wardrobes

I think I've pretty much finished with the book project for the moment. There's only so much more I can take of cutting up books and sticking them back together again.
The whole reason I started this project was because of today's mass production of books, magazines and the internet, written words loose their meaning and I don't like the fact that books become less important and precious as they were once regarded. They have now become the literature equivalent of IKEA furniture. Mass produced, cheap quality that can be found everywhere. By taking some cheap books and cutting them up, burning them and taking them apart, I've reversed their function and given them a whole new purpose. Every time someone reads them, they come up with their own interpretations and stories from the words and jumbled sentences that have been created from the cut up pages inside. Each book becomes something different to each viewer, and will say something different to each reader.


I was recommended to read some work by the French writer Gaston Bachelard and even though it was a tough read, I quite liked some of his concepts and its given me a few ideas of what to do next. His book, 'Poetics of Reverie' talks a lot about what we think about when day-dreaming and the impact of being lost in our thoughts and it is quite fascinating but it's the parts about our childhood memories that interested me.

'The child sees everything big and beautiful. The reverie toward childhood return us to the beauty of the first images'

I love the way that even the smallest things can be so much more wonderful and fascinating to a child than to a grown-up. It's still all so new and exciting to them and they appreciate things and look at things in a completely different way than what adults do and it's a shame that not everyone still sees things with the same enthusiasm anymore.

I also read a tiny bit of Bachelard's other book 'Poetics of Space' which deals with how we interact with intimate spaces. There was a whole chapter on wardrobes cupboards and drawers and I liked what it said about how a wardrobe or a chest of drawers can be very intimate spaces, not open for just anyone to look at which is why its a great place to keep or hide our secrets. He also mentioned a bit about how certain smells or sounds will trigger particular memories in our minds which, again, interested me.

'Images, smells and sounds are stored in the brain in keep-sake boxes that preserve fragments of the past'

'Memory is a wardrobe'

I was thinking of maybe combining the smells/sounds of memories and the whole wardrobe/drawers idea to sort of create a box of different memories from my past, and what triggers them. It'll be a lot more personal than the books but I'll still have to think more about it.

Fat Batman

"Virginie Barre creates fictions which invite us into reailty, plunge us there and presents us with unusual confrontations"

I came across an artist called Virginie Barre in a magazine I was reading today and the picture of her work 'Fat Bat' had me in stitches. In her work Barre wants to give the viewer the feeling that life is sometimes tinted by fiction. Like the picture above, she'll use famous cult film icons such as Batman and places them in a scenario that would appear more real to us, blurring the line between fiction and reality and trying to think as many ways possible to link such diverse elements together.
The way she went about portraying this idea though made me laugh. Due to peoples lifestyles nowadays, an obese Batman or Spiderman would seem more real to us, as thats the kind of person we're more likely to see wondering down the street. Batman would be more believable if he ate a few more burgers.

John Latham

I went to the Tate Britain the other week to see the John Latham exhibition before it closed down as I was told he worked a lot with books, which is what I've been using in my own work recently. Latham is seen as an important figure in contemporary art as he challeneged the notion of what constitutes art and embraced the idea of using philosophy and science in his work which went beyond the traditional boundaries of fine art.

"The books are a highly effective metaphor for this state of coming into being.......Like humans, books contain a kind of genetic code that dictates their character"





I could relate to Latham's work by the way he used found objects, in this case books, and by manipulating them, changed their purpose and use. However, when reading about each peice, I found it hard to take into account why he had done what he had done. His approach to his work seemed a lot more scientific than what I'm used to and his reasons where very complex and too much to take in. From I could understand, his ideas were very profound and intense and while they were all quite interesting and fascinating ideas, I couldn't really identify with it as much as I wanted to which was a disappointment. His much more scientific and philosophical approach to his work restricted my understanding of his reasons behind what he had done and it was quite frustraing as this exhibtion had been highly recommened to me because of its content. However seeing the technqiues he used and the way he actually went about constructing everything, it was good inspiration for my own work and ideas so the trip wasn't a total waste.

so....yea

ok its taken me forever but I've finally managed to set up my blog! woo-hoo!