14 Jun 2011

In The Fashion Store

(download)

In the basement of the Museum is a long white painted corridor. Behind what I remember as reinforced steel doors with their foundry’s name embossed on them, are a series of store rooms.

Inside the fashion store are some roller rack shelving units like those you now find in libraries and archives. Turning the wheel mechanism to part the stacks reveals full hangers and boxes one atop another. In the fashion store, as elsewhere in the Museum, there is that intriguing balance between objects of vernacular taste and artefacts that are seen to fall within the perimeters of high culture. Elephant collar Paisley shirts in limp synthetic fabrics of harsh hues hang not so very far away from the most delicate dresses of many centuries agoThe more precious items are contained in boxes and wrapped in tissue paper. It takes up to three weeks for garments to be readied to go into the stores, each item undergoing two processes of freezing to catch the moths.

I watched the Curator of Fashion, Martin Pell, and one of his colleague’s from Brighton University unwrapping a ‘sackback’ pleated court dress that had been loaned from another museum. Having put a neutral coloured protective cloth on a mannequin, the dress was lowered down over the dummy to give a sense of how the fabric would once have hung on a breathing body. As I leaned in to peer closely, I was able to see the incredible intricacy with which the silk had been brocaded and with which the finest of sprays of hooped silver had been dusted over the dress.

As I tried to find things to record, other than the roller rack shelves and the almost silent fabric steamer, Martin talked about the role of chintz in the industrial revolution, clothes and cloth in Empire and the fate of potentially historic garments that found themselves demoted to the costume chests of public school Drama Societies. As these stories unfolded, I realised again that with more time you could weave incredibly rich narratives around individual objects.

I did get some nice rustling of brocade and crinkling of tissue paper and, although I hadn’t been looking for it, some interesting conversation that might well work as part of the track in the Fashion and Style ‘hotspot’.

Throughout, of course, a prominent air conditioning unit hummed and grinded its time away. 

13 Jan 2012

An English Pastorale

Crockery
The collection of creamware and enamelware, of cups, mugs, jugs and other artefacts that might be colloquially identified as pottery, form the substance of Henry Willett's bequest on which the Brighton Museum & Gallery built its initial collection. For Willett, and for subsequent curators, these items possessed an appeal that exceeded any purely formal, aesthetic properties. In a prototype of today's anthropologists concerns with material culture, for Willett these little things communicated something of the lived life of their owners and makers.

For the hotspot called "An English Pastorale", I wanted to literalise these objects' relation to the hedged lanes, cobbled streets, creaking wharfs, rustling copses and gentle valleys of their country of origin. I wanted to create a sly counterpoint to the more anodyne painterly depiction of the English landscape, something I had attempted to do before, both in sound and in video. But I also wanted to reach another hand out to feel, so to speak, the tactile qualities of these glazed objects, their thickness and thinness, their robustness of fragility.

Brushes_hammers
Assembling a collection of ceramic objects from the kitchen cupboard and a selection of brushes and hammers from other points in the house, I set about trying to release their vibrations, recording the results on a Schaller guitar pick up mic. I then processed the recordings. accentuate the

Guitar
 

13 Jan 2012

Hutong Looming

Stretched out on a blond wood frame in Brighton Museum's World Art gallery is a Chinese woven robe with wide sleeves and a crossed-collar - technically a relatively recent version of a Han-style court yi I think.

I remember years ago pointing out this robe in the glass cabinet to each of my children on those days when a brisk tour of the Museum was a convenient staging point after a dip in the municipal swimming pool before we headed back up the hill home for a lunch of sandwiches with their crusts cut off, sliced kiwi fruit and chopped carrots.

Through a friend at London College of Fashion, I managed to get into a textile studio to record a student working at a Dobby handloom. It was strange indeed, for once, to be recording in an interior environment, not having to counter gusts of wind or directing the short shotgun mic away from unwanted sound events. All was otherwise quiet, just the sun at the window, the bright varnished parquet floor and the clattering, rattling sound of the loom in action.

(download)

For this Noli Me Tangere project for the Soundwaves Festival, I wanted to anchor the heard experience of craft activity - the loom's arrythmic cycles - within an environmental sense of place. I had been to Beijing once with work, interviewing potential students for places at our University. Everything about our short period there was conducted at such pace and pitch that down-time seemed, literally, a foreign concept. Nonetheless, we did get have a brief morning off before we had to board our flight home. After an excursion to the Yonghe Lama Temple and few rounds of haggling in the neighbouring street of shops selling religious tat - one of the results of which, a gold plastic, solar-powered prayer wheel I am looking at while typing this - I found my way into a narrow 'hutong'.

Having first visited a public urinal the size of small cupboard which had an ingenious thick khaki fabric door with a head height vinyl window stiched into it, I placed my little Zoom H2 recorder in my top pocket and set out to walk from the most deserted end of the hutong street to its busiest, moving steadily towards the traffic swirling around Dongsi North Road.

There was something very special about this little street. It was not as genteel as the hutong across the way where cafes selling beautiful teas rubbed shoulders with cool clothes stores and the Beijing Fixed Wheel Bike Shop. That other street was certain of its charms but my little hutong, in the half an hour I wandered around it with my tourist eyes and ears open, had a ruder, messier appeal, its miracles animated by the sounds of throats being cleared, goods arriving and being hawked, food getting cooked in the open, the voices of children and the elderly and the robust warmth of bodies jostling together in the grey cold morning air.

Layering these two recordings on top of one another - the loom and the hutong - gave me "Hutong Looming", the soundwalk that visitors to the Museum hear on their headphones when they entered the World Art Gallery.

 

(download)

 

Angus Carlyle's Space

This is a blog that charts the progress of the "Noli Me Tangere" commission for the Soundwaves Festival 2011 in Brighton. Posts are 'live' in the sense that they will only appear while I am working on this project (and in its immediate aftermath). Posts are 'raw' in the sense that I am using this Posterous blog more as a thinkspace - a scrapbook, a sketchpad - than as anything more polished or resolved. There will be typos and mistakes just as there will be changes of tack and contradictions.

Contributors

Angus  Carlyle