Helicopters go on and on

Lots of very boring publicity postcards for anonymous modern hotels from around the globe. Without looking at their addresses there was no possibility of guessing their country.

Somehow the helicopter stencils and the hotels fraternised on my desk and so we end up with helicopters displaying the enticing words from the backs of the postcards.

(I’ll put a better pic of this up when I get back to mine own computer)

Each hotel has its easy access by pedestrian crossing. The hotel stencils were themselves nice objects, crisp and more coherent than the images made from them. They seemed to add dimension to the frieze.

The combination of hotels and military helicopters brings up lot of questions:

What are the costs of mass-market, manufactured luxe?

Erosion of cultural identity?

Erosion of personal freedoms?

What is worth fighting for?

Easy questions, particularly from the well-off, indulged, Western European point of view.

No such easy (sentimental?) answers from the point of view of poverty stricken people and those ruled by divisive, kleptocratic or repressive governments.

The hotel stencils looked good in white on black, where their crispness was not an issue, the crossing created an interesting depth.

This was made as a foil for a ceramic Spitfire.

Sudden inspiration took me to Ceramics to make the Spitfire, a Stoke-on-Trent icon, this being the home town of Reginald Mitchell its designer.

The crossing is leading to the plane; an encouragement to its use.

The helicopters take off

To give the sense of monotony and to emphasise the modularity of it’s components I used stencils and spray paint to interpret some of the components in scene. The helicopters above a horizon on a 10m roll of paper produced something like a wallpaper border.

A happy charity shop find of postcards of hotels just had to join in; more stencils and deliberate monotonoy. Repetition is the basis of this work, it relates to meditation and how repetition is used to still the mind. Clearly this has the potential to be, and look, pretty boring, but a closer glance will reveal deviations from exact repetition; like traditional Middle Eastern carpets or Japanese ceramics (the Buddihst concept of wabi sabi, relating to impermance) where the artist deliberately introduces irregularities or flaws to eschew perfection (not that I’m in danger achieving perfection) and create a subtle interest.

The use of military imagery gives the work a political air and spending time thinking about it, I have found multi-layered possible interpretations. This oblique approach is seen in Thomas Demand’s ‘The Embassy’ (2007), a photograph of a model of the Niger Embassy in Rome which he visited in order to try and find the roots of a canard about Saddam Hussein attempting to import yellowcake uranium, thought to have originated there. The rumour was used one of the justifications for invading Iraq.

Peace is brought to Pashino

 

Meditation is a practice aimed at removing one from the narrative of a time-bound life and bringing consciousness to rest in the present instant, where the past is forgotten and the future does not exist, perhaps as close as a living human can get to suspending time. Clearly a result of suspending time, viewed from a temporal perspective, is monotony – eternally. I have been interested in how some artworks can give a feeling of suspended time. The stillness seen in paintings by Thomas Jones or the photographs by the Bechers, seem to have a meditative quality.

A photograph of a bleak village being flown over by four helicopters in perfect formation was the starting point for recent work. It accompanied an article about Sino-Russian military manoeuvres; the specially built village of Pashino was given hell and finally liberated. The participating armies were well pleased, the only losers, apparently, were ‘the people of a nearby village who had hoped that [the] six armies might pulverise their own ghastly shacks and then rehouse them.’ (The Economist, 23 Aug, 2007). The precise positioning of the helicopters gives the image a paradoxically static quality.

Is this photograph of the inhabited village or the doomed Elysium?

Are the helicopters actually coming here or just passing by on their way to a more important place?

What is going on?

Hello world!

I’m welcoming myself to WordPress…

Have to get some thoughts together on Art etc – assuming that there is any Etc when it comes to Art. In these days of conceptual art it would appear that actually EVERYTHING constitutes art; nothing is excluded from the category of art,  if I so wish.

In fact I’m finding that the highroad of art leads to many strange byways. Starting to write an ‘Artist’s Statement’ brings an ‘ohmygod’ moment when one discovers one is revealing much more than one might have intended about the ‘me’. Partic. having rather eschewed the ‘personal’ in my artistic endeavours.