CosmiKnot

In June last year I installed my Doctorate painting exhibition at UEL. I don’t like to say it was about David Bowie’s song Life on Mars, though not because it wasn’t (it was) but because I’m not sure it was “about” anything. It was more an attempt to capture some kind of essence that I felt Bowie represents. One of the things I love about Bowie from that song onwards is how he captures the meaninglessness of modern life but fills his songs with meaning. The meaning, however, is not something easy to put your finger on. It is more like a feeling of yearning and hope in the face of… well yes meaninglessness. You might think I’m being pretentious but this depth of feeling is what keeps us as humans dreaming that we can ultimately connect through creative experience. That is partially what Bowie means to me. He can be viewed as the personification of Camus’ urge to live life as fully and creatively as possible in response to the Sisyphusian struggles we all face. But let me be clear...

This is a piece I wrote in the Summer for The Modernist Magazine (Available online as the magazine has now sold out) Just to clarify my own personal experiments involve potentially futile attempts to reintroduce anecdote to Art. I see this as similar to Henri Michaux systematically ingesting mescaline in order to record the affect on his creative output. Both experiments are about questioning the sense of linear causality which has consumed our experience of creative practice. From the Renaissance onwards the acceleration of art’s alleged necessity for self-sufficiency increased until in the 20 th Century the image became autonomous and finally we had Guy de Bord’s vision of “separation perfected”. Through intuitive genius Einstein and Picasso devised ways to join things back together – E=mc2 and Les Demoiselle D’Avignon. It is significant that Picasso’s painting drew so much dark energy from cultures where separation is not present (the art object is part of life’s rit...