We are constantly fed (not always nourished), by external stimuli that come in, are mapped, and go out as response. And when we think about internal stimuli we talk about moods, nature, instinct. But what does that really mean. What is the data that is affecting us? How? Where does it originate? Why? Certain birds are born with the ability to cower in the nest when a predator flies overhead, yet not when a non-predator flies over. This is an Innate Response Mechanism built from millennia of experience and evolution. Imagine the spectrum of our human innate responses.

For example, I have just reread The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway and recognised several motifs that correspond with the tale of The Wounded Fisher King of Arthurian Romance legend, who is excluded from the hunt by his injury, leaving the world a wasteland. Hemingway’s protagonist has been wounded in the groin in the First World War and left infertile. His is the emotional wasteland of ‘The Lost generation’. He gains pleasure from fishing for trout in the streams of the Pyrenees (Romance country) and from watching the bullfights in which he cannot take part. I looked up Hemingway and the Fisher King online and there is a commentary on this subject but it seems to me to be in error. The debate centres on whether or not Hemingway was aware of the Romance tales of which TS Eliot was writing contemporaneously in The Wasteland, influenced by the academic treatment by Jesse Weston. However the tales of heroes wounded in the thigh or groin are many and ancient, (here are the ones of which i am aware – King Amfortas by a spear, Jacob by the angel, Tristan by Morold, Telephus by Achilles, Chiron by Hercules, Hercules himself, Adonis by the wild boar and Alexander by a spear. Of course Jesus was also wounded in the abdomen with a spear). I suggest that Hemingway is not knowingly retelling the tale but channeling the archetype that maybe concerned with spiritual infertility – who knows? That is to say, the Archetype of The Wounded King is expressing itself through Hemingway, carrying with it whatever the dream like message is that it needs to make us aware of. Such is the creative principal of the universe and the nature of our evolved, inherited, shared and subtle Innate Response Mechanisms.

So, in other words, where is the place where I stop and Everything begins? This is what interests me as an artist.

*

The Ego gives us a thick skin and sets us on a promontory that necessarily separates and protects us from Everything. As TS Eliot says

‘Human kind

Cannot bear very much reality’ (Four Quartets, Faber and Faber)

However there is a longing on our part and on the universe’s for a reconciliation (Science probes this. As does religion (re-ligio trans. re-link (ligament, ligature) or reconnect. Also Sanskrit Yuj – root yoga, union etc) and art.

*

Is there a sense that when Barthes wrote about the death of the Author God it was interpreted as an instruction to artists as doxa to remove themselves from the production and/or product of their labour in the name of the viewer/consumer? a sort of ideal, democratic self-immolation? presumably with the kernel ambition of producing pure, inclusive objectivity. Im attracted to this idea and I like dogmatic art. Im sort of jealous of it. I like the idea of producing work in which a feedback process of copy, paste, copy, paste becomes a mechanical separation of the producer from the product, the personality is removed in a sort of creative degradation.

And yet Hermann Hesse wrote about how he sometimes imagined taking all his work back from the altar on which he first proffered it as sacrifice to be cut up and dismembered by reader-consumers, critics and subjective opinion. I make subjective art. I make it for me. Consumption by others is incidental and a sort of justification. The conversation i am having is not primarily with an audience but between myself and Everything. In fact it is a probing of the relationship between myself, as a subset of everything, and the set that is Everything.

*

Create

Curate

Collect

all attempts to address (control) ownership of the creative act and its issue.

Owning is a form of creativity, an expression of the creative drive.

*

Looking at the primal matter and activity of human consciousness is like staring into the crater of an active volcano filled with potential for creation and destruction and its going on ALL THE TIME.

*

Money is a symbol of value.

Art is a concretion of value

Art Is Value.

*

There is still some discursive connection between Beauty and Art –  a sense that the art object should … what? contain beauty? represent beauty? BE beautiful? But does beauty inhere an object or is it a response? It is an effect, not a cause. It takes place not in the object but within us.

*

I think of Postmodernism as the consequence of gravity, volume and velocity. Many streams become one torrential river becomes shallow delta as its waters reach sea level, as all water pursues its own level: losing momentum and depth there is deposition and dispersal. The result, a myriad of rippled sandbanks spread over a wide area finally merging in oceanic conformity. And Post- Postmodernism? a hacking and slashing climb back up in search of the source or a new universalism? Or a compression of the deposition into a new stone to be mined? Of course it might also be dammed water, deep but virtually stagnant, as The Market releases just enough to power itself and irrigate a narrow strip along its downstream banks.

 

 

 

 

 

Fran Stafford and John Barraclough

For the first part of these enquiries I had to listen to the audios whilst on the move and couldn’t take notes and when I returned to listen again I had run out of time and they were unavailable.

From memory, neither speaker was describing any aspect of the art world that resonated with my little corner of it, while they both described their own wide ranging approaches to getting art seen. Fran Staffords seemingly inexhaustible energy and Barracloughs teenage fanzine enthusiasm for communicating  was fairly humbling, and both seemed quite well connected which counts for so much in the competitive market place that is the art world. Im sure I would have benefited from a second listening. I wonder why there is a time limit on these audio files.

Sam Wilkinson

I made a point of listening to the second part from Sam Wilkinson whilst taking notes. Whilst the art that she chose to illustrate her business practice looked very slick the idea of attempting to sell my labour to property developers through an ‘ameliorative’ art broker to adorn their shopping centres as a kind of Unique Selling Point does not inspire me. I was waiting for her to explain exactly what happened to the ‘homeless people’ of Leicester who ‘inhabited (the almshouses) in a way that was less than ideal for a commercial developer’ if Insites Art takes pride in being ‘considerate and thoughtful’.

Thats not to say that I thought the research undertaken by the artists in her examples didnt sound very thorough and worthy although I couldn’t see evidence of the artist making a connection between the almshouses and their historic role in ameliorating poverty.

Plus before I sound too principled and worthy I have completed several contracts to make stone sculpture to a brief for Muf Architects that adorn commercial space (Science Museum), housing developments (East Hackney Estate) and public space (Altab Ali Park, Whitechapel and Commercial Rd, Mile End) that involved close collaboration with a range of contractors and local organisations. There was just something about Wilkinsons presentation that I found personally uninspiring. And I kept wondering how much risk the clients and contractors are really prepared to take in allowing the artist a free hand.

Helen Chadwick

It took me a while to get beyond the weird trancey crashing orbs in the frame and the sound speed that exaggerated the speech into a parodic bourgeois drawl of the various talking heads and Chadwick herself. However once drawn into Chadwicks orb I was mesmerised by her vision and felt my entire understanding of art evolving.

She was intrigued by her own work in an un-selfconscious way

Of her ‘Oval Court of Mutability’ she says they are ‘oracles of myself…divining how one feels about things’. That in itself is a wonderful thought that helps and validates my own efforts to understand my work.

There is a moment where she observes her hands in the skate fish and describes a

“begging and bowing gesture” which to me is an astonishing, tender and powerful insight into her own work. ‘Divining’ meaning from behaviour.

Over and over she asks herself ‘why?’ and answers the question.

On seeing ‘Cacao’ in the gallery for the first time she says

“but is it art?”

and answers

“I really dont know…because it’s a phenomenon”

She asks herself

“who am I”

and answers with Viral Landscape, synthesising body cells and land art.

Of the compost piece she says its

‘something to contemplate beyond the trivial. The changing – its cyclical’

as though she is learning from her own creation. Where much art seems to say

‘here is what I know’

Chadwick seems to say

‘lets see what I can find out if i make this’.

The evolution of her work from one exhibition to the next is mesmerising. Ego Geometria Sum and her description and explanation seems to me a perfect body of art – exciting, adventurous, tender and exploratory.

One of the commentators speaks of her

“rigour of thought, of representation” of which I was left in awe.

My understanding both of contemporary art and of how I see myself as an artist has significantly shifted as a result of watching this short film.

Rachel Whiteread

I  like Rachel Whiteread’s monumental work.  But I visited her show at Tate Britain and was in and out within half an hour. I hoped for some insight from this film into her inner process but where Chadwick asked why and answered, Whiteread barely asked and never answered, beyond

“I became fascinated by the parquet floor”

“…preserve the quotidian”

“…give authority to unwanted things – you know”

“its very nice to find a line”

“stopping (things) in time”

BUT WHY?

Perhaps like Henry Moore she is afraid to analyse the forces beneath the surface in case the creative bubble is burst. It occurs to me that both his and her work resembles a skin or surface that is inflated to bursting point due to the inner forces remaining unaddressed.

In fact her work takes the inner space of objects and renders it as surface.

She says

“I kind of like the way things get their place in this world”

but offers no analysis. Sadly I was left thinking wow all she does is cast stuff, draw a bit and print. Except she employs a printer.

John Dewey said

‘an artist is compelled to be an experimenter because he has to express an intensely individualised experience through means and materials that belong to the common and public world. This problem cannot be solved once and for all. It is met in every new work undertaken. Otherwise an artist repeats himself and becomes aesthetically dead’

(Dewey, J, Art As Experience, Penguin, New York, 1934 p150 2004 edition)