Cornish Landscape III

When I left Newlyn Art Gallery I wondered down to the Harbour. With all my questions buzzing around, I found myself trying to square up the act of framing shots and finding interest and/or satisfaction in creating images, with this problematic of art as politics, art as social activator. Do pretty pictures affirm the status quo? Can I make images that can contribute to a green politics?

Mostly, the images need to lead themselves. I can worry over the larger paradigm that will show itself positively or negatively anyway. The framing I'm always drawn to is the composite of shapes and elements... Struggling to articulate what those composites are attempting to do...

And it is clear to me as I walk down the pier, that it is not any old landscape that makes me want to photograph it. I am drawn to the places where industry provides its clear and decisive objects, where industry and human activity have fallen into a state of disrepair, where the natural is breaking it down.

 

 

 In this way, there is a material, social aspect to the work.

 

 Smells: sea, shell fish, oil, cold. Sounds: gulls crying and wheezing, chugging of small boat motors, cars in the distance, some welding further up the quay, two men chatting as they head on to one of the boats.

Cornish Landscape II

Went to see three exhibitions over the last two days, all in the Penwith Peninsular of Cornwall: Richard Cook at The Exchange, Penzance; Unfold at Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn; and Peter Lanyon at Tate St. Ives, St.Ives. The three exhibitions are jostling about in my mind as I try to make sense of them, physically framed by my extraneous wanderings in the Cornish landscape and the clever use of windows and scenic viewing points by the galleries to reframe the outside view as inside. All three exhibitions use landscape and nature as subject matter, two of them solo painters and the other a group show.

It seems a monumental task to tie all my thoughts on the past two days into a coherent whole. Landscape is the ultimate frame, but there is a meandering problematic residing within this broad term as I grapple with it in my own experience, thinking and photography. I am going to post a small series of photographs and writing on this thematic.

I felt most troubled by the Newlyn exhibition, troubled in a way that marks an uncomfortable boundary to what I want from my own work. The full title of the show is 'Unfold - A Cape Farewell art exhibition, A cultural response to climate change'. It is a gathering of responses to an expedition that a group of artists, musicians and poets made to the icy north to reflect upon the changing status of our natural world. The impetus to the show is indeed laudable and I was quite excited to see it. I want art works that engage with the political issues of the day, especially when it's about the natural world. I want art works that help. But, despite liking several of the works on show, I was left feeling all my usual doubts about the success of such works to fulfil this extra-aesthetic role. I say extra-aesthetic because the political element to the show's purpose throws an uneasy extra criteria to our judgements: how does this work help us slow down climate change? And what happens to the aesthetic element of works when they are utilised for such a purpose?

On the train on the way down to Penzance I noticed that there were trees on the edge of some fields that had a shape like giant weeds, and I remembered how easy it is for us to justify felling trees accordingly, that the cultural associations and linguistic signs that we use are crucial to treating the planet better. It is in this that art and artists are crucial.

There is the post 'institutional critique' reading of art that gives us works that expose the social and material relations operative to works' realisation within their setting, gallery, landscape. This thinking criticises the aesthetic object for keeping up a facade of ideological illusion of art's autonomy for the bourgeois' claim on taste and political hegemony. I am impressed by this but mourn a means to make art that can retain an element of that spiritual rapture we get from great beauty.

Though how often do we encounter that? And how often is beauty genuinely beauty and not another kind of bewitching?

I sat after looking at the art works in 'the studio' to peruse the various materials that has been put there for our research (on eco art, the exhibition, the expedition etc). All text based, a computer, some books, some written comments on the wall. As I read I wondered how much this show was supposed to be a pedagogic experience, (which I find a little patronising), and how much the format lent on a design orientated aesthetic. Did I come here for information, in what feels like an ever encroachment of the administrative? Am I a purist to wish for my art to be art? (Maybe I am turning into a traditionalist). 

It is an interesting question - where is the aesthetic in a specific art sense here? Or maybe it should be, what is the aesthetic here? 

As I was leaving I noted that Frieze is doing a religious issue.

This is Daro Montag's, Leafcutter Ant Drawing, Amazon rainforest, Carbon and oil on pre-used paper, 2009. It was created with the feet of tens of ants navigating the two stripes "painting" made by Montag with a carbon-oil solution. The film accompanying the piece was very interesting. Where does the aesthetic reside in this? Perhaps in the visual as a composite of all the different material and social elements that go together to make an art object and to give that art object, externally, internally, meaning - firmly, integrally, immanently to its, the, landscape.

Beachy Birds

Just went for a walk along the seafront in Penzance, Cornwall. Saw many Pied Wagtails for the first time,

as well as the Rock Pipit  

and the Turnstone.

All very exciting for me as these birds don't visit London.

Bitter Cold, Grey Park...

...look at the little feet!

Bird Watching, Wondering

Still on the natural trip. Just watched the first three episodes of the series Birds Britannia - a really excellent historical and cultural overview of the UKs relationship with birds.

It lead me to research Jeremy Mynott and his book Birdscapes. I haven't read it, but am intrigued to after listening to this podcast (on Podularity - wasn't sure who in particular to credit). The crossovers between birds (as cultural symbol) and philosophy seems potentially very interesting. At this point I am wondering how it would be possible to interrogate philosophy, or use philosophical tools towards a meaningful or productive end, to interrogate meaningfully and productively our understanding of the natural world.

Dusk

Extracts

I have a habit of underlining bits of text as I read that feel particularly resonant to me in some way. Usually the resonance comes from an argument suddenly opening into another element or avenue (plane) that therefore connects up areas I hadn't before seen the linkage between. I thought I would extract these bits of text and see what they collate into as a collection of such openings.

"...the autonomy of the art object is something which is produced out of the social relations which constitute the institution of art itself." 1

"By defending a form of autonomy which is constituted through the negation of tradition, the irreconcilability of art is coextensive with the irreconcilability of the subject's consciousness of being-in-the-world." 2

"While it is a critical convention ... that people were exhorted to turn from the fascination of the world in order to attain eternal life, the situation is not as simple as this easy distinction between the sacred and the profane. It is the very point of the garden of love to show how the separation of the world, life, and love, into sacred and profane ... is a misprision; that the rift between sensation and understanding (between Eve and Adam) is an illusion..." 3

"The continual production of difference - that is, of uniqueness and particularity - is implicit in the singularity of things." 4

"...connection not renunciation..." 5

"...a continual benediction of emergence conceived as erotica and amoenita..." 6

"...a transformation 'of nature into culture to such an extent that the origin of love ... remains ambiguous' (Cherchi xiv)." 7

"For absolute freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of the whole." 8

"...art sanctions the primacy of reality." 9

"Art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants." 10

"That artworks as windowless monads "represent" what they themselves are not can scarcely be understood except in that their own dynamic, their immanent historicity as a dialectic of nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it." 11

"...and while this is the nominalist dilemma of all art after the readymade, we can only comprehend the distinctions we make through the frames of mind we do or do not have in common." 12

"The contemporary question of style must be pondered alongside this current "production" of subjectivity, whether emphasis is on regularized forms of self-fashioning or on the singular and less controllable aspects of becoming." 13

"...style may be seen as a key component of media apparatuses that are not just presentational frames but also social machines that integrate human minds and bodies as part of their functioning." 14

"Style is the man when the man himself is a stylus - as in geomancy, when one's body becomes a seismic needle for registering, in ink or sand or some other substance, the signals of the cosmos." 15

1,2 John Roberts, 'After Adorno: Art, Autonomy, and Critique', Historical Materialism 7 (Winter 2000)
3-7 Rod Barnett, 'Serpent of Pleasure: Emergence and Difference in the Medieval Garden of Love', Landscape Journal 28:2-09
8-11 Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans Hullot-Kentor, 1970
12 Michelle Kuo, 'Forms and Functions (Editor's Letter)', Art Forum, September 2010
13, 14 Ina Blom, 'Questions of Style', Art Forum, September 2010
15 Alexander Nagel, 'Questions of Style', Art Forum, September 2010

Green Ideology

Been on a bit of an environmentalist one recently. Just watched this, a film shown on UK Channel 4 about unorthodox views from within the environmentalist movement. It was difficult to watch - one 'green taboo' after another was demolished, advocates arguing for the use of nuclear power and GM food.

Made me think of Žižek's bit in An Examined Life:



The connection between the two is that they both identify ideology as the cause of an obscuration that prevents real insight into the problems that the planet faces and finding prompt ways to act. In the first film it is a residual hippy activist movement that is blind to the science that can treat the problems now. In Žižek, it is conservatism and secular religion lurking beneath our beloved Gaia. They both call for more technology: "We should become more alienated!"

Jellyfish

The Horniman houses these creatures. The lack of flash on my camera means that you can't see the neon colouring they exhibit in UV light, but maybe you can imagine what an incredible sight it was.

Looking at animals is always a challenge to imagine life without ego-based consciousness and a more profound challenge to live an ethics of equality that takes life without ego-based consciousness into account. Reading a lot of Freud at the moment. I can't imagine that he ever imagined the different - without being less equal - consciousnesses that might inhabit creatures. But, I guess his work paves the way for us to.

Horniman Aquarium from Horniman Museum on Vimeo.

Just found this video when searching for the link to the Horniman Museum. It shows the jellyfish in all their glory.

Also discovered that there is an exhibition of Venkat Raman Singh Shyam and Rajendra Shyam on currently. I first discovered Gond art via BibliOdyssey: The Night Life of Trees It's wonderful.

Treats

Clothe

Exhibitions 2

Enjoyed Wolfgang Tillmans at The Serpentine

Excited by Newspeak: British Art Now at The Saatchi Gallery

Still letting the thought of 'assemblage' float around. Both shows seemed to show an aesthetic of assemblage - the composition/juxtaposition/assemblage of different registers of meaning within one piece or installation.

Tillmans is all photography, but the images show great variety of subject matter and aim, and the installation is one of an experience reflected within the architecture of the gallery space. The experience conveyed is multi-faceted and complex.

The British Art Now exhibition is dominated by assemblages, both in the materiality e.g. sculptures by Daniel Silver, made from mixed materials - 'high' and 'low' materials in one, fabric and stone, with found or reclaimed wood - all seemingly retaining their own individual histories as a material, producing interesting new conglomerates that don't subsume these different (semiotically understood) codes into one new thing but a thing with its internal differences intact.


Daniel Silver, Untitled, 2010

The painting of the show shows a similar spirit of democracy, where different traditions are deployed to subvert each other in a mutual spirit of ironic re-invigoration (or mutual destruction).


Ged Quinn, The Ghost Of A Mountain, 2005

Alastair MacKinven, Et Sick In Infinitum, 2008

Work Lines IV

"In Woman is incarnated in positive form the lack that the existant carries in his heart, and it is in seeking to be made whole through her that man hopes to attain self-realisation."
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p173

The White Ribbon

It takes a positive act to enable a gesture. In depression, contraction, the plane of extension, gesture, unfurling, action becomes inhibited.
All writing about depression is a paradox, or at least can only happen after the mood has passed, for no positive gesture is possible in the spirit of withdrawal.
What does one do with doubt? The paralysis engendered by lack of faith must eventually be overcome, for the world does indeed keep up its turning.

To find a way forward when confronted by the doubt of no-faith, we either create new faith or remove ourselves from the dilemma. Taking a step back, ironically isolating doubt as a phenomenon in its own right, bracketed off as a thing to be observed. To this end, doubt is masked from its own cause and takes the form of a generative state. We forget the reality that gives us doubt.

Dance.

Dogtooth

Rudolph Arnheim, The Creative Eye
Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking

It is the story of struggle rather than achievement, as allegory of process rather than synthesis. Translated into local codes of application.
~ Francis Alÿs, A Story of Deception, 2010

ego as structural edifice, dissolve
something given and the tense
structure gives way - no ego
Parochiality
Only seeing a narrow parameter

Tremendous relief in letting go.

Mary Martin - Abstraction vs. construction.

A Return to the Thames

The first of these videos is a part of the view from a pub window, right on the Thames. It's the changing colours that made me want to record it.



As often happens, once you do something with the original impulse, some other interest wakes up. It's as if after videoing water, the next step is to think about the framing of that video of water. I find myself making another video with the conscious addition of structures.



I haven't commented on the sounds. They're important, as two sensations overlapping to create the moment, and perhaps in an incongruous manner. The fad for 'assemblage' has been stimulating my thoughts recently. For the 2nd video I went outside and we lost the hubbub of people and beer.

Work Lines III (continuous update)

Edward Abbey

Mugabe and the White African, Channel 4

The fold of one 'half' over the other - a geological fold, physical land based in my imagination.
The camera, we/I moves from the partition (head on) between the halves and takes the dominant's side.
Woman is folded over,
unseen unheard from beneath Man's enfoldment.
Man seeks/achieves transcendence by overcoming Woman (animal) - Woman seeks transcendence by overcoming her animality. Again, Man's viewpoint - Woman nothing more than animal. To what extent is our language of this talk contributing to this understanding?
Language - rational, of man's domain?
Where is Woman subsumed? Within language?
Investigate animality.

The difference between knowing something through language and learning something through experience.
Investing the material with the spiritual - sacred earth vs. sacred thought, sacred feeling, sacred energy.
The feeling of fabric against skin - erotic, not because it fits idea of the erotic.
The moment of realisation - crystallisation, condensement, reification of new reality where the elements/conditions rearranged.

Division between sensible and conceptual/Idea - how this translates into 'eco', Natural, concepts of.

"The proper test is not that of finality, but of progress."
A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, Free Press corrected edition, p14

Quite nice having only limited powers of perception or sensitivity to things. Less responsibility to the chains of effect that lead out of every event, moment, thing.

Sensitivity: to take on - suffer - great imprints from things; to be impressed upon in great depth and length by the imprint of things.
- Not only prone to being hurt.

How do you make a structure? How do you make a visual representation of a structure?
Doomed to fail.
Francis Alÿs a structuralist - the pictures, the walking. Re-inscribing structure(s).

A painting reduces all elements, conditions, to an equality of substance and makes possible the re-rendering of both visible and invisible components on this new plane, for the ready communication of this portrayal and recreation within this new plane's substance.
The absurdity of trying to represent, make real/sensible structures, that are inherently non-representable. Or even just obscured too much for us to recognise this structual form. If it exists, visibly/sensibly or not, can we re-present it in sensible form?
By attempting, Man exercises his capacity for freedom and action and the right to transcend it, change it, have control of his destination.

Work Lines II (continuous update)

Agacinski

The sensitive object
TO TRY
Empiricism vs. Conceptualism

╚►

out of this an -No Theory
experiential mode
of DOING art emerges.


Representing the non-representable through the transformation of painting, through the mystery of the process of painting making real the mystery of the object (Idea or otherwise) itself. And visa versa...
Art being the act, the simple narrative of how it works.

Bernstein

Rationalism being a cognition of dead objects.
Living is deligitimised.
What would be the affinities between existences?
Wielding the critical axe - scything through the problem to pit the various conditions of the concept, question, problem against itself. Re-forming or reconfiguring the problem to produce a new object.


I am like a weather vane.

Where J. stands in for the cynic
<—> making both ways. All experiences, events, people, things like tokens, signs, symbols, for the meaning we have associated with them/it. For our own universe/service. Works both ways —> what happens as this tokenography works the other way?
Empty ourselves out from centre of universe - we are locus for other peoples!

David B. Smith
Charlotte Street

www.speculativeheresy.wordpress.com
www.planomenology.wordpress.com
http://www.k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/

laura douglas

Georges Braque
Bottle and Fishes, 1910-2

At losing ones job:
raw despair
at the primordial fear at prospect
of not being able
to support oneself,
elated at the
promise of new beginnings,
new chances, new
opportunities. Maybe
things'll get better!
Sick of this place
anyway.
Brutal anger at the
injustice of it all.
How has this been
allowed to happen?

www.opelori.com

MONOSKOP
PDFs.

Duty
manager
scoffing
the biscuits

The Overlap Series: Jogger
(with comic event)
2000-1


The Emancipatory.
Emancipation
as
revelation
Sacrifice
-McCarthy

Carly Simon
What's the rule?
Adorno?
(internalising the law/s)
Baldessari

Colouring my mind
Romanticism w/ its
cheap promise of c o m p l e t i o n


plays itself out at my mercy


Imagine, being given edifaces and abysses with our
birth and box of characteristics. The abyss we carry and on the other side of the cut
lies All That We Cannot See. All That We Cannot See - our blindnesses, our abjects, our beasts.
We cannot see them. They look like merky areas
of unseeing.
They unleash themselves on all that we encounter, colouring our perceptions, unknown to us.
Our neighbours,
the other beings we come into contact with can see,
they see our blindnesses, they make form
from what we don't delimit. Their eyes and their
powers make things out of our unseeing and give them back to us as real life encounters, the incidences, the bus stop chats with strangers, the friend round for tea, the kiss, the supermarket queue.

Other people see out blindnessess.

Bird song anchor points
To elevate
Come back to
yourself
Feel your periphery again
Feel your edge.

John Buckens

Exhibitions

Am greatly enjoying the Haris Epaminonda exhibition at Tate Modern. I may or may not write about why.
Saw the exhibition Unto This Last at Raven Row. One piece, 'Common Knowledge' really chimed with me. Again, may or may not write about why.

More Treen

Sounds: roaring sea, birdsong. Smell: fresh green, earth.

Treen

Just arrived back in London after a week camping in Cornwall. Still glowing with the wonder of it. A glimpse:

Canal Beasts