its doors unexpectedly in the way such galleries could be expected to do, Medalla and Paul Keeler vanished, and it took weeks of phonecalls to Mr Keeler Sr to explain the situation and exact my money. In all, Signals cost me a year’s work.
Sometime later the Lisson Gallery was founded by Nicholas Logsdale and his partner Fiona, took on board several ex-Signals artists, and soon proved to be Signals’ successor as shock-absorber of the new. Dashing around with cans of white paint, readying it for the opening exhibition, we almost persuaded ourselves it was an artists’ co-operative venture. An idea in vogue at the time was that of the ‘multiple’, an artwork produced in large numbers of identical instances, forgoing both the Benjaminesque aura of theunique original blessed by the touch of the artist’s hand, and the preciosity (and frequent fraudulence) of the ‘numbered, limited, edition’. The concept was seen as a blow against the capitalist art world; economies of scale and industrial production processes would place these works in the financial reach of anyone who could afford a beer. My multiples were to be two prints in strip-cartoon format called ‘The Theory and Practice of Dreams’, in which little constellations of abstract shapes pursued an evolution of ‘sleepwalking surefootedness’ from frame to frame. They owed much to the technical diagrams I was drawing in the freelance-illustrator hours of my life that helped to keep us solvent at that period; in particular they were concocted out of the little symbols used in electrical and electronic circuit-design, available in sheets from Letraset.
Since money was need to print this ‘unlimited edition’, I wrote to Letraset Ltd explaining the ethics of the multiple and Letraset’s role in this project, and asking for sponsorship. To my surprise the Chairman replied: he had never heard of multiples but would be happy to talk to me. I went down to their offices in Seven Dials, and found the Chairman to be in low spirits; he had been kicked upstairs, he explained, and missed the days when he was a young inventor taking on the world (like me, was the implication ). He told me of the birth of Letraset: he was playing around with a sheet of transfers belonging to his children, and idly cut out the letters ILL in the backing film, exposing the ink layer within; then he pressed it onto a sheet of paper, rubbed the front, and behold, the lettering was imprinted on the paper. After that glorious moment, of course, years of research into inks were necessary and many financial disappointments had had to be endured before rub-down lettering became the world-wide industry it istoday. So, he was sympathetic to my predicament, and called in his chief accountant to see what they could do for me.
The accountant studied the drawings for my ‘Theory and Practice of Dreams’ consideringly. Was it some sort of a puzzle game? On being told that it was art, he began a long sentence to the effect that while the company did acknowledge a certain limited obligation to fund artistic endeavours in the local community, my work was perhaps outside their remit … whereupon the Chairman dismissed him rather shortly, and as soon as he had returned to his office phoned him and told him to make out a cheque for a hundred pounds to Timothy Drever. Thanks to this generous expression of fellow-feeling, I was able to have hundreds of copies of my abstract comic strips printed on good card. But then the fallacy of multiples, or at least of marketing them through the gallery system, became apparent: since they were to be so cheap, it was not worth anyone’s while trying to sell them. Mine lay in the Lisson’s print cabinets for some years until I was asked to remove them, and I have heaps of them in the attic to this day.
In those years when mass assembly seemed to be the art form most deeply concerned with great issues and our weekends were spent shouldering each other forward in
Sometime later the Lisson Gallery was founded by Nicholas Logsdale and his partner Fiona, took on board several ex-Signals artists, and soon proved to be Signals’ successor as shock-absorber of the new. Dashing around with cans of white paint, readying it for the opening exhibition, we almost persuaded ourselves it was an artists’ co-operative venture. An idea in vogue at the time was that of the ‘multiple’, an artwork produced in large numbers of identical instances, forgoing both the Benjaminesque aura of theunique original blessed by the touch of the artist’s hand, and the preciosity (and frequent fraudulence) of the ‘numbered, limited, edition’. The concept was seen as a blow against the capitalist art world; economies of scale and industrial production processes would place these works in the financial reach of anyone who could afford a beer. My multiples were to be two prints in strip-cartoon format called ‘The Theory and Practice of Dreams’, in which little constellations of abstract shapes pursued an evolution of ‘sleepwalking surefootedness’ from frame to frame. They owed much to the technical diagrams I was drawing in the freelance-illustrator hours of my life that helped to keep us solvent at that period; in particular they were concocted out of the little symbols used in electrical and electronic circuit-design, available in sheets from Letraset.
Since money was need to print this ‘unlimited edition’, I wrote to Letraset Ltd explaining the ethics of the multiple and Letraset’s role in this project, and asking for sponsorship. To my surprise the Chairman replied: he had never heard of multiples but would be happy to talk to me. I went down to their offices in Seven Dials, and found the Chairman to be in low spirits; he had been kicked upstairs, he explained, and missed the days when he was a young inventor taking on the world (like me, was the implication ). He told me of the birth of Letraset: he was playing around with a sheet of transfers belonging to his children, and idly cut out the letters ILL in the backing film, exposing the ink layer within; then he pressed it onto a sheet of paper, rubbed the front, and behold, the lettering was imprinted on the paper. After that glorious moment, of course, years of research into inks were necessary and many financial disappointments had had to be endured before rub-down lettering became the world-wide industry it istoday. So, he was sympathetic to my predicament, and called in his chief accountant to see what they could do for me.
The accountant studied the drawings for my ‘Theory and Practice of Dreams’ consideringly. Was it some sort of a puzzle game? On being told that it was art, he began a long sentence to the effect that while the company did acknowledge a certain limited obligation to fund artistic endeavours in the local community, my work was perhaps outside their remit … whereupon the Chairman dismissed him rather shortly, and as soon as he had returned to his office phoned him and told him to make out a cheque for a hundred pounds to Timothy Drever. Thanks to this generous expression of fellow-feeling, I was able to have hundreds of copies of my abstract comic strips printed on good card. But then the fallacy of multiples, or at least of marketing them through the gallery system, became apparent: since they were to be so cheap, it was not worth anyone’s while trying to sell them. Mine lay in the Lisson’s print cabinets for some years until I was asked to remove them, and I have heaps of them in the attic to this day.
In those years when mass assembly seemed to be the art form most deeply concerned with great issues and our weekends were spent shouldering each other forward in
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