We are into November now and are still none the wiser about events and we are none too sure when the main event is even taking place, so all is well in our strategic but questionable bid for ignorance. Some will say that if everyone just hid away in a rural cabin sketching pears then what would become of us? Well, each to their own. Who knows, but let me remind us that part of our mission is exactly to shelter and also to orientate 'ourselves' to our environment and we took that to mean our immediate physical, material surroundings rather than any virtual or media environment. So this is it, for the moment at least and as we have perhaps sketched the last out of these particular pears our thoughts are turning to the next what, and this in terms of what to sketch and what about next season? Before even asking if we may be granted another I must decide if we have the stomach for it but also whether there must be a change in direction, and that is something which is hard to decide while we have the shutters down.
The algorithm has been good enough to inform us that Dave Beech1 along with a couple of likely plotters has arranged a biennale in Coventry of all places. Its not to say that Coventry can't have one, what even is one, no its just that we actually went to an educational institution in Coventry by the name of Butts Technical College where we studied the photographic arts. This was some years before the digitalisation of the whole business and as such it was immensely gratifying to slosh around in the dark with the chemicals and emerge with a representation.2 My masters were Uli Ul, a naughty German and a certain Brian Starbuck who stole the show. A Kieth was involved periodically but my only memory of him was his mocking of our artistic ambition; "I suppose you think you'll exhibit in an art gallery". All in all a good time in rather raucous surrounds with very many farcical scenes erupting as one might expect with so many uncontrollable characters about. I recall one period of highest farce in which the fire alarms were being set off for the kicks of some anonymous figure on a regular basis, often resulting in our group mustering in the car park in the middle of a development where we all stood in line agitating our carousels, much to the amusement of graphics.3
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1. Art writer and author of Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production.
2. Pre digital photography was a chemical process in which photographs were produced in a light controlled environments called darkrooms. John attended the Butts from 1993 - 95.
3. Possibly refers to a graphics class or group.
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