Stating/Showing

BELGIUM AVENUE AND ATOMIUM

“At this age one can tell that neon signs have another side to them: another meaning in three-dimensionality. More than signs, objects in fact, that die in time. So, you now have the choice of two images…”

One image has the blurred movement of a child driving a toy car around a track in Brussels. The other image is entirely different but also the same. But not exactly the same: there’s enough difference there to tell the two apart – but this is where your eyes are tricked, and in trickles the illusion alluding to one image alone, with foreground and with background in Technicolor-terrific vision.

To the right of my picture now is a green bridge covered in cars and scaffolding. Below there’s a river dark and fast flowing, hiding the activities of earthy stick and stone. Along walks a man dressed in high top hat and trainers; there’s a fresh scar across his face running red and white and pink and blue down from his right ear through his top lip and ending against his chin. Between him and me is a pane of glass – he looks at me in frustration and moves his mouth whilst giving me a sign with his fingers.

Then there’s bright candyfloss before the sugar revolution. Hats made of edible cacophony spun and shone and done and gone across stage plateau and influx of helicopter visitor: more Technicolor fuller this time with whites and pinks and blues. Men are dressed high in tops, off white against the red adorned seats and suits: a procession or fashion parade.

So what is this object of sculpture and sound and cart winding up to the top? You have a choice of just two colours, either canary yellow or blood-orange: you’re then given a number “62” or 94 to take you along the river hovering your sites above the water along cables and wires. The underbelly is clarification and realisation, a definition of believability. Then there’s this climbing structure resonant of cultural adoration – something that’s new in its design, shiny in its affect – forward looking – and altogether celebratory of 1950’s health and wealth.

Now there’s scaffold upon scaffold, to understand urban renewal you have to understand the language of scaffold – it’s a new form of public sculpture.

“After making this up in your mind, you get there and see that perspective has tricked you. Your body has no affect. Your bones would snap if there were to be but one slip, all you have are your toes for grip. With bare feet underneath you and crashing waters beyond there’s nothing but the idea of building your way back out again…”

If you take your time when passing the cooling towers of south Yorkshire you can also spot the storage yard that’s filled with bright red scaffolding poles capable of cranes. There, you can build a city arbitrary to reason as to previous architectural histories. With different extensions of different sizes you can amount to one third of the first history and then another third of that again – three fold. You can see it in terms of plinths, I suppose, and what you might use these for, to build ideas and built on top of them, again, concepts for construction: one is larger and flatter than the other, the other being more cuboidial in appearance, the third and final version is of the same area but decidedly more stretched like a post or pole. From here you can build absolutely anything imaginable to support your ideas.

If it gets too much you can find a bit of nature, but you’ll have to follow the right sort of path through over and out of industrial magnificence. Here’s how you do it.

Instruction one: Get yourself to the outskirts of the city, inner-city parks will not do, you need green belt, the corrugated iron of tramp houses, ivy and lost soles in farm land, paddocks with angry horses and sheep with dangling backsides. You need to smell the shit of manure and reclaim your ability to climb trees to acquire better vantage points. From here you can call upon a dog to sniff out the stream.

Instruction two: Follow the stream upwards as you need more height. Find or make yourself a hill to scale. Then on top of this spread some woodland to poke your head out of. Come across a river, a dale, and a meadow: a structure of lime stone, a valley, a crag a rock-upon-rock to muster and define and conquer.

Instruction three: now you need mountains – not just hills. You need more height than the low rolling overturns of Derbyshire, something steeper than the North York Moors: more variety or difference in repeated roads, minor roads bee roads moth roads dusty roads the great western road through Argyll and Bute. Boats across waters to secluded bird sanctuaries and havens of lost stone. Then you see snow and have thoughts that are cold to the bone and altogether different from anything you have ever needed or seen or had before.

Instruction four: “Settle for a rope swing” and swing back through the text. By retreating in instructions – from four to one – you’ll regress back into my childhood. Back to the swings of Chatsworth River: a deer or two staring you in the face, as you’re too chicken shit to take the plunge.

Now you’re older you should not be so chicken shit. But you’re heavier, longer, hairier and more cumbersome – more aware of the affect your body has and the strength you go without. Rope swings don’t really work. They just make your feet wet in the stream below. You laugh it off though and decide that the waterfall above is now manageable – the rain means nothing now and your oversized umbrella has this great balancing affect as you climb with bare feet. You get to the top steaming with sweat, drenched in bracken-flavoured dew, and ready to take the plunge…

We found ourselves on the top of a hill, in a town surrounded by ancient walls. There, after all elements of self-clarification we lost sight of everything.

“If you get as far as Rome you can go a little further in to the mountains.”

Head inland and northeast towards L’Aquila and Parco Nazionale del Gran Sasso e Monti della Laga. The road holds its magnificence in height, viaducts upon viaducts and tunnel after tunnel forever heading for peaks dressed in white. When you get so far you’ll come across rows upon rows of tents on the outskirts of a departed city full of cranes – cranes that would look at home in any other landscape but they were out of place in this one. It’s a sore history of dust and disaster, centuries of harmony with the land only to be crushed by landfall and the quaking earth beneath. More noticeable then is the engineering feat that is the road you drive on – slowly circulating the city of crushed rubble beneath, surrounded by green hills high in the Italian sun.

Roseto degli Abruzzi is a land where olive groves lay upon steepened hills hiding pizzerias, and gems of disguised gardens to sit and view the coastline below. Its a place for vineyards and secret courtyards, with blossoming sweet trees, a place where the dust of the road gets caught in the western sun as it sets hazy and red through evergreen trees passed towns and cities towering above. To the east is the dawn, and the Adriatic that covers outstretched horizons with deep green waters and blockades of rock and stone.

In the day we headed for mountain top towns, markets, fresh pastries, bell-towers and the clarification of coffee. We fought against dead animals festering in the sun, broken water fountains and closed wooden archways armed with cats basking their totality.

But on one particular day we managed to find the rain and then clarity. After following many a road west, higher and higher still we reached a valley of tall grass. We settled there for a while against the verge; I had time to take in the sincerity of the air that was in dept to the downpour yet to come. As the clouds loomed, the grass before me grew darker and darker still. We looked north towards the towering hills climbing higher to frame the town in front of us; a wall of stone set in the landscape centuries before. The heavens then opened and we were wet within the seconds it took to take shelter.

There were two dogs roaming, finding water and shelter in the corner of the courtyard to the left. To the right four nuns disappeared up a winding stair of stone, hands holding their hats and an umbrella shared between the two that smiled back at us. By the time we had all set foot on their side of the archway, they’d gone with a flash of black shoes upon their heels, around the corner, out of sight. I had foot wear ill fit for the climb and insufficient for the rainfall – by this point my feet were sodden. We decided to follow the dogs as their city was otherwise deserted. Finding a path to follow we entered in to the stone plateau heading for the rooftops above and eventually – the castle. But we had walls to attend to, stairs to climb and paths to find. The rain got worse with more height, and upon reaching the clouds our vision betrayed us…

Theorems, disappearances-(appearances) and ways of winning

The start of Euclidean geometries for me is like taking something away, and then replacing it with something else – developing an axiom for change. You know, making use of something instead of just letting it sit, thinking of how it can be something other than itself. By any sort of means possible – a way of remaining ignorant of your disuse in the world I suppose. I recall this. My dad received a parcel in the post when I was around eight years old, it was a Saturday – my mother was working, he was washing the car, my brother burying his new plastic toy in the green house. I was looking in the parcel hidden behind the kitchen blind.

The parcel contained six wooden blocks that would make a puzzle if you knew how. I decided no one would ever know how so stole one of the pieces and burnt it. By this point my dad had left the hosepipe unattended on the front lawn and was readying himself to wax the car. I felt I had to do something to replace the act of taking away, I wanted to connect the happening some how, make something a little more complete so sneaked out the house to the top of the drive way, the car at the bottom my dad finding leather cloths in the garage. I took my chance in his position of ignorance ran to the end of the hose, turned the tap on, then ran to the other end. My dad was still busying himself over the cloths. The next moment I had inserted the end of the hosepipe in to the exhaust of the car to flood the engine with water. My task was complete. But my dad and his fury were one step ahead. The tap was turned off where he stood… from then on it was a race.

“They puzzled me – that’s what I liked about them. They were my task towards absolution. They were a means for a race against someone who had gone before and my step ahead.

I was leant against this fire exit, preventing any means of escape. It was then I saw them, at first I saw them as fuel, but quickly refrained and took them for other uses instead.”

Right now there’s a simple spire standing across from the window. It gets looked at from time to time through the rain and the shine. And on occasion gets spied at, by me, through a slight gap in the curtain during the day. It remains stationary in its architectural grandeur – but I am sure if it knew it was being so observed, it would move. Before such concrete roving however I would like to climb it, scale it get to the bottom of its measure and decipher an accurate trajectory, from which to then reveal myself when ready. Of course – I would dress up as someone else for this.

When ready I would open the curtain at the right moment, at night, with the light on. It would see me and then disappear for good. From then on my purpose would be obsolete but to replace the spire with something of less interest – a flat or two alluding to the age of the plastic number – in the form of a Japanese bathhouse.

There’s an axoim for this – the best things happen when you’ve reached a state of in-between-function – a status of chance, a chance for completion and definition. I came across four shelves upon a time when I was looking for ‘something else’ in form of fulfilment – they were discarded in a piss smelling side alley ridden with broken glass and moans from the gallery on the other side of the fire exit…

Here there’s something, a foot

When something is afoot it is also a foot that itches and keeps you awake at night. The window of my bedroom faces east so I get the sun in the morning before touching upon the cold light of the Kitchen where I watch the sunset every evening before bed. There I make myself a coffee with my extra super duper coffee machine and rush back in to my room to type. Then I remember my itchy foot something is afoot. For the first time in a long time I was awoken by the first light of dawn through my curtains too thin, I could see through half awake eyes the silhouette of my camera perched high upon the extended legs of my tripod.

The evening before after watching the last of the sun (I am sure we get longer evenings up here, more so than down there where the seasons very much mould in to one) I did indeed retreat to my room to find myself in “a room of one’s own” – I was then reminded of conversations I had in and around feminism and what it means today, histories and how they make structures of contemporary meaning. Someone, another queer like me, mentioned ‘equality’ and how feminism should be called something other than the word that relates to women alone…

History museums and shapes and buildings and architectures of time and place: something is here afoot and takes a couple of feet and steps to get there and realise what the fuck is happening. Then you find a stuffed animal alluding to the jungle before civilisation, a grim object display next to an equally grim steward stood to the side of a cabinet of turning twisting designer plates in the gift shop next to the café . Next to where you can see and browse and buy posters: posters of things and events and artists and works that mean nothing but to have them on your wall where they mean nothing.

This is something here there everywhere afoot. I attained these two A1 pieces a few years ago in a building not so far from the museum that I now speak of. They relate to art, architecture, sculptural form, blocks of wood, doors corners beams and other related ‘building’ features. The work is particularly site specific to Halifax. The beam of light is like the morning sun. The focus is my eye’s not being able to sleep as their lids are too much to do with the soles of my feet – here there’s much ado about an itch or two.