reading Boudoir on the plain I think he was saying that ethnographers make explicit practices that people understand implicitly - So museum curators and artists know what they are doing but don't deconstruct it . Anyway here's a picture of Eric Knowels with my paddle.

Madrid

Back from Madrid and the Rene Sofia workshops. Fantastic time but left feeling a bit confused over contemporary practice. Saw Gurnica and Goya's black paintings and the garden of earthly delight and felt tired out by authenticity. Liked reading peters musing on the Doncaster discussions Blog - do you think he would have a fight with paddles with Karl from Rotherham. I think there was a time in my recent past when I would of found this blogg impenetrable I'm not sure if the fact it makes complete sense is a good thing or a bad thing. Reading Boudoir on the plain I think he was saying that ethnographers make explicit practices that people understand implicitly - So museum curators and artists know what they are doing but don't deconstruct it . Anyway here's a picture of Eric Knowels with my paddle.

working to the wire

very very close but we managed to do it! The installation|intervention of thoughts and ideas materialised in the gallery at doncaster yesterday at 4.59pm. Just and only with the help of fabulous staff. We're still thinking and processing but for now just want to let you know that more dissemination and debate between ourselves and doncaster 'experts' is happening over here

I really want to take part in the discussion you're all having here, but time -- need more time. [interestingly though, peter, curator of arch., is -- over on 'the other blog' -- adding some comments on thinking through notions of meaning, information and narrative].

it's all really really exciting!
more later but check it out and perhaps we'll catch up soon? in real space sheffield? or elsewhere.

Symbols and Narratives

I emailed Kate to ask her if artists were ethnographers with different outputs? Does this fit in with Davids idea of artists being socially engaged? Eric Knowles was a real star. I'm now off to Madrid to work for a week -Just got back from a weekend in Amsterdam. Wandering around the streets at about 3 in the morning we came across a massive prosession of people walking in a series of continous lines and looking very solemn. Apparently it was an annual Catholic Vigil to commemorate a miracle in the 13th century. A child had taken communion and the host had entered the bread - he had vomited and the sick had burnt away leaving the bread which still contained the host untouched. Thousands of elderly people walking around and around at 3 in the morning.

I found the south African stuff at Kates conference really interesting. It reminded me of the museum being very careful about telling people their own history- perhaps this is why much of the recent stuff gets told in the first person and relies on individual testement more. So today I'm going to think about the difference between the recent and the distant. Are the people marching around to commemorate an event 700 years ago or to commemorate marching last year.

I'm learning a lot about multiple meanings and how to use them through this work. It's going to be hard to pull together a piece of work which communicates these ideas. I think I will stop talking about Symbols and start talking about context and meaning as this is perhaps clearer and closer to what a museum tries to do.

symbols and semiosis

The word symbolism might be a bit value-laden, as there is a sort of mystical connotation to the word (as I was hinting in a jokey way with the 'dream-symbolism' comment). Perhaps it is more helpful to talk about the construction of meaning (which is what you are talking about), and the way in which meaning changes depending on context. The notion of semiosis (Saussure and Roland Barthes) - where something (a word, object, image ... a text) functions as a sign works for me. There is of course no indexical one-to-one relationship between the sign and the signified, and in fact unlimited semiosis can occur (the paddle as sign signifies many other things, which in turn are signs pointing to other signifieds in a continuous exponential multiplication) the sign can stand for an infinite number of signifieds depending on the context in which it occurs - and of course this can be multimodal, shifting between the verbal, written, visual, performative .... So the paddle can mean anything and everything. The difficulty the museum might have is that they want it to have a single, static meaning so that they can attach a label to it.

I'm sorry to hear you have an alergy to cake Steve.

Cake Analogy

As is often the case Davids intervention on our rather gentle Blog has made me have a good think. I can take his word about Sartre and the Lobster but I'm not so sure about the Paddle not having symbolic status before I went to collect it. I suppose I may have a different understanding of symbols and Metaphors to other people. We could say that the object only has meaning within it's context but this is what I'm interested in. So perhaps I don't have a concept, more a hypothesis which I'm experimenting with. I've just looked up Concept in my trusty chambers and it says -"A thing conceived, a general notion, an idea - invention."

I'm now reading a long biography of Chalmers which Karl printed out for me from the world wide Missions website, I'm trying to track down some 1980's surveillance camera's and monitors, contacting an orphopedic trauma surgeon, Meeting the well known TV celebrity Eric Knowels at 2 pm to take some photographs with my paddle. I'm also toying with the idea of starting to make a replica paddle although Antonia Lovelace the Ethnographic curator at Leeds suggested getting someone from Papua new guinee to make it and fedex it over - am I obscuring or making a concept visible perhaps I'm struggling to find the edges of it so I can work out where the space is in between.

Heart of Darkness (Part two)

With the shopping and the weekend neatly packed away I shall continue my tale. I think we were just about to leave the office at Rotherham museum. We got in the car drove to leeds and picked up the paddle, on the way back we stopped for a coffee.

The lobster, the paddle and dream analysis

It can surely be no coincidence that Jean-Paul Sartre had a paranoid delusion that he was being pursued by a lobster, supposedly induced by an experiment with mescaline in his youth. I know this sounds totally ridiculous but you will have to take my word that this is absolutely true.

Is Karl's surname Jung, by any chance? What might the paddle signify in Jungian terms? Tell me Steve, what do you dream about? Maybe I've got too much time on my hands, but I found something crass on Jungian analysis on the web and it had the option to 'enter a symbol!' in a box and be told the dream-significance of it. I typed in paddle and got the result 'Sorry, we don't have a meaning for that symbol.'

So, Steve, the paddle has no symbolic meaning whatsoever, or had none until you got your hands on it! If there is, as you say, a concept behind the paddle expedition ('Could you just move that paddle expedition out of the way? You're obscuring a concept.'), then surely there must be something in front of a conceptual artist that prevents you from seeing him or her. I have always found you to be visible, if sometimes a bit opaque.

Looking forward to the next stage of the journey.

Heart of darkness

It was with a vague feeling of trepidation mixed with the adrenaline rush of anticipation to which I awoke this morning. Dreams with an urgent realism flooded my waking sleep and the cold realisation that this was the day, the day when the idea became fact. In the instance of living this day I would turn the idea into a reality. I now write energetically into the early hours to give testament to, and leave a lasting record of, a powerful and evocative series of events. This brief glimpse, this moment, becomes part of our collective history - the Paddle paradigm is born. One of the great philosophical questions facing Rotheram Museums Service is asked by a journey, a journey which starts and ends within the same physical space. A space once empty and now occupied by a paddle. Wrapped in acid free paper and bubble wrap, and sellotaped with a printed barb wire motif, it sits, pushed to the back of a desk, challenging us all with its raw and obscured physical presence.

What started as a simple journey to Leeds has through strange turn of fate ended with a question. If a paddle is in a museum collection and nobody ever asks to see it or use it in any way for any purpose, does it really exist? Well, as I took it for a coffee in Woolley Edge service station I can categorically prove that it does. Or at least does now.

As I discovered this morning, this blog is open to any inquisitive reader. Type Chalmers and paddle into google and it's the first hit. The "are you feeling lucky?" box, which I never hit because I don't usually feel lucky and I worry about ending up at a strange site and getting stuck in a time warp of links which seem interesting at the time. Anyway because of this I thought it best not to use people's names so I will from now on refer to both my trusted travelling compatriots as Carl.

I'd commissioned a photographer to document our journey and asked him to try and take pictures which looked like police or private eye surveilllance shots as I think people associate this style with authenticity. I left him in the car at the museum and was greeted by Karl, curator of all sort of things, outside the museum shop. As he led me up the stairs into the open plan office I felt an atomosphere, it was the same ubiquitous museum smell, a combination of the exceptionally clean and the dusty and dirty, a complex hybrid smell like hospitals or youth clubs that you can't really describe but instantly recognise. I think that perhaps my reputation preceded me. I noticed, or more accurately, perceived a wry smile or a short cut giggle. The word was out. I had been rumbled. The paddle and its retrieval were common knowledge within the department. Everybody knew the reason for my visit, everybody was aware that in our collective quest for a paddle buried deep in the vaults of Leeds museum store. Danger, both phycical and ethical awaited us.

Francis, who I can't call Carl as she is a woman, spoke to me of the potential to meet the well known Antiques Roadshow TV celebrity Eric Knowles who is visiting the museum next week to talk about pots. She has now started introducing me as a conceptual artist which, of all the things I've called myself or been called, I'm most proud of. She must have got really good at explaining the concept behind the Paddle expedition as Eric had mentioned a friend of his who carries around a plastic Lobster and introduces it to people. This reminded me of a time when I purchased two plastic crabs and a large plastic Lobster from a car boot sale and the vender said, "Look at that! They sold again. I never have any problems shifting plastic crustacia, but you try selling plastic fruit! See that plastic pear? I've had that for months". My son called the Lobster Barney and dragged it around on a piece of string for a few weeks. Anyway, my first celebrity paddle person. Karl suggested that we should introduce the paddle and the Lobster. I think he is a closet conceptual artist.

My wife has just walked in with the shopping and I was accused last week of making her an internet widow so I will have to continue this story at a later date, it's edge of your seat stuff and we've not yet got out of Rotherham.

postcard from the edges

Sorry to have been so long away from the blog. Here now is a postcard (or posting) from the edge (either Nether Edge, where I live in Sheffield, or whichever of the Peak District's gritstone edges you care to choose). From the edge rather than the Heart, anyway.

Heart of Darkness is an interesting book ... surprisingly short! I had the idea that it was published in 1901, but looking into it it was 1902. Nonetheless it is one of the first books of the 20th century (the narrator talks of the turning of the tide - the tide of history?).

Looking at what else was going on, the excellent reference guide 'What Happened What Year' http://www.kordy.dircon.co.uk/misc/what.html lists the following significant events in 1902 -the teddy bear is created by a Russian immigrant to the USA, after seeing a newspaper cartoon depicting President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt. Automatic vending machine invented. Willis Carrier invents the air conditioner (a strange collection of artefacts), whereas 1901 would have had - Christmas tree lights are introduced by Edison General Electric Co. The first facelift is performed by Eugene Hollander in Berlin on a Polish aristocrat. First time getaway car is used by 3 bank robbers in Paris (more acts than artefacts).

I find the narrator disconcerting in Heart of Darkness, as the whole thing is his quoting of the story told by Marlow to his shipmates on a quay on the Thames - and the format is that of the elongated shaggy dog story told round the campfire (yes, I was a boy scout). The ending reads like this, 'Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky - seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.'

This is of the Thames, of course, not the Congo. Interestingly, the town of Marlow is about 20 miles up the Thames from London - in the Heart of Darkness? See http://www.marlowtown.co.uk/index.html.

In Susan Hiller's (ed.) book, The Myth of Primitivism, found here on Amazon (sadly there isn't an online bookseller called Congo) http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415014816/qid=1141741379/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_2_1/026-1476849-8451615 there is a discussion in one of the essays of the known history of Europeans in the Amazon, and it seems that the first European discovery of the Congo River was by the Portuguese in 1482, that the area had been extensively mapped, and that there were established trade links between most of the Imperialist European countries and the inhabitants. So the 'primitivising' of Africa as the Heart of Darkness requires a great deal of forgetting.

I had a look at the Amazon entry for Heart of Darkness, and in a reader review there someone makes the outrageous assertion that the book wouldn't have been half so popular if FF Copolla hadn't made the film 'Apocalypse Now' - 'you've seen the film, now read the book ...' Happily, other readers disagree with him.

Susan Hiller is, of course, also responsible for From the Freud Museum -http://www.susanhiller.org/Info/artworks/artworks-FM.html - this is a quote from her website, 'The common denominator in all her works is their starting point in a cultural artefact from our own society. Her work is an excavation of the overlooked, ignored, or rejected aspects of our shared cultural production, and her varied projects collectively have been described as investigations into the 'unconscious' of culture.' Isn't this what you are doing in your respective residencies?

Anyway, I'll leave it there for today, but I will be back! Very happy to meet up if at all possible.

objects in parts: MDOS [e.version]

monday, visited Doncaster for the last time before we need to install some form of diagram or drawing by the end of the month! Finally, had the chance to meet Anna, the finds officer who spends her time identifying the objects brought in by amateur archaeologists and field walkers (my chosen profession had I known!). Objects that are small but obviously or seemingly tiny bits of 'something' she terms 'pArtefacts'. I really like this, it sounds like objets having a good time .. "mam, what you have found is a 'partefact'". it needs to be compared against other objects to be identified, if identification is possible at all.

With regard to sampling objects and opinions:
following the relative success of the "MDOS", we have today launched the "Most Desirable Object electronic Survey"[MDOeS]. The aim of the survey is to consider how expertise is employed an exchanged through observation of the arguments for objects' accession into a collection or their [re-]introduction into its display.

"there's a box. anything could be inside it. what do you most want it to be?" and, most importantly, "how would you argue for this object's position and status in relation to what is already there or not there?" answers on a postcard please ...