CosmiKnot

To gee myself up during the installation of Trope I bought a copy of The Doors of Perception. Perhaps it was my porous state of mind but nearly every line felt like a consoling arm around the shoulder with an accompanying voice telling me that a sense of wonderment was a good, albeit out of fashion, thing (I jest the voices were purely metaphorical).  “At least you aren’t lulled into a sense of false security by some merely human, merely fabricated order” The above is part of Aldus Huxley ’s response to a recording of some madrigals by Gesauldo . Admittedly at the time he was “high” on the affects of mescaline recently ingested in the name of experimental science but there is something in these words that speaks to my heart. There are two choices when this revelation strikes you and one is to respond with the anti-energy of the Dadaist and the other is to embrace the cosmic order of the dislocated wonderist for “the totality is present in the broken pieces” as Huxley goe...

Invisible. Art about the unseen. This show at the Hayward is sublime. It is also by turns maddening and hilarious. It’s like your very own immersion in the joke about trees in the woods making a sound when no ones there to give a shit. Or like you stepped into a film delighting in the extended agony of art pretentiousness. Wear a polar-neck. It’s that good. It's also very like being in a sci-fi lunatic asylum. Right now that’s out of my system I can admit that I did come away thinking I will never make any art again. It’s like the world is too cluttered with culture already. I thought about the words of Salvator Rosa in his stoic self portrait, "Be quiet, unless your speech be better than silence". Despite the fact that this show is literally nothing except explanations on walls about nothing (spoiler alert) the same life/art dialectics resurface again and again. Teresa Margolles is a fully qualified forensic scientist who specialised in autopsies of victims of viole...

Richard Holloway is a Christian Agnostic and this got me thinking. I mean everyone's talking about secularism versus faith right now. I have never seen so many comments on an article . Mind you religion brings the zealot out in us.  I like point about the Agnostic Anglican. It has a nice ring to it. From where I'm sat it seems clear that our spiritual selves are seen as an embarrassment even to believers. We (civilised) humans have come so far on intelligence alone that we feel we can leave our deeper perception of life behind. Agnostic Anglicans and their like try to present belief as an adjunct to the rational. An egg laid by reason's hen. I don't feel confident about us realigning the two experiences of life when I see the either or options we present ourselves with.  Technological advancement has required intense objective activity but not all of us can maintain Einstein's empathy for a faith based on doubt (wonder!) when we subject ourselves to this process. ...