Life seems to be led in a bubble of our own current fancies. This is true of the Netherlands where I live, where my longstanding obsession with images of the descent from the cross and the last judgment are often put politely to one side.
Over the summer, I decided to throw out all my old papers and photocopies and paintings. My friends Paul and Dan rearranged them for me and added their own mark. The resulting works were shown – and remained – in Rotterdam.
The three new works somehow managed to have an air of the Baroque, and Northern Renaissance images I have long admired. Details of two are shown here in black and white and colour. A third piece is the result of a happy accident born of mild annoyance at the original work, an irrelevant, insouciant circumstance that this otherwise quiet country often throws up. Ah, vanitas, vanitas!
A photograph of a photocopy of a photograph of a print work showing pop star Justin Bieber moonlighting as Napoleon crossing the Alps. The image was seen at a show in Rotterdam. The main interest for the curator was the reflection of the strip-light which added a great deal of drama to the original. The photograph is taken at a deliberately rakish angle which adds further (in the curator’s opinion ) to the image’s presence.
Photograph of a detail of a work from the exhibition, “Hold on to the Paper”, Rotterdam, 2017. The image (suitably apocalyptic and “recreated” by the curator’s friend Paul) shows old drawings and scraps and photocopies from the curator’s collection.
There is a peculiar shade of blue that pervades certain parts of Accrington. Not always seen, it can nevertheless be sensed as a strong visual memory over long periods of time and sometimes in other places, far removed from this former manufacturing town in East Lancashire.
Memories can be cut out and rearranged. But that doesn’t make them better or any easier to grasp. Looking at these three new additions to the museum, the curator can’t help but wonder what binds them outside of his own random attempts at fusing or displaying memory. Maybe not even that. Maybe they should be pondered in silence, without recourse to thought.
Photograph of a letter from an ex-University friend, circa 1993. A lot of letters from that period were full of such declamations and anecdotes. And the actions of the writers always seemed full of adventure, wit and brio; totally at odds with the curator’s Accrington sojourn.
Photograph of a collage of a colour photocopy of a photograph of a mysterious duckboarded path on Ilkley Moor, West Yorks. The pen and ink graffito is a typical response from Richard the Photocopier when presented by such a visual prospect.
Photograph of two photocopies set side by side. One is a collage made out of newsprint, ink, pencil and tracing paper. The other a photocopy of a pencil drawing of the curator’s father in January 1970. The Photocopier’s father always wore stylish (if not trendy) clothes for the (aspirant) working/lower middle orders in the period.
There is a peculiar shade of blue that pervades certain parts of Accrington. Not always seen, it can nevertheless be sensed as a strong visual memory over long periods of time and sometimes in other places, far removed from this former manufacturing town in East Lancashire. The blue can be put to various uses. In modern parlance, it is a “positive” force. And the curator invoked it at various times during that strangest of decades, the 1990s.
A photograph of a colour print of a photograph of model aeroplanes found in a photo studios in Bury, Lancs, around 1996. One of the more peculiar images in the museum, the curator can’t think why he commissioned this photograph to be taken. It may point to the lack of interesting creative ideas running around in the UK during the mid 1990s. The print has spent the last 20 years in a portfolio.
Photograph of a print of 4 small drawings depicting the fruits of Richard the Photocopier’s imagination. Drawn around 1998 during a period of great tumult in his private life, the drawings also show the influence of too much Robert Graves. The original drawings were posted to the singer of Super Furry Animals.
A photograph of a damaged colour photocopy of a black and white drawing in dip pen and ink. Coloured ink added by the curator at a later date. The image was originally found in the prospectus of St Martin’s College, London, circa 1992. The curator valued it for its obvious satirical qualities. But, unwittingly, the image also replicated some unspoken desires. To escape Accrington, and to “be” an artist.
Sometimes you can see a peculiar kind of blue in Accrington. You can normally see it when the sun goes down behind the hill where the former NORI brickworks use to be. (It’s now a new housing estate.) The afterglow spreads over Accrington Stanley’s ground, and then casts a peculiar blue green light into the back room of my parents’ house.
In the very early 1990s, on the dole and living back at my parents’ in Accrington, I began to draw and write in earnest, and in secret. I thought of applying to St Martins’, but couldn’t be arsed. The post ERM crash suited me. No jobs worth having in East Lancashire. Still: I needed a counterpoint to my friends’ exciting lives in dreamlike places like Bedford, Lutterworth or Chalfont St Peter. And, around 1993, London, where my more urbane mates ended up. I started to draw what it would be like to, you know, go there.
Then I would go to the corner shop and buy 4 cans of Trent Mild, and mixed salt and vinegar peanuts and salted crisps, and read the Acccrington Observer letters page and listen to BBC Radio 4.
The past is my playground.
Photograph of a handmade, typically artsy postcard received from a Lancashire friend then residing in Bedford who had a job and was about to marry and buy a house. Note the postmark smear, meaning at least one enlightened Royal Mail employee working in the South East.
Photograph of two collages using photocopies and newsprint, created around 1992-3 in Accrington. The words are moot for the time: “Lonely” and “Bugger Off”.
Photograph of a colour photocopy of a black and white dip pen drawing originally created for a London friend’s band’s LP cover. Date: 2002. However the drawing evokes a much earlier time, that of going to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, London in 1992-3, to both waste time and save money. Digitally messed about with by Richard the Photocopier in a misguided attempt to “get into” digital art and to evoke the Accrington blue.
Sometimes you can see a peculiar kind of blue in Accrington. You can normally see it when the sun goes down behind the hill where the former NORI brickworks use to be. (It’s now a new housing estate.) The afterglow spreads over Accrington Stanley’s ground, and then casts a peculiar blue green light into the back room of my parents’ house.
I still find it a remarkable light, something I haven’t seen anywhere else. I always found its appearance a very hopeful sign and – like the two Haitian angel/devil tin cats hanging on my wall – still draw on its presence.
In the very early 1990s, when I left Felling, I spent some time living back at my parents. Sometimes letters from friends, (whose lives seemed to be far more exciting, or at least much more dramatically, entertainingly, boring than mine) would summon up this blue light. Places like Bedford, Lutterworth or Chesterfield, Aberystwyth or Chalfont St Peter loomed large in the imagination. And, around 1993, London. A place seen only three times previously. And then in passing. I began to draw what London would be like, if I ever went.
The 1990s, where letters would stop and start amidships, beached by thoughts or sudden displays of emotion. A time when the World of Word Processor leaned like a sinister uncle over your shoulder.
The past is my playground.
Photograph of a letter the curator received from a university friend, describing work in Chesterfield around 1991. Note the postmodern socio-cultural reference – once the preserve of wits in the immediate post-Thatcherite landscape – that became (overbearingly) ubiquitous later in the decade.
Photocopy of a letter from 1993 from a London friend. Additional marks have been made digitally by the curator to highlight the word, “word processor”.
Photograph of a photocopy of a photograph of one of the Twelve Apostles on Ilkley Moor, West Yorkshire, and a letter (in post-it-note form from a Newcastle friend, then living in London). The curator’s influence back then is revealed as exhorting his friends to read “Lucky Jim” (1954), by the writer, Kingsley Amis.
Everyday, we feel the weight of the presence of the New Age of the Witchfinder Generals. Blinding everything with a cruel light. Projecting a grey film just behind our retinas. Photocopy and use these images as charms against their powers.
A photograph of a colour photocopy of a collage made in 2003. The figures are sketched in dip pen and ink and depict a vote being cast in the USSR. From the book “Russia From The Inside”, by Robert Kaiser and Hannah Jopling Kaiser.
A photograph of a colour photocopy of a collage, inserted into the press release of Ceramic Hobs’s LP, Oz Alice. The curator found this image increasingly interesting in the light of our ever-present digital lives.
A mini-series of posts dedicated to our Patron Saint, (somewhat slipped), Eddie B. Why should we tell each other anything anyway? What’s the point? Every time we do, things just get worse.
A photograph of a photocopy of a dip pen and ink drawing. The term, ‘Circular Beast Exhibits’ is taken from a song by the band, Guided by Voices.
Photograph of a photocopy of a sketch in byro and pencil taken from a Vice NL magazine, around 2007.
We switch on our devices and see the New Age of the Witchfinder Generals. Perched on their glass thrones. Photocopy and use these images as charms against their powers.
Photocopy of a photograph of a performance in the SUB071, Leiden, sometime in 2007. A reminder of Little Gwion dipping his thumb into the digital cauldron.
A photograph of a photocopy of a pencil sketch of Ainu women from the book, “Life and Survival in the Arctic”. To be used as a charm against Witchfinder Generals.
All hail the New Age of the Witchfinder Generals. Wrapp’d in a cloak of goblinned code. Photocopy and use these images as charms against their powers.
Photograph of a photocopy of a digitally altered drawing made by the curator of a photograph of a “typical” Dutch family from the early 1900s. The digital extras were originally added by Mr N Spong. The drawing was shown at the “Music Shouldn’t Look Like This” exhibition, Leiden 2004.
Photograph of a photocopy of a sketch made by the curator of Hungarian horsemen. From a postcard bought at the Museum of Ethnology in Budapest, 2003.
A mini-series of posts dedicated to our Patron Saint, (somewhat slipped), Eddie B. Why should we tell each other anything anyway? Our emotions are being turned into clean code. Very soon we will be shared to death.
Members of the CPSU, pen and ink drawing, photocopied, then extra colour applied with coloured pencils. From the book, Russia from the Inside by Robert Kaiser and Hannah Jopling Kaiser, 1980 (Withdrawn from Lancashire Library 1991.)
Pen and ink sketch of a photograph of Uncle Lawrence on a day trip, late 1940s. Flanked by two bowler hatted men drawn from the curator’s imagination. Colour pencil added to photocopy.
