10pm

I was speaking to a visitor called Jerry or maybe Gerry on Thursday. He was saying about why he couldn’t make the launch party. It was because he had gone to see his 11 year old grand-daughter dancing at the Royal Ballet.

Sarah was eleven the youngest there..It came up about stories in the news or maybe heard on the radio that the principal dancer at the Royal Ballet had resigned this week.

http://www.app.com/article/20120126/NJENT08/301260…

We pondered this for a while, wondered how it could have come about. Gerry said he might be off to become a tattoo artist. Simon suggested that maybe he’d had enough of the pressure and just wanted a regular life. I wondered what was happening in New York. I heard on the news a while ago about strikes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/arts/music/city-…

Gerry was here to see the exhibition and asked me where all the paintings were. There was one painting in the room. It took up the entire wall. I hadn’t painted anything. I suppose that is because I am a sculptor. I know this. But as Simon pointed out Picasso sculpted and painted and I remember seeing a body of work which was entirely composed of faces on ceramic bowls and vessels.

Maybe I am not as diverse as Picasso. I have made prints. I did a residency at Leeds College of Art and Design a few years ago where I spent 6 months in the print studio. I eventually got the hang of it. In the end I quite enjoyed it. But no painting for me as yet. Do I event have paint anymore? I definitely have a handful of brushes. I think when I lost that really nice watercolour set after Limavady I was really upset and never really got over it.

Anyway, so Gerry and the paintings. In a winding tackful way I said I was kinda over the modernist ideal and that I was in no position to present him with a masterpiece in oil or marble and that the best I could do with the resources I had was provide a platform for dialogue. Maybe something would come out of it, maybe not but that is wasn’t up to me to provide a finite.

I don’t know how this went down. I needed a break anyway because we just had created 10 Mutoscope animations in collaboration with a group of primary school kids. Well we kinda pointed them in a direction and they just ran away with it. They’d made up some crazy funny stories about Borris the mouse who stole things like pencils and bits of plastic for fun. He slept in a bed shaped like a chariot which he accessed through a hole in the floor. There was also Lost Larry, and a guy who was really tall and used this to see in peoples gardens, a flesh eating monster and a space ship that also worked in water.

The challenge for me when working with young people is not to oversimplify things. To tell it how it is but use simple words. Sometimes when trying to find the right word the idea can get a little lost so when I was taking about ‘Unnamed (System)” which was inspired by the celebrating weighing I kinda lost the plot a bit and so I just left it hanging in the air. The kids were cool about this but I felt that I could have done better with that one.

Never mind life goes on. It’s not a static object, it is just evidence of a conversation which when you try to remember it comes out differently. It’s probably better this way.

BTW Jonathan who had just come back from NYC had the lowdown on the scene there. Although 6 protesters had been arrested. It seems it was full of life in the museums and commercial galleries.

http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/World/Sto…

The show is up at the Old School Room, Phase Two has been handed in and things are underway with the urban sculpture garden in Branksome.

It’s pre- Phase Three, the final stage of my masters studies. Last phase I didn’t do myself justice. The shock of having my work assessed by a university really threw me. Well that along with almost being evicted because the landlady didn’t pay her mortgage.

I was struck with inertia for most of the time. I lost track of making and as to writing I just couldn’t put anything together. Knowing that all of this mattered; this was my first qualification in Fine Art and being aware I was letting it slip out of my hands just made it all worse and perpetuated the spiral of negativity.

I kind of pulled it together by going back to Polymer. I feel at home there, accepted and I work hard when I am there. This time I set myself an unachievable goal. To make a mutoscope in less that three weeks. Of course I did not complete it and the object that I created seemed to be proof to myself that I was incapable of achieving anything.

At the time I was reading a book published by the Whitechapel Gallery in their series on documents of contemporary art. This one was titled Failure. During making I listened to recordings of myself taking to school children about the idea of failure and all the while I was producing something that I knew was destined to fail, in that it would not be a functioning mutoscope.

Perhaps there is the argument, as there was in the book, that failure is something we must embrace and that if you are not failing you’re taking it too easy. I certainly wasn’t taking the easy route going to Polymer. Everything is harder in a factory with no heating and shared showers. You have to rely on everyone else for materials, tools, access to resources. Even to make a cup of tea you have to go and fill a bucket with water.

It’s not the first time I’ve ‘failed’ . A few years ago I made a year long project on rejection after I failed to secure funding for a project.

Perhaps I knew when I began my investigation into making a photographic document of the process of making the document that the outcome was unpredictable.

Is this why my work feels better when it involves participation? By involving others it creates certain unpredictability. You can always rely on people to behave unexpectedly. By asking people to be involved in making my work either through contribution of information, like at Show and Tell, action like in Invitation to Shred or materials like in the Fine Art of Rejection in each case it the outcome open and unpredictable.

Phase two taught me that I need to continue to write and to research and from there the making will come. I am never satisfied with the things I make by myself. They lack something. They lack any sort of connection, they are contrived and awkward. I am always impressed by what I can facilitate in others, what I can instigate.

At the beginning of this process I wanted to delve into dialogical practice and ‘relational aesthetics’ and somehow I got distracted because I was isolated and I tried to impress by making clever art. Now that I have learned some new skills in early photography which I feel compliment my current skills I know that I can learn new skills but how I apply them should embrace chance, or more correctly acceptance of unpredictability and the best way I can do this is by re-appropriating these processes to create a different object determined by the circumstances it is placed into.

Have you been watching the You tube video’s by Mark McGowan?

I think you should.

http://www.youtube.com/user/chunkymark?feature=wat…

Despite all the terrible things going on i believe there is enough goodness to change things for the better. We’ve all been living lives that exploit the poor and weak and now we have to change.

Rip it up and start again.

As an artist I feel privileged, but with that privilege comes the responsibility to society to enable change. By facilitating a discussion about what we have got now and where we would like to be the artist can ‘reveal mystic truths’ as Nauman declared. Can we?

Can we really help the world? Is this an unachievable aspiration? Should we aim for it anyway?

What if what we reveal is not truth? What if we are lead by riches, fame, power? How do you remain truthful?

On Friday I went to the Artworks Christmas auction. Despite a crowd not a lot of works sold and none for the kind of money that could buy you a decent lunch never mind cover the cost of production. A lot of the artists were disappointed. I wasn’t sure I felt as disappointed as they did. My drive to make anything comes from a personal desire and the reason I share it with others is so that maybe they connect with it and it inspires them. That’s kind of enough for me. I sold 4 framed works, all for less than a tenner. I was glad that someone wanted it in their lives and like me I think they would have paid more if they had the money. I bought 3 pieces for 50quid which was all of my wages from working in the restaurant this week. I wish I could have paid what I felt they were worth, at least ten times that.

Each of the pieces I bought I have a connection with. I’ve seen them in the studio for months and they represent the artist, the time, the place. The narrative is as important as the object. In a way the objects are documents of the narrative and that’s why I am connected with them because they are part of my narrative also. The cash I hand over is just a representation for the appreciation of this and really the art always belongs to the artist. The collector just holds the document.

Back to Mark McGowan. He is uploading videos everyday reminding us about where we are. They are there for everyone to see. The more people who experience them the better, but who is paying for his food? Who buys his kids school uniforms and lunches? If the artist is challenged with revealing mystic truths then these cannot be bought. What does the artist do to feed themselves whilst in pursuit of mystic truths? Work in a restaurant? Make craft pieces to sell? Maybe the collector also needs to change and rather than hold a document of the work appreciate that no object may change hands in the quest for truth.

At the end of the event I went up to the tech room where I had set up my Flip HD camera held in place with a piece of blu tac. It had fallen over and out of power. Well, I thought, that’s it no chance of having captured anything on this.

After yesterday with the trauma of capturing the video from the DV tape which took most of the day and then finding out the paper we’d used had been taken away by the cleaners I was overjoyed today to find that my little friendly Flip camera had stayed alive until the end and must not have fallen over until I’d arrived upstairs.

Now is the task of editing. A while ago I did a course on Final Cut Pro, but only afterwards I researched the cost of the software so I haven’t used it much since. I have Adobe Premiere Elements but I find it so frustrating to use. I think at university they have Final Cut Pro but now that the place is closing for Christmas I will not have time to edit…

..actually i got side tracked here…

I’ve just given up on Premier and decided to take stills from playing it in movie player as I pressed the fast forward key and almost fell off the chair laughing at the action in quick motion.

I love how you can see how it developed, the different activities going on, the conversations and interactions between people. If I edit it I would have to cut out these little sideline things that happened but these are important because they all informed the entire event.

And the chipmunk style sounds are hilarious!

It happened.

tearing

stuffing

sliding

throwing

batting

jumping

covering

sweeping

laughing

showering

folding

twisting

clapping

reading

acting

filling

Is it chaos? is it play? what would happen if we never stopped?