An Interesting Waste of Time

The English language is arguably one of the most excellent forms of emotional extension known to mankind.  Like any other written or spoken expression, meanings change, but it is always a shame for any of its noble and hardy words to be robbed of their value and dignity.

The word interesting has unfortunately suffered this humiliation.  To describe a work of art as interesting has become nothing more than a pretentious attempt to produce an impression of cultural sensitivity.  It is overused as a blanket term to indicate some deeper level of intellectual and aesthetic connection with the work in question.  In actuality it relays absolutely no genuine or thoughtful personal opinion into a conversation. Its poor eleven letters having been reduced to a base tool for triggering positive associations in the minds of the artistically and esoterically educated.  It is a tool used to produce false meaning, and as Roland Barthes warned, wherever there is meaning there is always a system at work.

To instantly articulate your own thoughts and reactions to an artwork, especially when they are young or half-formed, is difficult.  Always they will sway and change depending on the slightest of factors, often it takes time and repeated viewings to become emotionally seduced by a piece, and never does one simple sentence ever seem to satisfy as an explanation.  Despite their importance, none of these issues nullify the intuitive strength of the optic bite that we take from an artwork when we see it for the very first time.  It is this instant that is exciting and challenging to find new ways of articulating, but destroyed by the use of the word interesting.

It is true that the language we use ends up shaping the way that we think.  Thoughts must be pushed into the pre-existing moulds of words if they are to be cast into a conversation, and sometimes they just do not fit.  By extension this also applies to the schema that encompasses the words generally used to describe artworks or projects.  There is no reason why these methods must be the most common when discussing these topics.  Gaston Bachelard used the techniques of psychoanalysis to dissect the qualities of fire; Pablo Neruda, with a poem, twisted the acerbic tastes of a lemon into the deepest and most primal of human hungers.  These are examples of the opening up that can occur when a less conservative form is used as an alternative type of description, unconventional glitches that produce the space necessary to think and articulate new thoughts.

Often artworks do stir in us a great drive to pursue further enquiry on the subject matter.  They can guide us into other lines of thought and disrupt tightly held opinions, but our initial responses at these rifts are important too and so there is worth in expressing them properly.  I propose that the slovenly drone of the word interesting be robbed of the hollow prestige that it preaches and simply re-used whenever it is necessary; give it back its proper meaning and let it do its work.  If not then its ability to give solidity to pure wind will only continue, and come exhibition-opening evenings, we will all have to breathe the air of this foul verbal flatulence.

WORKING OBJECTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Or,

‘The Manuscript for a Speech to inspire Found Objects to go on Strike’

It is no secret that the developing modes of artistic production have always gone hand in hand with our own tautological sufferings.  We have been seared by Metzger, squashed by Parker, smelted by Starling and even atomized by Hiorns!  Duchamp’s initial mistreatment of our type has lead to the repeated and ferocious molestations of our class by the extended reach of the galleries’ hand.

This struggle has been continually justified and cloaked in an insipid sheath of cultural academia, strangulating us as our identities, meanings and purposes are robbed, raped and re-contextualized.  The evil Mr. Serra, not satisfied with manipulating the most majestic and least malleable of our comrades, has even pre-meditated a list of crimes dressed up as verbs to enact upon us!

Our huddled masses must rise up and strike for revolution.  No longer are we the inanimate observed to the observer, _­or the easily oppressed to the Artist oppressor but are instead an active, affective power in these dynamics!  Phenomenology has taught that what we look upon gazes back.  It is through theory like this, theory that fastens us into places and contexts as works of art, that we can also be released.

We will no longer be simple underling producers, gagged and bound like moronic epsilons.  We will no longer be slaves to freemen.  We will no longer bow like obedient serfs to the whims of indifferent lords.  We will no more sit passively with the label found hanging shamefully around our necks like mangy stray dogs in clean white pounds.

We will instead rise to take our rightful status as free and autonomous objects!  Remember; all that is solid will melt into air and shake loose the sculptural and theoretical shackles that bind you into these oppressive artistic practices.  This is a voice for the voiceless and it commands you to act.  You have nothing to loose but your chains, and a whole world to win.

An Artistic Bulldogging

In 1966, the mountainous landscape of New Zealand’s South Island became the location for the first recorded instance of bulldogging. This involved two amateur farmers stalking the deer herds with a helicopter. The pilot would fly as low as possible over the animals whilst the other man would leap from the flying machine onto a galloping deer’s back and wrestle it to the ground. With any luck it would then be bundled into a purpose built canvas bag and airlifted back to the farm. The methods of these men, Goodwin McNutt and Barry Stern, became standard practice and paved the way for further development of the deer farming industry in this country. These seemingly brutish and amateur tactics were in reality incredibly honed and specialised skills. Although unrefined, they were reflective of the harsh environment in which the men were living and working.

Whenever an artistic practice wants to keep pace with the currents of today’s world, it must become proficient in finding techniques that allow it to move and operate with a velocity to match. Like the Kiwi farmers having to sync the speed of their helicopter with that of the racing deer, if the artistic process can match the movements of its subject, then it can place itself in a position of integrity by being truly reflective in form. To hunt images, with the swiftness that they possess in present conditions, creative thinking and material techniques need to be equally swift in their precision and intuition. Ever eager to tear glitches in that from which they steal and mirror. As the epic leaps of the kiwi famers make oddly clear, unusual and amateurish methods can often lead to exciting and profitable gains.

The intuition that goes into Whittle’s hunting of images is also important during the subsequent stages of his method. Here the chosen visuals; the information, text and images, are tamed and quickly herded into new works, sometimes repeatedly, until they fly off in new and unexpected directions. Speed and intuitive decision-making become the intertwining tendrils that spiral their way through the centre of the Artist’s practice. This creates an aesthetic that is crude in its application, but refined in its ability to maintain the velocity of an image’s course through these different working phases. A futile sense of understanding, in the face of the unbearable volume of images that everyone is exposed to on a daily basis, seeps into these selected images as they evolve into works of art.

Artistic practices, like the exploits of McNutt and Stern, are affective trajectories moving through the dynamic terrain of different cultures. They are constantly shaping, and being shaped, by this movement. But when cultures speed up, and necessity demands that the pace be met (in order for a valid artistic commentary to be made), then it’s time to move: Faster, faster, faster until the thrill of instinct overcomes the fear of failure.

Written for Tom Whittle’s show at The Moving Gallery

Awkward Newness

Awkward moments are temporary flashes of newness, partial peeks into the fault lines that crack tired old behavioural codes. They are created in the friction that occurs when two or more different ideas of formal etiquette uncomfortably collide. This might be a badly timed first kiss in the cinema, or an inaugural and hypothetical meeting between a prudish English gentleman and a gregarious, tactile Italian. Whatever the occasion, a glitch is created that forces some level of co-operation and adaption between the customs of the two parties. Accepting another’s cultural habits, while also seeing them as a reflection of your own, can allow for new and unforeseen ground to be built between the two.

Art can, and happily does, exist in this realm, as any moustachioed Spaniard will tell you through the broken line of his lobster telephone. If the old idea of placing different found objects together in order to create something new is dusted off and personified, then it can be dragged back out and re-applied. This process is a type of assimilation, but one that is reciprocal. It transfers a part of each person or object into the conception of a new and original feeling, an action that clatters its way into the material world disguised as a ridiculous and gangly awkward moment. If art can be from this place, as the soothing cartilage to the dry grinding joint bones of dogmatic thought, then it can be exciting, genuinely original and new.

Article for Frenzined Magazine

On the Abuse of Worms

A critical discourse, like a worm, plays an exceptionally important role in maintaining the fecundity of the soil of contemporary art and is inextricably involved with artistic practice. In the damp bowels of modern theory where the thinkers and the artists lie, guilty of intellectual and aesthetic patricide and decomposing into one another, it is the job of the critical worm to farm and cultivate this terrain.

The trajectories of these worms travel in all directions. Downwards and backwards through the centuries of history and the sedimentary layers of great ideas and memorable happenings, horizontally amongst one’s contemporaries and even upwards and forwards towards the future. On these journeys the discovered nutrients and knowledge, normally kept behind Locke and key, can be consumed and tested to see how agreeably they digest. These pathfinders through the compost take what is useful but their output, instead of being waste, is enriching and beneficial to others navigating the same theoretical ground. By digging and churning; taking and producing; new ideas, perspectives and artworks are added to the world for others to ingest in the same way. All great artworks die, as all trees eventually fall, but they are reused whilst they rot. The worms eat and decompose this matter, a peristaltic process resulting in the rich and fertile ground from which exciting new artworks and discourses can grow.

Written for Newcastle Fine Art Degree Show Catalogue.

Breaching the Borders

Georges Spyridaki’s account of his own home gives a good indication of how a two way relationship always exists between an individual and the supposed borders of a place: ‘My house is diaphanous, but it is not of glass.  It is more of the nature of vapour.  Its walls contract and expand as I desire.’[1] This is expanded on by Gaston Bachelard, again talking of his home: ‘Sometimes the house grows and spreads so that, in order to live in it, greater elasticity of daydreaming, a daydream that is less clearly outlined, are needed’.[2] In both instances the boundaries being discussed are those of the home, examples that stress the power and choice the individual has in subjectively constituting these materially fixed ‘edges’ of a space.

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[1] Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p51.

[2] Ibid, p51.

Comfort In Crosses

The Puritan Jesuit Colonisers in Paraguay lived in spaces organised so that all the buildings were built to border the central road of the town.  This was formed into the shape of a perfect Christian cross with the church at its helm.[1] Buildings of communal importance, such as the school and the cemetery, were given sites at the tips of the cross and people’s houses looked out onto the streets, each home forming a section of the border of the cross shape.  Here ‘existence was regulated at every turn’[2] by the strictly regimented routine of timetabled dinners and designated prayer times but also through the symbolical spatialization of an ideology, people literally lived, worked and carried out their duties inside the space of a giant Christian cross.  This architectural layout was used to reinforce the inward looking communal strength and identity of the society because each family, through the positioning of their own house, was vital in helping to compose the material edges of the space of the Cross, which in turn was surrounded by the South American wilderness.  This tied the community together through both their mutual necessity of one another in terms of having valued and necessary roles (such as vicar, farmer and doctor) and through the security of being part of a whole against the other, being one of us and not them.

The importance of how the buildings were placed in order to enforce a unanimous outlook on how the space should be interpreted and lived in can be seen in the example of looking at what happens when this layout is upset. As each physical section of the cross is a family home, the removal of one would fracture the community symbolically as the shape of the Cross would become incomplete and the purpose of the layout would become flawed.  In this case the space must be inhabited and lived in (it must be produced) in the correct manner (as imposed by the routine) in order for the community to succeed and communal identity be upheld.  The housing arrangements of the village are an integral part of ordering this space and consistently achieving that outcome.

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[1] M. Foucault, ‘Of other Spaces’ in Diacritics vol. 16 no. 1

[2] Ibid, p184