Just over a year I showed two artworks made under the broad title of Following Eugène: the first was the installation of a glitter carpet in the original navy bath house building on Skeppsholmen, the second an artist’s walk informed by locations on Eugène’s Södermalm. Now I find myself beginning to conceive of the next chapter.
Over the year I have had several ideas but none that really grabbed me, or that seemed to have more than an obvious air of superficiality to them. It could be said that the idea that is now starting to form has been eight years in the making; or rather that the idea extends, and returns to, some thoughts that were seeded by Patrik Steorn’s Queering the Archive project for Euro Pride 2008 (Stockholm). The idea also picks up on some aspects of my looking at Eugène’s life and work that simply did not fit, or sit, earlier. Nor is it impossible to ignore the sudden flash of inspiration that came about and joined the dots between my own life, Eugène’s male nudes, and short but very pertinent exchanges on Instagram relating to my visit to Västerås Art Museum and the show of Carl von Platen’s photographs.
As an aside, I notice how difficult it is to give an accurate account of the events/thoughts that lead me here. Would I ever be able to claim that they might be termed as a ‘research methodology’? Is it useful to spend time shoehorning my process in to a format that might satisfy someone else’s idea of an acceptable methodology? Or is it simply better to flow my gut feeling and explore where the ideas take me? Gut exploration wins! Methodology is cold, art is hot! Going with ‘hot’ as in ‘hot and sexy’, research is rarely sexy. Re-working my previous considerations of the emotive differences between the terms research and exploration I considered a much more personal sentence and tried it with both words …
Your lover whispers ‘I want to explore your body’
Your lover whispers ‘I want to research your body’
(Is it just me or does research just sound too creepy in some contexts?!)
Diagram/mind map:
As it stands now – develop work that explores and expands the above connections. Develop a Eugène WOD?!
