Book selected: The Catalogue of Paintings at Bowood House
The Catalogue of Paintings at Bowood House is simply a catalogue, a list of the titles of paintings with supporting information, but no pictures. Reading through these titles and descriptions gave me a sense of the past as being made up from artifacts, some of which we label art. A family must have collected these artworks for generations, investing the revenues of their estates into cultural capital.
Perhaps, as Walter Benjamin suggests, these artworks were founded on invisible forms of barbarism. The titles in the catalogue though (many of them reclassified with marginal numbers) were surely innocent and capable of being re-used. If we unmoor the titles from their pictures, we have the chance to drift or trawl through our daily lives and choose what we like to be the picture for any chosen title.
I decided that the best way to alter this book would be to provide images for some of the titles. As a predominantly textual artist (i.e. a poet) whose preferred medium is verbal collage, I found that the best way to do this was to gather found material and in some cases also to encourage my children to produce images, which I would then arrange and laminate.
My limitation was that I should not stray from my daily routine in the gathering of this material. The walk to and from my work, time with the children, a stay with the in-laws in Pancevo, an industrial town in Serbia. It was in these places that I found this material.
Sources include (but are not limited to) free plastic gloves from a petrol station, a roll of fax paper found in a skip, some damaged books and recipe-cards from a charity book-bin outside a church, leaves, a spam email, various wind-blown scraps of paper, discarded shopping-lists, tickets, an enlarged photograph of an eye found in a skip outside a hospital, computer images produced by my children (unsupervised), plants and seeds, street-rubbish, a half-decayed pornographic magazine found in some bushes, sweet-wrappers, and ink.
This is the kind of detritus that would not normally be placed in a museum or stately home, but provides the substratum on which places like Bowood House have in the past been built.
email : gilesgoodland@aol.com
web : www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/184471263X.htm
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