personality
We are 1 percent ourselves and 99 percent sociological. The personality is the mask you have to hide your essence. The mask is very difficult to discover. Everyone has reasons for protecting himself.
P. D. Ouspensky.
papermache & chicken wire, 130 x 160 x 90 mm, 2012
wine
How do I know that the dead do not regret their previous longing for life? One who dreams of drinking wine may in the morning weep; one who dreams weeping may in the morning go out to hunt. During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. And yet fools think they are awake, presuming to know that they are rulers or herdsmen.
Zhuangzi (translated as Chuang Tzu on a book I had – since lent & lost).
pencil in sketchbook, a5, 2012
i have been arguing the use of gallery space. seems like a direction-less argument. all space has its rules and ghosts and spirits. institutions on the other hand are nothing but a psychic bluff.
seeing the bauhaus exhibition in the barbican; peculiar to see those amazing pots & teapots & chairs behind glass. funny to see the place move from expressionist phase to utilitarian (to simplify it). great to see bits from the triadetic ballet though.
results
I know a lot before a start an action. I know a lot about the necessity of the general idea of sculpture, but I don’t know anything about the process in which the action will run. When the actions runs, my preparation works, because I am prepared to do a thing without knowing where it goes. You see, it would be a very uninteresting thing – it would have nothing to do with art – if it were not a new experiment for which I have no clear concept. If I had a clear concept of solving the problem, I would then speak about the concept and it wouldn’t be necessary to make an action. Every action, every artwork for me, every physical scene, drawings on the blackboard, performance, brings a new element in the whole, an unknown area, an unknown world.
Joseph Beuys. Interview with Kate Horsefield, 1980, as quoted in Energy Plan for the Western man – Joseph Beuys in America, compiled by Carin Kuoni, Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 1993, p. 73
mould
Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.
Antonin Artaud. Letter to the Chancellors of the European Universities. Collected Works, vol. 1, pt. 2 (1956, trans. 1968)
watercolour on paper, 420 x 297 mm, 2012
podge
pencil in sketchbook, a5, 2012
interesting comparisons in exhibitions. two exhibitions; both slick and look good. one clearly focussed and the other more of a hodge-podge. the one clever and the other largely (but not necessarily) expressive…
perhaps both are self conscious.
analogy
papermache on chicken wire, 2012
according to an analogy used by joseph beuys; the revolution should be like a slowly blooming rose.
general
Social and political issues in general seem to me fairly simple; the effort to obfuscate them in esoteric and generally vacuous theory is one of the contributions of the intelligentsia to enhancing their own power and the power of those they serve.
Noam Chomsky.
from a series of drawings taken from the cherubs on the hawksmoor church in greenwich.
cuts
Firebugs dragging their gasoline bottles
Are approaching the Academy of Arts, with a grin.
And so, instead of embracing them, Let us demand the freedom of the elbow
To knock the bottles out of their filthy hands.
Even the most blockheaded bureaucrat,
Provided he loves peace,
Is a greater lover of the arts
Than any so-called art-lover
Who loves the arts of war.
“Freedom for Whom”, Bertolt Brecht as translated in Brecht on Brecht : An Improvisation (1967) by George Tabori, p. 18
watercolour on paper, 420 x 297 mm, 2012
there are no short cuts. results take time, work, discipline & thought. ideas take research, patience, experimentation and practice.
how you do something is invariably as important as what is done. essentially there is no beginning, middle and end. no narrative.
naked
The law is simply and solely made for the exploitation of those who do not understand it or of those who, for naked need, cannot obey it.
Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera: Polly Peachum, in Act 3, scene 1, p. 74.
- pencil in sketchbook, a5, 2012
inspiration
spices: the right curry is the greatest inspiration.
