CosmiKnot

A strange thing happened today which I would like to tell you about. I'm reading to you in the voice of John Smith the film maker whose introspective I have just attended at the ICA. Who knows perhaps @theotherjohnsmith will read this into his phone and send it to me. This is not a review. I don't feel I can do that as I  rudely left half way through the Q&A due to my usual anxiety about catching trains. I’m not sure where to begin so you will have to forgive me if I digress something John Smith seemed embarrassed to do during the aforementioned Q&A. What I want to tell you about is what I call meaning inside the event. The event like a liquid glass that is not quite as set as we like to see it as being. The glass that becomes blunt over time after being cut and subject to the process of oxidisation. But this is a  story which perhaps begins with my visit to Gallery 46 today with the students on the Masters course in Fine Art at the University of East London. I...

  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...

In a recent article on his favourite Hitchcock film Geoff Dyer implies that the thing that let’s The Birds down is the birds themselves. I guess what he might mean is that their awkwardness in terms of special effects gets in the way of their metaphorical presence. For me the “special” effects are precisely what imbue them with a very real sense of the uncanny. The birds is one of those films I thought I had seen because it’s on so many clip shows and was completely unprepared for its unfiltered delights. I am so glad I recently watched this film having only the merest whiff of Zizek’s "mother love" thesis to affect my perception. I soon forgot Zizek’s interpretation (although I am a fan) and sat exclaiming in wordless wonder all the way through. I couldn’t believe that such a piece of total art had been produced in the name of entertainment. With this in mind the special effects seemed to my now expanding mind to be mind-blowing. Yes there are moments of clunkiness b...