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.