Sigh

I am the worst procrastinator in the world. (Or do I mean the best?)

I just made Melting Moments, and I don't even particularly like shortbread.

Photophobia?

Man, have I got a corker of a headache.

I looked at lots of art today

Not much of it was terribly inspiring.

I'm confused again. I was over it for a few days, but I feel a little bit of confusion returning.

It’s okay for artists to make money… no, really, it is.

The title is the same as a Harvard Business School paper posted by NAVA on their website. It's kind of timely, given this blog's recent self-flagellation about art and purposelessness and ... well, all that stuff. I haven't read it all yet so I don't know if it's any good. I'm posting it anyway... because that's what I do these days. I post!

Here it is.

In other news, I just baked a cake.

Unprecedented! It's cooling as we speak.

UPDATE: I read that paper now ... most of it. I got annoyed after a while and stopped.

There's four left in the box/Eureka moments

Direct quote from source:

"A single grain of sand is not a heap; that’s obvious. A heap is a collection of things, you need several things to make it up. Two grains of sand isn’t a heap either; a heap is a collection of several things, more than just a couple.

The concept of a heap is fuzzy, though; there’s no precise number that marks the difference between heaps and non-heaps. It’s not as though 37 grains of sand aren’t a heap but 38 are. Defining precisely how many things one needs in order to have a heap is impossible.

This is what gives rise to the paradox of the heap (also called the “Sorites paradox”, sorites being the Greek word for heap).

Suppose that we have a collection of a million grains of sand. That is absolutely, definitely, undeniably a heap.

Because there is no precise number that separates heaps from non-heaps, removing a single grain of sand from a heap will never turn it into a non-heap. If you have a heap of sand, and you take away a single grain, then you still have a heap.

If you have a heap of a million grains of sand, though, and repeatedly take away a single grain of sand, doing so 999,999 times, then what do we have at the end of the process? Is it a heap or not?

Taking away a single grain of sand cannot turn a heap into a non-heap. We had a heap of sand at that beginning of the process. All we did was take away single grains of sand. Therefore what we have at the end of this process can only be a heap.

What we have at end of the process, though, is a single grain of sand, and, as we said at the beginning, a single grain of sand is obviously not a heap. The single grain, then, both is and is not a heap."

Master and slave

It's a bit blurry. Also craply made. Text reads, 'master' and 'exhibition copy'.

Media art!

Do you ever feel it's all been done before?

This Tom Friedman thingy is made out of 30,000 toothpicks. I was prompted by AG's comment that she likes things that look like they were fun to make. I agree, I do too. I covet the having made them myself-ness. I like things that look like they lead out of something that was efficient or made sense according to some unspoken natural law (the tapered shape of the end of the toothpick). I like to think of his play with a thing and discovery of what the natural properties of that thing are and where it should go, and then he takes it all the way there.

Cereal boxes can also have natural properties.


This is, like, the seminal Friedman work (IMHO, obvs). This is just made out of several identical cereal boxes. It's the thing in itself only more of it and bigger, and because of that vaguer. Like, the accumulation and aggregation of many equals more volume but less specificity. The trade-off for scale is lack of resolution; this is like a 3d jpeg. Blur = dilution of exactness caused by excessive multiplication. Too much same = no longer separately clear.

You can get all this from a thing that simply looks (ie is visual. As in, looks like only without the simile). There's power in something that can be seen and not said, but you can't explain that power by saying, because it's in the seeing not the saying. Things that can only be known by seeing are everywhere, in graphics, in photography, images of all kinds. In the dialectics of streets and buildings and trees and the light from the sky. But how can you explain any of that without the thing that is seen that is the explanation in and of itself? (Eh?) It's like the difference between doing and planning.

Yesterday I joined a small group of friends trying to help a collaborative pair of artist friends to workshop a long-running project they've got going on. Because of the kind of project it is (connected to a festival) with lots of planning time, they are researching and researching and trying to draw the work out of that. But they're blocked, stymied by what is a non-intuitive process for them. Can't make the leap from research to performance/work. From what it's meant to be about, to thing-that's-independent-of-all-else-but-itself-and-embodies-ideas-rather-than-illustrates-them. Which is what they normally do intuitively. We have so much to prove/explain all the time, it reduces our confidence just to do. It sounds so airy-fairy, intuition, but the thing is our intelligence as artists needs to be trusted (inc. by us) that we will be able to embody intelligentness (intelligence?) in the thing itself, in how the thing itself is executed, rather than in via how known a quantity it is before it is undertaken.

I'm struggling with this meself.

I seem also to be making a collection of works that are pieces of A4 paper.

I owe someone a nail. It's waiting patiently in my studio. It's actually nail plus these days. It's accrued interest. But not in anyway that undoes the inherent simplicity of nail as nail, fear not. It's just more practical now. Shall I show you? OK, hang on. Maybe next post.

More on this

A Goodreader's comment on the letters of Vincent Van Gogh:

"he was definitely not crazy, just someone who, sadly, was incredibly talented but got hit with an extremely severe mental illness:"

Heh. Not crazy; just had a mental illness.

It's like, one is medicalised, and the other means 'out of control'. But who exactly is crazy if not the mentally ill?

Anyway, whatever.

Procrastinatin'

I was cataloguing books on Goodreads, a task I allowed myself as a reward for finishing Dreams From My Father. A chance encounter with Spike Milligan on said site reminded me of how much I loved his war memoirs when I discovered them as a young 'un (teen). I mean to read them again, now. Soon praps. (Or not - I have to read according to the rules first). Anyway. I added a new category to account for his description of shellshock in the fourth of the trilogy (and his bi-polarness in general), which I called mental illness. Then I needed to go through all my 'read' books (I know, I know) and mark up the other books with that tag. This proved a problem; is (for example) The Virgin Suicides about mental illness? They all killed themselves - something must have been going wrong in their brains, right? Or what about American Psycho? Does he have an illness? Is sublimation an illness? Or nihilism? What constitutes a mental illness anyway? How about Louis Riel? Is going a bit nuts not a rational response to oppression? And maybe his vision was true, truly from god - who am I to say?

Anyway, the anti-climax here is that I changed the label to the more inclusive and unreconstructed 'madness_mental illness', which allowed me to tag tales involving things like depression and OCD.

This labelling thing is a lark, innit. In the words of Sandra Bernhard, "don't label me: I'm a people person".

If I gave up art

I could
* spend more time with my friends and family
* save money
* read more books
* learn (a) language/s
* be more interested in my job, which is not uninteresting, and do it better
* take up a proper exercise program
* cook more and hence eat better
* take up sewing, crochet, carpentry, or any other skill or craft
* be at peace


It's a theory, anyway.

Progress on Rules

Today I had to exercise some self-control. In keeping with the new rules, I did not buy either of the two books I was considering at Gleebooks second-hand.

I will probably long for them for a couple more days, then I'll be over it.

If not, I'll go back for them in blatant disregard of my commitment.

Our apartment is bitterly cold today, despite the sun outside. Studio calling! (There's a heater in there.)

Statistical negligibility

I just did a double take upon closing my Blogger window at the new tab, 'monetize'.

WTF?, I asked myself.

Apparently I can put ads on my blog. It claims:

"AdSense for content automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads (you can choose both text or image ads) that are relevant to your audience and your site content—ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful."

Curious, I thought. My readership is so low and my content so negligible that I cannot imagine what the ads would contain that could possibly make them relevant. I'm almost tempted to do it, just to see what Adsense makes of La Di Da.

It would like having the blog reviewed by a bot. Automated interpretation: intriguing.

OMG

Four. Days. Off.

This pleases me.

I must not waste the next three like the first.

My return to blogging has thus far been kind of banal, of late in any case. I suppose it was often like that in the old days anyway.

Tomorrow may well be a less banal day, as well as being at the very least another in the series. (Of days.)

Rules

I'm making some rules.

I'm not allowed to buy any more books until i read at least a third of the ones I've got waiting. Opportunities to buy graphic novels or illustrated art books at highly discounted prices (ie in an op shop) don't count in that rule. No more novels, or Amazon and its ilk until I get through the backlog.

What else?

No more spending without reference to my new Financial Priorities list. Food and drink and the like are exempt from the rule. Also art supplies.

I will turn off the power at the wall in our lounge room whenever I think of it and it's practicable.

Because the rules are public I will have to stick to them.

Don't make fun of my rules. I know they're small, but they're a start.

A start of what, I hear you ask? I do not know.