Nottingham Trent University

I always hate the blog posts that start off ‘I haven’t posted on here for a while’ however I’m going to do it anyway might as well keep some sort of blogger cliché

I haven’t posted on A-n for a while almost due to not wanting to because I didn’t feel I could. The blogger profile dialogue between Richard Taylor and myself, in all honesty it seemed to occupy much of my time trying to answer those questions not because I didn’t like it but because I found it very difficult. I also got a bit of a wake up call when in email conversation between myself and our website and catalogue designer for degree show. I sent him a email which had terrible sentence structure, waffled on and had no paragraphs. The reply I got was could you please try to make sense.

It did teach me that an about an online profile and the way conversation arise virtually, be it for a residency, job or just general networking for an event. I think maybe a sense of destination with what I’m writing could become really necessary when doing anything over the Internet. With what 7% of communication in language coming from just words 55% is body language and 38% is vocal (pitch, volume, speed, tone).

So maybe virtual profile and a real life profile come hand in hand. Not like I want a complete virtual life like second life or World of Warcraft. I’ve mentioned World of Warcraft twice now in this blog, I don’t play honestly. Although I could become like the guy off South Park that thinks he is really powerful because he is killing all the little kids but actually he is this fat monster behind a desk. It happened to an old friend of mine just before I went on my foundation course he dropped out of A-levels and started working part-time at Iceland but really it was full-time warcraft. I didn’t see him again.

It always brings me to think about a nice little quote from Slavoj Zizek

‘Live entirely in fantasy and you die; live entirely in the real world and it’s dreariness kills you’

Contextually I think I’ve mentioned this slippage between reality and fantasy but I wonder if that fantasy can help reinforce something in reality. I can understand that I could confuse this slippage to be in fact a mechanism to start to interrogate what is real and start thinking philosophical but I don’t think my interests lie within that. If I was reading a fiction, I think the way in which something like this can make you feel or think about something that may not be immediately their straight in front of you but lead on to other things. Is this just down to how the structure of how the book is written operates in a particular manor? Or could it become this with a simple choice of words, which help me, relate to the characters and I go yeah you’re right feeling like this do that I know in the end it’ll be alright.

I started to watch that channel 5 zombie series the walking dead and in the first episode he is trapped in a tank and it’s left on a cliffhanger as if he might die. There are 3 more episodes left in the series of course he won’t die.

after lots of meetings and our ever so helpful web designer pip the website is up and running.

not long left till degree show.

http://www.fineartdegreeshow.info/artist/john-harr…

WINNER!!!!

god it’s coming already!

i was asked yesterday what does john harris want to make work about? i started looking around the room, looking at my note book, then back around the room trying to formulate the answer i thought that summed up this question. in fact going back to the friday it was the private view of an exhibition i was in called ‘old church slavonic’ someone was asking if there was an accompanying material to my piece to help with understanding influences and what it was about. someone called me over introduced me as the artist and they posed this question again but directly to me all i could think of is this rubbish i had been thinking of that didn’t really make sense and i would becoming this mumbling fool like ‘Little Nicky’ i suppose at the end of the day he does save mankind from the evil depths of hell and gets his dream women but in till that happens 45 minutes into the film he is pretty much a complete loser with a delightful taste for fried chicken. i came to blurting out to these two people well it’s about ummm the slippage between fantasy and reality, i like films and yeah computer games. this becoming regurgitated in an equally disgusting manor to when i got asked yesterday. i might as well of wet myself would have given them more to talk about.

the question asked yesterday i was beating around the bush not really knowing quiet how to articulate what i meant. i just said well i like funny things. why. i talked about an accessibility to the work not quiet understanding what i meant by this, i suppose i meant a way in but it could be taken as an access to everyone but the realisation is that why would i want a piece of work to be accessible to everyone not to be elitist but who looks at art? i think that’s the question if i wanted to be a public sculptor i would take other things into account. like that Saatchi show when they got the task of making public sculpture frankly it was terrible but they had a specific audience it was site specific. i’m making work for the gallery why shy away from these nice white walls that create a platform to the work. embrace the Whitecube! humour then becomes this tool which becomes a mechanism to allow the artist to deal with things like how self deprecation is used as a tool by comedians to allow the viewer to relate to them but allows for the application of concept or ethos. humour is there to firstly entertain then have this almost chuck this over my shoulder i don’t care approach to the work i suppose slightly hopeless which i definitely want my work to encompass giving the viewer that ounce of hope but undercutting it.