Iris

Playing around with shape, thinking about how beautiful flowers are as they start to die. And the Georgia O'Keefe exhibition at Tate.

can you make embroidery from detailed photo images?

my creativity has been focused on a new home.
textiles follow from this state. here are photos i want to register as potential embroidery designs:

hmmmm 

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.

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.

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

Treen

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

Work Lines (continuous update)

The following are lines I have scribbled on the back or in the margins of my rotas while working as a Gallery Attendant:

In longing there is escape from my present
a reach for more than.
An acknowledgement of my present limitations,
imprisonment.

Jeff Koons: funny, in your face, shocking - unreal - hyper-real, staged, ridiculous, egocentric, worrying.
Exposes the crassness, nastiness of the successful art world.
Unreality of imagery.
Strands of sexual liberation and money, fame = this.
Posed as porn films, what does she think?
Anti feminist but not because anti rights.

www.myspace.com/grainsuk

I am inside.
The world is outside.
On that threshold.

Ossification

Where are the lines of taboo? Fitting the female form into that shock factor - iconoclast - shock from images already exists.

I wonder if it would be possible to do a phenomenological reading of Peter Fischli and David Weiss' Untitled (Tate) 1992-2000 piece...

Jiří Kovanda 53

What do we hold as our object(s)?
The way we orient ourselves by whatever we place before us.
To the sane mind, the fantastical is an adventure, an important exercise in possibility and elasticity of thought. An exercise in the forgetting of the horrors of madness.
But with the first whiff of madness, fantasy's dark side, the devils and goblins, the devil worship and evil seeps forth again, makes us shiver, is threatening to our grip on reality.
Is reality anything more than the organising structures - grids - we impose onto it?

André Breton: What Is Surrealism? (Trans. D. Gascoyne) 1936

Uncovering the ground of the issue.
Pulling off another layer, flying carpet, rug. From under our feet (foot fall).
Pull away another layer to uncover the ground, uncover another carpet to pull away.

All this uncovering makes me think of falling down a well,
scaffolding gone, the brickwork is slippery to touch.
All this dismantling of conceptual structures,
and the ground is an eternal uncovering in the pursuit of a ground.
All this questioning makes me want to reach out and touch someone.

Gödel, Escher, Bach
Hofstadter - Maths, early 20th Century.

0845 300 7000 - London Bus Complaints

Fresh round drips off of umbrellas
collect in front of the art works,
bleeding into the wood grain and dust.

Weird, confronting the loneliness, grab a relationship and seals herself into it for some years. Jobs and houses follow. Experiment continues but with the expectation that settling down and moving up in the world is to come.

Colouring my mind
Romanticism with its cheap promise of completion
Plays itself out at my mercy

The Emancipatory
Emancipation as revelation
Sacrifice - McCarthy

Carly Simon

What's the rule? Adorno? (Internalising the law/s)
Baldessari

24th @ A's. Bring food etc.

The Overlap Series: Jogger
(with Cosmic Event)
2001-01

Imagine, being given edifices and abysses with out birth and box of characteristics. Across the way from the abyss, on the other side of the cut lies All That We Cannot See - our blindnesses, our abjects, our beasts.
We cannot see them. They look like murky 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 our blindnesses.

Last Batches of Bodmin #3

Sunny ones:

Aggregation

These two images strike me in ways different to the more landscapey shots I've already posted. Still from Bodmin, still marked by my sense of 'homecoming' obscured by the newness of everything, these shots hone in on things strewn about the place, found at the back of a garage etc. When lining up the camera's viewfinder with what my brain wants to see as a composed image, I am guided by a certainty within myself on how to order the image, a logic. Categorically I wanted to avoid photographing one thing, isolated, and instead show what happens within the frame as a conglomerate of parts to make the whole, consciously disrupting the normal edges of a thing in able to show it as aggregated within a new - or just my own - frame of meaning.

Art-speak flowing then today. Sweet.

Overview

Trying to decide which of my photos might be appreciated as a gift for my two closest friends here in Chania. These are a few of my short list:





















In the end this process has become a bit of an assessment of all the photos I took whilst being away in Greece and Egypt. A natural closure.

And More Pigeons

Yes I may be pushing up against the line between absurdity and boredom, but I am still very much in love with pigeons. It could be a little harmless anthropomorphism, it could be an attraction to their purely instinctual being. They seem to embody 'flow'. In groups their spacial awareness causes them to make evenly balanced patterns best seen from above.

And finding the odd squashed one on the road still affects me.

Derrida Drawing

Not sure if this will work but anyway...



..it's the product of the last talk on Derrida I attended at LSE, over a year ago now. I don't know if it works because the pencil is too fine really for the scan, but maybe the general idea is there - responding to the discussion with both words and doodles or free-flowing pencil marks, like automatic drawing...

Thought Themes To Build On (1)

Current topics of interest:

crystalise - a moment in time, of time, a realising, the birth of a structure
revelation as disclosure, uncovering
phenomenological description vs writerly imagination
mothering, mothership, as a state and concept
facing the world with our viewfinders already configured to see according to the structures we already know
destroying structures, destroying worldviews, in order to see reality again

the experience of being absolutely structureless and out in the world
despair

rebuilding

Lilies and Natality

This is an image I picked up of the harbour burning in Chania, and the mosque. In real life the mosque is pink stone, a very beautiful building.



After reflecting a little on the fleshy nature of some lilies I have been enjoying, it seemed as if the petals were too rich, too perfectly designed to be real. Then Y and I decided that a painting of these petals would seem unreal. And there you have it, a flower so beautifully carries the whole burden of reality upon its resplendence.



Got very excited yesterday over Hannah Arendt's concept of Natality. Shall be adding more.

Mystical Tsikoudia

Am enjoying thinking about mysticism and drinking tsikoudia, Greek raki.

Some pleasant concepts that deserve more attention from me:

the occult
revelation,
revelation as truth in religion, in Heidegger
anxiety as a groundless state of fundamental truth of Being (more Heidegger)

empathy, sympathy, love, relating
relating as primary means of being-in-the-world
magic
magic from David Abram
recent advances in technology and brain science
recent advances in psychology, behavioural science
epiphany
religious ecstacy

I'm buzzing off connections in a little-bit-drunk-kind-of-way. Finished the beautiful Kazantzakis' God's Pauper today and Dermot Moran's chapter on Heidegger. Revelation as truth, revelation as beauty. Lovely.

More Liminal

It is a beautiful bright sunny morning here in Greece, still quiet before the traffic. I just read the Wikipedia excerpt on liminality again and am turning the concept round in my mind.

Imaginitively, the line marks the edge of one thing and the beginning of another - a road to cross. Liminality becomes no man's land between two worlds, the threshold before dissolution of identity, disorientation and a relaxation of normal thought, self-understanding and behaviour. Out of this period of liminality we emerge again with new perspective, as a new person.

Now I'm near the end, I feel somehow that my time in Greece has been entirely for this reason.

I'm going to do something a bit cheeky now. I just did a Google image search with 'liminal' and found that the word is a popular one with artists. So, I don my curator hat and present a select few. I haven't asked permission, but copyright and credit lies with the artists and any objections will be graciously adhered to.


Liminal Condition Detail copyright Susan Palmisano


Land-Care Yuccas copyright Kurt Brereton


Liminality copyright Kevin Sargent


Copyright Er| Naem & X.iso for album Liminal Sampler 2008 by Various (Liminal Recs)


Liminal copyright Andrew Rose

Indolence and Liminality

Pulled this card from the deck recently. Made me laugh.

Found myself (while) looking into a comment I read about going from A to B and thinking about liminality. It's an incredible concept, traversing such exciting explorations as drawing, anthropology, structuralism, religion, and so on. I am gathering words to stew over during my evening: empathy, criticality, indolence and liminality. I think it might be time for some new labels.

Am remembering Keats' diligent indolence.

Sketchy thinking, ideas, analysis on dating sites.

When we join a dating site we write something about 'who we are' and 'what we are looking for'. Sometimes we write this first, when we join, before looking at other people's writing. Sometimes we write ours after. A lot of the time we start with 'I don't know what to write here' or 'this is weird for me'. Either way there is a process that takes place upon our engaging with the dating community:

Presumably we approach the site with sincerity and hope. The hope may well take the form in our minds of a roughly sketched partner of perfection.
When we read other people's profiles we assess our own in relation to theirs, seeing what other people write as the blueprint. We shop around for ideas and we see that other people are more savvy about the internet dating process.
We re-write or edit our writings to communicate with an impression we gathered from reading other people's profiles, our assessment was a social one.
Hence all the profiles that say the same thing.
When we don't partake in this process our profile fails to involve itself with the language of internet dating and subsequently it is unreadable or fails to offer meaning (within the framework of internet dating).
As a result it would appear from Guardian Soulmates that all people are the same: like: travel, walking by the canal, etc.

Personality traits are 'memes'? of personality that we adopt or not. GS is a chance to showcase the particular memes we subscribe to.
Successful profiles are the ones that seem to lead the way in social currents
Confidence pitted against non-confidence being the flipside/darkside of the same thing - celebration comes in validation of someone's alterity or sophisticated antithetical nature
When we read a profile we don't look for the facts but more the ability of the writer to communicate, looking for a similar skill at this form of communication to ourselves. We use identification for this...

Another subjectivity machine, composer, program, curator...


Blah blah......

I have been thinking a lot about the semiotics in fashion recently. I am imagining that we, as in the person we think of ourselves as, is not to be found within our bodies, and instead we are purely responses to everything around us. I imagine that we turn ourselves inside out so that skin becomes flesh, then this exchange we are imbibed within impresses itself onto our pliable natures or putty-like brains and the indentation then creates a delta or rift or mountain range of peaks on our surface for more stimuli to travel over, react to. This is what I think we are.

Fashion likes to mirror this basic process of interaction that makes what we are and displays to us the currents and trends of the time, taking into account of course the non-trendy trends, using visuals and identification to attract us or repel us as each case determines. I like the thought that something fashionable can travel over and through humans like a viral game of tag and sometimes we join in and sometimes we don't. I don't think we can choose. That woman with the red shoes that I saw tonight has infected me.

Metaphors of Subjectivity (with non-specific parameters)

black holes, centre of gravity, artist, consumer, traveller, student, hero, artificial intelligence, central processing unit, god(s), actor, animal, writer, another brick in the wall, machines, more computers, texts, organs, sheep, machine, composer, program, curator, cyborg,

Just found this and this, and am pleased. I'll come back with more soon.