I'll see your Ricoh C901s…

The Hegemon is boasting about its state of the art hugely expensive printer (think a run-down house in Stoke-on-Trent and you're in the ballpark), but I saw a good one at the weekend (click to enlarge):

and it does things like this:

If I were a free man, and talented, I'd run a Morris/Gill/Johnston style printing house and type foundry, only without Morris's aristo customers and Gill's penchant for incest and bestiality (the commercial Eric Gill website uses the word 'colourful', while the EG Society only mentions his religiosity). I don't know much about Johnston except that he's the most famous Uruguayan ever, so perhaps he's a good role model.

Also at Gregynog were these period features:

and this rather unpleasant brand name on a concealed door mechanism.

Wonder if they're still going… I can't find anything by or about them online or at the Intellectual Property Office, but there is a company in South Africa (of all places) called Slavepak: mmm, cheap. Union Street is all very arty-farty these days but was a manufacturing and prostitution area.

Brrrr

Shivering in my freezing flat, I was reminded that warmth is very much a class issue, and remembered this from Eric Gill's rambling 1930s book, Typography. How would you like to live in a household shopping at Robinson and Cleaver, Belfast?

'Best blankets at 80s per pair, blankets 'for the spare room' at 65s, blankets 'for servants' bedrooms' at 25s, and blankets 'for charitable purposes' at 18s'.

He also has these stirring words, which mean even more in an economy predicated on turning our workforce into mechanical adjuncts on minimum wages:

'…the most monstrous characteristic of our time is that the methods of manufacture… of which we are proud are such as make it impossible for the ordinary workman to be an artist… That the ordinary workman should or could be an artist, could be a man whom we could trust with any sort of responsibility for the work he does… is an idea now widely held to be ridiculous; and the widespreadness of this opinion proves my point as well as I could wish. When I say no ordinary workman is an artist, no one will say I am lying; on the contrary, everyone will say: Of course not'. 

There are echoes of Marx (alienation) of Arts and Crafts and of Tressell's Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist here. What strikes me is that of course the working-class occupations have been reduced to drone-work, but so have the jobs which we self-deceptively call professions. Here I am in a warm office surrounded by books, smugly thinking that I'm free, but it's not true. We're under constant electronic and intellectual surveillance, some of which has been internalised (Foucault had plenty to say about internalised discipline). Our work is being reduced to that which can be conveyed electronically: outcomes and metrics which any decent teacher would reject as reductive, philistine and ridiculous. Anything important I manage to discover in conversation with my students can't be expressed on a module evaluation form, a flowchart or a statistic. Intellectual labour isn't like that - but the institution thinks that measurable things are essential and unmeasurable things are beside the point. The modern lecturer isn't an artist, and nor is the modern student. They should be, but the Browne Report, Cameron, Cable, Clegg, Gove and all their friends would respond to the question of whether they should be with a resounding OF COURSE NOT.

Which is why we're all in it together. As long as 'it' refers to a big bucket of intellectual, philosophical, cultural and economic shit.

I got me some art-learnin'

Hi all. How was your weekend (bank holiday weekend, for the Irish and New Zealanders)? Mine was glorious. Firstly, I did no work at all. In fact, I did the opposite of work, much of it the company of colleagues who were similarly determined to not even think about work.

Friday - to the pub, of course. But Saturday saw me on a train to London to see the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. I turned up early to see the Wild Thing exhibition - Epstein, Gill and Gaudier-Brzeska, which was fabulous and still shocking in many ways. They reintroduced 'direct carving' (i.e. chisel on block rather than making clay and plaster casts for technicians to reproduce. They revisioned sculpture and heavily influenced each other. If you want to see lots of Epstein, go to Walsall Art Gallery - their collection is based on Epstein's own work plus that collected by he and his wife. Here's a photograph of Epstein's Rock Drill, which was so advanced that it was totally rejected by the critical establishment. He took it apart, did a bronze cast of the head and torso and chucked the rest away - the version in the exhibition is a 1970s reproduction. I've gone on about Eric Gill far too much, so won't dwell on his manichaean genius any further here.

When my comrades turned up, we trooped into the Anish Kapoor exhibition. His interests are in space, form and the body - one room contained pallets of extruded concrete, reminiscent of turds, maggots or intestines. Another contained a long, writing intestinal tube which ended in a shiny red vulval aperture, while Svayambh consists of a 30-ton red wax carriage endlessly moving through 5 galleries, squeezing through each ornate doorway and leaving wax splattered over the walls and edges - it's hard not to think of childbirth. Elsewhere, a cannon fired red wax onto the wall every twenty minutes (no, me neither).

Kapoor plays with perceptions too - the perfect white pregnancy bump (or malignancy bump) on the wall which can only be seen from one oblique angle, the fairground mirrors, the deep receding yellow hollow: spatial perception is warped throughout, as is the nature of art and the role of the gallery. The sculpture outside (The Tree and the Eye) is also interesting - at first it just seems a little flashy, but then I realised that it's doing two things: warping your perception of the severe classically-designed buildings surrounding it, and turning you into the art: to look at it or take pictures of it is to publicly proclaim your narcissism - there's no way to view this art without gazing at yourself, so that every picture is a self-portrait (should it be The Tree and the I?).

Here are a couple from the exhibition and some more of the day here. The bad ones are of Ezra Pound by Gaudier-Brzeska, and Kapoor's Svayambh - rubbish quality because photography isn't technically welcomed, so I used my camera phone. The others are of my fellow cultural refugees.

This  is Gaudier-Brzeska's Ezra Pound, the poet.

Kapoor's Savayambh, pushing through the door.

Kapoor's The Tree and the Eye.

The Wolverhampton University Culture Vultures.

The Wax Cannon.

Christmas keeps on getting earlier

Despite the postal strike, which I fully support (damn you Mandelson, you sounded almost like a Labour Party minister for a few weeks, but bad will out), I've received a couple of interesting things - a photographic (stressing the graphic) catalogue of Eric Gill's sculptures and engravings (ranging literally from the sacred to the profane, with a fair amount of crossover), the new Kings of Convenience album and Yo La Tengo's Popular Songs. I'll listen to it once I manage to stop playing Nancy Elizabeth's Wrought Iron, which is a more sensual cousin of P J Harvey's bleakly beautiful White Chalk.

I also accidentally bought a couple of books in Manchester yesterday - Amis's Money (for work purposes) and the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, which is fascinating though rather venerable, having been published in 1951.

Of cheese and plagiarism

Anita presented me with two of the finest Irish cheeses available, in thanks for wandering around Stoke with her. One of them was a lovely unpasteurised soft cheese from Gubbeen, a West Cork dairy and meat producer.

However - I'd seen their logo somewhere before (I can't copy it from their website, but have a look). As you know, I recently read a biography of Eric Gill - typographer, sculptor, child abuser - and saw this engraving, done on commission for a bakery's bags (wood engraving 1915, published 1929):

Gubbeen - you thieving swine.

'Artless git

Now that my debit card's gone, I keep seeing things I'd like to purchase. Oh well, it's good for what passes for my soul, and as one of you pointed out, I can catch up on the books I've bought. I've almost finished the Eric Gill, so perhaps something lighter and fictional next - though I really want to buy some (of the more demure) Gill prints now, despite having no wall space.

My collection of framed prints and posters are in the office. I have the Reds exhibition poster (a historical one on the Communist Party of Great Britain, staged at the People's History Museum in Manchester), a Tree of Literature in Danish, 6 CND reprints of their early posters, a brilliant dayglo 1970s poster of Angela Davies, a limited print of David Jones's Cara Wallia Derelicta (Gwalia Deserta) and a stunning batique of a yacht in the rain, done by Bev, my old fencing coach. I remember a patronising academic telling us penniless postgrads that we should be investing in prints and we all laughed at the idea of having money for art… I'm also really keen on Clifford Harper's work - emotion beautifully muted.

Who let the dogs in? Gill did.

Back from the dullest meeting on earth, held in a weird, circular classroom. In between interminable discussions of grades, I sneaked a few pages of Eric Gill. Somewhat distractingly, I got to the discussion of his diary, particularly the record he kept of sexual congress with dogs. Admin was suddenly a welcome task…

A tale of two Erics

Over lunch, until joined by my esteemed colleague Debbie, I carried on reading MacCarthy's biography of Eric Gill.

It's funny how books can lead you through all sorts of terrain: typography to sculpture to Modernism to early-twentieth century sexology, the Arts and Crafts movement and many other things. What caught my attention today was Gill's status as the perfect subject for a moral conundrum. According to this book's take on his sex life, he slept with his wife (fine), other women (naughty Eric), his sisters (ooh, racy), his daughters (not very nice) and sometimes had a go with farmyard animals (clearly unEnglish, in fact positively wrong). Meanwhile, he converted to Catholicism and created the great Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral (as well as an exact copy of Little Eric in marble). When this story broke, there was pressure to have the Stations removed: how could people pray in front of these religious icons knowing that their creator was a sexual transgressor? Or doesn't it matter? It certainly fascinating to read of a man who joined the strictest of religious organisations while not altering his behaviour one iota.

By of comparison, here's one each from his sacred and profane sides (though Gill would hate the distinction (buy prints here or see them and sculptures at the Tate:

Transient random noise bursts and announcements

A quick bit of sport, even though lurker Jo doesn't like it: the US are in the Confederations Cup final after beating Spain 2-0: their biggest result since 1916.

Another book in the post today: Fiona MacCarthy's biography of Eric Gill, painter, sculptor, typographer and child abuser. Should we take down art (especially the religious art) of known paedophiles? Or does art transcend the weaknesses of its composer? I'm quite a fan of Gill Sans and its close relative, Edward Johnston's Johnston Underground (designed for the London Underground).