Tunisia (2)

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.

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

Last Batches of Bodmin #3

Sunny ones:

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.

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!)

Summer Afternoon

Thought Themes To Build On (2)

There's a moment that happens when one event that we percieve jumps from its normal setting and seems to suddenly be from another reality, and in that moment the two (different) realities become one, transforming everything. I am finding these moments all over the place now and am thinking of it as phenomenological observation. I'm preoccupued trying to put the experience into words.

This is what happens when Spring eases into Summer and the Cicadas begin and we are all sweating in the lazy sleepy and quiet afternoons.

Shut Eye

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.

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.

just storing this here to grow something from later

affetti

Good morning. Another kind of line:


Mutsugoto from Distance Lab on Vimeo.

(found it, here are some snippets)
The Dividing Line, 2007

When I think of a line on a page, or canvas, I imagine a miniature version of myself struggling to take hold of the line with my hands. It becomes a rope, or unwieldy tentacle, of which I must wrestle off of its grounding surface. I seize it with effort and tear it from the page, pulling it up as we would rip off embedded wires, the paint encrusted nails pinging dramatically and flying off to scatter into dark corners. In my hands it is rounded and slippery with a certain life force of its own. It flexes on its own accord and takes all my might to keep it under control.

Once I have released it from the surface it becomes a journey for me to undertake. I travel the length of the cord with my hands doing the walking. The line moves between my hands like a tug of war team might hope for, the slack - the distance travelled - discarded behind, fallen and forgotten, tamed but coiled, twitching. I pull, and is it me that moves forward or the line that pushes towards me? I don’t know. There are feet, but perhaps in this imagined world they are many and don’t only stand on a base but push out in all directions to define the whole sphere of spatial extent. The journey travelled, always seen linear – A to B. This terrible three dimensional snake whips up around me carving its way through a thought space, a nowhere place.
...

Sometimes I am allowed to come back down to earth and two feet plant themselves, imaginatively, on a bank on the side of a ravine. This line has morphed into a chasm of depth, with a bottomless view, for me to look fearfully over. I am so small, and it has roared open, a hairline crack grown catastrophic. The wind blows and threatens to take me over the edge. This line is no less scary, but I am no longer wielding it; I now grip the turf and feel condors soar over currents, their beady eyes watching me on my level, indifferent to the fathoms below.

...


It should go next to one of my drawings really.

Really excited this morning. Found a video of a talk by Margaret Wertheim on TED about a project to crochet coral reefs - an environmentalist, artistic and scientific collaboration. Apparently crochet is perfect for representing hyperbolic space. Wicked!



Without dwelling too long on what intuition is, I have been thinking about why we respond to certain ideas so well, perhaps picking up on them previously in other guises. Is this mimesis again? Communication through metaphor, understood abstractly (in language?) on an intuitive level, empathised with through emotions in real-life human interaction, reproduced in creativity as new ideas, plastic or virtual... blah blah, I'm just buzzing like I did reading William Gibson as a teenager. Uranus again. Communication, it's overwhelming. These fishes know where they're going.

Took this today on my walk up to J's to feed the cats and water the plants. Currently fascinated by construction - concrete, steel, order, solidity and magnitude. Think I'm responding to it metaphorically, as well as antidote to the picturesque beauty of Crete. Don't think the image really conveys the awe that big constructed things can make us feel in real life, but happy to discover a kind of twisted elegance in the two arms' coupling.

Hello, welcome. This blog is to try and make something of what goes on in my head and record it. I have a history of writing about myself, diaries and blogs, but am feeling resistant at the moment to sharing. We shall see then what happens between some conflicting interests. I hold that we are vessels for what goes on outside of ourselves and that we mirror, mimic, the world at large. This enables me to write, as the oscillation between inside and out is where we live and how we make sense.

On making sense I am not particularly interested in being coherent. It's been a tough winter and I am shattered; this is a beginning and an axiom. I suspect what starts off very raw and messy here will be edited into something more solid in time, but for now, pictures are easier as expressions and I'm wondering if keywords, labels and tags are the new criticism.

Luna