CosmiKnot

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. I...

Celts: Art and Identity – The British Museum As an exhibition this was a major influence of my Deadend works in how it openly struggled to present an ostensibly unknowable culture within the structuralist framework of received knowledge. It highlighted the problem of analysing (a) culture through the fixed parameters of current evidence based frameworks. There could be no clearer illustration of the distortion or impasse created by subject object separation. Each age projects an idea of itself onto the past – this is particularly apparent within the industrial Victorian romanticisation of the Celt. This apparent presentation of subjectivity as truth is what Cultural Materialism and Nonrepresentational theory redress. Gundestrup Cauldron C150-50 BC

Here is a link to a comic strip I've done with a long standing friend and interrogator The Aug Stone. I love Aug's affinity to a natural state of wonder, which made making the comic a total pleasure. He gave me free rein with clear instructions as to the setting. Writing a comic is much more than just filling in speech bubbles. Aug has created an existential miss-en-scene without breaking sweat. His visualisation of the scenario is genuinely bizarre and dreamlike without feeling contrived. Funnily enough Aug thinks that the story is perhaps too obviously personal but I've been working on it a while and it still intrigues and niggles away at my unconscious. The story seems to lead towards a meaning but never wholly explains itself, which is exactly what I want from a tale, rather than a moral observation or rousing resolution. Click the picture to see the whole thing.

I’ve been reading Tamper by Bill Ectric. I’m enjoying it so much that I can’t wait till I’ve finished it to write something about it. For a start it does what all good art does and makes you think, “how could I ever do that?” Bill’s crisp visual descriptions are not so much Faberge egg as hand crafted ingenious piece of furniture with hidden drawers and false bottoms (nice). Bill describes the book as part Nancy Drew and part William Burroughs and you think okay yeah I get that because people always use that devise to give a flavour of the piece. The difference in the case of Tamper is that the book is exactly part Nancy Drew and part William Burroughs. There is, to my mind, a joy in the mysteries that are revealed as the book goes along. Bill outlines the machinations in such a way that I feel like I understand how Nancy Drew book works without having read one. The trick that I am trying to see from all angles is how Bill Ectric has written a book about the passing of youth that in...