Notes on Perception (Looking Out For a Place To Go)

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak.^[1]

The theory that language shapes thought, linguistic relativity, ask a question of translation and perception. Is my red also your coch, your dearg, your rouge? Do you see what I see? The visible spectrum is carved by subjectivities: cultural, historical, learned. In the late 1960s, an anthropologist and linguist duo hypothesised that all known cultures share a sense of black and white, of dark and light, cool and warm. The evolution of a colour lexicon thereafter is much less homogenous, but if a language develops three terms, the third is invariably red.^[2] Red approaches a degree of universality not known to other sense phenomena: my blue, isn’t your glas; Japan has 72 micro-seasons, kō; there are more than a hundred Scots words for rain.

Into this fixed hue, however, we pour our symbolism. On the 1978 pride flag, comprising eight stripes and designed by Gilbert Baker, red equals life. Red is the colour of socialism and its fetishised memory—Red Vienna, Red Clydeside. Red is the colour of the AIDS ribbon and the plastic collection buckets they adorn. Red is not my colour. Red is the colour Nintendo’s mushroom-headed Toad paints the town, after Doja Cat, in that meme we like: Bitch, I said what I said / I’d rather be famous instead / I let all that get to my head / I don’t care, I paint the town red.^[3] Red is red, until it isn’t. 

Can you inhabit the historical other? I try to, almost obsessively.

In your video, Seeing Red (2024), the long wavelength of that colour hits the cone cells on the retina in much the same way that those cheap disco lights would have done for the drag queens and fairy boys occupying the dancefloor of a shit gay club in North Wales. Our red is their red.

In four sequences you grasp at something half-remembered, over a decade ago: the Three Crowns, Bangor, was destroyed in an arson attack in March 2014, six were injured and it would never reopen. On its site stands a faceless two-storey block of flats, rendered in dandelion yellow. It speaks no vernacular, pock-marked with air ducts and security cameras. There are no remaining gay bars in North Wales. The closure of LGBTQ+ spaces in the UK is now so frequent as to seem inevitable, a ticking clock—though discussion on this decline rarely escapes a London focus.^[4]

Weaving memory, oratory, fantasy, you give us something of a particular place  at a particular time. Sometimes figures come into the foreground, lifted from an  informal archive of Facebook album uploads, before blistering into a nostalgic miasma. In this soupy mixture, you ask, how to reconstitute a community, a far away feeling. 90s futurist interior design, 70s moral ambiguity, 80s rage. Is this the material world of a queer transhistoricity, or the rose-tinted retrospect of a disaffected now?

We live in memory. Idolatry for a mundane Xanadu and its inhabitants—Dolly Minxture, Amanda Playwith, Robyn Graves, Natasha Tightsdown, JT or Gaz hosting karaoke—each preserved like cherries in sweet syrup, the kind which makes that wooden dancefloor so very sticky. 

I have a little red fantasy too, you know.

L recently leant me John Berger’s The Red Tenda of Bologna (2018), published shortly after the great old man of seeing died. L’s copy is filthy, stained with coffee on the back pages. Reading it necessitates a commitment to sticky fingers.

A short essay in fragments, Berger is in Bologna—the Red City—after the death of his uncle, pursuant of a thick red linen, tende, native to the northern Italian commune as a window dressing and first defence against the beating sun. ‘Not clay red, not terracotta, it’s dye red,’ he says. Iron oxide, maybe, or cochineal. A  timeless presence, yet, in their slow bleaching, also a record of time’s passage, the tenda offer an allegory for memory as something both persistent and contingent, continually reproduced across successive generations.

In his search for four metres of the fabric—for what purpose he doesn’t yet know— Berger arrives at a textile merchant. The air inside is thick and still. ‘The light, like  the quiet, is diffused, muted, as if all the rolls of cloth had given off, over the years, a very fine, unidentifiable white cotton dust.’^[5] I think about this when I hold my breath past busy roads in futile attempt to filter particulates; when my eyes roll back from screen-time and I feel sick. The dislocated fabric store, not unlike your dancefloor, is something to be yearned for: both are heterotopic, a break from time, stolen from a world in which a politics of degradation impress upon the psyche daily.^[6] I long for a muffled peace, improbable and unattainable. You, for the provincial gay bar. Are either retrievable?

In your video, quoting Sophie Orlando, you ask why does the air seem thicker when I identify people with whom I work regularly? Does the thick air of white cotton dust or a glycerine smoke machine make something, someone closer? Or, does proximity itself produce this haze?

Most of your video is suffused with a blurriness, sometimes like a retinal scan, red and glowing, sometimes it’s in the digital corruption of that fugitive archive, captured on a 5-megapixel point and shoot. When representation and protection are in conflict, imprecision offers security. In Seeing Red, figure and ground interchange, shoulders merge with glitter walls, torsos twist into fairy lights. Bodies and space are indistinguishable. Your images only coalesce into sharpness as we enter the present day, stalking the former Three Crowns site, where the dandelion yellow cuboid sits: fitting, perhaps, in our hazy schema.

I used to think that abstraction was a kind of negation, a comfort in inarticulation, or a substitute for the sharpness of thought. More recently, as my own research bends backwards through time, I’ve begun to rethink this, finding possibility in the plausible deniability of the inexplicit, of the not-quite-legible within moral and legislative frameworks which have long been repressive for certain kinds of lives. It was always a rich space for queers: innuendo, ambiguity. 

In another kind of search, Berger grasps at the words of Bologna’s sodomitic son, Pier Paolo Pasolini:

The light
of the future doesn’t cease for even an instant
to wound us: it is here to 
brand us in all our daily deeds
with anxiety even in the confidence
that gives us life.^[7]

If the future is that bright, sun-beat place where we must keep remaking, let me dwell, only for now, in the improbable haze of our imagined past: phantasms of dust and disco.

Ooh, see that girl, watch that scene
Digging the dancing queen.^[8]

 

 

^[1] John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), 1.

^[2] Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969).

^[3] Xickel, 'Paint the Toad Red,' YouTube, uploaded 23 September 2023

^[4] Chelsea Coates, 'Six in 10 London LGBTQ+ venues shut since 2006,' BBC.co.uk (9 February 2024).

^[5] John Berger, The Red Tenda of Bologna (London: Penguin, 2018), 28.

^[6] Michel Foucault, 'Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,' trans. Jay Miskowiec, Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité (October 1984)

^[7] Pier Paolo Pasolini, quoted in The Red Tenda of Bologna (London: Penguin, 2018), 25.

^[8] ABBA, 'Dancing Queen,' Arrival (Polar, 1976)