we're done!

the resources has just returned from the printer signalling the end of what has been an huge project. now, the website is oficially up, i'm signing off!
www.criticalm.org/surveys
it's been exciting and exhausting and exciting ...

External Fixators

Went to meet a really nice trauma surgeon today to talk about external fixators. They are devices which hold bones in place while they heal. Surgeons use them as thay don't cut off the blood supply to damaged areas and this encourages healing. I'm going to use similar structures to hold museum objects in the fabric of space time long enough for their narratives to calcify.

The thing I learnt today about the mechanics of the fixator is the importance of weightbearing in bone healing - if you fix something to rigidly the body doesn't see a problem so lets it be. This has made me think about how well I need to fix things in the context of the museum and space time. Apparently there is nothing within the laws of physics to prevent time from flowing backwards it's just very unlikely.

The week after next I'm going to Scotland with my paddle on a journey into the heart of Haggis. Exhibition planned for the 20th of may - everybody invited

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.