NOTES: metaphor as a viaduct

spread from the upcoming work stormy seas and calm waters

The other way to rethink the word-thing relation is to look at the material roots of metaphorical language, and metaphor stands at the heart of all useful, meaningful descriptive language. The Greek linguistic roots of the term metaphor denote a "carrying across." Just as physical bridges are built over rivers, there are verbal viaducts that carry us across the physical experiences of our lives. We use language to bring us to some farther shore, to help make sense of events and experiences. The metaphor of "metaphor" is that it is based on physical, spatial activity.

The Materiality of Metaphor: On Words and Things (In this extract from his recent book, A History of Religion in 5½ Objects, S. Brent Plate discusses the grounding of language and meaning, especially metaphor, in bodily experience)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Words : STOICHEDON

Words : BOUSTROPHEDON

Boustrophedon ( /ˌbaʊstrɵˈfiːdən/ or /ˌbuːstroʊˈfiːdən/;

 ”ɓuᴉuɹnʇ-xo“ uopēɥdoɹʇsnoq ‘νόδηφορτσυοβ ʞǝǝɹ⅁ ɯoɹɟ

from βοῦς, bous, “ox” and στροφή, strophē, “turn”; that is,

ןɐuoıʇɔǝɹıp-ıq ɟo puıʞ ɐ sı '(ƃuıɥƃnoןd uı uǝxo ǝʞıן ƃuıuɹnʇ

 text, mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions. 

pǝsɹǝʌǝɹ ɥʇıʍ 'pǝsɹǝʌǝɹ ɹo pǝddılɟ sı ɓuıʇıɹʍ ɟo ǝuıl ɹǝɥʇo ʎɹǝʌƎ

 letters. Rather than going left-to-right as in modern English,

uı sǝuıl ǝʇɐuɹǝʇlɐ 'ʍǝɹqǝH puɐ ɔıqɐɹ∀ uı sɐ ʇɟǝl-oʇ-ʇɥɓıɹ ɹo

boustrophedon must be read in opposite directions. Also, 

˙pǝɹoɹɹıɯ ɹo 'pǝsɹǝʌǝɹ ǝɹɐ sɹǝʇɔɐɹɐɥɔ lɐnpıʌıpuı ǝɥʇ

The wooden boards and other incised artifacts of Rapa Nui

 ,oǫᴎoɿoǫᴎoЯ bɘ||ɒɔ ƚqiɿɔꙅ ɔiᴎobɘʜqoɿƚꙅuod ɒ ɿɒɘd oꙅ|ɒ

which remains undeciphered. In Rongorongo the text in

 ᴎɒʜƚ ɿɘʜƚɒɿ ꙅɘɘɿǫɘb 08 bɘƚɒƚoɿ ꙅɒw ꙅɘᴎi| ɘƚɒᴎɿɘƚ|ɒ

mirrored; this is termed reverse boustrophedon.

  .ᴎobɘʜqoɿƚꙅuod ɘꙅɿɘvɘɿ ᴎi ᴎɘƚƚiɿw ꙅi ɘboɔ ᴎooM

Harland Miller @ White Cube

... I have always seen books as ornaments, as objects in themselves, irrespective of the writing inside inside them, and so as such I'm going to have them on my shelves at home - the same way some people might have vases - and when I paint them it's kind of like painting still life, and the titles for the show I've done of those book jacket pictures come from the fly leaves of actual books I've found...(p.33, Harland Miller, ILG)

Kiev: something old, something new, books, art and Ukraine

(II International Arsenal Book Festival in Kiev) + (two suitcases of the most beautiful work from the MA Book Arts graduates of Camberwell College of Arts, UAL)

Random reflections on the experience:
1. Kiev is an extraordinary city, with superb food, warm people (and radiators), splendid architecture, a whiff of the Soviet past. A fine fusion of the old and the new and the borrowed and the blue.

2. Unsurprisingly, in preparation to the show things did not go to the plan: some shoddy paintwork, wrong angles, etc.  It must be in the nature of things not go to the plan - England or Ukraine. I am yet to experience a miracle of flat plasterwork and seamless paintwork.
3. Against all the odds - the stand looked superb. The best. (see the next post on the Art of Book and Book Arts).

Александр Сухолит loaned us some Übercool plinths. Black is a useful colour.

4. I met some inspirational people and it has been a lesson in many areas. It has also been an intensive course of Russian - total immersion, as they call it in linguistics. I have revived my nearly extinct knowledge of the language - and it was a good laugh too. Thanx to all involved!

Мистецький Арсенал, Kyiv

Margaret Cooter, Fanfan Yang, Maya Ohashi, Di Suo, Yue Li, Karen Apps, Jing Yao, Xizhi Li, Janet Marie Bradley, Shou Wei Tsai, Carolina Diaz Carmona, Mariana Valenca, George Cullen, Roland Brauchli, Egidija Čiricaitė.

Egidija Čiricaitė

Egidija Čiricaitė

Margaret Cooter, Fanfan Yang, Maya Ohashi, Di Suo, Yue Li, Karen Apps, Jing Yao, Xizhi Li, Janet Marie Bradley, Shou Wei Tsai, Carolina Diaz Carmona, Mariana Valenca, George Cullen, Roland Brauchli, Egidija Čiricaitė.

Егідія Ціріцайте «Мистецтво створення дизайну книг»
"Masterclass" on book design - it was a new and very positive experience to teach the audience this size. 

Егідія Ціріцайте «Мистецтво створення дизайну книг»
"Masterclass" on book design - it was a new and very positive experience to teach the audience this size.  

Churchill's letters @ Chartwell

On Sunday we ended up at Chartwell - Churchill's home since 1920.
"This must be very good" I thought, as we fought our way through the coachloads of anglophile French and Japanese tourists as well as WI groups from the shires. The house was so full, one could only trail like an ant in a very English orderly line along the marked route. I was only pleased that NT failed to cancel our membership last week and we did not have to pay for the experience.
On the positive side, Churchil's studio was almost empty and much more interesting too. Especially the letters at the end.
Here is one on the foreign names:

1. The principle at “A” is entirely disagreeable to me. I do not consider that names that have been familiar for generations in England should be altered to study the whims of foreigners living in those parts (true, we call England Anglija, Poland Lenkija and Germany Vokietija). Where the name has no particular significance, the local custom should be followed. However, Constantinople should never be abandoned, though for  stupid people Istanbul may be written in brackets after it (competing with Prince Phillip in rhetoric?). As for Angora, long familiar with us through the Angora Cats, I will resist to the utmost of my power its degradation to Ankara.
2. You should note, by the way, the bad luck which always persues peoples who change the names of their cities   Fortuna is rightly malignant to those who break with the traditions and customs of the past. (auch. Think of all the Eastern Europe towns that have been named and renamed at least twice in the last hundred years: local names, Nazi names, Soviet names. So how come, it is Greece and Spain who are in so much shit now?) As long as I have a word to say in the matter Ankara is banned, unless in brackets afterwards. If we do not make a stand we shall in a few weeks be asked to call Leghorn Livorno, and B.B.C. will be pronouncing Paris Paree. Foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names (indeed). I date this minute from St. George’s day.

Here is another note:

                    

Elizabeth Price @ Baltic, Newcastle

I never use songs because of their words – but I do try to use songs with an effective, generic
pop sentiment, or a certain ersatz emotion, and to connect that strange, strong attachment or feeling to another narrative. (Elizabeth Price)

The videos are great. They are probably as close as a video can get to an artist's book. A book with a sound.*

The one right at the back was about the things: User Group Disco. All it shows is a mesmorizing sequence of everyday objects spinning to the music. The objects are lit with that British Museum kind of light that makes them resemble important sculptural artefacts. You would be forgiven for thinking you are watching a documentary! The imagery is punctuated with her trademark snippets of text that drop in here and there. Like flicking trough a book. A Christie's catalogue.
Very simple. Very detached. Very engaging.

USER GROUP DISCO, 2009 (15 mins) This video is part of a series in which each episode constructs a section of a ruined museum. This work opens in the ‘Hall of Sculptures’ and is a fantasy narrative played out through objects, neglected items of kitsch and consumer goods and artefacts that swirl in the darkness like floating debris. These various utensils and ornaments drift through categories of definition and, in so doing, gradually generate other spaces and narratives. A distinctive rhythmic soundtrack completes the work.

The following text is an edited (twice!) interview between Elizabeth Price and Alessandro Vincentelli, BALTIC Curator of Exhibitions and Research.

AV: Each of the three works in the exhibition is constructed around a different spatial concept or place: the auditorium, the Hall of Sculptures (from an institution or museum), and, in the newest work, the bottom of the sea. How did you intend the viewer to experience these?

EP: I want the viewing space to exist as a parallel or mirroring space to the place constructed within the video, the fictional location proposed or established through the narrative. The title of the show, Here , refers to this. Each of the video’s narrators repeatedly calls the fictional place they are describing ‘here’. They insist upon the real presence of the fantasy location – but in doing so, I think they actually disrupt that fantasy, because they remind the viewer of the empirical ‘here and now’ of the viewing space, and of their own embodied reality. I called the show Here to co-name the two contingent but distinct ‘heres’ of the work.

AV: In your videos you don’t use people, you use objects. Are you more at home working with archives or museums, and with the meanings that objects have?

EP: I usually appropriate objects that do not belong to me personally, which I think are powerful or important. I take possession of them through art, and adapt them to tell other stories, although I usually draw upon their own existing, archived histories to do this. My work is about people and histories, but not individuals – it’s about people as collective forces or voices and how we emerge as such through material culture. This is why I use objects (in which category I would include melodies and writings).

AV: With several of your films you are creating a very particular kind of space in the work, one
that seems to be informed by film genres. Are science fiction films or horror films an influence
for you?

EP: I’m interested in the kinds of complex imaginary spaces constructed in science fiction. Each of my videos is constructed around a spatial principle, which is the ‘here’ the narrators refer to. In fact the narrative often comprises little more than establishing imaginary places and moving through them.

AV: The third section of the film Choir continues the research from the first two. With this you
have drawn on a powerful real event, a fire in a Woolworths department store in Manchester in May 1979. What was it that drew you to this?

EP: The image that links the three films is one of an expressive hand gesture. The image from the Woolworths fire of women waving from windows for help was the first image I came across of the three. I remember it from the time; I saw it in a newspaper when I was a child. When I was looking at the image of the Shangri Las doing their sombre, enigmatic dance, and wondering why I was so fascinated by it, I remembered this newspaper image. At the same time I was reading about ecclesiastical architecture – for no good reason, other than being interested in the arcane terminology – and I came across a similar image in that context. To some extent, it was a coincidence.

AV: Your use of text draws from a whole range of sources, from artistic manifestos to advertising scripts.

EP: I really enjoy finding and reading arcane texts. I like technical vocabularies and take pleasure in the formal qualities of strange or new words, how they sound or look on the page. The script for West Hinder drew from car manuals and press releases, and that for Choir (Part 1) drew on essays on ecclesiastical architecture. In each of these sources, a different kind of language has been used very precisely to name things, to build complex ideological worlds.

AV: What were the sources for the range of objects and artefacts in User Group Disco?

EP: I collected all the objects over several years, because they seemed redundant in some way: damaged, outmoded, useless or excessive. I didn’t initially collect them in order to make the video – and many objects in the ‘collection’ do not appear in the video.

AV: The motif of the spiral or the turntable recurs in User Group Disco. Why is that?

EP: The ‘pivotal’ object in the video is the turntable and this is used to animate the other objects, which rotate and swirl in the darkness. Hence the reference to ‘disco’ in the title. In The Form of the Phonograph Record’ (1934) Theodor Adorno describes the phonographic record as a strange and terrible science fiction object, in words which seem to evoke a whirlpool. This text, with its prophetic tone and paternal attitude, was the key for all the others. credits and funders.

(from the exhibition brochure)

P. S. October 22, 2012 - a follow up from Tate Britain.


* which suggests that an average codex book is a video without a sound. A customizable kind of video -  where the viewer can toggle the scenes as he pleases.

Words : SILLYBOI...

... (regardless of what you may think) is a Greek term for title tags, that were attached to the upper edge of the papyrus scroll. The titles and author's names were written at the end of the book, therefore the reader had to unroll the whole scroll before they reached the information. Sillyboi  (sillybos, sittybos) allowed the them to access this information quickly - much like reading the spine of a modern book.