Today I finally got round to
documenting this favourite piece of urban text that I regularly see on my drive
to work.
The building concerned is an
ugly, gaudy edifice housing a discount furniture store and replete with brash
blocky text across its topmost windows. Most of the panes spell ‘BEDS BEDS BEDS’, but my eye is
always drawn to the legend ‘LIVIN G SLEEPING’ positioned at one end.
The two words face me
directly as I wait for the traffic lights to change and seem ripe with
potential interpretations. One might
read them as a comment on our collective state of hypnotised consumerism, lack of intellectual curiosity or,
more prosaically, on my usual state of alertness at that time of the
morning. Cities are full of texts
like this and I love the way a mundane or utilitarian phrase can become
redolent with ambiguous poetry or be mentally detourned into completely new or
contrary meanings. This one could easily translate into a typical Situationist slogan.
I anticipated difficulties
in finding a suitable camera angle as the building sits on a busy roundabout,
adjacent to large flyover and amidst a visual clutter of lampposts, road signs
and traffic and nearly scrapped my plan when I saw the building being
painted. Then I realised the men
on their lift and incomplete area of new colour added an extra dimension to the
images. In addition to their
textual content, they now relate to my interest in urban transformation and, of
course, the very act of painting.
The choice of lime green
against that red steel work should wake me up too.
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