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?
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.
I had a small site specific sculptural piece constructed in my garden today. Very simple, the artist built it with a sense of delight in the rightness of the materials and their placing. It consisted of a series of flint stones arranged in order on a path. It was a pleasure to watch her work. However, having completed the piece, she suddenly decided that she preferred the stones to be placed in a bird-bath. The transfer was completed with the same sense of delight as the original installation. I thought about my cake. It is easily possible to try too hard. Indeed, the cake must have got wind, because I found it looking embarrassed behind a packet of Jammie Dodgers shortly after the sculptor’s mum returned to take her home.
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?
