CosmiKnot

The great T.V. experiment of the late twentieth century is over. That little white dot on your screen Has finally popped Nothing Will fix it Not even a good slap on the side with an open palm The static is no more The furthest reaches of the cosmos are on the brink Of being mapped Front rooms are all arse about tit As partners unwind Furiously masterbating in downstairs bathrooms Over hard core clips Civilisation is completely completed The great television adventure has ended Roll the credits, cue the music Prepare not to dance There is no more darkness Only blinding light And retina burning displays Oh come back Neolithic Marshall Join me in the forest of the night And let us go then you and I Hiding together Ready to leap out when Next there is a power cut.

One of the benefits of being sick for a month is that you get to live in a muted hinterland. It's great you too can feel just like one of Virginia Woolf's dissenters. Just now I went to the local hospital for a blood test. The building, a gargantuan Victorian edifice designed by Edward Gorey (I swear), is handily close and is unoccupied apart from a woman inside a tiny reception hatch and the blood testing people about a quarter of a mile away down an airless corridor. Having experienced the performance art comedy of the receptionist yesterday (fork handles, parrots and so on) I glided swiftly to the blood sampling area. This place really has been like they were closing it down for the last five years and could easily provide an extremely convincing set for anyone interested in making a zombie film set in an abandoned hospital where a hypochondriac wanders in believing himself to be in a legitimate National Health institution but then finds his mind filling u...

The truth is there is something about “ Verity ” Damien Hirst’s newly installed 65ft seaside saucy statue. That something may well turn out to be truly terrible but that sword held aloft to the elements “by the power of grey skull” prods my old grey matter.  That dank old cavern whence my soul has fled. Like Verity, Hirst stands out on the craggy coastline of British art. There is no missing him. After being lost in the first Freeze show he swore he would never be missed again. I have a suspicion that the "something” that bothers me could be distilled to one word. “Naff”. That Princess Anne endorsed phrase that is in itself… well… naff. There’s a wrong end of the stickness to it. Like that creepy Dr. Hagen Das who freezes people. Oooh look we’re all flesh and blood and will one day die but we stand defiant in the face of everything nature can throw at us. Admirable sentiments. But still a bit embarrassing. But hey that’s good isn’t it? I’m challenged into being embarrassed...

My Museum of Unfiltered Reality is over here .

In a recent article on his favourite Hitchcock film Geoff Dyer implies that the thing that let’s The Birds down is the birds themselves. I guess what he might mean is that their awkwardness in terms of special effects gets in the way of their metaphorical presence. For me the “special” effects are precisely what imbue them with a very real sense of the uncanny. The birds is one of those films I thought I had seen because it’s on so many clip shows and was completely unprepared for its unfiltered delights. I am so glad I recently watched this film having only the merest whiff of Zizek’s "mother love" thesis to affect my perception. I soon forgot Zizek’s interpretation (although I am a fan) and sat exclaiming in wordless wonder all the way through. I couldn’t believe that such a piece of total art had been produced in the name of entertainment. With this in mind the special effects seemed to my now expanding mind to be mind-blowing. Yes there are moments of clunkiness b...

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...