8 Temenos

This is about another luminous rectangle this time in Arcadia, Greece in 2016. The Temenos is a film festival screening films by one filmmaker, Gregory Markopoulos, which (normally) happens every four years. 

An unexpectedly powerful event. An experiment in sensual and expanded cinema. 200 international pilgrims sat in a field over 4 nights, watched the sun go down, listened to an increasing symphony of crickets, aware of the starfield erupting overhead, watching projected films until 2am.

http://www.thetemenos.org/

Peloponnese https://youtu.be/k4_msbd0T8U

9 Undoing

I currently have a role in Edinburgh College of Art, with Postgraduate Illustration. It is a large course with highly skilled students from all over the world. Perhaps because it has the word illustration in it, many students feel they have to make a certain kind of art. I spend much of my time discussing this with them. One of the skills they show is by putting a considerable amount of effort into making digital images look hand-made. I ask them about this too. The main problem I see with this is they can undo everything, allowing them never having to make a decision.

Last year because of Covid it was very difficult for everyone at college. They were however able to make some amazing work. One of the MA students, Shuyu Ke, only saw me once in real life. She very generously made a drawing of the occasion to send to me. I was quite moved by this. To relax the situation I said thank you so much for the lovely drawing, it’s a shame I can’t show my mother, because my shirt-tail is hanging out. She said, no problem, I fix!

10 Burial

There was a TV show broadcast in 1980 called ‘The Shock of the New’ which was a personal survey of 20th century art by Australian Robert Hughes. It came with a tremendous catalogue which I (and probably everyone else) still have. There was a scene in it which I have not been able to find online which went something like this…

English/Australian artist John Wolseley sitting on a folding chair in the outback painting the landscape in watercolour. Wolseley tears the painting in half and buries it in the dry soil beside his chair. Puts other half in his portfolio. Camera follows him over the next hill. Sets up his chair and brings out of his folio half of another painting done the year before. He digs around the earth at his feet and finds its neighbour. Brings them together in an unexpected and astonishing collision of time and colour and weather. As I say I have not seen it since. I hope I have not imagined it. 

I have torn one of mine in half and stuck it in the garden. We’ll see what it’s like in 2023. East Lothian v Woolloomooloo. Ha!

John Wolseley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcFx5TX49e8

... makes a book https://youtu.be/j-kqhqaoTLA

11 Lazy

Juxtaposition (1970s), notion (nah), think outside the box (stay marooned outside), away from my comfort zone (stop it now), automatic writing, cut-ups, structuralism, as form rises art declines, Brion Gysin, give the public what they want, problem with actors is they speak back… are rules in art lazy? Probably.

A line from Grey Area by Will Self: “The images on the wall were tired, static, self-referential, each one a repository of forgotten insights, now incapable of arousing fresh interest” 

So bleak, but we’ve all been there. A few years back I took a group of Chinese postgrad students to the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. There was a large expressive abstract, gestural, painting on the wall. I can’t remember the artist. A student very politely asked me why it was there. All kinds of thoughts went through my head. eg It was just after a recession and they were digging out purchases from a bygone lesser informed committee as an inexpensive solution to filling what was not a temple but a large publicly owned barn. I didn’t say that, but it certainly looked foosty. I was slightly on edge because there was someone there from the gallery education team who may have been able to read my mind. Paintings stay the same, it’s us that change. And even though films look like they are constantly renewing themselves, it is us that change our minds.

https://will-self.com/category/radio/

Kevin Atherton https://vimeo.com/31444775

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

12 Hermits

In the 1760s, the bigger houses might have had an ornamental hermit installed out back in a grotto, used like a proto computer, searching for answers from the cosmos to be presented at dinner parties. Wealthy people are just too busy to do this themselves. There is a hermit's house not far from here in Dalkeith Country Park. You can paste 55.904513,-3.072481 into Google Maps, but he's not there any more. The fashion didn’t last that long, research shows a chequered history, although they did at least seem to have a sense of humour. 

A contemporary equivalent might be The Artists Studio. There is a show soon at the Whitechapel Gallery in London about this. I am looking forward to it. I’ve ordered the book. I imagine Francis Bacon’s studio will figure. This is currently recreated to perfection in the Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin. We have Eduardo Paolozzi’s version of this in the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, but it doesn’t quite have the peep show into the artist's head we want. 

Our extended brains (mobile phones) can be enlarged in a studio. Is our interior decoration a reflection of our minds? Lofts in NYC were coveted for their industrial edge. The fashion continues in the UK with organisations like ACME and WASPS. I have rented from both in the past. Eventually the large mechanical spaces are always sub-let into more human traditions with rugs and chintz.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/500916/short-lived-british-fashion-ornamental-hermits

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/22/the-stranger-in-the-woods-by-michael-finkel-review

13 Sales

Q: Why are artists poor?

A: https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/92339cef-c1e9-41fe-ade8-8dc95a67b948/340245.pdf

In the 19 century, before Netflix, the painter John Martin made enormous panoramic landscape paintings that toured the town halls of Britain and charged a penny entrance. They have tiny little people in them, probably (partly) to emphasise how small we are in the cosmos. Another artist in Kirkcaldy Art Gallery, Sir William MacTaggart, painted large expressive seascapes, and put little figures in them. Both these artists will have incorporated humans into these scenes for greater sale potential. They look silly now.

Soviet émigrés Komar & Melamid tried to find out exactly what people want for their walls… https://awp.diaart.org/km/index.html

That was an old project, they stopped working together in 2003. With that done, tastes are now set forever, repeating, cyclical, mirroring into infinity, classic pouts on Instagram, graveyard poets, postmodernism which is modernism, cute, I just really like it, and they’ve got one. 

Free work is not valued by the person who has commissioned it, they should be eternally grateful but never are. Money is a sign of value and respect, even if it is a small amount. By working for free, you perpetuate a culture in which creative work goes unpaid - Oliver Jeffers

There is no must in art because art is free - Wassily Kandinsky 

Same but different, different but same, something for the wall.

https://www.porty.net/windle/2020-in-the-house.pdf

Ghastly Good Taste https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD4ZPANU8DA&t=2s

How about a frame?

14 War

There is a link to ‘Six Men’ by David McKee in 7 Fireworks. Published in 1972 it is a very circular storybook about war. They need to republish it.

"Once upon a time six men search for and finally find a land where they can settle down and grow rich. But they fear thieves, so they hire six strong guards. When no robbers arrive, the men worry that paying the guards is a waste of money. So they put them to work capturing a neighbouring farm. Enjoying the power, they add soldiers and capture more land. Some, who escape their expansion, work and live happily together across the river, but still worry about the six belligerent men. So in case of attack, they take turns being both farmers and soldiers. Unfortunately one day the bored soldiers on both sides of the river shoot at a passing duck. The anxious armies, fearing they are attacked, gather and a mighty battle begins. In the end, only six men on either side are left. And so they set off in opposite directions, beginning again the search for a place to live and work in peace. ..."

I have it in mind to put some of my luminous targets in the old radar installation building beside RAF Macmerry.

Google Maps 55.94906772449463, -2.881995063893326

I think it might be interesting… although I wouldn’t want to start anything…

Sortie https://youtu.be/VT1-Q1AEt90

Bunkers https://youtu.be/XjesOah2gCw

15 Time

Things look different up close and far away. Stars, relationships, singing. After my father passed away, lots of accumulated family possessions were lost. Time-based things… holiday super-8s, tape recordings… sad that this stuff so inherent of life and memory were not prized more. Something from this archive was an old vinyl record cut in a carnival record-your-voice booth in the 1930s, of my grandfather singing ‘So Mary Marry Me’ to my grandmother Mary. He was a terrible singer, but the sound was so full of pathos, scratches and fluff, that this powerful evocation of lost time and love was remarkable and self-evident to the teen-age me. It inspired me to make a disc of Catriona telling stories to our son Luke when he was a baby. I wonder if any of the family will be listening to it in 100 years?

We are moved by deja-vus in all media. Music - Charles Ives Central Park in the Dark. Literature - David Mitchell Cloud Atlas (not the movie). Film - William Kentridge thinking about all the other things he has to do that day, and how it affects the work. 

I was born in 1958, and am alert to it when I see it written down. The oldest satellite still circling the earth was launched in 1958. This naturally worries me. 

Fingers crossed for Vanguard 1 https://www.porty.net/st-kilda/mullach.html

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

I have a book, published in 1958 ‘A Dictionary of Abstract Painting’. The poor quality printing and thumbnail images make the work look quaint, like a stamp album, which completely loses any sense of importance and vitality the work originally held. I am drawn to the images still. 

Francis Bacon never saw the Velasquez popes, he painted his versions from magazines.

Here is an image of the dictionary, opened at the page Hilma af Klint should be. The rather beautiful 10 Kensitas cigarette card bookmark came inside when I bought it in the charity shop. Another deja-vu.

Apologies, I seem to have strayed into oblongs. Easily done.

William Kentridge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G11wOmxoJ6U

Page one https://porty.net/windle/images/Page-1.jpg

16 Atmos

Back again to the warm fuzzy world of round, vignetted, egg-shaped, ovaloids. I bought my Claude Glass on Alibaba. I wonder where Claude got his?

A long history of yearning for a different perspective. A tutor of mine who was something of an academic life drawing guru Bill Cadenhead, told me at my age, in his experimental days, he poked his eyes and made paintings about it. Stars and colours. He reverted to landscape painting quite quickly. It is interesting to read in the Andy Warhol Diaries how he was trying for abstraction late in life, that he found some kind of solace in camouflage but couldn’t make the full leap. 

Selfie filters are a version of instant perfection. It goes way back of course…

Claude mirrors, Gray’s glasses, Cozens, Gilpin, the Picturesque. Ultraviolet.

A funny history of this is captured in the play Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. Set in front of French windows in a grand house, it switches between now and a time in 1809 when the garden behind was being transformed from a classical to a wild romantic place.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/claude-glass

https://longreads.com/2019/07/11/the-ugly-history-of-beautiful-things-mirrors/

17 Loop

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana. Groucho Marx (maybe)

It’s all loops. As far as the eye can see. As far as the ear can hear. In time. Loops are the foundation of our experience of time and, so it follows, any time-based art. Which of course is all art, as we perceive nothing without time. (Odd that time is taught as 4D in art schools, when in truth it is primary, viewing a painting is a temporal experience.) Brian Evans Loop Theory

Things that loop, own themselves. They are the most important thing in the room as far as they are concerned. They appear self-actuating, or made by someone else, which is useful for artists because they can be as critical as they want to be. 

I made quite a lot of films a while back using computer programs that could run video clips out of sequence. Making non-linear film with multiple pathways takes a lot of effort because all of those individual journeys need realised somehow. The Garden of Forking Paths + Meaning Making Machines. Why not just get the PC to do it. 

In your Christmas Spotify playlist, the loop takes a year. I let my own loops appear when they wanted after I twigged that all paths through a non-linear landscape are linear unless done twice.

And what’s the point of that?

Digital VD http://www.porty.net/digitalvd/

The Fall Repetition https://youtu.be/mTKCKBu8CLI