come up and see me sometime

whistles

http://whistlemuseum.com/2011/11/28/asylum-whistles.aspx?results=1#SurveyResultsChart

stripes

I had to go to the British Library yesterday to renew my Reader’s Pass [has it really been another 3 years!?] learnt this week that stripy

http://www.tartanmaker.com/#Zm9yZT1EMDAwRkYsNSxGRjk1MDAsNSxGQUY4RjUsNSxDQzVFNkUsNTtsPTI7dD0wOw==

http://www.danielburen.com/esquisses/permanentes_group/toutes

The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes & Striped Fabric_ (Columbia University Press) by Michel Pastoureau (translated from the French by Jody Gladding)tutes, bastards, traitors, Beelzebub, Cain, jugglers, clowns, hangmen, lepers, heretics, adulterous wives and non-Christians were all depicted as wearing and sometimes actually required to wear stripes in the Medieval era. A Middle Ages black hat designation as it were, striped clothing served as a visual shorthand judgement of the person donning such garb. Before eyes could discern more subtle notations, stripes announced a lack of cherished virtue(s), marking the wearer as a person at best on the fringes of the mainstream social mores. Such were stripes-barres.

What did striped cloth and clothing mean? Why, indeed, would it mean anything?

In the first chapter, Pastoureau muses `The problem of the stripe does indeed lead to pondering the relationship between the visual and the social within a society. He then poses the questions `Why does the West, over the very long term, have the majority of social taxonomies expressed through visual codes? Does the eye classify better than the ear or sense of touch? Is to see to classify? Why is the derogatory sign system-the one that draws attention to outcast individuals, dangerous places or negative virtues, more heavily stressed than the status-enhancing systems?’ The questions are disquieting, staccato, sometimes painful.

About 225 years ago, the American Revolution’s use of stripes was adopted in Europe’s changing fashion and social mores. But the pejorative striped garment remained alongside the playful and fashionable stripe as a mark of the social outcast, the inmate, the madman, the thief. What does that say about Western culture? Did we, and do we continue, to use stripes to hold at a safe distance the questionable? Do we use barred barriers to allow us to peer safely onto the unclean, the disturbed without being subject to the reach of their conditions? Is the stripe a visual sign of our attempt to control our surroundings?

While pondering the author’s questions, the notion of sacred geometries and M.C. Escher returned time and again. Try as I did to expel the distractions of what seemed only marginally related, the nebulous concepts persisted. The unsettling truth is that stripes are an “uncontained,” open-ended geometry. Escher’s birds and lizards were closed systems, stripes have no end, even when severed, the stripe marches beyond mere visual boundaries. A geometric renegade, stripes defy enclosure in any manner. And we react to them with both caution and delight.

February is the cruellest month *

So the story in short and a big thanks to the Pingback.

• End of January after daily posts for 4 months I thought I would have a little breather.
• Return to posting early February and immediately get a serious bout of flu that wipes me out for 2 weeks.
• Forget that I have started several posts and, as is my wont, have already scheduled them although still half finished/barely started.
• Become somewhat disillusioned by the whole blogging experience due to censorship issues with WordPress.
• Pretty much give up on blogging.
• Receive a pingback on February 26 that indicates that the half finished posts pre-scheduled weeks before are now visible to the wider world.
• Decide that I may as well make those posts presentable.
• Decide that I may as well continue blogging at a pace that suits even if no longer daily.
• Pen February is the cruellest month * explaination.

* With apologies to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land 1922.

Loony Bin

The lunatic is on the grass.
The lunatic is on the grass.
Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs.
Got to keep the loonies on the path.

Brain Damage, Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon, 1972

So quite awhile ago whilst writing the keep off the grass post I realised that Bram Stoker’s birthday had just passed. Perhaps being minded of the Pink Floyd lyric [and also having recently watched Scorsese's Shutter Island again] I remembered the lunatic asylum in Stoker’s most famous work Dracula and how at that time it was still commonplace for the middle classes to [literally] view the insane and mentally disturbed as touristic curios.

William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress, plate 8, a print, 1735 [revised 1763].
Tom Rakewell ends up in the Bethlehem Hospital madhouse

In A Rake’s Progress by William Hogarth, the Plate 8 illustration could come with the following inscription:  ”A Rake’s Progress” ends in the famous madhouse, Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam). Chained, half-naked, and in great anguish is our final view of Tom Rakewell. Faithful to the end, Sarah Young attempts to give him whatever comfort she can. One keeper attends to Tom’s chains while another molests Sarah.”

“Most disturbing, however, are the two, pretty aristocratic ladies who have come to view the suffering of the insane as a form of entertainment. Throughout this entire, masterful set, Hogarth has shown us the dangers of a morally bankrupt society.”

Wallpaper

So for those unaware a 6 week battle with WordPress over censorship has just been ‘resolved’ via the censoring of a world famous painting titled The Origin of the World [post on December 12 2013]. Being of a mind to explore boundaries and how bureaucracy works, I submit today’s image for consideration.

Flower of Life II, Georgia O’Keeffe.

Hippos Boiled in Their Tanks

Six months after they opened I finally got around to going to see the Tanks at the Tate, the former oil storage area for what was the Bankside Power Station, before conversion to the Tate Modern.

On show currently in the larger space William Kentridge: I am not me, the horse is not mine. In the medium space http://www.thewomensroomblog.com/2012/09/05/go-see-this-quickly-suzanne-lacy-and-lis-rhodes-at-tate-tanks/

http://www.nancycrow.com/HTML/imagesofquilts.html

wentelteefje

The ground-breaking Curl up bridge immediately made me think of Escher of course. I wonder why such simply seeming technologies always take so long to develop? Roll out causeways have been around for decades at least. Now a really impressive feat would be a bridge that could roll out and back the same way that flowers and the leaves of certain plants do.

Curl Up

Curl up Bridge

RaiN rOOm

Billed as a sensory experience to feel what it’s like to control the rain

So after being open for nearly four months [with only one to go] and being the day after reopening, post two day Spring clean, I thought I’d go and try out the Rain Room experience at the Barbican Curve gallery last week. The announced wait time of 2-3 hours seemed correct, as when I arrived one and a half hours before opening, the queue had already formed. Then bang on the dot at 11am the experience commenced with the opening of the doors and the first handful of visitors, including myself, were ushered in.

Emerging again 30 minutes later I have to say I was rather underwhelmed [and more than a little bit wet].

Knowing the space well [a large C crescent moon shaped room with very high ceilings] I had envisioned the rain filing pretty much the whole wonderful sinuous curve, rather than merely a small squarish area down the far end. So disappointment one. Number two was despite the blurb that only 5 people could enter the area at a time, there were clearly double that at any one time, meaning actually finding any spots with any rain falling proved tricky. But unfortunately not tricky enough. Disappointment three, and the biggest of course, was simply that the piece did not work!

Having been warned that dark/black clothing might possibly mean that you might get just a little bit damp, I had purposely worn a white top. Immediately on stepping into the area under the ‘shower maker’ I was, if not soaked, then pretty wet. I continued to get pretty wet for the next 20 minutes whilst trying to mooch around slower than a dead tortoise being moved by geriatric ants. Simply the technology didn’t seem sensitive enough and I began to feel like the Pink Panther with his own private rain cloud. I had of course visited with the intention of testing the limits of the technology by trying to ‘fool’ it by moving rapidly, but my pace of movement couldn’t have been any slower!

Some of the technology seemed simple enough: florets of ‘shower heads’ with differently phased water droppage giving the appearance of there being much more water than there actually was [aided by the lighting] and presumably break a beam type sensors [rather than weight sensors in the floor] that turned the sprinklers off when you passed underneath; or not, as the case may be.

Personally I also found the usher/rain god guardian that directed entry and exit from the attraction, constantly having to, not so subtly, close a wooden door in a fake wall [housing the Wizard of Oz mechanics?] that kept popping open, completely killed any potential feelings of wonderment or awe.

I do wonder given that it is usually raining outside Oct – Feb in Britain why the organisers didn’t choose to schedule this exhibit during the hotter drier months?

Olafur Eliasson’s the weather project at Tate Modern in 2003, now that was an interesting piece - and no one got wet!

On Holiday