Fire Drain
Fire markings and drain, Arboretum, Austin 2008
If you have read any of my earlier posts you will have realized that I am not the kind of blogger who has the energy and enthusiasm to take a new picture each day to feed the blog; until now I have cheated and pulled something from the archive that I wanted to write about. Today is a new day. Today is a good day. Today was a Sunday and I had no excuses. I used my camera and here is one of the results.
In all parts of the wealthy, developed, world we have a thing about painting lines on our streets. We read them so unconsciously when driving that we don’t really see them until the first time we arrive at a complex junction in a foreign country. If you do stop and take the time to consider some of these lines they have a few jokes to tell and questions to ask that were almost certainly not intended by the rule makers that commissioned them or road gangs that laid them down.
Like the store windows series, I don’t have to go far from my house to find some paint on the street and I have a growing collection of what I have named ‘Urban Semiotics’. In this case the pull is mostly in the color and form rather than any contradictory message. The damaged red lines, the blacks and blues of the grate, and the Pollock like randomness of the grain in the road surface. The picture is a rip-off of (homage to?) modernist painting. It’s another one that my dad won’t get and I won’t be able to put my finger on why exactly I do.
[Added September 15, 2008] There are some alternative messages that can be read from this picture. Drains, grates and manhole covers all imply an underworld, a dark and unknown place, a place where monsters live. Is the fire that the red lines warn of something that might come up through the grate? Is it dangerous to stand near it? Might a bogey man pull you down?
