I went to Frieze. Five hours on my feet. Exhausting. The rich must be tough. Missed the Art Crab. Saw a Henry Moore. Boat – Art is my cake writ large – bigged up big time? Asda art is ‘Chosen by You’ – Boat Art, your exclusive choice. Any difference? Of course there is. Purchase the cake and you have a £1 rollback bargain route to mastication heaven. Buy them both and you can sail and chew art simultaneously. Maybe Asda could issue certification of their goods as Art for an extra 10% at the checkout, and then roll back to 5% and watch sales soar. Interestingly the artist created a piece in 1992 in which he went into a supermarket with a bow and arrows and ‘hunted’ his purchases, which were taken to the checkout impaled upon hisarrows.http://www.lissongallery.com/#/artists/christian-jankowski/works/ In these collaborative times, I wonder if I could give away a signed cake to all purchasers of the boat? Different worlds. I’ve been drawing another bird, this time with considerable patience. I’m building up quite a collection. I don’t quite want to repeat myself, but there is something satisfying about the increasing obsessive nature of it. The act of drawing itself is repetitive at all levels of looking, describing, feeling, correcting, finding appropriate marks, pressures, actions, discovering, examining, reflecting, doubting, enjoying.. Perhaps I do want to repeat myself. If you can’t help it, enjoy it. I’m not an experimenter, more beachcomber.
A moorhen. Drawing with Bert Jansch and then Little Richard. I thought that I would make some observational studies, but as soon as I began, I found that I could work in only one way, hurried and gestural. Inappropriate music perhaps. I’ve worked like this before, and it’s maybe a bit of a cliché, but sometimes it feels like it is necessary to be bluntly physical with a drawing. When it goes wrong, the battle to restore it is part and parcel. Medium and message. Errors in making are errors in message also. Going back to comments on previous posts, I wonder what is the medium of media. Zeitgeist? The description of the relationship between medium and message as mechanistic seems suspect, a false distinction? Back to Little Richard.
Have been working on this for most of this week, Alison Craig’s comment below expanding and contracting in my thoughts. I keep coming back to the idea that medium and message are always one, in a similar fashion to form and content, or function and form; they are and are not the same thing; visible and indivisible. A work in which the medium takes second place to the message seems a form of kitsch; medium reasserts itself ‘from the inside’, content’s form, not its scaffolding. Attempting to understand what might be the content of this stuff, I have become more aware of distances, spaces, voids. To descend into a merely compositional exercise is to lose the medium, which will inevitably reassert itself in some perverse manner, but the way in which I appear to work is perilously close to that. If these things are to ‘work’ in any meaningful sense, (whatever that might mean) I have to trust the medium to reveal content?
A few days painting. Some time ago I wanted to squidge some paint. Have now done it. One of my early teachers was a man known as ‘Archie’ Campbell. He had this loose manner with his painting, and it has stuck in a recess of my mind, emerging consciously from time to time but probably always prodding and influencing what I do. I have always had a feeling for the juiciness of paint. Outside of my own head it may well be a clichéd notion and connected to early experiences. Thinking about Archie, I wonder if much of what we become takes after the first experience of the duckling, for which all manner of inappropriate creatures can become mother if the timing is right. Archie’s painting was a physical thing, oily and smelling of turpentine. Lovely! It’s really about a desire to return to formative experiences, to repeat?
