InPrint Editorial - Issue 3

Chagall wrote “it is not a thing, but a road”, he was talking about art. So what about art or artists that travel, or travelling art? The nomadic artist has become a staple of our art consciousness, what artist wouldn't want to include travel in their lexicon of ways to work? We have a sneaky suspicion that artists have always done it but now it's been institutionalised and scrutinised in infinitesimal detail, the residency has become a staple diet of artist practice. We’re not complaining though.
It's a strategy often born of necessity or desire as much as practice. It's an intentional destabilising strategy, we counter our human tendency to get stuck in a rut by another human impulse, the impulse to move. Sometimes it is just time to go…a place has been good to us and we have fond memories but it is the movement we crave as much as the destination; the road beckons and the journey is worth it even if it leads in a circle.
The immediacy of movement has a meditative effect, the nature of our experience, one thing passing after another is magnified but somehow it's soothing to encounter this in the changes of physical landscape, in the act of travel, even if it's just a walk to the end of the road. We are forced to abandon any illusion of being able to 'hold on', the point is to move.
Preoccupations of what we are going to do in 5 years time become preoccupations with where are we going to eat when we get hungry and sleep when we get tired. The best journeys have vague sketch maps that allow you to react, it's a lot like making art; you begin, you have an idea in mind and gradually the work takes on paths you couldn't have predicted, you are just about able to keep up, making the occasional decision sustaining the illusion you feel like it's your work, your road. In the end does it matter? You enjoy it for what it is, including the struggles, and like travelling have a strange amnesia about the crap bits when it's all over.
The experience of travel is as much about giving perspective to previous understandings as it is learning about another culture. Indeed, learning about another culture proves problemlematic when forced to consider the authenticity of the travel experience. But what is certainly gained, is a personal development that marks us permanently, and as artists this can influence the way we work or the work itself. It’s this kind of unique experience that can only be found on the move and perhaps it’s one of the most valuable lessons travel has to offer.
InPrint has been a Bristol based publication since 2005 but will soon find itself lying in the balance as we move our seperate ways. We don’t know how this development will shape InPrint in the long run, as only the road can determine that, but we hope it will lead to many exciting progressions on it’s way to a forever unfolding destination and we hope the goal posts get moved along the way.
The first development is the creation of a blog so that we can continue to publish in this initial phase; www.inprintonline.blogspot.com. No traveloguesque style posts though, we promise.


Sarah Tulloch and Julie McCalden

The act of faith in the age of mechanical locomotion - J. Tooke

Image: Max P. Rudd -helsinki Airport Jan 2006

“…the construction [of airports]…serves to guide the passenger from darkness to light. The arrival is in a huge cave from which the passenger gradually ascends…after passing through clearly organised stages of preparation…[into] a point where the initiate can contemplate the heavens”


If the signs are to be believed, then all the promises of heaven as a posthumous destination are obsolete. Eternity has been supplanted by the eternalised memories in holiday photographs, longing and desire shifted from a future paradise to one in the present and obtainable with only a small financial sacrifice.

Sacred journeys of the soul towards an ecstatic afterlife are out; sensual secular trips abroad are in.

In short, let’s go on holiday.

The holiday has taken on some of the characteristics of sacred processes and ritual.

The language of holidays owes much to the rhetoric of the pulpit: journey, transformation, sacrifice, finding your self or just holidays from hell. But the simplest link is with the etymology of the word holiday itself. It derives from days when Saints names were celebrated-literally Holy Days- and work was postponed in favour of more sociable activities.
Despite their secularisation, holidays persist with the language of heaven and the gods; the presence of celestial bodies a prominent selling point. The sun, the preferred deity amongst ancient Egyptians, is worshipped still by most holiday makers. Locations with the most sunlight hours are favoured by the traveller, while the moon becomes the necessary backdrop for all romantic encounters.
Brochures often advertise their wares superlatively as a `trip to paradise’ or `heaven on earth’. Holidays often demand conversions (albeit ones of currency) or at least possess the power to transform, to restore, to offer the potential for re-birth.
Landscapes inspire awe, and are populated (if you believe the ads encouraging trips to Turkey) by ancient gods and mythical creatures, while the bodies that inhabit the beach, one hopes, are divine.

Whether for the soul or for international travel, it is the buildings used and how they organise people that reveals a strange correspondence between sacred and secular structures. In terms of scale, carefully constructed spaces, views along enormous corridors, the contemporary airport is on a par with the finest medieval cathedral. In some senses they represent similar dynamics: the meeting point of worlds, an in between place subject to forces out of the ordinary that require strict observances to control them.

“For many Airport designers, design is subservient to the idea of the gateway, which affords a view of the journey into light”

The airport, like the temple, has a number of distinct areas, each more exclusive than the last, separated from each other by a succession of guarded doorways to which only the initiates have access. These are the outer area/foyer, where anyone can be; the waiting area for your gate where duty free gifts may be bought (only by licensed travellers and pilgrims must have their souvenirs); the area beyond the metal detector and finally the air craft itself-the holy of holies. Churches have a similar system of spaces organised in order of sanctity: the graveyard; the porch; the nave (from the same root as navy-the seats arranged like those in a ship-another link to travel), the area behind the rood screen (that represents the veil between earth and heaven); the altar and tabernacle.
Within the airport complex, spatial awareness is kept to a minimum by a considered lack of external referents. Geography is wilfully confusing and relies on signs and guidance. This accentuates the mystery at the heart of air travel. The psychological confusion of the interiors prepares the traveller for the shock of meeting the gods, acts as a cushion between the reality of earthbound movement and the surreal lunacy of flight.

Access to these areas relies on strict controls and the possession of talismans.
Tickets are talismanic: a sacrifice is made to the operator of the air line and in return permission to travel is granted, at a specific time, place, and exclusively for named travellers. Once the ticket has been used, the charm will no longer work. The ticket will only work in conjunction with other charms: the sanction of an authority- the high priesthood or the passport office. Having provided these to the satisfaction of the attendants/priests, a further document/talisman (the gate pass) is awarded for admission to the air craft.

The passenger is subject to a number of cleansing rituals. Just as those entering the Temple of Amun in ancient Egypt were depilated, washed, and dressed in specially designed robes before admission was granted to the inner temple, so the passenger must pass through security. Documents checked, verified, the luggage vanishes (the first miracle: a disappearance also the first act of faith: it shall be returned to me, the passengers remind themselves), the traveller must pass through the door in the air, the portal without visible reason (a metal detector). If the applicant is found to be unclean (or forgot their keys) they must be cleaned by the temple attendants and pass through again.

The holiday requires acts of faith. The first, as already noted, is the belief that the relinquished luggage, that contains all the departed will need in the holiday life, will manifest itself once again at the desired location and time. The second and much greater act of faith comes when the passenger steps onto the aircraft. This is placing one’s corporeal being in the hands of the god of technology. Despite the physics, the ratios between thrust, speed and lift, all points to catastrophe: the flight of tonnes of machinery makes no real sense. They are too heavy for flight, too cumbersome to land with grace. But it is too late. The decision is made. The tube of metal must be trusted.

The trust is justified- we fly through space in the glorious void of heaven.

The immediate reward for those with faith is the view from the window. The sky, traditionally where gods have residence, is full of the iconography of heaven: a cloud landscape so white, billowing and pure it sears the retina. The cloudscape often contains great lakes of air through which, many fathoms deep, glimpses of the world of mortal men be seen. Sinuous roads like ribbons covered in ordered lice, and cities appear from above like cut steel encrustations on a patchwork quilt of fields. Or there is just emptiness: vast expanses of empty oceans, or snow capped mountains that go on to the horizon.

Flight connects disparate destinations with such rapidity that it must be a sort of magic. The speed of flight, beyond comprehension, can only be produced by a god or goddess, with full and potent mastery over nature. Vast distances, oceans, mountains and deserts are no longer obstacles to travel; geography is as plastic as the imagination. The thousands of miles covered are only half sensed as if the passenger were in a dream or trance, jolted awake by the boiling air off the hot tarmac. Even then, impressions remain unreal, the smells, the taste of the air, and unfamiliar landscapes.

Sacrifice, death looked at in the face and denied, disappearances, reappearances, acts of faith, miracles, and rewards. These are journeys that in the past could only be made by the spirit, technology has made them possible for the body.

Humuhumunukunukuapua'a - Ian Smith

The surgery in Moiliilili is covered with posters for drag beauty pageants and lots of photographs of sexy mahus. This time I meet some ex-work colleagues of Ginger’s from Divas in San Francisco and a stunning young Indonesian who’s so fish and is moving to Las Vegas the next day. She is definitely P. I guess from the way she’s dressed that she’s going to hook in Las Vegas and raise the $20,000 for a pussy. She pipes on about it incessantly as though it were the latest youth craze, knowing all the buzzwords and which doctor is best for each operation she requires. Ginger thinks the girl is nails for going on about it all the time. I remind Ginger that she told me she’d been there herself; having 34DDD breast implants and getting them paid for by various STRAIGHT MEN ON THE WAY TO GAY TOWN VIA TRANNYVILLE. Ginger rustles the magazine she’s not really reading at the Indonesian girl and I sit there in my yellow sunglasses not really looking at an interesting article in Nature about Superstring theory and wondering if I’m on holiday.

Is my life imitating art? Is it art? Is it life? I ask these questions as I lie here on this hospital bed. I have certificates confirming my qualifications as an artist, but have I gone too far this time? Away from ideas of representation, my practice has become my life and I’m the artist in residence of my mental, physical and psychological studio. Researching, preparing, experiencing, retouching, considering, evaluating, exploding into action and then spent and exhausted, relaxing and finally presenting a finished artefact of sorts. I don’t know if it’s true, but I remember it started with art and I think that this is my art project. It started 1 year ago when I began to research photographic persona presentation on dating websites. I created an archive of images when I became aware of semiological patterning and photographic unusualness that would make me a Doctor of Ph, but I missed my interview at the University of Arts. I fucked up and lost the gig. I had planned to build relationships with some of the datees and then construct a theoretical argument based on their implicit comprehension of visual culture or something or other that was arty and grant worthy, but it all went wrong and then I met Ginger. Six months later I collapsed in her and Ken’s tiny 12th floor apartment, two blocks from Waikiki beach and we became lovers. I don’t know if I know what art is, but Ginger thinks I’m some kind of artist and a twat. She says that being a twat is SO BORING.

Doctor Goodman tells me that people didn’t start smiling until the 1920’s; it’s a Hollywood invention and it pisses him off. I try to suggest that cameras in the Victorian era had such long exposure times that it may possibly account for people’s miserable countenances - having to hold a fixed smile for too long - but he’s having none of it. Smiling is a Hollywood invention and it irritates him, happy people. We laugh. In fact Ginger and I laugh uncontrollably as he is currently injecting feminizing hormones into her arse and it’s all a bit too much for me. The last time I met the South African born doctor, he told me how he’d made nitro glycerine as a boy and blew up his father’s cornfield. He hung a vial of the explosive from thin copper wire, placed a concrete block underneath and passed a high electrical current through the wire, melting it and causing the vial to drop on to the concrete. The explosion wiped out a large proportion of the surrounding maize and damaged a tree, but he got away with it because he paid the servants to keep schtum. Doctor Goodman pulls out the needle and slaps Ginger on the arse. She pays him 20 bucks for the pleasure, pulls up her knickers and we leave listening to the good doctor complaining that he can’t get Channel 77, “It’s got all the best Hollywood films, but you’ve gotta pay!!” I flash him a smile.

Lying in the Queen’s Medical Centre in downtown Honolulu with tubes in my arm, electrodes stuck all over my body and a machine behind me with an alarm that keeps going off every time I have a heart attack, I’m on holiday. Hospital staff rush in and look worried and leave again. I’m giggling my throbbing head off between bouts of unconscious babbling and chest explosions. I see Ginger who shouldn’t be there; I thought she’d dumped me in the hospital after drugging me and harvesting my organs, or whatever her and Mr Ed’s evil plan was - some kind of sexual perversion - luring men from abroad and then physically and psychologically abusing them. My arse feels fine, but my head is fucked. Ginger’s sitting there in the ward looking worried and I realise that I was wrong, she wasn’t trying to murder me; she ACTUALLY likes me and is concerned for my welfare. I apologise for thinking she was going to kill me and we make up, but with the condition that I don’t do it again. I agree to her terms; my blood pressure reaches 248/123 and the machine’s siren goes off. It’s my second day in Hawaii.

I can see the Banyan tree in the Food Pantry car park from Tula and Brandon’s lanai. My two favourite things in Hawaii are Food Pantry, where I learned how to buy stuff and Banyan trees, because they’re weird. My third favourite thing is Newcastle Brown. Ginger kicks the ashtray off the lanai and we lean over as it drops 22 storeys and explodes in the car park. I say “Wowdy” and Ginger says “Fuck”. Tula’s and I go down to sweep it up so that she doesn’t get another fine. Ginger stays in the apartment drinking Jack and pretending it didn’t happen. Afterwards and after we’ve finished off a large bottle, we argue about cocaine and she storms off saying that I was accusing her of being a drug addict. She was once a drug addict, addicted to smoking Ice and she came to Hawaii to get clean - Hawaii, Ice capital of the US. I wasn’t calling her a drug addict; I just didn’t want to do cocaine because I don’t like Todd. We walk back screaming and shouting at each other until she asks me for sex with no strings attached and I say no. We argue some more about that and then I laugh when she yells, “I do not want to be having this conversation” and it echoes around Waikiki. When we get back home we fuck.

Micky always turns his back on me and on his birthday I ask him why he hates me. He says he doesn’t hate me - he’s just been busy. Micky’s known Ginger since she was a boy and they tell me about calling the AIDS helpline and asking if you can catch it by having sex with a dead cow. Micky’s fucking Brian and Brian’s wife is fucking Brian, the other Brian and Brian used to fuck Brian when they did Hillbilly Heroin together and now someone’s divorcing someone and the happy family all work in the same bar and all live in the same house in Moiliilili. Ginger and I babysit Harry for them and in return we get a Happy Meal. Harry runs into my arms when they all go to work, I guess he likes guys. Ginger hates kids, which is why she pleaded with me to come, but Harry falls in love with her and they both start having fun. When she tells him to get out of the trash and he does and gives her a big hug, she has an epiphany. Ginger wants kids.

“It’s treat treat time!!!” shouts Mr Ed and all the kitties come running. He loves them and cries when they are ill; usually it’s just fur balls and the fact that they haven’t breathed unconditioned air ever. During the day, when he’s working they all watch Animal Planet, which features dogs having surgical procedures. Mr Ed is my very good friend and we share a mutual abhorrence of Ginger’s hygiene with regards to her apartment’s cleanliness. Mr Ed is very intense and one day corners me and asks me to name all the kitties - “Peepee, Boo, Patches and Tiger”. I used to think he was going to shoot me, but not after I named the cats and quickly too; I didn’t have to think because I’d rehearsed intensely. I knew this day was coming. Mr Ed is an EX. Alcoholic, Navy Seal, Smoker, Drug Addict, Pervert; he’s given it all up and found God. God features in our daily conversations and on his everyday To Do list - he always writes ‘pray’ first and then ‘cat litter’ or ‘treat treats’. Sometimes he buys me food. Mr Ed considers it his duty to save people and I think he thinks I need to be saved, but leaves me alone because I make Ginger happy. I really like Mr Ed, I really love Ginger and I really hate cats, but don’t tell Mr Ed, he might kill me.

Oh the beach!! Waikiki is a famous beach with surfer dudes and Japanese mini models, body builders, fat tourists and bums; healthy looking bums. I don’t go there except at night and usually walk down the Ala Wai Canal to Kapiolani Park and avoid the smug joggers. Diamond Head volcano towers over the east of O’ahu and is a direction pointer. South is Makai and north is Mauka. Actually Makai is ocean and Mauka is mountain, but east is definitely away from Diamond Head. Ginger and I climb Diamond Head without any water. We get to the top, sweating and smelling - I have BO and ED and Ginger panics. She gets claustrophobia AND agoraphobia, but I trick her through the tunnel in the volcano by starting an argument about something - I think it was my ED, which I’ve sorted out now by having my frenulum cut off. Out the other side, she realises that finally she has done something she’s been meaning to do for 5 years and she loves me. The view at the top is awesome, but we haven’t got time to appreciate it because we’re dying, so we run down and find a tinky toilet where we drink water and laugh about how crap we are at doing stuff; always ill-prepared, usually arguing about sex, broke, out of condition and crazy. We’re a weird couple, but it works. We’re not going to get married and not have any children and not climb any more mountains. These conditions have all been revised.

I walk up to The Contemporary Museum in Makiki Heights. On the map it looks a short distance, but Mount Tantalus is steep and the road winds up the side of it. No one walks there ever, especially in the middle of a baking hot day wearing jeans and boots and a jumper. I explain to the woman at the entrance that I’m English AND an artist and I walk everywhere. The Hockney room is crap, but has air-conditioning, so I sit there to cool off. When I visit two days later with Ginger, we get a taxi and she thinks the Hockney room is a children’s play area; she thinks it’s crap too. The exhibition of drawings by Geoffrey Chadsey is also crap. I write YOU CAN’T POLISH A TURD on a comments note. Ginger writes TURD POLISH FOR SALE.

Other places of interest in Honolulu: Iolani Palace, Cabana’s, Ginger’s bathroom, Tobaccos of Hawaii at Atkinson and Kapiolani, Hanauma Bay, Dog The Bounty Hunter’s house, Mr Ed’s 40” HD flat screen TV, Micky’s invisible chakra wall and toad, Family Guy, the ABC store, Brandon’s receding hairline (and hat), the lift in Lewers, Kuhio at night, Queen Liliuokalani’s prison, The Lieutenant Governor’s giant door (behind which is a lovely little lady behind a desk - it’s her birthday), Happy Jacks, the International House Of Pancakes, Ginger’s lanai, poi and a sex shop.

I fly back from San Francisco an Upper Class Virgin with $20 in my pocket, bankrupt, on the dole and an artist again. The stewardess asks me if I want champagne and what type of massage I prefer and then makes my bed because she thinks I look sleepy. Instead of sleeping I spend all night at the free bar, drinking Jack and hanging with the beautiful people. Drinking Jack makes me think of Ginger and the awesomely wild times we had together. I make a vow to return to Waikiki. On arrival at the airport, it’s a custom to get lei’d in Hawaii’. When you leave, you throw the lei into the ocean and if it comes back to the shore - you will return. I guess my lei floated back to the shore.

Are you watching comfortably? - Sarah Tulloch

I like Melanie Jackson’s work; I saw Made in China, at Matt’s gallery two years ago and was struck by the combination of a possibly true, possibly mythologized, story and her more documentary style. So I approached Jackson’s new work GPS A Global positioning system expecting good things and also intrigued by the work’s premise of unravelling the component parts that make up a GPS unit. I was fascinated and intrigued but... I felt a bit sick… finding the topic “interesting” didn’t seem to be an appropriate level of response, was it me? The strategy and structure of her investigation and the voyaging aspect of her image gathering started to take up a lot of space in the work. Jackson traces each component part or material used in a GPS unit back to it’s source or manufacture. I felt like a bit of a filthy voyeur or detached scientist of the Victorian plant gathering age. Oooh look at how the world works…now lets classify and be masters of the universe. I was being implicated in this massive global system and therefore feeling the weight of my privileged position in the world. But what about the artist, was she also putting herself under that scrutiny… clever. Or is it?

It’s not a startlingly new revelation to me or, I would guess, the majority of the gallery going public that we are beneficiaries of a global network of trade and exploitation. I live in Bristol, so there is no getting away from our national history of profiting from others misery. Jackson’s work, puts artist and viewer in the position of co-voyagers both real and virtual on a mission discover the true implications of world trade for the irrelevance of a GPS. It’s quite a side step. Our common bond of ‘guilty western person’ makes it hard for me to turn and criticise the work as work.

I’m nodding my head saying, yes, yes isn’t it awful and Jackson is right alongside me saying yes, yes I know and suddenly I realise the bone sticking in my throat is the nagging feeling that I am not made to feel uncomfortable enough, this is a nice presentation of a nasty situation. The deconstruction of the “system” is an interesting and fascinating project, but that is just the problem. I find myself full of new facts and information and strangely detached by the systematic nature of her inquiry. I’m also aware that such observational but transformed images, lead to a potential and misleading exoticisation of the other.

For example, Arnolfini gallery wrote, Jackson’s work takes;

“the viewer on a whirlwind tour that stretches from the rubber trees of Sri Lanka to the tin mines of Congo, and onwards to the production lines of China.”

What??? The romantic notions attached to words like rubber trees of Sri Lanka are just cringe worthy… do gallery owners/text writers really think about Jackson’s work as a whirlwind tour…

‘ohhhh sweep us off our feet to far flung exotic places …aaaaahhh bliss!’

I realise I am critiquing an interpretation of the work rather than the work itself but, an artist is in part responsible for how their work is presented. Somehow the focus is misplaced, in short, Jackson has made too much of an object, fetish like, out of the mechanics of this project and for me it’s lost punch in the process. For me it was the mythical aspect of previous works that acted as a resistance to the “reality” that otherwise numbs us. It was the fantasy in her works that actually put them in a realm beyond pure “observation and uncovering of terrible facts”. It’s the stories that really make or break the work and their capacity to resist our observational detachment, we get involved, we want the story to be true, we want the worker to escape. Day dreaming in itself is a form of resistance to the capitalist insistence on efficiency and production at all costs, as are “dancing drinking and singing” as Mark Harris points out in his excellent essay on Jackson’s Made in China.

According to Marx the alienation of the worker is a result of their separation from the end product. I wonder if Jackson’s systematic project was intended as a mirror of the systematic way the working individuals are treated? The comparison has been made between the way Jackson works, using painstaking animation or construction techniques, and the monotonous repetitive working actions of her subjects. Placing Jackson in relation to her subjects in this way is too much of a leap for me. Can you say that animating film footage to your own specification and design in a studio environment is akin assembling microchips and soldering each tiny piece together in a factory? Crucially, as an artist, you are not alienated from your production you are highly invested in it and you and your interests largely drive it. Once it goes out into the world you encounter all sorts of problematic market related issues but the actual work is the fun bit, fine it is a drag sometimes but it’s not a sweatshop.

Does the operation of aesthetics get in the way of the reportage? Am I too occupied with notions of “is this a good piece of work?” to truly consider the subject of that work? Alternatively is the subject of the work, a worthy investigation into the evil workings of global economics, a side step to any serious rigorous consideration of whether this is a good artwork or not? I am cynical but I do wonder, why isn’t anyone more worthy and weighty asking these questions? Is there a lack of rigour in the rush to support artwork that is ‘now’ and ‘worthy’ China and all things related are definitely the “it” kid of current contemporary art circles.

I started off thinking Jackson’s GPS proposition was an interesting and guileful approach, in many ways I still do but, it’ doesn’t make me think any deeper about issues of global economics it just underlines it with a funky colour and then allows you to move on. NEXT…


Please send comments and responses to www.inprintonline.org or for instant postings and potential online arguments www.inprint@blogspot.co.uk where I will be masquerading as me.


Sarah Tulloch 2007