I couldn't bear that picture of the gun being on my blog for longer than about an hour, so I've put a new picture up.
A visitor to the gallery on Saturday offered to bring in a picture of a fluffy kitten to stick onto the collective protest banner that visitors to the exhibition can contribute to. (This image was not donated by her but found by me online).
In amidst all of this experience I am finding that my ability to judge the tone of people's comments is weak. Did she really mean that a fluffy kitten would be a suitable counterbalance to the images on show on Hirschhorn's banner or was she being entirely facetious. It may seem obvious to you but at the moment I really can't tell.
It's the same with 'Max Loader' and his/her posts about the tin can (see below). To use a word like 'transfixed' to describe an interest in my discussion of 2- and 3-Dimensions appears to me to be rather exaggerated.
A gap has opened up in my interactions with others between their intentions and my receptiveness to those intentions. A widening which includes a muddying and mixing of friendliness and hostility.
But I can work with that. It's at the core.
Just some things I've observed over the past few days:
I heard a loud banging and when I looked down onto the street from a top floor window I saw a young lad, perhaps 12 years old, hitting a flint wall repeatedly with a long stick. Standing next to him was a much younger boy, perhaps about 6 years old, watching, motionless. The older boy was putting all his effort into attacking the wall although there was nothing to be seen on or around the wall that might have been his target other than the wall itself. When he had done enough hitting with the stick they both walked up the road a bit until the older lad stopped near a grass verge and with great concentration ground the toe of one of his shoes into the ground flattening the grass. He did this calmly several times on the same small patch of ground until he felt he had stopped the growing.
A tiny boy about 5 years old dressed in an immaculately pressed bright white karate suit flew by me silently on a scooter near the seafront road. Several times he measured out the breadth of the car salesroom forecourt with his two small wheels. The words 'avenging' and 'angel' came to mind.
Outside the Londis shop a cluster of adults laughing happily after their meal out in the Italian restaurant next door kept an amused eye on the two boys. Imitating computer game fighting these two were extremely skilfully raising clenched fists and pointed toes to each others chins without ever as much as touching each other and equally skilfully ducking to avoid the acted out blows. The sounds coming from their mouths were aping simulated explosion noises and imagined gasping reactions to violent hitting. "Ah", the adults' faces said, "look at the boys enjoying themselves".
In the park earlier this evening, three boys, around 8 or 9 years old walking conspiratorially close to each other. As I overtook them one was twirling a gun around his middle finger. Presumably a replica, but by the evident weight of its metal in his small hand, definitely not a toy. I stared long and hard at it in his hand as I passed them, as if to say "I can see what you've got, I've noticed you" but didn't say anything to them. A bit further on up the path I turned to look back at them. Looking slightly more agitated now, the one in possession of the weapon was stuffing it into his little backpack whilst his friend was saying something in a raised voice about his big sister.
Some text I have written to accompany my contribution to our open studios exhibition 'Around Photography' 25 and 26 October and 1 and 2 November 12 – 6pm:
Thinking Still
Photography is to my practice what something is to something else, but I don’t know what those things are.
I don’t know what the relationship is or the things that it connects. I don’t know that I need to articulate this any more clearly to myself at the moment.
I use photography just as most artists do. I use it for the following:
• To document work I have made and exhibitions I am in.
• To record visual ideas I think of so that I don’t forget them.
• To record an arrangement of objects in my studio before I move it around or put it away, so that the connections may be recalled at a later date.
But mostly I don’t go back to look at these saved images.
I can’t get round the power involved in photography. Behind the lens I am a god creating worlds. In front of the camera I am always a victim. Maybe because I am female and I can’t get through, round, over or past porn.
My first camera was a really old paper concertina job that my Dad gave me. I took it to London on a school trip and took a picture of Tower Bridge. It was magic.
During the Brighton Photobiennial 2008 I am artist in residence at Fabrica, engaging with and thinking (a lot) about the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, specifically his use of appropriated images in his Incommensurable Banner. The images are graphic depictions of bodies damaged and destroyed by munitions. People so far are displaying a range of reactions to this work. I am a lightning conductor for them.
I am thinking still.
Someone's response emailed to me. They wish to remain anonymous.
"I looked at your blog and the Fabrica site about Hirschhorn.
It must be difficult to keep an objective position on this work.
Quite honestly I think his work is such butch male piffle.
I suppose if we live in a landscape of rubbish and people are
brutally turned into rubbish and then photographed like landfill sites,
we will get an ‘art’ that is an equivalent of MRM.
What is the point of this kind of visual / philosophical appropriation.
It colludes with the visual landscape of excess, nihilism and amorality – its really about his celebrity, about violence and political philosophy being sexy.
He’s producing a commodity – ‘find prices on artnet’."
A view of the tin can from the side. To prove that it really is flat.
