ARTISTS TALKING

# 19 [20 November 2009]

My record of everyone at the grand ceremonial opening, for the archive. Another photo taken later in the night when the Cosy had taken up residence. 

The pillar box is in the city centre, it was Saturday night. Brighton gets packed with leery clubbers. When the Cosy was on the postbox, individuals, couples and groups were running across the road to hug it. Useful that there was a cash point next to it. There was a lot of rubbing, stroking and laughing. There was a real warmth. Post box as pet. Enjoying the middle of the night textures.

Lots of mobile phone photography. Lots of posing. Some people were trying the cosy on, with hilarious results. Then their mates insisting they put it back, “No! Properly!” A group of young women turned out to be a knitting circle on a day trip from London. The whole Cosy thing was proof that Brighton was an ‘excellent’ place, “We don’t have anything like this in London, London’s dead.” Positive conversations, no agression. No-one said that it was stupid or absurd. It was accepted. One couple even managed to buy a post card, and a stamp, then photograph themselves posting it. This at one thirty am. A very heartening experience all round. Will they wake up the next morning puzzling whether they had seen it and why it was there?

There were several offers of help should I need to knit another, including a faroese version. One change of plan, I didn’t leave the cosy in place as I had intended. It needs to be made into a one piece object, not three pieces as it is now. The top comes off too easily, the main sleeve is only Velcro’d together. My intention is to set it up again in the next few weeks, on a night when it isn’t raining (another design flaw), sew it together and then leave it. Cast it adrift.

More photographs: Flickr: davidjonathanswain

# 18 [18 November 2009]

According to Tila, whose birthday it is and who is Mexican, November 12th is their national Day of the Postman, Dia del Cartero. It is to acknowledge the hard work, daily difficulties and constancy of those who work in the postal service. There are different days for this in the different southern American countries. You are encouraged to leave small gifts, sweets, pastries in your mailbox to show your appreciation. Tila says that on November 12th there is no delivery or collection. When she was younger she had gone to the delivery office hoping for birthday presents. It was closed. But there were people inside. She explained. She was let in and given a slice of postal worker cake and her birthday cards.

In my local post office there was the usual queue of misery. Two windows out of eight open. “Any picture stamps?” “What? No we’ve just got the usual, Christmas stamps are out soon.” “Ok, four of them then.” Flicking through the ledger “Oh, there are  these, must have come out in the summer, you want them?” holds up a sheet of post box stamps brought out to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the earliest known surviving posting slot, outside Wakefield Post Office in Yorkshire.

Behind the front door when I get home, my first letter since the suspension of the strike last week. A cheesy Christmas card from the Royal Mail. 

It’s all getting confusing.

# 17 [17 November 2009]

At last. This morning my copy of ‘Searching for Sebald’ arrived on an inter-library loan. A beautifully produced collection of essays and photographs edited by Lise Patt. It costs thirty quid, but is 650 pages of luxury. I have only had it in the house an hour and already I have the urge to splash out up the Amazon. 

Subtitled ‘photography after WG Sebald’ this book answers and creates so many questions. Thoughts that have been ricocheting  around in my head for the past few years. Now I realise that there are many people who have been having the same ambiguous feelings towards Sebald's novels. Each contributor examines part of his fiction and looks again at the images used alongside the stories. The truth, the lies and the dubious evidence of authenticity. Reproducing the photo’s and often their source material in grainy black and white. Throughout the different essayists are skeptical, yet in loving awe of Sebald’s method and occasional dry humour. Are the pictures suggestive, rather than illustrations of the text? Are both edited and cropped? How and why? What does he leave out? What impression does the combination creates in the readers head?  What can it mean to the state of literature and visual arts? Is it a movement?  

As if to answer the editors own question, two parts of the book are well chosen reports and images from projects by other artists who use writing and fiction as one tool in their work. There is an intimate examination of all of Sebalds work, novels, poetry and essays. He oversaw the layout of the different translations and editions too so there is painstaking analysis of the different ways each edition is laid out, and what that says about Sebalds overall ambition. When Sebald died he was a lecturer in film studies in UEA so there are several articles dealing with his film references and his cinematic style. One regret that seeps out continually, in the essays and the photographs is the frustration and regret that Sebald died when he did. What would he have done next? What would he have thought to this thick brick of a book?

Searching For Sebald, PHOTOGRAPHY AFTER W.G.SEBALD. Edited by Lise Patt with Christine Dillhohner. The Institute of Cultural Inquiry. Los Angeles (2007)

# 16 [4 November 2009]

On the train to Manchester yesterday the lady in the adjoining seat told me about her four children, how they’d all become doctors. ‘Not enough time for meals’ was her comment on their cosmopolitan life styles. We shared her snack, made that morning ‘At five am’ she said ‘before I started out’. It was half term, she was having the day off. All the time we were talking she was weaving a delicate crocheted decoration  ‘Not crochet, tatting.” It was almost finished, the edging to go around a collar on a dress. I couldn’t understand how you would start. Too complex, too intricate, how did it all hold together? She let me have a try with the tatting chatel. It looked like a small weaving shuttle. She may have said shuttle. Very thin yarn, cotton almost was wound round a wheel inside. There were no needles. You just followed a pattern of knots, back and forth with the chatel, ‘off the internet, couldn’t find the pattern anywhere else’. She was from Dehli, she thought that tatting originated in the US. She let me have a small sample. This took her less than ten minutes to make.

# 15 [28 October 2009]

Grudgingly, I’m impressed how Sol are promoting their beer around the city centre of Brighton. They have paid for the refitting of security shutters for small shops. An expensive item for desperate shops with dwindling turnovers. The Sol logo is now at street level around the fun n’ booze zone, presumably without the need for planning permission. More significantly it will appear in the background of student group photo’s, hen night shots, pissed up portraits and lots of flickr and facebook updates. Cunning. Now their advert has weedled its way on to the Artist Talking blog site. 

# 14 [24 October 2009]

Not a fan, this evening I sat through a whole documentary about Charles Bukowski. As was to be expected most of the film indulged his heavy drinking and it’s influence on his poetic quest. Coincidentally it focussed on his time working as an Indefinite Substitute Carrier at a postal sorting office in Los Angeles. Early mornings, drink and poetry didn’t mix well. He couldn’t cope with the drudgery, quitting in a drunken flourish with a really scathing and abusive resignation letter to his bosses. With a family, an extravagant way of overcoming his own melancholia and in desperate personal neglect he was eventually forced to beg for his job back again. Now relegated to the role of Temporary Substitute Distribution Clerk, he worked there for the next twelve years. By the late sixties he was becoming a nationally recognised poet, traveling across the US to read his work. In 1970 a publisher persuaded him to take up poetry full time, to leave the job that had given him at least a small portion of security. Bukowski sat down and wrote ‘Post Office’, a two hundred page description of his experiences and the characters around him at the sorting office. It was this novel that led to him gaining wider literary appreciation. 

# 13 [23 October 2009]

Curiously my scanner has stopped working, something to do with the driver? I have had to rephotograph an old snapshot of Tatsumi Orimoto’s Bread Man, performed a few years ago at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London. 

# 12 [22 October 2009]

Just as I finished my second, less tense square I was whisked away from one knitting circle to tea and cake with another. A machine knitting group that had been meeting for twenty five years. None of them hand knitted, and they admitted that most of them didn’t produce much on their machines now either. The meetings were a good excuse to see each other, to swap hints and tips on different machines and computer operating systems, linux was their preferred option. They showed me Jacquard patterns, a binary code system that has been part of knitting machines since they were first developed in the 16^th Century. Explained the wonders of Embelishers and Dry Felting. There were also holiday photos of a trip to see the crocheted coral reef, an environmental statement about Climate Change produced by knitters in Sydney.

As we were leaving the discussion turned toward health. One of the members was due to have a cataracts operation this morning, she was nervous. Everyone else had already had them removed so they told her how simple the procedure was and how brilliant the effect. Instantly fabulous colours, blues, reds and greens, fantastic and so clear. Their eyes sparkled with delight at the memory of that moment.

http://sydneyreef.blogspot.com/

# 11 [20 October 2009]

Re-photographing from the computer screen a small detail of a badly scanned version of WG Sebald's photocopied image of a photograph of herring fishermen in Lowestoft. I had to dash out for a meeting. It was raining heavily, the first time for a good while. I grabbed someone else’s raincoat. Curiously, when I got back I couldn’t find my camera. No-one had been there. Had I taken it with me? Had it slipped out of the flimsy pockets of the jacket? I didn’t think so. Three days of looking high and low, the workshop was in a shambles. Still no camera. Grrr.

I bite the bullet, trudge over to the Police Station. In the queue ahead of me, a man was attempting to get his passport photograph signed. Kafkaesque logic meant that he couldn’t get his plane back to his home without someone validating the picture. Just as I was to be called to the counter a young mother marched in demanding that the police arrest her daughter, who she had locked in her car outside. This took fifteen minutes whilst everyone signed the relevant paper work and looked for keys to the cells, and then her car. Another person rushed in, couldn’t stop, with a completely different set of keys, found in the next street. More paperwork. More confusion.

My turn. Had anyone brought in my black, shoot and snap digital camera? The receptionist laughed cheerily, tapped the few details I had given. “yes, sir, we have it here, someone will bring it up for you.” Unbelievable. “Fantastic. Thank-you”. When I left ten minutes later I floated through the mother/child/police dispute that was flaring outside. The sun was shining, a lovely spring day was bursting forth.

# 10 [16 October 2009]

My First Tension Square. Relatively loose (“for a beginner”), and quite controlled but hardly square. It’s difficult to knit, listen and chat. Regulars at the group say that they save work to bring in, stuff they don’t have to particularly focus on. The source of my tension, some might find it relaxing, but it is a complex series of knots nonetheless. Ten rows of ten stitches leaves me shellshocked in admiration for the person who took up two sticks and a length of string and created those first few stitches.

I thought this might be as far as I would get, but this week I have spent more time than usual in front of the computer working out how to Cast On. It was recommended that I use You Tube knitting videos as a guide. Hilarious. Lots of different ways of casting on, lots of different forms of presentation. Language and terminology I have never heard before.

Braided. Knit Half-Hitch. Standard. Tubular. Double Needle. Chain. Chain Crochet. Turkish. Circular. Magic. Knit-on. Twisted German. Wrap. Backward-Loop. Long Tail. Continental. Single. Double. Cable. Old Norwegian. Provisional. Invisible. Looped. Alternate cable.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T43J_cYlSU

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAeSIlEQaZU&feature=related