INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE
© 2008 Jeni Pearson & Marielle Macleman | Contact the Artists | Home
Think about a door. Entrance to a home.
Home’s Close from Clement Cor’s Close, then Cant’s Close to Advocates Close. The names would change according to the most notable resident of the time. The tenement. In 18C Edinburgh, members of all classes stacked according to social ranking. An anagram. Letters written anew. A type of word play, the result of rearranging.
SPES ALTERA VITAE (hope of another life) I sever a past tale
of
BLISSIT BE GOD OF AL HIS GIFTS Blights, gaffes, diss, toil & bio
in
HE THAT THOLES OVERCOMES The homes over that close
He that tholes overcomes. Lintel above a door. A former printing premises. William Chambers was one of the first publishers to embrace new printing technologies that came with the arrival of steam power in the 19th century. In 1832, the Chambers brothers launched Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. William stated their beliefs clearly in the first editorial: “Every Saturday, when the poorest labourer in the country draws his humble earnings, he shall have it in his power to purchase with an insignificant portion of even that humble sum, a meal of healthful, useful and agreeable mental instruction.” Followed by Information for the People, the brothers’ publications cited education as the necessary prerequisite to social mobility; to moving out of poverty to prosperity. As Lord Provost of Edinburgh, William was responsible for the introduction of the Edinburgh City Improvement Act of 1867, which brought more light, space, safe waste disposal and clean water to the inhabitants of the closes.
Waste space now resides where society used to stand. An ornamental fly-posting campaign adorns the abandoned doorways and drainpipes of Advocates Close, directing to informationforthepeople.com. It echoes current forms of mass communication and alludes to the determined experiments in cheap, mass volume publishing of our Victorian predecessors. Updated in technology, Information for the People 2008 shares notions of a quest for self-improvement. Parallels can be drawn between the auto didacticism of Chambers’ time and today’s phenomenon of the self-help manual. Drawings from site visits and archive research are repeated to form ornamental patterns. When replicated, an abandoned shoe, the insignia above a door, architectural features and topography from antique maps form intricate backdrops for social commentary. Anagrams, derived at from the carved lintels of Advocates Close, make reference to the current state of the close and reflect back to Chambers’ autobiographical writings which remark on the spread of learning and reading habits of a wider range of classes.
Information for the People 2008 is a book in 4 parts. Using the proportions of the first issue of Chambers’ first publication, yet scaled for home printing, each part consists of 8 pages in 4 leaves. Recommended print size is 263mm x 387mm on A3. Fold in quarters.