28 Heat

Folk can make art, and they do everywhere  

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jun/24/monkey-christ-worst-art-repairs-of-all-time

Anybody that avoids bland commercialisation gets my vote. Monkey Christs, tattoos, garden gnomes, Aphrodite at the water hole… all are created with love, and can be considered in many ways contextually. At Edinburgh College of Art there is a valuable collection of classical Greek casts, traditionally used for drawing instruction. Over the years things have fallen off (not only toes and fingers). There was someone over time, perhaps janitorial staff, repairing them with Das clay. These were not always anatomically correct, but considerate and full of care. We liked them. We don’t have to be logical. That is for Vulcans.

My friend Erfan Khalifa is a musician and visual artist in Damascus. He studied photography in Vienna. He has the strong idea that contemporary art from the West is cold, and art from the Middle East warm and full of emotion. He has a point, when we compare Bauhaus with Dervish. But both are fantastic, no? 

A work of art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t art at all - Paul Cézanne

The Moon and the Sledgehammer 

Home Made Europe

 

Maudie

29 VCCA

It’s 1994 now, and I’m on a residency in Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in a corner of Sweet Briar College, near Lynchburg (named after the ‘Hanging Judge’) and 4 miles away from Walton’s Mountain on the Blue Ridge Highway. Sounds great eh? Except everyone thought I was a weirdo for wanting to visit the Walton sawmill. The Waltons had been shown much later on TV in UK than in the US, and no longer part of the cultural hinterland. Disappointed. They did take me to Jerry Falwell’s mountain though, which seemed much more in their headspace.   

VCCA was full of musicians, composers, visual artists and writers. Each is given a studio to work in with a bed to lie down on if you feel tired. I borrowed a camcorder. It was the first time I had used one. The advice I was given was ‘Gee you have to move much slower than you think’. I suppose that set the tone. Lunch appears mysteriously and silently in a bucket outside the door so not to distract. Mesmeric. I bought windchimes. Everyone was quite bemused that I had been in Sweet Briar for two months having never been anywhere else in USA, and getting a skewed perspective for sure. Met lovely people… including writer Joanie Puma (Hopi chanting in the empty swimming pool) painter Julia Jacquette (who finally took me to NYC at night in the back of a pickup to see her recording ‘Root Canal’ as bassist in a metal band) and Max Goldfarb who later invited me to contribute to his Incident Report project. 

We made an artist's BÜK! Perhaps more of that later. We were inspired by a book artist that visited. In a walk we had together, passing a cemetery, she told me she had had a heart pacemaker fitted. Her specialist told her that pacemakers were normally taken out of the body after death, but that in America this didn’t happen for some legal reason. It put her on edge to imagine all those devices still beating away under the ground. For how long?

Max / Julia / Joan 

30 BÜKS!

DAS BÜK! I eventually found our book from VCCA (minus the original ironic cover made from two large slabs of bark) that I had instigated as a mail-art opportunity to keep in touch after returning home. Seeing it now I realise people didn’t take it too seriously. It must have been more my thing. Joan’s page was nice though

https://www.learnevents.com/blog/2015/09/07/imagery-vs-text-which-does-the-brain-prefer/

Over the years I’ve considered this a lot. What do we remember from art? Film courses are full of return of the hero type screenwriting advice. I’ve been on some of them. The big Hollywood writers admit that although these formulae exist, they are useless to use in any meaningful way. People still buy the how-to books however. I bought one, Save the Cat There is one bit in it I liked called ‘Double Marzipan’. The idea being if you have two elements in a story, one can be free (subjective) and one not. EG You probably should not use fuzzy abstract imagery to illustrate fuzzy abstract poetry. I made an artist's book out of it. It’s a silent book (that looks noisy).

Kurt Schwitters has long been a hero that returns to me. An artist known for his commitment to total art work Gesamtkunstwerk. Although we know him as the king of collage, he was as much a writer as a visual artist. There is a book about this called PPPPPP 

I made my own little total art book as a lock-down project in 2020. Connecting old and new, online and off. Slightly disappointed now I spelled (or is it spelt?) NAPOLEONIC wrong. I’m stuck with it now. Old media eh?

31 Muse

A friend of mine had ‘If music be the food of love, play on’ painted in large script with a violin on a statement wall in her new flat. She must have been excited. She has moved since, and I’ve not been invited to her new house. There is a long history of visual music worth reading.

I’ve been told that if you are good at maths you are good at music. I’m not sure what that means. Does it mean sight-reading sheet music, or being able to do the dad-dance at 150 bpm? (that’s a number). My son Luke is very musical. He doesn’t like maths though. Was it his teachers? To help him at school I ordered what I understood to be child-friendly maths books by Carol Vorderman, the pretty lady on the telly. The delivery was late. I was away on a trip for a few weeks and they arrived a week after I had left. On his birthday. He thought it was a present I had sent him from the Middle East. Nae luck. He will probably cite that incident in later life. I’m sure I bought him a birthday present too, although I don’t remember what that was now. Must be my mathematical mind. A lesson from school

I’m on the left https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMSbDwpIyF4

A painting tutor of mine used to play Sibelius at top volume in class. We put up with it probably because his son was Edwyn Collins, who was in Orange Juice, a big band in the eighties that we liked better than Sibelius. Did then anyway. At that time and at that age the biggest connection between art and music was the gatefold LP. Nice. Even now.

The art expert in this newspaper article seems to be concerned with only a subsection of what visual art is. She was probably chosen for that reason by the journalist. I wonder why that was?

D I GH T Y

32 Composition

It depends who you speak to… when you say artist. 

In certain quarters, conversation immediately turns to someone with a vocoder and leather trousers. Although there is crossover. Composition has this too. 

Visual art is bombarded with helpful rules, procedures and devices to make it look right... The Golden Ratio, The rule of thirds, perspective, the double fold, camera lucida, looking at your thumb with one eye.

It doesn’t stop. Claude, Gray, Cozens, Gilpin, Cowper. Amazing. Perhaps too much. And that’s just the old ones. My wife’s drawings are interesting. In the dark they look like Samuel Palmer. In the daytime we see the felt-tips. 

They are not averse to the old UV treatment either

Blurs, Blots and Clouds: Architecture and the Dissolution of the Surface

https://www.diatrope.com/stork/StorketalCRCBook.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasujir%C5%8D_Ozu

33 Posh

In Edinburgh, SCIS proudly announce that 1 in 4 pupils are educated at a private school, the highest proportion in the UK. Our son went to the local school, which is code. In Glasgow it is a different percentage. They say things like ‘can yeez no jist send yer bairns tae the school?’ They don’t want to in the capital though. They need to make sure girlfriends are from the same income bracket. Keep the money in the family. How common.

My mother is a smart cookie. She doesn’t like being looked down on however. She likes jigsaws and wordplay. She knows what the word CARNAPTIOUS means. There was even a family spat in recent years about ONOMATOPOEIA. Whatever.

Standing as it does for Port Over Starboard Home, and with it’s origins in The Raj, POSH even has a song. Condescension, wealth, breeding, righteousness, deservedness, arbiters of taste, code switching… unlike my art school: punk rock, listening in horror to classmates talking about buying shares, overnight bus to London, waking up to beans and chips in what’s it called?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Snobs

Accents alive and kicking

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/12/accent-discrimination-is-alive-and-kicking-in-britain-study-suggests?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Then there’s Brian Sewell

Private View https://youtu.be/A5qKgYgRvPA

34 Unseen

Back in an earlier post, 3-Circles, I mention Hilma Af Klint. About how her sisterhood at the close of the 19c became mesmerised by invisible things hinted at in new scientific discovery. Magic persists

In recent years with a small group I have toured around a local haunted Loretto House with my EMP detector (electro-magnetic pulse) playing the part of artist-ghosthunter. I went along with it, imagining the other two were slightly bemused at my enthusiastic immersion in the project. That’s OK though. Often it’s better to take things slowly to see what might try to escape your approach. Stupid like a painter 

Subsonics are unheard things below 20hz in wavelength. To us anyway. Dog whistles are high at the other end of the spectrum. http://www.porty.net/weltanschauungskrieg/

My grandfather became a Catholic in later life. Converts get it intensely. He started going to Lourdes every year on pilgrimage. I have large box of old View-Master slides I inherited, which were a 1950s precursor to the 360 headsets we have today. The old black and white stereo images have 3D magic held within them. In the image below you may just be able to make out the wall of abandoned crutches, post miracle.

I recently discovered a story about an entombed water cistern in Edinburgh that held an animal diorama in secret for 300 years… https://porty.net/blindwells/levels.html

Moonwalk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNSgmm9FX2s

Try with a headset - Munlochy Cloutie Well 360 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky1Q2RCAS_A

35 Bing

This is the name of a search engine I’m using, but also Scots for a slag heap, a mound of (sometimes hot) waste, dug out of the ground during mining. There are many near Edinburgh. I fashioned a story that included one… The Quiet Hill https://youtu.be/aXxu5Qttr2s The bing was closed to the public when I went to film. It had caught fire again 40 years later! Old bings never die. There’s a joke there somewhere.

They are often an unusual shape. Probably because they are man-made, and cast a particular shadow on the landscape. I have a beautiful book about them Terrils : Naoya Hatakeyama

The Five Sisters are nice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmABCUyR2Iw

…with gradients useful for performance poets https://youtu.be/Y9TrPYEqxas

My grandfather lived in darkest Fife, Cardenden, and was a miner all of his life. The village arrived with coal mining and disappeared with it also. It took about 150 years. It is an incredibly interesting history, pretty much ending with the fight between the miners and Margaret Thatcher. A hated figure in these communities. Joe Corrie - the miner playwright - was from here https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/joe-corrie/ Fun fact The woods adjacent to Cardenden are known as Cardenden Den.

One of the UKs great social historians, Tony Parker (amazing books), wrote Red Hill, the story of Horden, a mining town devastated by pit closures in the mid-1980s. I was inspired to go on holiday there to find out more. I may have been the only tourist they had seen for a while. Horden is also famous for (another reason I went) the closing scene in Mike Hodges 1971 film Get Carter with Michael Caine. He said he wanted to film on the ruined beach because it had a close vision of hell. It has been beautified since with European money. Bit of a shame.

One of the great landmarks (well two actually) near me was Cockenzie Power Station. Demolished in 2015 and sadly missed, it was a last coal-fired power station from this once great mining nation. I have a bag of white stones collected from the rubble after the chimneys came down, and am still considering a suitable epitaph. I have to admit though, wind turbines look better.

36 UNC2

The return.

In 2016 I made a film called The Unconformity Project

In the world of Geology, there is tell of a famous event that took place one day in 1788. The story is recounted in ‘Transactions - Volume 5’ from The Royal Society of Edinburgh and is about three men in a boat, bobbing up and down in the sea, just off Siccar Point on the South-East coast of Scotland. One of the men in the boat was James Hutton, and he was out to prove to his two friends that the world wasn't created in 4000 BC as the Church told them, but was in fact billions of years old (4½ billion actually). His interpretations of rock enabled an understanding of some of the magic stuff, through his beliefs about Deep Time… about mountains, stars and galaxies... and evolution... 15 years before Charles Darwin was born.

We have just revisited Siccar Point for a week in a caravan, taking with us some new ersatz unconformities, lit with ultraviolet and the arctic wind.

37 Unreturn

A story I particularly like is when the hero doesn’t in fact return. The opposite of circular. Our minds just go on and on, and it’s exciting. I’m not sure if this automatically converts them to antihero status. That’s OK, heroes are never as lovely as antiheroes. Plagued with insecurity.

A favourite example is The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. There is also a pretty good film version of the novel from 1990 from Bernardo Bertolucci, with John Malkovich heading off into the North African desert at the end. For me it triggers the same romantic sensations as Peter O’Toole had in Lawrence of Arabia. Luxuriating in myth and landscape. 

Kurt Schwitters didn’t entertain insecurity or orthodoxy. Right on! Collage is a kind of non-linear unreturning.

Not Schwitters

One day Schwitters decided he wanted to meet George Grösz. George Grösz was decidedly surly; the hatred in his pictures often overflowed into his private life. But Schwitters was not one to be put off. He wanted to meet Grösz, so Mehring took him up to Grösz's flat. Schwitters rang the bell and Grösz opened the door.

"Good morning, Herr Grösz. My name is Schwitters."

"I am not Grösz," answered the other and slammed the door. There was nothing to be done. Half way down the stairs, Schwitters stopped suddenly and said, "Just a moment."

Up the stairs he went, and once more rang Grösz's bell. Grösz, enraged by this continual jangling, opened the door, but before he could say a word, Schwitters said, "I am not Schwitters, either" And went downstairs again.  They never met again. Hans Richter

I am not Schwitters -- not he

who wheezes at the tops of hills

Not Sturm und dung-wiping Schwitters

the delicate ego smeared on canvas

Not Kürtchen -- Mama's blond-eyed boy

Not Anna Bloom's snivelling lover

Not Schwitters

Not Pfc. Schwitters, Army corps

pppppppffffffffffff

cacacacacacacaca cucu -- No

Not he

I'm not dada

Not anti-dada either

Not anti-Schwitters but definitely

not Schwitters

Not Huelsenbeck's nor Spengemann's Schwitters

Not Schwitters the ad man -- buy bye bye!

Not this quaint old easel-leaner

peddling landscapes to the tourists

Not Kurt the pharmacist's chessmate

Not that file they keep down in Oslo

No -- I'm not Schwitters

I'm Merz

I'm a gleam of sun over mountain peaks

reflected off the glacier

I'm a foehn wind howling down the fjord