Competition!!! Having communicated with Phil Illingworth on the subject, it has been buzzing around in my brain ever since. I descend into a kind of madness when the bee gets into my bonnet. As soon as I wake my brain starts. I realised that having raised objections to the notion of competition, I had in fact submitted this painting to the same John Moores open in which his work was accepted. A guilty secret. The bee in my brain stings indiscriminately sometimes, and then suffers embarrassment. However, looking for a little nectar to sustain a few thoughts about competition, my bee discovered that the stinging was not indiscriminate, but that it is repeating itself. The bee that seeks recognition, the bee that seeks power, the bee that seeks status all to an extent seek to repeat memories of success. So what of the hopeful John Moores bee? Some bees are destined to repeat their historic rejections. Disappointment can only be created through false hope, maybe that of the presumptuous, the deluded, the naïve, the misguided, and all the pollen in the world is insufficient for such a bee, whose pursuit of it is the mainstay of his self deception. How do bees become this bee or that? How is it that so many bees, maybe quite talented in a bee kind of way, can live simultaneously with hope and rejection?
Reading Deleuze and stuff, I frequently get to a point of utter incomprehension. I see words, and related words, whole sentences, and can make no sensible connections. I read and read again, and progress is slow. It disappoints me to find myself in such a position with all that it implies of my mental faculties. And yet to be in this position is itself interesting. Sometimes my incomprehension seems so profound that all I have left is to smile at it. It is an experience of the sublime. I hope that coming to understand something is an evolutionary process; given appropriate experience, the light will turn itself on; understanding is not something that you do, but something that happens to you. So with the Cake as Art, I don’t know if there is anything sensible in it, or if it was simply a perverse thought on a particularly grumpy day. I continue to ponder on it; it is a little self destructive, maybe even a form of mental self-harming, in its potential for the ridiculous. But we have no power over our next thought until after it is born. In a sense I am trying out thoughts on the Cake, to see if they might make sense, to see what happens to me if I trust them to tell me something. Something totally unexpected might happen.
In a world of signs, where visual qualities seem to become irrelevant, the cake as signifier has a place. Its visual qualities drop away leaving a sign And paradoxically the visual qualities of the cake become the source of its being. The cake demands meaning. Its everyday social use is wrapped in its significance as cultural signifier; the cake becomes Art when the wrapping is exposed. In Asda today I made a point of looking. It is a visually harsh place, red and green in a visual clattering over the aisles, but as far as you can get from John Hoyland. The latest slogan is ‘Chosen by You’ signifying, ‘Do as The Label Tells You.’
Drawing this pigeon stretched me rather. From the beginning nothing seemed to go right. Line, tone, shape, everything that I did was clumsy, inexact, difficult. Couldn’t concentrate. Had been out on my bike, and I was more tired than I expected to be. Concentration involved disproportionate effort. I found myself compensating for poor observation with technical things; a bit of contrast and gesture goes a long way. In a sense I found myself making what I was doing appear as if it were a drawing. I was making feathery – birdy marks. And listening to Bluegrass. I’m no connoisseur, I just hear. Eventually I might listen. Drawing with Bluegrass in the background is one thing; with Blues another. I tend to be sucked into the rhythm. This drawing has evolved in the company of both. But it was a drawing, just the opposite kind of drawing to what I think I do – look at things, in the first place.
I read an obituary of John Hoyland today. I remember his show at the Whitechapel many years ago. Things stick in the mind – Red and Green – wedges of colour. Sad day.
