Some months ago, it was suggested by the Corporation of London that the best way of dealing with the pigeons fouling the high-rise on the twelth floor of which the International Necronautical Society has its HQ was to drape netting over the whole building, cap-a-pied. Having spent a year researching the history of cartography with a view to mapping death - researching this history in all its details, from the variations between Mercator, Petersen and Polar Gnomonic map projections to the question of graticule to instances of blank and one-to-one scale maps (Lewis Carrol’s oeuvre is awash with these) - INS staff were intrigued by the prospect of having a grid square superimposed over their splendid view of the world’s greatest city. They were, however, even more appalled by the thought of working in what would effectively become a cage, and lobbied the Corporation to opt for an alternative method of pigeon control. read the rest of this article
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“In that, to be able to read a line ‘as a line’, we first have to posit the areas where there are no lines; within and upon the picture plane, as non-object field. A field which, for line to speak, is required to be read as mute and empty of characteristics, over and above that required to allow line centre stage as the apparent site of all meaning.” Gordon Shrigley, Spatula
, How Drawing Changed the World, London: Marmalade, 2004, p.116
At centre of the moving image lies a technological desire for transparency, a need to obliterate a consciousness of the ‘line’. One can see that modern art rooted much of its practice in revealing the line, the edge, of exposing its duplicity in the production of absence and presence. Montage, theorized by Sergei Eisenstein in terms of the cinema, pervaded the modernist movement in the form of Cubism, the use of collage, and so on. The force of modernist art made lines and edges apparent, boundaries were put under constant stress, where the line, a divide between part-images, between fragments of images, split and gathered together images and words, engaging with the production of meaning based a dialectics of conflict.
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Ben Wilson paints little acrylic paintings on discarded chewing gum that has been stamped into the pavement. His pictures are emblems of contemporary social life – some are declarations of love, some commemorate the absent or dead, some celebrate a gang or the bonds of friendship, others record memories or tokens of identity.
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