CosmiKnot

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...

“I want to convey a narrative in which unrequited desire, jealousy, love and other real emotions implicit in the experience of being in a relationship with another person, as well as the various manifestations of one’s sense of self, are all emphatically alluded to,” Peake said of his Barbican Curve installation. I really enjoyed this exhibition - it became a personal journey. My initial reaction to Forever Loop was this is an elegiac ritual for the crashing of the urban hipster Wavey Garms art wave. Fishing around on the Internet and going to other shows I see I’m horrendously out of touch. This early 21 st century try-hard edgy style is not on the decline. I also thought oh another show that could be a joke about hip modern multi-disciplinary art but dismissed this due to my open minded position. Peake himself recognises that the nude has become a semiotic unit. What is the reason for a touch stone of radical art having been scooped up as a signifier and severed from ...

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...