A FACE ON WHICH TIME MAKES BUT LITTLE IMPRESSION
Since I was last a member of Artists Newsletter (2015) I have completed a PHD and a son has been born to me, almost simultaneously. I have also been working at a London University as a dissertation tutor and contextual studies lecturer (Senior) for design students. But now at this particular institution dissertations don’t exist anymore.
The phd was all about making and mending machines and when I finished, my thumbs hurt so much I never wanted to assemble another one ever again. So, since 2018 my work has largely eschewed the physical and machines were replaced by gifs (another machine of sorts). And now seven years later I have become ambivalent about this exchange.
This month (some might say) in an act that flies in the face of good sense I have decided to resign my Senior Lectureship and take a new smaller post on the fine art course in my hometown. Here I will be teaching analogue and digital sculpture, a subject so interstitial as to be almost ungraspable. The slowing of pace I hope to achieve from this decision resembles the procession of a distant airliner (Which I have just glimpsed taking off from City Airport) and the white surface of its road which remains almost as clear as ever.
My ‘career’ has continued its trajectory over the years of my hiatus. I have been in some exhibitions and been rejected from others. Much of my production latterly has been made for or despite the Instagram algorithm and I have become fed up, indeed overstuffed with social media and its ‘mean’ (Hito Steyerl) images. Now emerging like a tape worm from an overly dry corpse I find myself yearning for something riper. This blog –and its fitful twitching – is an attempt to stitch together a physical body of work from the various excursions and diversions of my practice – who knows I may even apply for funding.
‘I’m pleased announce… I’m delighted that… I’m excited to be involved…’ so goes the declaratory mode of social media. Iceland is calling. One of my films has been selected for screening in the Sluice Film Festival. The film entitled ‘Word of Important events’ is one of an experimental (for me)body of works that I am very unsure of. They are long (for me) and more narrative than previous efforts. Also they have never garnered much interest when posted on instagram. Despite, or perhaps because of, this I had decided to enter them into a number of film festivals to see how they do. I’ve shown work in Iceland before many years ago in the 700IS Experimental Film & Video Festival, Culture Centre of Fljotsdalsherad, Egilsstadir. (2007). This year it will be in a cinema in Seyðisfjörður. In 2008 I also received a text from Iceland and thought I had made it big. It turned out to be an offer on chicken nuggets.
I like the antonyms to ‘rigorous’ they are a good fit for my research processes:
In my pursuit of writing around the afterlife of images I’ve been reading Elias Canetti’s The Human Province, I love its aphoristic style, and hope some of it will rub off on my writing. Here are two quotes I find interesting:
The object of archeology is a whole new kind of future. It is retrograde; every new step it takes into the past, every older grave it finds, become a piece of our future. The ever-older becomes what lies ahead of us. An unexpected discovery could change our own, still uncertain destiny.
(Canetti, 1978:159)
At the funeral, the coffin went astray. The mourners were hastily shovelled into the grave. The corpse suddenly emerged from ambush and threw a handful of earth after everyone into his grave.
(Canetti, 1978: 261)
I’ve been frantically entering one of my films ‘Incunabulum’ to various film festivals in the vain hope someone will say they like it.
This is my last early morning train journey to London. I like to sit in the vestibule of the bicycle carriage and watch the cyclists jockey their mounts into their stalls. Many years ago I met a curator crocheting on this train. She was horrified that I was about to embark on a PhD and foretold the end of my practice. I already had an uneasy relationship with research so her prognostication tickled my unease. Forgive me I am tired.
Breaking the Narrative was a group exhibition curated by the painting duo Broughton and Birnie. It sought to understand how artists were responding to the myriad images that now bombarded them via social media. My contribution involved hastily cobbled together assemblages supporting frantic animation. I also wrote an essay for the catalogue which contained this piece of found writing.
Incunabulum
All images are dead! We are Necromancers, we tickle the dead! We conjure the spirits to arouse the living.
All images are undead, revenant forms of exanimate matter. The spirits conjure us to arouse the living.
The Necromancers’ studio is the graveyard and the curtained room. We scratch in the mud and send images to the heavens. Cthulhuian and aetherial, we produce monstrous hybrids and wispish phosphenes in the funk of seclusion.
We hold that there are four supreme vectors of the undead image re-embodied in the recursive flow of the inverted ankh ☥ (U+2625 ). These vectors are personified in the romauns of the vampire, the ghost, the zombie and in death’s drogue, the gravestone.
The gravestone is undeniably the most material of the vectors of unlife. Its role is to trans-port the corpse beyond the lost realms of past and future into the eternal historical present. The gravestone crystallises corpses into data. Solid state bodies, stacks of information. The Necromancer collects, weighs and taxonomises this flesh made too solid. We present it under lit glass shimmering with glyphs.
The anachronistic and bloodily present vampire image begets imitations of itself. Pale variations of former glory flit insubstantially, bite deeply and move on. More master than servant to the Necromancer, the vampire image’s power increases during night mode.
The autopoetic zombie image adds to the horde. It follows the calls of homogeneity and multiplicity. Repeating, crowding, welcoming, the zombie’s power lies in the trollish mob. Eating is creation, thought is replaced by function. The Necromancer can do no more than release this automaton and observe.
The ghost image is a lost wanderer. It’s strigilant voice barely reaches the living. It is an itch in the mind’s ear, disconnected, repeating, calling. It is both insistent and impotent. To summon a ghost image is to do nothing.
We, the Necromancers, will birth anti life matrices for each vector of the un-living image. We will craft proto-celestial machines and become their conscious slave organs! Machines of reoccurrence! Revelling in their unending death throes, rattles and spasms! Rocking mad elephants pounding heavy hammers of light!
It seems my introductory post was not entirely true.
