E9 BYE

Topographically speaking Hackney Wick is no island, though, sandwiched between the A12 and the River Lea, it often feels like one. This week we finalised our tactical retreat from London and broke down the print studio... just as everybody else was setting up the weekend's Hackney WickED Festival. We've met more great people in the final few weeks than we did during the two years prior, making it especially difficult to leave.
Occasionally popping to the Pearl for refreshments, we picked up some free papers as keepsakes. Issue 1 of The Hackney Wick skits on the vagaries of the area with cultural assessment from Iain Sinclair and local teens alike. The Cut is part of a broader project which takes an archival approach in mapping the area's socio-economic history (including Speedway, a few failed visions for the future and, ironically, Class War's resistance to gentrification) while simultaneously putting paid to the notion that successive generations obliterate the memory of their forebears.

Objecthood

You don't need to visit a museum to see the way humans invest objects with symbolic currency. An incorrigible hoarder, I've lately tried to penetrate layers of sentiment and see the useless tat beneath. The process puts me in mind of a 36-panel Chris Ware piece which tells the episodic, cyclical tale of a table lamp.



In the 18th century a literary style sprang up around this approach to objecthood, called It-Narratives. Anthropomorphic versions of these narratives tell the fiction "from the perspective of the objects themselves, others use them as hubs around which other characters’ stories are spun."[1].



• Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library #2, summer 1994

• Clifford Still, Lucian Freud (1922-2011), British Vogue 1948

Wishful Living

We were quite happy to be moving to an old post mill until a friend lent us the fantastic Converted Into Houses (Charles A. Fracchia, Thames & Hudson, 1977). Not only did we have to pack and shift it, it brought on a profound bout of space envy too. It consoles me that, almost like savages, none of these homes had an internet connection.

 

• Cigar Factory, New York (x2)
• Lumberyard, California
• Industrial Building, Paris
• Icehouse, Connecticut (x2)
• Cannery, Monterey
• Butterscotch Factory, London

Going, Going, Gone

We may have mentioned it a million times already but, hey, this is a web-log after all! Not much in the way of idle chit-chat this week, just the hard graft and residual doubts* of imminent relocation.

* Actually, this is a crass understatement, we're both completely incapacitated and Edward —a born Londoner— is queazy green with fear.

So Long, Stuff

This week we began dismantling our lives in the promise of reconstructing them elsewhere afresh. Obviously this starts with a radical de-clutter on that latterday Bonfire of the Vanities, eBay. A Maclamp gave good return alongside an old Routemaster destination blind, but David Hicks books got a huge consumer thumbs-down.

Of all the lots though, I was especially sorry to say so long to a cache of posters (mostly travel & tourism from the 1960s but also this WVS public information number from 1956), a totally 80s Janette Beckman photographic print I found on the street, and a heap of wonderfully pretentious art books we'll realistically never read.

• Janette Beckman, Rosemarie, LA 1981
• The Women’s Voluntary Service was set up in 1938 to augment the work of the ARP. This campaign dates from the early years of the Cold War and was instigated ‘to inform one in five of the women between the ages of 16 and 70 in Great Britain of the simple things they could do to protect their homes and families in the event of nuclear attack – should it ever come.’ [Source: District Nursing Archive]

• Richard Hamilton's typographic version of Marcel Duchamp's The Green Box (1934), 1975 (3rd edition of 2500)

Couch Potato

Don't tell the Tories, but I'd pay my TV licence for radio content alone. A bonus then, that Adam Curtis's All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace has been showing these past three weeks on BBC2. If there's an equally compelling counter-thesis, it couldn't be put together with the same abstract, awkward elegance.

Neither did the series culminate in one catch-all, cosy conclusion, it simply finished... with everything still in chaos and the viewer all-at-sea. Luckily there's local hero Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle too, which has been like some acerbic kind of antidote; I can pat myself on the back and laugh at the same time.

Bawden Abroad

Here's some mid/late-period Edward Bawden. Stylistically, they're bolder and more decorative than the studies popularised today. Also altered by the intervening years is their subject, Portugal. The target of violent gangs, visiting Brits were this week urged vigilance.



Motif 9 (1962, Shenval Press) is one of so many wonderful books I nabbed from Griffith & Partners on Great Ormond Street. For years I'd tweak my cycle route to take in their curb-side curios. The owners disavowed the internet age as a torment of listings, trips to the post office and 'customer service'. Now it's an espresso bar.

33.3%

We've been searching frantically for a home these last few months, our rent was rising by a third! Fingers crossed, yesterday we got something. Very expensive, very small and very far away.

I recently got caught in the sights of a local woman who loves nothing better than bawling at total strangers. Her insults can be pretty painful sometimes so I did my best to avoid eye contact. Strange then, that I should've noticed the her spectacular collection of brooches (worn all-at-once on the same jumper). Maybe we're not so different after all.


Unlike the work of Lea Stein, my favourite brooch is not in the least collectable. Originating from a small fishing town in Denmark, Buch & Deichmann’s founder took inspiration from the ‘shiny rings of the moors’ to make bracelets, expanding the full line of accessories in the plastic-loving 80s. These days they make frames for glasses.

Early Bird

I gave up on milk the day a Japanese friend explained that westerners famously smell of cheese! So, although those beautifully blank bottles no longer figure in my fridge, they do feature on the doorstep of Early Bird, our latest print.

With a lingering whiff of nostalgia, the traditional milk bottle has a look I still enjoy in umpteen applications, from the cast concrete bollards outside a dairy to the roughly drawn outlines emptied on Tom & Jerry. So ubiquitous is the symbol that it occasionally jolts my reality when I see one filled with orange juice!

Pound, Shillings, Pence

They're a highbrow bunch up in Shropshire. Our latest stockists, Black Bough, take their name from the Ezra Pound poem, In a Station of the Metro. Run by Adam Withington, the go-to guy during our stint at Great Western Studios, Black Bough takes its cue from the eerier elements of British Modernism. Can't wait for the shop to go online... just check out those bowls!

Similarly, a current group show at Clerkenwell's Rob Tufnell Gallery focuses on the activities and ongoing influence of Vorticism, a term coined by Pound for the British movement quashed at the outbreak of WWI. Under the title of Ken Russell's 1972 biopic of group member, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Savage Messiah exhibits a range of art and artefact (from publishing, periodicals and posters to sculpture, relief and film) spanning the entire tumultuous century.

• Karin Ruggaber, Relief(s) #67, #89, #94, 2008-2010

Savage Messiah
Rob Tufnell at
1 Sutton Lane EC1M 5PU
Wed-Sat, 12-6pm
23 April-23 May 2011

Chewed Toggles

This week Edward suffered a, shall we say, milestone birthday. What with the brown 1970s anorak, you needn't be a time detective to work out which one. This look of abject terror on his face always makes me smile, though I'm glad there's no lingering phobia... he draws all the animals!

Age anxiety aside, we had a good night's eating, killing brain-cells and dancing. Thanks to Hannah, the hard-disc jockey; so many good tracks, shame I can only remember the first and last.

Bunte Eier

• Spine-breaking scans from Bunte Eier aus aller Welt [Colourful Eggs from around the World], Eduard Polak, Harenberg, 1980
N.B. Other religious festivals are available

TGWWGB

I've not been to an opening for a while and when everyone piled into a darkened space for the screening/performance at Saturday's The Great White Way Goes Black, I realised not only how unaccustomed to crowds I've become but how uncommitted to art. Luckily, the 2/3-dimensional pieces from Vilma Gold's all-female hang were easy to view, and included our friend, Hannah Sawtell, Czech-born German artist, Katharina Sieverding (whose four-part photo supplied the show's title) and the criminally underrepresented work of Julia Wachtel.

17 Apr - 29 May
Vilma Gold
6 Minerva Street
London E2 9EH

• Julia Wachtel, Stripes, 2002 (not actually in the show, I just like it).

Enormous Room

Inoculated, collared and neutered, the cat's finally got to venture outside this week. So far it's like she's on a sponsored sniff of one especially enormous room.

  
• Illustrations: Bartram for S. Carmiggelt's Poespas, 1953

1961... and all that

I've been reading (in the latest edition of Frieze) about the creative explosion in Milanese design and the birth of Domus and Abitare in 1961. Also celebrating its 50th year is the Salone del Mobile where Daniel Rybakken will present an installation of his understated ideas. Pictured is Counterbalance, a responsive, repositionable lamp where cogwheels allow the head and counterweight to occupy the same space.

SaloneSatellite
Spazio Rossana Orlandi
at the 50th
Salone de Mobile, Milan
12-17th April 2011

At some stage during the 1980s my mum's boyfriend switched careers from driving instructor to bus driver. One day I found him re-viewing the same videoed scene from some Ealing comedy, transfixed by the black and white trickle of traffic through London's old West End.

• Daniel Buren, Photo/Souvenier, London, 1972

Tea Pottery

My neighbour caught me on the way home from pottery the other night so I showed her my new teapot... she said it looked like a prop from The Flintstones! Admittedly it's a bit brutal and the glaze took on a touch more texture than I would've preferred but I'm still pleased. You can be sure I'll christen it this weekend with a brew.

50th

Good to see Janet Charters' The General (1961) in a handsome new 50th anniversary edition, our grotty 1968 reprint does Michael Foreman's gorgeous illustrations a great disservice. What The General does to promote pacifism during the Cold War, Foreman later does for environmental issues in the prescient, Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish (1972).