Continued...The Road Sign Collection - Series One Development (Firstsite Collectors Group Bursary)

The Road Sign Collection drawings are now complete. 

Next Steps

- To print and review The Road Sign Collection
- To cut down The Road Sign Collection from 71 to 50
- To seek peer advice on The Road Sign Collection; How to group the work, How to cut down the collection to 50 signs
- Look into types of book; shape and size, visual/colouring 

Who is the audience of road signs?

This is something that I have been considering lately, in reference to audience and audiencing of the road sign (Rose, 2013). The natural audience for road sign is, unsurprisingly, people using the roads. This audience intentionally engage with the road signs daily. The road signs engage us with their use of our shared public language (Wittgenstein, 2007) falling into the category of conversational texts, instructing the audience on how to use the roads (Eco, 1979). Going forward I will also need to consider the audience of my copies too.

As I go through this process, I am trying to draw on comparisons between the two contexts for the road signs; real life and the art world. In their current locations the signs are specifically fitting and, in a context, allowing it to resonate. gives the audience immediate access to the work (Stiles and Selz, 2012, p.712). This will change once repositioned. Artists strive for immediacy to be ‘in the moment’ and road signs exist in that state naturally (Hayward, 2004).

Since starting The Road Sign Collection one of two things has happened; there has been a sudden rise in the need for road signs in my local area, or, I have awakened my attention to their existence. As I cannot now walk down a street without feeling absolutely bombarded by them. It is quite distracting. However, I do not feel fluent in this new language, so I investigated this system of signs to find out more about the basic rules.

Road Sign Shapes

Circular road signs -> give orders

Triangular road signs -> warn.

Rectangular road signs -> signs inform

(RAC, 2018)

Road Sign Colours

Black and white -> regulations (i.e., speed limits)

Yellow -> warning
Green -> guide signs

Blue -> guide signs

Orange -> construction occurring

Brown -> parks and recreation

(Top Diver, 2017)

Some signs are very to the point and I appreciate then for that! However, I find myself with odds with others, for example I learnt that this sign means ‘no stopping’ – who knew?! (This is of course a rhetorical question, I’m sure many of you did know).

Some signs irk me more than others, particularly the sign below. The mix if text and image annoy me. If you only look at the image you do not get the full message and likewise, if you only read the text, the sign also falls short. It appears that my own confusion is mirrored by most intended uses, with research showing that only 21% of people surveyed could correctly identify the meaning of the sign (Allen, 2019). 

The audience of the road sign is something that I want to address within my art practice. Firstly, I want to change who the audience of the road sign is, by repositioning them into an art context. My intention being that by positioning them away from the road they will be looked at by either; the same audience in a new way, a new audience in a way that differs to their original intention.

The next step in this process is to step away from the original features of the found road signs. By rendering the signs in tape, rather than creating copies in mental, the signs become cheap, disposable and physically weak. This uncrafted aesthetic communicates to the audience something about my art practice and positions me, as one of them, rather than as an authority figure (Eco, 1989). The font used on the original road signs will slowly be replaced with my own, ACComplete4, to further that feeling.

References

Allen, J. (2019) Survey reveals the road signs most motorists don't understand. [online] Available at: https://www.driving.co.uk/news/survey-reveals-road-signs-motorists-dont-understand/. [accessed 21/11/19].

Eco, U. (1979) Role of the Reader Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Advances in Semiotics). Indiana University Press; Midland Book Ed edition.

Eco, U. (1989) The Open Work. Harvard University Press.

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

RAC. (2018) The Highway Code - Common UK road signs and what they mean. [online] Available at: https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/advice/learning-to-drive/the-highway-code-uk-road-signs-and-meanings/. [accessed 21/11/19].

Rose, G. (2013) Visual Methodologies. Sage Publications Ltd; 3 editions. 

Stiles, K. and Selz, P. (2012) Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists. University of California Press.

Top Driver. (2017) Black, Yellow, Green, Blue, Orange, Brown: Know What Each Type of Road Sign Means. [online] Avalable at: https://www.topdriver.com/education-blog/know-type-road-sign-means/. [accessed 21/11/19].

Wittgenstein, L. (2007) Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. ed. Cyril Barrett. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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.

The Road Sign Collection

The Road Sign Collection started by chance after an art walk during an art tutor CPD day run by NEAAT (Network of East Anglian Art Teachers). As a group we were instructed to walk around the Fine City of Norwich and document the walk with; photos, drawings, rubbings. During this walk, I photographed road signs. I was drawn to these due to the nature of my art practice, which is concerned with the relationship between text and site.

The choice may have also been influenced by my interest in what Duchamp calls the ‘unchoice’ (O’Doherty, 1986), with so many things to look at in a fine city and I am choosing to focus my attention on road signs. They struck me as ready-mades in a site-specific installation, something chaotic, yet powerful in their ability to direct traffic (Ranciere, 2009).

However, despite my initially drawing my attention, once the day had come to an end I promptly forgot about the signs.

During this time, I was teaching a short course titled, ‘Exploring Drawing and Illustration’, keep your eyes peeled for a future blog post ‘Teaching Drawing’ for more on this, with one of the weeks focusing on line drawing techniques - something that I am usually guilty of neglecting within my practice. However, covering this topic and seeing my learners’ outcomes – particularly their continuous line drawings, made me want to give it ago within my art practice. 

Working with the long-forgotten road sign photographs, I drew mostly continuous line drawing of the photographs using a drawing tablet and digital pen. I found, as my learners had hours earlier that it is much easier to tell someone not to take the pen off the page than it is to not take your pen off the page. However, I found the continuous line drawing outcomes felt more natural and so persevered.

I felt that once the pen was lifted from the page the aura of that piece of work is set (Benjamin, 2015) and that those drawing which contained broken lines lost their authenticity. Having a break in the line looks too considered, shows a pause in the process and takes away from the overall aesthetic of the sign. 

The intention is that each road sign drawing will be an original (Benjamin, 2015), with each only drawn once, in one continuous movement. There is some irony in this conversation about originals, as the signs themselves are of course not original, rather they are multiples of something mass-produced and largely used. What it is that makes them original is the lived experiences the sign has had (Benjamin, 2015), reflected in the condition of each sign. The more these road signs have been interacted with, the more damage they will suffer (Dezeuze, 2007). This is something that I wanted to ensure that I captured within the drawings, to allow each sign to be recognisable as a copy of the original sign, drawing on Judovitz's notion of originals as multiples of sorts (1998). 

Initially, this activity did not have a purpose beyond flexing my continuous line drawing skills. However, as I created the drawings, I started to see the potential for a new project. I started to explore the use of block fill colour to make them more reminiscent of the originals. I was undecided on the outcomes and continued to keep a version in which they remain as continuous line drawings.

The use of colour in the signs felt important to their ability to carry out their function successfully. I had to start to consider the readability of the sign and our temporal relationship with them (Foster, 1996). Without the colouring, there is a sense of unfamiliarity to them (Deleuze and Guattairi, 1987).

The more time that I spend with the road signs the more I start to consider placing them into a new context (Grosenick, 2002). The text is direct and to the point when it is within the original context.

Within my practice, I look to have public-facing outcomes and these signs lend themselves to be repositioned into a new context, away from the road. I look to explore what this does to our relationship with these signs that we encounter every day once they are put into an art context. This starts with turning them into drawings and will perhaps end in a gallery context, allowing this new cultural framework to change the context of the road signs (Kwon, 2002).

Reference

Benjamin, W. (2015) Illuminations. London: Penguin.

Deleuze, G.  and Guattairi, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.

Dezeuze, A. (2007) Tate Papers no.8: Blurring the Boundaries between Art and Life (in the Museum?). [online] http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/08/blurringboundaries-between-art-and-life-in-the-museum. [accessed 23/10/19].

Grosenick, U. (2002) Art Now. Taschen GmbH; 01 edition.

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

Kwon, M. (2002) One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity. The MIT Press: Cambridge Massachusetts and London, England.

Ranciere, J. (2009) The Future of the Image. London: Verso.