Project Me

I have been thinking about a couple of people recently; one a friend in London, the other more of a friend of a friend here.  Both these creative people have become very successful in realising their ambitions, and while they work in completely different spheres of the art/design world I am incredibly impressed with their focus.  Focus is something that I want to concentrate on and perhaps seeing how Tine and Halvor have made their practices their focus is a good starting point.  What strikes me is that they have both focused on what they want their practice to be rather than on individual pieces/projects – a meta-level focus.  It also strikes me that they have both taken on board the cultures in which they operate and have identified what they need to do to establish themselves and generate interest in what they do.  What is really re-assuring is that both Tine and Halvor are genuinely good people and they have made it in competitive worlds without losing or sacrificing their kindness, generosity, curiosity, wit, or integrity.

Over the last couple of weeks I have begun to think about new work – studio and installation/live work pieces as well as some community events here in Enköping.  In the past I might have laid too much emphasis on thinking that getting to know and understand my focus would come through being able to give it a word or phrase.  I thought that if I could know and understand what my focus – “theme” –  was (in a verbal form) then I would be in a better position to develop it.  I thought that if I could reason why I should make something, if I could understand my motivation to invest in making something before I even began making it, then I would be on the right track.  It is as though I wanted to make visual art that could also exist in another (linguistic!) form. My role is to make and to make things that are experienced in their artistic reality.  I do not want to feel that I need to justify what I do.  Perhaps I became confused between ‘justifying’ and ‘explaining’.  I am going to see if I can not be more confident in explaining what I want to do and less worried about justifying what I want to do!

Ambitions for the coming year:

• Extend and develop Following Eugène.  Mr Dandy Blue’s Room: an installation – planning, furnishing, creating an interior/environment for Mr Dandy Blue.
• Play with old sewing machines as material
• Seek exhibition and showing opportunities here in Sweden, in the UK and abroad.
• Investigate starting some community art projects here

The last point came to me when in the town centre last weekend.  The week before at the Christmas Market I heard a speaker (I missed the beginning so I do not know if they were from the Council or the Shop-keepers’ Association) talking about how vital it is keep the town centre alive.  I completely agree and think that with the growth of the physical out-of-town retail parks and the ease of on-line shopping that town centres need to offer something other than just shopping.  I think that they need to be culturally vibrant as well, and to offer experiences that capture both the hearts and minds of people.  Last Saturday the town streets were wet, dark and dismal by 2.30pm!  Most shops only are only open from 11am to 3pm on Saturdays (even in December!) and some close at 2pm!  The tail end of a storm made the skies dark even earlier than normal and the Christmas lights seem to be on a time rather than a light sensor.  There was nothing to draw people in to town, not when there are the bright lights and Christmas jingles of chain stores just a few miles away.  So it made me wonder if I should propose a lantern parade.  It could be a little like the ones I worked on in Bromley many years ago, with children from different schools making lanterns and then parading them through town, and a little like the brilliant community events that Birgitta organises on Årstfältet.

There are so many exciting and important things to be done, the only thing that there is a shortage of is time!

Tonight is the eve of the eighth anniversary of John’s death.  Eight years ago I (unknowingly) spent the final evening with the man that I love.  Not unsurprisingly John has been in my thoughts.  He would be highly amused to see me working on costumes for musicals – a type of theatre that was definitely more his thing than mine.  He would be shocked to hear me speak Swedish!  John had an amazing lust for life – something which is good for me to remember and to honour.  He was not one for sitting on the side-lines, and he was courageous, charming and passionate.  In being himself he made the world a better place and that is exactly what I want to do too – for him, for me, for us. That is my focus.

At last the studio is feeling like somewhere that I can work

It has taken longer than I expected and it is not yet totally as I want it, it is however much much better and well on the way to being a working space. Unpacking, re-packing and sorting has given me the opportunity to literally and metaphorically go-through things. I am pleased that I have saved not only documentation of realised works but also notes, proposals and sketches for “as yet un-realised” pieces too. Of course some of these are now quite dated, others maintain a certain relevance, and one in particular could be seen to have taken on a new significance since it was first drafted in the late 1990s! In the light of the very positive reactions that I received to the performative aspects of Following Eugène it was interesting to look at some of my earlier performances and live works. Finding notes and photos from the gay performance workshops and show that I and several other men did with Tim Miller at the CCA (Glasgow) in the mid-nineties(!) reminded me of the process that we used to devise a piece that combined autobiographical, cultural and historical content. Our ways of working were not so different from those that shaped Frozen Progress with Nic Sandiland’s Ambler group several years later. I want to develop something else out of the city walk and the subsequent short monologue at Fylkingen (Stockholm). Being unsure of what exactly it is that I want to achieve is exciting and means that the eventual form that the work takes will be shaped by the content and the process. At the same time I getting ahead of myself and am starting to imagine something quite theatrical with a set, props, lights and music. It feels important to allow something to develop between these realms of the unknown and the known – perhaps this is what all artists strive for.

Could it also be that my ‘new’ studio is influencing how I see myself working? After both the studio at Wip and the one in West Norwood it feels very different to be “working at home”. It is easier for me to imagine working on performative content here than it is for me to consider working on sculptural objects or even installations. In the longer term I do want to find a studio that feels more industrial and more suited to physical materials and fabrication, in the meantime perhaps this room in my flat is a good place in which to conjure up ethereal and fleeting scenes. It is not lost on me that I spoke of the significance of the artists’ studio on the Following Eugène walk. I wonder if there are rehearsal rooms to be found in Enköping?

Collage: the collage work of two American artists: Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) and Jess (1923-2004) makes me want to get out my scalpel and glue! Something for long winter evenings?

Do I believe that everything happens for a reason?

My journey back to Sweden has given me much to mull over.  What is essentially a short flight – about two hours fifteen – is of course just one part of the longer trip.  However on Wednesday the whole thing took an exceptionally long time, the total door-to-door time being a little over 12.5 hours!  During this time three particular things happened one of which resulted in nearly three hours sitting in a plane on the tarmac, and all of which would have individually struck me as noteworthy but somehow taken as non-related but sequential events they acquired a greater significance and offered fascinating glimpses in to others’ lives.

On arrival at the airport the man on the check-in desk asked if I would be prepared to take a later flight in return for some vouchers as the plane was potentially over-booked.  It was a good offer so I agreed.  Part of the deal was that I did not go through security until the last minute and in return for losing duty-free shopping time I got a lunch voucher.  I decided to spend this at Carluccio’s and took advantage of the lunch deal.  A nice waitress served me and as I was short of time I asked for my dessert and bill at the same time.  As she put my card in the machine so that I could pay the difference between the voucher and my bill she looked at me and with great serious said

“Now I have a big dilemma.”

There was silence and my mind scrambled to work out what I could possibly have done to have put this young woman in such a position.  Unable to come up with an answer I asked what her dilemma was.  Standing with my credit card in the machine so looked straight at me …

“I am seeing this man and we have not said it to each other yet but I love him and I want to say it to him but in my country it is not the woman who does this but I am ready and want to say it.  The man must say it first and the woman must say it back, that’s the way it is, but he has not said it and I want to say it, I love him.  What should I do?”

Her earnestness and the directness of her question took me by surprise.  I had only a minute or two before I need to be back at the check-in desk and to get to security if I was still booked on the earlier flight and yet here was this stranger asking my advise on what could be of vital importance to the rest of her life.  After a few seconds of waffle and a brief exchange of details about where she and he boyfriend both come from – Poland – I said that she should tell him.  I explained that I thought it better that she be clear and open about her feelings (despite her cultural traditions), that if he did not feel the same or was outraged by her saying it then it was better to know sooner rather than later.  I quickly put my card back in my wallet and grabbed my coat and bags, she started to take the order at the next table.  As I turned to leave I looked over to her and wished her good luck.  She beamed back and said thank you.

It seems very unlikely that I will ever know if Anna tells her boyfriend that she loves him either without waiting for him to say it first or not.  In hoping that she does, and that he not only says the same but respects her courage and honesty, I realised that many of the conversations that I had Kim while I stayed with her were about being true to oneself and taking risks.  It seemed fantastically appropriate that I should be given such an obvious, virtually cinematic, opportunity to give a stranger the advise that I so often need to give myself.

30 minutes later I was boarding the original flight feeling slightly cheated that I got neither ‘bumped’ to the next plane nor the significant amount of vouchers to use on future flights, and yet at the same time it felt good that Anna and I had had our brief but intense encounter.  If I believe in fate I could suppose that I was never meant to get on the later flight, I was supposed meet Anna.

And so we began to taxi towards the runway.  I thought that things were taking longer than normal and as we continued to taxi along turning off the runway approach and on to a remote stretch of tarmac the pilot made an announcement.  A passenger had been taken ill and paramedics would be attending, in the meantime we would be waiting here.  It was the first time that I had heard such an announcement and I found myself wondering what kind of ‘illness’ could come on so suddenly.  As an Archer’s listener I know only too well what happened to Granny Heather on her journey from Prudhoe to Brookfield.  Stroke? Heart attack? Whatever struck my fellow passenger it must have been unexpected and serious.

While waiting I read a little and then decided to take a nap.  I do not think that I was asleep for long (if at all really).  When I opened my eyes I noticed that the man in the seat diagonally in front of me was holding his phone so that I could see the screen.  He looked to be in his thirties, casually but well dressed, good looking in a traditional clean-shaven middle-class kind of way.  He had sent a selfie to someone – for some reason I read the text that he sent with the picture.  In it he referred to the man asleep behind him – and I could see from the photo that that was me!  For a few exchanges he and his friend discussed me!  I was apparently “sleep-neighbouring” him.  Though their conversation moved on I continued to read the texts from over his shoulder.  If I had not seen that I had been mentioned I would have stopped myself from doing this, however I felt as though I was already involved so …  I know that I was being spoken ‘about’ rather than ‘with’ but we were still stuck on the tarmac and I was trying to work out the man’s relationship with his correspondent – the top line of his screen told me that it was “Tracy London”.  Their texts were chatty and a little flirty.  Things became more interesting when he swiped away from Tracy on What’sApp to send a text to Emilie.  He carefully explained to Emilie that he was held up on the plane, said he would be arriving late, and signed off with five x’s.  He returned to his chat with Tracy and asked if there was any chance that she could send him a selfie, before she had time to reply he suggested that hers could be a “cleavage shot”.  She demurred on grounds of what she was wearing.  Suddenly the captain’s voice filled the cabin.  The passenger, their family and luggage were now safely off the plane and we would be taking-off soon.  We were instructed to switch all handheld devices to flight-safe mode.  The man in front of me sent a final message to Tracy and put away his phone.  As he ran his hand through his hair I noticed the wedding ring on his finger.

I had received impressions of three separate and distinct lives, each of which gave me something to think about in relation to my own:

• You cannot expect other people to know what you are thinking if you do not tell them.
• For good or bad the unexpected and uncontrollable happens.
• Life is a simple or as complex as we want to make it.

I can not help myself – when engaging with something new I turn to books. This time I am trying to track down books on creative uses of feathers. As yet there seems to be very little on the subject other than the catalogue that accompanied the Birds of paradise exhibition at the Fashion Museum in Antwerp. (On leafing through the book recently I spotted a consistent mis-naming of a particular feather which made me wonder whether if it was a genuine mistake, an over active auto-correct function, or carelessness.) I treated myself to three books at Foyles though none of them are exactly what I was looking for: one considers the soci-cultural images, myths, and legends of various birds hroughout history; another examines the evolution of the feather from a biologist’s standpoint; the third is “visual guide to the structure and anatomy of birds”. All of these books touch on creative uses of feathers but I thought that I might find a more comprehensive volume looking at feathers in artistic practices.

So on Saturday I took myself off to the National Art Library at the V&A. I have never been there before and I have to say it is quite an experience! I was surprised and delighted at how many people were there on a fine autumn weekend. It is a wonderful place with helpful staff and what must be an incredible stack/store as it takes less than an hour for requested books to be available. I found four books in their catalogue that seemed relevant though I wonder if that has more to do with my abilities to come up with ‘keywords’ for the catalogue’s search facility. In my mind I have images of strange victorian confections of feather flowers presented along with taxidermed birds under glass domes. But how do I search for something like that? What did come up was a book documenting the commercial and industrial aspects of plume-making in France! Published in 1914 the book lists and illustrates the range of feathers available at that time, a list that is certainly not available now! I was interested to see how many terms for the plumes are the same as Tim uses – the language of feathers seems international, or perhaps acknowledges the supremacy of france and french in the fashion industry. Diagrams of various machines for the treating of feathers, and the exprot/import tables, made me realise how large-scale the operations must have been in the past. The book was fascinating and it was a real treat to be able to look at it. As I mentioned I had not been to the library before and the way in which the book was presented by the librarian had perhaps primed my curiosity and wonder. The book was classified in the special collections which meant that I was invited to look at it at particular and considerably smaller group of dark-wood tables, each reader’s place was denoted by a large grey cushion on the table top. The librarian placed the book on the cushion that I quickly understood was there to support its spine when I opened it. I spent a very happy hour leafing through a book in which, despite not speaking french, I found both the familiar and the new.

Last week I saw Prem Sahib’s shows at the ICA and Southard Reid. I didn’t know his work and went along based on a short article in a copy of the Royal Academy magazine. I liked the work and am thinking of going over to the Barbican to see the work of one of his friends and collaborators Eddie Peak. The ICA has re-instated its “day membership” – a brilliant idea that means it costs £1.00 to see the show. The ICA was one of the first, if not THE first, contemporary art venue that I started going to when I was a teenager. I remember seeing a Rosemary Trockle show there – I must have been 17 or 18 which would make it about 30 years ago! It was great to be back there and feel a familiar sense of excitement and curiosity.

On friday evening I was able to accompany Kim to the RA and join her public talk in the Ai WeiWei show. It is amazing how popular the show is. It must surely be the art event of the year. Kim and I have been discussing both the artist and the work over the last few months as she prepared for the show and has been giving tours to both school and public groups. What I really apprecaited was Kim’s skill at presenting the pieces as outcomes of both artistic and activist commitment. The work is wonderfully material, and the materials and forms are beautiful, whereas the popular image of Ai Weiwei seems more concerned with the stories around his detention and treatment by the chinese authorities. The show is impressive not least for the way in which takes on the scale of the RA galleries – it is one of the few one person shows that really sits well in those grand rooms. Kim and I continue to ponder why the show is so very popular – we can’t believe that it’s because of the actual artworks, however if the cult status of Ai Weiwei gets people interested in art and shows them how artists work through personal, political, and philosophical issues then it is all to the good!