Cosmos

Gursky

'Thebes, West' 1993

Andreas Gursky
Biog here: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/andreas-gursky-2349

There are some ongoing questions or queries that arise as I think about posting this:



* affinity - seeing connections and similarities; is this truthful or just the need to see myself in everything?

* Tate says: "Gursky uses a bird's-eye view to portray the collective behaviour of large social groups." I wonder about abstraction and distancing - the aerial, distancing, over views, seeing patterns and form, being far from the action.

* abstraction and the meditative, calmness, order. Still images, reflection, meditation, only by removing ourselves?

* the need to explain, a way to explain, using language to images, posting with language, how to passage from the production and the reception, packaging. Staying truthful to the intention. Telling you this.

Getting Into Natural History

I've been away, and pondering on this notion of natural history (since I'm writing a thesis on Adorno's take on it). A new found fascination for animal classification and the natural world as object of study is burgeoning, though these pictures don't really reflect that as they are still very romantic and I'm not sure they pull off any convincing scientific objectivity. Wow, without even trying the dualism/opposition is set up! It's not a dualism that I'm interested in - the affirmation of an opposition between subjective and scientific ways of seeing the natural world. It's the entwinement of the two that is interesting, triggering thoughts on culture/nature as one and semiotics. 

I'm thinking to keep and collect the references to NH and animals... see what they grow into. Reading Afterall today, I was enjoying this article by Francis McKee on Minerva Cuevas: Anarchy in the Hive, with its introductory discussion of a cultural tradition of anthropomorphism being replaced by science, which does of course mean that science has retained something of the function of the old anthropomorphism to society, whatever that was.
 

Natural-Historical, Natural-Artificial, Natural-Cultural.... (beginnings)

There's a process that is being undertaken by reading a lot of philosophy, from entering into philosophy, within the philosophical. And as the categories and concepts that philosophy refers to are being interrogated - clarified, so it seems are the fundamental elements of life and living.

I'm thinking about images again.

I'm also thinking about nature, second nature and the dialectical dissolution of the difference between first and second nature.

I'm going to be writing my thesis on Adorno and nature and his concept of 'natural-history'. Adorno uses the idea of first and second nature to account for the way that we naturalise cultural phenomenon dialectically, which also accounts for how we can move through the one concept to the other - that by moving through the artificial (as second nature) we can reach the natural (as first nature). That's not merely that there is a hidden authentic natural behind our world, but that natural and artificial are always mutually constitutive, and the natural is found as much in our actions as is the artificial - in the moving itself.

These images came to mind as I was thinking about this. When I took them (in Bodmin 2009) I was thinking about shared shapes and processes by us and by nature, which seems at this point to concur with my recent reading of Adorno. If Adorno is right, or at least if he offers a viable means to get beyond the limitations of the artificial-natural distinction, then the act of photography would enter into its claim to naturalism as well as the chosen subject matter. I find that quite exciting.

In Solidarity With Egypt

These photos are from my two months in Egypt over the winter of 2008-2009. My heart goes out to this beautiful country.

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.

Treen

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

Canal Beasts

Still Intending

Hola!

Grappling a bit with intention again. Not only trying to decide what I want this blog to become, but wondering how to make the changes take hold of me enough to make me apply them.

For the sake of bringing abstract theoretical thoughts into life, it might be nice to post regularly about the philosophy I'm studying and how it interacts with life.

Gonna try this.

It's been a long time coming...

These images were taken on a ramble through Hertfordshire in February, the day before Valentine's Day. They are probably a bit dreary, but then English Winter is.

Tree lines and structures...

Tree lines, rivers, routes, veins, lungs....

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.

15th September 2009

Alrighty. Next stage: intermittent (guerrilla?) internet visits (get in get out), dump photos and videos and some thoughts. Disappear completely again.







These shots were from the night of my 30th Birthday.

Last Night of my Twenties.

On my walk home this evening, the last walk home after work of my Twenties. It means nothing really but I do want to mark it. Something is being said goodbye to, all the events that live in times now passed, all the people and places that are now gone. There's something about turning Thirty that offers the possibility of starting anew. Illusion maybe, but both nice and scary too.



This is the Thames again and I wish I could say it was this colour but actually it was very brown. It's the camera that's made it nice colours.

More from Bodmin

It's a dream of mine to make images that are of the natural and mundane realms that seem completely abstract, that is, without completely losing touch with the thing in its setting. Er, abstraction that isn't totally abstract... or at least isn't allowed to drift off to lofty heights...







These three are more obviously from, and of, a journey. It was a day trip I took with my half-brothers Jacques and Jim. I sat in the back taking in the beauty of Cornwall and trying to hold onto something from it in these photos.

Sky as Opening

Contact

Hi! I don't know how long it's been since I posted but I know I've been out of it, feeling the lack of commitment to something that I make.

I just scanned the humongous list of blogs that I follow and haven't had a chance to look at (I have no internet at home at the moment) and had a pang for everything I'm missing. The internet keeps me connected and in conversation with art, imagery, words, news, culture, ideas, lives, people...

I returned from a trip to Bodmin (Cornwall, UK) over the weekend and will post some of the photos from what was a really beautiful trip.

Observations #2

I'm getting tardy I know, but there are reasons.
Some observations recently in words:

So many birds in cages, birds singing gloriously, nailed to a crumbling wall, above the ancient woman who keeps them there.
Birds in cages outside the petshop. Chorus of competing singing and chirping to the accompaniment of terrifying Greek traffic on a tuesday morning. Birds calling to be noticed in cages.

A lone cockroach outside the supermarket. Retreating from the pavement as we pass. Returns to its position when we are gone.

A basketball court at night with the stars just visible despite the floodlight. Tall metal arms holding the hoops and their shadows falling over the court, one arm's shadow intersecting with an oilstain, interconnected, a centipede makes a quick scuttle across both and into the dark on the other side.

A rusty drain pipe protruding from the middle of a balcony four floors above us. Showering the street with soapy water. At midnight there were rivers of the stuff making inky landscapes all over our walk home.

A fish with a tail of fine silk billowing out behind it, locked in a never ending forward motion in a glass bowl. Glassy eyes that don't register me.

Market Day

Everything is a sensual feast at the moment and with it comes the urge to preserve or possess it all. I think that might need investigating - possession - a sign of the times or inheritance..? In my small way I wonder if my wish to hold on is because the date of my departure from Greece is looming ever closer.

Today C and I went to the λαϊκή ('leiki' - street market) and gawped at the amazing array of fresh produce. We talked of bringing our cameras next week to mark my final visit and try and save something of the visual experience. It was the fish that caught my eyes the most. Plump, compact, tiny bodies seemingly pushing out at their taught skin; the silver and yellow and black and blue shimmering; the shape of many of them slippery on top of each other; the death that their prettiness distracts me from until wide open jelly eyes stare me right in the face. Pools of bloody water collecting in plastic buckets under the table.

In the heat all smells are pungent, lettuces reek, parsley - fennel - celery emanate, peaches and nectarines drift down the busy corridor of humans pushing past each other, trolleys over sandled feet and body odor as normal as toothy grins and rough hands throwing bags of produce from the scales to the customer. I can let most of the noises ride past me as I don't understand much of the Greek.

There was an enormous woman in a bright red dress. Her flesh was visible underneath the thin layer, rolling, and she had no apology for it. I smile, this red is dazzling and suits the market. Mushrooms, peppers haphazardly splayed over everything, live rabbits to coo over, thyme, olives in vats, sweaty feta cheese, tomatoes tomatoes tomatoes, cucumber, cherries, potatoes, errant snails moving in their boxes. When we cleared the stalls the heat was unbearable.

Fun Feeling Famous

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