This cake thing. And innocence? I’ve been plodding on thinking about the cake.
I know this is all cod this and that – forgive the continued food thing, but I got onto Debord’s notion of spectacle in ‘Society of the Spectacle’. Just about everything that he writes in Chapter 1 seems to ring true of the Cake. Para 4 ‘The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.’ resonates in the supermarket, with an edge of sadness. The cake and its environment in spite of all their efforts to the contrary, remain a conduit through which the hollowness of the spectacle reveals itself. Eva’s stones are equally a conduit, but one which is hitherto untainted by a concealed true nature; stones and cake are polar opposites. Perhaps that goes to the heart of the (im)possibility suggested by Rob Turner, of seeing as a child, in that tainting is somehow homeopathic – once it has occurred it remains a memory and is constantly on the surface. The idea of the Cake as art has clearly got me into difficulties. The hole that I am digging for myself is in turns a source of perverse pleasure, and mental discomfort. It may have been a mistaken venture, but it has taken me into interesting areas of reading. This drawing was done in response to Rob’s idea of drawing with the ‘wrong’ hand. It looks much like a lot of work that I saw as a teacher – not a negative comment. Whilst drawing it I became aware that I had formed my ‘proper’ drawing hand, my right, in sympathy as though it was holding the pencil. But as soon as I began, I realised that I had a self-consciousness that Eva has not yet developed. I was becoming concerned about the look of the drawing. Young childrens’ work as well as possessing a range of qualities, is schematic, about what is known and displays their unselfconsciousness; I was drawing what I could see.
