The Road Sign Collection: Types of sign

As I start to grow the Road Sign Collection. One of the first things that has started to become apparent is that there are different types of opposing sign categories within the sign collection.

Temporary / Permanent

Image / Text / Image and Text

Black and White / Colour

Triangle / Circle / Square / Rectangle

As I move forward, I feel that I need to decide on which category I am most engaged with and want to develop further. It is the contrasting temporary / permanent which draws me in the most, as within my art practice I usually work with the temporary.

I am partly interested in temporary art as my practice is very much concerned with creating work which exists for a limited time (Owens, 1998). This also allows me to explore the absence of the art once it has been uninstalled (Doherty, 2015). I feel that there is a real-life parallel with temporary road signs once they are removed from the site. Once removed, is the feeling of absence felt here too? Due to this they also carry a feeling of now-ness (Hayward, 2004). They are in this site right now, for a very time specific reason. Due to the context of the sign and the context the site, the sign would no longer make sense if it existed longer than necessary.

The permanent signs lose these characteristics, as the intention of them is to stay in place and due to this they start to become less interesting to me. However, I also have an interest in the everyday and placing attention onto thing which are usually overlooked. The permanent signs are less obvious than the temporary ones and so this brings me back to them. There is also more variety in the signs which fall into the permanent category, possibly giving more scope for development.

I am also intrigued by, as mentioned in my previous blog, in the notion of multiples as originals (Judovitz, 1998) and this is something that I am more able to explore with the permanent signs.

With both sign categories there is a direct relationship between themselves and their context, the site of the signs gives the reader immediate access to them (Stiles and Selz, 2012, p.712) as all road signs draw on our shared public language (Wittgenstein in Kripke, 1984). The use of context helps the audience to understand the text, in a real-life situation this is particularly important with road signs as they are commenting on social contracts that we follow (Rousseau, 1998).

While I am still unable to decide which category to peruse, I know that I want to challenge this aspect of the signs by putting them into new sites. This will allow the text to have a dialogical relationship with new sites (Owens, 1998).

The other categories are less important in that I do not have control over them, in that I am taking them as I find them.

References 

Doherty, C. (2015) Public Art (Now): Out of Time, Out of Place. London: ART/BOOKS.

Hayward, K. (2004) City Limits: Crime, Consumer Culture and the Urban Experience. Routledge-Cavendish

Judovitz, D. (1998) Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. University of California Press

Kripke, S. (1984) Wittgenstein Rules and Private Language. John Wiley & Sons; New Ed edition.

Owens, C. (1998) The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism. New York: Oxford Press.

Rousseau, J. J. (1998) The Social Contract. Wordsworth Editions.