David Chalmers Alesworth: Work and Research Notes

The end of the Sawar Road, Water Towers, Cantt., Lahore. 25th July 2011.

2011-08-08T01:20:00.001-07:00

Felled like trees in their entirety

some having stood for almost 150 years

exquisite brick detailing, gone forever.

Goithic revival flourishes

a minor earthquake when this one came down

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The end of the Sawar Road, Water Towers, Cantt., Lahore. 25th July 2011.

2011-08-08T01:06:00.001-07:00

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"Anatomy of a Garden" Quddus Mirza's review: 27.2.11

2011-03-01T09:33:00.001-08:00

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'Babel_Show.pdf (16732 KB)

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'Babel_Show.pdf (1013 KB)

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The Class

2011-02-24T06:39:00.001-08:00

Now we know that Duchamp is always amongst us as we try to make art today
- what would he have said of Land Art?

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"Gardens of Babel" solo show

2011-02-23T10:25:00.001-08:00

- through till end of February 2011 at

Rohtas-2 Gallery,

Model Town,

Lahore,

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The red Kashan before work began, its around 100 years old.

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Cut down to the central medallion, repaired and embroidered.

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"Hyde Park 1860's" - the last few days left in the studio, show opens 16th Febuary 2011, Rhotas-2, Lahore.

2011-02-10T11:09:00.001-08:00

The Singer 3-77 now in running condition.

The reverse of the rug.

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Studio update, Ist February 2011

2011-02-02T11:29:00.001-08:00

New rug works, details

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Garden Works

2010-11-21T06:26:00.001-08:00

A Water feature, one of a pair in progress for a new garden,
based on the Sharifa fruit or Custard Apple, Annona squamosa.
Thick welded copper sheet throughout.
42" wide.

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Garden Works

2010-11-21T06:24:00.001-08:00

A Water feature, one of a pair in progress for a new garden,
based on the Sharifa fruit or Custard Apple, Annona squamosa.
Thick welded copper sheet throughout.
42" wide.

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MILLER-UREY BONG, 2010

2010-10-03T01:19:00.001-07:00

Date: October 2, 2010 9:44:02 PM GMT+05:00
To: alesworth@gmail.com
Subject: MILLER-UREY BONG, 2010

MILLER-UREY BONG, 2010

THURSDAY 7TH OCT - SATURDAY 13TH NOV 2010

PRIVATE VIEW - Thursday 7th Oct

Dimension/Next*
Miller-Urey Bong, 2010
* a collaboration between Paul B. Davis and AIDS-3D

In 1952 Stanley L. Miller, working in the laboratory of Harold C. Urey at the University of Chicago, attempted to clarify the chemical reactions that gave rise to organic compounds on primitive Earth. The experiment ran as a closed loop connecting two flasks. One flask contained water that represented Earth's ocean, a second flask contained a mixture of methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), and hydrogen (H2) that represented a hypothetical 'reductive' atmosphere. Miller heated the water to simulate evaporation and rainfall, and used electrodes to simulate lightning, guessing that lightning was a likely energy source for ancient chemical reactions. After running the experiment for one week Miller found that as much as 15% of the carbon in the system now existed in the form of organic compounds. While the Miller-Urey Experiment did not conclusively prove the chemical makeup of primordial Earth, it became a classic experiment on the origin of life.
'We really don't know what the Earth was like three or four billion years ago. So there are all sorts of theories and speculations. The uncertainty concerns what the atmosphere was like. This is the major area of dispute.' - Stanley L. Miller
Miller-Urey Bong allows experimentation with genesis models of the early Earth atmosphere by re-creating the Miller-Urey experiment with the additional functionality of adding any combustive material to the atmospheric simulation. The material is heated using a high-powered laser and the vaporized remnants are drawn into the experimental apparatus through the combined use of a specially designed stem system, carburetion port, and user provided suction. Employing the same suction, users can also orally sample the experiment's contents at any time for further analysis.
Dimension/Next specifically proposes that the addition of C21H30O2 to the existing Miller-Urey hypothesis of CH4 + NH3 + H2 + H20 has a high chance of producing exceptional results. However, in the interest of scientific objectivity, Miller-Urey Bong is BYOW (Bring Your Own Whatever).
Due to the inherent dangers of Class 4 laser technology, stringent controlled conditions and safety procedures govern the interaction of Miller-Urey Bong. The work will be fully interactive only at specific periods during the installation, however performance documentation will be on view at all times.
-----
Miller-Urey Bong, 2010 is the tenth exhibition in an ongoing programme curated for Seventeen's basement space by Paul Pieroni. The exhibition will run concurrently with Susan Collis' solo exhibition in the main space. AIDS-3D will present a solo exhibit at Frieze with Gentili Apri this October.

17 KINGSLAND ROAD LONDON E2 8AA

www.seventeengallery.com

.
Unsubscribe from Seventeen.

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Peter Wegner

2010-10-02T01:29:00.001-07:00

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Pakistani Truck Artist Paints Granta Cover - mediabistro.com: GalleyCat

2010-09-10T02:06:00.001-07:00

via mediabistro.com

Truck Art lives!
This is nothing you should see whats driving on the roads of Pakistan.

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"Foucault's Teddy's Bear Reliquary"

2010-07-14T03:49:00.001-07:00

This is it, Nikon D3, Raw conversions and downsized for web.

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Febuary-March, Cantt. Lahore & Ganche, Baltistan

2010-03-26T05:18:00.000-07:00

Carrots in the washing basket, 13 March 2010

I've been thinking about inserting carrots into this plastic washing basket since i got it about two years ago.It seems made for them. Though I hadn't counted on its flexibility nor their weight. Then there's the lack of symmetry in an average Pakistani carrot. These black carrots are amazing, they seem another whole species from their bland orange cousins. The bigger picture is a putting together of the product of industry and the produce of nature. Both are interventions of a sort, neither are "natural". This goes beyond my anthology of plastics.

Black and red carrots, 13 March 2010

Black Carrot juice, 26th March 2010, Lahore

Carrots in the clothes basket, 13th March 2010

Mixed carrots and plastic

Black carrots and orange plastic, 13th March 2010

The shoot

set-up with Nikon D3

Dyed eggs for Naurose,

Appo Jaffar, at Khaplu Palace, Baltistan 23rd March 2010

Khaplu village from above, 23rd March 2010

Khaplu high plateau in search of lawn-grass, 23rd March 2010

Panorama with Huna, Khaplu 23rd March 2010

Black Peppercorn Haier top-loader, detergent free twin tub, 14th March 2010

R.A. Bazaar Bombings, Friday 12th March 2010

Body parts, mobile phone advert, R.A. bazaar Bombings, Friday 12th March 2010

Washing down R.A. Bazaar, bombings, 12th March 2010

R.A. Bazaar bombings, 12th March 2010

Just outside Skardu by road, 23rd March 2010

Cabbage White's eating all my Ruccola, 26th March 2010

Sound Work, web-clip 6:31

2010-02-20T22:35:00.000-08:00

From "Automaton Love" Loft gallery, Mumbai
February-March 2010

A down-sampled clip from a larger sound work of 12 mins.

Images added from Bilal Gunj market, Lahore

-editioned sound work 1/3
built up from sampling at Bilal Gunj over the past three months.

(Desi Garam Unday = Local Hot Eggs)
Something for the winter in Lahore.

"Desi Unday" Bilal Gunj

2010-02-03T09:37:00.000-08:00

I went back to "Bilal Gunj" Lahore's massive used car part market for a second sound sampling, a few days ago. This time with Huma's 4 channel Zoom recorder.

In over an hour of walking the lanes I got reasonably varied ambient sound from the breakers, welders, paint-sprayers and a great many gas and kerosene burners heating food and tea. On this trip I realized there was a tremendous culture of food going on here.

Fish, tea, sweet-potatoes, chena, monpelli, carrot juice, egg-fried rice, subzi and dal, roti's of every description and finally hot, boiled desi-unday. I'd almost given up on the eggs. I kept asking where the sellers were, because it was their presence selling these beautiful subtle-hued, small precious des-unday (local-eggs/free-range eggs) in the context of these ancient and smashed oily wrecks of cars and trucks that had given rise to the egg and engine photographs.

Suddenly they were there running through the lanes, two sellers I'd never seen before. They both carried padded bags to keep the boiled eggs warm, their cry was garam-desi-unday and I realized this would give a somewhat different spin on the photographs. They'd be read as engine heated eggs, not what I'd intended.

I'd intended the teeming living eggs as nature amongst the toxic waste of the man-made, the guts of the engines.

I produced a 12 minute mixed edit of the garam-unday criers and the ambient sounds on my stroll through the richly varied soundscape in the lanes of this market. Hazrat Data Ganj Bakhsh's shrine minarets can be heard throughout the work, a constant accompaniment at Bilal Gunj. This shrine to the patron saint of Lahore, lies right in front of the car market.

"966th URS Shareef is on 3 Feb 2010 Inshallah"

966 Urs Mubarak Of Hazrat Data Ganj Bakhsh Ali Hajveri Will Held On 19 Safar al Muzaffar And 4 February 2010 (Approx) At Data Darbar , Near Bhatti Gate, Lahore. Pakistan
Days Remaining In URS Hazrat Data Ganj Bakhsh

His birthday is being celebrated today which a holiday in most of Punjab.

(....haven't been able to upload this clip as yet)

Art for "The Post-Colonial Garden as a Palimpsest"

2010-01-15T04:26:00.000-08:00

Let me begin by saying that I love hand-knotted rugs, of all sorts and I do own a few.
These are not mine, well maybe a few are by now and some are with my friends. It was a day of viewing rugs, mostly Chobi's (Zeigglers) here.

We're moving house much is being discarded, here's an old rug I almost threw away today.

...and part of another

Some details of the finer piece.

These are around 10 x 12 ft, very old, badly damaged hand-knotted rugs that I acquired in Karachi almost ten years ago. I had intended them to be used in work for many years after I gave up on them, as floor coverings.

The blue Persian is a much finer piece but totally threadbare, worn right down to the structural weft and weave of its base, from a distance it's almost monochrome. They are both also full of dust despite several previous washings. The motifs are of course all plant and garden based. These rugs would seem a viable visual metaphor a cultural reading of "the garden". Here it is played out as as paradise itself. A contained garden of fountains, bird song, fruit bearing trees within in an ordered orchard. An oasis of sorts.

I decided to cut out the still intact central portion today, and have kept the borders to experiment on as well. I'm intending to somehow work into and onto these rugs. At present it seems to me that the only authentic way to do that is to actually stitch another layer right into their very fabric, perhaps this should read from both sides as in fact this threadbare one does. Now there is no hierarchy of front or back, its much the same.

I will have to have to stitch the edges to prevent this one disintegrating. It felt sacrilegious to be cutting into this once magnificent rug but if I can use it in my work it will have another lease of life.

I'm thinking of stitching the ground plan for "Lawrence Gardens" a Lahori British Raj park, now Bagh-e-Jinnah or perhaps even the plan of parts of the "Palace of Versailles", gardens, the parterre's in particular. Right now I'm thinking of a gold thread for visibility but I'll have to try things out.

They'll need to be stabilized, stretched on frames, washed and dried, none as simple as it sounds.. Then I'll have to find out what the issues of working in to the surface of these rugs is.
I think I'll begin with some photoshoped treatments as mock-ups.

The rug represents a pre-colonized traditional cultural thread (forgive the pun) or does it? Their history in this region is not so pure or simple.

William Glover's new book "Making Lahore Modern" Constructing and imagining a colonial City, just arrived. Its only been a week or so since I ordered though Amazon's express delivery cost me as much as the book itself!

"Flying Carpet"

A work by Berlin based Alex Fleming shown at Art Dubai a few years ago. I instantly recognized it as a work I should have, could have made! (don't you hate it when that happens?) We became friends and I sent him an Afghani War rug subsequently.

Mochi Gate, Old City, Lahore 29th November 2009

2009-12-01T01:09:00.001-08:00

Over Bakra Eid in Lahore, November 2009, near Mochi Gate, Walled City.

Skinning a sheep, near Mochi Gate
(also see movie clip)

Sheep

Wiring and speakers

BA English

Nan Katai shop

Nan Katai's

Carolyn Guertin

Bazaar life

Bazaar

Cleaning Goats Heads

Goats Heads

Processing goat parts

also see the movie clip

Dry Fruit Stall

Carolyn Guertin

Brain Computers

Brain Computers

Beautiful animals for Eid

Remains

Skins on a bike

Skins at the roadside

Modes of Enquiry

2009-11-14T23:03:00.000-08:00

Currently I am involved with:

Walking Lahore as psychogeographical derivé. Starting at the Ganda Nala on Zafar Ali Road, Gulberg.

Working with Lawrence Gardens, Bagh-e-Jinnah.
Had an initial walk through the park on an exceptionally drab smoggy day. Met with head mali Alam and his staff and borrowed plans of the park and other parks of Lahore.

The People's Art and Historical Project.
A collaboration with Adnan Madani, Karachi/London.
We are working on several new versions of the People's Art Historical Garden Centre Project, that was performed to good effect at the opening of Greynoise's recent showing on 25th October 2009, entitled "Patrons of Oh My God, I can afford Art".

Beginning work on my dissertation "The Post-Colonial Garden as a Palimpsest".
Busy reading. Recently finished K. Helphand's "Defiant Gardens", much else to write up here.

MANUFACTURER OF " " ROAD BLOCKER " " in KARACHI LAHORE ISLAMABAD PAKISTAN , WE ALSO MADE TURNSTILE GATES & REMOTE CONTROLL GATES IN PAKISTAN -NOW WE CAN STOP A BOMBER TRUCK WHO IS TRYING ENTERING & BLOW THE WHOLE BUILDING FROM HIS TRUCK .

100 % MADE IN PAKISTAN , IMPORTED SYSTEMS ARE EXPENSIVE WE ARE DIRECT MANUFACTURER IN PAKISTAN , INSTALLATION , AFTER SALES & SERVICES IS EASY FOR ALL OVER PAKISTAN CUSTOMERS -EASY SMOOTH OPERATION OF OUR OWN MADE SYSTEM IS AVAILABLE AT HALF PRICE THEN IMPORTED SYSTEMS -WE ARE DIRECT MANUFACTURER OF FORCED FULLY HARD STOP" " ROAD BLOCKER " "WE ALSO MADE - TURNSTILE GATES & REMOTE CONTROLL GATES , IN PAKISTAN - SEE OUR OTHER ADDS HERE -

NOW WE CAN STOP A BOMBER TRUCK WHO IS TRYING TO ENTERING & BLOW THE WHOLE BUILDING - WE CAN STOP THAT BASTARD -

OUR EQUIPMENT IS REALLY A LIFE SAVING EQUIPMENT -SAVE ASSETTS =SAVE PEOPLES LIVES -SAVE EGO -2 TYPES WE MANUFACTURED -A) MANUAL CONTROLLED -B) HYDRAULIC CONTROLLED -JUST 1 SECURITY GUARD IS ENOUGH TO CONTROLL THIS GATE -ONLY IMPORTANT BUILDING CHIEF SECURITY OFFICERS LETTER HEAD ENQUIRIES WILL BE ENTERTAINED -WE ARE THE ONLY 1 MANUFACTURER IN PAKISTAN & WE USE BEST SYSTEM TO EJECT & RELEASE THE SYSTEM -

Studio check-in 1st Nov. 2009.

2009-11-03T01:17:00.001-08:00

Some current thoughts and initiatives.

Walking the ganda-nala’s of Lahore

I have approached a potential collaborator for this venture and we are in the process of discussing it. The open storm drains in this massive city of 7+ million (1998 census figures) provide the only channeling of sewage from homes to its ultimate discharge in the now dead river Ravi. There are no treatments plants. However the ganda-nala’s also create ecological corridors through the city where plant and animal life is left fairly undisturbed. The current heightened tension in the city is making any walking venture deeply problematic, let alone undertaking a walk through a highly suspicious no-mans land. I hope to undertake an initial walk (and documentation) within a few weeks.

The People’s Art Historical Garden Centre Project

Completed 25^th October 2009 in collaboration with Adnan Madani. We have collaborated on several projects previously, notably “The Frankfurt School” video which is also covered in previous blog entries. See the newly added page of documentation and narrated video. Akbar Naqvi’s book “Image and Identity” (Oxford, 1997) is systematically dismantled and converted into useful paper bags. It is unbound and liberated from it’s burden of assumed authority. A reclamation, a reinterpretation and dissemination. Even an insemination (seeds are added to each art-historical bag). Like seeds themselves it is finally disseminated to the public of Lahore.

Eden project

I have yet to locate specialist input for this project and I now see it as being a much longer term initiative. I hope at least part of it may be realized by next summer’s residency.

Berlin Collaboration 2009-2010

I have sent out initial emails towards this collaboration. It is intended that a dual project be negotiated that comes to fusion and fruition in Berlin next summer. Something that involves horticultural practices in the cities of Lahore and Berlin.

Readings, recent and in progress, 1st Nov. 2009

Tim Richardson. Vista, The Culture and Politics of Gardens.

K. Helphand. Defiant Gardens.

Khan. The Gardener.

Ian Sinclair. Hackney that Rose-Red Empire.

Reza Aslan. How to Win a Cosmic War.

Charles Darwin. The Formation of Vegetable Mould.

Foucault. Several Readers and The Order of Things.

Isenberg. The Nature of Cities.

Belting. Garden of Earthly Delights.

Jellicoe. The Landscape of Man.

Coverley. Psychogeography.

Reynolds. On Guerrilla Gardening.

Allen. Kipling Sahib.

Solnit. As Eve Said to the Serpent.

Driver. Nash. Landing.

Research

I will be contacting Kenneth Helphand for my research on the ”Post-Colonial Garden”. This is currently under negotiation with my mentor concerning it’s whole approach to the subject.

"P.A.H.G.C.P."

2009-11-01T10:17:00.000-08:00

A collaborative project with Adnan Madani, in Karachi. We also collaborated last year on the video work, "The Frankfurt School". Here we again made use of the skills of Mahmood the book-binder.

This is the most recent completed project. Participating in the current group exhibition (curated by Mehreen Murtaza and Umer Butt) at Greynoise Gallery, Lahore.
In the show entitled "Patrons of Oh! My God i can buy Art!" opens 25th October 2009.

Our work is entitled:
"People's Art Historical Garden Centre"
A project of P.A.H.P.
(People's Art and Historical Project)
David Chalmers Alesworth and Adnan Madani
Variations: 1/12
Recycled paper and live seeds.
October 2009

PAHP: Tomorrow's History, Today.

"The P.A.H.G.C. aims to create a new and green space for supra-critical reappraisal of the use-value of art history (as written from the point of view of colonial and post-colonial
govern-mentality), by converting the plastic objects of art history into objects of everyday fetish use for the subjects of history. The dissemination of alter-knowledge and the insemination of alter-culture are the short, medium and long term goals of this project, which conforms closely to the will of the people while correspondingly attempting to shape the contours of that will and its future forms."

David Alesworth
Adnan Madani
Lahore
Oct. 2009

Video documentation and context for "P.A.H.G.C.P"

Mahmood with a collection of raw material.
Oxford University Press's "Image and Identity" by Akbar Naquvi.
In this book he describes my practice in the mid 1990's as being more orientated towards
horticulture than art making.

Iqbal Geoffrey to whom this work is in part homage.

Mahmood at work with editioned works behind him.

In the gallery prior to the opening.

The rosta of participating artists in this group show.

Gallery goers and Mahmood at work producing useful paper bags from this troubled text.
Gallery visitors were encourgaded to take away free art-historical bags containing live vegetable seeds.

The work place, finished bags to the right.

The seeds in the foreground are added to each bag.
They are egg plant, melons, cabbage and chillies.

The twelve editioned works, each bag contains some live seeds,
the local seed packets are inserted into each art-historical bag.
Each bag/seed packet combination is mounted on a facsimile herbarium sheet
and framed with acid free archival materials.

This is the hebarium mount for each of the editioned works.

Readings readings readings....(Context only)

2009-11-01T10:13:00.000-08:00

Will I will never read fast enough?
How will I ever retain all I need to?

"The Home Front" travelling horticultural experiments

2009-11-01T09:37:00.000-08:00

All this has to become work too.......

Weddelia and Washingtonia in the front garden, October 2009.

Luca, from our room to the Olive orchard.

The Olive grove at alta Luca, Tuscan hills.

Unripe Ginko Biloba Seeds from near Cuvrystrasse, Berlin.
Prior to planting. None have sprouted in three months.

The vegetable garden and wormery on my return from Europe.
Almost everything is dead.

How the Tuscan Olive cuttings were at the begining, August 2009.
-three months later only one is still green.

Thuja orinetalis From near Camp Darby, Tuscany.

More unripe Ginko nuts

The summer's seed gleanings

Stop Camp Darby.
Outside Pisa Botanical Garden.
Camp Darby is a 2500 acre US munitions dump in the Tuscan countryside between Luca and Pisa.

Congolese Avocado's

Cat and slug proofing the Ruccola seedlings, moth balls and slug-bait.

Tuscan Olive cuttings

Tuscan olive cuttings

Pots at Lahore nursery.

Baltistan (-towards some new work)

2009-11-01T09:12:00.000-08:00

Working for Agha Khan Cultural Services on the Baltit forts,
as the horticultural consultant.
First visit October 2009

Mushtaq's solar dryer house in Saling, he's to the left of his new house.
Mushtaq was a cook in Saudi Arabia for a number of years.
He's now a keen gardener and has a fish farm, garden and restaurant which is
very much of his own taste. He's drying Sea-Buckthorn berries and Apricots here, making a medicinal jam in the kitchen downstairs. The labels carry his email address.

Mushtaq's private museum of local treasures.
Everything is directly labeled, on it's surface.

Between Khaplu and Saling, impossible scale.

Paeony in the gardens at Khaplu fort.
This raises interesting issues about what constitutes an authentic garden here.

The mali's and their tools.

Khaplu fort.

The garden at Khaplu

The mali's herbarium.
All the wild flowers appear the same in this state.

Gardens at Khaplu fort. Mostly raised from imported seeds.
The structure of lack of it is what interests me.

Khaplu fort

Ceiling at Khaplu fort

Khaplu fort

Khaplu fort

Nuts and fruits at Khaplu

The Project

Landing at Shigar fort

the view from Shigar fort, dawn.

So how does this become work?

Obviously diaristically, but also I am intending to undetake interviews with the local inhabitants concerning their ideas about the "garden". There are also some interesting rumours of an english governess and the Mir's son. This may have resulted in a disinheritance, the couple ultimately lived in the gardens of Khaplu fort. I suspect thats how a number of British plants arrived there, and are still persisting hundreds of years later.

Lahore City (Context) September 2009

2009-11-01T09:04:00.000-08:00

"Main Boulevard September 2009"
Sony HD Handycam

"Dream Flowers" (Context images)

2009-11-01T08:57:00.000-08:00

Eid at Liberty Market, Lahore (Context)

2009-11-01T08:53:00.000-08:00

Some context images from Lahore city, September 2009
shot on a Sony HD handycam.

"Roti Home" (Work)

2009-11-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

How to make work from incidental encounters such as this?
Old roti's being stored in a disused bird-cage on top of a broken dolls push-chair.
I'm going to set it up on a plinth under studio lights and see what happens.
Maybe track around it with a video camera. recently got a Nikon 35mm adapter for the XL-1.

Urban Trees-ongoing (Work)

2009-11-01T08:27:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about a work entitled "The Beautiful Painted trees of Pakistan"
It might be in the form of an English explorer's portfolio of water-coloured botanical illustrations, maybe in miniature on wasli. Perhaps a combination of text, printed image and hand-work.

However the urban tree here faces many more challenges besides paint.

Tree that don't sleep.
Constant light will eventually kill any plant.

Street Weaponary, Lahore.

2009-11-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

Context images, not studio work....

Even the trees are armed
Chorisia speciosa, the Buddha tree.

Moving, context images....

2009-11-01T08:09:00.000-08:00

Moving home and moving Campus.
This is not studio work, this is just for context.

Riverside Leisure, Berlin 2009

2009-11-01T07:26:00.000-08:00

"Riverside Summer Home" Berlin. Summer 2009. web. 1.45 min

A sample of fifty-five perfect little homes.
The law states no one is allowed to stay here overnight.

I intend to present them as grid of vintage Kodachrome looking postcard sized images. Alternatively I may issue them as a set of postcards? Yet another Berlin work to resolve.

"A Walk in the Woods" Berlin, 2009.

2009-11-01T06:57:00.000-08:00

Arno Breker's studio in the woods.

Gorlitzer Park, Kreuzberg, Summer 2009

2009-11-01T03:35:00.000-08:00

A most amazing garden design disaster.

I love it. Right in the heart of Gorlitzer park, in fact the restaurant overlooks it.

People sit on it's steps and gaze out into this barricaded ruin. The barricades add to it's sense of dissaster and potential threat. It becomes a complete dead-zone. I have heard the project is still in litigation.

Intended as a water-garden of terraces and cascades, the wrong stone was selected and the decay of the stone began with the first frosts, it was never completed.

This is another Berlin work to be pursued.
I am hoping a local collaborator will shed more light on this. I have both video and still documentation. What the work may be is still to be resolved. I would consider intervening in the site itself.

Gorlitzer park abounds with Kreuzvbergian oddities.

Bomb Damage, Yorkstrasse, Berlin.

2009-11-01T03:15:00.000-08:00

Some abandoned railway bridges and some still in use. Frequently passed on our way into Transart, summer 2009. I didn't get to make work from them on the residency but afterwards I went back and documented them with stills and video.

Similar to the Lola piece they too bear witness.
There is so much damage to the bridges and the surrounding walls. I tried to research why they were targeted to this extent, nothing conclusive as yet, although I did find logs of bombing raids on the area.

What I took to be C.I. sections must be steel given the extent of their gouging and distortion under the effects of the blasts.

Nature is reclaiming much of the surrounding post-industrial sites and railway sidings. Trees are actually growing into the edges of these fabricated metal bridges.

I also find the language of the ornamental capitals of some of the columns interesting.

Berlin Landscape Maintenance

2009-11-01T02:54:00.001-08:00

The absolute care with which this tree is planted, protected and logged onto the tree data-base. All images located in Kreuzberg, Summer 2009.

Municipal landscape maintenance, Berlin, 2009.

Germany has an interesting approach to urban landscape maintenance. I believe this has cultural significance. I need to research it's history. I have seen the same approach in Hamburg and Frankfurt in recent years. The cultivation of unkempt weeds in the city, allowing grass to grow and seed, little use of herbicides and pesticides. At first I thought it was financially motivated, now I think it's part of an overall environmental strategy.

It's something that I hope to discuss with a Berlin based collaborator for one or more works towards this year's overall practice. (I am making enquiries towards this currently). I am writing out to friends in Berlin for suggestions.

Question, to seek collaboration with an artist, botanist, horticulturalist, urban-activist or simply a motivated citizen?

Berlin Residency Summer 09: "Run Lola Run"

2009-11-01T02:10:00.001-08:00

"Lola Ginko Biloba"

"Lola Ginkgo Biloba"- a work still in progress

Cuvrystrasse then and today, where Lola was shot in the film.

I undertook additional research for this piece in Berlin after the residency, amassing more photographs around Cuvrystrasse and interviewing a number of residents. I am still looking for ways to get finished work out of this enquiry, which is by no means over.

Ginko leaves and fruit from the area

The remains of the Yam club, the Lido remains nearby.

-with their backs to the river

The trees of Berlin as a counterpoint and enduring witness. Lola's constant movement, the trees absolute slowness. Their change in size over the past decade since the film was made. The hidden history of the Yam club, the underground music scene around Cuvrystrasse. I believe Franka Potente was living in the area with her partner Tom Tykwer at the time Lola Rent was made (1998). Did she perform at the Yam club at that time? Now demolished, she was shot in the film right in front of the club, on Cuvrystrasse.

I have yet to decide how to formalize this work. Am I looking for a small book/note-book like piece, short video, slide-show or graphic work(s)? It's important to me to finish this as a link into next summer's show and residency in Berlin.

Research title update

2009-11-01T01:56:00.001-07:00

"The post-colonial garden as palimpsest"

This is the current working title of my second year paper.

I intend to take a very expanded view of the garden as culture and nature (including small farms, orchards and the landscape of the cities of Lahore and Karachi).

To investigate the possibility of obscured layers of garden practice and concepts that may originate in the land and region itself.
I will include sites in Baltistan as they would seem to have a very different conception of the garden and hopefully I will continue to work there some of this year.
-the poppy fields of the far north, what fantastic gardens they might be?

The current renaming of streets (and prior namings under other administrations) the removal of all Raj statuary and re-appropriation of sites Victoria's memorial is now Jinnah sister memorial in Lahore).

My emphasis is probably to be on the soft-landscape rather than an analysis of architectural elements, though I'm sure that will form a part of the research.

Perhaps the result would be to argue that the naming of most plants and any particular conception of the garden will always be layered with obscured influence.

2009-07-12T02:03:00.000-07:00

Transart draft Proposals
Research and studio 2009-2010

Work Year-1

davidalesworth.com (blog links also on home page)

Research-Proposal (year-2)

Draft title: “Working the Garden, a consideration of the garden in contemporary Pakistan”.

Towards my studio work "A Taxonomy of Eden" I will be researching gardens and urban landscape in contemporary Pakistan. This will include varying attitudes to the notion of nature, wilderness and the paradise garden. Also the legacy of aging colonial parks. Besides readings (see bibliography below) I will interview a cross section of contemporary society from career gardeners in Lahore's parks, agricultural workers, religious scholars (and lay practitioners from various religions and sects) the educated and the less educated in the city and countryside of Lahore and Karachi (possibly further afield also). From nursery owners, the head of the Punjab Horticultural Authority to jobbing residential gardeners in the Defence housing authorities of Karachi and Lahore. This will follow a format of recordings, translations, transcriptions and analysis. Also photography and some video. I work as a freelance horticultural consultant in Pakistan and have done so for the past 21 years. My clients currently include Agha Khan Cultural Services Pakistan, with whom I am working on several restoration projects, including the uplift of the North Circular Park belt around Lahore's old city.
(Sacred Texts. Garden Design. Garden History. Landscape. Popular Culture. Decorated Transport. Trees on the edge between nature and culture. Motifs. Carpets. Ageing colonial public parks in Lahore. The culture of the Mali.)

“Working the Garden”
Draft Bibliography (11 July 2009) Part Questia, part owned.

Albinia, Alice. Empires of the Indus. John Murray. 2008.
Anderson, Earl R. Folk-Taxonomies in Early English. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003.
Anderson, Edgar. Plants, Man and Life. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1952.
Anesaki, Masaharu. Art, Life, and Nature in Japan. Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1933.
Arber, Agnes. Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670. Cambridge, England: University Press, 1938.
Aubrey, James R., ed. John Fowles and Nature: Fourteen Perspectives on Landscape. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.
Aydon, Cyril. Charles Darwin, His life and times. Running Press. 2008.
Bailey, L. H. How Plants Get Their Names. New York: Dover Publications, 1963.
Barton, Gregory Allen. Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Baydawi, Abd Allah, and Mahmud Isfahani. Nature, Man and God in Medieval Islam: 'abd Allah Baydawi's Text, Tawali' Al-Anwar Min Matali' Al-Anzar, along with Mahmud Isfahani's Commentary, Matali' Al-Anzar, Sharh Tawali' Al-Anwar. Translated by Calverley, Edwin E. and James W. Pollock. Edited by Edwin E. Calverley and James W. Pollock. Vol. 2,. Boston: Brill, 2002.
Bedford, Henry F. Citizen Politics and Nuclear Power Citizen Politics and Nuclear Power. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.
Bell, Simon. Landscape: Pattern, Perception, and Process. New York: Spon Press, 1999.
Benson, Lyman D. Plant Taxonomy: Methods and Principles. New York: Ronald Press Co., 1962.
Bracey, H. E. English Rural Life: Village Activities, Organisations, and Institutions. London: Routledge and Paul, 1959.
Brichto, Herbert Chanan. The Names of God: Poetic Readings in Biblical Beginnings. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Brother, Nan. Men and Gardens. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.
Burden, Robert and Stephan Kohl, eds. Landscape and Englishness. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
Busch, Lawrence, William B. Lacy, Jeffrey Burkhardt, Douglas Hemken, Jubel Moraga-Rojel, Timothy Koponen, and José De Souza Silva. Making Nature, Shaping Culture: Plant Biodiversity in Global Context. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
Campana, Richard J. Arboriculture: History and Development in North America. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1999.
Carr, David M. The Erotic Word: Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Conlogue, William. Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture. Edited by Jack Temple Kirby. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Dale, Stephen F. The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India (1483-1530). Boston: Brill, 2004.
Don, Monty. Around the World in Eighty Gardens. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2008.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Bantam Press. 2006.
Ereshefsky, Marc. The Poverty of the Linnaean Hierarchy: A Philosophical Study of Biological Taxonomy. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Evans, David. A History of Nature Conservation in Britain. London: Routledge, 1997.
Eyler, Ellen C. Early English Gardens and Garden Books. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974.
Foerster, Norman. Nature in American Literature: Studies in the Modern View of Nature. New York: Macmillan, 1923.
Fry, Michael. A Manual of Nature Conservation Law. Oxford: Oxford University, 1995.
Gardens of Prehistory: The Archaeology of Settlement Agriculture in Greater Mesoamerica. Edited by Thomas W. Killion. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1992.
Gatta, John. Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Geikie, Archibald. The Love of Nature among the Romans during the Later Decades of the Republic and the First Century of the Empire. London: John Murray, 1912.
Gersdorf, Catrin and Sylvia Mayer, eds. Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
Grady, Wayne, ed. Bright Stars, Dark Trees, Clear Water: Nature Writings from North of the Border. Boston: David R. Godine, 1995
Harada, Jiro. The Lesson of Japanese Architecture. Revised ed. London: Studio Limited, 1954.
Hatton, Richard G. Handbook of Plant and Floral Ornament: Selected from the Herbals of the Sixteenth Century, and Exhibiting the Finest Examples of Plant-Drawing Found in Those Rare Works, Whether Executed in Wood-Cuts or in Copperplate Engravings, Arranged for the Use of the Decorator. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1960.
Harberd, Nicholas. Seed to Seed. Bloomsbury. 2006.
Hawks, Ellison, and G. S. Boulger. Pioneers of Plant Study. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1928.
Henderson, John. Hortus: The Roman Book of Gardening. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Hoffenberg, Peter H. An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001.
Howes, Laura L. Chaucer's Gardens and the Language of Convention. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997.
Huggett, Richard John. Geoecology: An Evolutionary Approach. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Hunt, John Dixon. Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 1600-1750. 1st ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996.
Huth, Hans. Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.
Jacobs, Noah Jonathan. Naming-Day in Eden: The Creation and Recreation of Language. New York: Macmillan, 1958.
Keulartz, Jozef. Struggle for Nature: A Critique of Radical Ecology. London: Routledge, 1998.
King, Amy M. Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Lehner, Ernst, and Johanna Lehner. Folklore and Symbolism of Flowers, Plants and Trees. New York: Tudor Publishing, 1960.
Leiss, William. The Domination of Nature. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994.
León, Luis De. The Names of Christ /. Translated by DurÁn, Manuel and William Kluback. New York: Paulist Press, 1984.
Luger, Michael I., and Harvey A. Goldstein. Technology in the Garden: Research Parks and Regional Economic Development. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Milton, Kay. Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion. London: Routledge, 2002.
Noble, David W. The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden: The Central Myth in the American Novel since 1830. New York: Braziller, 1968.
Pavord, Anna. The Naming of Names, The search for order in the world of plants. Bloomsbury. 2005.
Prance, Ghillean and Mark Nesbitt, eds. Cultural History of Plants. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Reed, Howard S. A Short History of the Plant Sciences. Waltham, MA: Chronica Botanica, 1942.
Reed, Michael. The Landscape of Britain: From the Beginnings to 1914. London: Routledge, 1997.
Reynolds, Richard. On Guerrilla Gardening. Bloomsbury. 2008.
Robbins, R. H. A., ed. Religio Medici: Hydriotaphia: And, the Garden of Cyrus. Oxford: Oxford University, 1972.
Rojas, Carlos. The Garden of the Hesperides. Translated by Glad, Diana. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.
Scidmore, Eliza Ruhamah. Winter India. New York: The Century Co., 1904.
Simmons, I. G. Interpreting Nature: Cultural Constructions of the Environment. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Stave, Shirley A. The Decline of the Goddess: Nature, Culture, and Women in Thomas Hardy's Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.
Gill, Simryn. Pearls. Raking Leaves. 2008.
Thomas, Julia Adeney. Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001.
Tillotson, Geoffrey. Pope and Human Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958
Trowbridge, Peter J., and Nina L. Bassuk. Trees in the Urban Landscape: Site Assessment, Design, and Installation. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004.
Troyanov, Iliya. The Collector of Worlds. Faber & Faber. 2008 (Novel).
Turrill, W. B, ed. Vistas in Botany. New York: Pergamon, 1959.
Veenhuizen, Rene Van, ed. Cities Farming for the Future: Urban Agriculture for Green and Productive Cities. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2006.
Verdoorn, Frans, ed. Plants and Plant Science in Latin America. Waltham, MA: Chronica Botanica, 1945.
Webb, Richard E. The Accident Hazards of Nuclear Power Plants. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976.
Wiggin, Kate Douglas Smith. My Garden of Memory: An Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1923.

Transart Year-2
Studio Practice: “A Taxonomy of Eden”

Building upon "The Garden of Babel" 2009 as the initial format I will work towards examining aspects of various sacred texts in translation. Those of the Abrahamic religions including Judaism, Christianity and Islam and possibly others in the broad grouping in relation to notions of the garden of Eden. In this respect I will be particularly focusing on the plants mentioned there. Using this with allied horticultural enquiry, and in consultation with various international scholars I would work to build a plausible taxonomy of Eden. The works may be gridded digital prints of botanical and zoological accession labels, as are to be found in Zoos and botanical gardens around the world. My work on “The Garden of Babel” revealed a pleasing lack of scientific rigour in the world of plant taxonomy. I would find reasonable botanical approximations of specifically mentioned plants in Eden (these will be real plants). I will aim for around 180-300 plants in a work. There may be one or more works. I will then make the labels in etched plastic laminates, as authentic botanical labels. Photograph them in particular settings, as I have learnt from the making of “The Garden of Babel". These may then be composed as grids and printed as large C-prints. How the work will play out in other forms such as performance, video, audio, texts, woven carpets or illuminated manuscripts or their digital equivalents remains to be seen.

Notes/alternatives: Performative: (Autobiography/Horticulture/Video) The Lawn Mower. New Liberal Mowers, Lahore, producing Ransomes vintage 1950's machines, monstrous machines evolving on their own paths away from their colonial models. Lawn grass is the white mans burden? Myself pulling a large mower around a massive lawn I have made, (re: Un Chien Andalou, the harness pulling all the mass of culture) I encounters at various Stations around the route (Columns of Stewardship for example). Garden machines, garden technologies, male (Machinery) and female (the land itself). A sort of Cremaster of the garden approach. Exploring the history of the lawn: it speaks of class aspirations, industrialization has allowing broad access to the privilege of the lawn, once the domain of the landed gentry. To make my own lawn-mowers and perform with them? (Very autobiographical). Greens, British racing greens (Brooklands, where I studied), English mower greens, the Suffolk Punch mower. Water cans, columns of Stewardship, a journey around the Tarogil lawns. Lawrence Mali's. Howard Gem rotator’s. My grandfather’s horticultural medal. Events in the journey around the Tarogil play ground lawn, journeying on a ride-on mower?
Go down into the ground too, digging into the soil. Incorporate the “12.2.42” boxes in the fields of Tarogil.

Radical garden design, guerilla gardening? Imran's early chainsaw, Bhor tree (at home), climbing trees, tree work equipment (I used to work as a tree-surgeon). Fruit bat counting Mali’s, Lawrence Gardens, Cantt. Water Towers. The canals, barrages and bal mitti of Punjab. Garden tools. Lahore Compost at the city dump. Shalimar Gardens in disarray. Punjab Horticultural Association, my meetings with them. Garden plans, graphics, plant taxonomy.
How to build upon “The Garden of Babel” work?

Car number plate grids? Hierarchies. Another trajectory.

DCA 12th
Lahore,
July 2009.

Transart Submission: 15th June 2009

2009-06-14T05:53:00.000-07:00

Artists statement, June 2009

The finished project consists of a number of interrelated works, spanning a variety of media produced throughout the year. There are thirty seven large, monochrome metal framed digital prints of images derived from the Record Room, shoots I undertook in Karachi’s vehicle record archives over the last year. One large digital print “The Garden of Babel” which references scientific accession labels for plants from horticultural gardens in Austria and Pakistan. A large scale rectangular stack of 180 steel cubes, each 14” x 14” x 28” in matt lacquered passivated mild steel (11’6”h x 14’ x 9’4” rectangle) a mutable installation/intervention at 11’6” high. This refers to both the Kaaba, modernist sculpture and early nuclear technologies. Over this past year I have produced a series of works in Lahore, Pakistan, that explore the interlinking of the autobiographical with the public. This takes the form of aspects of my personal history woven into outward issues, such as that of post-coloniality in the “Garden of Babel”, or nuclear power and nuclearization, weaponisation in “12.2.42”. The latter work was also conceived to be used for public interventions in the city of Lahore and surrounding countryside. The prevailing security situation in Pakistan made this impossible. Instead the work was brought into my home, where it displaced the living spaces of the house. This became a broader metaphor for invasion and imposition, right into the home itself. This imposition in question may be read as the fall-out of technologies, be they nuclear poisons or otherwise, or even the mental poison of the always present threat of nuclear war, in this, the worlds number one hotspot for a potential nuclear conflict. The imposition on the living space of my home may also be considered as ideological, and it is no accident that the structures produced are essentially Kaaba like. Pakistan is currently in a state of low intensity civil war, it’s nuclear assets are the whole worlds concern which we hear of daily in the international media. This war is a supposedly religious war, certainly ideological and I find myself particularly visible in the midst of a divided nation that is not my original home. Yet in Pakistan there is no public awareness, debate, protest or education on the complex issues of nuclearization. Karachi is in the process of ordering four more domestic nuclear power stations this year. This period globally has been dubbed “the beginning of the second nuclear age”. The other thread of my work has been the more intimate and directly autobiographical in the form of video.

Research Synopsis 2009

I have read widely in the diverse genre of autobiography, it's associated theory and criticism. I have also read a selection of autobiographical works from St Augustine's "Confessions" to Damien Hirst's "On my way to Work". I have considered the autobiographical in art history and contemporary art practice. I have retrospectively considered some of my own work over the past thirty years in the light of an autobiographical reading. In conclusion I have proposed that all creative work is essentially autobiographical in nature.

Draft Proposals for 2009-2010:
Research Proposal 1.

As "A survey of autobiographical tendencies in contemporary art practice in Pakistan" I would be researching attitudes to the autobiographical in contemporary Pakistani art, across the board from contemporary miniature to teaching approaches in various art schools in the country and video and installation based practices. Thorough interviews and photographs, possibly video documentation too. Perhaps producing some Podcasts in the process. I have worked on art and autobiography in my research of the past 12 months. (History, interviews, conclusions. Post-coloniality, censorship, narrative, contemporary miniature, feminist and gay perspectives, gender specificity. The role of galleries, institutions and collectors in shaping art criterion. Art education and the international audience.)

Studio Practice: The Autobiographical and the public.
In relation to the above enquiry and as an extension of my practice in 2008-2009 I would continue to make autobiographical work. I see the task in hand now to be a full integration of my life, as outsider and "other" in Pakistan with broader societal and global concerns. The thread of this may be taken up from the "Domestic Displacements" work I undertook in Lahore in May and June of 2009.

Draft Proposals for 2009-2010:
Research-Proposal 2.

Alternatively under the banner of "A Taxonomy of Eden" I will be researching gardens and parks in contemporary Pakistan. This will include varying attitudes to the idea of nature, wilderness and the paradise garden. Also the legacy of aging colonial park spaces. Interviewing a cross section of contemporary society from career gardeners in Lahore's parks, agricultural workers, religious scholars (and lay practitioners from various religions and sects) the educated and the less educated in the city and countryside of Lahore and Karachi (possibly further afield also). From nursery owners, the head of the Punjab Horticultural Authority to jobbing residential gardeners in the Defence housing authorities of Karachi and Lahore. This will also follow the format of recordings, translations, transcriptions and analysis. Also photography and some video. I work as a freelance horticultural consultant in Pakistan and have done so for the past 21 years. My clients currently include Agha Khan Cultural Services Pakistan, with whom I am working on several projects, including the uplift of the North Circular Park belt around Lahore's old city. (Sacred Texts. Garden Design. Garden History. Landscape. Popular Culture. Decorated Transport. Trees on the edge between nature and culture. Motifs. Carpets. Ageing colonial public parks in Lahore. The culture of the Mali.)

Studio Practice: A Taxonomy of Eden.
Building upon "The Garden of Babel" 2009 as a format I would initially work towards examining various sacred texts in translation. Those of the Abrahamic religions including Judaism, Christianity and Islam and possibly others in the broad grouping in relation to notions of the garden of Eden. In this respect I would be particularly focusing on plants mentioned there. Using this with allied horticultural enquiry, and in consultati0n with various scholars I would build a taxonomy of Eden. The works may be grided digital prints of botanical and zoological accession labels, as are to be found in Zoos and botanical gardens. I would have to create reasonable approximations of specifically mentioned plants of Eden, I would aim for around 180-300 plants per work. I would then make the labels in etched plastic laminates, as authentic labels. Photograph them in particular settings, as I have learnt from the making of "The Garden of Babel". These would then be composed as grids and printed as large C-prints. How the work may play out in other forms such as texts, woven carpets or illuminated manuscripts or their digital equivalents would remain to be seen.

The Autobiographical

2009-04-15T07:51:00.000-07:00

HALF-LIFE
New Work
David Alesworth | Huma Mulji
Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery
National College of Arts | Lahore | Pakistan

February 16-March 4, 2009

DAVID CHALMERS ALESWORTH

My work has long addressed issues of environmental degradation, cultural attitudes to the notion of nature and nuclearization/weaponisation of the sub‐continent. Growing up one of my earliest memories was of the Cuban missile crisis and the tension in the family home as the world inched ever closer to nuclear conflict. CND marches were a constant feature of the UK in the 1960’s . We now live in an age where nuclear power begins to look like a cleaner solution to our energy needs and nuclear weapons are considered for tactical use. It’s as though the world has forgotten what was unleashed on Japan in 1945. People are calling it the Beginning of the second Nuclear Age.

"12.2.42"

180 Passivated MS boxes, installation variable.

A tribute to Fermi’s first experimental nuclear pile built under the squash courts of Chicago University in 1942. Here on the second of December the first sustaining chain reaction was initiated amidst a stack of graphite blocks and uranium metal. The pile at that time cost around one million dollars to make.

The idea that CP‐1 was built in a university squash court has always appealed to
me.

This sculptural installation has other resonances, the formality of artists such as (late period) David Smith, Donald Judd and Karl Andre. This is slightly tongue in cheek reference to such minimalist concerns, through the lens of time and place. This is another prayer for sanity and peace, the way my “Two Bombs Kiss” was in the early ‘90’s. It was within the unshielded CP-1 reactor that plutonium production became a practical proposition.

“Seaborg, (the discoverer of Plutonium) was asked to suggest a name for the element he had discovered. He decided to respect the tradition begun with uranium, named for the planet Uranus, then neptunium — the 93rd element, found in 1940 — for Neptune. As the next planet in the solar system was Pluto, he suggested the new element be called plutonium. No one thought to point out that the deity after which the planet Pluto was named was the Greek god of hell, the Roman god of death.”

All the Plutonium on the planet now (a completely man‐made element) is around 50 tons; enough, if judiciously employed, to entirely destroy life on the earth. It is undoubtedly the most toxic substance in existence. I see "12.2.42" as part tribute (to scientific endeavor) and part warning (of the imperfect nature of mankind's knowledge). The smallness of mankind's achievements set against the vastness of creation. The ultimate failure of all technologies and civilization itself. It is a Vanitas sculpture. It critiques the arrogance of scientific knowledge. I half suspect this world will be sucked through the eye of an atom sized black‐hole, produced in the new Cern accelerator experiements. What a suitable ending it would be for this planet, wrecked as it is, by mankind's insatiable greed. The units are identical but also quite distorted from the heat of their welding. The proportions of 14 x 14 x 28 inches directly address the scale of one’s body. I investigated other sizes and ratios to arrive at this. It is to do with one's span. I realize these are very much the concerns of the early minimalists, like Caro, who was once Henry Moore's protégé. The idea of span and of being body‐scaled are terms that could be right out of Moore's own vocabulary. Though such concerns are readily discernible in ancient Egyptian sculpture (all of the canonical works.) My undergraduate dissertation was on the cannon of proportion in ancient Egyptian sculpture. I welcome the "wobble" that sign or life. It's the imperfection that makes energy flow in the work, something I’ve long used in my practice. A tension between stillness and movement.

There’s a correlation between the persistence of an official record and that of radioactive waste.

I'm thinking of Half-Life as the link between the forest of files (The Record Room Series), undying, unending and uncountable, and the beginning of the nuclear age. Taking Fermi's first pile CP‐1 as the beginning of this as it was here that Plutonium was first produced, albeit in tiny quantities.

On that day that CP-1 first went critical for only 28 minutes and Plutonium was produced in its nuclear flux. Leo Szilard lingered on the balcony until most people had left, then turned to Fermi, shook his hand, and said that he thought the day would go down as a "black day in the history of mankind."

This cube of steel boxes is as much a play with the proportions of the room and scale of the body as it is a reference to nuclear power. Waste from Chicago Pile1 was buried in nearby woodland, this was not a fortuitous beginning to the nuclear age.

“Doomsday Clock Will Move Closer to Midnight.

WASHINGTON, DC, January 12, 2007 (ENS) ‐ The minute hand of the Doomsday Clock will be moved closer to midnight on January 17, the first such change to the clock since February 2002. The Doomsday Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world's vulnerability to nuclear weapons and other threats.” The move was announced today by the Board of Directors of the magazine "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists." It reflects growing concerns
about what the board calls a "Second Nuclear Age" marked by grave threats. The board also cited "escalating terrorism, and new pressure from climate change for expanded civilian nuclear power that could increase proliferation risks." The Doomsday Clock is now set at seven minutes to midnight. The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock face that the Bulletin has maintained since 1947 at its headquarters on the campus of the University of Chicago. It uses the analogy of
the human race being at a time that is a "few minutes to midnight" where
midnight represents destruction by nuclear war. The decision to move the minute hand is made by the Bulletin's Board of Directors in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates. The "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" was founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project and were deeply concerned about the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

"The Garden of Babel"

A grid of botanical accession labels from Linz (Austria) and Lahore. I believe all work is essentially autobiographical. My grandfather was the horticulturalist, F.W. Alesworth, a rose is named after him. He taught me my first name in horticultural Latin, something I still had yet to study at school. These names in all their authority and scientific exactitude are threaded through and through with tales of conquest and aspirations of immortality. They speak of the earliest attempts to order the natural world. Beginning with Theophrastus in 300 AD, and for me ending with John Ray (he wrote it, Wray), not the upstart Linnaeus. Perhaps the names of Neem and Bachain say it all. Azadarachta Indica and Melia Azadarachta respectively. An Ash like leaf (Bachain) and both the Free-Tree’s-of-India), this co‐opting of language is typical of botanical Latin. It is a specialist, insider’s secret language and as equally imperfect an attempt at creating logical order as the Record Room itself.

Botanical accession labels are often grey or black and the whole assemblage feels like a mausoleum to me. A graveyard for nature, epitomized as “the garden”. This also serves as a pointer to environmental issues, as so many plant names may actually survive the species (in the wild) in many cases. Many of these names are embedded with tales of Empire, the names of Victorian naturalists, indigenous names Latinized and other slight problems in the overall scheme of things. To say nothing of the need for constant revision as new discoveries lead to new classifications of relatedness. The books "All the Names" (Jose Samarago) and "The Naming of Names" (Anna Parvord) were inspirations for this work.

“The Record Room" series 2009.

Monochrome archival, digital C-Prints. Galvanized and passivated

steel-frames, 2009.

These myriad vehicle papers are more akin to a living entity than an official archive. They represent the dreams of countless families for progress, modernity and the transformation of their lives. This is failed order, individually and collectively; as a species our attempts to control and order the world are doomed to fail, for we forget that we are also nature. The images of this record-room are for me beautiful and tragic. They are 18 million files, 18 million dreams, a poignant metaphor for the populace of Karachi. My own records were found here in a matter of minutes. I was invited to view this record-room after commenting on the speedy delivery of my own file. I fell in love with it instantly and have been begging my way back with an assortment of cameras ever since. It is a dying (physical) archive the files are being scanned and destroyed currently and should cease to exist entirely in a few years. I've seen the facility shrink like the loss of forestation, the demise of a coral‐reef or the melting of glaciers, for this is something like nature itself. Somehow in all it's dog‐eared, rubbed till soft existence (so handled these records become almost living); the archive actually works. It functions daily at huge volumes and serves the inhabitants well for without their cooperation nothing will ever be found. One can read the staff's valiant attempts to manage the deluge of incoming paper, abandoning the expensive (but rapidly collapsing steel shelving) in favor of old fruit crates. The failure to create order in the record room for me becomes a Vanitas subject, a gentle reminder of our ultimate individual decay and demise as a part of nature itself.

Towards the Autobiographical

2009-04-15T07:26:00.001-07:00

"Time Lapse Video footage with FS4 and Canon XL-1"

I thought I might face the camera for three days and nights continuously as part of my autobiographic video project. This was a test for that. The day that I did it the power went down for the first time in months and the FS4 corrupted much of the footage. I now have a UPS prepared for the next shoot, plus a twelve foot jib-arm to get elevated shots that will give a God's eye view like perspective to myself in my spaces.

"The twelve foot, parallel motion jib-arm"

I'm going to use this for the autobiographical video to get unusual shots, low to the floor as well as elevated perspectives, but probably not pans. I will also be using it to make images from the documentation of the external reincarnations of "12.2.42". The units will first be installed in the living spaces of my home, effectively displacing all the useable space in each room, intervening and denying any living space to the occupants. Following that the 180 units will go out to the countryside at the edge of the city, the area known as Tarogil. Here I hope to build alien structures amongst the crops and cattle. Something indeterminately industrial, something intrusive yet temporary. I am hoping the jib-arm will allow me to locate the steel installation amongst the agricultural. The logistics of moving all the work, let alone equipment through the cities multiple road-blocks and security check posts is daunting, it is also getting very hot.

'Half-Life" Video Documentation

2009-04-14T23:17:00.000-07:00

A video survey of my part of the show. Everything is in monochrome except for the "Garden of Babel" which is composed of horticultural accession labels, in polychromed plastic units. Repetitive units are everywhere, the surrounding Record Room images, the steel cubes and the horticultural tags.

The installation of "12.2.42", it took six hours to build and then to adjust and rebuild again.

This is an autobiography through formalism. This is minimalism gone bad. Minimalism having no resonance in Pakistan. The disintegration of an idea,the loss of an ideal. Also the idea of cheap clean nuclear energy, once discredited and now again being entertained as a lesser evil in this carbon obsessed age. Karachi has commissioned four new nuclear plants this year.

Transart: Studio Projects, Various, 2008-2009

2009-04-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

"Autobiographical Baked Bean Can" April 2009

2009-04-13T02:39:00.000-07:00

"The text that wraps the Can"

Printing to size, fixing and glazing it to a convincing sheen took some time to configure.
Its my contribution to another artists project, "what is your take on art making?" Please do it on a can. She told me it was a can of kidney beans but I know someone who opened one and it was Baked Beans. That completely changes it for me. Though it all means something else in Pakistan, different associations entirely. The point was that I did it autobiographically. Even the corrections of the text refers to my work as a teacher.

More views of the autobiographical baked bean can: April 2009

2009-04-13T01:47:00.000-07:00

Other autobiographical works April 2009

2009-04-13T01:46:00.000-07:00

Autobiographical Bean Can with Tarogil Landscape Plan

"Damaged Donkey Pump, Liberty Market, Lahore, 2009"

"Wild Grasses, Tarogil, April 2009"

The background rumble is the sound of tractors and bull-dozers working the grade on site.

I work at Tarogil, both as a teacher, on occassion and weekly as the landcape consultant to the new 40 acre campus that is coming up there. It's a troubled project for me. I would love to see it return to some kind of wilderness, but 40 acres is hardly much amongst all the built structures of the university. I'm lobbying for the "Formal Gardens" to become a mud-pond and wild-life reserve cum arboretum. It a questiom of world views, mine has support but amongst a few. The problems of education and maintenance of such a space in a place that has no positive concept of "wilderness" would mean that I would have to perpetually fight for it's existence, and for it to be understood. All of these are concerns that I wish my future work to address and to muse upon.

"Half-Life" NCA Gallery Show, 16th Feb. 2009

2009-02-10T10:53:00.000-08:00

"Half-Life"
New Work by David Alesworth and Huma Mulji
Two person show at Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery,
National College of Arts,
Lahore.
February 16th-4th March 2009

"The Garden of Babel"
Botanical accession labels, Lahore and Austria.
30 x 40 inch, archival C-, Edition 1/6, 2009.

Melia Azadarach
(Bachain)

Half-Life: "Record Room" Images

2009-02-10T10:47:00.001-08:00

NCA Show

2009-01-28T23:55:00.000-08:00

Work in progress, 2 person show at N.C.A. February 2009

"All the Names"
(detail, in progress)
Botanical accession labels grid.
30 x40 inches.

"12.2.42"
30 units of 180 units (in progress)
Mild-steel, zinc plate, units 14 x14 x28 inches.

"Half-Life"

2009-01-20T22:42:00.000-08:00

The persistence of an official record and that of radioactive waste is probably about the same.

CP-1 was buried in nearby woodland, this was not a fortuitous beginning to the issue of dealing with nuclear waste.

I'm thinking of Half-life as the link between the forest of files, undying, unending and uncountable, and the beginning of the nuclear age. I'm taking Fermi's first pile CP-1 as the beginning of this as it was here that Plutonium was first produced, albeit in tiny quantities. The cube of steel boxes (if they get made in time) are as much a play with the proportions of the room and scale of the body as they are references to nuclear power.

I had originally intended the installation to be about order and chaos but the imperfection of the cubes has led it elsewhere. I like the lack of perfection in theses boxes, distorted by the heat of their making. The imperfection of these (not so) minimal cubes echoes the story of the black stone of the Kaaba.

"According to Islamic tradition, the Stone fell from Heaven to show Adam and Eve where to build an altar and offer a sacrifice to God. The Altar became the first temple on Earth. Muslims believe that the stone was originally pure and dazzling white, but has since turned black because of the sins it has absorbed over the years. Islamic tradition holds that Adam's altar and the stone were lost in the process of Noah's Flood and forgotten. It was Abraham who found the Black Stone at the original site of Adam's altar when the Archangel Gabriel revealed it to him. Abraham ordered his son--and the ancestor of Prophet Muhammad--Ishmael to build a new temple in which to embed the Stone. This new temple is the Kaaba in Mecca.” (Wikipedia)

"Base of the World, Magic Base No. 3 by Piero Manzoni 1961 Homage to Galileo."

The world as sculpture.

Mona Hatoum, "Socle du Monde" 1992-1993
Wooden structure, steel plates, magnets and iron fillings
64 5/8 x 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 in. (164 x 200 x 200 cm)
Photo: Edward Woodman

Besides a tribute to Manzoni's sculpture by the same name of 1961, Hatoum says like the black stone of the Kaaba, thirty years of wars and deceits have turned Manzoni's pure work black with the sins of man.

"12.2.42"

I see "12.2.42" as part tribute (to scientific endeavor) and part warning (of the imperfect nature of mankind's knowledge). The smallness of mankind's achievements set against the vastness of creation. The ultimate failure of all technologies and even civilization itself. It is a Vanitas sculpture. It critiques the arrogance of scientific knowledge. I half suspect this world will be sucked through the eye of an atom sized black-hole, produced in the new Cern accelerator. What a suitable end it would be for this planet, wrecked as it is, by mankind's insatiable greed.

"A Taxonomy of Eden"

“Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

Genesis 2:8 9

In the Bible, God tells the man to name the animals (Genesis 2:19). In the Qur'an, Allah teaches Adam the names "of all things" and Adam repeats them (Ta-ha 20:120).

It is through the learning of "all the names" that Adam's place above the angels is consolidated, for the angels do not know the names of things.

I propose that Hazrat Adam made botanical labels for Eden, having learnt of all the names of the plants from God. Unfortunately many of these names are embedded with tales of Empire, the names of Victorian naturalists, indigenous names latinized and other slight problems in the overall scheme of things. I was thinking I might add zoological names plates for the reptilian and mammalian inhabitants of Eden, at least a few key characters. This is still under consideration.

Finding convincing and possible names for the plants of Eden is a longer task. I've started researching Quaranic and biblical references, but they then need re-translating into botanical Latin, it's going to take some time. I will then commission engraved labels, which I will in turn photograph. I am hoping to do one garden work for the NCA show, by 14th. February 2009. This will be a grid of botanical labels, in place of a garden. "All the Names" (re. Samarago's book) or "The Naming of Names" (re. Anna Parvord's book) may be title options. This will work alongside the file (Record Room) images. I will combine photographs of botanical labels from multiple locations, the regional languages also impinge in this supposedly international language of science. The labels are grey and the assemblage feels like a mausoleum. This also serves as a pointer to environmental issues, as so many plant names may survive the species (in the wild) in many cases.

NCA Show references.

2009-01-19T19:51:00.000-08:00

CP-1
1942

The idea that CP-1 was built in a university squash court has always appealed to me.

(Chicago Pile-1) This appears to be a stack of graphite blocks from the core prior to assembly.

Artists impression of the view across the squash courts.

Context for the current work, Jan. 2009.

2009-01-18T02:33:00.001-08:00

"Tower" 1974

An early sculpture from my foundation year at Epsom. 1974. I had spent the previous summer working on a motorway, the A3. We used to construct road markers out of waste materials to warn of hazards, to the trucks and other users of the as yet unopened road. I think something of my attitude to positioning work in the public space, and then the gallery space originated here.

"Two Bombs Kiss", Neem wood carving, 1990.

A prayer to avert nuclear war in the sub-c0ntitnet. It's based on a story I'd read of Brancusi, his ambition to place a version of "The Kiss" between the trenches of the Germans and the allies in the first world war.

"Heart Mahal" 1996,

Collaborative work. Iftikhar and Elizabeth Dadi, Durriya Kazi and David Alesworth.

"Fukuoka 2000"
A residency undertaken with Durriya Kazi and Pakistani truck decorators. Intended to interface with Japanese truck decorators. (Image right.)

Collaborative works with Durriya Kazi, 1997-2000

"Chamak Patti disks" David Alesworth, 2001. Icons of modernity such as washing powder adverts, emblems of arab culture, early nuclear weapons and mushroom clouds. The "Chammak Patti" is glass impregnated tape (3M reflector tape) used to decorate trucks in Pakistan.

"Event Horizon" 2002.

six-foot satellite Dish, chamak patti, enamel paint, steel stand. An anti-globalization, ad-busting work. It's first incarnation was on a thela (hand-cart). David Alesworth, 2002.

"War Against Terror" 2002
Aluminum trays, nan roti's, toy American soldiers, chamak Patti tape.

"Teddy Bear Rug" 2002.
Second hand soft toys on sale at Itwaar Bazaar, Karachi. A rug made of Teddy Bear skins.

The first of the "Teddy's Bear's". Toys for the war child. 2003.

"Probes" 2003, Karachi, out in the city of Karachi.

"Probes" in Karachi, the phalwala, murgheewala and doodhwala. 2003.

"Trays" 2003.

International brands, hacked, based upon fake items found in Karachi's markets. Stensil cut aluminium.

"Record Room"

Series, 2008-2009. Monochrome photographs. These will be shown in combination with "Fermi's Pile". The photographs will also be framed in grey, passivated zinc-plated steel. I will probably use a phosphate passivation on all the metal items.

"Record Room" series monochrome.

Probably around 20 x 30 inch, full-bleed images, in grey metal frames. 2008-2009.

"12.2.42"

Part-progress to Fermi's Pile, to be shown with the monochrome, "Record Room" images.
This will be constructed from 180 units, around 30 are present here. I'm now looking at a dark grey phosphate finish, same on the photographic frames. The work will probably be titled "12.2.42" the American date for when this first went critical and so beginning the atomic era.

Chicago Pile-1, a massive "atomic pile" of graphite bricks and uranium fuel, which went critical on December 2, 1942, built in a hard racquets court under Stagg Field, the football stadium at the University of Chicago. Due to a mistranslation, Soviet reports on Enrico Fermi claimed that his work was performed in a converted "pumpkin field" instead of a "squash court".

The NCA gallery space where the works will be shown, Jan. 2009.

NCA Gallery, Jan. 2009. This is probably the space I will be using. There are three potential rooms.

"Botanical Garden" or perhaps, "Role Call" or "All the Names", "Looking for Eden"?
2008-2009 currrent work.

I may also show a few of the botanical label works, these are in progress. They began in Linz, in the summer of 2008, at the Transart residency. I'm thinking of God telling man all the names (to settle the argument with the angels). I'm thinking of Eden and a taxonomy for Eden. I'm gradually working my way towards that, reseraching Quaranic and Biblical texts and refernces.

Work on "Fermi's Pile", 17 Jan. 2009

2009-01-17T07:20:00.000-08:00

Working amongst the small metal workshops of Lahore's Lakshmi Chawk area.

Stack of 30 units, from a total of 180 units.

The units are identical but also quite distorted from the heat of the welding. The proportions, 14 x 14 x 28 inches somehow work interestingly with the scale of ones body, why? I investigated other sizes and ratios to arrive at this. Is it the scale of a pet? child? what one can hope to pick-up unaided, something to do with one's span? I realize these are very much the concerns of early minimalists, like Caro, who was once Henry Moore's protege. The idea of span and of being body-scaled are terms that could be right out of Moore's own mouth. Though such concerns are readily discernible in ancient Egyptian sculpture, canonical works.

Is it not possible to make a perfect, quiet cube in Lahore? I think I welcome the "wobble" that sign or life. It's the imperfection that makes the energy flow.

I'm facing problems with the zinc plating process. I want the zinc plate not only as protection from rust or as an aesthetic surface, though I want both of those qualities too. I chose it for the link to the last two bodies of work I've made (objects), the "Probes" and the "Trays". These deliberately turned away from the aesthetic of "Truck Art" and other high visibility urban craft items in Pakistan. That strategy well played out by now, though I might well re-visit it. I want the link to a more domestic space, the kitchen. The zinc plate is the language of milk-churns, baking trays, funnels and jugs. There is a strong reference to the making, but they are also somehow, proto-industrial. Retro-tech, almost industrial.

Much of my reading over the last decade has been about the origins of nuclear technology and weaponry. I've made work that addresses the bulbous, toy like proportions of early nuclear weapons. (Two Bombs Kiss).

Work the in progress for NCA Show, Jan. 2009.

2009-01-15T12:34:00.001-08:00

Reference Boxes, for "Fermi's Pile"

Sample cubes, distortion and weld issues under consideration. I'm settling on 22 gauge MS sheet and argon shielded welds. These are cleaner welds for later electroplating.

"Column of Stewardship"sample, trying plant motifs for scale. The idea is four of these guard "Fermi's Pile" like the guardian figures around Tutankhamen's outer sarcophagi, in the Cairo Museum.

More stacking, exploring stability.

MS stamped floral motifs, I'm considering them for the "Column's of Stewardship", they're a bit "Truck Art", crude, heavy and undifferentiated. I'm still gathering the range of samples for these.

The first zinc plated cube on top. The black areas are around weld holes, which is a problem. The lower cube has been Ducco sprayed, it's not the look I want. I'm looking for a kind of failed minimalism, referencing Karl Andre and others in the 1970's.

A prototype MS, Zinc plated frame. This one's got a hot-dip surface. This has a thicker Zinc deposit which is good, for oxidizing, but also heavily crystalline, which isn't what I'm looking for. The second frame sample is currently in progress.

A zinc plated surface prior to oxidation, I'm still deciding how and when I'm going to fix the Zinc. I may go with an iridescent metallic finish

National College of Art, two person show, Febuary 16th-1st March 2009

2009-01-11T03:14:00.000-08:00

Work in progress January 10th, 2009

Columns of Stewardship

Samples of boxes, for Fermi's Pile.

Construction of CP-1, or Chicago Pile Number One, was done under the football stadium in an abandoned squash court. On December 2, 1942, mankind first harnessed the energy of the atom. Fermi's pile produced only 1/2 watts of power. But that was all the power the United States needed to start the next phase of the bomb's development. The pile contained 771,000 pounds of graphite, 80,590 pounds of uranium oxide and 12,400 pounds of uranium metal when it went "critical." It cost about $1 million to produce and build. The pile took the form of a flattened ellipsoid which measured 25 feet wide and 20 feet high.

Light Box sample, for "Trees of Lahore"

Column sample, for "Columns of Stewardship".

Working towards the autobiographical video.

2009-01-11T03:12:00.000-08:00

Acer palmatum atropurpureum

My grandfather taught me the name of this plant, the first I ever learnt, I must have been around nine years old. It grew in our front garden at Whiteherons.

The contents of drawers, remnants.

Bad sculptures. I've taught sculpture for more than twenty years, the bad ones never leave the studio. I've come to appreciate them recently, their presence, neglected and decaying.

"Waring Birds" Drawing, Dec. 2009

Video clip traveling
(avi. compact still cam.)

The long bus journey to work at Tarogil and back, from city to farmland and back again. I'm collecting video and images like this, the compact camera is so much easier to keep to hand but resolution will be an issue for final footage.

"Record Room" Video clips
(DV footage Dec. 2008.)

Sample footage from a compact camera. I also have some new mini-DV footage which will be used in the video. I am also planing to use large images and pan across them within FC-Pro.

Notes on "The Frankfurt School" Collaborative Video, 2008.

2009-01-11T02:27:00.000-08:00

The "Frankfurt School"
Video installation. David Alesworth and Adnan Madani. 2008.

(Short low res clip)

This collaborative video installation produced by David Alesworth and Adnan Madani originated in certain discussions between the two some years ago. Here the idea was posited of coercing members of "the public" to read critical theory, out loud, to the camera. The idea arose from the artists experience as teachers and the difficulties of getting students to read texts. Prompted to revisit the idea by a mutual friend, the project was begun in 2008 with a series of experimental shoots of art students, often tied or kneeling reading from Theodor Adorno's book "The Culture Industry" Routledge, 2nd edition, 2001. After further interviews and video shoots the artists settled upon filming a group of law students reading from the text in an academic environment. This being a small lecture theatre. The artists intervened in the readings, often stopping the readers and requesting them to start again from the beginning. The readers were also asked some simple questions in the course of each two minute reading from the same piece of text. The subsequent video revealed a study in power and something of the politics of the classroom. "The Ignorant Schoolmaster" by, Jacques Ranciere is a text that both artists had been recently considering. Subsequently it was decided that the video required a second, disparate element that would run parallel to the video portraits. In the end this became the accompanying footage of a bookbinder dismantling the same text, Adorno's "The Culture Industry" and producing from it a pile of folded and glued paper bags. These are common items in contemporary Pakistani street culture. The revered canonical text was ultimately reduced to a common disposable item that might be used for the sale of low value items. The two videos were streamed alongside each other in one fourteen minute loop initially. Upon first exhibiting the work, it was decided to set it up in the form of a video installation. This comprised of a large mounted plasma screen with audio, playing looped footage of the video portraits of the readers and the interruptions from the artists. On a table in front of this, not aligned to the main screen was a small LCD screen playing the silent dismantling of Adorno's book. Next to this on the table was a neat stack of paper-bags, weighted down by a smooth white pebble, the bags having been produced from the pages of the book. The accompanying text:

The Frankfurt School

David Alesworth Adnan Madani

"We asked students from the Law Department of the Lahore University of Management Sciences to read aloud an essay written by the German critical theorist Theodor Adorno. We filmed them reading in the lecture auditorium, while asking them a variety of questions to test their grasp of the text. The individual sessions collectively form a series of portraits, or studies in power; the text itself was subsequently converted into an object of (first) use and then (later) fetish value."

- was presented as a museum label on the adjacent wall. The whole ensemble was encountered as a puzzle to be investigated and pieced together through the examination of the elements.

Autobiographical connotations and relevance to my current project:

(The creation of autobiographical works through video and other means.)

For myself (David Alesworth) the whole work has a strong autobiographical resonance. I have taught in art-schools in Pakistan for some twenty years, and struggled unsuccessfully to integrate some theory alongside studio practice, at a variety of schools in the country. In my art practice of twenty years of living in Pakistan, the transformation of material (and often content) through interaction with Pakistan's urban crafts, of all forms has taken the central position. The production of the bags from the "western" text particularly resonates with this enduring concern.

This is the first major work that I have edited on a Mac and in Final Cut Pro. Adnan and I literally googled our way through a number of the editing steps, Adnan seeking the tutorials on a laptop and interpreting them to me, whilst I attempted to follow these instructions on the editing i-mac.

"Johnk"(60 Seconds) was commissioned by Motiroti UK.
Produced and directed by David Alesworth. Lahore. 2008.

(Low res. complete video, one minute)

The video was filmed in my residence earlier this year. Through the use of a split screen the passage of Jahangir (my housekeeper) and myself towards the vegetable garden is documented. We travel over very different surfaces. Jahangir leaves his quarters and walks around the rear of the house where he lives with his wife and three children, largely outside. I travel from the hall, over plush rugs, through the carpeted lounge, dinning-room and kitchen to meet with him in the vegetable garden. Here we discuss in my poor Urdu and his limited English issues of vegetable growing and other topical subjects. Like the split screen footage, we are arranged either side of an improvised irrigation support. Both devices serve to underline the formal intimacy of our domestic lives. We are either side of the class divide. Having been plagued by slugs (Johnk) the conversation ends with their mention. We withdraw to our respective quarters, Jahangir's door opens into his single room, amidst the chatter of his young family. I enter through my front door and toss my keys down. The video ends with a shot of my book on sustainable slug management practices. The video is about economic disparity in Pakistan today, post-colonial ghosts and eccentric English obsessions. I intend to make more work about slugs in the near future.

Jan 10th 2009: Current work overview:

2009-01-10T10:14:00.000-08:00

“The Record Room” Series, Dec. 2008

How I’m now thinking of (all) the work:
To create a non-linear, non-chronological autobiographical narrative.
When I reminisce (it’s always about me, as I’m always there) it is in fragments. I can navigate around the fragment but there is always a sense of place at the core of this experience. When I write these fragments down they become a sequence and already a sense of chronology imposed. Even if I make it achronological, it will still have it’s own fixed chronology. That of the sequence of the text itself. This is inauthentic for me.

What if I hyper-link the fragments? What if the writing and video, images, sound, other fragments exist in a sort of pool, cloud, or solar system of inter-linked information? Closer to the way my mind recalls.

I wish to collapse the research and the studio practice into one activity as far as possible (as far as I consider relevant, useful and possible even.)

Then the research essay and the autobiographical video work can all somehow be together, as one work. It’s ultimate form will also depend on the enquiry of the next few months.

How might I produce all this? Presently I believe, ideally as a web-site. I have been intending to learn Dreamweaver towards the development of my own artist site, this might be a further incentive to do so now.

I do wish to challenge the accepted form of an essay or dissertation. I believe the form of the text dictates in part it’s subsequent reading.

Researcher’s write and artists produce visual works, I wish to begin to creatively confuse this distinction.

The work of the last six months

September 2008 to January 2009

September 2008. Setting up i-Mac for editing. A major work as all existing data had to be incorporated into the new system and reformatted several times over the first few months, till a large stable, backed up resource was created. Still an issue as large quantities of visual data have to be re-organized and cataloged before it is usable. Completely moved to Mac platform, including laptop by October 2008.September to October 2008. Researching and ordering books for autobiographical studies, (slow delivery to Pakistan, no relevant libraries here.)
November,December, January 2009 ongoing. Readings beginning in late November. (Books mostly arrived by mid-December 2008, ABE and Amazon, up to 3 months for delivery to Pakistan.)Frankfurt School Video, collaboration. With Adnan Madani, completed first edit and shown for the first time, 21st Nov. 2009.
September-January 2009. Gathering resources for an autobiographical video. These comprise of the file store images (see image at top of page, two further shoots undertaken in December 2008, including some video footage). Incidental video footage and stills of bus journey's, to and from work.
October-November 2008. As part of a larger public presentation of my practice of some thirty-five years, along with access to a high-resolution film scanner, I came to reconsider a number of earlier works in the light of my current position. This will be leading to a series of photographic works that juxtapose scanned old transparencies of sculptures made decades ago. The images look new, the tools that created them are decayed (although the works have actually decayed and been destroyed for the most part). I consider this project to be autobiographical in nature.
August 2008 to January 2009. At work (BNU, SVA, University, Lahore) I have been conducting interviews, August 2008. Coordinating the foundation department, September to late December 2008. Teaching two courses, foundation studio and Fine Art Seminar.
September-December 2008. I was involved in the VASL international residency in November 2008. In addition I have been working on several large, complex landscape projects throughout this period. I consider all of this to be relevantl to my art practice impacting it both positively and negatively.November to Febuary 2009. I have committed to a two person show (with Huma Mulji) at the National College of Art, Gallery, in mid Febuary 2009. Here I will be showing some of the "Record Room" series for the first time, alongside a large sculptural installation. I consider both the sculpture and images as part of one installation. I consider the work to have considerable autobiographical relevance. I will be writing about the work in subsequent pages.

"The Frankfurt School" Video Installation.

2008-11-23T08:38:00.000-08:00

David Alesworth and Adnan Madani, Nov. 2008.

(details of the installation....)

"Frankfurt School" Collaborative, Video and Sculpture Installation.

2008-11-23T00:57:00.000-08:00

Friday 21st November 2008.

Alhamra Art gallery, The Mall, lahore, Pakistan.

VASL, Lahore International Artists Residency.
http://www.vaslart.org/

"The Frankfurt School"

David Alesworth and Adnan Madani

We asked students from the Law Department of the Lahore University of Management Sciences to read aloud an essay written by the German critical theorist Theodor Adorno. We filmed them reading in the lecture auditorium, while asking them a variety of questions to test their grasp of the text. The individual sessions collectively form a series of portraits, or studies in power; the text itself was subsequently converted into an object of (first) use and then (later) fetish value.
November: 2008

"The Little Book of Slugs".

2008-11-18T22:19:00.000-08:00

ISBN 1 90217 513 1 Paperback
Publication date 2002 Retail Price £4.99
Format Pb - 130mm x 100mm
Extent 128pp
Illustrations b/w line drawings

The Little Book of Slugs edited by Allan Shepard and Suzanne Galant, CAT Publications, 2002. A truly tiny book, perhaps pocket sized to facilitate it's use in the garden. Tales of woe and revenge. Slug inflicted carnage and diabolical retribution, from salt, egg-shells, scissors and copper sheets. A good chapter on knowing your enemy followed by several on tackling the pests. Gleaned from the experience and advice of hundreds of surveyed gardeners the book is at least solace if not the final solution. I found most of the advice suitable for a more tropical garden too.