Introduction

The works gathered in Public Pages engage with modes of textual and pictorial address, styles of verbal and visual presentation. These presentations represent an audience, as readers, as subject to the words of the proclamation, of the notice, of the instruction, of the persuasive suggestion. They operate with and on such forms or styles as the reader is already familiar with, that are recognisable. These pages operate within a rhetoric that figures its readers as (the) public, and bring attention to that position. There is a making public, a publication of these pages in their presence on the website and a making available for public reading in their installation at Plymouth University.

Some of the pages were made to occupy a public space, outdoors or indoors where the text might be seen and read among others, read as other texts might be read. These pages respond to or comment on texts that operate as signage, as information, texts that direct the reader viewer somewhere, to something, to do something (or not to do something). The pages partake of the rhetoric of public address, an address to the general reader, to the member of the public who is in the space governed by the sign. The reader is made responsible, 'if you can read this it applies to you, you are the intended addressee'.

Such texts may constitute that space of reception by designating it a reading and listening and viewing area as a book or a painting may constitute the space in which they are received. Others may recognise a place or location as constituted by textual inscription. Jos Smith's text installed in a Kent orchard recognises the mediation of such a space, as already written for the visitor, as part of England's garden, as part of an inscription of a version of pastoral. Alan Reed's casually taped A4 pages write the city back into itself, but in a context of competing texts, other signs and slogans that also demand to be read. Kate Rowles' transcription of the public texts that define a location in Liverpool is conscious of the impossibility of recording the place on a page, reducing her attempt to some spare notation.

The works cross a range of media and methods. A sign, collected by Scott MacLeod, once held by a homeless person, a person without economic means, was used to catch the attention of or prick the conscience of those who are housed or wealthier. By referring to religious modes of address, to prayer, to an authoritative address that the reader may recognise and in recognising react to, the page becomes affective by drawing on other forms of public speech. "I come in peace / Drive Safely". The materials of this hand drawn sign, cardboard packaging, marker pen, cheap and available, analogue, are reworked in the studio in a painted poem by Stephen Rodefer. In this piece of arte povera, handmade words are presented operating across associations of love poetry, desire, and fetish symbolism. As desire impacts on the lover with a bang it smites them in a gloved strike to the heart, to the head, or to that between double-point where the fetish operates. "Smitten Gloves". The sign represents but is not, the words are materially present but are not what they name. Held up on a city pavement by a distressed lover the sign brings a private emotion to public attention, but the response it can expect is literary, to the words, rather than an empathetic or contributory reaction.

Other works in the exhibition take or partake of a public language, a language of scripture, of a shared way of knowing or being in the world, and partly privatise it. Altering a public text to make it particular to one reader, in the shift that the lyric text attempts, is to speak to one in the language of the many. The page speaks of the one in a mode that all may hear, may hear indifferently, without specificity. The private address of lover to beloved, of spy to handler, of confessor to priest, is made public, placing all who read it in the position of the designated recipient, or making each reader one who overhears, who eavesdrops, who is an over-the shoulder reader. "Well of course I'll keep on trying" (Waekerle).

The reader may be an inadvertent stumbler across a public private gap, or one lured by text from an anonymity of the public to being implicated as a particular addressee. "My mum hates me" (Tremlett). This confessional mode is part of a proliferation of texts across media that present in public and as public particular life events, sharing the particular account of incidents. Personal experience constitutes as individual the one who experiences. Making it available to others calls for identification with, as opposed to and in the same gesture as, identification of. "We are 50% happier now than we were last year" (Caves).

The public language of political speeches, of the newspapers, of an authorised voice is reframed as a modified replaced privatised utterance. In this reworking it is remade available for other readings, resistant or alternate or against the push of the sanctioned intent. Re-cut and reworked as a page bearing evidence of reconsideration, of restatement, it opens to private reading that operates both in public and on public address. Through collage layering and combination some works republish texts that had clear public places. Olchar Lindsann disrupts the texture of the US currency, "kinds of advertising"; while Catherine Ricoul interrupts the grid of a ship's log with private symbolism, "sueurs froides".

The reader is invited to respond directly, to reply via e-mail in Moira Allan's Proof of Identity, or Irene Pomatto's iloveyou project; or to obey the directive in Christopher Fleming's Page for a Public Library. Other writers imagine the possibility of a response by affecting change in the reader's relation to those (other) public texts. Rupert Hartley reworks the front page of The Sun newspaper, and Mags Treanor gathers texts from the Paris Metro. David Kennedy combines references to the mythologizing of Princess Diana, with formal qualities of biblical language and the page layout of religious texts. Seeing the modifications or quotations of official language, of sanctioned discourse, of the words of advertising may open them to new interpretation or to variant deployments.

Other pages allow for the reading of the text to activate or make the written work, to put it into operation, as the reader recognises the form or the mode that is referenced, and also enjoys the play of sound or shape or other materialities of the text. Drew Milne's page designed in a font titled 'Bank Gothic' responds to the shape and visual associations of the letter forms, allowing references to Modernism and a European avant-garde to mix with Art Deco stylishness. Nathan Walker's alphabet, absea, is divided into lower and upper case rows, but this neat order is disrupted by a sound play, a homophonic incursion. Mary Crowder's Bass also plays with homophones; in this case their being laid over each other performs the confusion they can provoke.

The poetic text in the modern developed West has one origin in a public speaking, in public address, in a text that operated in the public sphere. This origin has been privatised in successive redrafting that has progressively enclosed the poem in a private realm of feelings, of sensibility, of individual consumption. Each of these aspects also has a public face, but the public face serves to reinforce a private individual identity. John Hall's A Private Grace draws attention to this doubleness, presenting in public form his extravagantly framed phrase. The frame encloses and protects the words, and in the same gesture makes it available to and for public reading. Public Pages seeks to complicate privatised reading, involving reading directly with questions that concern the public, the community, the larger group, in addition to or beyond the individual particular member. The public address of these pages is to many, but is not generalised, as a response may be demanded of or effected by any one of the texts' readers. "Disquiet Please!".

Mark Leahy