BREAD AND BUTTER, BREAD AND BUTTER (2012)
And Edward’s back hurt. Too much the night before in Dutchtown. The new floors at Arbeiter Hall seemed fine and the program was not that taxing, but the rumbling of the seat is the enemy today. It may have been those damn turns in the bon-ton, money-musk or even Ol’ Dan Tucker, but the morning has come early for an arduous drive.
The new stretch of concrete needed inspecting so Edward was committed to the drive and the sun was not out and the rain a few hours earlier made him feel more alone. He was craving his bicycle – craving the League days, the green grass days, Cass and Horatio and a cold drink of water days, but in just short of a decade those days were vapour.
Vapour days, lost nuanced ways.
Huron River Drive rambled, the way its appellation suggests. A gray Wayne County day was nothing new but the sound of the motor added to the hoariness. Edward’s unsure feeling of the road and the dust and the cloudless, post-rain sky all seem to close in on him. He funnelled forward…there was not much farther to go, just a look and then the report, but this road always devoured time.
And Edward’s back hurt. Approaching the famed ‘S’ curve that always was the talk at the Society; he caught up to a palette wagon that was once a speck on the horizon, was now just ahead of him and slowing quite quickly, even for the expected navigation of the curve. As if in a cross current on the parallel river, the wagon struggled to lead the way. It was the road too. Graded inadequately – like a fallow field, Edward thought the road was like a press blanket that had been used over and over again; its felt impressions permanent and ink-washed like the sky. All of this added up to a terra void…no reference points, no contrast, bothersome to navigate. Edward ruminated how far to steer to the edge, how much to stray to the middle?
Back pained, perception waned.
Peering at the wagon’s flatbed as it shook laterally, no matter at what speed, its full load was tenuous. Reaching the next gear it jolted forward. Then, with that action, its rear left corner load began to leak, like a forced spurt towards Edward, like a thin hose stream. White. Milky white. White on gray. The corner of the truck funneled a stream on the road, marking its tire trodden path like a snail’s trail bisecting the plain.
Edward watched and followed and somehow because of this trail, he immediately felt less hollow. The wagon’s string-stream continued like a guide and Edward steered his left tire hugging just to the right of it. Its existence and its resulting communication as an idea washed over him and flooded alongside his memories. All those days on the bicycle, all this time thinking about the road, about movement, about navigating one’s place in a designated space. All the rules, all the gavel-bangs at all the meetings. He had it now. It was phenomenological. Like a template, like a jig, like a ruler back at the print shop.
Painting a line down the centre of a road as a guide for the driver and as a province for the space…simple. Common. Communicative. A line on a road, like butter on bread.
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Since 1996, the LINE MARKER PROJECT has explored an interest in the historical authenticity and the socio cultural meaning of ordering devices. The line marker's role and continued significance as a global communication emblem - from its cold, coded meaning to its poetic impulses in popular culture continues to develop the line marker as the emblem of movement - urban, rural, city, country and the space in-between. As a research project as much as a contemporary painting praxis, the line marker's origins and authorship were concurrently developed as an integral part of the creative process and began to be fully examined in Detroit in 1999 and further in 2001 in Trenton, MI.
The unveiling of Edward Hines and the line marker's inception narrative, established further subject/content for studio endeavours.
'Authorship', as an entity tethered to invented devices from the industrial age, seem to still be a relevant premise. Individual ingenuity authoring out-of-the-blue ideas within a world less effected by an 'everything-has-been-done' lens is worthy of exploring.
Although this aspect of 'then and now' is not the content of ED103; it sets a perceptual stage. As an ongoing, accumulative exhibition project, commenced in 2011 for the centennial of the device; the viewer is asked to ‘put’ objects in a certain time and place - specifically a world of apprenticeship and analog technologies –specifically Hines’ time (1870-1938). It is desired that this interpretive process can tether art to a material sensibility developed and found by the genre of life, by the touching of things and through the many memories we have collectively of travelling on a road.