BY IAN McDONNELL
published by EMP
www.emp-london.com
Review By Paul Davis
When I first opened I Like Aerials and leafed through it, as you do, my first reaction was hardly a reaction at all so slight and seemingly flimsy is this minimal book. It's by Ian McDonnell and published by the EMP; the images first seen in the much beloved McSweeny's quarterly. It's so simply designed it doesn't seem to be designed at all (nothing wrong in that); there's hardly any information apart from the index of where the aerials were seen and no page numbers. The images of different aerials mostly from New York and London (and Newcastle) are tiny on the page, black and white and look a bit pixillated (or look similar to when there's a problem with your printer). Try using a loupe and you'll see.Then, little by little, the meaning of the book begins to uncover itself and show much more than the sum of its parts. The aerials are printed small because that's how we see them: small up on a roof up there somewhere, so the finer bits seem to melt away or flash in and out of what's visible and what's not. So, an honest representation, plus they look like drawings too which adds to the slight confusion.
They are, we're told, photographs, which are stripped back to their barest, basic essence but are all different. Some look like insects, others remind me of fossils. Most are beautiful, linear and lonely-looking. All this made me realise that there's no such thing as a generic aerial set-up, in the way the folk inside the buildings in front of the TV are all different too, lolling around in different positions eating pizza and watching Big Brother beamed down in evil frequencies from a satellite miraculously held in orbit hundreds of miles above our synapses.
This wonderful book takes you somewhere else; to all the homes around the world, sitting rooms, kitchens, dens, and makes you think that before television there were books to be read or radios to be listened to by the fireplace. The chimney stacks have been taken over, invaded, almost been made obsolete by aerials as they cling on insect-like. Instead of smoke indicating that someone's at home, aerials don't give away anything, they are just there, eerily affixed but somehow inherently, individually beautiful.