Newcastle is a former steel town reinventing itself as a knowledge and creative industries hub. Whilst it remains the world’s busiest coal port, there is extensive development to reinvigorate the centre of the city, which hollowed out much in the same way as the centres of industrial US cities such as Detroit. Hunter Street, once the retail, administrative and commercial core of the city, is now at the centre of regeneration. I had read that in the decline of the UK high street, there had been a paradoxical flourishing of barber shops. So here are all the Barber shops in Hunter Street. Plus a vestige of a, not quite, bygone age, one of the ‘Gentleman’s Clubs’ and massage parlours that pepper the seedier end of the street. I followed the form of Nine Swimming Pools for this one, with colour images and a final tangential image, which provides a twist at the end of the book. The colour of the text for the title page is taken from the dominant brown colouring of the images (in the same way that the colour of the text in Ruscha’s book is taken from that of the pools).
Ruscha activity 1: Illegal Immigrants
My first shot. I made this while I was packing. It draws inspiration from Ruscha’s ‘Colored People’. The use by Ruscha of a contentious title (a demeaning, if not racist, term) draws attention to the problematic nature of a white artist casting a gaze on an(other) community, which is subverted by the, seemingly unrelated, content (which does, though, relate to the content of an earlier Ruscha book, but now with colour rather than monochrome images – this draws attention to the synchronic and diachronic dimensions in understanding a body of work). As a first attempt, my work is rather crude. As anyone who has traveled to Australia knows, there are strict interdictions on the import of plant and other organic material, and this is firmly policed at the airport. The government also sanctions harsh treatment of refugees and others seeking entry to the country, particularly those who travel by boat. I don’t want to develop this further, but its an interesting, if frivolous, attempt to get a feel for the format. I haven’t done the required photoshop work to get the full Ruscha look (which is important for this work, in that the tight masking of the images suggests a clinical/colonial gaze, which abstracts its object from context and lays it out for scrutiny, in the manner that, for instance, plants and animals are laid out for zoological and botanical analysis and classification, and different racial and social groups become objects in Galton’s racist eugenic project). Packing took priority, though.