Fuck it, I'm going to blog more

Anyone watching Mad Men (obsessively like me)? I'm even feeding the habit peripherally through re-watching movies such as North by Northwest, The Apartment, and reading this book:


It tries to show how much things were changing in the mid-late sixties via an in-depth study of the development and production of the five movies nominated for best picture Academy Awards in 1967. It's a really good read. Super-well researched. Anyhoo, I digress.

There's an episode where Kinsey has this great idea (supposedly; I'm sceptical) but he's drunk and doesn't write it down and thereafter continually regrets the loss of the (supposedly) best idea he's ever had. The 'moral' being, write it down. That's the moral I'm choosing to take in this moment, given that there was something I needed to write down, which triggered the memory of that episode, so I've retrospectively assigned that moral to the story. I can't even remember how it was needed for the narrative. Oh yeah, I think it was to show how good Peggy is relative to her peers at coming up with ideas.

My old friend Rommel said something once about not writing all those ideas down, and getting stuck in yesterday's stale ideas and re-churning them. Put them away (or something), he says. Go fly a kite.

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.

What a swell party

Topics of conversation tonight included:

*Which Jane Austen character are you most like?
*Does reading Archie comics as a child give you unrealistic ideas about what teenagerhood will be like?
*The emphasis on scatology in French culture
*Cost/benefit analyses in everyday life and 'Freakonomics'
*Hill End
*Sideways [film]
*The woman who gave birth to rabbits (fake!)
*The possible formation of a photographic lighting ownership cooperative

I can't remember any more. There was a lot of wine and food and goodness.

That is all.

Post title

My blog has got heaps suckier lately. It's not specific enough. Gotta work on that.

Must. Push. Envelope.

I had this great idea for an exhibition today as I was walking down Cleveland St on my dinner break. Well, I thought it was great at the time, I still think it's very fine. In about 24 hours I'll think it's really banal. In about two weeks I'll know if it's stupid. If I still want to do it in six months it might get done. So entrenched is the procrastination; so essential is the forward planning.

Anyway. My idea. [Oh - it's been all built up now.] I would hire a visual merchandiser to install the works for me in the best way that they could. In a window space, of course. They could use whatever fancy techniques they have. I would give them a bunch of Fimo objects and off they could go. And I could, like, audition different people by asking them to describe on the phone what it is they do. I could record what they're saying and then make a wowie zowie superficial and graphic animation that would illustrate what they're saying. This video would show all by itself inside the gallery.

I think I'm going to pitch this to someone. I like it.

My art ideas are like dreams and my dreams are like art ideas. I suppose that's because both happen in my head.

Ho hum.

I have been thinking a lot about Adrian Mole lately, the TV show specifically. I really think it was very good.