Coffee-Table Notes

Walls are everywhere in Margaret Mitchell’s collection of photographs of her extended family in Stirling, an ancient limbo of sorts that exists more or less equidistant from Edinburgh and Glasgow. Doors and windows too. Together, they look out on other worlds beyond while at the same time hemming in those who occupy them.    Drawn from two series’ of images taken more than two decades apart, the story these pictures tell of Mitchell’s nieces and nephews as both children and adults with their own broods is a deeply personal family portrait. In its everyday evocation of still lives getting by in spite of everything, it also highlights the social and economic barriers that exist, and which continue to worsen to a dangerously damaging degree.     The first part of the book, Family, dates from 1994, when Mitchell’s sister Andrea and her three children, Steven, Kellie and Chick, were living in a flat in The Raploch, an area of high socio-economic deprivation. The second pa...

Thanks in part to Resonance FM, the art/noise radio station run by London Musicians Collective, and thanks in part to cheap technology, sound art is less a samizdat activity and more obviously a community-minded experience, practiced in solitude but disseminated with ease. This exquisitely packaged release from Vienna’s Nonvisualobjects label, founded in 2005 by Heribert Friedl and Raphael Moser with the aim of focussing on ‘interpretations of minimalism in sound’ is a bumper compendium of hiss and fissures, environmental ambient, deep listening rhapsodies and deconstructed noises off. Presented in a numbered edition of just 500, the 22 pieces spread across two CDs alone are an attractive enough proposition. The 96 page hard-backed book which houses them inside its lavish but minimal design tells the black and white of it even more. By way of a grab-bag of interviews, testimonies, note-book jottings, drawings and photographs, each artist is afforded space to sketch out their practice...