Look like if the words are bleeding

Photo and artwork: Theodore Diran Lyons III

A US college art teacher makes an art installation of his students' abandoned essays - which he marked but they never bothered to pick up - to illustrate his thesis that too many people are admitted to higher education without adequate literacy skills. For the purposes of the display he anonymises and red-pens the uncollected essays to highlight the errors.

Commenters are outraged that he has appropriated students' work, that he is not showing proper respect to his students, that he is not teaching writing in an effective way, that he is misdefining "mistakes" as illiteracy, and that in concentrating on the medium rather than the message he is focusing on an irrelevant skill. He engages his critics with surprising stamina.

The USA is not alone in having a problem with poor language skills. According to The National Literacy Trust, "one in six people in the UK struggle to read and write." Hmm. They don't give a source for that figure. "Dismal", says the chair of the Public Accounts Committee. Here in the UK Lyons would be similarly criticised for using students' work like this. But it doesn't make the problem go away.

Via.

Street art

Photo: Bailout by Slaminsky


Annie at Slaminsky has come back from New York with a fab slide show of street art.

Here are a few more sites for your delectation:

Brooklyn Street Art

c-monster: Eclectic, informed and witty art blog

El Celso: colourful, unpredictable, and not worksafe

wooster collective: A celebration of street art from all round the world

Bombing Science: Graffiti Pictures and Graffiti Supplies
Interesting forums. One thread on How to cook wheatpaste is enlightening about the consequences of not using the product quickly enough:

well, i'm sitting on my floor in my room watching Comedy Central when out of nowhere, i hear my backpack start to make this weird fizzing noise, it almost sounded like a zipper. anyways, i looked through my backpack for the source as it was increasing in sound, when i realized it was coming from my bottle of wheatpaste. well me being the idiot that i am i decied it would be best to pop up that littl cap thingy to give it some air.
THAT WAS THE WRONG THING TO DO!
the very second i opened it, BLAM! wheatpaste all over my room. i was left there watching the wheat paste LITERALLY spray out of the tube, as i franticly try to figure out what to do (so just seal the cap again right? well it wasn't til after the whole ordeal that i realized i should have.)

farewell

Up to Kettle's Yard yesterday hoping to get a last look at the de Waals. The gallery was shut; black-clad staff inside were squatting, wrapping things. There were cartons stuffed with bubble wrap and bound with parcel tape, boxes of curious dimensions, some very long and thin, unwieldy. Two men paused amid the ruins of the Wunderkammer, of which nothing remained but the base, some stacked sections of plywood, and cardboard boxes. A high scaffold stood next to where 'All you can see' had cheered the empty wall. The young men and women in their black t-shirts looked like rude mechanicals, and I wanted to watch but that's rude. I'm even now wondering if de W has decreed how the installations should be dismantled.

Oh, come on, I tell myself. This is just taking down an exhibition. These people are used to it.

National treasure

In the National Museum in Cardiff there's a gallery round the foyer, given over to Welsh crafts: glass and pottery, silverware and so on. Some of it's fine, but it doesn't interest me much, or at any rate, not as much as it should. Perhaps it's because I'm not feeling 100%. Slipware, oh please; it's nice and homely, but the decoration, the use to which it's put, hardly merits place in a museum. Most of the stuff would be better off in someone's house, being used. What is there about it to be stared at, wondered at? The skill in making? Yes, but it seems skill without purpose: the purpose is curtailed, we are looking only at a small part of the thing's reality. Our imagination must supply context and use, imagine an owner, or at least the hands of the user: this is what it's like to hold, this is how easily it pours, feel its heft, the sound it makes as you place it on the kitchen table. How the light strikes it among the apples and red peppers. The morning sunlight slanting in through the half door, the light reflected off the river, wobbling and shifting.

Somehow it's much easier with something from the past. Contemporary craft is so self-conscious.

And there is a cabinet of de Waals. (That doesn't merit an apostrophe as it's a standard museum cabinet.) Instantly recognisable: two of his tall swaying cylinders placed, I'd have thought, slightly too far apart, and some shallow nested dishes, wide, with straight sides, very thick. Some are nested with their sides touching, some randomly, but they look untidy and haphazard rather than studiedly random. They look as if they have been put in the case by someone other than the artist, someone who's just collected some examples of his work. I can't explain it. If I knew that de Waal had installed it, I'd pay the arrangement a different quality of attention. Instead, they seem to be tired, denatured, uncontextualised. They're pieces in a museum making as much sense as something dug out of a garden when we don't know where the garden is or what the thing is for. The presence of the pots is only part of their meaning. And how naked they are. We can see them, see into them - all except the tall ones, which have their unknowable interiors. Perhaps under the dishes there are marks or colours we will never see. I'd like to think so. And there are no titles - simply 'Edmund de Waal' and some dates, I forget now. I should have made a note. De Waal's captions, titles, are part of how we read his work. So again, I'm wondering if this is after all an installation, if he's deconstructed the museum exhibit to leave the thing stripped down like this, bare, devoid of meaning and context (the title is literally 'con-text'), the unknowable just creeping in when you think you've drained it of meaning. But I doubt it. It's too obvious: it looks as though the museum staff have been able to do that anyway, all by themselves.

Tenebrae

On the spur of the moment, we went to the performance of Gesualdo's Tenebrae in Trinity Hall Chapel, where de Waal's installation Tenebrae sat in a row on the floor down the aisle, up at the holy end. It consisted of a number of large, shallow pots somewhat larger than dinner plates, about 3 or 4 inches deep, and in each sat what looked like an inverted cylinder, almost filling the interior. Down the insides, like the gap between a boat and the dock, you could just glimpse the fact that the bottom of the larger piece was coloured, but not what the colour was, beyond its darkness. The pieces difffered slightly in size and proportion, and in glaze, but they had more in common than not. I didn't know what to make of them, really - they were mute, and from where I was sitting during the performance I couldn't see them. But I could imagine them, with the sound of the voices falling into them, and the shadows darkening, while they harboured their own secrets in their interior.

I hadn't been in TH chapel before. It's small and rather lovely in an 18thC way. A huge sub-Poussinesque altarpiece, lots of natural light, lots of oak, and a pretty gallery. There were, J told me, 26 candles, and these supplied the majority of light as day began to fade.

And having done no homework about the music, and having been kept away from churches in my childhood, I didn't know about the religious service, though something of its nature became clear through the music itself, and the odd snatches of Latin I was able to recognise. So my experience of the installation and the performance was not well-informed, and I was reacting on a fairly visceral level.

It was perhaps a strange time of year to be singing Tenebrae or celebrating the Passion. The music wasn't a piece I knew, and I had misgivings about its discordances - it wasn't clear if they were Gesualdo's or something incidental. Yet no-one else seemed disconcerted. It was rather long, too, though this only bothered me when I thought someone was off-key. It became clear that the piece was deliberately timed to start in daylight and end in total darkness. It was certainly an experience watching the candles come into their own. Afterwards, everyone milled around and looked at the pots in - it has to be said - a somewhat cursory fashion, as there were about 60 of us - and then afterwards to the Master's Lodge for a glass of wine and a chance to meet the great man himself.

Fourteen pots, I counted.

The Master's Lodge! Oh, I could live like that! And there was a de Waal on a window ledge: two huge cylinders like those tube-worms that live near underwater volcanic vents... tall and thin, and swaying slightly in unison. They were almost identical, but one had a very shiny glaze and the other silkier. From across the room, you could tell instantly they were de Waal's.

There was a lull when de W was standing by himself, so I told him how much we'd enjoyed the exhibition in the gallery, the subtleties, the wit, and the way he withheld things - how we'd nearly missed 'All You Can See' (the red shelf piece) and he was amused and touched, I think. (It was more of a conversation than I'm making it sound.) And he said how he'd always longed to do an installation in the chapel. I should have asked him about the spiritual dimension, and his asceticism. I wanted to ask him about Morandi too, but more people came up then to talk to him.

J was edgy throughout (his seat was uncomfortable, and it's not his sort of art or music anyway) but even so we came away, as we usually do from such events, with a sense that we are enormously privileged.

Still thinking about it later. I cannot know how differently I'd have experienced the evening if I'd known something about it at the outset, if I'd bothered to do the slightest research rather than just looking at my watch and saying: it starts in half an hour - we can catch it if we leave right now! without a sense of what 'it' really was. A concert, we thought. I doubt I'd have persuaded J to come with me otherwise.

Fourteen pots. Fourteen Stations of the Cross. I should have realised. Yet it's a curiously flattened interpretation of the Passion, even allowing for what's concealed. Then again, it fits with the stripping down of the altar that traditionally accompanies the service. We couldn't have counted them from where we were sitting, so it can only affect the experience retrospectively. And retrospectively, I wonder if I'd have felt the pots, lovely and mysterious as they are, equal to their metaphorical burden, if I'd been thinking clearly about the religious meaning. It was a very secular audience - the couple next to me were the only ones who didn't applaud. I'm bothered, really, by treating something like that as a purely aesthetic experience, even though I can't partake of the spiritual side of it. It's cultural tourism, isn't it? I wish I'd got my mind engaged before I went - we left in a rush, and didn't think about it as more than listening to some music. Is it simplistic to hope that music, art, will create its own conditions for attending to it?

Oh, and apparently Gesualdo was a murderer.

Tenebrae (de Waal 4)

If you dare tell it honestly. The chapel. The empty vessels. How you were one yourself. The light faded. Candles brightened. Music went in and out of harmony. Went on forever.

It should have been Easter. They should have stripped the altar.

14 pots. 14 Stations of the Cross. How similar they were, how each concealed something.

De Waal's work enacts individuality and withholding. It seems like endless attempts to identify what makes the unique precious, while valuing what we hold in common. The withholding is what's reserved for mystery, the ineffable.

Wunderkammer (de Waal 3)

Along the window by the street: 'A line around a shadow' is an assemblage of tallish, thin pots, catching changing light from the window, and reflected in it. Again, there are the marks of touching and - as with some in 'Predella' - adhesions that almost resemble wings, or as if they'd been suggested by a broken handle some time in the distant past.

Is it lese-majesté to wonder if de Waal ever worked as a waiter? That homely association of function hovers behind 'A Change in the Weather' (suggesting a dresser) and particularly 'Attic' and 'Wunderkammer' which also rely on our readings of domestic porcelain and how it is used and stored. Perhaps that's a sweeping statement, though I can't be unusual in seeing these associations.

'Wunderkammer' itself stands in the middle of the room, inviting and resisting our attention. This large plywood cabinet, smelling strongly of the plaster and resin in its construction, is stacked like a pantry inside with white plates and dishes, observable on their shelves above and below through narrow vertical and horizontal slits. Again, the placing seems random, but nothing is ever really random with de Waal. One of the horizontal windows was too high for me, probably too high for most people, remaining merely a teasing possibility. The idea comes slowly: how did they get in there, how do you get them out, which bit did he finish last? But then again, the idea of sequestration, collection, order, interiority... When we look through the slits, are we spying on the plates, or are we being permitted a glimpse? They are blameless. The plates are candid, literally.

There are dishes that look like stacked ashtrays, but it's inconceivable that someone as ascetic as de Waal would smoke. There is order, discipline, control - yet the individuality of the plates. These are protestant plates. And our access to them is controlled, orchestrated. We are required to see them in a certain light.

The components aren't objects for possession. Their function is as part of a whole, as part of an installation. It is public art, not rich man's art - or so I thought. Wunderkammer is for sale at £180,000.

And while we're contemplating this, friends of E's wander in and we are distracted. They start talking of house prices, and it feels incongruous while there are these abstract lares and penates all round us.

And back at the entrance, in the catalogue I find a piece I don't recall seeing: 'All you can see', which is described as pots on a red shelf. I don't recall any red shelf. I'd have noticed. So we go back and look, and while I'm detained once again by the exhibits, and wondering what it means, and what 'meaning' is in art anyway - E has found 'All you can see' and is laughing, because there it is: 5 metres up on the wall as you enter the Wunderkammer room, where you can't see it as you go in, and wouldn't have seeen it on your way out if you'd been talking to friends... So it's witty, as the red is bright poster paint red, and you can hardly see the pots way back from the edges of the shelf, almost out of sight, mocking us with their red shelf, the one strident note in the exhibition (after the slightly vulgar gold dabs).

Later, I read how de Waal has no compunction about smashing something he considers imperfect, that that's what porcelain is for, that archaeologists are always uncovering sherds.

Attic (de Waal 2)

In the next room, there is an installation in the ceiling, like an open trap door. Pots are arranged round the opening as if in a pantry, almost out of sight, but neatly arranged, packed tight... It is called 'Attic' and makes me laugh. It is like that, and not like that. The hidden lives of pots. The pots on the edge of your mind. The higher pots. The unneeded pots. The pots you call down at times of crisis, when great numbers of family arrive for weddings and funerals. They are white, pure, unreachable. We can look up at them from this distance on the ground and desire them. And of course, the word 'attic' conjures Greece and the history of decorated pots, which these are not. They deny decoration, though they have touchmarks. We clothe them with our imaginings, which they shrug off.

On the floor further along is 'Register'. I wasn't taking notes, so this is only a hazy recollection. In two long black containers - again, thick IKEA-ish walls - arranged in close parallel, the pots stand at ground level and we look down into them, their emptiness. Some, if not all, have a very shiny glaze. They fit their trough, though the sizes vary slightly. Again they are whitish, very plain. There is ribbing inside: it's the first time we've been allowed to see inside the pots, but now we can't see their outsides.

Why 'Register'? An account. A list. A calibration. A pitch, a lexicon. A noticing. I can't get it right in my head. They are contained, and withheld from us. They are singled out for attention, and we look at each one: tick, tick, tick. We move round it, seeing how the light plays on them; at one angle it looks as if they are holding water. It is shallow of me, but I think of a trough of plant pots. I'm not thinking of schoolchildren, or types of discourse, or even of pennies dropping, but of geraniums, winter, potting sheds, the smell of the leaves, the texture of them rough on the hand, and how they make your hands smell. I look again at the pots and they are white, innocent, empty.

And I notice how scuffed the floor is, needs stripping and resealing. Or else you can think: it's textured, marked, touched by all the feet of art-lovers, and the reluctant lovers of art-lovers, and the culture-vultures and posers and critics and pilgrims that have passed this way.

On the wall opposite are a pair of cubic cabinets, set up almost like a stereoscope. You can't see both properly at once when you are close to. The exteriors are white, the interior a slightly silky dark sludgy grey/green/blue which reflects a little light. And right in the back of the boxes are more cylindrical pots: tall thin, short fat, white, creamy, pale yellow, some with cracked rims from firing, some - possibly all - marked with a brush of gold. It feels devotional, these are like candles at a shrine, and the gloss of the walls reflects back the ghostly forms of the pots when you get them at an acute angle. As you approach the boxes with your face, they absorb sound; they are a micro-climate. The pots are withdrawn from the world. What is this piece called?

Along the ramp, echoing the movement of the step but way up the wall, is 'Rill'. This seems the least subtle of his titles. It is a run of little pots on a dark shelf, with a step part way along, and the light bubbles off the shiny surfaces and different colours, and it gives a pleasing sense of running water. Again, one longs to touch them, and the title supplies the idea of filling them with water at varying levels, and tapping them for the ringing sound. As I said, I am shallow.

de Waal (1)

Went with E to see the exhibition at Kettle's Yard. I knew nothing about de Waal: what follows are crude first impressions.

The first piece you see right by the gallery door is 'A Change in the Weather' - a large frame of shelves with small cylindrical jars lined up along them. Packed close, but each stands in its own space. They are no more than 3" high at most. Made of thin porcelain, pinched at the rim to make it even thinner, their dimensions vary, and none of them is straight. They lean, fingered and dented, impressed by a rectangular tool - each touched, individual. And the colours range from deathly white, through palest greys and blues, to steel, with glazes dull or high, and they sit there on their thick shelves each in their allotted station, the sizes and colours seemingly randomly arranged. The title suggests English skies. It's all muted, subtle. Though the range from darkest to palest is wide, and sometimes similar colours sit together and sometimes not, the overall effect is to average it out. It looks so random it must have been carefully considered.

We can't see inside the pots, we can only imagine the care and difficulty of wrapping, transporting, unwrapping, arranging. I imagine gallons of bubblewrap. I imagine each pot with a numbered sticker underneath. I wonder if they get dusted. I like them: their individuality, their collectiveness, their insistence on a different same. I like the changing colours, the misshapenness, the 'chosen' air of each with its own touchmarks. I like that their function is to stimulate thought and response, though they are suggestive of measures of things, shot-glasses, rations.

I wonder what the title means, whether I'm supposed to think of anything but the sky and the grey light of England under cloud. Whether it's a celebration of plenitude, amplitude, sufficiency. It doesn't seem to be about excess: it is restraint. The shelving, being thick, seems to emphasise this. It could have been thinner; it could have been wood, rather than painted white. Both E and I think of Morandi, and 'arte povera'. It seems to work within the same register of restraint.

What I don't notice is that there are twelve shelves, that the first has 31 containers, the second 28 and so on. There is one for each day of the year. Yes, it is enough.


Examples of Edmund de Waal's work here: NewArtCentre