18 Filmy

I have visited the Venice Biennale every couple of years for a while now, and am going again in Aug (really excited - in this dismal world situation). I prefer not to engage in the usual culture-vulture activities (maximising stay - reading reviews) and just stroll in the sun by myself and happen on stuff. I like my own take on it. It's nice to have a surprise. In 2011 I was pretty obsessed only with film https://youtu.be/j-Vne_Pvqv0

Tony Conrad stole the show though. He painted a series of film frames on paper in 1973. The idea being that (like photo emulsion) the image would be affected by light. It would just take longer. They appear at the end of the clip at this point https://youtu.be/j-Vne_Pvqv0?t=582. Painting sometimes doesn’t let you down.

Some non-painted films I have seen often. My father was born on Groundhog Day (Feb 2), and after he passed away in 2000 my wife and I watch that film on that day every year as ritual - alternating it with the Italian version (with spaghetti and red) to mitigate boredom. Other regulars are The Time Machine (1961 - not the new one - eek!), The Wizard of Oz and the amazing Turkish ersatz Ayşecik ve Sihirli Cüceler Rüyalar Ülkesinde, The Singing Ringing Tree, Decasia… and so it goes.

Film as film, film as painting, painting as film, film as time, time as film. What have I missed? We’re not there yet.

Stork Day https://mubi.com/films/stork-day

Little Ayşe and the Magic Dwarfs in the Land of Dreams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnApKUztuyo

Decasia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDa-mmSldDg

19 Experts

When I was 15 I thought my father was an idiot. But when I was 21, I was amazed at how much he had picked up in 6 years. Ken Dodd

Pretending you're an expert is almost the same as being one. This is a good ploy to get you started, although you need a get-out clause. Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins in the 17c. wasn’t a general (but he did look for witches) appointed himself the expert.

There are so many of them

In art we are always being told what to look at, so much it’s difficult to see. Having spent a number of years in London helping make temporary public art I have a slippery perspective on what we deserve to see outdoors. The saving grace for me in the work I did was the word temporary. Meaning changes over time.

Class, cash, and business dictate to us. Look at Edward Colston. Look at the Dandy Lion (actually people seem to like it, so that works). The 'race to the lakes' in the 19c. was the realisation landscape can be enjoyed and not necessarily a place of terror. The National Trust is still telling us where to point our camera in the Cairngorms though, even in the rain.

Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it. Salvador Dali (although this is quite good)

Rules based art http://philipgalanter.com/downloads/vague_terrain_2006.pdf

 

The Pseuds https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.732666/full

Berger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk&list=PLn6KyJ4PmZsPhigNqPlWGEoCgBHJbhib3

20 Data

Art colleges require staff to tell them why their art is any good. Institutions are only interested in work as an infographic, not prepared to get into the murky worlds of virtually everything art is about. No longer I don’t know what it is but I like it. Context is king. Well of course. 

Can we separate out the art and the life of the artist? Probably not. Do we still have to identify the component parts? Trudging around large blockbuster shows in our national galleries, slow processions of weary humans eventually ignore the paintings and read the cards only. My friend Jim P is adamant audiences should have to pass an exam before getting in. 

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-stunning-early-infographics-and-maps-of-the-1800s

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/18/is-fake-data-the-real-deal-when-training-algorithms?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

21 Islands

No man is a… (no no, don’t say it) 

On an island our world is smaller and we feel bigger. I think that’s the basis of it. It is all over art, literature, film, and is supremely romantic. There is a short story by DH Lawrence The Man who Loved Islands that spoofs a chapter in his friend Compton Mackenzie’s life. Compton fell out with him over it. A sad tale of a failed utopia.

I have been on some islands https://youtu.be/dVccOqWjJto 

and https://porty.net/st-kilda 

… and discovered that this music was thought to have been composed by Marion Morrison a few years after the Napoleonic wars in the 1820s. She met a young man - a ‘laird of Islay’ - who visited St Kilda and promised to return the following summer to marry her. Sadly, when he eventually appeared on his fancy yacht in Village Bay, impressively decked out with fake armour, she and the villagers ran away thinking it was a press gang. He sailed home a bachelor.

Fun fact Marion Morrison was John Wayne’s real name. And that suggests a whole ‘nother island story. I made a short film in 2017 inspired by John Ford film The Quiet Man with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. Sort of.

The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

The Man Who Loved Islands

In Space

22 Ersatz

What a great word. A cousin to quotidian. Both slightly magical sounding but opaque in meaning. Matter-of-fact stuff as metaphor is a useful perspective in process. 

There is some playing with scale… here and here

I have mentioned The Singing Ringing Tree before. Made in a big sound stage at Babelsberg Studios in old East Berlin, it was (unusually for a children’s movie at the time) given a similar budget to a grown-up film. All kinds of things stood for something else. A stand-out prop being that the frozen water in the pond of the giant fish was actually lard. A higher melting point under arc-light.

After WW2, the French government introduced needlework kits to encourage cottage industry self-help. It took off. I bought one of these magic curtains on Ebay, which are able to transform any living room into a rural idyll. 

Rural idylls are what we want, we can even do a short course on it

Although there are rumblings…

https://www.fwi.co.uk/business/tesco-fake-farm-brands-called-out-as-farmers-come-forward

23 Spirit

Genius loci is the intangible quality of a material place, perceived both physically and spiritually. It reveals itself through visible tangible and perceivable non-material features. Having quoted that, it’s interesting to note that archaeologists don’t like it. But we do, don’t we.

I don’t watch horror movies as a rule, although I did get a simple and impressive scare once in a 360° headset when someone crept up behind me. I might try to recreate that for this text afterwards. I don’t have the ley-line bug either. I have had some extraordinary and unexplainable sensations in a few places however. One in the courtyard (sahn) of the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, and another (twice!) much closer to home outside Rosslyn Chapel, famous for the Knights Templar and a scene in The Da Vinci Code. Definitely something. Not sure if it was a crusader flashback. Hope not.

I was out taking photographs yesterday of a strange chimney in the middle of a copse of trees I often see from the 44 bus. Usually in grey overcast light, it always seems significant. Sadly it was a sunny day, I will have to go back. The pic does have a sense of magic. Although I did Google it later and found out it was a vent called a stinkpipe.

Studio Morison https://vimeo.com/52501604

Maaloula https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGofwGl-faM

24 Competition

Eyes on the prize. History is written by the victors. I want your wife.

You’re not getting her! One of my wife’s many attractions is her (apparent) lack of ego, and reluctance to compete. It is something I am learning from her… although I’m not there yet. A psychology major and devotee of Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis, this approach to life has been a constant in all the time I have known her, and it still impresses.

Bruce Mau says… 26. DON’T ENTER AWARDS COMPETITIONS.

Just don’t. It’s not good for you. https://brucemaustudio.com/projects/an-incomplete-manifesto-for-growth/

Ambition is a different thing. I currently run a large postgraduate course at Edinburgh College of Art. Every semester myself and colleagues review hundreds of applications to get on MA. The portfolios seem to be getting much better. It is relatively subjective. They just want in. About a month ago I suggested to a student that she should watch a film I had just discovered in its entirety, in a good print, on Youtube. The Red Balloon. Well, it may be coincidence, and the whole world is watching the same things of course, but an application popped in three weeks later extolling the virtues of this very movie. I’m guessing social media. Yes, the portfolios are getting better at high speed now. Soon they may not need to do the course.

It has always amazed me, and taking the RA and Scottish RSA Summer shows as an example, that if art can be anything, how come it looks like that? Or is this more coincidence?

https://catrionawindle.weebly.com/

https://www.lifehack.org/325964/8-reasons-why-people-without-heart-compete-are-more-motivated-life

Pace it https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/mar/13/vote-now-painted-snail-and-shipworm-vie-for-mollusc-of-the-year-title-aoe?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Now let’s see if you can get three arrows in the middle like I didn't, and 100 points for the balloon…

25 Masque

In the spring of 2020 an avalanche of very funny videos came our way, as an outpouring of collective and febrile gifts to each other in uncertain times. Some we got many times. I have my favourites. 

Slouching vicariously on Zoom and Teams our meetings were humanised with these… and Snapchat filters… pig noses, bunny ears, weird glitterati eyebrows and unicorns softened embarrassment at our arrival in a future sooner than we thought was possible. That is if we were brave enough to switch our cameras on. It seems to have calmed down a bit now. 

 

I’ve gathered together a few more powerful and visceral masks I have visited over the years here

Apart from Center Pompidou (best museum in the world) there are a few amazing ethnographic spaces in Paris, the small almost invisible https://www.chassenature.org/en, and a large almost equally invisible https://www.quaibranly.fr/en/ hard to find because of the glare from its neighbour, La Tour Eiffel.

Our faces are masks in any case. They are eagerly altered and to great effect, look at how many beauticians and hairdressers we have lining the high street. Skin itself has its own idea too, giving us away with blush, twitch and pallor. And don’t get me started on selfies https://bit.ly/36pc4r2

 

https://www.gq.com/story/blue-steel-zoolander-selfie-culture

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

of course, not forgetting the old pareidolia

https://porty.net/st-kilda/levenish.html

26 Industrial

In 1985 I was an ‘Artist in Industry’ in a chocolate factory, Rowntree Mackintosh in Halifax, where Quality Street were made. Very Willy Wonka. The women on the conveyor belts were allowed to eat anything from them. I never saw it happen. The factory floor had a large in-house (and free) dental surgery.

I think the residency may have been a last hurrah of an idea that APG from the 1960s had, and Yorkshire Arts Council were running. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/artist-placement-group

Ted Hughes writes in Remains of Elmet about Halifax… For centuries it was considered a more or less uninhabitable wilderness… then in the early 1800s it became the cradle for the Industrial Revolution… Throughout my lifetime, since 1930, I have watched the mills and their attendant chapels die.

Lots of industrial art there then. LS Lowry of course

then there is a Snicket in Halifax

I think I’ve found where Bill’s photo was taken… https://goo.gl/maps/2PfbszNe3pvzQdpX8

And probably so has someone else

But if it’s cobbles you want… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mq59ykPnAE

I also have a vivid memory of a gig there by Nico, not in Reims Cathedral, but San Miguel's in Broad Street, supported by a dazzling Angie Bowie singing razzamatazz with a backing tape. True.

The series of works I made for the resultant show in Leeds City Art Gallery was constructed from very industrial but unecological shattered Perspex.

27 USSR

In 1990 and again in 1991 (before and after USSR) and long before the current nightmare, I visited with the Soviet Union of Artists across Russia. I paid for it - but because I could pay in roubles in that first year, it was my one and only taste of how an oligarch might feel. 

First trip was with my Delfina Studios colleagues to make work for an ice sculpture festival in Gorky Park Moscow. We bought hats. We also went overnight on the Red Arrow to Leningrad, swapped our clothes with the guards, we all pretty much looked like staff when we arrived in the morning. Slightly hairy moment when the police stopped a flotilla of vendors following our bus into town. I automatically reached for my little point and shoot camera. It was an overcast sky which made it flash… all guns swung towards me.

Going again six months later (Leningrad had become Petersburg) and all points east and south. Met artists underground (literally) in Moscow, wild evenings in Tashkent, a beautiful couple in Novgorod who were committed artists (ра̀бота, ра̀бота, ра̀бота) and very much in love… ‘in the evenings when the light is poor we paint abstracts’. Eventually making it to the House of the Artists in Gurzuf (home of the Ninth Wave), and losing my mind one night to the home-made wine crafted by a local engineer, who scoured the vineyards in the dead of night for the muscat grape. Vineyards had been closed and guarded by Mikhail Gorbachev to tackle alcoholism. 

In the Soviet era, you had to have a job. If you were an artist you had to be an artist. You were allocated the tools of your trade, paint, canvas, brushes. Towards the end, and I noticed this travelling, things were so tight that even road signs were being made by artists, because they had the materials. I remember seeing a roundabout sign in Bukhara which was very like the one in Sankt Petersburg, but on canvas, and in sunnier colours. Nice.

In Moscow we became part of history one evening, happening on a huge crowd in the process of toppling the massive statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky outside KGB headquarters. People were so happy, normally the square was the emptiest in Russia. We were there until the wee small hours, until finally the crane that was holding it by the neck, lifted Dzerzhinsky into the sky like an avenging angel. It wasn’t the effect the crowd had expected. There were a few anxious moments before the cheer finally erupted.