Working Title:
Risen on the Edge.
This provisional title is a phrase of my own origination. I will be using William Blakes ‘Book of Urizen’ as a centre piece to study. While Blake offers a vast array of possible fruitful banners, it’s important to ground the work in my own words, potentially allowing multiple voices into the language of the work. Rather than focussing pedantically on Blakes existing (and canonical) piece of language, and risk being drowned in the values attached to his figure and literature. The phrase nevertheless picks up on prominent Blakean themes, principally to do with the figure of Urizen (from his The Book of Urizen, 1794). ‘The Edge’ is — possibly, or potentially — an horizon; to rise also calls back to Blake’s figure’s name. To be on the edge, is a condition of instability, both mentally for a subject, and in relation to the imbalance or un-centeredness of external objects (things that are ‘on the edge’ are potentially dangerous or unsafe – physically and mentally). The notion of ‘rising’ is also a familiar mainstay of the language of revolution. The contemporary phrase ‘edge lord’ could also be invoked and the distasteful meme politics which the idea of the ‘edge lord’ – & it’s there I locate connections to ‘strong man’ politics narratives – something that may be an interesting reference point later. The aural structure of the title has a pleasing balance, one that belies its internal instability or its prophetic potential for disaster.
Aim 1 Researching British dissent and its place in anti-capitalist / anti-empire resistance.
My interest in the tactics and symbolic violence of the strong-man figure will draw on a close reading of William Blake’s Book of Urizen, where similar motifs persist. Blake’s ‘prophetic book’ (his own term) offers a rich text for the origin story.
Visiting churches in the East of England that have surviving wall paintings and graffiti to acquire images, textures and icons, and exploring the local landscapes for sources of folk legends, micro landscapes, landscapes of decay and architecture that can be woven into the artwork.
Unknotting the contemporary arguments for oppression, discussing the place of antinomianism in historical and current British political discourse.
Allowing for absurdities and off topic detours.
These approaches to history, myth and landscape will lead into the second aim, taking specific subjects and working them up into paintings.
Aim 2 A series of paintings / drawings / prints.
Create time for contemplation and listening, adapting some of the antinomian approach to create paintings of quietude and unease.
Apply anti-narrative and experiment with surrealist techniques to combine philosophy, history, found objects and paint, alternative models for consciousness. Looking at how time is used in painting – exploring it further in my own work.
Test out materials for best use – I have extensive knowledge and experience with which to use as foundations for further experimentation in making paints and expand my knowledge into creating pigments from local (sustainable) sources.
Testing how to mix up diverse ideas, values and subject matter across the paintings – allowing me to blend times and restructure space to frame motifs and relate landscapes and events.
Context (Including Historical, Contemporary and Theoretical Contexts):
Immediate context is empire, climate disaster, disaster capitalism plus the continuing heavy increases of hierarchical oppression and poverty, media overload, constant deluge of information (false / weaponised). visibly enforced hegemony. Examples of ‘strong man’ figures include Putin, Trump, Farage, Bolsonaro, Berlusconi…. People who weaponise cults of personality, who speak and act in lurid, broad-brush, belligerent gestures, to capture the news cycle, and manipulate and intervene violently a fractured and degraded mass media environment. As someone whose presence and philosophy would violently stymie the growth of antinomian movements, killing major figures and criminalising antinomian literature, the figure of Cromwell is an apt precursor; a possible connection from then and now.
Conduct research and access historical documents in the Cambridge university library, British library, amongst others, on specific historical individuals including Boehme (Behmenists), Fox (Quakers), Reece, Muggleton (Muggletonians), F.H. Maberley (local campaigner), E. Coppe (ranter), G. Winstanley (Diggers / Real Levellers). Following Blake’s antinomian tradition in dissent – picking up on writings by the Levellers, the Ranters – possible further research into Quakers and Swedenborg. Possible local connections – local battles against oppression – struggles against the enclosures and the poverty laws.
Taking an approach to time from literary sources specifically ‘Proust’ by Samuel Beckett,’The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ by Lawrence Sterne, ‘Rings of Saturn’ by W. G. Sebald and film sources Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson in Ruins’ Luis Bunuel’s ‘The Milky Way’ and Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’. In terms of painting reference points will be Asger Jorn, Anselm Keifer, and Thierry De Cordier. Sharing some commonalities with hauntology and psychogeography and folk horror but not so introverted or detail driven.
Poetry from William Blake, J. H. Prynne, John Milton, Kurt Schwitters and Thomas Hardy.
A broader context is that of experimental music – I trace influences of Delia Derbyshire, Cabaret Voltaire and Elaine Radigue for adapting found material for work. As well as the contemporary ‘improvised music’ scene, improvising / seeking values and behaviour from a strong base of techniques and information.
Methodology:
Building the project towards a cardinal number of finished works, the idea that both a label (my title) and labeled things (my works) could mutate or change, is deeply linked to my guiding interest in the complex antinomian tradition (from the Greek anti- ‘opposite, against’ + nomos ‘law’). My personal ‘nomos’ of a title and a supportive rubric, is something I will have to take care to challenge in my own work as it unfolds, despite the useful temporary armature of stated goals and aims. Scepticism of declared motives, and operating under the radar of set practices or forms of observation, is in tune with a nebulous antinomian agenda, in the widest sense possible. It is also a means of keeping my own practice from falling into the trap of a set rubric, as my ideas (and my historical researches) evolve.
‘The Book of Urizen’ is a creation myth – giving allsorts of opportunities to devise and explore creation myths of my own as well as evolutionary and geomorphic studies.
Art practice functions and relates in modules, interconnected and disconnected according to where ideas take me. My thinking has a rolling momentum. I’ll leave ideas incomplete if that’s the state they should stay – or I feel words cannot relate the whole idea sufficiently so sentences get left unfinished or notions are not fully explained / explored. Some things shouldn’t be explained – some things I’ll come back to later (maybe in years) and work through. I’ve been painting and drawing by building structures – and I enjoy leaving the forms incomplete – in a world where everything interrelates and all barriers are porous (or potentially porous).
The paintings – are intended to create quietude and unease. The paintings, the drawings require time – they exist in a state that is slow – values across the page change in ways slight — information is interrupted or subverted, colours are muted or thrown into relief. While the colour may be the only real hook to grab attention. I will use some colours to stand out – their purpose is to dazzle. Working this into a behaviour with in time so treating time as flat as the surfaces being used to paint – devising connections and moving between points in history as directly as contemporary values.
The connective tissue is largely supplied by the blog – and has been for as long as I’ve been running it (since 2010). The blog has become a repository of ideas, thoughts, quotations, information, work and theory.
Walks and photography and science books are useful research material, picking up colours and textures and shapes amongst church paintings, mosses, lichens, landscapes, architecture, graphs, charts, photographs and figures. I have been connecting finished paintings to their sources – placing photographs and sketches beside them (using social media – Instagram). I have rejected being so prescriptive in the past – but so for it has been quite useful, and I will persist – linking ideas to more solid and direct influences offers a potentially quite powerful link to historical / spacial points (whereas previously I liked to keep connections ambiguous).
My painting techniques are quite experimental – I use a lot of the Surrealists techniques – with mixtures of water based paints over rag paper. There’s a possibility of returning to oil painting and using found materials – to paint on & mix into paint. Experiment with materials, including oil painting – giving me an opportunity to mix in found materials and upcycle boards and used canvases. I would like to make my own paints – I have mixed up paints before – I would like to test out some ideas for creating pigments from local materials – possibly also a form of gum as medium. I would also like to recycle a large amount of paper I have to create new paper for painting on.
Outcomes:
A series of ten paintings, water based mixed media on paper, framed. Notations.
A series of ten paintings in oil paint. Notations.
18 digital prints in book form.
Like my main title, the undertaking to produce a set of ten pieces is also provisional. It’s a provocation to aim for a number of works that’s at once compact, but that offers a constellation of multiple different routes through, in any direction. Ten works can be arranged in a vast number of different orders, and resonate differently accordingly. The number ten has obvious resonances with ‘the canon’ and law (the Ten Commandments) but is ultimately just an arbitrary number; the first of double figures in our arbitrary base ten system.
Time:
Rolling – every 4 weeks a painting – with notes and title. Some paintings take a week some take twelve months – I have learnt that while I can challenge my systems and experiment with the time I will mostly need to let works gestate and unfurl at their own pace. I can only really work when I have a number of tasks on at once. Slow time, interruptions and diversions reflect my thinking and practise.
Bibliography:
‘Blake, W. and Kay Parkhurst Easson (1979). The Book of Urizen. Thames and Hudson.
Erdman, D.V. (1969). Blake: prophet against empire. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press.
Thompson, E.P. (1993). Witness against the beast : William Blake and the moral law. Cambridge England ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Blake, W., Keynes, G. and Mazal Holocaust Collection (1966). The complete writings of William Blake; with variant readings,. London, New York Oxford U.P.
W.Blake (2000) William Blake Complete Illuminated Works Thames and Hudson.
Morton, A. I. (ed.) (1975) Collection of Leveller Writings Lawrence & Wishmart.
Hill, C. (1972). The world turned upside down : radical ideas during the English Revolution. London: Penguin Books.
Gerrard Winstanley and Hill, C. (2006). The law of freedom, and other writings. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, N. (ed.) (1983) A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century Junction Books.
Frost, Joseph and Issac (ed.), The Words of John Reeve and Lodowicke Muggleton the Two Last Prophets of Our Only True God Jesus Christ (London: [printed by subscription], 1832
Priyamvada Gopal (2019). Insurgent empire anticolonial resistance and british dissent. London New York Verso.
Rosewell, R. (2014). Medieval Wall Paintings. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Sebald, W.G. (2020). Rings Of Saturn. S.L.: Vintage Classics.
Prynne, J.H., Kerridge, R. and Reeve, N.H. (2018). The oval window. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd.
Beckett, S. and Georges Duthuit (1970). Proust.
Sterne L. (orig. 1767) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1967) Penguin.
Carroll, L. ed. Gasson R. (1978) Complete illustrated Lewis Carroll. Jupiter Books.
Debord, G. (2021). Society of the spectacle. Critical Editions.
Knabb K. ed. & trans. (2006) Situationist International Anthology. Bureau of National Secrets.
Jorn, A., Aagesen, D., Helle Brøns, Baumeister, R., Foster, H., Harris, S., Henriksen, N., Holm, H., Kurczynski, K., Klaus Müller-Wille and Ohrt, R. (2014). Asger Jorn. Prestel Publishing.
Germano Celant, Anselm Kiefer and Annabianca, E.E. (2011). Anselm Kiefer : salt of the earth. Milano: Skira, New York, Ny, Usa.
Films:
Robinson in Ruins dir. Patrick Keiller 2010
Solaris dir. Andrey Tarkovsky 1972
Milky Way dir. Luis Bunuel 1969
The Creeping Garden dir. Tim Grabham, Jasper Sharp 2014
Websites:
reeddesign.co.uk. (n.d.). Medieval Wall Painting in the English Parish Church: A Developing Catalogue. [online] Available at: https://reeddesign.co.uk/paintedchurch [Accessed 4 Feb. 2024].
blakearchive.org. (n.d.). The William Blake Archive. [online] Available at: https://blakearchive.org.
http://www.autodidactproject.org. (n.d.). Ralph Dumain: ‘The Autodidact Project’: A. L. Morton: ‘The Everlasting Gospel: A Study in the Sources of William Blake’. [online] Available at: http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/morton_imagination/morton08_blake.html [Accessed 4 Feb. 2024].
Wilson, A. (n.d.). https://travellerintheevening.substack.com/. [online] travellerintheevening.substack.com. Available at: https://travellerintheevening.substack.com [Accessed 4 Feb. 2024].
http://www.muggletonian.org.uk. (n.d.). Muggletonian Home Page. [online] Available at: http://www.muggletonian.org.uk/ [Accessed 4 Feb. 2024].
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