CosmiKnot

Speech for the Blakefest Cinematic Glad Day Celebrations  Bognor Regis Picture Dome 28th November 2021 Video here When I was asked four years ago to curate Blakefest I was over awed by the great innovating poet’s creative legacy. Soon, however, I began to realise that his song of creative emergence resonated with my ideas about the possibilities for an experience of meaning inside the event. Is, for instance, the event the same as Plato’s Khora; movement as the womb of everything? Thankyou for organising the event Rachel (Searle). What is a song if not an event? And so for Blake the imagination was not a bolt on to or escape from the mechanistic material reality but the core of the cosmos itself. Blake shows us an opening onto a realm where feeling and creative emergence a literally within all matter and we become aware of our indigenousness to nature. This, explains why we need to embody the extra sensory experience via ritual to feel meaning as a part of the expressivity of the u...

  Eye in the Sky   Kimey continues along the edge of the playing field and passes a swing wrapped around its own frame. How odd, he thinks, that the loan company had chosen to reply to him on paper. Weirder still that he had decided to open the envelope. No need to look at the screen. The drones are hovering close by. He catches the merest waft of the vestige of an idea of Sunday lunch from one of the nearby houses. All sealed up. The self-important wood pigeons patrol the air like Napoleonic survivors. Unable to find any statues they have decided to become them. That smell Kimey thinks, what is that? Then he’s remembering, it’s the inside of his grandfather’s suitcase. One of a pair his mother had presented him with. An empty suitcase. A mystery. Not because it led to an unknown life but because it led nowhere. Was this smell escaping from the black upended suitcase he had just passed? Left out by a bin standing on its side slightly ajar to deter any opportunist peddlers. Col...

  “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.   Is it enough to know a green space is there waiting full of potential?  Or are we alright with a green screen  backdrop of a landscape we have a vague idea of?  Ozymandias is Shelley’s meditation  on the vanity of human civilisations  and the Phyrric victories over nature.  A funny thing about the rising universe,  Horsham’s tribute in fountain form,  to their son is that it has survived  somewhere in a private garden.  The peculiar thing about a Percy Bysshe Shelly poem is that it can never be destroyed  by humanity’s drive for progress.  Unlike his poetry the landscape that inspired it  can so easily be destroyed for all enternity  with no potential for restoration  via creative proliferation ...

  We three super kings   We three kings dispersed Over the kingdom’s surface Scratching our heads as we Gaze up at the same ceiling Our sheets damp with dew Undulating as molluscs perform Before our eyes We behold our return Back or was it forward? Ours is not to reason why There’s a cobweb on the cornice Cracked plaster edging Is this our limit? We chime Your hand my hand his hand Feeling for some cool sheet I was a terrible heir And I regret those statements I posited that you banked upon But now I’m left counting the stars One is so very difficult to keep Count of: don’t take your eyes off it You say looking straight ahead I love the smell and feel of sand Beneath the camels’ hooves I passed an old friend The other day Why isn’t he here? He’s busy keeping his hand in You say smiling Like a plaster matelot Will we make it in time For midnight’s mass I wonder? But I know the thought Is just grist As the mill thunders on And in the distance the sun Is rising over the bedframe ...

  I’ve just watched Midsommar straight after watching Hereditary last night. This morning I wrote a poem about how it made me feel (wake up art I thought you were dead). Essentially the poem is about how I’ve noticed that art is a way we access the excess or the shadow in films. Think about all those serial killer’s sketch pads prepared by the film’s art directors. Hereditary had the sketch books of the Milly Shapiro character and the aesthetic of what turned out to be a cult of Satanists, whereas Midsommar took this much further into a whole complex ritualistic culture of a remote Swedish village. Anyone whose been near to my recent art making will have perhaps picked up my obsession with aesthetic ontology. I like to think that art can speculate about a culture that places feeling at the core – hence aesthetic ontology – this is what the village of Hargar in the film started to represent to me. In this realm, however, we do not abandon reason and our ability to problem solve usin...

Rachel Searle of Blakefest suggested that as curator of the festivals's Corona Visions show, I respond to the ruling that Poetry will be optional in the next GCSE syllabus: This sylla-bus is a coach driving through the boundless Amazonian forest via the wilds of Siberia with a well-tended bed of specimens and flowers down each side of the interior. The people on the bus believe this is the limit of knowledge, after all you could spend a life time analysing the bus’s botanical cargo. Poetry has been a lifeline during the lockdown and presumably most people have accessed it via their computers and yet the reason given by Ofqual is that respondents to their consultations have “highlighted the difficulties for students in trying to get to grips with complex literary texts remotely”. What they mean is that there is difficulty translating the individual responses to observable measurements. You see there is a limit to what observable measurements can tell us otherwise why not just have ...

This artwork questions the idea of art as a form of interrogation of habitual patterns.  Art is not a mode of questioning. To make it so is to rob it of its status as otherworldly form within the worldliness of things. You wouldn’t greet an indigenous culture with hello and thanks for your role as questioning my habitual patterns of living. It may have that effect on you but to introduce the culture within this hierarchical framework is literally madness. I’m not sure art has a role or a message. This is how it frees us from the hegemony of habitual patterns and traumas of thingness accelerated by digital cultures effective dissemination of pure functionality. Digital culture can be used effectively e.g. showing patterns of bowling deliveries in a test match but its rather less wholesome when defining identity. Unclasping from linguistic meaning is what art does best. This functions by leaving a vestige of the linguistic striation and offering a simultaneous nomadic freedom from...

Reading about  Hito Steyerl   I found the desire to reclaim the experience of art exciting but I began to recollect a discussion I had attended about theory communiste, which advocates the creation of instantaneous revolution rather than the production of preparatory propaganda for a revolution of the future. The power of the institution is upheld by direct protest art like the songs of the proles. This is what Orwell revealed when Winston and Julia betray Love in 1984. It's what one might call fucking self-neutering art. Art belongs to a realm beyond and outside of the institution accessed from the gaps in the fabric of its all enveloping mesh. Art understands the language of the soul or perhaps it is that but only by virtue of appearing in the gaps in the living society. The problem is that much time and effort is spent reacting against the patriarchal institution and yet much of this this effort by attempting to adopt a cynical or aggressive stance, rejects the soul in equa...

According to the curators of the Tracey Emin and William Blake in Focus exhibition, the link between the two is existential pain leading to artistic truth. I'm not convinced Blake was a champion of existential suffering as a prerequisite to creating art. Yes he had an insight into suffering but he was more interested in revealing our access to the creative soul as a means of emancipation from the institutionalised oppression of the goal driven, patriarchal/bifurcated forces that shape society. My Bed in some respects is the ultimate in turning art/life into a fixed object rather than the process of living event. The subject object split is the error at the heart of the mechanistic model of the mind that leads to human oppression. To think in terms of fixed substances is useful for certain forms of processing such as shopping lists or auditing of munitions but is a completely dysfunctional mode when it comes to addressing metaphysical matters (see how an elephant becomes an aspirin...

The Deadends are perhaps a view of ourselves through the cosmic microwaves of time via a post-apocalyptic primordial telescope. We live in a state of self-hypnosis to permit our disavowal to frame our lives with perfectly engineered precision. We are all akin to the footballer who inhabits a Caravaggio painted mask of pleading sincerity to indicate that he played the ball despite having been pulling his opponents shirt for ten seconds. He believes he is correct in pleading to the referee’s sense of reason. This is clearly an evolutionary glitch that has us in its grip. This separation is what keeps us estranged from the very part of us that would reconnect us to the immediate embodied responsibility to each other. Each and every other. Now here we will remain until more idiots claim to have a soul. This is Ginsberg saying something similar in the TLS in 1964 "The individual soul is under attack and for that reason a “beat” generation existed and will continue to exist under...