Grizedale got asked to do an oyster card wallet (some sort of travel pass thing) - a part of celebrating 60 years of the Arts Council. Not quite sure if I get the connection but I guess they wanted something from the ol’ countryside, nice to asked though. Kinda hard thing to do, so little space, we would have liked to do something a bit promotional but it didn’t really seem possible within the constraints. The other idea was to crusade a new set of morals, a code for social living. The Arts Council ambition is to promote the idea of a ‘right to art’ . I like the idea of what you might have a right to but didn’t know or care, or that was not of any relevance, i.e. a right to luxury goods ‘err like thanks yeah’. So anyway we did a code for the country which referenced many other codes of behaviour all of which have been horribly abused, misused and re interpreted. The text is accompanied by an elysian fields like image of Langdale valley in the Lake District sourced from the internet. Langdale was the site where the London bombers allegedly trained for their attacks, allegedly running up and down this idealized UK landscape wearing heavy rucksacks.

I think the message of the code and image we finally produced was fairly clear, hinting at various interpretations but fairly clearly saying something about the degeneration of social living, the over emphasis of individual rights over the common good, our twisted and overblown concept of freedom and the kinds of reaction this position is likely to generate.
Anyway after everyone (commissioners, designers, Arts Council) had had thier say, it was maybe slightly more ambiguous (or less) so here for anyone interested is a version I thought worked - (on advice I was happy to take out a rather pompous quote about freedom being a licence).

A Code for the Country
Rights of Persons
To say anything in private and nothing in public
To feel superior in a variety of ways
To inflict themselves and or any parts of themselves at any time upon another or others
To be right unequivocally
To shrug off the burden of others
To ‘whatever’ by any means necessary
To wander

With sincere thanks and regrets to:
Privacy laws, The Declaration of Independence, Legal Rights, Paris Hilton, Malcolm X, 10 Commandments, Islamic principles, Green Cross Code, Rights of Man, Burgess Meredith/Mickey Goldmill, William Wordsworth, The Country Code, Lager ads of the 1970’s, various Christian doctrines, the Highway Code, Tony Blair, Milton, Raymond Babbitt

Twisted pulled and hurt …..

Posted by Adam Sutherland on 17/02/07 at 10:43 : 1 Comment