slow glass

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. It was after all the University of East London where the aforementioned John Smith was my supervisor during my doctoral studies. John Smith who was highly influential in my discovery of the means of activating my capacities for expression through the specifics of my biographical encounters in what I consider to be temporal substance. I was of course aware of John Smith‘s films before visiting the introspective of his films made in the 1980s at the Institute for contemporary art this evening but it was not until I had sat within the cuboid dark of the cinema taking in the narratives that I became aware of his mastery of weaving a contingent story into personal  biographical specificities and embodied encounters in the medium of Film. But I am getting ahead of myself so let us return to my meeting with the students of the masters in fine art at Gallery 46 (you really must go there) earlier on today. After gathering outside the Whitechapel gallery we made our way along the high street before turning off towards Ashfield street where we found number 46. Here I had arranged to meet the gallery curator a man called Sean Mclusky who would introduce the students to the space in which there is currently an exhibition of paintings by the musician and artist Gina Birch. I can’t be sure why but as I was leaving something prompted Sean to tell me that glass was not set and was in fact still liquid. Perhaps it came out of a brief discussion about the processual nature of art but I don’t recall this if it was. "Wow" I said as I tend to when I encounter something truly interesting. We discussed the dates of the forthcoming exhibition of student work and made our farewells. After a detour to university to print student work onto acetate in preparation for a darkroom workshop the next day I returned back into town and made my way to the Institute of contemporary art. Upon arrival I first made use of the bathrooms and then went back outside to vape. As I was stepping outside I saw a familiar face. It was the musician and artist Gina Birch. That’s a nice coincidence I thought remembering that many of my fellow artist friends are suspicious of coincidence. In a similar way I felt John Smith, who had been so encouraging of my practice,  maintained a distance from more cosmic aspects of my methodology. Outside I also met a dear friend Graham who is one of the sweetest and most insightful artists I know. We spoke briefly about some work of mine Graham had recently found in storage at his gallery space. These were works from a project about a made-up culture called the Deadends. When I went in to take my seat and saw John Smith take to the stage to introduce the films I remembered how the last time I had been in the room I had stood on the same stage alongside John incanting the words "ended ended ended ended" (eventually sounds like deadend) when we both showed short  films for the 100 years of Dada Evening. The screening began with Om and I was already familiar with how this film takes a humorous poke at a certain po-faced kind of cosmic spirituality but found myself becoming immersed in the sumptuously simple sound of the om merging into the buzz of the hair trimmers. My familiarity with this film because it was the first of John Smith's films I encountered has perhaps overweighted my tendancy to view his work as absurdly humorous. I had gone to the screening primarily to see a film called The Black Tower on a cinema screen. I wanted to lose myself in its atmosphere of non-orientable otherness without foreclosing what it could mean. Watching it I began to feel a familiar shame that I myself could not be as methodical as John in my approach to art. I was struck by a somewhat zen-like patience that enabled him to enfold the specific biographical encounter with time and place into what I consider the temporal substance of art or in John Smith's case the methodology of film making. Much of the pleasure from watching these films I felt comes from knowing that the juxtapositions are made with a physical material over a period of time. There is something about this process that draws us the audience into the meaning inside the event I thought. I imagined the physical film bobbing and jerking like a large wood pigeon expressing it's wood pigeon-ness. Whilst some of the scripting seemed to gently rib attempts to find philosophical sense I had an intense feeling that we are all sharing something meaningful. How graceful I thought, thinking how the temporal substance of a more enduring kind of change was woven into the more familiar idea of quick filmic cutting. After Dark Tower there was a short film a minute long which again deftly revealed how all perception is contextual even if it was with gentle humour. Then came a film called Slow Glass. This was a film about which I knew nothing at all. It began and before very long at all it became transparently clear that the film was about the fluid nature of glass a substance we consider to be fixed. It was then I remembered that Sean had mentioned this property of glass in response to my description of the non-drying paintings of Alexis the programme leader of the MA in fine art. Alexis had been unable to attend the visit due to a leg injury. I began to feel anxious about leaving for my train home and took my phone from my pocket to see the time. I realised I had been swallowed into the film's transformational tapestry of time weaving imaginary and specific biographical encounters into a sticky celluloid substance and it had somehow become far later than I expected. John took to the stage again this time for a Q&A. He is a very modest and restrained talker. He explained that it was important that half of The Black Tower was actually a blank screen because pictures are better on the radio. He wanted to convey a sense that language is key to triggering an imaginative response. Later when I was hurriedly walking through the darkness of the park towards Victoria station - the park where I had first dated my wife - passing couples sitting on barely perceivable benches, I began to feel that language alone is not an imaginative trigger but rather it is the specific encounter through an intra-relational process that forms the felt intensities of imagined remembering of the present. John's films I thought are an exquisite interweaving of the really real entanglement of emerging into the fiction of what Catherine Malabou describes as the one life only. This is what I consider to be a form of radical empiricism or the perfection of the specific encounter without judgement. I'm not at all sure that John Smith would see his films like this but I recall Carl Jung discussing how moments of synchronicity come into our lives when we find ourselves meeting the universe halfway.