Accumulating ephemera

I confess to being an Image Junkie, habitually picking up scraps of printed paper and tearing out lines of found poetry from newspapers and magazines, examples gathered over the past week include salt and pepper sachets, a pineapple serving diagram, ‘Tear Here’ strips, ramen noodle packets, a soiled t-shirt chart from a washing powder carton, recycling logos from beer bottle labels and rail tickets printed VOID VOID VOID VOID. These are all items which have been designed with consideration of size, colour and illustration methods, they are printed in hundreds of thousands, which we encounter in our everyday life, glancing at them for less than a second and obeying or ignoring before discarding them.

They collect like dust bunnies under the computer screen, in the kitchen drawer and in small piles fading in the sun on the shelf behind the worktable, they're sporadically rounded up and added to a cardboard box full of similar bits and pieces of ephemera and printed matter, the original intention was that this would be an image bank of source material for collages but I could just never commit to the fixity of glueing things down.

One day in the late 80s, sifting and sorting through this ephemera, I found 4 plug wiring diagram cards, the ubiquitous slips of printed card which are slotted over the prongs of new electrical plugs. What fascinated me was that they were all slightly different, the diagrams convey the same information, which is potentially life saving information, but some are neat and precise with curving wires, while others are blocky and cluttered and they were printed in different colours, black, red and brown. The edges of the pieces of cardboard, cut to fit flush with the face of the plug were all slightly different shapes, hexagonal or quadrilateral with rounded off corners.

I'd never thought about them before or decided to look for them, couldn't remember where they had come from and didn't even know what they were called. They seemed to have just accumulated by themselves, but now having been noticed, lined up and considered, had shifted from being an ad hoc accumulation to the status of a collection. These objects intrigued me and I wondered why there were this many variations and how many others there were. I wanted more, but how do you find them? Considering the amount of mains powered domestic electrical items in the UK there would have been millions of them printed, I didn't want millions of them, I just knew that wanted some more, or maybe lots more, I wanted a representative sample of something that I'd probably never know how many versions existed of. (And if for some reason you happen to have a box of 5000 tucked away in your garage, I'm very interested).

They needed a name so I called them die-cut plug wiring diagrams, to distinguish them from wiring diagrams for larger electrical items and diagrams printed in books or leaflets, my research method was to made a hand drawn ‘What are you collecting at the moment Mark?’ leaflet which was photocopied and then given to friends and colleagues and distributed via the mail art network. Quite quickly afterwards they started arriving, in the post, via friends and picked up off the floor in different locations. When there were 30 I made some A3 multi-coloured prints showing a grid of 15 different examples, each one with a solid background in one colour and the fine details on top in another colour. When the collection had grown to over 60, I realised that it was necessary to record this ephemera in more permanent form and decided to make a book of them.

The Die-Cut Plug Wiring Diagram Book, (1992–2016, 72 × 70 mm, 60pgs, 600 copies, £5.00) reproduces 43 die-cut plug wiring diagrams, one per page at 100% actual size, it was photocopied in red, blue, brown and black with a full colour centre spread. The cover shows only a grainy grey plug shape, with slits cut through, so that it can actually be slid over the prongs of a plug, text is kept to a minimum with just a single page explanation towards the end of the book and a page thanking the ‘contributing electricians’ who had donated plug diagrams. The book was hand sewn with 4 strands of cotton thread, blue, brown, green and yellow, to represent the colours of plastic coated electrical wires.

Subsequent reprints of the book have been slightly updated and now include a strip of wiring diagram adhesive tape which I discovered several rolls of at an East London street market, so this book reproducing printed ephemera now also includes actual ephemera. The Die-Cut Plug Wiring Diagram Book is an example of how ephemera feeds into, informs and inspires my work, but for me this has to be a process which develops and evolves. If I decided arbitrarily today to collect, let's say, Boris bike receipts found in the street with the aim of using them as the source material for a publication, this approach would feel insincere and result in poor work.

Producing ephemera

The Aggressive School of Cultural Workers, est. 1987, is an ‘Art Gang’ and every gang needs it's own insignia. The Aggressive School of Cultural Workers membership pack (1992–2016, 95 × 58 × 5 mm, open edition, £3.00) comes in a small ziplock polythene bag with a printed header card, the pack contains a 25 mm diameter badge, twenty stickers and a small leaflet. It is designed to work in two states, closed and opened, whilst the pack remains closed with the contents on view but unused it functions as a discrete object or a publication, when opened each of the components can be actively used, the badge can be worn on your favourite jacket, stickers can be stuck in various locations or given to friends and the leaflet studied.

The badge shows the ASCW logo, with the name running in a circle around a central diamond shape which contains the hazard symbol for corrosive material, a pair of test tubes pouring corrosive liquid onto a block of metal and a human hand. For every badge the central diamond is painstakingly collaged in place by hand, the colours of paper and ink are changed repeatedly to produce hundreds of different colour combinations, a framed set of 525 badges in a grid formation, showing every possible combination of 5 paper colours and 5 print colours, has been exhibited at Transmission, Glasgow and currently hangs proudly in the ASCW HQ. The stickers are printed on garish fluorescent red and yellow self adhesive paper, they're triangular, equilateral, sharp and pointed, the triangle was chosen as a challenge to the universal graphic hegemony of rectangular forms, these stickers can be used on communiques, envelopes, front doors, bikes, laptops or other devices and are ideal for defacing other gang logos.

The leaflet is a family tree showing the ASCW's antecedents and successors. I created the Aggressive School of Cultural Workers in 1987 (so now I'm a Gang Leader and Image Junkie.) as a response to The Aggressive Correspondence School of Art, 1986, the name given to a schism between Swiss mail artists H.R. Fricker and Gunther Ruch, which sent waves through the international postal art network, which I was an active participant in. This term piqued my interest and in the spirit of interplay and exchange of work and ideas which was prevalent in the postal art network, I adapted it, downsizing ‘correspondence’, and replacing ‘Art’ with Cultural Workers. The ASCW is a decentralised cluster of non-aligned activists, socially aware creators, meme breeders, unreformed idealists and autonomous cultural producers.

The family tree shows how the Aggressive School of Cultural Workers originated and traces it's genealogy back to organisations such as the New York Correspondence School (1962) and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (1974) and forwards to the Passive School of Cultural Inertia, the Transgressive School of Culture Shockers and the Copyright Violation Squad. Both the Passive School of Cultural Inertia, invented by Art Nahpro/Paul Jackson and the Transgressive School of Culture Shockers, created by Dawn Redwood & David Jarvis, began as responses to the ASCW and were subsequently co-opted and had their own membership packs issued. The PSCI, with its yawning head logo embodies a more laid-back, laissez-faire attitude, than the ASCW and of course it was possible to be a member of both. The TSCS with it's exploding brassiere logo, is for cross-dressers and transgender people and with the current interest in discussion of sexualities, is due for a revival.

The ASCW logo was periodically updated, first to show a book and a photocopier under attack from that mysterious corrosive liquid, subsequent targets were a computer and mobile phone. Both of these versions appeared on t-shirts which had a small discreet logo on the left breast and a large version on the back. In 2006 Aggressive School of Cultural Workers t-shirts were offered for sale via a mail-order leaflet with a price structure that required the purchaser to select from 3 different choices;

An honest-to-goodness, doing-it-for-the-kids t-shirt at the non-profit price of £7.50.

A value-for-money t-shirt at a market price which rewards the thought and effort of the cultural worker, for £17.50.

A limited edition artwork, recognising the artists unique talent and vision, sent in souvenir packaging individually embellished with stamps & stickers for £27.50.

This strategy was intended to place some power in the hands of consumers, to make the t-shirts available to people with differing amounts of disposable income, to be transparent about costs and profit margins and to illustrate how the same product could be ascribed a value purely by how it was described in the marketing material. And to make it fun.

Let's talk about ephemera

‘Never throw anything away, ever’, is a phrase which was torn out of a long forgotten newspaper article, I thought about using it in one of the media I regularly use, as a badge, a postcard or on a rubber stamp, but when I had the chance to make a series of work out of laser cut Perspex™ it seemed like the perfect opportunity to present this slogan in a more tactile and substantial 3 dimensional form. These signs are assembled from components which have been laser cut from sheets of 3 mm thick acrylic, the letters are glued in place by hand and I vary the lettering colours to introduce slightly different colour combinations throughout the edition, to emphasise the word ‘ever’ and to make the task of glueing the letters in place more interesting. (Now I'm a Glue Sniffer, Gang Leader and Image Junkie.)

They were inspired by signs in institutional settings like schools, hospitals and libraries, signs which are primarily functional, to convey information or a message, but with scant thought given to design or aesthetics. The ‘Never throw anything away, ever’ signs are deliberately clunky, with the uninspired choice of Helvetica Black for the lettering and the typographic faux pas of making the letters of each word different heights. The first batch of signs assembled were made in an intentionally unappealing colour palette of black, pale pink and dark green, although for the second batch I opted for more appetising colour combinations.

The Never throw anything away, ever signs (194 × 170 × 8 mm, edition of 60, signed and numbered, £75.00) are ready to hang using the chain attached and can also be screwed to the wall for additional security, they are suitable for use in the home, workplace or gallery. It's a sign to myself, but also relevant to and useful for other people. It's a sign for pack rats, hoarders and out-of-control collectors, groups who rarely have products so thoughtfully designed for their specific requirements, but who would undoubtedly not waste funds buying one. It is also meant as a stimulus for thinking about how to cope with with ‘stuff’ and combat information overload, the phrase can be read as a warning, caution, reminder, encouragement, mantra, or viewed ironically.

You can hang it prominently in a hallway cluttered with bookshelves and cardboard boxes so that it's the first thing that anyone who comes to your front door sees, place it reverentially in a display cabinet, use it to create a shrine on top of a row of filing cabinets or mount it on the door of your storage unit. Conversely it could be the only object on display in your minimalist dream home, watch out for ‘Never throw anything away, ever’ signs in three shades of grey…