Air That Tickles the Throat

I have something lacking when it comes to talking about art – and it goes beyond impatience. In the pub I’m very happy to throw ideas around – similarly at pvs & exhibitions. Describing my own work, putting it into writing, I find gruelling, reductive…?

I’ve had people tell me it’s conceptual and I’ve had people tell me it’s figurative and I’ve had many conversations on what it means to be abstract. I’m not sure I find these terms greatly definitive – sometimes useful – but in conversation rather than absolutely.

The movements I admire are all in the dust – reviving the terms seems foolish, maybe furthering reductive processes on art language and joining the general cacophony of nebulous art speak.

What a thing is can change – things can be repurposed. To imbue a thing with meaning… requires what…?

I had an idea for an installation – take a gallery space in one of these big old art museums, calculate (hah – somehow) how much dust n cobwebs would’ve been cleaned out of it – in say the couple of hundred years of its lifespan – & return it. Ideally filling it up wall to wall top to bottom.

Growth out

rest your head (w.i.p.)

each paints have specific qualities – there’re rhythms – or that’s my experience. build up and cut back – create forms and then erode them, reveal and obscure – apply layers and remove layers. several paintings in varying states – working between each. In rhythms.

potentially a never ending process

Cut

The past has ideas

You can read more about Impington college here

This is an interesting study of Morris’s project as a whole from a website devoted to pedagogy.

Sebald visits a library on the south east coast built for the use of sailors, and it’s a comfortable, idiosyncratic affair. Impington college has its own library but for use of pupils and locals. It has community rooms and gardens for the use of locals. [According to my sister the community rooms are still community rooms] Before public libraries were common these made a huge difference to people’s lives.

Reading about the Bauhaus is immensely enjoyable – politics, culture, art, poetry, performance and philosophy and craft – all approached with equal seriousness – and sometimes uh fun. A little something on the bauhaus

Presently there is not much value placed on these things – they are period pieces and their ideas are curious but not actionable.

Roaming has merits

Crawl

Been out visiting churches – one in Impingdon and another in Chesterton (Cambridge).

The first had brilliant line work and repeated motifs of fruit and leaves decorating it. A large rendering of St. Christopher – popular amongst working people generally but I’d imagine quite appropriate to the people of the fens what with how unsafe the land was – St. Christopher being the saint of safe passage

The second I found less aesthetically interesting – characters were almost cartoons – like the whizzer & chips comic I read as a kid.t were filled with demons – a Doom painting. People pulling themselves out of graves. A good source for demons

Took some photos (instagram account for photographs) made some drawings – and then recreated them on the tablet.

Impingdon – in the company of my partner (Helen Cook) – had treasures. Impingdon village college – designed by Walter Gropius (first director of the Bauhaus) – beautiful building, enough to make me search it out online… I would very much like to have a proper look around. The Bauhaus is one of those moments in history I would love to visit – a crazy & fun sounding time – mixing arts n crafts with radical notions and modernist aesthetics… hm. Further on we followed some woodland off the guided busway – spotted a large variety of mushrooms, and a slime mould – ‘Wolf’s Blood’.

Chesterton has its charms – some bizarrely idiosyncratic approaches to architecture, some home made honey, a great butchers, and various gargoyles and sculptures on and around St. Andrews – dated 1400s and earlier.

Build with mudd

Protected: There’s vigour in this here despair

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Meekness

Our Interest of life and liberty is at your service; if you call for it, take it; we are contented to be prodigal of it, to satisfy the blood-thirsty spirit of any man in the Kingdom.

While we are in the enjoyment of these outward things, we use them as if we used them not, being free to throw them off at the first demand: we are as free to suffer, to be trampled upon, to hang and burn, as to enjoy that outward liberty which you (so seriously and resolutely) press after. I tell you, Sirs, suffering is our conquest; While we are ground to pieces under any power whatsoever, all this while we trample upon them: debasing is our exalting; in that which you call misery and calamity, we are more than conquerors: We dare meet you (even you, whose courage hath excelled, whose fierce countenance makes the earth to tremble, you who are the present terror of the Nation) and appear in a naked posture before you; yea, throw yourselves, lives, liberties, and all upon the edge of your cruelty; and we are sure, if you dare encounter with us here, we shall overcome you. Ah Sirs! When you see this way of conquest, you will throw your swords behind you in an holy despite and scorn; you shall lay all your honour in the dust, and by that sweet spirit of meekness shall destroy and subdue your enemies.

Joesph Salmon: ‘A Rout, A Rout‘ – available here: https://www.exclassics.com/pamphlets/pamph005.htm

Salmon is a member of a group ~ not really a group ~ but a loosely affiliated bunch labeled ‘ranters’. This was written in 1649.

The spirit of them is very much in the spirit of Blake.

Salmon is a soldier and speaking to other soldiers.

Never a sect as such but still they exist today under this title of ranter, represented by their writings (which I am enjoying) and some small references to them from notional allies in the diggers and quakers, and of course the persecuting authorities. the persecuting authorities insisted ranters on recanting as well as gaol time and a few of them did but with varying degrees of irony and conviction.

The book I’m reading is “A Collection of Ranter Writings”, ed. Nigel Smith, 1983 & 2014 but this wonderful website has reprinted them; https://www.exclassics.com/ in this amazing collection: https://www.exclassics.com/pamphlets/pamphcnt.htm

It’s worth remembering that a great deal of Blake’s obscurity of language and meaning was intended. Blake had a deep fear of being challenged in the courts – terrified of being forced into a legal system that was – maybe is – malign. Especially without the tools or support to deal with it.

In Blake’s time treason would be punished by death, and horrible punishments were available to the persecuting authorities.

The quote above, its content and its source and its audience. I wonder whether it could’ve been effective. A soldier speaking to soldiers. Language biblical and common. An idea of weakness and an idea of strength highly sophisticated and profoundly subversive.

I’ve been discussing these with a fellow student at St. Martins – Lucy (https://lucymoyesart.blog/). Do i think pacifism is possible. Pacifism is an essential element to the ranters and an essential element to Blake’s vision. Neither could be said to have succeeded in their aims or even held much influence in their lifetimes. Pacifism has to be a core belief

creation

following some of the themes of creation in ‘the book of urizen’

blake mixes in body horror to his creation myth – an interesting problem to solve in terms of my approach to the corporeal

his achievement is remarkable – corporal, spiritual, psychic and mythic…