In this sense, one has to wonder how it is that a light bulb made during the Second World War is still able to shine when one made a year ago sits in darkness. This marks a sibling stab Beckett makes at business ethic and the creation of market from otherwise stabile technologies. The effect is a provoking hollow, the technique more that of a clinical archivist than an artist.

In ‘A Partial Museum of Noise’ one is alerted to the extent to which the built environment is descriptive of its own nature and construction through irritating sound. Beginning with a series of historical accounts of attempts to suppress sound in cities, musty seventies cabinets lead you through related objects of urban infrastructure. Such an example is that of Nevsky Prospect, the main road running through St. Petersburg, when over a century ago wooden street surface had been employed to absorb the friction of noisy cartwheels. The streets were doomed to failure, as when water levels would rise, the wooden blocks would dislodge and float away. This is contrasted with a more modern brief for the construction of a sound barrier, isolating a Florida highway, a sub-urban enclosure to be painted with murals featuring the F-16 military aircraft. Placing documents in such close proximity creates an environment laden with accusation, in turn illustrating the extent of Beckett’s frustration. The suffocating language of the museum becomes the uniform of a desire to understand diverse absurdity in human practice.

In this exploration something quite elusive becomes evident; the often crude and descriptive evolves into the hidden and sophisticated, -perhaps too much of our practice is taken for granted. In this, Beckett draws much from the writings of Dutch biologist Midas Dekkers. Dekkers is a macabre romantic with a healthy grudge against humanity. Conservation, for example, is his pet hate. The trimming of grass, the replanting of indigenous foliage, -humbug, he believes more in the likes of allowing actions to follow through to their logical conclusion, in this resides his view of truth and justice.

All said, the latest series of works I am not that fond of. He has become a bit too retentive in his approach and has, to some extent, forgotten the need for translation in favour of the raw hording, arrangement then presentation of information and objects from this world. In order to show his appreciation, confusion or just plain wonder, he has apparently become more of a second rate writer than the type of trash-cook with which I was once familiar.

Form your own opinions at www.jamesbeckett.tk where you can read among the afore mentioned, the life of ‘Larson Keys’ (a geologist come tugboat engineer who develops a skin disease and becomes a sub-urban recluse) as well as his latest lectures on sound (and a history of money in music) scheduled for presentation early April at the Nanjing University, China.

In visiting Belgrade for the first time I was inspired by a city which is depicted to be wrought with tragedy. Mediated history of Serbia is often reduced to fragments and time-lines dealing with either genocide or atrocity related to, for example, the bombing campaign of NATO. With little space in such media for the leaking of everyday experience one could be lead to believe that this is a morbid country. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. In so many respects Belgrade is a soft and welcoming environment, both eloquent and nurturing.

A host of ours had much to say in lines of advice for us visitors:

1) When encountering hostile youth, understand that many are suffering an inferiority complex, as, through communist times, people were lead to believe the rest of the world despised Yugoslavia. (We came across no hostile youth).

2) Serbia is best experienced through its people, not its architecture or infrastructure.

(I was pretty shy of Balkan decadence and had, for the most part, my head pointed upwards, checking out the various forms of windows and blinds.)

In the windows and blinds I had found much pleasure. The individual personalising their variation of what was essentially a (or a set of) generic hole with the option of slats. How one would cover or open their windows, the extent to which decay had placed a signature on every crevice had for me become a parallel language describing an emotional history. -One perhaps much closer to an actual history than processed media.

In attempt to deal with this language I had planned an intervention of façade in order to translate some of these forms, basically this set of silos to the upper-right of which I was to mount my own hand-made windows. In the end this was not possible as the bastards form city planning etc. had a bad relationship with those in the cultural programming for the city. On top of that it is pretty stupid to be drilling holes into a silo.

‘Berea in Soap’

The following is an attempt to record rush hour traffic of Berea road into soap, using a 1916 Edison phonograph. This is achieved by a telephone call to Durban from Amsterdam where a friend stood with his mobile phone on an outstretched arm to register the traffic and peripheral sounds. The call is then received in Amsterdam, taken directly from the telephone line and amplified into the horn of the phonograph. The sapphire recording head then cuts the signal into the soap.

Berea Road is the main road from Durban, South Africa, to the interior. This road functions as the main artery for commuters to and from the city, a pathway bearing the affluent guts of the city. During 1996, three friends and myself lived in a perpendicular road off Berea road called Florence Avenue. In the upheaval of Berea, inspiration was spawned and although a potentially dangerous place, people were loose and mixed. In contrast to the plastic nature of insular suburbs, people spoke, the street was not only a travel route but an extended mess of a community centre, – a destination.

Edison offered, among others, the following possible future use for the phonograph in North American Review in June 1878:
– Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication. (conceived of in light of business transaction)

The three different soap types attempted for recording are as follows:
Bees wax, animal fat and caustic soda
Animal fat and caustic soda
Melt and pour soap (carries recording but cannot be played back)