the end of the year….

Friday was our end of year show, a fine display of work by around forty second year Fine Art students at Staffordshire University. What diversity, what breadth of interests.

My Spitfires took a large amount of space, hung at nose level in the middle, and were suitably in the way. In their ghostly whiteness they are identical but individual, afflicted but equal; like human souls. What I like about ceramics is that one has to surrender control to the kiln at some point in the process of making. In this it has something in common with printmaking; the outcome is never completely assured (or at least its not at my level of skill).

Also on display were the stencils made for the desolate village scene (Pashino mentioned in the first helicopter post) which featured the helicopters, they returned to their roots as drawings, the cuts being another way of creating a line. The stencil parts cast good shadows and combination with pen drawing was quite interesting.

WordPress lost all the content I put on this post last night ( despite my having saved it, or so I thought) and now is opening the picture adding window so low down on my screen that I cant get to the photos I want to add, of the exhibition peices, so for now this is words only. Will try again anon. But now Ive managed to circumvent its coniption, so pix there are. So Im slowly getting better at dealing with this beast and bending it to my will.

Berlin 5th biennale,2008, 2.

A high point of the visit to Berlin was creating our own contribution to the Biennale. The section of the Skulpturenpark where Thea Djordjadze’s Fold b (large), 2008 is positioned held some quite informal, but poignant works. Thus inspired, the rejecta found in the area were used to create structures which agonisingly echoed the former utility of their components.

The video recounts the process (courtesy of artintelligence, see links).

Here silently howl materials which once provided shelter to humans. A cry for the no longer useful, the no longer young, the un-cool, the gray, the disappointed, the invisible.

An interview conducted by Andrew Flint during Feb, March and April 2008

To start with could you give us a brief description of your work?

At the moment I’m interested in boredom and repetition. This is linked to my interest in meditation, which from the outside can look pretty boring but personally this is not so. I have been using stencils to reproduce images of helicopters and hotels. The hotels I’ve used have come from boring postcards, so I’ve being making repetitive images out of these.

 

Where did the helicopters come from, why use them?

Well they came from a photograph that I came across of a bleak village being flown over by four helicopters in perfect formation. The precise positioning of the helicopters gives the image a paradoxically static quality, and because of the short shutter speed of the camera the blades look perfectly still.

I’m interested in stillness, the paintings by Thomas Jones and photographs by the Bechers seem to have a meditative quality.

As well as the obvious political/philosophical threads in your work there seems to be an air of humor?

Well with the postcards they are such uninspired photographs and badly reproduced too; old and tired. The hotels are basically featureless slabs but it’s quite funny that they have pretensions to being some kind of wonderful paradise, when quite obviously the building is just dull if not actually ugly. I think its strange how we’re lead to conduct our lives as human beings in structures such as this. Then of course there is the ironic story of the village that I’ve just mentioned. I think the boring can be funny in this way, ironic but with a certain innocence. On the whole I have a completely silly sense of humour.

 

What do you want the viewer to gain form the work?

Always a hard question to answer, but something about things which look boring at first and turn out to have subtle interest in the variations which happen in ostensibly identical things.

You say meditation only looks boring on the outside, explain?

Meditation seems to be a boring practice from the outside, but that’s because the ego is like a child – it constantly wants to be doing, to be in control, and meditation is a way of stilling the ego. Bad things seem to come from self-absorption: at one extreme the mind becomes completely solipsistic as in Ellis’s American Psycho, the ego just wants more and more. Well I haven’t actually read the book, I’ve been getting all overexcited about A Philosophy of Boredom by Svendsen. At the other end of the spectrum from the all encompassing ego which has lost any ability to relate to anything outside itself there is the transcended ego which is sought through meditation.

You see I’m gathering evidence for this ‘Unified Theory of Everything’, or perhaps Human Mind, I’m working on.

 

Ego can be seen as the conscious self in western tradition so are you saying our culture is childish?

Really I’m not using the term in exactly that Freudian way, but I think modern western society is in a way becoming more childish, or at least adults seem to be getting increasingly infantilised. The cult of celebrity and all that is really a cult of instant gratification and that is clearly an infantile trait. Adults are meant to be able to anticipate the advantages of delayed gratification when presented with the option, but ‘I want it NOW’ is what we seem increasingly to be encouraged to aim for. Then again we have this common feeling of being victimised; being more and more unwilling to take responsibility for what happens to us. There seems to be a common feeling of – ‘Not my fault, I was but and innocent bystander, I must have recompense’. The compensation culture.

But we are social beings and social intelligence (theory of mind) may have evolved enable us to function in groups. Social intelligence is also referred to as Machiavellian.

That is obviously the Cheat’s Charter – as long as only a few cheat they will prosper. You see the same in some animal social groups. We aren’t that different from other animals when it comes to social politics.

But we see ourselves as having free will and self awareness, and lots of us pay lip service to all sorts of high minded ideals about the Good of Humanity and such. Things would undoubtedly go much smother and easier if we could be less engrossed in ourselves, because we know from history that we only work as a species together – we are social beings.

What are your future plans?

Future plans… I’ve had a great time these last few months and the summer holidays represent a huge hiatus in trying to develop a sustainable practice. I’m hoping to be involved in a community based art project over the summer and will have another go at painting on canvas, then it’s into the third year… and beyond; the world. I think the big emphasis being put, in our course, on presenting oneself as a practicing artist is really excellent and should stand us in good stead.
Longer term, I may think about a part -time MA as I suspect I could suffer real withdrawal symptoms from the absence of all the workshops: ceramics, metal, wood, and from the need for serious reading and thought which I have found so exciting.
Clearly these are things a person could do on their own, but so much easier when there is a compulsion and advisers to help! (here speaketh the true me; fundamentally, deep down where it really counts – completely lazy).

 

Berlin 5th biennale, 2008, 1

                                 

A departmental outing to the Berlin biennale; artveiwing on an industrial scale; it forms a soup in the mind, but a few standouts (lumps of proteinacious material, to co-ordinate with the metaphor). Coinciding but not attached was Christl Mudrak’s installation at Field, Vertigo, and aptly named it was.

                           

The space was lit with neon tubes (see photo above) which further added to the dizzying effect. Talking to the artist, she said some visitors had found the installation so disorienting they had to leave imediately.

A dance performance had been held here, which must have been very interesting, we considered this in relation to a gravity-free (free fall) dance performance, the result of a science/art co-operation. (I dont have the references – can anyone suggest?)