Birthday Sunflower

Through various practices in my life at the moment, I am getting better at understanding what it means to meditate - or what it means to me: going into myself, searching for the quieter tuned in side of existing. I am thinking about how this state has happened by itself in my past, and always accompanied by great creative inspiration. When that feeling of inspiration and connectedness with the world is not there, I wonder what happened.

So, I am getting better at seeing that stresses and worries, too many distractions etc. etc. are what take us away from that quiet space, but it takes experience to be able to recognise it in order to learn to prioritise it.

Which comes first - the quiet connectedness with the world or the looking? Looking - a concentrated focusing on the things in the world, probably through beauty, though I don't think beauty has a fixed meaning - I am talking about the feeling of the beautiful whereby feelings come with and cause actions from us. The inside/outside thing again, human skin as interface: do we find beauty in looking or does the beautiful find us?

These are of a sunflower that a dear friend gave me for my birthday.

home space

There's been a process unfolding within and around me, as I adjust to having a new home, and fill it physically and psychically.
Encouraged by a lovely compliment from Rita Evans - I begin to let more of the fruits of this process appear on here.
I have felt as if my home space has become the outer limits of my psyche, and within these walls all is creativity and play. To take it beyond these walls is to make it something else, but that's ok, I have encouragement.

(below) Shapes intersecting, things intersecting as they are in this particular moment.

Chillies and umbrella 

and bananas and daffodils

colour connections

and sunshine

Another two from Paris

My thinking on images is continually buffeted around by new ideas. I'm reading Cassirer's Philosophy Of Symbolic Forms (vol 1, Language) and am enjoying it. So far it affirms my own epistemological beliefs, that knowledge of the world is mediated, meaning is not fixed,  and that we deal mostly (entirely?) with fictions. I'm not sure yet if Cassirer is as sceptical as me, I hope to find out. It's interesting though how Cassirer posits language as one of several independent modes of symbolic formation - language, art, myth, science/reason and religion each function through their own cultural forms and the meanings attributed to them, unlike the Saussurians who would place language as the most basic means by which all the different cultural forms function. As I am reading Cassirer it is easy to imagine that photography possesses the dignity of a fully qualified category of epistemology, because the aesthetic imagination is treated as essential to our basic experiencing of the world. Although Cassirer was against Heidegger ('being' as the basic ground of philosophy is constantly rejected), I am reminded of when I read 'The Origin of the Work of Art' because of the same sense of the fundamental importance of representation, of an image inserting itself between us and the world. However, Cassirer rejects the concept of representation too, because for him there is no guaranteed already-existing external world for us to make copies of. It is us that forms the criteria, categories, of perception in an ever constant process of relations between that which we have already formed as symbols and the world that comes to us through them.

Cornish Landscape V

This will be the last installment of posts from my trip to Cornwall in December. I welcome the distance that a bit of time passing grants me when selecting images - I felt in December after taking the photos the immediate rush of quantity and possibility, now I'm more -er- discerning.

The first two images continue a formal interest of mine - using the photograph's rectangle shape to draw in different elements around a central composite of accidental things. That sounds a bit abstract, what I mean is the hope that the object(s) of the photograph are photographed in a way that their interrelatedness with the things around them and their setting are apparent - empirically and aesthetically.

I have spoken as clumsily about related thinking in writing form here, and the lower of these images is a favourite of mine that I think is the most obvious example of this aggregation thinking.

I'm not sure yet if I'm succeeding at an aggregation, conglomeration thing... These two images (above) do have a centralising orientation where the different bits are already organised around each other, but what is interesting to me is the accidental nature of this conglomeration - the bits of rubbish sit within their own damp halo or frame, an emphasis that I hope questions their status as things, raising it perhaps. Other images of mine that are dealing with these issues are more constructed (and on an aside, I see that 'construction' has nearly risen to the top of my tags tower on the right - interesting...).

The bottom two are just views from Cornwall. After tinkering with images from Egypt it is apparent how grey Cornwall is! UK winter is dark compared to the golden bright light of Egyptian winter.

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!"

Novalis Essay

Re: post below...

Writing an essay on Novalis' text Fichte Studies. Mostly I'm thinking about how to re-enact the movements he employs in both the concepts he explores and the flow of his text.

The movement is like this:

One thing moves forward. It meets something that divides it into two. Two things move forward. They meet something that synthesises them back together. Synthesis is more ideal than real and there is a discrepancy in the resolution. This pulls the thing ever more forward towards its resolution.

That probably seems really dull, but somehow I find it fascinating. Lets apply it to something:

I, a person/subject/consciousness posit myself and am promptly divided into two by this positing. The act of reflection on myself slices me into myself and my knowledge of myself, I become two. The two parts of me seek identity (what is known as an 'absolute I') and this search for absolutisation propels me forward. Identity is an ideal that I strive for but it is unachievable. The quest propels me forward.

I am not quite sure yet whether the is a convincing closure to the movement or not.

I want to write about the rhythm of the text and how the ideas Novalis posits follow their own momentum - a rhythmic, choreographical movement.

Flow.

It's a rain all day kind of day outside. Quite beautiful.

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.

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.

Observations #4

I want to give some proper time to the blog and maybe some writing but the days are so hot that I am reduced to that of a Vogue reader (Martha Rosler antidote here).

I have been feeling recently that there is a kind of illogical aesthetic to Chania though the ubiquity of being here day in day out prevents me from satisfactorily grasping and articulating it. These two photos are rough attempts to record some of it and I hope I have a chance to take some more. Then maybe more ideas can come from a later meditation.

Ach Thoughts.

I am deliberating over how much word I want to put on the blog. For the sake of visitors I tend to think pictures and minimal writing is enough; sometimes though I am in the mood to talk.

I just went off on one with an opinion on someone else's blog:

Jane McCoy's post brushing off the chips

I read myself in your excellent blogpost, not just in the persona but in the analysing it after. I've spent good hours negotiating the 'show myself/hide myself' dichotemy and thought I might share some thoughts with you (if you don't mind).

1) Coolness is always as we perceive. I have on several occasions been informed that it was me who appeared 'cool' at school despite the fact I was a nervous wreck. I am at the conclusion that everyone feels sensitive in the end, it just varies how we display it.

2) I come to the belief that there is something inherent to art-production that is about uncovering/covering or hiding/showing. It lead me to Heidegger.. blah blah and too much intellectualising later, I feel that the process of making art is experienced within us bodily as we bodily become extensions of the object we wish to manifest (or something..). Anyway, what I'm (taking too long) saying is that the negativity we experience is a crucial part of the dialectic and life and art-making - the boundaries, the retraction, assessment, etc. etc. Our abilities to be self-critical are not just psychologically the 'tortured artist' stereotype but just a necessary part of bringing something into the world. Being sensitive to it is because making art fine tunes our listening abilities precisely for this making process (and responding to the world around). If we had no doubt then we would be running ourselves and our art riot all over the world - a violent and monolithic way of making a mark. Ok, maybe I will make this into my own blog post... not sure... sorry to impose.... Keep up the good work, I like your drawings.

I have decided to re-post it here because it collates some of my thinking on this subject of disclosure, uncovering, truth, the ground of truth.. and the role of doubt in this process. Having suffered from doubt in various forms of discomfort/self abasement, it comes to me as something in the end that must be necessary. There is nothing more grounding than the continual return to making, producing, thinking, writing - even if this production is just the debris or excess of a kind of striving, aspiration.

Was writing a little recently on the violence of totality and the drive towards totalisation. I come to this from reading some discussions on the nature of knowledge (being a drive towards co-opting every 'thing' out there into the system of knowledge), and I live this through the disappointment of hearing sentences that I have somehow heard before, and before, and before... I'm not asking for pure originality (what's that?!) but instead am just recognising how homogeneous we insist on being in the name of our insertion into the world. I make a case for subtlety, listening, small things, sensitivities, taking the time to respond honestly, a commitment to letting ourselves respond.

(This last paragraph is woefully without references and steps rudely onto Derrida's toes. I will return to it as I think Derrida is right and that there is nothing really grounding beneath it all. But this is another post.... ach! thoughts!)

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...

Like A Flash

On our walk home last night we sang the Beatles' Across the Universe and talked about God and the godlessness of modernity. Somehow the Twentieth Century appears to me now like a flash of brutal ideologies and the very force of it and the drive towards secularisation is exhausting.

Sweet thoughts and feelings about beauty and God and higher feelings.

Eleni's Dog

I passed Eleni's dog today - the stray she loves - as I was walking to the street with the minaret. It was foraging in a half moon of turf land that accidentally carries sounds like an amphitheatre and always needs its grass cut. The dog looked busy enough, with its small head perched on a big barrel body and a kind of permanent grin on its face; familiar looking wiry biscuit-coloured fur; short legs to trot around the harbour with, unkempt nails tapping on the paving. A mutt's life, that black gummy grin still hanging in the air after the dog has gone. Tourists stood nearby taking photographs of the decrepit houses crumbling above us under the sun.

I looked at the dog and remembered how Eleni had been telling me one evening about it. We were sitting on the harbour with our backs to the people and watching night creep up at us from the sea, watching as the world beneath the water's surface disappeared and the waves transformed themselves into brooding slow-moving beasts, blackening. Eleni told me about how the dog would come and sit beside her to share the view and she made the sound of the dog's sigh. And with a jolt, just like that, the two were one!

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.

More Treats

http://www.philipglass.com/audioplayer/audioplayer.html
It's the Violin Concerto that's got me.

Aesthetics Making

Aesthetics making belief,
love in at number 14, below beasts,
order
and,
sense.

A Kind of Play of Surfaces

A kind of play of surfaces, for what are surfaces other than interfaces? The meeting of two different impressions where one substance throws to light the differences of the other. The waves move rhythmically in a corner of my view and shine like flashes of light caught on hammered pewter. The sea, framed by sugar paper mountains and the little box houses that look out with hooded windows are all cast in hues of shadow and are all still but for the waves. The sun shines on me and my squinting expression will be tan-lines when I go home.

The sweet solitary chirp of a singular bird slips into the space between car engines and dogs barking. It pierces the distance as if to emphasise height, for what is distance other than a view? The clouds have become a heavy blue and the sun’s rays are beaming with the certainty of geometry, a heavenly pathway if I ever saw one. Earlier today the harbour was awash with swollen ocean, smacking pungent black weed at my feet. Frothy and sensual, the green made by a sea churned in wild storms to a brooding murky mint, all vital movement and white spray. The sun is sinking now and the light is soft golden as a tired finale to the day and the hubbub of the street rises but can’t touch this gentle vision, opened and unfolding even as the light fades. The sun moves so quietly to the little bird's song.

Empathy and Criticality

Coming back to an earlier post, I am wondering about empathy and criticality. The statement creates a relationship between the two, perhaps one of opposition, perhaps one of kinship. It seems to say to art that we approach it with either hope of connection or suspicious reticence.

Empathy = feeling?
Criticality = thought?

There is much to stew on here.

Just touching in very quick. Reading Kazantzakis' God's Pauper. It's amazing. Got me thinking about religiosity as a beautiful thing. Sublime!