Kinematic Clichés

The Pataphysician, Alfred Jarry, said, ‘Clichés are the armature of the absolute’, and swans, like ducks and sheep (from lambing to shearing), invite (incite?) the production of photographic clichés. In sculpture, an armature is the framework around which the sculpture is built. 'Outdoor types' are often clad in a combination of fleece and down - walking, climbing clichés. An armature is also the name used for the kinematic chains used in computer animation to simulate the motions of virtual human or animal characters. In 1996, Dolly the sheep was the first mammal to be cloned, using the process of nuclear transfer. And we are all familiar with 'The Ugly Duckling'.  

Plagiarism By Anticipation: Like The Real Thing?

This morning I woke up to this: what an attachment – a false vagina. Makes a difference from all that Viagra. The strangest of attachments - strangely familiar: a real attachable attachment. Not the real thing, but like the real thing.

The email came in response to my ‘Picture Inspired by a Panda’ (23/5/2010). “Did you invent this? Or was it the other way round? Was your picture of a rider really inspired by a panda? It looks to me more like it was inspired by this - ‘like the real thing’ - vagina, the correspondent (and fellow Pataphysician) wondered. And being a disciple of Duchamp (how could he be my friend if he wasn’t?), he also included a quote from the great cigar smoker: “I want to make art to grasp the mind the way the penis is grasped by the vagina”.

Like The Real Thing, there’s a thing! No, I’m not the patentee of a pump-up vagina; what we’ve got here is a case of what Raymond Queneau coined as ‘plagiarism by anticipation’. Or to put it another way – given the horsiness of my original subject matter – ‘putting the horse before the tart’ (and I use the word original advisedly). But it’s wonderfully liberating to find possibilities in your work that often exceed those you anticipated. When a photograph that had been taken was found to have been taken before, the previous attempt could be called ‘plagiarism by anticipation’.

But which came first, the horse, or the tart (the panda inspiration, or the pump inflation)? I ask because the photograph was published in a book called 'Mrs Sharpe's Cracks', and a few years ago I came across a battered copy, in a secondhand bookshop in Earlsfield. Flicking through it I found someone had traced the jodhpurs and riding apparatus in the photograph we've been discussing: ironically, I'd traced a copy of my own book only to find one of my pictures had been copied! I bought my own book. To think, the image could exist – on some bedroom wall - as an original painting? Who knows, it’s conceivable that the tracing could have been used as the template for a sex toy? 'The real thing' would take on a whole (hole) new meaning. I hope not. I don’t think art should be stimulating.    

  

    
    

No Smoke Without Soya: The Most Photographed Man in Bermuda

I’m scrutinizing the advertising on the wrappings of two plants I can’t seem to live without: tobacco leaves and soya beans.

"Because what you eat shapes your life: Make your body a better place to live". "Fumer tue" (smoking kills)

Two constants: cigars and soya: daily, orally, necessary; I have to swallow a contradiction. Yet there’s a harmony in the imagery; a sublime synchronicity unites my two favorite brands.

If I were to trace both the leafy-sleepy-island-nude and the poised panther, I'd have almost identical tracings.

Cheek to cheek.

Leaf to leaf.

But it has taken an out-of-time postcard from Bermuda, ironically, a place associated with disappearances, to reveal (through pataphysical association and pictorial logic) that there’s no such thing as “smoke without soya”.

On the reverse of the postcard there's a map of Bermuda: a country you wouldn't struggle to draw from memory - no need to 'know it like the back of your hand' - you could just trace the side of your hand.

"The policeman who directs traffic from his bird cage in the Island's busy capital is, perhaps the most photographed man in Bermuda".

I wonder how many photographs exist of this policeman's hand mimicking his native land?

I burn a book a day; smoke 20 Panthers every day; 2 tins of 10 cost €9.50 (£8.99) in France, where I go to import mine. The average paperback costs about £8.99. If I bought my Panthers in the UK, where they cost £8.99 per tin of ten, I’d be burning a hardback a day!

Look, I'm getting as mean as the Dean!

Pyramid of panthers/2800 cigar triangle.

Leaning tower of soya.

Wildfowl Management - Not Golf Course Management: And Elephant Memories

I bumped into a tree - a tree with a split personality. It had a trunk that wasn’t its trunk (in the tree-trunk sense): it’s trunk doubled as a nose. The tree was both an Indian elephant and a Red Indian, depending on how you faced it.

The elephant face had an eye – I’d heard of Elephantiasis – swelling of the lower torso: thick legs and swollen scrotums; I’d seen Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” (1980) with John Hurt as the unfortunate John Merrick who spoke like a door sticking; and let’s not forget the beautiful Hannah Gordon (the wife of kindly surgeon Antony Hopkins); I’ve been in love with her since 1972 (“My Wife Next Door"; “Call My Bluff”).

The last time I clapped eyes on her she was as fragrant as ever, presenting the highly successful “Watercolour Challenge” on Channel 4. In the episode I was glued to a group of Sunday painters were trying to depict the archetypal English village churchyard at Crowhurst, East Sussex, in watercolour.  The place seemed to have a placid beauty – in fact the village of Crowhurst is just the sort of wisteria cottaged village I’d imagined Hannah Gordon had retired to (she’s 68). Perhaps she just popped out from under her thatch – found a window between the jam pachón and her pension collection (from the village post office) to present “The Watercolour Challenge”.

I felt a sudden itch - an itch that could only be scratched against Hannah Gordon’s thatch – or at least, on the very gravestones the star of “My Wife Next Door” had rubbed against as she’d faked praise on those Sunday painters.

My guidebook says: “Crowhurst, with its famous yew-tree, is within a quarter of an hour's railway journey from either Bexhill or Hastings”; so I set out from London and alighted at Crowhurst an hour or so later, with a photograph of Hannah Gordon – book-marking “The Crowhurst Yew” – her face flattened against a mustached Victorian, jammed in a crack in the tree: A typical autumn day – thin sun between heavy showers. I make my way towards the Church. Here’s the guidebook again: “On the south side of the Church stands the famous Yew Tree, said by some to be three thousand, and by others fourteen hundred years old. Its iron-bound trunk and propped-up branches betoken its age: and the visitor, as he gazes upon it, may reflect with tolerable certainty that it was flourishing here when the Norman defeated the Saxon close by, more than 800 years ago. The tree is now 50 feet in circumference at its base, and 38 feet in circumference 6 feet from the ground.” The guidebook I am using is a bit out of date: Ward Lock &Co’s Red Guide, 1907. Would the ‘famous yew’ be still standing? My heart, like my pace, quickened. As I entered the village, I thought: funny, if this yew tree is so famous why I don’t recall any of the watercolourists painting it, or Hannah Gordon hugging it – why shun it?

Look: the ancient yew’s still standing; it dwarfs the 15^th Century Church. I fight my way beneath the limb-like lower branches and vertical supports in search of the crack that leads to its heart – if I couldn’t photograph myself beside my favorite aging actress I was going to photograph myself inside one of the oldest trees in the land.

But look at this: the yew’s been fenced off. But would I have entered the crack? The tree’s infected - riddled with kind of disease (can trees catch elephantiasis?)

I’m looking for a crack and I find a bottom: this overhanging, seeping, bulbous, buttock-like branch reminds me of the baboon, Bosse-de-Nage (literally, “bottom-face”) who’s glowing buffed backside guided Jarry’s Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician, through Paris (by night) in a bed-boat (see “Hanging Around Toilets”, 29/10/09). But it looked too much like a zoo, this yew.

In search of a pew, I made for the church: but I didn’t get further than the porch, where I came across these books for sale. I was half-hoping to find a novel, often encountered in charity shops: “A Crack In Forever” (a great name for a climb) but I was out of luck. I settled for “The Manual of Ornamental Wild Fowl Management” instead. Look: it shows you "how to hold young birds for sexing".

Equipped with this knowledge I dropped a few coppers in the honesty box and headed off into Battle.

On the train back to London I replayed the day – examined my photographs. Bored, I blew up the books – look at this:

Not only did I miss out on Woody Allen’s “Without Feathers” – the perfect bookshelf companion to “Wild Fowl Management”- I failed to notice a novel about a hairdryer. Me who can’t fall asleep by just reading in bed: me who can't sleep at night without a hairdryer blowing me on the pillow! Me who’d once tried to shoot a thrush with a hairdryer! 

But I can’t really be blamed for missing these books next door to one another, I’d visited some ‘sacred sights’: elephants; memories; Red Indians; ancient burial grounds; buttocks; cracks; baboons; noses; split yew trees; split-personality trees, and Hannah Gordon, my wife next door (but here, next to a tree).

Don't Let Sleeping Bags Lie

Back at Uni. We had to present all the golf balls we'd found over the summer to the our tutors and peers. It was a poor show. The majority of my contemporaries, I hesitate to call them students (the University refers to them as customers) on this golf course management degree had barely collected enough balls to fill a bra - and a back-to-school bra at that. I on the other hand decanted a whole sleeping bag full. And I'd made quite an entrance into that darkened seminar room. The group were already at their desks with their balls on the table, as I entered backwards, dragging a sleeping bag full of golf balls noisily through the double doors. My sleeping bag's bright red and being as loaded as it was, it looked like a massive swollen tongue or a mermaid with crabs (but how would she catch them?). I'd got the sack dragging idea from a Bunuel film ("That Obscure Object Of Desire"), where Fernando Rey, a smart middle class, middle aged, well dressed man, is seen dragging an old sack (contents unknown) through Paris. This sack dragging scene is never explained and seems to have nothing to do with the plot/story of the film.
The group formed in a circle around my boil-ridden tongue. You could have heard a golf ball drop, they were all tongue-tied. I started to redden up. Having spent all summer camping alone on golf courses hunting for balls, I felt hemmed in, on the spot (or as we refer to it here, 'put on the tee'). I had to fill the void (left by the lack of words) - I had to do something visual. So I employed a step-ladder from the back of the room (it was safe to do so, we'd all been on a ladder awareness training course last term). I climbed the ladder holding the neck of my sleeping bag. Once at the top,  I hauled the bag onto my back, hoisted it over my head (as best I could) and showered more than four hundred golf balls onto my peers and professors. The golf ball fall was from a height of about twelve feet. Balls ricocheted off the walls and bounced back like bullets off the ceiling. The entire tutor group were atomized. By the time my tongue was flaccid again all the golf course managers (and the professors, or as we have to call them, the professionals - the pros) were either under the tables or face down on the floor. The sleeping bag didn't quite have to double as a body-bag, but two students were still out cold as I was being taken away. But I saw a lovely scene as I was being led to the Dean - I just got a glance. One of the students who'd been hit on the head was taking aspirin, but instead of popping the pill in her mouth she'd  balanced the painkiller on the tip of her tongue (which was green). What a scene - just like a golf ball ready to be teed off.. If I'd have had a hairdryer I'd have blown it down the hatch there and then. When I'm done with the Dean (or he's done with me) I'm going to find that girl with the lump on her head and and ask her out for a walk in the rough (the rough is a technical term for the long grass that borders the fairways). I hope she'll accept -  I'm not going to take a headache as an excuse.

  Here's a shot from the summer, when I'd been camping out on golf courses and cricket pitches, collecting balls.

Look at this. This tiny image of sleeping bag on a golf ball. I found this golf ball. The red markings on it (made by the ball's original owner - most amateur golfers have bright coloured spots on their balls, usually made by marker pens, for identification) resemble the sleeping bag I slept in the night before, the very night before I found this ball. Spooky! That's one of the reasons I'm studying golf course management - a course that manages chance encounters, facilitates coincidences, is purely Pataphysical.