Sunday, August 30, 2009

Jemande musste Josef K verleumdet haben ...

What Christopher Hitchens says to do with Kafka:

... When I went to Czechoslovakia under the old Communist regime one day in the '80s, I thought to myself whatever I do, whatever happens to me in Prague I'm not going to use the name Kafka, I'm just not going to do it. I won't do it; it's so easy, everyone else does, I'm not going to. I'll write the first non-Kafka mentioning piece. So I went to this meeting of this then-unknown dissident, Vaclav Havel and various of his Czech friends and Slovak friends in an apartment in Prague and we thought that no-one knew that he had these visitors coming from America, but someone must have given us away because it wasn't long before the door fell in and in come police dogs and guys in leather coats carrying heavy electric torches and truncheons and so on, slammed me up against the wall and said, 'You're under arrest and you've got to come with us.' And I said - I thought of saying 'I demand to see the Ambassador', and I said, 'What's the charge?' And they said, 'We don't have to tell you the charge'. And I thought 'fuck. Now I do have to mention Kafka'. Totalitarian is a cliché, dictatorship is based on clichéd thinking, on very tried and tested uniform stuff. They don't mind that they're boring, they don't mind that they're obvious, their point is made and I thought 'Now you've made me, I know you're going to make me do it'.

Friday, August 07, 2009

Flailing about in the dark

There's also this:

It's an exhibition. Don't try reading the little bits of text, they're too small and I couldn't be arsed mucking about with preparing images properly. You should know by now that that sort of thing isn't what goes on in these parts.

On the show, though, I was down on my work, but the parts that insisted on not being able to be fixed knew better than me how to self-actualise their constituent selves into a successful work.

I was battling every part of it all the way, and it beat me, and I learned that I was beaten because the work itself is superior to my understanding of what makes it good (when it is). That's a little scary. But it can be no other way. My little brain isn't capable of logically following through to the conclusions of its instincts.

This is what makes it hard to write artist statements, but at the same time is what is the appealing mystery of, like, yanno, art. It needs to reach for something slightly further than your own understanding. Maybe.

I don't learn something from every project I undertake but I have from this... I don't know exactly what it is, but it's there somewhere.

Anyhoo.

Tom Polo is awesome, btw. He's good people.

OMG generic post title

I made florentines.

They are freaking amazing. Hence, I am the best pastry chef ever. Don't bother arguing with me, because you'll lose.

ION, I'm back in the studio, finally. Freaking about time. Not much excitement is going on there, but I'm working, anyway.

Such a Good Thing.