Theo’s front wheel collides with the weight of an obstacle. His body tips forward and is thrown up into the air. The impact of the ground punches. Theo’s winded puff breaks the silence. Stunned he lies there. Then he panics. Is he hurt? He checks himself. Does a quick body scan, he’s ok. ‘Get up’ he tells himself, ‘move. Now’, and moves, pulls himself up, rubs his muddy trousers, dusts away the wet from his arms, turns around looking for his bike and finds himself looking standing in front at of two suited bodies lying on the ground, a concrete block between them.

There’s quite a lot that goes through a mind with an encounter such as this. Firstly, you might begin by questioning yourself. That actually, whatever it was you collided with had caused a cerebral short-circuit and the concussion was making you hallucinate. You might try to think about what triggered your brain to imagine two older men, of about seventy in age, wearing shiny silvery green suits, white shirts, khaki green ties, orange brogues, lying in the middle of London Fields their feet very neatly positioned toward the Lido, their heads facing toward the exit. Secondly, it is not so unusual to find men,, lying in parks. Quite often, that’s how parks are used. People lie in them. But that’s not really anyone’s business. What is extra-ordinary however is to encounter two men, older and suited, lying prostrate, their arms handcuffed inside a cylinder hole carved through a concrete block. The block is the signifier that makes one start to doubt what one is seeing. The block invites the cerebral short-circuit as a possible explanation. The block stops the brain blocking out what it thinks it is imagining. The block persists.

Theo could not make sense of it. He couldn’t place himself. In that split second, when his face met theirs, he considered whether or not to circle the ‘thing’ as one would do with an exhibit in a gallery. Theo didn’t want to appear stupid. It could be one of those performance pieces he’d heard about on Radio 4, like those silly ‘sound sculptures’ on that god awful Saturday morning show. ‘It’s a poor replacement for Home Truths’ Theo grumbled to his wife. Susanna was very good at rolling her eyes at just the right moment. Over the years she perfected her ability to sense literally a second before Theo, his launch into a lengthy monologue about some failing aspect of the country’s infrastructure, and bring him to an abrupt halt. ‘Let. Me. Just. Stop. You. Right. There’ she would say. And Theo would stop, because occasionally she would let him go on. If he was being captured on film by a bunch of pretentious art students behind a tree, Theo didn’t want to lose face and appear like some bad sport. After all, just because he was a paper shuffler by training, didn’t mean he wasn’t receptive to new ideas.

Theo started to encircle the block with a half-hearted purposeful stroll. He wanted to give off the impression that he was also looking for something, perhaps an important file from out of his briefcase, or one of his luminous bicycle clips. In case it wasn’t a work of art. This resulted in a kind of ambling limp. Theo thought it better to stop moving. ‘Perhaps’ he thought, ‘I should really begin with an introduction’. But, how to introduce oneself to a ‘thing’ that one doesn’t even know how to name? ‘Do I address the block or the men?’ Theo asked himself. ‘And even then, how does one approach two suited men on either side of a piece of concrete?’ He saw very clearly the dilemma before him. It was impossible to make eye contact with both of them, unless he stood at quite a distance, but retreating at this stage, was really not an option. If he only made eye contact with one of them, it would seem unfair, but also biased in the eyes of the camera crew. Theo imagined black polo neck jumpers and skinny legs behind the large Oak tree to the left of him. Trying to address the two suited men at the same time would make him look as if he were affirmatively shaking his head with a ‘no, no, no’, valuing the work according to his good or bad judgment. That could turn out to be embarrassing. He was uneasy about being read by the art students, if of course, they were behind that tree. One must be careful with these kinds of encounters. ‘Hello there’, wasn’t really appropriate. ‘Excuse me’, seemed rather daft. Theo decided to address the block instead. He began with ‘Well’. And then, ‘I wasn’t really expecting this’.

The block seemed to respond.

‘A man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end’. The voices coming from the suits sounded eloquent, quietly reserved, slightly foreign.

‘Pardon?’ said Theo, not quite catching the line.

‘Someone has seen a thousand adult men’.

This time Theo heard. He laughed politely but felt very uneasy. There was silence. The two men were still. Theo tried again.

‘I can see how this might be rather interesting’.

The voices chanted in holy prayer ‘Finger to finger, and of all the fingers to the palm and then wrist and of these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the upper arm, and in fact, of everything to everything else’.

Theo started to panic again. He heard the hum of the traffic in the distance. He was getting cold. He wanted to go home and forget this nonsense. But he didn’t know how to leave. He felt he was missing out on something.

Theo suddenly alighted on a different idea. Maybe it wasn’t a bunch of art students but Hackney Council instead. So stupid of them to install an installation and neglect to tell anyone about it. ‘In that case’, Theo surmised, with growing irritation in his belly, ‘I’m perfectly within my rights to demand some kind of compensation for my bike’. The bike was a mess. The front wheel had distorted into an unfamiliar shape, the rubber tyre half hanging off the frame, which was now more of a lopsided triangle than a circle. Theo felt better. Now he had reason to hold a conversation, and with some more direct questioning, perhaps he could get an answer that was affirmative and not so speculative.

‘No, seriously, I’m sure it’s going to be very interesting in daylight. Are you planning to be showing for long?’ Theo wasn’t sure that ‘showing’ was the right word, but settled on it. ‘I will of course, have to take your number, with regard to the cost for a replacement wheel, or would you prefer me to contact Hackney Council directly?’

He looked at their hands, thinking that it was indeed possible to write down a phone number with one free hand, but wondered if this would compromise the performance? He didn’t want to tamper. I mean, all those sculptures in the Victoria and Albert Museum, even the plaster cast ones, you can’t touch.

‘The arrangement of ‘shapes’ which have hitherto appeared differs from the way they appeared in their own order.’

Theo felt like crying. Their connected hands inside the concrete block were sinister. He saw a wired bomb in his mind, a kind of time bomb protest. Maybe they were suicide bombers and not artists? He started to panic again. It was time to call Susanna.

‘Are they Gilbert and George?’

‘Who are Gilbert and George?’

‘Oh Theo, for goodness sake, you know, those performance artists, the “living sculptures”? Don’t you remember Underneath the Arches?’

‘No.’

‘Well ask them then’

‘Ask them what?’

‘ASK them if they are Gilbert and George’.

Theo moved the phone away from his ear and half cupping his hand over the mouthpiece, bent down and said in a kind of hushed and slightly apologetic tone ‘You don’t happen to be Gilbert and George do you?’

‘We have a plastic figure which is universal rather than a real individual’.

Theo could hear Susanna yelling down the phone.

‘Sorry. What?’

‘What did they say?’

‘Erm...they didn’t really give much of a straight answer. Something about having a plastic figure.’

‘Well perhaps they can’t really reveal their identities when they are actually living, sculpturally, if you know what I mean’

‘I guess so’ said Theo, confused.

‘Just wheel your bike home Theo. You can chase up the compensation stuff tomorrow. They go to that Turkish restaurant I hear, down the road, same time, every night, so you can go and ask them when they aren’t performing...in a park’.

Theo wasn’t convinced.

‘Are you sure they are Gilbert and George? I mean, how do we really know who they are?’
‘Theo’ Susanna softly warned ‘Stop worrying and come home’.

‘Alright’ Theo said, slightly relieved that someone else was making all the decisions now.

The next day, Theo avoided going home through the park. He took the long route on foot. The previous evening was bothering him. He spent his lunch hour trying to find the right department at Hackney Council. Cultural services seemed the most obvious choice but he was put on hold. Eventually Theo gave up, re-wrapped his half eaten cheese and tomato sandwich and put it back into his lunch box. He had lost his appetite. The whole situation was very upsetting.. Susanna didn’t seem to be listening. to Theo, thought Theo. She left that morning in such a rush, depositing the name and address of the Turkish restaurant ‘Mangal II, 4 Stoke Newington Road’ on the shelf in the hallway, yelling out before slamming the door behind her ‘I’LL SEE YOU ABOUT NINE’ then mumbling something Theo couldn’t hear, followed by ‘ADDRESS IS ON THE TABLE...MAKE SURE TO GET THERE BEFORE SEVEN’. Slam. Quiet. Theo looks into the bathroom mirror. ‘She’s not going to come with me’ he sighed and then starts to imagine all kinds of humiliations. They’d once been to Turkey for a holiday. Theo hated it, all that sitting around in the heat. He spent his time in the shade feigning sleep behind his sunglasses while Susanna helped the Turkish women pick vibrant green cucumbers, squatting down with them outside the kitchen, communicating with smiles and giggles. He’d liked the yoghurt and honey. That was probably the best bit .

‘It’s not us’ Gilbert and George say in unison ‘But we can see the resemblance’.

The weekend brought sunshine. Susanna agreed to head to the park with Theo to see the legendary installation and to pin the mysterious couple down. At breakfast Theo recounted his experience at Mangal II.

‘I had a rather nice charcoal grilled lamb kebab and some of that rice with bits of vermicelli in it. The grill is called an Ocakbasi’.

Susanna poured some museli into a bowl.

‘What did Gilbert and George have?’

‘I think they were eating chicken’

‘Really? I always imagined they were vegetarians’

‘Why?’ asked Theo, recalling his awkward encounter with them.

‘I’m not sure’.

Theo hated the way Susanna jumped to conclusions and provided no apparent reason for them. She believed that instinct was a guiding force for making decisions. Like the times she would follow her gut and not a map in areas she thought she had already visited. Theo would follow Susanna sensing her way down unfamiliar streets turning alien landmarks into signals of familiarity. ‘I’ve seen this before’ she would murmur unconvincingly. Theo wished she would just stick to the map. Maps were reliable.

‘So did they know about the installation then?’

‘No. They were very polite about it. I don’t think they minded me disturbing their meal’.
Theo cringed. In actuality, he rather thought they had minded. It took him some time to explain what he had encountered in the park and became increasingly more flustered as the waiter hovered by him waiting to intervene. Gilbert and George sat patiently, their expectant faces turned toward Theo. In the end, he drew them a technical diagram of what he had seen, mapping out how his bike had collided with the ‘thing’.

Later on at home, Theo looked up Gilbert and George on the internet. He found a clip of ‘Underneath the Arches’ and watched it a couple of times. He wondered what singing sculptures had to do with Flanagan and Allen. And why did they have a manifesto for life that preached smart dress and being friendly and polite? Or making the world believe in you but paying heartily for the privilege? Theo admitted that they were polite to him. But he knew there was something intrinsically different about these men in the park. Whatever it was that was coming out of their mouths was laden with a weight. The delivery of those strange sentences was mechanical and foreboding. Gilbert and George were very pleasant.
Susanna started laughing.

‘It’s great’ she said ‘Really funny’.

She acted as if the two men were deaf and couldn’t hear her at all.

‘What about my bike?’ Theo said looking at the block. Susanna was bending down peering at their feet.

‘Those orange brogues are fantastic. I wonder where they got them from. Looks like an Oxford wingtip but I’ve never seen them in bright orange’.

‘Ask them a question or something’.

Susanna stood up. ‘Where will I be in ten years time?’

‘There is a right physical size for every idea ’

‘How prophetic’ Susanna mocked ‘With age comes an extra pound or two’.

‘I’m not sure that’s what they meant’ Theo deplored.

They walked home via Ridley Road market to pick up some vegetables. At the stall Theo looked at bunches of coriander and thought about his bike. Susanna was filling up the string bag with spinach. If he couldn’t pin down the ‘thing’ to an owner how was he going to get his bike mended? He stood taking in the green of the coriander leaves and thought about filling in compensation forms. Theo was a very good paper shuffler. Administration was not intrinsically boring. Over the years he had found satisfaction in his job. He had quickly realised that there was something comforting about the generic character of the forms he would process. Just himself, the computer screen and a pile of forms waiting to be filtered and administered, catalogued and filed into a database. Theo was part of an information data assembly line, a small database interlinked in a chain of other similar databases. His colleagues personalised their desks with photographs of small children and bright pink post-it notes, but Theo preferred to have very little beside him, just a pile of forms in his in-out tray and the satisfaction of inputting words and numbers into spreadsheet boxes. When people asked him what he did, he often felt like saying ‘I’m making virtual paper trails’ but usually settled on ‘application processing for on-line distribution channels’, which was as close as he could get to what he did, although he couldn’t be too sure.

Money belt
Sleeping bag
Insect repellent
Pillowcase
Chicken wire
Photo of husband
More than one copy of passport details
Alarm clock
Smaller rucksack
Writing equipment
Camera
Razors
Tampax
Pack of cards
Sealable plastic bags
Envelopes
Cagoule
Warm top
Cotton top
Little radio
Address for the embassies

Went out this morning, walked past the station and down a long road to find myself on Preston Road, past a car sales point with flying flags of blue and red, colours flapping in the rain, passed by and up towards Riley Road. Checked emails, spoke on the phone, and then left the house to Kemptown to visit a friend who gave me coffee. She made me feel good.

The tree opposite, with green spiked leaves erect and upright sits in collaboration with the building in the background. Jutting out at one corner is a quarter wheel set against the leaves. It brings an aesthetic tinge of shapes, an image caught in space.

A Californian pink building against the blue sky and the leaves of a palm tree, alongside some boulevard somewhere, white wooden shutters closed. A yellow crane gives a straight horizontal line. A structure. Mass collaboration of structures, open-ended exploration, always onwards, existing, moving, breathing, questionable.

There was no party to begin the academic year with, nor was there a celebration to mark its end. There was no money for that kind of thing anymore, not in this place, a strange department….demurely set within a neo-classical, neo-fascistic building and housing the most diverse assortment of academics, so diverse that any point of commonality between them was quashed immediately in the name of a kind of vulgar essentialism. This department prided itself on hostilities, on living out a kind of antagonistic practice of everyday life, a kind of impersonal fellowship that survived on exacerbating frustration and anger between colleagues. But, at the end of a semester, and with the dawning realisation in most academics minds, that the onslaught of the summer months ahead held some promise, there was a lapse in the barriers of defence, and when the time came to gather in the seminar room for the upgrade papers, the academics seemed more relaxed. Having spent the year frittering between departmental meeting after departmental meeting, delivering lectures written hastily the night before, hating each other and their students because of the workload, the idealisation of the summer and the prospect of ‘getting down’ to writing revealed itself as a symptom, a way of coping with the pressures of academic life, and feelings of well being towards the book chapters that could now be written or articles finally edited for publication. The promise of writing allowed a kind of nostalgia to be generated between colleagues about their efforts that year. Academics may work hard, but they also grumble hard too.
Upgrade papers were rituals, an opportunity to present the shimmer of a research project, the glimpse of a much bigger thing. Members of staff were in attendance. Some would come along for the whole two days, others would sneak in and out of the seminar room intermittently, occasionally raising an eyebrow in recognition of those colleagues that stood as firm allies, showing to each other who was with who, and what it meant to proclaim allegiance to a disciplinary camp. Those who stayed for the duration paid attention, concentrated, phrased their questions carefully and tactfully. They were invested. In those moments, one could catch onto the vibe (often lost in the muddle of bureaucracy, of form filling and protocol) that some academics felt committed to their apprentices. But emotions run high in these spaces, and more often than not, each kindly response was met with a counter-attack by someone else, and not just by qualified academics.
It was the worst department on campus. Financial difficulties, hostilities between disciplinary camps, self-seeking academics in the guise of managers allowed to run freely between budget after budget, filtering and pillaging numbers. It wasn’t so easy to lay the blame for the circumstances were more complicated than that. But this didn’t stop the act of blaming playing itself out, from hour to hour, year to year; the desire for someone to be held accountable, responsible for each downfall, each minor glitch.

'The written word opens up a space of random appropriation, establishes a principle of untamed difference that is altogether unlike the universal exchangeability of commodities. To put it very crudely, you cannot lay your hands on capital like you can lay your hands on the written word. The play of language without hierarchy that violates an order based on the hierarchy of language is something completely different than the simple fact that a euro is worth a euro and that two commodities that are worth a euro are equivalent to one another. It is a matter of knowing if absolutely anyone can take over and redirect the power invested in language. This presupposes a modification in the relationship between the circulation of language and the social distribution of bodies, which is not at all at play in simple monetary exchange' (Ranciere, 2004, p.55).

Ranciere, J (2004), trans. Gabriel Rockhill, The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum

List to close read:

worn path and concrete steps - juxtapositions
Lamp post - what is the sound of a lamp post bulb blowing?
the constructed path through the woods - framing Heidegger's 'clearing'
folders
shelves
paper clip

Response II - Differing modes of analysis, de Certeau...or how to begin?

How might thinking through this exchange, be a mode of making, a poeisis; a productive activity connected to, but distinctly critical of, ways of using (modes of consumption)?

Michel de Certeau would suggest that a 'tactics of everyday life' brings 'clandestine' formations to life; it is the creativity of groups/individuals responding within the net of 'discipline'. A form of thinking; a mode of making, shaping, forming, responding.

But, is a philosophy of the everyday/'lived experience', really a subversive form of thinking? Are there instances/examples/utterances of experience in everyday life that provide critiques of the everyday (the everyday that binds us to an order, such as labouring activity)? Are there examples that tell us something about our sensations of shock, delight and disgust with the everyday? (I guess would signpost Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea as one significant example of this...perhaps?).

How might we find these intense experiences of the everyday in books, images, formed material objects, processes/techniques/practices of making? Are these 'modes' of making and their effects, the critical formation of differing social spaces; a social commentary on the existing social/economic ordering of the world?

How might reading an image such as yours, also be the formation of a critical social space?

How is a 'critique of the everyday' a compulsion or drive to connect with 'subaltern' experiences so as to transform social life.

For example, Michel de Certeau in his introduction to The Practice of Everyday Life, writes the following:

'Many, often remarkable, works have sought to study the representations of a society, on the one hand, and its modes of behavior on the other. Building on our knowledge of these social phenomena, it seems both possible and necessary to determine the use to which they are put by groups or individuals. For example, the analysis of the images broadcast by television (representation) and of the time spent watching television (behavior) should be complemented by a study of what the cultural consumer "makes" or "does" during this time and with these images. The same goes for the use of urban space, the products purchased in the supermarket, the stories and legends distributed by the newspapers, and so on.

The "making" in question is a production, a poeisis - but a hidden one, because it is scattered over areas defined and occupied by systems of "production" (television, urban development, commerce, etc), nad because the steadily increasing expansion of these systems no longer leaves "consumers" any place in which they can indicate what they make or do with the products of these systems. To a rationalized, expansionist and at the same time centralized, clamorous, and spectacular production corresponds another production, called "consumption". The latter is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order'.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp.xii-xiii

1. How am I not consuming in this exchange between photographic image and response?

• My resistance has already begun....perhaps I should begin by saying what I want to resist writing about?

2. How might I respond to this context (through that of de Certeau's)?

3. How might you respond to this context (through that of de Certeau's)?

4. I have already started the process of framing, of imposing a particular kind of social order onto your image.

THE MATERIAL LIFE OF OBJECTS?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SvdWk8zRrI

THINKING OBJECTS SCULTPURALLY - derive, detournement, unitary urbanism, psychogeography?

• An everyday object?
• What is an object?
• How is an object different from a thing?
• An opening?
• A spacing of the everyday?
• Narratives of this spacing?
• A cupboard inaccessible - a storage facility for what?
• What construction are we situating?
• Image production - the accumulation of spectacle?
• Cultural materialism - culture is a productive process?
• Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of SpaceDomestic spaces - the interior (psychological) life of these objects - hybrid objects - quality of intimacy
• The imagination and the cupboard
• Stationary cupboard
• Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday LifeThe Psychogeography of objects

http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/projects/documents/MLOT-callforapplications_000.pdf

more to follow