Rehearsals For An Unrealised Photograph

Rehearsals - two eve droppers, two glasses, two double beds, one coupling  – for a photograph that was never in the end realised.

I'm A Real Artist Now

On Friday 13^th of November 1987 I almost cut off my right ear. The accident happened on a golf course, but it had nothing to do with golf: it was the result of a climbing accident - on a golf course - but it was more about art; done in the name of Art. And as I was sitting in hospital - waiting to have my ear sewn on again – I thought: I’m a real artist now.

Pronounced Ear Surgery

This billboard’s confusing image/text pair is, ear (something that you cut off), and year (something that flies by). Pay attention to the beginning sound, ye, and the vowel combination, ear.

To say the word ear correctly, move your lips from a smile, to a rounded position.

To see the word ear correctly, place the torn-off ear over the letter Y, in year.

To say the word year correctly, think of these two things: (1) start with the ye sound, as in yes, and (2) move your lips from a smile, to a rounded position.

To see the word year correctly, leave the torn-off ear-of-paper on the pavement, beneath the billboard, where you found it.

Give it a try; people will notice the difference. Unless you come from South Wales (as half my family does), where ears are pronounced, ‘yeears’. If all else fails, you can undergo surgery against pronounced ears.  

Foot And Mouth Picture

A foot and mouth picture, from my ‘wheelchair period’. Media: toothpaste on a black and white photograph. Method: using my toenails as nibs, I scratched away at the surface of the photograph, whilst at the same time, spitting toothpaste at the image.

Usurpers

Two ‘found’ images: a postcard of a rock-face; Samson's Ribs, Holyrood Park, Edinburgh, with the university student halls of residence in the foreground (circa 1975), and an illustration from a Boy Scouts Annual (1940). Both images are connected; the original intentions of both have been usurped. Usurper: a type of snake? If it isn’t it should be.

A Boy Scout appears to be pulling a girl – a Girl Guide: guiding a Girl Guide to her death? And a student bedroom ejaculates ectoplasm (in reality, an abrasion on the postcard’s surface) across ‘Samson’s Ribs’. 

It is also interesting to note the similarity between the slant of the ‘pulled Guide’ and the slant of the bedroom windows. But these snake-like usurpers - when considered side-by-side - are in turn usurped by the correspondence between the outlines of the cliffs (in backgrounds of both images).

Samson's Ribs

Girl Guided (pulling a girl?)

It Was My Leg I Broke

In hospital: the physiotherapists, they stretched me, but my dad - when he visited - he’d sketch me. Model patient? I don’t think so. He’s my dad, knows I'm a man - he made me, but look: he drew me (reproduced me?) as a woman. No – a transvestite: a trannie in traction with an erection: it was my leg, not my dick I broke.

This kind of mistake, it could happen by accident in a photograph – telegraph poles growing out of heads and so on - but it shouldn’t be going on in a drawing; where every mark is deliberately made, and can be erased if it looks wrong. 

Look. Consider this drawing: a military man on a camp bed, with a snake on his lap. Two things stand out: (1) The military man maybe on a camp bed, but he doesn’t look at all in any way, ‘camp’. (2) The said man has a snake on his lap, but the snake, it doesn’t signify a dick. Maybe I was a model patient after all? And the model patient’s situation was a frightful one. 

Dress Rehearsal for an Undressed Photograph

Woman saying goodbye to her mandolin? A touching moment, it reminded me of a De Chirico; reminded me of La Jetee; reminded me of another photo - one of the first (and worst) black and white photos I ever took (for a project called, ‘People at Work’) – an Old man touching-up his Princess (an Austin Princess).

Both images were heavily criticised because they were faceless. It was at this point I adopted, what the critic A.D. Colman has termed, ‘the directorial mode’. But I wouldn’t invent a photograph (what an absurd idea); I’d take a photograph to record something I (we) already did – as a kind of ‘ladder to an idea’. 

Here’s the dress rehearsal for ‘Sex Mechanic’, a photograph - inspired by the embrace of a mandolin and the touching-up of a Princess - that required the actors to appear in a state of undress.