Framed

First you take a photograph because the image inspires you - you see something in that particular view that suits being photographed.
Then time passes and when you return to the image it seems uninteresting. Disappointingly, you cannot remember why it seemed a good idea to take this photograph.
Then, you find the image when you go through your photographs from the past and it interests you again - look! A photograph framing an object framed, by an accident of how these objects occurred in the world. Beautiful fruits framed by a grey box, as I saw them in that moment.

Bornholm

I just went on a short trip to Bornholm, Denmark.
It was the first time I've had in a long while to reconnect with photography and nature.
I came away wondering what a critical photography practice of mine would look like...

Critical - i.e. that problematises, that raises questions, that delimits (as I understand it).

And, after reading Spheres of Action: Art and Politics (ed. Alliez and Osborne), I am re-reminded of the importance of history and materialism, and am wondering how it would be possible to reconcile image making (photography) with this aim.

Here's an assortment of images that are doing different things, but I wouldn't say they were critical. That's the problem, and I suspect the only way such a thing might be possible would be through some heterogeneous element(s).

Tree Nipples

 

It's been a while...

language is annoying me. instead, ambivalence and complexity.... de-connecting the standard meanings of things...

these are from september

Congratulations to Egypt - what an inspiration you are!

In this amazing moment that Egypt has created for all of us, I'll slip in some more photos from Egypt, winter 2008/9.

Alexandria

 

(The Mediterranean)

Abu Simbel

 

Aswan

Luxor

The Nile

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.

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 (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.

More Docklands

In the background there is the constant roar of a lot of traffic passing very fast.







Even the birds look a bit gloomy.

Last Batches of Bodmin #2

Foggy ones: