Month: January 2026

O Meteorite

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“When Commander Robert E. Peary was exploring Greenland in 1894, an Eskimo took him to a place near Cape York, where a huge metallic meteorite lay, half buried in the ground. For a hundred years this had been a source of metal for the Eskimo hunters, who used to break off pieces from the meteorite and fashion the metal into weapons and tools. There was still a mass of about thirty-seven tons remaining, and this was taken to the American Museum of Natural History in New York.”

‘Metals in the Service of Man’ by Arthur Street and William Alexander, Pelican Books, 3rd Ed. 1944.

Meteorites and their landing are always given significance. useful too.

“At the start, Peary was kind enough to my people. He made them presents of ornaments, a few knives and guns for hunting and wood to build sledges. But as soon as he was ready to start home his other work began. Before our eyes he packed up the bones of our dead friends and ancestors. To the women’s crying and the men’s questioning he answered that he was taking our dead friends to a warm and pleasant land to bury them. Our sole supply of flint for lighting and iron for hunting and cooking implements was furnished by a huge meteorite. This Peary put aboard his steamer and took from my poor people, who needed it so much. After this he coaxed my father and that brave man Natooka, who were the strongest hunters and the wisest heads for our tribe, to go with him to America. Our people were afraid to let them go, but Peary promised them that they should have Natooka and my father back within a year, and that with them would come a great stock of guns and ammunition, and wood and metal and presents for the women and children … We were crowded into the hold of the vessel and treated like dogs. Peary seldom came near us.”

Minik Wallace Petrone, Penny (January 1992). Northern Voices: Inuit Writing in English. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9780802077172. I got it here

I was leafing through ‘Metals in The Service of Man’ when this little bit of history cropped up. And a little light googling brought up some more context. Four Inuit died in the US and were dissected, their bones placed on display at the museum after a fake funeral….

A small piece of the colonialism in Greenland while doing some reading around industrialism. But any reading in our history will bring up similar grotesques. US or UK. Funny timing considering Trump’s recent comments on Greenland.

Digital drawing, 2026

On

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“I’ve long understood there is zero difference between me and a bug, or a bug and a river, or a river and a voice shouting above it. There’s no sense or meaning in anything. It’s nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures.”

― Béla Tarr

Rest in peace Bela Tarr. Such an incredible way he work. Dense, brutal and beautiful. He gives weight to everything he points a camera at.

Anarchism – at least these days – is the first point from which all systems of thought can be compared

Politics in art

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I found my self in a conversation about political art.

I think all things can be political – it’s best to take some sort of responsibility for your political values – but that’s pretty broad.

I’ve been filtering my art through my understanding of politics – rejecting some values & struggling to realise others.

Artists / art movements that claim political aims often hold things that are problematic in their values as well as their more interesting approaches – usually due to their egotism and chauvinism. The people and groups I admire whose work I would say hold interesting political values would be Asger Jorn, William Blake, W. G. Sebald, Patrick Keiller, Joseph Beuys, Alan Clarke, Donald Locke, Agnes Varda, Adam Curtis, a Korean group called Dansaehkwa and (with caveats) Surrealism. In musical terms I think hard be bop held some very exciting political values, as did krautrock, acid techno, reggae, musique concrete and Sun Ra. There are poets and writers as well but I’ll stop listing people.  Obviously they exist within their own cultural and social milieu but also they step beyond it I think – they create something richer, exciting, far more complex and more nuanced than uh ‘politics’. The commonality all these diverse people share is that they refuse to manipulate their audience, they totally refuse, and interrupt; status quo, at no point is it propaganda as applied by parties or personality cults. Though Beuys sort of became a personality cult, maybe there was some of that in all artists, and perhaps it’s unavoidable & to be filed with ‘how people want to see artists’.or maybe I’m making excuses for someone who wanted to create a new sort of politics – and maybe a new sort of politician, himself…. Anyway many artists are dropped or happily dive into personality cults, it ensures an audience and money stream, both otherwise quite hard to acquire.

None of them had simplistic political messages or went in for agitprop… & I think they all come under experimental which is important, experimentation towards open systems that enable action, creation, conversation….

These days it has become rather difficult for artists to work with and maintain values that do not feed our consumer society. The art world and the financial world share the same nervous system. advertising has taken on the methods of the Surrealists, and propaganda is the realm of bots – and everything is regarded as pose rather than anything substantial. Everything is spectacle / spectacle is great. Politics is reduced to catchphrases, empathy portrayed / taught as tourism.

The weirder part of political discourse currently is a different form of abstraction that comes with what Adam Curtis identified as ‘Oh Dear-ism’. Floating abstractions with meaning and without meaning, with conviction and without conviction – maintaining a static which makes action difficult. Makes decisions and informed analysis very difficult. Plus any action or analysis is lost in a storm of actions and analysis that are presented equally (by the media) – as though they exist on level playing fields, which masks just how inequitable the interests at play are.

I have to say – improvised music is one of the few forms that really shine in these weird touchy bleak times. 

The way things work – an unavoidable thing in exhibiting – is that there needs to be a narrative of somesort for us to attract visitors and memorialise it for our CVs. This means we have to scrutinise our methods and our aims and render them in words which follow patterns laid down by academics, bureaucrats and financiers. Essentially the bourgeoisie control the way we talk about the things we do; as well as controlling the spaces we exhibit in, the universities, grant funding, and because they stockpile property most ‘unofficial spaces’ are unavailable to us. Arty-bollox is a ridiculous extension of imperialism. And being ridiculous fits perfectly in with our Trump / Putin world of confusion, meaninglessness and bullying. The art world’s mix up of corporate speak and badly translated French philosophy is a blight.

Mine and Helen’s response to this has been to focus on what we can say that holds meaning. Politics is a cesspit. But political is broad enough to communicate to people some of our intent. My current approach is to bring together what Beuys called a ‘constellation of ideas’ disparate elements for a sort of anti-narrative. The whole may contain contradictions and a mixture of familiar and not familiar. Some things political some things favouring other values. But also an exhibition is an opportunity to bring people together. Uh should they turn up.

,I think also that we are experimenting, without many resources – there is always a danger of our experimentation not working. Not working can be that we and our visitors fail to engage – or it could be that mine or Helen’s work aren’t shown in their most effective light. Failure and success are feasible within one exhibition.