Blog block
A lot has happened over the past couple of days. I have done my first two residency sessions in the gallery talking to visitors about the Thomas Hirschhorn exhibition.
I need to digest it all a bit before adding another blog posting.
I was in Polegate today, which is a town near Eastbourne, in Sussex. I found this completely flattened and very rusty tin can on the grass verge by the side of the road.
It set me thinking about flatness and three-dimensionality. And about bodies I suppose. And their transposition into images.
Photography.
What an alien concept to me.
The visual.
What does that mean?
And why if we inhabit fleshed out, rounded bodies, would we ever think of making flat images? I know, it's something to do with the retina and all.
Flat Stanley.
A children's book about a boy whose noticeboard falls onto him in the night and he wakes up with as a two dimensional person. And then he has adventures as a 2-D person in a 3-D world.
How can the images that Hirschhorn has chosen for his banner have the visceral impact on us that they do have? What is the process whereby animal fear is generated by looking at pictures of dead and mutilated people? I'm not really interested in the neurological answers to these questions. But rather in the part that imagination plays in that process.
Imag(e) in a(c)tion.
Last Chance to see 'For Those Killed in Ambush' at Hold & Freight, Bradwell St, London E1. Finishes Sunday 5th at 6pm.
I am showing one piece:
2003 Peace Banner – 2008 Pea Spanner
Geddit?
Had a conversation where I realised that I make assumptions about there existing an area of common ground about what is meant by 'political'. The person I was talking to clearly thought that by 'political' I meant 'party political'. This was a thunderbolt to me. To realise that a lot of what I take for granted, have always taken for granted, actually doesn't exist (any more? did it ever?). There was a time in the 70s and 80s when if you talked about politics then it was sort of assumed that what you were talking about was something to do with power relations, identity, gender, race, class, in short, the underlying dynamics of any situation. Everything could be understood politically. This didn't make life any easier. In fact it often made it seem a lot harder, but there was a language (or at least we liked to think there was) for what went on amongst people. Then there was a time when you had to talk about 'politics with a small 'p' to denote the same kind of analysis and to make clear that you were not talking about party politics. Now, if you talk about politics, people turn their noses up and look displeased, or they assume you have some personal chip on your shoulder, or that you're just plain mad.
Yesterday on Radio 4 there was a programme about anger. Apparently, in the States now they are calling anger 'intermittent explosive outburst syndrome' or something like that, I can't remember exactly what they called it. And of course there is a pill for it. To cure it. To stop it.
So in these placated times where does justified outrage go? Where do we put it? How can we channel it into action?
'The personal is political' was a rallying cry of feminism. It meant that what went on between people, in their relationships, in everyday life, was significant, that it mattered, that it was the world in microcosm. But is the personal being squeezed out along with the political? Are the only spaces left for the personal: the confessional art of autobiographical artists providing vicarious experience as commodified art products for the over-busy super-rich? Or the safe and hidden, intimate spaces we create in our own, very private, private lives?
And this evening I put her back together again.
