Hardware
Certain architectures, even individual buildings or objects, pre-empt, reflect or echo a mythogeographical approach or some part of one. They may express their place in the world as a performance, or enact themselves as layered with multiple meanings. By visiting and exploring these sites and things, famous or obscure, and processing impressions into a mental pattern book, the disrupted explorer can assemble a sensual resource for their own recreations and performances of place.
Places and Displaces
Bory Var is a castle built in a suburban street by a Professor and his students during summer holidays. Szekesfehervar, Hungary.
The Little Chapel, originally assembled by a local monk (1914 onwards) is a failed attempt to create a replica of the grotto and basilica at Lourdes.
The skin of this tiny concrete chapel is made from broken china; the accidental, unintended and unacknowledged juxtapositions are satirical, blasphemous, philosophical and banal.
Les Vauxbelets, Guernsey.
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly is a glittering apocalyptic altar, a fiercely dense visual effect, created from discarded objects and everyday materials: worn out furniture, cardboard, insulation board, aluminium and gold foils. It was created in his spare time by a janitor, James Hampton. Found, after Hampton’s death, in a garage (right). 7th Street, NW, Washington, D.C.People As Things, Things As Pedestrians
The pedestrian symbol is intended as a generic sign. Even where the symbols are identifiable by gender or age – as with the Swiss symbol of a middle aged man with pipe and trilby – the implied assumption is that such a figure stands in for the rest. However, the vagaries of weather, wear and tear, frost and subsidence, graffiti, breakage, inefficient re-painting, spills, over-enthusiastic street cleaning and other exigencies can give these signs personalities, histories, metaphorical and metaphysical significance, poignancy, victimhood and individuation. As signage multiplies, this alternative shadow pedestrian population of performative flatlanders increases, sliding across planes of consistency, if only we would recognise them.
(Here is a gallery of images of various ‘pedestrian’ signs – mostly those painted on to the ground to indicate a recommended or designated walking route)
Chance Meetings on Dissecting Tables of Sewing Machines and Umbrellas
‘The street’, as if such a multiplicitous set of things and phenomena could ever serve as a general category, is alive with accidents and ironies, an anti-text to the dominant script of the everyday. Lyrical and absurdist,
ANGER
agile roof
devotional and improving, the street’s accidental signals provide a morphing credo of resistance and distraction for the walker, offering momentary alternatives to official streamlining.
Conspiracies of the Street
There is another kind of iconography of the street; that one that is organised. While the degree of co-ordination is open to debate, the streets are bathed in cogent symbols; each in turn has required some sort of decision. What drives the designer of concrete garden walling? Why the pylon to carry electricity? Why the pecten to sell gasoline? Why do esoteric geometries decorate continental European manhole covers, while in the UK the decorations are organic, amoeba like?
Pylon: the ‘pylon’ is named after the doors between the various chambers in the ancient Egyptian afterlife (smaller at the top, wider at the bottom), portals for the KA, the soul-energy.What part did a metaphorical imagining of the electricity power grids as enabling a massive national trajectory of dead souls play in their design?
Broad arrow: the sign of an arrow pointing upwards capped by a horizontal straight line chiselled into the fabric of many older buildings in the UK denotes a benchmark. The horizontal line marks a height above sea levels, the measurements recorded on publicly available maps. Now superseded by GPS, these marks provided shortcuts for map makers, architects and building surveyors. The arrow – technically a “broad arrow” – has an independent symbolic life from this function. It is the symbol of government in the UK (for example, old fashioned cartoons would depict prison clothes with these arrows), borrowed from the coat of arms of the Sydney family. But some neo-Druids in the 19th century claimed that the Sydneys had themselves purloined the symbol and that it represented the “Awen”, the sound made by God calling the material universe into being. Contemporary physics researchers have been able to detect a pattern of acoustic oscillations in the Cosmic Microwave Background still resonating in the universe from the Big Bang. So urban walkers in the UK are fortunate to have a reminder of these tunes rippling constantly through their bodies (micro-patterns of the giant structures of mass in the universe) every few hundred yards, around knee height.
Shell: the pecten or scallop shell is the logo of the Royal Dutch/Shell company, familiar to millions from petrol stations, tankers and refineries.Few people realise that the original logo of this company was the mussel shell (the name Shell derives from a part of the company’s original trade which was importing precious shells). The change to a pecten has been attributed to one of the firm’s salesmen, whose family had the image as a part of their family’s coat of arms, indicating that some ancestor had made the pilgrimage to the s
hrine at Santiago de Compostella to St James (whose ghost reputedly appeared at the battle of Clavijo, hence James’s title of “Moor-slayer”).The scallop shell became the general badge for pilgrims and it was perhaps this appropriation of travel, of the road for the car, of the ambulation of the pilgrim for the insulation of the machine, that attracted Shell.
Behind so many of the commercial and civic symbols of the street lies a history of esoteric, magical or devotional practice. Are these symbols appropriated by secular powers in the hope of commanding the glamour of other powers? To monopolise the discourse of the irrational as one further production unit? Or just the savvy design choices of madmenadmen, recharging old icons, bleaching former contents? Either/or questions rarely lead anywhere but to repetition. Rather more interesting might be to trace the orbits of these symbols about each other in order to disorder them for our own ends; mytho-iconography?
