CosmiKnot

No one cares what you think.  Freudian analysis is the multi-storey  carpark of the human as mind.  We approach the child’s fort  where we hold the figures  ready for battle as if we know the truth.  I want to cry because I feel  there is no victory  because victory is failure  or rather submission.  Are you following this outline?  This sketch? Death  ah yes congratulations  you spotted it up ahead.  Here is the Kantian hearse  drawn by the feather-headed  black horses the glass glinting in the sun.  Here is the Lord of the flies  swallowing old ladies  who cannot shine his silver up to standard.  Here too is Plato spinning his way  back to his correct position.  Here is Zizek brum brumming his cars  down the ramps of a wooden multi-storey carpark  the  glossy  smell of the paint still lingering  years after his uncle built it for him.  I want to c...

In making a doctoral proposal there is a certain amount of casting forwards. There is a required intuition that what you chose to research will be compatible with the practical process of researching. This is not a problem for an artist who works outside of linear time but in the realm of academic research the framework is still outwardly representational. The representational world is one of cause and effect i.e. I decide to research this and I make work with the theme of my research. Art has its origins in magical thinking and doesn’t really work as an illustration of ideas. Even as an illustrator I realised that illustration works better when you don’t just illustrate the meaning of the words on the page. Perhaps this is why I am aware of the pitfalls of art becoming illustration. An artwork can have an outwardly illustrative form but this is not where the meaning resides even if the artist themselves declares that it is.  This is my first performance of Blackberries - Blood ...

Getting on for ten years ago my friend Barry recommended I read The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. Another left-brain right-brain tract I presumed and thought it would hold little worth beyond the usual character insights – perhaps there would be some of Jung’s personality types thrown in. How wrong I was. This book addresses, with its specific thesis, the problem addressed by any recent critical theorist of note – namely the distortion caused by systematic or mechanistic modes of thinking. Most of these theorists eventually have to break free of the mechanistic mode and end up writing something like poetry – Deleuze, Derrida, de Bord, Adorno even Foucault to an extent. That McGilchrist doesn’t do this is perhaps why his book is so lasting and resonant. It’s tough going but if you stick with it the evidence marches forward like the massed ranks of one of the civilisations he reveals to be self-destructing. The reason for this self-destruction is that systemised or left ...

Repetition in Hegel’s dialectical framework, seems to under pin all modern philosophy and critical thinking. He gives the example of Caesar who was once a real person but soon became a symbol of something far more fixed. We’re still repeating except now we repeat the repetition more self-consciously. To the point where self-consciousness has become so interwoven with our concept of ourselves that it is invisible. I would argue that repetition is behind the progress of civilisation because it allows communication on a larger scale.  Celt and Pict art is fluid and alive and whilst there is repetition it never repeats itself in the same manner as Roman culture, which made a virtue of repeating the symbolic. Hairy hippies are to be avoided, as is the swirling psychedelic barbarian art.   So now we have come through the rot of meaninglessness that saturated western culture after 1972 and we have absorbed the traits of appropriation effortlessly Things, Like Caesar are rarely w...