In Tipping's photographs, the context changes the sign. Tipping's objects reverse this method. By manipulating a common sign, the context is re-charged and significantly altered. His AIRPOET sign began as a modified airport direction sign on the way to Adelaide Airport in South Australia: the arrow pointing up into the sky and not as convention would have it, straight ahead. In another installation at a road entrance to The University of Sydney, the signs CROSSING and HUMP were modified slightly to become SING and HUM. Both of these otherwise standard road signs completely altered the space they occupied through a shift from a rather mechanical instruction to imaginative provocation.

Twenty years ago, it would have been enough to label these kind of works visual or concrete poetry. So much text-based art has been put into place over the succeeding years that different modes - or spatialities - of this kind of work can be clearly identified. One of these is Tipping's. In Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Marjorie Perloff devotes a chapter called 'Signs are taken for Wonders' to this particular spatial aspect of contemporary media. Perloff relates the literary appropriation of this space to the democratic necessity of connecting art with daily life, that is, with consumerism and corporate identity. This is one possible genealogy. Another might trace back to Stephane Mallarme, who wrote of the newspaper as an innovative literary model. Yet another goes back to tribal and religious symbols. The single word manipulated visually and placed in a public context is common to all of these traditions. But advertising extends it by providing a hot-house of techniques for condensing a message in time by relying on space as the major semantic element.

Indeed, most of Perloff's examples are taken from advertising to compliment her examples of classic European concrete poems from the 1950s. Tipping's work is an even better support for her arguments. His poems are the best realisations to date of Eugen Gomringer's call for "poems....as easily understood as signs in airports and traffic signs". (The words 'airport' and 'traffic sign' are particularly apt here.)

Since Gomringer wrote that call, the world of signs has omnivorously consumed many of the dissenting images of this century. This is hardly news: somewhere, someone is surely working on a perfume to be called FIDEL. For art iconoclasts the fight appears to be lost. Man Ray's Cadeau (The Gift), his smoothing iron with the tacks attached, and Salvadore Dali's Aphrodisiac Telephone, where a lobster becomes the handset on a standard telephone, have long been thrown into the vortex of everyday images which constitute a linguistic collective unconscious. The up side is that everyone has access to it, the down side is that Man Ray's and Dali's icons have become mere logos, jostling for space with thousands of others.

Tipping's achievement is to handle such images and nimbly sidestep the dangers of parody, wherein the advertisement and its status quo are extended further than the original could ever demand. It's instructive to note how he does this. In mass media, there is very little 'time' but lots of 'space'. This is one thing that the UStates and AUStralia have in common - bulk space. This 'space', moreover, is not just void but is filled with the power of ownership, territoriality and ego. Further, as messages become briefer, they take up more room. In the workings of this space, in its everyday manipulation of us, there is a totalitarianism that can be used against itself because of the unpredictable human presence in all media systems. Graffiti is one manifestation of this unpredictability, another is the high culture borrowing of pop which turns it into Pop Art.

But while graffiti may be rebellious and Pop Art celebratory, it isn't art unless it is, like Tipping's work always is, an open conduit to new interpretations. In contrast to the effort sometimes required to install them, for example, the Southern Cross lights Tipping installed on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, or his illuminated concrete poem HEARTHEART on the facade of Australia House in London, Tipping's signs are effortless to absorb and the 'message' simple and surprising. Nearly always, his signs ask us to do or imagine something totally different to the expected. Every one of his altered signs suggests a new context, an imaginative one in which the original sign is remembered for its banality. By doing this and opening up the imagination rather than restraining it, Tipping shows how one can transform advertising and bureaucratic space into poetry on its own terms. The sign says ONE DAY and points ONE WAY, which is where it came from. Tipping's signs (and objects) are two-way: pointing to their origin and also to a new, imaginary location. GO!

Alex Selenitsch
Melbourne - September 1998