CosmiKnot

A funny thing happened on the way to the newsagent. There I was wondering what collection of neural passages it was that led to a sense of feeling like I was where I am when I began telling myself that I could perhaps find ways of bringing a sense of the wonder I felt in the Swiss Alps to my South London proximity which might include enjoying the foliage in the local area, for example the vines growing on my neighbours boundary wall, when a leaf loomed in my field of vision and I found myself plucking a dense grape (perhaps a pinot noire) from the interwoven recesses and savouring the taste. The Lavaux vineyards are known for their pinot noire grapes and yet the Swiss, I am told, choose to find it uneconomical to export their wines. You are probably thinking I think I’m being annoying on purpose to write in such a clumsily tangled fashion and whilst I admit there is a feint echo of my previous self that sought to prod the fleshy hard drives of liberal clever clogs’ I prefer to thi...

I've just got back from the exhibition called Quand l'art fait rire at the mcb-a in Lausanne. it was great to experience a darkened room of Bruce Nauman's clown torture although in not sure it was wholly responsible of me to drag my two sons into it. I was thinking they would find it funny but they both became visibly paler and i fear i may have clumsily provided them with a moment that will haunt then for life. Nauman's group of films do genuinely transcend the cliche of clown as demonic unlike the skull with a clowns nose in the other room. and what a treat the William Wegman films were! That man has real muscle both literally and creatively. Unlike nearly every artist at frieze this year he addresses the over awareness of our age with humanity and intelligence. He seems to approach video with the same sense of wonder that celluloid pioneers embodied (l'entracte par example.) "i should go" he says in one clip picking up the arm chair and standard lamp a...

For the last few years I have made a conscious effort to avoid the above named program. Yes even mentioning its name might bring all manor of calamities upon my head. Having had my own brush with minor celebrity I was finding it`s visceral efficiency some how touched me where I didn´t want touching. In the pop world I get the feeling that once you`ve had your go you are expected to politely move aside and let some other young turk step up and take a swipe. My lingering on the edges of the playing field has become, I suspect a mild cause for embarassment" is that man still loitering?" There is something of the primal power of the mob about X Factor that disturbs me. (In an earlier blog I mentioned guilt over a radio shaped like a JPS racing car that my parents had bought when caught up in the whirl of a cheap market auction and the frenzied feeling that all of this is somehow of vital earth shattering importance not to be allowed to pass unacted upon permeates pores of this te...

There is a form of ultra rationalist art that permeates institutions. This appears to me to be a facsimile of the creative process. artists are encouraged to move through everyday life and project it back in metaphorical power points rather like computers programmed to have personalities. It seems data is fed into the artist who then makes a rational manifestation of his or her processing of the information. This does have echoes of the mystery of creativity but so does a computer programmed with data. my thesis its that Duchamp is a scratch in or collective unconscious and we are stuck on that groove. in the same way that aristotle was not proposing dogmatic annihilation of intuition Duchamp was deliberately confronting the methodology of objective rationality whilst retaining the ineffable quality of individual process. We however have taken him at face value. If a work of art does not reflect the neurosi of modern culture. i.e. violence porn nihilism materialism then it is deemed ...