Spied but Untried (No.2)

Spied but Untried (No.1)

Post Anticipation

Those pants (see last blog), with their washing-up glove gusset - that strangely stitched together combo – anonymously, stuffed through my letterbox the other day – has alerted me to something that ‘I knew but didn’t know I knew', regarding the disparate relationship between washing-up gloves and pants.

Years ago (in the mid 1980s) I responded to two – unrelated - photographic briefs. The first brief (quite understandably) involved pants, and its aim was to illustrate the slippery relationship, between Water Diviners and Y-fronts. 

The second brief said, Illustrate the saying: ‘Hand in Glove’. This, I interoperated with a washing-up glove. Both subjects – pants and glove – were modeled - or in the case of the pants, ‘dropped’ - by the same model, at the same location - a rocky outcrop – on separate occasions.

It's as if these – at the time, unrelated – briefs, anticipated my Post (of a few days ago); predicted what would come - stitched together as one - through my letterbox, a quarter of a century later. Perhaps the glove sewn into the gusset of the pants is - like some futuristic time-traveler’s underwear - a message from the ‘Briefs of yesteryear’. It's as if the Y-fronts had 'divined my own destiny', and this disparate meeting - of pants and rubber, post, past and future, latex, letterbox, and outcrops - may even have given birth to a new theory – albeit, one based on contradiction - Post Anticipation. 

On the Laws that Govern 'Straw and Order'

I’ve been away for a few days. When I got home this evening I found these ‘adapted pants’, pushed through my letterbox. Here, I made a few brief photographs of them, before stuffing them through my next-door-neighbour’s letterbox.

For some reason these unwanted ‘adapted pants’ (Outsider Art, inside my flat?) made me think of the French writer, Raymond Roussel. Roussel's writing often described peculiar artifacts (he invented some very strange objects and garments for which there was no name) - like a statue made from whalebone corset parts that traveled on railroad tracks made from calf's lungs. 

Roussel’s novels’, ‘Locus Solus’ (Lonely Place) and ‘Impressions of Africa’ (it’s not a travel book) have had a great influence on me at one time or another. I first became interested in Roussel when I read that he’d traveled all the way around the world in a very early form of motor home - a motorized ‘roulette’ (gypsy caravan) - from which he only very rarely alighted: to prove once-and-for-all that external reality had very little influence on his writing. Louis Aragon called Roussel, ‘The Emperor of the Republic of Dreams’. 

Roussel committed suicide in 1933, aged 56 (in relative obscurity). Two years later saw the publication of his ‘secret and posthumous’ literary testament’, ‘How I Wrote Certain Of My Books’. Shortly before his death Roussel had produced a text - a bean-spiller - explaining the ‘very special method’ he’d employed, to write such strange and poetic works. Here’s Roussel introducing 'his method':  

“I have always been meaning to explain the way in which I came to write certain of my books (Impressions d’Afrique, Locus Solus, L’Etoile au Front and La Poussiere de Soleils).

It involved a very special method. And it seems to me that it is my duty to reveal this method, since I have the feeling that future writers may perhaps be able to exploit it fruitfully.

As a young man I had already written stories of some length employing this method.

I chose two almost identical words (reminiscent of metagrams): for example, billiard (billiard table) and pillard (plunderer). To these I added similar words capable of two different meanings, thus obtaining two almost identical phrases…”

As Colin Raff points out: ' Here we perceive Roussel's basic paradigm: an image or idea generating supplemental material, which, through seemingly infinite in scope, will always resolve itself with the original subject'. 

Why am I telling you this? Because I’ve often adopted an adapted version of Roussel’s ‘special method’ when making of my own work. My last blog, ‘Straw and Order’, is an excellent example the ‘Rousselian technique’ – adapted to accommodate photographs - in action.

The Laws that Govern ‘Straw and Order’

I started off with just two initials, PC. I then looked for two opposing PCs, and came up with, Police Constable and Petty Criminal. To this I added similar, rhyming words that were often capable of being related to one another somehow: law and straw, arm and farm and sheep and sleep. Sometimes these word combinations suggested – gave birth to – new words. Restoring became re-strawing, which in turn conceived, thatching. This gave me the storyline; which is basically about, how in order to catch a criminal you have to act like a criminal. I made some linguistic adjustment (discussed above) to what is a very simple plot. ‘To catch a Petty Criminal’ became ‘to thatch a thief’. The actor Cary Grant stared in Hitchcock’s film, ‘To Catch A Thief’. Then I had to find a way of getting both PCs (the Petty Criminal and the Police Constable) into a position where they would ‘grant’ me permission to photograph them ‘clutching’ straw. Cary Grant came in very useful at this point. The straw was contained in a bin-liner – a form of carrier bag. This united Cary with Grant. The criminal and the policeman were thus, both 'carriers' and 'granters'. They were both seen to be literally, and physically, using the Long Arm of the Law, to clutch at straw.

The photographic illustrations were the most difficult part. I had to persuade a policeman, and a criminal, to clutch at the same straw. 

Straw and Order

The Problem (In two parts)
To make two photographs that - when viewed side-by-side - unite opposites. For example: light and dark; good and bad; right and wrong; left and right.

Philosophy: I felt I was clutching at straws with this brief. So I bought a black bin-liner, went to a farm, filled it with straw and used it as a pillow. My best ideas often come to me in my sleep; and I always fall asleep faster when I’m lying in a position– in a field – from which I can count real sheep.

Part One: Next morning I drag the sack of straw to a café, for coffee, where I resist saying: I like my coffee like I like my women. Out of a black bin-liner. The only customer’s a Small Time Crook - a Petty Criminal – a desperate character I’ve known – by sight - since school. He’s sitting there, alone, looking down on his luck. This was both unexpected and fortuitous: it gave me the opening I was looking for: I asked him to clutch at straw. He didn’t exactly jump at the chance, but he agreed to hold it at arm’s length. I take a photograph: Straw-and-Order. He finishes his tea, hands me back my pillow, leaves. The next part’s a piece of cake.

Part Two: I call the police and tell them I have information on the whereabouts of a Known Criminal. They send a Constable, right away (look at the clock, they responded in under an hour). After I’ve spun him a yarn about sheep rustling, I ask the PC if he’ll pose for a photograph - one that best demonstrates, The Long Arm of the Law. I snap the PC clutching my bin-liner, thus re-strawing (thatching? – ‘To Thatch a Thief’, staring Cary Grant; carrier bags...) Straw-and-Order. They’re one and the same, the Petty Criminal and the Police Constable. Both are PC.

Executed by Dental Experts

Diary entry (and photograph), from the late 1980’s: ‘Spent the morning spitting tomato ketchup and mushy peas onto the pavement outside the Dental Executioners’.

There’s a lot of blood spitting and bile, and humans – on all fours – barking, in ‘Dogtooth’ (Yorgos Lanthimos 2009). We watched it again the other night. I could watch it forever. Why can’t we make films like that? A Fritzlesque father keeps his children locked up in a country mansion where they are totally ignorant of the outside world. It’s frighteningly funny. In this hermetically-sealed environment they are taught the wrong words for things: a ‘pussy’ is a bright light that can be switched on, and off; a ‘zombie’ is a small yellow flower; a motorway means a small wind, and an ‘excursion’ is a hard material for coving floors. The children are told that they’ll eventually leave home when their canine teeth – the ‘Dogtooth’ – falls out. In other words: never. It’s wonderful. They throw marble cake over the perimeter hedge, lick shoulders in mistake for ‘keyboards’ (a ‘keyboard’ is a vagina) and one of the daughters – after watching videos of ‘Rocky’ and ‘Jaws’, illicitly smuggled in by a blindfolded security guard, employed to provide sex for the son – becomes a pugilist shark who eventually knocks her own teeth out. There’s fake-blood and real blood, and it's only the passing airplanes in the sky that offer a glimpse of the 'world outside'. The same thing happens at the end of Bunuel's brilliant, 'Simon Of The Desert'. 'Dogtooth' is all very Bunuel: Bunuel with bite.

Enough Rope?

When I first started photography I’d go to an evening class and for one of the first briefs we were required to: Make a portrait of a stranger in uniform. I visited a prison (but I wasn’t a prison visitor; I went to a prison, not, to prison) and said asked if I could use a prison warder to help me re-enact a hanging-vision I kept having: ‘could I borrow a prison warder to help me bring back hanging?’

We found the spot, in a spinney quite close to the parameter wall. There was still an old rope swing hanging from the tree. I took some of the pictures on an old 5x4 plate camera. ‘You look like the hanging judge', the prison warder said, as I pulled the dark cloth over my head.

When I was young we lived near an Open Prison. You could see it across the fields, where I played. Strange to think now, that I dreamed of meeting an escaped prisoner – a bank robber or member of the Baader-Meinhof gang (but in the unlikely event, it would have been a petty-fraudster – a corrupt businessman or some bent solicitor). Nearby there were some specially built houses - a redbrick terrace -, where the prison-waders lived. 

Occasionally, whilst playing in the woods, I’d encounter a prison warder walking home after a shift, or for lunch. There was one I’d see regularly, hanging from a tree. He told me it was for his sciatica. ‘It’s not only the prisoners who do a long-stretch, it’s not only them inside who have to be straightened-out’, he’d quip. It was such a funny thing, to see this prison-warder, in his uniform – keys and all - hanging from a tree (beside a rope-swing). From a distance - and if I hadn’t have known he was doing it for his health - it looked like he’d hung himself.

And it must be made clear: I am not and never have been, in favour of ‘bringing back hanging’. Except, that is, for myself.