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Signposts by Maria Doiranlis |
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As the summer draws to a close and travelers head for home to face that dreaded post-vacation malaise, a last remaining glimmer of frivolous pleasure can be had from the photographs taken during the trip. As reminders of a time spent in a foreign country, on the beach, or on the road, personal travel photos not only document events, sites, and attractions, but also act as mental triggers, dislodging memories that might have gotten stuck somewhere between the cracks of deeper, lasting impressions and experiences one would soon, sometimes deliberately, forget.
 Fish ladder sign, Seattle, WA. Image courtesy Salomé Plaix-Czoldàr. As signifiers, they serve as links to a particular moment in time, but also bound together within that moment are the inherent sights and smells that are now stored in memory, the sense of, and identification with, a particular location, and, if others were present, the impact of shared experiences. The relationship between photographs and what they represent calls to mind the semiotic theories of Roland Barthes (see his Mythologies, 1957) and Ferdinand de Saussure, and the complex correlation between the signifier and the signified that constitutes the linguistic sign. It is through a similar language of varied media, such as posters, drawings, video, and performance, that the artist Matt Mullican attempts to translate the world of experience into a representational form and to decipher the ambiguous relationship between perception and reality. An exhibition of his work (22 October 2000 - 7 January 2001) appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford <http://www.moma.org.uk> in October of last year. More Details from an Imaginary Universe, the title chosen over the original World/Information/Architecture, demonstrates Mullican's "attempt to organize the world, to distinguish between what we see and how we categorise it." http://www.moma.org.uk/mullican/mullican.htm "The Details from an Imaginary Universe," he states, "are details of places that exist, they don't exist in themselves. If you look at the pictures, there's a bus, a car, a plant. There's nothing in there that doesn't really exist in some approximate form. It's only the physical object that doesn't exist - that's the interesting thing for me." Not your typical Kodak moments, Mullican's representations are representations of objects that do not exist in and of themselves, but exist in some "approximate" form, some conceptual form. http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/dx/mullican/subjecti.htm Even then, the form seems so far removed from reality that it cannot escape slipping into the pool of linguistic theory and its inevitable role as sign. http://www.centreimage.ch/mullican/WorldUnframed.html Adrian Searle's review in The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4090651,00.html> elaborates further: "His work is about how we log the world, how we perceive signs and symbols and pictures, and how we flesh them out into full-blown mental images. His work is also about the imaginary mental maps we make, the lists, the baggage, the black holes in our consciousness, and the cosmologies we keep in our heads. … His is an art that triggers thoughts that leap from one thing to another." http://www.centreimage.ch/mullican/ The Shape of
Cities in the Future Etched Granite
Pavement, 1995 Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, NY Resources: Signage can teach children the meaning of symbols. See a short animated teaching module for a third-grade curriculum unit on symbols, in the Newsletter's In Practice section. For more signs, see the following links. 
"No
Puffin" non-smoking sign can be downloaded from http://homestead.juno.com/rekontak/RandomPicks.html (scroll down the page to see the
Puffin) UK road traffic
signs German signs Elderly drivers'
comprehension of traffic signs Unofficial US
travel signs Official US traffic
signs International
standards "Children Playing"
signs |
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