What Are You? – Society’s categories and labels

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I am currently attending a residency in Vermont Studio Center, Vermont USA. The residency invites up to 75 writers and artists to participate in their own studio practice for a predetermined amount of time in the company of other creative practitioners. During the first week, we, the aforementioned practitioners, have engaged in introductory conversations around the dinner tables etc, spouting the usual introductory dinner-table questions, e.g. “What’s your name?”, Where are you from?” etc. One recurring question has caused me an abundance of consternation time and again. That question is “What are you?”

The residency in Vermont accepts proposals for projects in writing, painting or sculpture as broad overall fields. Thus the expected answer to this question is “writer”, “painter” or “sculptor”. My general answer to the question is “artist”. This is a bit of a dodge, and isn’t entirely true, but it serves a purpose. It doesn’t satisfy most interrogators though, as it fails to conform to the predetermined categorisation of “writer”, “painter” or “sculptor”, and I have met with some objection to this vague retort. The outright correct answer to “What are you?” would probably be simply “human”.

It should be pointed out that the spoken emphasis on the question at Vermont Studio Center is on the “you”, i.e. “What are you?” This emphasis infers a certain understanding that the “you” in question falls under a predetermined category (painter, sculptor, writer). The actual question that is being asked is “What category do you fall under in order to attend this residency programme?”, but it is abbreviated for swiftness of delivery in a conversation. The question becomes something completely different if the emphasis is placed in the “are”. It then becomes “What are you?”. This question seems somewhat derisive, inferring that you are perhaps not human at all, but some malformed hybrid concoction of an entity that requires definition.

The reason this question gives me such reserve is in its delivery. A straight answer is expected, but a straight answer can’t be honestly given. It’s like the question that is more common in Ireland, “What do you do?”, which might be most accurately answered by saying “eat, sleep and breathe”. The desired answer here would normally be your occupation, or your regular past-time, or the area that you have achieved a qualification in. However, this can’t be an accurate answer for any individual, as most people fill their time in a variety of ways. If someone spends every waking hour of every day making carboard boxes, then I would accept “I am a cardboard box maker” as an answer, but even then that person would still sleep, eat, drink and breathe or they would fail to exist.

Applying labels is often dismissive, as can be seen when right-wing commentators describe figures like Barack Obama as a “communist” or “socialist”. The word is used due to Obama’s leftist stance on certain issues, and is selected as a negative term to categorise Obama with a political system that is seen as negative within America. In this case the label is used as a form of derisive stereotyping based on capitalist views of what socialism is based on the last 100 years of international history.

“Who are you?” might be a more accurate question than “What are you?”, but it has just as vague a line of definition. Who you are speaks more about a person’s cultural, ethnic or historical background, as well as the things that the person does to help define their personality. This is a small obsession that I have noticed since arriving in America. Regularly you will ask a person about themselves and they will tell you about both themselves and half their family tree.

I recently asked a lady where she was from and she answered “Brooklyn, but my grandmother was from Scotland and my grandfather was from Guatemala.” I hadn’t asked about her paternal lineage, but it seemed pertinent to her to share that information nonetheless. Who you are is more about the present than the past, but the mixed cultural heritage of America leads Americans to regularly digress into long lines of lineage without thinking about it.

“Who are you?”

“I’m a half-Spanish half Papua New Guinean lady who sails a tow-boat off the coast of South Africa three times a week after enduring fifteen hour flights from Saipan on which I re-read the same edition of The Pickwick Papers every time, and in my free time I build microscopic paper airplanes using a sledgehammer because I love a challenge.”

It’s protracted, but it gets the point across.

The idea of categorisation made me think about the recent viral meme obsession, seen below, where various occupations were converted into quirky memes and people used these to label themselves in their area of practice. Hyperallergic, the online art zine, interviewed the artist who originally created this meme, Garnet Hertz, where he spoke about mixed histories and how things are portrayed. The idea of portrayal and the point of view of an observer who responds to “you” being a “writer”, “painter”, “sculptor”, “editor”, “gambler”, “flaneur” or whatever else suggests that any field has a stereotypical categorisation, whether this be true or not.

This meme was one of my favourites. Thanks to hyperlallergic.com for the image, click for link.

However, the categorisation is always in the eye of the person who directs the question, as illustrated in these memes. Three separate people may see “painter” as either a) a person who paint the walls of a house, b) a person who paints photo-realist landscape paintings or c) a person who paints abstract forms. And there are thousands of other variants in the broader field of painting, before each individual practice can be disected. Nothing is revealed in the answer “painter”, except to the stereotype of the person who received the answer, who will then happily categorise it away in whatever bracket they have predetermined for “painter”. The same is true for any one-word answer to the question “What are you?” (in whatever form it is asked).

One of my paintings from a series of anonymous portraits that attempt to remove context from the subject. For more information on the project click the link.

The fact is that what “you” are can’t really be defined in a single word answer. The question is asking for a categorisation, but people do not categorise. I remember a piece where Damon Albarn berated an interviewer for naming his super-group “The Good, The Bad and the Queen”. The interviewer was referring to the project that he conducted with a super-group of musicians which culminated in the an album of this title, but the group itself was never named or labelled in any way. Albarn sticks rigidly to this opinion on labels or categorisation, seeing it as a dumbing down of human interaction into a scientific sectioning and sub-sectioning of individuals in society, rather than treating each individual on his or her own merits.

I often see people introduce themselves online in forums or comments sections where they state “I am a biological scientist, therefore…” or “I am a graphic designer, thus…” in order to lend more weight to a comment that they are making. I guess level of expertise is pertinent in this situation, but the level will probably come across in the answer without the categorisation to begin with. And besides, it is easy to claim anything in anonymous online forums. I am actually a professor in online sociological behaviour, so I should know.

So try to answer in one go: What are you?

All images in this post are my own and subject to copyright unless stated. I don’t mind reproductions, but please credit them to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.

Spking fnetics: Bil Brysn’s “Muthr Tung” & txt spk :-o

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Image courtesy of Penguin Books, click for link

In 1990, Bill Bryson’s comprehensive book about the history of the English language, Mother Tongue was published. In it, Bryson analyses the origins and evolutions of the English language from its conception to the date of publication of the book. Throughout the book, he places emphasis on the mixed etymological origins of many words and phrases.

Bryson notes various spelling anomalies in the English language. Some include the use of gh as an f sound, for example in enough, or the use of silent letters, such as the s in aisle. Much of the reason for many of the obscure spellings occur due to archaic spellings from  mixed cultural origins, for example debt‘s silent b, with origins in the Latin word debitum, or the French origins of the spelling of debonnaire.

Although the solid standardisation of English spelling began with the invention of the printing press in the 14th Century, many groups throughout the last 700 years have tried, and predominantly failed, to convert spelling practices. Changes in standardised spelling cause for changes in a wide array of printed material, and would also call for a re-learning of the written English language, and as a result these changes have not been adopted en masse. That standardisation may have taken a massive hit ten years after Mother Tongue was published, when another invention, the mobile phone.

At this point txt spk (academically “SMS language”) had become the common written communicative language in most young teenagers. The main proponent of the commonality of txt spk was the shortening of messages (msgs) to get a point across in one SMS instead of several. In txt spk phonetic spellings of wrds (incl numbers substituting wrds) and dropped vowels became commonplace 4 mny common wrds.

Before the invention of the printing press, English spellings were wildly erratic. Bryson notes the liberal spelling by a courtier of King James I where he spells clothes with two separate spellings in a single sentence; “…more corpulent though, in his clothes than in his body, yet fat enough, his cloathes being ever made…”. Post printing press, a standardisation of English began. London was the core of this standardisation, and as a result many London pronunciations were used for the spelling of English words that would be pronounced particularly different in a different area of England. Even today dialects and accents are wildly different throughout English speaking areas (as with New Yawker’s erronous spelling of their own city’s name), but the spellings that we inherited from the 17th Century are primarily London-English (with plenty of exceptions…).

William Caxton brought the printing press to England and in doing so helped to introduce standardised spelling. Image courtesy of Wikipedia, click for link to Caxton.

The idea of phonetics is still conceptually central to books like Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, which was written in a Scottish accent (a sample quote: “Funny scene, likesay, how aw the psychos seem tae ken each other, ken what ah means, likes?”). Another Scottish author, Iain M. Banks, released the science fiction novel Feersum Endjinn in 1994. The entire book is written phonetically, making it a slog in condensed sections, for example: “Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u ½ a holiday?”. Many other authors use phonetic spelling to emphasise accents during sections of dialogue.

There have been constant revisions and attempts to streamline and categorise English spelling from the days of the printing press on. Many groups have spawned and died who were dedicated to the idea of a simpler spelling system, with little success. In America some spellings were altered, like catalogue (catalog) and programme (program), but there has still been limited alterations of the obscure spellings in English (e.g. words like cough or laugh have not adopted phonetic spelling, for example, to coff or laff).

The issue has sparked heated debate at times, calling for rewriting of dictionaries and resulting in heavy funding being poured into spelling simplification programmes (or programs) to little avail. Bryson notes “In 1876 the newly formed American Philological Association called for the ‘urgent’ adoption of eleven new spellings”, including words such as liv, thru, tho, ar, hav and giv. The later revision of the spelling of catalog seemed to be the only success of the group’s urgent goals, although txt spk has naturally adopted many of the others, including all those listed above.

The interesting thing about txt spk is that it was created quite intuitively. I remember the folly of sending entire words in messages, and how this was swiftly eliminated as more and more people became accustomed to txt spk. Some abbreviated spellings stuck, others didn’t. Writing from experience, there was lots of experimentation, but eventually some spellings just seemed to fit. Lik, hav, giv etc. came naturally, as did “Y” or “U” for “why” or “you”, both of which were used in Feersum Endjinn.

Bryson also comments on spoken language’s tendency to abbreviate words. He accentuates the use of the schwa, the sound we make when we don’t pronounce a vowel (as in the i in animal, mostly pronounced an-mal). Txt spk tends to eliminate unnecessary vowels regularly, creating shorter words that still express the same meaning but read more like the spoken form (as in tnx for “thanks”). Another interesting feature of txt spk is that it introduces pictograms, similar to Chinese or Japanese writing, usually used to express emotions or symbolise tone in a message when the limited words may be unclear. Smileys :-) would be an example.

So Y is it so ez 2 undrstnd abbrviated wrds thru txt spk when it is mor difcult t’reed fonetics or mispellings? The case returns to upbringing. The generation of txt spkers around now (although I am not a txt spkr, I can proudly boast to being able to decipher even the most complex of txt msgs due to my outstanding teenage education) hav spok txt since they wer kids. Phonetics dnt matter, familiarisation does.

From a brief series of paintings dealing with the mobile phone as a communication device.

Txt spk is more or less intuitive. The more it is practiced the more simply it can be understood. Mother Tongue shows how common usage can eventually evolve a language to different spellings or pronunciations. Reading this makes me wonder whether words in txt spk could eventually be common usage. Although dictionaries were originally written with London English in mind, there are now many dictionaries with wide variations, some even including a variety of txt spk words. Depending on the generation now growing up, txt spk may become commonplace. I still see people my age update statuses on Facebook using txt abbreviations.

There is opposition to the further development of txt spk from many quarters, both as a “dumbing down” of English and as a deviation from the creative aestheticism of the older language. However I see no reason why txt spk English wouldn’t be amalgamated into regular English just as previous perversions have influenced English. It may be swift and we may not realise it’s even happening, but after another generation txt spk may become the most accepted form of English just by being consistent and understood by the masses.

4 me tho nglsh wll rmain as th language i grw up wit.useful as txt spk is,its no replcment 4 propr nglsh in terms of a descriptiv, analyticl language.

:)

All images in this post are my own and subject to copyright unless stated. I don’t mind reproductions, but please credit them to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.

Sent to Iceland: The idea of rural in contemporary society

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Apologies to readers for the 2-week hiatus – I have been mid-adventure and things have been too hectic to write. This piece and the next few will follow up on this. Posts will be back to regularity from this week.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the protagonist Bernard Marx finds himself on a holiday visiting a rural reservation. The visit is an insightful event showing a strange community that live outside of the “social norm” of this urban-centred world. This journey marks a decisive moment in the novel, where Bernard’s story is turned on its head by the people that he encounters and the adventure that he has with the “savages” in the wilderness.

This separation of urban and rural in Brave New World was part of Huxley’s tongue-in-cheek mockery of the society that he believed he was watching develop. The greatest  threat brandished to citizens in Huxley’s dystopia is being forced to move to Iceland – a desolate and unpopulated island. This relocation was the deepest fear for Bernard, who was pleasantly settled in the urban landscape of central London.

A dichotomy between urban and rural environments can always have been said to exist, with the bohemian bourgeoisie living surrounded by the infrastructure and metropolitan grandeur of cities and large towns, while smaller villages and country houses have a more sombre, classical cliche attached.

Certainly, like any stereotype, there is some level on which these assessments are true. Highly developed urban areas are centres of development and technological advancement. Due to the centralisation of funding and higher populations, urban areas are privy to more contemporary art, performances, innovation and ideas. The result is that in an urban environment there is often more susceptibility to change, whereas in rural environments this is not an issue that is so often dealt with.

The urban/rural divide in thinking can be seen in its influence on political decisions in the US. In a piece by Bill Bishop on statesman.com, the writer quotes statistics stating that “By 2000, however, the average Democratic county had three times as many voters as the average Republican county”. This showed that heavily populated urban areas had a higher Democratic vote, showing a leaning towards more left-wing policies in these areas. With the Republican party representing a more conservative wing of the two-tier system, the statistics point to the stereotype of conservative attitudes in rural areas, at least in the US.

The English Independent posted an online article in 2007 documenting a rise in poverty and racist attacks in rural areas in Britain. The economic wealth in rural areas has begun to decline from a traditional abundance due to the vast increase in population in urban areas. In 2008 the UN published a report stating that cities hosted over 50% of the world’s population for the first time in global history. The increase in population has positively affected the economics of urban life, in turn having a detrimental effect on rural areas. However, the mental health of rural dwellers shows lower levels of social stress than those in urban areas, as shown in a 2010 study by Dutch researchers.

The above theories may show signs that the rural/urban divide is broadening, but with the relentless development of internet technologies rural people may be becoming more centralised than in the past without ever entering into the urban sprawl. The availability of social networking, mobile telephone coverage and other information through advanced communication techniques has increased accessibility and created new opportunities for rural people. An indepth study on the effects of the internet on rural communities was conducted by Namsu Park in a dissertation available from University of Texas online (click here) and included studies that showed the positive effects of internet media on rural dwellers.

Through the internet the field of work has also broadened for rural people. As a graphic designer much of my work is contracted in urban areas but conducted from my own rural home. The instantanaeity of the internet allows for better communication with clients, eliminating the necessity for face-to-face meetings.

This blog and others like it are an opportunity for the sharing of information from any area with little influence from whether the writing was made in an urban or rural context. The internet is making the world smaller, but the rural/urban divide seems to still have weight in certain areas.

 

Having lived in a small town in a sparse region of Iceland I have to admit that Aldous Huxley’s model of rural seclusion in the north Atlantic island is not necessarily a torturous thing. Although the isolation of living in a rural environment can seem to stifle creativity at times, there are certainly advantages to the separation and freedoms that are offered in non-urban settings, including the aforementioned loss of social pressure.

Where the border exists between urban and rural when the internet is involved is still being determined.

All photography is my own and subject to copyright unless stated. I don’t mind reproductions, but please credit them to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.

Pre-occupied with Post-Occupy: Protesting in Ireland

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Occupy Dame street removal. Image courtesy of Drowskaerf, click for link.

Last Thursday (March 8, 2012) Occupy Dame Street, Dublin, was removed at 3.30 a.m. by the Guarda Síochána in an operation involving more than 100 people so that the plaza that they had occupied outside the central bank could be cleared for St. Patrick’s Day festivities. The de-occupation mimicked the late-night move made by police on Wall Street last November, but was met with far less public outcry despite the overkill of 100+ police removing approximately 15 protestors.

I am far from the most avid Occupy supporter, although I do regularly speak out in defence of the movement. But one of the things that shocked me most was the immediate online response to the end of Ireland’s central Occupy movement. Broadsheet.ie, a fairly liberal outputter of general national trivia and other silliness, was inundated with negative comments after their announcement of the end of Occupy Dame Street. The (assumed predominantly young) online audience were vocally critical of the Occupy movement in Dublin. The youth are the expected proponents of social change, especially when they have been (arguably) hardest hit by the economic downturn

Although I do not doubt that there is an online presence of politically motivated commenters on blogs etc., I did not believe that this backlash could have been orchestrated so acutely by the flaccid governmental bodies that called for the de-occupation with the dubious motive of retaining the country’s international image on our day of national heavy drinking. The Fine Gael government in power failed to prevent two teenagers from hacking their website this year, and the Twittergate scandal of the recent presidential election highlighted the limited knowledge of online media in Irish political debate. Although setting up fake accounts to comment on political stories is significantly easier than taking down an entire website, it does make me skeptical that the current government could navigate online media precisely enough to make this emphatic an assault on a popular news site. So I began to debate with my peers in the offline world to see why the youth of the nation appeared to detest Occupy Dame Street so vehemently.

Occupy Dame Street in November 2011

In conversations over the last few days I’ve noticed that the attitude toward Occupy Dame Street online was similar to that offline, if less outspokenly critical. The main concern was that the Dublin movement was not connected with the problems being faced by Irish people at present. It did not directly approach current issues, but stood as a symbol against them. I visited the former site of ODS last weekend, and saw a continued protest amid heavy Guarda presence, but the movement continued to resonate an anti-establishment stance rather than a view toward positive social change.

Principally, Occupy Dame Street was not Occupy Wall Street – the latter embraced positivity in social reform by encouraging interaction in a less money-driven community. The Dame Street equivalent was seen as having a negative, anti-establishment stance that is perhaps counter-productive to the overall idea of protesting against late capitalism. There is a resonating opposition in Irish youth to grand nationalistic movement – we can still (just about) remember the troubles in Northern Ireland, and ODS’s negativity certainly had a whiff of the militaristic, even if that went against their mantra.

Graph courtesy of irelandafternama.wordpress.com, click for link.

Another major failing of Occupy Dame Street could be attributed to its Dublin location. Since the economic crash in 2008, Dublin has been heavily marred by empty properties, falling property values and a marked increase in unemployment. However, the rest of the country suffered a near tripling of unemployment between 2006 and 2009, compared to Dublin’s increase of just over double, and the non-urban regions of the country have also suffered from the lack of infrastructure put in place due to delayed development during the boom years. Protest movements have been taking place outside of the capital, as documented recently by the Irish Times, but they are on a more localised community level.

The amount of intelligent debate both online and offline about this subject has since matched the blunt negative comments like “serves the smelly hippies right”, etc. Many have begun to respond to ODS’s collapse as a positive move. People who previously felt that they need to protest but were nervous about being bulked with a negative movement have begun to put new ideas in place, in the form of art and music events, social gatherings and just general debate and discussion.

Occupy Dame Street in November 2011

On Wall Street and in the highly successful Spanish Occupy movements the message was always directed at positivity. Although these movements are also faltering, they have garnered far more popular support than the Irish equivalent. These foreign movements exhibited far less of the social ambiguity, secrecy and coterie nature that Occupy Dame Street seemed to harbour.

On the whole, Occupy Dame Street’s major downfall seemed to be that it did not appear to represent the 99%. It only appeared to represent its own 1% (as a friend cleverly said to me – now we can form our 98% movement and carry on). The Irish protest movement exists, and takes on a variety of forms, but perhaps Occupy is not necessarily built for the Irish model.

Whether the Irish protest in its current post-occupy format it will be impacting remains to be seen. Risking the communist reference, perhaps this movement is more Menshevik than Bolshevik. It might not be a bad thing, but it does make it a less instantly recognisable one.

All photography is my own and subject to copyright unless stated. I don’t mind reproductions, but please credit them to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.

Filling The Void: Art in disused urban spaces in Ireland

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One of the most notable visual effects of the international economic crash in 2008 on the western landscape was the sudden closure of hundreds of small and large businesses, and the emergence of idle business premises in urban centres. From factories to fashion boutiques, empty spaces corrupted the urban landscape and spread like a pandemic through cities and towns in Europe and America from 2008 onward.

In town and city centres the effect was most visible as large chain stores began to go into receivership and their commercial outlet units began to shut up shop. Usually located in prime areas, these vacated properties created trails of desolate spaces in urban areas. The result was for these spaces to lie idle, in some cases for the past four years. Although many were reoccupied by charming boutiques and craft stores that have been thriving in the “post-capitalist” atmosphere of the last four years. Others still were claimed by visual artists, who began repurposing disused urban buildings as temporary art spaces.

The recommissioning of industrial and commercial properties by artists was not a new idea in post-crash society. Buildings have often been repurposed as art institutions historically. The Irish Museum of Modern Art is a former hospital, and the Tate Britain was once the Millbank prison. Artist-led initiatives seemed to crop up in the late 20th Century as with Bristol’s Jamaica Street / Stokes Cross area, which swarms with artists who work from floor to ceiling in formerly disused buildings. It is difficult to pinpoint the precise beginning of post-crash “pop-up” art spaces, but the repurposing of buildings for artistic uses has flourished since 2008.

The first time I encountered the phenomenon was in early 2009, when I discovered numerous groups in England who were occupying vacant properties. The spaces became installations, art galleries, window displays or one-night art party hubs as the revival took hold and local artists began to rejuvenate areas of their towns.

Installation shot from the Surplus Value exhibition at Occupy Space, Limerick. Image courtesy of the gallery's website - click for link.

The rapidity of the occupation of spaces by artists was overwhelming. Everything from abandoned petrol stations to decommissioned airports have been used to stage large art exhibitions and installations since the global crash. By 2009 Ireland boasted several semi-long-term art spaces in abandoned commercial units, most notably Occupy Space, Limerick and Pretty Vacant, Dublin. The former capitalised on disused spaces in Limerick City and established a city-centre gallery which is now one of Limerick’s primary contemporary art hubs. The latter stages exhibitions regularly in the Irish capital by gaining temporary control of vacant spaces and using them for pop-up shows.

I was involved in the establishment of two spaces in my native Sligo. Although inspired by research into the movements in England and the US, the initial proposal that I and others worked on was an organic response to the abundance of potential art space which had been so desperately lacking in boom times. Although both spaces have subsequently closed, both were largely successful and the experience has made the possibility of repeating the task far more achievable. The main instigator making the occupation of these spaces possible was the leniency of negotiation with landlords and property owners. In Ireland artists predominantly live below the poverty line from their artistic earnings, as shown in a survey from 2011 conducted by Visual Artists Ireland. When property was expensive in boom-era Ireland, there was no opportunity for artists to live and exhibit outside of the extremely competitive museum/gallery scene.

To gain use of disused commercial spaces deals were often struck with landlords. Artists often promised actions like basic renovation work in exchange for the opportunity stage exhibitions, etc. The use of the spaces also regularly led to the spaces renting commercially afterwards. The visual art lease of life helps to advertise and mark the space apart from surrounding abandoned commercial units, essentially creating a place out of a disused space.

Leeds group East Street Arts took the system even further by developing a scheme whereby landlords pay artists to occupy their spaces. The group capitalised on laws in place which offer reduced building rates to art spaces, and offered to take on disused spaces for a percentage of the annual rates, paying the rates themselves and using the rest for administration and exhibition expenses.

As the movement has become more mainstream, policy-makers like corporations and councils have begun to recognise opportunities in artists occupying disused spaces. I took part in a collaborative residency / exhibition, Creative Campus, held in Tallaght in 2011. On this project artists and digital media practitioners were invited to stage an exhibition in a council-owned space in the Dublin suburb. The space, known as The Big Picture, is a defunct technological centre that was built in 2008 as a three-storey multimedia tower designed to advertise the urban development in Tallaght. Three years on artists were granted access to the building to use the wide array of technology in the centre to create artworks that responded to the building and its surrounds.

Due to the relentless pace of technological advancement, the interactive screens and buttons in The Big Picture already seemed outdated when we began the project. The building itself is a monstrous failure. Inside, a pre-crash pipe dream of slick urban development was exhibited via looped videos on tall video screens. It is a perfect monument to the failure of the construction frenzy that swept across Ireland in the boom years. The construction work showcased in the videos was mostly completed, but the finished buildings form an abandoned wasteland in the centre of the urban area. The area is bizarre – the steel and glass town was never occupied and forms an urban ghost town that was built to exist as a ruin.

Although the project was initiated by artists, it was funded and monitored by South Dublin County Council. The artists were repeatedly restricted by interference from the council, who insisted the artworks not respond to the failure of the building. This was the first instance I noticed of corporate interference halting project work and disrupting artistic innovation – it seemed that the authenticity of the failure of the building and the development was to be avoided and that the exhibition had to focus on positives, presumably for publicity reasons. The overall goal seemed to be to reinstate the building as a functional utility rather than to use it as an artistic medium, and as a result the goal was not reached.

Although the proliferation of the economic crash has led to further closures in urban areas, the associated art movement has not halted. Negotiations have become more strenuous at times, as landlords have begun to expect some form of remuneration and the liberal attitudes taken toward artists in 2008 have begun to slide. However, initiatives are still starting. Recently Dublin City Council have put a scheme in place encouraging landlords to rent at low rates to artists in the city. This followed on from similar schemes in the UK and elsewhere.

It remains to be seen whether schemes like this may be detrimental to the overall movement. The artist-led initiatives may have sometimes lacked direction, but they were at least artist-led, allowing for substantial inquiry and visual response to the idea of the construction-led economic bust. If landlords begin to see a potential for direct profit from artists (as in the case of the Dublin City Council initiative), or councils see schemes as beneficial to their public standing (as with The Big Picture) the schemes may cease due to the ongoing problem of low artist incomes, or due to the lack of meaningful inquiry and debate that the artist-led initiatives bolster.

However, artist-led initiatives continue to crop up. Artist and facilitator Dan Thompson formed The Empty Shops Network in late 2011. Thompson had years of experience staging exhibitions in unusual spaces through his group The Revolutionary Arts Group. He found himself inundated with requests for information on using disused spaces since 2008, and formed the network in response. This network allows artists and owners of disused spaces to come together and discuss possibilities of using commercial units as art spaces, introducing an information pool that cites mutual benefits for both parties in getting involved in art spaces.

The economic crash shows no signs of halting, and disused commercial properties continue to crop up throughout Ireland and abroad. But the visual art movement capitalising on the crash also shows no signs of halting either, with groups becoming more organised due to the experience of the last four years. Although it still seems there could be a battle between policy and artistic inquiry at hand, as long as there are unoccupied spaces it seems inevitable that artists and creative practitioners will find a way to use these for creative output.

All photography is my own and subject to copyright unless stated. I don’t mind reproductions, but please credit them to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.

Budapest in a nutshell, on a shoestring (January 2011)

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Picture courtesy of Amy

The towns of Buda and Pest were amalgamated into one city in 1873. The monumental castle of Buda became the focal point for the new city; it sits enormous on the west bank of the Danube. It is the latest in a long line of castles to be raised and razed in this spot, the current castle is a Frankenstein’s monster consisting of parts of the 18th Century upgrade and reconstructed areas of the medieval castle amongst others after the castle was heavily damaged in World War II.

The amalgamation of histories and styles is a reflection of the central European hodge-podge that is the capital of Hungary. Landlocked in the centre of Europe, Budapest’s history has seen war after war; from Celts to Romans to Huns to Christianity, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian empire, occupation and conquest saw the landscape of Budapest change and mar through past generations. And what remains today is a damn fine spot for a holiday.

Landing late in the evening, myself and my lovely girlfriend Amy embarked upon a 5-day adventure in this striking city. We came to do a gung-ho tourist trail, promising ourselves an active long weekend of trips to the famous castle and the renowned health spas alongside some less well-traveled tourist routes.

We touched down in hostel HQ after the relatively short journey from airport to city. Our abode of choice for this trip was the Caterina Hostel, which, it is worth mentioning, was pretty much the lap of luxury of the hostel world. The building is beautiful, with high decorative ceilings juxtaposed against a modern interior that works perfectly (to my bemusement). The private bedroom was extremely reasonable on price, and the on-site fridge etc. came in extremely handy for the adventurer of limited pocket.

On to the city!

Picture courtesy of Amy

The trams in Budapest are great. They are Eastern European in every sense; snarling old mechanised things that make you feel like you are really taking a journey. Most of the city is easily navigable by foot however, and this is how we made most of our way.

To get a brief point out of the way quickly: the famous health spas are underwhelming if you aren’t into that sort of thing (I have learned that I am not). The buildings are lovely, but to me naturally warm water is just like unnaturally warm water, and besides the nice fresh smell they are really just glorified swimming pools.

With that gruff moaning taken care of, there is a wealth to do in the city besides the spas. We managed to stick to the tourist routes, but allowed time for meanderings and deviations along the way.

The old town of Buda surrounding the castle made good on some of these meanderings – on side-streets we caught sight of lines of old Trabants and Ladas that are still chugging away in the more remote regions of the city. We also stumbled across some great cafes in this region.

Picture courtesy of Amy - my Tiltshift edit

The castle itself is part of the Budapest UNESCO World Heritage site, which incorporates a variety of the historical riches in the city. It is spectacular for an evening wander and offers the best views of the city from its spot perched on high above the west bank of the Danube. The surrounding walls are great to explore, and the old cable car that brings you up the hill to the castle is worth the journey even if it is extortionate by Budapest prices.

There is a labyrinth that runs underneath the castle and is advertised as a tourist attraction, but beware! Although a bit of fun to explore on the late-night torch-light excursion, the cavernous tunnels are a little conceited, with unneccesary sound effects and somewhat tacky art pieces along the way; and the labyrinth culminates in a bizarre and inexplicable pseudo-exhibition placing the viewer in the future, with fossils of laptops and mobile phones on display. It is hard to describe but in my humble opinion it’s not really worth a visit even for the kitsch factor.

When night falls, Pest is the party side of the Danube. Here you can find the trail of ruin pubs that we sampled on our visit. These are terrific – the buildings are derelict and decorated sporadically with graffitti and recycled art. The ruin pubs form the centre of a lively Budapest nightlife. The Hungarians are good drinkers too, and behave more or less like the Irish when smashed (high spirits, don’t stop drinking til you hit the floor). The similarity could be due to the Celtic influence. Or the history of occupation.

On the art and culture side, the textile museum is great for a visit, with a comprehensive history of Hungarian clothes on display. We were also lucky to land during a terrific art exhibition at the Ludwig Museum showing a collection of Taiwanese art. The show was typical of group shows, in that there was a wide variety and something for everyone to love. And, of course, something for everyone to hate. But the exhibition and the museum impressed no end. Budapest’s art scene is decidedly contemporary, but offers a rich variety from grungier young art to high art museums and historical exhibitions.

Outside the Ludwig museum stands Heroes Square, a large monument commemorating the leaders of Hungary through the centuries. Completed in 1900 (and part of the enormous area of Budapest that comprises a World Heritage site), the square comprises  a semi-circle (never mind…) of statues, each one showing one of fifteen admired Hungarian historical figures. This is worth a visit and a long ponder over the variety in the excellently crafted sculptures.

The tourist hot-spot Margaret Island proved a high point on this trip on our last day. Bathed in fog we set forth on a long walk around the tranquil space, encountering joggers and tourists and freezing in the cold January air. Until this point the winter cold hadn’t hit – the days had been sunny throughout and temperatures were mild, but in the fog Budapest got extremely chilly. We passed an open nature reserve that held a selection of domesticated animals and wandered by the Danube catching sight of broken piers and the barely-visible far bank of the river, until the cold was too much to bear and we packed it in.

I haven’t exactly told this story chronologically – I decided to meander in and out and give a taster of all that was on offer, which is really how this flying visit went for myself and my adventuring companion.

But I wanted to save the best for last. Although the historical beauty, contemporary culture and boisterous nightlife were magnificent, the arguable highlight of the holiday was Pál-völgyi Cave, which we visited during a guided caving expedition north of the city. It is easy to find information on the caving trips in the hostels of the city. Take a couple of buses to the outskirts of Budapest (around an hour of traveling) and you’re there.

We were guided by Laszlo (excuse the probable misspelling), a magnanimous caver and all-round enjoyable chap. Provided with jump-suits and making up half of a group of four eager tourists, we descended into the winding, squeezing tubes of the cave. We took a route affectionately known as the “toilet seat”, which brought us on a 3-hour loop underground through some of the most fascinating tunnels I have ever seen. This was my first ever experience of caving, and I could not recommend it higher. Crawling, pulling, climbing, scraping and getting stuck were all part of the fun. Not for the claustrophobic or anyone who is afraid to get dirty, but this adventure is really worth having, if not in Budapest then somewhere. For me these underground tunnels were a terrific introduction to caving, and the tour was exemplary in every regard.

A choice of riches described, and this doesn’t come close to the full Budapest experience. The markets, although disappointing, are worth a visit. Traditional Hungarian-style garbs are on offer, along with games and trinkets, but the space is very tourist-orientated and extremely expensive. The walks along the banks of the Danube are a treat at all times, and it was fun to follow the tram-lines around the city. There is incredible architecture everywhere you look, and grand statues are nearly more common than people. Although still a very poor city, the people are extremely friendly. The high street shops are popular and much the same as they are anywhere else – better avoided in my opinion but people do travel to Budapest to shop.

It is also worth mentioning, I left Ireland with €300 cash, ate and drank liberally, went on numerous adventures and came home with money to spare. There is value to be had for anyone who wants a holiday but feels like it might be out of reach. Avoid the city-centre restaurants and dodge extortionate tourist fares and spending a few days in Budapest will not break the bank.

And that is Budapest in a nutshell. 5 days of extremely proactive tourist-ing later and we caught the next flight back to Ireland. On a whole, the city is extraordinary, and although we didn’t see everything, the essence of Budapest can certainly be experienced in a shotgun visit.

All photography is my own and subject to copyright unless stated. I don’t mind reproductions, but please credit them to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.

Illuminating the Grotesque: Crawling into political satire

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For any who have ever experienced caving, you will remember unsure footing, tight squeezes and low-hanging rocks and the claustrophobic feeling that can come in the moist earthy air. You will be aware of how extraordinarily dark it can be in the gloomy underground. It can be stifling and unsettling in the depths of a cave, but with light to guide the way, the experience can instead be extremely fulfilling.

A detail of a Roman Fresco. Image courtesy of Imaginarium blog

From the Latin word “Grotto”, meaning small cave or hollow, the term grotesque was originally ascribed to Ancient Roman art by Renaissance observers. Bartók explained how the origins of the term came from Renaissance explorers who dug out niches under villas to find the macabre frescoes depicting half-animal, half-man forms. By the 18th Century, the term grotesque had come to be used to describe uneasy or bizarre forms in general, and around this time the literary world had started to use the term to define mixed-genre work, principally comic tragedy.

Something about the cavernous origins of the term grotesque seems to ring truer with the cross-genre idea than just of the half-animal, half-man forms of grotesque art coming to represent the bizarre in popular media. Political satire often takes the most tragic and outrageously upsetting elements of society and morphs them into a comedic pill that is easier to swallow. But by plunging into in-depth political ideas, the comic element can also provide a stark contrast to the tragedy, like a light in a dark recess, often emphasising the tragic element more than a pure-bred tragedy could.

Film has ducked and weaved into grotesque tragicomedy since its early days. Charlie Chaplin’s famous satire of Hitler’s war machine, The Great Dictator, blends the dark undertones of Nazi Germany with slapstick and wit, making the film both entertaining and affecting. The crossing of genres afforded Chaplin the opportunity to use his abilities as a maestro of comedy to both belittle Nazi Germany and also to place comparative emphasis on the more biting realism of the harsh oppression of the Jews inside German borders at the time. As a result the filmmaker’s powerful speech at the climax of the movie seems far more significant in the overall context of unmitigated silliness. The film was controversial, particularly in Nazi Germany, where Chaplin’s lineage was questioned and the star was repeatedly mocked.

With darker humour still, author Salman Rushdie’s descent into religious history in the novel The Satanic Verses was answered with an even harsher political outcry. The book deals with a variety of religious, cultural and political themes, using imagery comparing life in India to life in the west and creating a melting pot of spiritual observations. Mostly, the story is a twisting tale of fantasy and observation, rich in humerous undertones.

It seems from a reading of The Satanic Verses that the intention was probably more one of academical witticism than outright blasphemy, but for his trouble Rushdie earned himself a fatwa calling for his death from extremist Islam, issued in 1989 by Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. When questioned about the fatwa, Rushdie commonly responds with witty retorts, seemingly unabashed by the controversy surrounding the novel.

German artist Martin Kippenberger was another commentator who disregarded controversy in the name of farce. Kippenberger used the literary grotesque to paint satirical images of modern life, bamboozled by what he viewed as the ridiculous notions of propriety and high society.

Martin Kippenberger - Martin, Into The Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself (image courtesy of MoMA website)

Only truly recognised after his death, Kippenberger was a great political spelunker, diving deep into the recesses of bureaucratic inanity and digging up tongue-in-cheek responses to 1980s and 90s western society. With Likeable Communist Woman (1983), Kippenberger strove to “infuriate petit-bourgeois and leftist sympathiser alike” (quote from Tate Modern). The expressive portrait, painted by a German in a period where the Berlin wall seemed destined to stand eternally, played both as an insult to anti-communist propaganda, but also as a subtle jibe at leftist sensibility.

Essentially, Kippenberger’s art is a mockery of the ridiculous notion of sensibility. Another of Kippenberger’s most obnoxiously daring works was the brazen Martin, Into The Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself. This sculptural self-portrait was made in response to the art critic Wolfgang Max Faust accusing Kippenberger of Neo-Nazi behaviour. Kippenberger dismissed the sensitive nature of social faux-pas and exchanged it for the truly ridiculous. His work remained mockingly derisive throughout his career.

In the deepest recesses of the cave of the grotesque, the ridiculous rules supreme. The darker the political undertones, the more light humour can juxtapose with it, piercing into the vacuous hole of political rockiness and emphasising it. Political satire reinforces that the best way to reveal darkness is to shroud it in light. Political satyrists are the torch-holders, crawling into the grotesque and revealing the beauty in the depths.

Grotesque is the dark niche where great beauty can be found. Grotesque is the blending of contrasting styles to create a powerful sub-genre. Grotesque is, in the literary sense, grotesque!

At the heart of the bizarre, the consequential. At the heart of the grotesque, the grave. At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.

All photography is my own and subject to copyright unless stated, please credit any reproductions to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.