Taking a stance (albeit small)

I am not ever again going to comment on Julia Gillard's hair or clothing. Even if I think she looks nice. If I think her new 'do is unfortunate I will not mention it. If I think she's looking better and better every day, I will not mention it. It is the least I can do. Yes, I know; the very least. When I notice how she looks I will notice myself noticing.

Coming up in September: Life Summit (unrelated).

*stand. not stance. Stand. I could just correct this in the title, but for some reason it seems dishonest.

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.

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".

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.

More on Martin Creed sort of

I quite like this one. There's a kind of art where you get painted into a corner by the history and possibilities of art, and it's so inhibiting that all you can do is something very simple or small.

Are we running out of possibilities, though? Surely not. Perhaps if you have fixed ways of thinking about things, then that might happen. A radical shift isn't so easy. maybe MC's work is not any kind of shift, but it's a kind of narrowing of the field.

I feel a bit like that sometimes.

Sometimes also I think I like works based on what I imagine making that work to have been like. I would like to have made this. I would have enjoyed it, I would also like to be confident enough with my practice to make such a work and classify it thusly (a work).

Maybe it's just about getting rid of all the limitations. But thinking is a discipline, you develop your own way of doing it, and without that limitation, I don't know if art is possible. Without limitations. Therein lies the paradox.

That's something to work towards: the courage to strip things back further, further and further.

OK, it's definitely leave the house time.

Things are looking up

- Feel less rutty (ie no longer in rut)
- Room tidied
- Breaking back of art projects
- Spring arrived!
- More work obtained (poverty fended off again)
- Haircut
- Quazillions of books mooched waiting for me to read!
- internet addiction subsiding (enabling life to be addressed)

In other news, it has been so long since I blogged that blogger has changed its interface in the interim. (Blog, blog; inter, inter).

Dream: 22/8/08

I made a massive cake that was an artwork. The cake was about my height, and it was round, like the chocolate cakes I used to make as a child. It was chocolate and it had cream in the middle. made it outside, and people watched me. I sliced it into ten pieces, or twelve. The division of the cake was a kind of performance.

Unfortunately people started eating the cake. I was alarmed, first that they were wrecking the work, and then realising they might be poisoned, but then I realised the main ingredient was flour so it was OK. I had to work out how to make a cake that would be more hardy and last longer, so I did research on how to combine the flour with more permanent materials. I used a huge cream filled cake-icer thing to make the curly cream shapes between the two layers of cake. The cream was made of a heated liquid plastic that cooled as soon as you applied it. At some point the cake became a pie and the cream went on top of it as though it were tomato sauce.

Now I'm hungry.

I don't feel like being an artist this week.