DNR
The VAULT Gallery, Lancaster, UK
60-62 Church Street
April 9th – April 23rd
Preview 7pm Thursday April 8th
unrehearsed theatrum mundi
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An Excerpt from the exhibition Text I’ve just written for Ben Jeans Houghton’s
On ARKA
1st – 14th April
Moving Gallery
67b Westgate road, Newcastle city centre, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
” What’s in a name?
If we were to trace the etymological roots of the title On Arka we may be led to believe that it belongs to two (diametrically opposed but simultaneous) modes of being. The ‘ARK’ (minus the ‘A’) is a concrete noun ascribed to a place of refuge or security. It resonates to the biblical portrayal of Noah’s Ark, the boat built by Noah to preserve himself, his family and two of every animal from the floods (Genesis 6:19). Or the mythical Ark of the covenant, the vessel said to have been constructed after the commandment of God, as a container for the Stone Tablets onto which Moses carved the ten commandments (Exodus 25:10). But ARKA does not belong to the concrete, nor the figurative. While it acknowledges the parallels, the insertion of the abstracting ‘A’, ruptures the implicit meaning, making the title ambiguous and metaphysical. It is important to consider because the poetic title of the show prefigures the work which embodies a similar duality; a dialectic of infinite possibilities oscillating between the literal and the metaphorical, flux and inertia, and between existence and oblivion…”
http://www.benjeanshoughton.co.uk/
http://holeeditions.blogspot.com/2010/03/ben-jeans-houghton-on-arka.html
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54 days into 2010 already….
That is what I woke up feeling with acute gravity as I tried to emancipate myself from a brain fogged with illness this morning…
…..that and suddenly through the fog…. it’s time to regroup (and refocus).
The day to day experiments/ sketches I’ve been doing at home & work may ‘keep my hand in’ but they aren’t deliberately working towards anything specific (beyond survival). So I’ve decided to pull some threads together and begin a proper Project, with a proposal… and deadlines…. Here goes…
Working title: After the Ark
Deadline: May 24th 2010
Proposal
Since graduating in 2008 my work has been predominantly concerned with something disorientating or uncanny in the contemporary condition (Woodward, 2003). Before now, & with the Specula & Other Stories series of miniature paintings, the work addressed this in terms of a disturbance fermented through, and as a result of, the saturation of imagery in commodity culture. The work was culled from media imagery and referenced Baudrillard’s concept of the “Hyperreal”.
However, even before graduating the work had begun to prescribe, and adhere to, it’s own confined system of rules…
On reflection, this may have been an inevitable consequence of working towards the degree show i.e. the overbearing sense of needing to ‘consolidate’ or ‘conclude’ with a consistent body of work. But I feel what I was interested in, & trying to evoke, was stifled & diluted by this… Maybe even lost entirely. The paintings became an end in themselves, an enclosed, complete circuit. The entire visual & conceptual experience became contained in that miniaturized space.
…Since 2008 I have had the opportunity to develop & showcase new work(in exhibitions such as Through the Looking Glass…. & The Spaces Between etc and through residencies including BLOOM) but my critical awareness – & ability to see, and keep in mind, the larger aims and context – has been fairly nonexistent, so hopefully this proposal will give me the impetus & structure to make things happen….
Research
While my practical and technical research is a constant, and ongoing process through sketches, models, photographs etc, the theoretical impetus has been quite vague and satelliting around many different aspects of a ‘contemporary uncanny’. The research I propose to conduct, therefore, for this project is twofold;
Secondary Research – Revisiting the writing of Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Lyotard and Vidler regarding the disorientating effects of the specularization of society. But, from this, finding sources (literary, artistic etc) which refer to the end of time and reality.
What I’m increasingly interested in (especially after reading Man in the High Tower, The Road and Brave New World) is the notion of false mythologies, and looking at the present time as if through the perspective of a museum display or anthropological study e.g. the coke logo being seen as an embodiment of sacredness, or the reverence given to “original American artifacts” cf Phillip K Dick’s reinvisioning of history in Man in the High Castle. But I also don’t want to be too discriminating… In the past I have tried to contain my research to a neat segment of issues. With this project, I would like to take on board as many, various, and variable, influences as possible (which rather more aptly reflects the concerns of the project).
Primary Research – As the 12 week deadline allows very little time for experimentation (when balanced alongside full time employment and other responsibilities such as studio/exhibition proposals etc), I am going to allow 2 weeks for sketching and preliminary work (drawings, models, photos, etc) which will be loose, fast and unresolved. In 2 weeks time (the 11th of March) I will have an interim appraisal and plan towards some more resolved pieces (which can take longer).
Practical Work – Similarly to the research, it is my intention to work initially through a mishmash of 2D and 3D media; sketches, collage, found objects/ constructions (and drawing from these) but also if it seems appropriate to bring in any other media, I will do so. Hopefully this will encourage a fast, dynamic way of working through concepts…and by the end of the fortnight I will have accumulated a plethora of artifacts, pieces, sketches and ideas. I am going to begin working from a dream I had (mentioned in the January 1st Blog entry) about a dysfunctional (or mutilated?) Ark… and from here pursue this personal, distorted vision of a post apocalyptic future…
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Reflections on reflections and relationships
Over the last week I’ve watched (or listened to) this lecture by Helen Fisher a couple of times…
http://www.ted.com/talks/helen_fisher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat.html
It isn’t immediately related to my work, but does address much of what I’ve been thinking about over the last year… or perhaps my whole life to degrees…because, like every human (& every artist) relationships have been a perpetual aspect of life to balance (not always successfully) alongside a full time art practice…
In the talk Fisher addresses the subject of love from the perspective of an anthropological/ scientific angle. She describes love as “…a powerful brain system…one of 3;…the sex drive…romantic love…and attachment…” & explains how she believes these evolved as part of our genetic necessity to reproduce i.e. hunt out/ find a sexual partner, become absorbed with them in order to successfully conceive & then to stay together long enough to rear a child until it’s old enough to be safe/ fend for itself. Or, in her words, a brain system which “…evolved for us to be able to tolerate another person long enough at least to raise a child together as a team…”
It’s not my intention to deny or discount what is probably the most enthralling & mysterious of human conditions with dispassionate scientific reasoning, but… this idea of love as a genetic programme makes a lot of sense… why else do usually rational, intelligent human beings bind themselves in the yolk of a pairing which is, at least, fraught with differences & complications which must be negotiated, at most, unmistakably incompatible?…
And why are people so blinkered to the short comings and faults of those they have relationships with?… but not to others we share close bonds with (family, close friends, housemates etc)?…
…how is it that any of us, ever, think that colliding two individuals (with their individual personalities, foibles, beliefs, habits, dreams etc) together under the presupposition that they will stay together & love one another, will work??… Is this madness??… Mass human hysteria??*….
…(at this moment the phrase “the love bug” springs to mind & I imagine some kind of emotionally deficient parasite, infecting the brain & stimulating the endocrine glands in order to nourish + fatten itself on positive human emotion)….
But then again, how can this phenomenon be used to explain the love of other things?… of music, for example….(which, I often find can inspire feelings at least akin to those of love for another person)…..or tea, or art, or smoking, or words, or friends?….
….Fisher does offer some words of hope which are similar to a conclusion I’d started to arrive at myself recently….
“…we’re also seeing the return to an ancient form of marriage, equality…”
This is a pairing based on mutuality, something lasting beyond the intoxicating effects of desire/romantic love/attachment….
…maybe it’s not the same for everyone but when I look back at the ocean & tides of 24 years, those individuals whove been constant & lasting in their connections (& remain sources of great love and reciprocity) are all people who I’ve known outside of the bond of so called “love” in the traditional sense… that’s not to deny the possibility of lasting romantic relationships, I’m sure they exist, but I would also imagine what gives them the ‘staying power’ isn’t rooted in the effects of the initial hormone sodden mind…
This conclusion is both frightening and comforting. It’s frightening because – if it is the case that love is a term used only to describe genetically-prescribed, chemical effects of the need to reproduce on the brain – it harbours the notion that it won’t last… & admits to the possibility that monogomy is culturally (rather than naturally) conditioned.**
…But it is also a comforting conclusion to arrive at in as much as it illuminates the essential value of relationships (with anyone, not just partners), being based on something more sane, bilateral & benevolent…
We are inevitably fated to be unhappy animals… most of the time, anyway…..
…that may have all come out completely wrong, & I didn’t give any time to addressing what I intended, to do with Honey & Mumford Tests & reflecting on teaching/learning practices in art….but…oh well…. back to the course work…..
*Just try spending 3 years sharing a house with anybody you love & (I’m almost sure) you will be asking the same questions….
** As Fisher describes “…we’re capable of loving more than one person….”
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…a few conversations over the last couple of days have made me consider the place of writing and criticism within my practice… While blogging has spurred me to ‘produce’ things/ images for presentation every day, I’ve been increasingly feeling the vacuum which opens up when there’s no ongoing conceptual impetus behind these sketches & pieces… Obviously (rather too obviously) we make images as a means of communicating in an alternate lexicon to words, and the image’s potential for ambiguity & nuance is why I’m an artist and not a writer, but the textual accompaniment (or coexistence) with art work is crucial for so many reasons* that I feel it’s definately time to make some efforts to reestablish that equilibrium…
In the upstairs of a sticky & unpleasant smelling pub, a friend remarked how good he considered it was that “…the world is getting smaller”… He underlined this musing with the example of the iphone and applications which facilitate owners to essentially carry a mobile library of books with them, wherever they happen to be… another friend, who’d been looking increasingly uneasy with the direction of this approbation, interrupted at this point with the argument for the need of physical, tactile, tangible texts (the kind that have their history creased & stained into the pages, which smell like books, which you can annotate and leave bookmarks in, which you can remember through handling)… but which also (i should know) accrue library fines…
But this is where my first point of departure begins, namely the increasingly miniaturised interfaces through which we engage with the world… and the channels which facilitate this (nearly) new relationship…
I can’t deny that telephone, email (and now skype?) has facilitated people to make (or remain in) contact with people who are physically distant, which can almost exclusively be interpreted as a positive development… but, when our words, thoughts and identities become increasingly something online, removed from daily reality (the facebook status qualifies “What’s on your Mind”, life reimagined in tweets etc), does this lessen our ability to exist in real time?… or to embody a live moment or experience without the ultimate commentary/ status update, the reflection and re-presentation of it through the digital medium?…
There’s some haunting truism here echoing up from Baudrillard’s 1976 Symbolic Exchange and Death …
“…Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium… the real is volatilized, becoming an allegory of death…It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal…”
I love facebook. It’s a disgusting confession but… I really do. It’s a crutch which allows my normally socially inept self to talk to people I wouldn’t usually… to tell of states of mind/ experiences which would usually remain buried beneath all my reclusive, incompetent traits… to project an image of myself which is infinitely more astute, interesting and colourfull than the genuine article… In other words, to be the person I’d like to be in real life but could never concievably be…. On the other hand, I fucking hate facebook. The slavish resignation to all the above… the giving in to a life and personality which is so completely disembodied from the real, flawed reality of face to face interaction….
But, returning to the iphone… At the touch of a 6cm x 11cm screen we can access a world of information… but can we?… What the cencorship of google China underlines is just how much of the information we access online is increasingly institutionalised… And even before that, who writes and posts the majorty of websites?… I don’t know but would hazzard a guess it’s probably the more affluent, time-rich people with the best internet connectivity and education?… does this ‘world wide web’ diversify our potential experiences and perspectives?… or increasingly serve to affirm our western dominated viewpoints, consolidating and cementing what we know of the world through the existing media and circles we move within?…
I suppose I’m inclined to be an unrealistically romantic person who’d extoll the value of the tactile & tangible above virtuality, but not entirely, and not always. I just think, as with everything, it’s important to look at what we read and experience with a certain degree of questioning sceptisicm… because, of course, our weakest blindspots are the things and aspects of life which we take for granted…
*(that I’m not going to unneccassarily tackle here)
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