Tamper

I’ve been reading Tamper by Bill Ectric. I’m enjoying it so much that I can’t wait till I’ve finished it to write something about it. For a start it does what all good art does and makes you think, “how could I ever do that?” Bill’s crisp visual descriptions are not so much Faberge egg as hand crafted ingenious piece of furniture with hidden drawers and false bottoms (nice). Bill describes the book as part Nancy Drew and part William Burroughs and you think okay yeah I get that because people always use that devise to give a flavour of the piece. The difference in the case of Tamper is that the book is exactly part Nancy Drew and part William Burroughs. There is, to my mind, a joy in the mysteries that are revealed as the book goes along. Bill outlines the machinations in such a way that I feel like I understand how Nancy Drew book works without having read one. The trick that I am trying to see from all angles is how Bill Ectric has written a book about the passing of youth that incorporates the style of the books that clearly informed that particular time in his own life without it dragging? Well clearly he is a good writer but soul and genre don’t normally mix well. Another wonder is that this book is not arch or pastiche. The writer is actually taking us right to the source. This means the work is vulnerable and perhaps not as knowing or sophisticated as a fully shielded hack would like to be these days. A writer who might say, “yeah its derivative and sloppy but I know it is – sort of thing”. Nietzsche realised we were repressed by religion and that in fact our obsession with it was a kind of sickness. So much so Dawkins. But Freidrich wasn’t saying think like me he was saying think for yourself. So all these bombastic atheist hammer of truth wielders are just a heinous echo of repressed Methodist preachers (personal experience). Bill Ectric’s book is not repressed it is free. Forgive me if you have heard my song about it but Dawkins is like a kid who sits through an episode of Thunder Birds pointing out the strings – all the way through. And shit REAL HANDS. Yeah get over it and then perhaps we can start to understand the cosmos in more expansive ways. Dawkins would be happy I suspect if we could freeze the universe and create an Airfix instruction leaflet for it so that we could pretend we made it. Then hang it up to gather dust in a classroom with posters declaring the original genius of the meme theory. Tamper is partially about the ambiguity of perceptual experience without a character holding a golf sale sign that says, “Perceptual experience is ambiguous”. Although I haven’t finished the book yet. This ambiguity is Subjectivity and objectivity colliding in Hegel’s large dialectic collider right? We are, whether we like it or not, part of the thing we are trying to examine and calibrate. Each time we redefine this cosmos or some specific part of it we remove ourselves from the calculations. It’s like a tick. A scientist who upon placing the slide under the microscope but then in a seamless movement immediately puts it in the yellow bin marked “sharps only”. He does this every time and so has started to see shapes in the defects in the base of the microscope itself and draw conclusions from this. The mysterious monk come lecturer Johannes Itten (very informative blog) made a colour globe which tries to include us in the process of calculation. In a rational sense Itten's colour globe is a complete paradox. He sets up some objective rules about complimentary colours and tonal values. The same stuff that has been used to repress art students for years. But then he suggests that by thinking of the colour wheel as a three dimensional globe we can travel through it into the grey area of indeterminacy. Rationally this makes no sense. Why have some clear rules about combining colour only to then say but you can travel through this any way you like because it’s a subjective realm – The Grey Area. It makes “sense” if you think of it the other way around. The globe is largely composed of the grey area but should this become overwhelming then there are these anchor/compass points of colour theory. In other words the essence of life is indeterminacy and metaphor and theory helps us along the way. The way it generally works now is that metaphor and subjectivity are appended hobbies to the serious business of fucking life up through abstracted bureaucracy and occasionally retreating to write a poem about how fucked up it all is. Seek out Itten’s colour globe (I can't find it online) that seems to propose we try and become less repressed by our own frameworks and instead use them when they are needed. Oh and please read Tamper – it is profound and yet light and consoling. It’s weird but with a precision of vision that means the weirdness never muddies the waters.

Blind Man's Buff

A hang over is a funny thing. I am in the dining room having eeked the last part of the maths homework out of my son and the world seems fuzzy. Not fuzzy as it did yesterday when I realised my left eye was struggling to focus (age and stress) but fuzzy in a way more suited to Sundays spent in an undergraduate bedroom. I never really let go at art college. By which I mean I was always aware that I might have to function the next day. Life was not an Alex Garlanded beach for me. There is probably a certain amount of obsessive compulsive control freakerery to blame for me never really disengaging from an approach of nervous trepidation. The old spectacles testicles wallet and watch is a joke that chimes with me on a number of levels - not least the repeated rituals that Catholicism seemed to instigate. Set off. I never forget the time my parents found me, aged 10, kissing the feet of the deconstructed crucifix that hung over our staircase. You don't need to do that they said gently. Oh but I do I remember thinking as any obsessive believer would. What I'm trying to do in this game of blind man's buff, is find a route back to my childhood. I've just read how Alain-Fournier remembers having a longing for the past even before his adolescence had finished. He became fearfully aware of the impending loss of youth. In writing when this approach doesn't work its called sentimental. So I risk being awarded the mawkish medal when I suggest that mornings on the carpet with the sun streaming in through the crack in the curtains watching the opening titles of Robinson Crusoe somehow capture the dull ache of this particular longing. Earlier I remember feeling an increduluity that my childhood had ended so abruptly. I remember asking my father if it was normal to long for your childhood. I was probably only six and in my mind childhood was the time I spent up until the age of 4 playing in the back garden of a bungalow in Bexhill by the sea. There always seemed to be a stream of people through our front door and the large garden complete with apple trees was often host to children inventing games. I myself was reknowned for being able to fearlessly pick up any living creature found withing its folds. when we left Bexhill life became perimetered. we never actually painted half a gate post but this is the way we seemed to define our world. My father often quoted Rousseau's words about the phrase "this is mine" being the sowing of the seeds of (the downfall) of civilised society. Me thinks the lady doth protest too much? Another odd fact that strikes me now is that I have no recollection of going to church prior to leaving Bexhill. Bexhill is my lost paradise. A state of mind not the subject of jokes about wheeling the dead along the front. It is a pre-intellectual place. Where a snake could be picked up without fear because I couldn't name it. Bless.

renaissance man.

Damien Hirst is a renaissance artist. By which I mean he is part of a defunct tradition not that he is a polymath seeker outer of the green fuse of wonderment. Leonardo was the latter. It's a cliche but his work was driven by enquiry and a desire to explore the outer limits of materials and their ability to depict. The renaissance used the order and systematic application of classical antiquity as its framework. From a classical view point the underlying form then became more and more important. This broke with a byzantine idea that the picture surface was a conduit for something beyond the surface of life. The ego discarded the unconscious. The renaissance became all about the surface. With the sense of ineffable vaporised the only escape from the surface was to go below. Anatomy abounds. Depicting death becomes the best way of making things realistic. Mantegna's Dead Christ ought to have been the last word on this matter. Instead centuries later the ecorche (a cast of a flayed body) was the thing to draw if you wanted to learn to make realistic art. So art became a flayed skin and poetry was left on the mortuary floor.

This is why Hirst goes on about being unable to imagine death. Because in his particular art cage we are fixated with the immediate material world. Hirst's art is species specific just like that of Florentine renaissance. Contrast this with Hockney at the RA which picks up the byzantine thread of the perceptual world as manifestation of the ineffable beyond the picture plane.

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mimicry

Okay Hirst is part of the artist as lone individual genius picture. A shark savagely devouring weaker rivals. My hunch is that at Goldsmiths they train em up like pitbulls hanging from branches by their teeth. Two things created ybas. One is tutors saying explore your identity. Your obsession. You are unique. The other is the tired idea that anything can be art if the artist says so. This is duchamp as Buddha. The YBAs were not radical free thinkers like say those of arte provera. They were good students fed on steaks and steroids. Good students mimic the ideas presented by their tutors and disguise this enough to make it communicate an idea of originality without unsettling the tutor because it goes beyond the limits of their personal art cage. Damien Hirst talks about the power of juxtaposition to create something new but this is simply the talk of nineteen eighties ad men. Hirst's is a hermetically sealed world - all of it a teenage boy's over blown Vanitas.

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making things up

Obvious title really but it refers to the idea of doing or making something in order to think. Manet for instance thought through painting. Rodin thought through sculpting and drawing. William wegmann thinks through film making. Charles Dickens made up stories to himself. Nowadays the artist or pupil "thinks things up" due to the nature of accountability in funding. "Making things up" feels more resonant and relevant to mutual and connected experience. Having said this the ebb and flow between the mind's eye and the hand's action is a delicate force. The minds eye often seems to present the maker with a barrier to making. Likewise the making can develop sufficient momentum to obliterate the fragile web of initial inspiration. Put simply imagine you have a ball of clay. You could sit and think all day about what to make. This would be thinking up. Or you could pick the clay up and see what you make. This would be Making Up. Of course every creative process is a mixture of these two scenarios but it appears the muscle of the latter has withered to the point of redundancy.

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diogenes gone

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magic and science

Don 3D specs now... Thanks to martin White for rendering this. I'm very pleased at the accidental union of left and right brain this produces.