PINS - The Beginning

Hold on in there, as style is surely on its way.

PINS is a game for all anonymous egos, everywhere, made through repositioning and reproducing old dreams and documents.

PINS is a game that rejects the word “practice”, a ponderous barrage balloon of a word, one with a thin skin that can be undone with a pin prick, revealing an awful lot of hot air. Leave it for the doctors and lawyers. Or call it “praccy”. PINS favours the word “process”. Process can mean the slow deconstructing of making art. Process also means something that can be tracked. It means repeated and unglamourous toil, uncertainty, silence, private actions with no hope of public validation, multiple failures and misunderstandings, and - eventually - something or other. 

In the 1960s you could enact “death by Process”.

There is rarely a plan, just an idea. Chance, whim, accident and other people play a role in the end result. 

What does Richard think about PINS?

Richard often feels between worlds. He remembers the congealed boredom of the analogue industrial past. He is often wary of the earnest, yet fly-by-night present with its assumed importances and digital fevers. Like Syd Barrett, he is “much obliged” to contemporary life for regularly “making it clear that he’s not here”. Richard realises that being between these worlds is both his natural state and his opportunity to act. 

Between 1840 and 2023 he spent an incalculable amount of time looking out of bedroom windows, or sitting in pubs listening to builders, plumbers and middle managers telling him what real art is. Now he wants to bring those worlds he saw together, somehow. He feels he has a lot to do, even if his work may not make much sense. 

Back in 2004, Richard painted out all the images he didn’t like on lots of 12 inch record covers. Only those images that momentarily interested him stayed. The record covers are still more interesting than Richard’s actions. They are now under the spare bed. One day he may photocopy them. Now for the RULES, and ILLUSTRATIONS: both here and at the Museum of Photocopies. 

RULE ONE: THE BEGINNING 

(AKA “The Heap of Trouble is a pile of rubble.”)  

The first thing to do is to say we are at the Beginning. In the Beginning, we need to appoint some Commanding Officers, hereafter known as C.O.s. For those who would rather steer clear of using military terms, all titles beginning with the letters C and O are perfectly acceptable. We recommend the following combinations*…

Cascara Ononis

Casein Orache

Cento Oshac

Chank Opsomaniac

Chigoe Olla

Chopper Orchid

Cingulum Obelus

Clicket Optophone

Cowlstaff Oat

Convolvulus Orobanche

Cortina Oven-Bird

Cucumber Olfactory

Curvet Oxalis

Cystic Oleaster

*Taken from Odhams Dictionary of the English Language (Illustrated, no date given, guessed as 1940s-1950s) and Flowers of the Field: with Appendix on Grasses, by the late Rev. C.A. Johns, B.A., F.L.S., Twenty-seventh Edition. London, 1893.

Consulting the original photocopies, it seems the first thing the C.O. has to do is to 

DO SOMETHING.

But someone has to ASK THEM. 

(We note that the word Monday has been crossed out, which is perfectly sensible.)