My Journey through a Book of the Dead with the Three Jays and Then Some
2014/12/23 § Leave a comment
On opening night J¹ said she felt sad. “I don’t want to make art. It all… I don’t feel like making any anymore.”
Industrial Egyptpunk
Numbed ghosts walk by lots of found objects touched by a lesser Midas. A gallery plonked with faux ready-mades from the factory floor. Technically brilliant foundry work. Lovely copper. I get bored with people saying they are underwhelmed.
Beautiful.
I could make all of this. I would make none of this. I am a year older.
The pitch: Mad Max versus Stargate
Norman Mailer as a car, a character in an adaption of his own novel, see… like… you know… c.f. Ka, Egyptian soul-double. Ha-ha. Haw-haw. Crow bars as was:- bull’s blown bits as magical scepters, jawbreakers. But there is no release, no transfiguration. So us psychopomps, like K, flatline ___________________________
Homework
Please read Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings and produce a 6 tonne bronze by Thursday morning.
The Nile as an autobahn of progress, a physical series of tubes. Discuss.
Closing the book on his desk J² shakes his head, “If only Barney had joined the 27 club.” After dusk on Wednesday, J² pours petrol over his copy of The Cremaster Cycle, drops his joint and stands back but forgets to video it for youtube.
Satan’s Skin
Milton Moon covers the walls, “the devil gets the best tunes” we jest. It’s a shade, not a colour. Just wait until the flouros flicker.
J³ crumples into a corner groaning. He wants to cower but there are no shadows here. No hidden depths.
Remote control
I like process. I like review. I like books. There are copies of Barney’s tomes. He says this show is a bit remote. He says he is not a theatrical filmmaker, it’s about the objects. J² says there is nothing there. In the book of interviews Barney says he doesn’t do interviews. Or catalogs. Pick two.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Pyramids as immortality machines; a form of conspicuous consumption showering society with law and order.
Or poo machines of fertility.
Either way, ancient eternal lives for the rich and powerful, opera for the bored in spirit; over-laboured, groaning, constipated, inappropriating, and signifying nothing.
Get behind me
C said antithetical to Beuys but I can’t spell that in this light.
This is a response to Matthew Barney - River of Fundament - MONA
Our Aesthete Brains Evolving to Desire Beauty but Relax Into Art
2014/08/26 § Leave a comment
I have been reading The Aesthetic brain : how we evolved to desire beauty and enjoy art by Anjan Chatterjee.
Key message is that the diversity of form is directly related to environmental and selective pressures.
Where there is strong selective evolutionary pressure then, as an example, birdsong will be as unchanging as Egyptian art over millennia. Or, when there is strongly repressive government then art will be restricted to pro-government propaganda i approved form and genre, and as unchanging as the wild birdsong.
Where conditions relax then there can be a survival in a diversity of form, as in the diverse songs of domesticated songbirds compared to their wild cousins.
The middle bit of the book surveys the recent writing in neuroaesthetics and a number of evolutionary arguments about “why art?”. Unsatisfied by the answers involving “art instinct” or “by-product” he argues for a third way involving that relaxation of selective pressures mentioned above.
I still feel Ellen Dissanayake‘s work is the best of “why art” in a evolutionary context, and I can see it fitting in with Anjan Chatterjee’s suggestions of relaxation to allow the diversity we see through time and across geographies. Both are at base material arguments, one for raising children, one for how they, and we, survive.
Suggestions of relaxed environments, if not attitudes, will probably work for any Dissanayake’s “making special” activities covered by other modern words like ‘religion’.
“Art” after all is primarily a marketing category, a very modern form. And perhaps one not relaxed enough yet to be any good. Especially all that conceptual art that just looks like bad science fiction made for people who do not read science fiction.
#Formats & #genres are #rituals.
2013/02/26 § 1 Comment
Over the last week I’ve been tweeting notes and implications on reading What is Art For? by Ellen Dissanayake. It’s all about ‘making special’.
A year ago I starting working on a performance piece libretto [I dare not call it opera as I detest that format…] dealing with our making of things, like baskets, knifes, houses and operas, and thus our specialness as a species, which may not lie in the making of things, so much as in the specialness we make.
Here is a crude mind map of that twitter stream.
The thought “Formats and genres are rituals” occured at the end of mapping out the tweets.
I am using a very simple mind mapper that doesn’t even use arrows, thus it is a very unstructured mind map. However as a first draft of an ontology of making, if not an ontogeny of special, I like it.
Naming the Figures of Anticeptual Art, number one: #Swineflu is born!
2012/05/15 § Leave a comment
At my Web 1.0 style personal homepage trying to pass itself off as a gallery, I’ve just worked through to a labelling of the current figures I am working on. I have this need to put them in sets, I do this by naming them.
For example Consorts to the Mountain Goddess.
The new set is Figures of Anticeptual Art. They will not get their own blog.
Now, the thing is, in realising the name Figures of Anticeptual Art I suddenly also recollected that the first of these figures was made two years ago. Thus #Swineflu is Born! (pewter, 2009, wallaby dung outer investment) is the first example of the process where naming is a conscious method of finishing the artwork.
It doesn’t start with an idea or concept, for the naming finishes it. The art is realised, not conceived.
I had just recovered from the misnamed swineflu, (I caught the #swineflu from a young woman who served me a hamburger as I transited through Melbourne back to Hobart from Weilmoringle.)(She did not look well and should not have been at work.) At this time I was wanting to send a piece to the Twitter Art Show, so as I broke open the wallaby dung and plaster it was obvious what the piece should be called. I stopped then and there. I did not even cut it off its cup to retrieve all that pewter.
It was finished in the moment I realised what its true name was.
Twitter hashtag and all.