Recently I have been re-visiting Arthur Koestler’s 1964 classic ‘The Act of Creation’. It’s over 700 pages so I have only ever dipped in here and there, and I’m sure it must be very dated in art theory terms. Nevertheless his central idea still appeals to me and seems very relevant to what I am doing. The idea is that creativity can occur when two previously unrelated planes of thought are made to intersect and he applies this concept in a variety of situations – including jokes.
In my Detour 5 with collaborator Gill – try to keep up – we decided that, of her three randomly chosen artists, Nam June Paik looked the most promising. As a founding father of video art he particularly interests me and especially his ‘My Faust’ series of around a dozen gothic structures made in the late 1980’s each referencing different aspects of western society. www.paikstudios.com/gallery/22.html
Meanwhile Gill has a passionate interest in bees – remember them? – and they feature in various ways in her own practice. And so there are the two ideas to rub together. Over the summer quite a bit of research has been done into the many faceted world of apiary and a maquette made for what might eventually be called ‘The Palace of the Bees’. You will have to peep through the little holes on the front of the hive bit to see the video of the bees who live in Oxford.
Detour 3 is the one that has made the slowest progress so far but Saturday is ‘Mind the Map’ day.
