stolen objects

ive been burgled and am now in a phase of considering lost objects - specifically my large maglite torch in metalillic, limited edition, green. But you know whats ironic? they used a cow stick to break the security light, the first act in the burglary. Yet again a stick features as a fundamental object. Funny because only this week i was accused of fetishising a stick , which steve, in supportive mode, said to take as a completement as thats quite a difficult thing to do i.e fetishise a stick. So the cow stick has a new narrative layer, and im going to add it to my collection.

My dads breakfast story

I like my dads story it is my equivalent of a wheelbarrow. It makes me think that the idea of sending trainee enginners to work with the men who will later entrust their lives to them was a good thing and probably reduced the number of switching errors. It a made me think of the relationship we have to the land and how because we can manipulate it so much with machinary we think we are more incharge than we are - like the floods in Sheffield in this day and age. it makes 1958 seem like a long time ago. I wish I was good with an axe I'd like to be good with an axe and able to draw so if I ever got the opportunity to do these activities in front of other people who could do them they would say "Boy that bloke is good with an axe" or "He has a good hand look at the way he holds a pencil he is clearly very good at drawing" alas I will never be very good with a pencil or an axe I will just have to become good at living with this fact.

The breakfast

It must have been in late October or early November 1958, I was a student apprentice working for Yorkshire Electricity based at Goole. The student apprenticeship trained its candidates to be electrical engineers for the power industry. They believed that, for an overall knowledge, the apprentice had to work in each discipline within the company.

I had already worked with the electricians on housing and industrial wiring and on appliance repairs. I had also spent the summer working at Ferrybridge power station, (the old little one on the river edge).
So it was me for the overhead line section. The staff had a cowboy attitude; ‘the mail has to get through’ spirit. They were tough no-nonsense men. They constantly bantered with anyone who in their eyes didn’t come up to scratch. As a new boy I had to absorb some of this. I mixed in with the best of them and won respect because I would do anything they had to do and was better than anyone with an axe. This was due to me being a lumberjack for nine months prior to working at YEB.

I loved the work - it was extremely variable; marking out routes, erecting poles, fixing steelwork and pulling out conductors and erecting them. It is strange that all this activity took place without mechanical aids but by manpower. By the time I became an engineer all this was replaced with JCBs, Land Rovers and Simon lifts - now only 4 linesmen are needed in a gang.

So back to the old days: a gang had a ‘Ganger’ who was in overall control and a driver, who did nothing but drive a big lorry that transported men sitting on planks across the lorry and all materials to site. The lorry had a lift-off canvas cover which, when off the wagon, was called ‘a Bivvy’. There were four linesmen who did the climbing and two mates who assisted in the climbing, with three labourers lifting, carrying and digging post holes and stay holes. The oldest labourer was in charge of the Bivvy and the fire and messing facilities.

So, on the first day we drove to site and lifted off the Bivvy to the Ganger’s instructions. He was a man of about 58 years at this time called Raith Penistone and it’s his breakfast. ‘Right lads’, he said, ‘Let’s get to it. Les, get the fire going well - we’re gonna supp’ at 1000 –ish’. Everyone set off to perform different tasks over a three to four hundred yard area of open fields. Les Asp was in charge of the fire. This was known as a ‘Fire Devil’ - it was the size of a five gallon oil drum with holes in it to let in the air. Les chopped firewood from scrap poles and lit it in the Fire Devil. We were supplied with coke which was then put in and the whole devil glowed with raw heat until we left site at 1500. Raith blew a whistle at 1000, ‘Get yer arses here’, he shouted, ‘We’ve only got fifteen minutes’.

Raith, being head man, was first to the fire. He carried a shovel which they all used called a ‘Grafter’, designed originally for draining. All the shovels were bright from use. He went into his snap box and took out a large parcel then looked at me grinned and said, ‘This’ll do, they belly good but tha int havin any’. He wiped his shovel on his coat-sleeve, removing most of the mud but not all. ‘What’s tha looking at lad?’ he said to me, ‘It’ll be sterilized in a minute’. He put the shovel on top of the fire. Steam came off after a couple of minutes, the blade was very hot. He opened his snap box, took out a large lump of ham and tossed it onto the plate. He then removed an egg and smashed it, shell and all, onto the ham. It sizzled away merrily. He removed two large slices of white thick bread, placed the ham and egg with shell between the slices and began eating. ‘He’s a real gourmet cook is our Raith, an no mistake’, one of the men said.

After about fifteen to twenty minutes Raith stood up shouted back to work, ‘You lazy buggers’, and peed onto the fire. A cloud of fumes was emitted and everyone dived for the outside. ‘Was that for my benefit?’, I asked someone. ‘It’s for no bugger’s benefit’, was the reply, ‘The daft bugger does it every day’. And he did. He was still doing it in 1965 when I, by then an engineer, shook his hand as he retired. He said to me then, ‘You want ser bad lad but we’ve had some shite doing yer job’.


Gordon Pool
October 2007

i ate it and now i feel a bit sick

Here you are steve, photo really a bit duff but you get the idea, the top one is from memory/ imagination, i deliberately didnt cook one first to inform my visual memory, so its proper true. The bottom one is as i ate, outlines of food and plate as it changed - the activity recorded, no rubbing out, just line overlay. Hope you like them or at least it does what you want .
Just want to say i dont eat fry ups, well hardly ever and so i feel a but sick, also though this is my perfect fry up combination, crispy bacon, fried egg no runny bits, on fried bread and beans. The beans i eat first as their my least fav and then i combine the bacon egg and bread, which is odd for me because i normally eat in order of least fav to best so obviously cant decide between the bacon, egg and bread.
oh my god i can feel im slipping into this......................

Becoming Sausage

Not put off by fear of OCD I post a becoming sausage. But you must take this with a pinch of salt. So Kate - engagement - if we define something or even bring it into existence by measuring it does your idea of the body as scale represent a sort of soft measurement system? If this is the case is this an exploration of space and our personal relationship to it through scale. Is there a connection between the personal relationship to a site and the a bit of what you fancy methodological approach to creating or perhaps defining a library of measures. On a higher level is the project saying something about the personal and the external and giving back control of measurment to it's funtion rather than an external established set of rules.

An imagined breakfast

I. Imagining the full English breakfast

Sausages –
so long since I’ve eaten real sausages that I can’t remember how they taste and all I think of is the plate heaped high at my sister’s house, succulent and freckled black and brown, steaming and sweating fat; or cartoon sausages in Beano comics, slightly curved and strangely phallic, tucked into a bed of mashed potato and slathered in thick brown gravy, whose viscous meaty bitterness I can still remember from Aunty Dolly’s house after all these years.

Nowadays sausages means
veggie sausages, thin pink frankfurters plumping up in the boiling water, their smooth, rounded sides pockmarked as they overboil, their smoky taste turning to sawdust held together with salty glue once they are anything less than piping hot; or the herby, peppery heft of vegetarian Lincolnshire sausages, not quite fatty enough, but succulent and spicy; or the gritty textured sos-mix cooked in tetrahedrons because that’s the only shape I can roll them into, burnt on the outside and tender inside, textured like couscous; sausages dipped in grainy beery mustard, snuggled up on the plate next to the fried egg, ballerina-frilly skirt bubbled and browned around the edges, plump yellow bodice ready to burst open at the slightest touch of the fork and spread glimmering trails over the bacon, stiff and straight with artificial fat slightly browned and the tasteless cardboard texture of the wound-red veggie rasher.

But the mushrooms –
it’s worth the whole meal just for the mushrooms: pale grey flesh flecked with the black of freshly ground pepper, smelling earthy and oily and glistening with juices, as succulent and flavoursome as their aroma suggests, the perfect complement to a thick slice of white bread, soft and doughy, soaking up the thin dark juice, salty fresh and earthy, and the streaky yellow of the egg, the sharp juice of the tomato that nestles almost under the sausages, soft and yielding and slightly burnt on top.

I. Imagining the full English breakfast

Sausages –
so long since I’ve eaten real sausages that I can’t remember how they taste and all I think of is the plate heaped high at my sister’s house, succulent and freckled black and brown, steaming and sweating fat; or cartoon sausages in Beano comics, slightly curved and strangely phallic, tucked into a bed of mashed potato and slathered in thick brown gravy, whose viscous meaty bitterness I can still remember from Aunty Dolly’s house after all these years.

Nowadays sausages means
veggie sausages, thin pink frankfurters plumping up in the boiling water, their smooth, rounded sides pockmarked as they overboil, their smoky taste turning to sawdust held together with salty glue once they are anything less than piping hot; or the herby, peppery heft of vegetarian Lincolnshire sausages, not quite fatty enough, but succulent and spicy; or the gritty textured sos-mix cooked in tetrahedrons because that’s the only shape I can roll them into, burnt on the outside and tender inside, textured like couscous; sausages dipped in grainy beery mustard, snuggled up on the plate next to the fried egg, ballerina-frilly skirt bubbled and browned around the edges, plump yellow bodice ready to burst open at the slightest touch of the fork and spread glimmering trails over the bacon, stiff and straight with artificial fat slightly browned and the tasteless cardboard texture of the wound-red veggie rasher.

But the mushrooms –
it’s worth the whole meal just for the mushrooms: pale grey flesh flecked with the black of freshly ground pepper, smelling earthy and oily and glistening with juices, as succulent and flavoursome as their aroma suggests, the perfect complement to a thick slice of white bread, soft and doughy, soaking up the thin dark juice, salty fresh and earthy, and the streaky yellow of the egg, the sharp juice of the tomato that nestles almost under the sausages, soft and yielding and slightly burnt on top.

la la la la America

Well paper got excepted for Boston so we have to do something now - I'm concerned about my Carbon footprint if we end up flying. I think they will like the English breakfast thing in notions of the other. Spent today carving a breakfast - it's made from Geleton a grainless wood traditionally used to cut patterns for sandcasting - felt more like prop making than carving but I like it and it made me look closer. It's good to have Tim making comments he clearly thinks about it - or perhaps he just needs some egg and bacon round at our house rather than all them french croissants.

painted breakfast

Liked Kates comments about funtion - takes me back to right tool for the right Job as my dad would always say. All the things people have to make because the job is so specific the tool doesn't exist - like Tesco direct or the wheelbarrow. Spades and forks are interesting because if you have to use them a lot tiny differences make a massive difference to how effective they are. So we have a rifinement of tool as a job gets more specific. This also reminds me of Damian Hirst chemists cabint - where it looked pretty accurate but was organised in authentically as the drugs were plced in it by the artist who did not consider the practicalities of dispensing drugs. Kim is clear she collects real objects for the museum - the Narrative is important but she thinks the object exists without it - we know it has a narrative because it's there so we have no need of a specific narrative or a real story to make it real -

lead in my shoes

Reading this book about Socrates today and one of his followers got so stressed by the question "This statement is a lie" that he lost loads of weight and had to put lead in his shoes to stop himself blowing over in the wind. At least I got so stocked up on fried breakfast last week I won't have to do this if I get over concerned about the third breakfast. Thinking about funny measure I remembered those people who jump over things on moter bikes like double deckers
Evel Knievel Stunt Set

Just had a chat with

Rachel Reynolds at Clifton Park.
She thinks that the object is less important than the narrative and while you can have narratives without objects, you cannot have objects without narratives.
Just stirring.
She thinks objects are 'props' to keep narratives alive.
Is the blog an electronic object?
Bruno Latour would say that this blog has a 'thing-like' status' that is separate from the separate traces that encircle it like spiders' webs.
This reminds me of Clifford Geertz who famously said that
'man[sic] is an animal encased within webs of signifiance'.
The Interpretation of Cultures (1993).
Fab book.
Your mind will be blown by Notes on a Balinese Cockfight which is in that book.
If you have not yet read it RUSH to Amazon.
Have booked 8.08 in the Education building for our meeting on the 17th.

Look at me mam I'm king of the blog

The standard Kilogram is apparently getting lighter but as it is the standard the kilogram is getting lighter. When you fish a lot you get to be able to guess the wieght of fish - this allowed me to get to within a few pounds on all my babies. When you do a lot of plumding your wrists become more like a tork wrench and you learn how tight to do up compression fittings so they don't leak. The body learns how to measure things finer through experience so how much salt to put on food or how much marmite to put on toast. Is it the body as a frame of reference rather than an imposed scale - like the rulers and pecks and chains - do these seem more human as they are based on an older archaic system? Do you want me to dig out the measurments makes things real artical from ne scientist? As I'm now self elected king of the Blog I include the cast white breakfast for discussion.

The Agony and the extesy

When I said that thing about not talking about the measurement idea I meant on the Blog not in real life. So the post was a change of use of this space which is a development. Sorry not to be of more help. Perhaps we need to set up a period of postings which are more focused on the work and the ideas behind them and less broad - which is why my tree picture didn't feel right - just takes us off at to many tangents. The thing is I'd have to talk about breakfast again as I'm an obsesive.

if it succesful what does it do?

tonight i mostly hate art, thinking and talking
and steve i think your wrong about being able to post up ponderings and no im not keeping ideas to myself, i am considering quietly. Why are my questions different to yours?
Again i reitterate, i find art hard, 99% of the time i am frustrated and disappointed with my abilty to make some thing that means the title to this small post is not asked.

Funny thing this

I've done this thing for the last few years with every piece of work I've produced to try and illicet peoples stories. In the "what were you doing when "exhibition at Rotherham I did the Sep 11th postcards. A woman had written that at the time of the twin towers her daughter was in a coma after giving birth to twins and she was visiting her - high up -in the wards of the Hallamshire hospital next to this card her daughters card read -" I was in a coma- wish I hadn't woken up."

In Pigeon Stories the son a missionaries who had grown up in post war Kenya talked of his affection for the birds which kept hunger at bay and gave him something to do as he hunted in the landscape of his youth.

Which brings me back to breakfast. It seems like everybody has a story about everything like in my seminal piece "Thermos stories" the woman who had broken her fathers treasured thermos and instead of owning up had placed the broken thermos on the edge of a table where she new it would get knocked off and had avoided punishment but learnt about guilt.

Anyway I'm not sure if I can write my dads breakfast story -which is brilliant and involves braziers and shovals and spit and shirt sleeves and broken eggs and gammon and calcium incase Kate uses exclamation marks (I told Kim about this and she said she would like to say to kate"Welcome to my world") but this strand is interesting as provinence is becoming narative and the materiality perhaps is the connection of people to things and this can only happen through lived experience which becomes narrative and we are exploring this- which is good mostly.

Hymes

I like this post and you and Kate's insistence on the thing itself, un-adorned by narrative.
This reminds me of Del Hymes, one of the world's great ethnographers. He was obsessed with ways in which life can become narrative:
The view of narrative as an iterative form, I take from Hymes, who described an incident from his personal life where,

…one often saw a bit of experience becoming an event to be told, being told and being retold until it took shape as a narrative, one that might become a narrative told by others. (Hymes 1996:118)

Hymes developed his concept of narrative using his experiences of living amongst a group of Native Americans where he had a house. He produced this passage to describe what he learnt from them. He linked narrative to wider and more fundamental forms of life,

There is a current movement to go beyond collection and analysis of texts to observation and analysis of performance. That is essential, but perhaps only the second moment of three…Continuous with the others, this third is the process in which performance and text live, the inner substance to which performance is the cambium, as it were, and the crystallized text the bark. It is the grounding of performance and text in a narrative view of life – that is to say, a view of life as a source of narrative. (Hymes 1996:118)

The fourth breakfast

Not happy with the third breakfast discourse I push the boundaries further into the realms of OCD and suggest that perhaps we should shift focus to the highly contentious Fourth breakfast which only exists in the fifth space. Only kidding. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The body as a measure stuff sounds like a really strong idea but you have until now been a little reticent to discus it as a concept (I don't think this can be put down solely to my breakfast obsesion). I think this may be because you have a feeling about something - an idea that this is interesting - it's a very strong and simple focus which has a lot of connections to all the stuff we talk about but I wonder if you think by saying it out loud as words or text you will lesson it. It feels like a seed you need to water and let grow. I think we have both decided that we have to bring things into the world - that this is why we do what we do - I'm not comfortable talking directly about ideas so I wrap them up in irony this is how I've always worked and lived. I don't think you do this but in a way we are both looking for an honesty and a freedom of expression. I don't think I can help you with the work until you make it real I do however think that lots of the stuff which feels like secondary practise like the Aura scoring ' and the picture hanging ideas are free and liberating and quite good. We both have a lot of angst when it comes to making personal practise - I always have had - is this a bit newer for you? - didn't you have a similar thing in Japan? So I don't think we can get very far using the BLOGG to help discuss the actual work it's more about leaving a record - maybe we should do the crit thing at the gallery - both get some stuff to show and then build on the idea of a mid point crit to help us push the thinking a bit further. And I think the etching of the T bag at least it's digital representation looks fantastic and can you run me one off for crimbo. This said maybe Kate could talk about the idea from her perpective as an ethnographer.

hey have started making new work and yesterday made this etching - its the contents of one pg tips tea bag - ie a measure of tea for one person. I am interested in the idea of man as a measure but dont want to think in terms of fixed offical measures. So i dont think the the tea bag works because its not personal, also i know a metre on me so i can measure fabric , but better ones are : me dad knows the height barbed wire fence needs to be against himself, his belly button. Or my friend allison knows if the the choke chain fits her head it fits her dog when buying a new one. Does a pinch of salt work ? What am i trying to say or do? spatial maps - man as the measure? How does all this fit my representing the landscape? or the farm. Yes i know it fits in terms of how it looks the dividing of space but what else? DOes it fit as a record of ephemeral things a collection of the unoffical?
Also i was thinking of documenting all the sticks we use on the faarm - the walnutting stick, the cows sticks as seen earlier, the planting things straight stick, So then i suppose why not all the string or rope we use?
I feel confused please post me a comment all we do is talk about bloody steves breakfast!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We the dead

This has no place on our Blog really but we foound this tree in the woods and it made us think about sedemented layers of meaning and growing history