Please help.

The black dog is yapping at the door to my sleeping bag, and he won’t go away.

You must know what this feels like, lest you forget the rambling man in gin-sodden overalls that would tap-tap-tap on the mirror of my tutu, late at night, begging for harmony.

I could never offer harmony, only my perpetual freehand.  My pneumatic drill of a hand, with rampant energy and an overture of half-baked desires.  You’d take it up anyway, even though you knew it would leave you feeling lemony-fresh.

Well, my perpetual freehand is perpetually free again. Twitching.

If only I could ram a screw into it, pin it to a piece of wood, but I hear this has been done by another fairly recently and a fat lot of good it did him.  My other hand is pretty useless anyway, doesn’t have a poker face, would never get it in in-time.

Yapping in the alley and kicking bins over in frustration, red eyes bulging and a permafrost clinging to its huge hanging balls.  Disdainful creature.  Black dog, back-yard dog. It doesn’t just wait, but revels in the constancy of madness.  Once your mad, your always mad.  You can try the glove on, to see if it fits and then you find its a chinese puzzle, the more you pull the tighter it gets.

I wish my hand was permafrost but its always hot. My red right hand. My filtching, feltching godhand.  Hurling thunderbolts into the arses of well composed daydreams.

I’ll wail into the bag and wait to see if I answer.  That way I’ll know if it’s real or not.

Roland Barthes’ ‘Mythologies’ is a seminal text on Semiology. It is a lucid, profound and insightful deconstruction of the manner in which Western society prostitutes itself through veils and constructions of signs, signals and symbols. Seemingly disparate subjects are discussed, from ‘Toys’, through ‘Striptease’ and ‘The Writer on Holiday’ to ‘The Great family of man.’

I have recently been working on a series of drawings, photographs and performances all of which take wrestling as their subject. Barthes discussion of this subject has articulated elements which drew me to wrestling, opened up realisations of its further potential and ultimately revealed its capability to be the ideal painterly subject.

“The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres.”

The debauched theatrics, ‘the spectacle of excess’, are the crux of wrestling’s initial appeal to the painter. The pomposity and bombastic nature of wrestling’s linguistics place it firmly under the stylistic, rather than historical, umbrella of the Baroque. It’s the timelessness of Wrestling which makes it such an a[appropriate symbol, Read the rest of this entry »

Foucault- Heterotopias, Tom de Freston

Foucault postulates that the 19th Century’s great obsession was with History. By default, therefore, he confirms his belief that history is an artificial construct. Such a construct is part of a broad obsession with categorization and the desire for knowledge and truth. This is all the inevitable by product of a society which had raised doubts over previous certainties such as religion. With the central belief system damaged they sought more scientific and empirically measurable forms of truth. History was just one of many disciplines which needed to be invented, ordered housed and institutionalized. This gave rise to the birth of the museum.

Foucault’s essay concerns itself, predominantly, with a discussion with the historical shifts in space. He discusses that there has been a shift from a space of binary oppositions, of the near and far, open and closed, private and public and sacred and profane. Without deviating too far it would be interesting to see what he made of the technological revolution, the internet and its many manifestations, has surely given rise to a whole new experience and existence in terms of our relation to space. Geographical barriers have dissolved our need to receive information, communicate and purchase no longer requires a journey to a specific, concrete and tangible space. Instead we can move between realms with the click of a mouse.

Space, Foucault argues, has a History in Western culture, and it’s always closely bound to our experience of time. The progression and evolution of this history has marched on to new venues in recent time.

Foucault argues that Heterotopias are a specific kind of space which exist today. The homogeneity of space, or at least the dialectical interrelation of spaces, has been eroded. In its place is a system of spaces which creates a heterogeneous landscape. The is a geographic of multiple layers, one which devours binary oppositions and gives birth to a more complex network of relationships, all mingling to create a kind of black hole, a cavernous void. There is no space between or no central venue; there is no definable point to measure against. It is the nightmare of structuralism. As Foucault states:

“We live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another”

The train is the clichéd example given, a place in which we can sit, a form which takes us between two distant points, an object which passes us as we remain stationary within one place. The ground and existence within the geography of a train might be multiply layered, by its still a ground well worn; so perhaps not worth discussing weakly and further here.

Foucault labels a certain kind of space as ‘Heterotopias’. My instinct is to be cynical to the classification through labeling, thus allowing us to believe in a set of relations due to the umbrella terms which sits above the discussion and protects us from the truth of difference and ambiguity. The definition requires the appreciation of a Utopia as a platonic ideal, a place which cannot exist in tangible or real form. They are unreal spaces, merely a by product of our belief in what actual space would be if cleansed and purified through some kind of philosophical filter.

He defines Heterotopias as spaces equivalent to that which exists in a mirror. These are spaces which exist in relation to real spaces, and can only exist because of that real space. Yet there is a certain placelessness in the space within the mirror, for it does not actually exist, yet we know it is the product of the existence of a real space which we occupy at the time. It informs us of our occupation and the space in which we belong. It tells us that we are over there, over there being here. It is a place which does not exist itself, but informs us.

The shifts in space is described in the shift in cemeteries. They have moved from being a fulcrum of society, placed centrally within the city, next to the church. They were confirmation of the passing of our souls and crucial aspects of our existence and moral and spiritual well being. Not denying other aspects of the cemetery, with the type of burial still mirroring the deceased’s socio economic standing. Foucault describes this as a ‘hierarchy of tombs’.

Yet as the west has become increasingly doubtful ands skeptical about the existence in a god and an afterlife we have become increasingly obsessed with our mortal remains. We live in ‘the cult of the dead.’ Foucault argues that is natural for a society who believes in an afterlife to not put so much emphasis on our remains, the corpse is seen as an empty vessel, due to the spirits ascension to heaven. Yet the importance rises when we consider the process of decay, the fleshy corpse within a box, to be our final destination. Foucault describes an almost fetishistic, ritualistic obsession with our ‘own little box of personal decay’.

Thus the cemetery has moved to the outskirts; no longer the heart of the city, no longer the spiritual haven confirming transcendence, the passing of our souls to another destination. Rather it becomes the place on the outskirts of the city, becoming ‘the other city’, the eternal stagnant resting place of a rotting corpse. A new binary opposition, a dark mirror of life.

That Foucault choices to label Museums and Libraries under a similar umbrella term says as much about his approach as it does the spaces themselves. It should also be noted that gardens are discussed under this title of Heterotopias. It is a system which looks to cast its net wide in order to uncover certain elements of the zeitgeist, that elusive and fashionable spirit.

Foucault sees Museums as timeless places, venues outside of society, existing in relation and opposition to other spaces. A museum is a palimpsest, a continual accumulation of time. Foucault sees them as idealistic and evolving beasts, ‘heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit.’

He describes the museum as embalmed venues, able to exist outside of the normal flow, destruction and passing. Places ordered and categoriesed, providing stationary points which build corridors of pauses. It is, he states, a notion formed directly from our notions of modernity, spaces which are a by product of the 19th Centuries most intrinsic beliefs.

It seems they are formed from the same system which forms modern cemeteries. With the belief in a higher state gone, it becomes of utter most importance to provide sanctuary to the life and existence of all earthly possessions. The fetish for the object and the religiosity of its celebration and display is a by product of this fear and doubt.

These spaces require the construction of rituals and codes. They become sanctified spaces, demanding a certain form and type of behavior from the visitor. It is this which creates the veneer of these institutions as elite establishments, as codified venues designs only for an elite section of society. The bourgeois and the rising and spreading middle class claim to find ways to make these spaces increasingly accessible. Yet in truth they desire a venue which celebrates there supposed intellectual, academic, economic and moral superiority. It is, after all, these values which the places are founded on and on which these individuals society is built. Such values are at the core of a humanity which is otherwise bankrupt and bereft of values. Thus we move towards Foucault’s other argument for museums, as being parallel to prisons. That is for another time.

The cure would consist, therefore, in making explicit a situation originally existing on the emotional level and in rendering acceptable to the mind pains which the body refuses to tolerate.  That the mythology of the shaman does not correspond to an objective reality does not matter.  The sick woman believes in the myth and belongs to a society which believes in it.  The tutelary spirits and malevolent spirits, the supernatural monsters and magical animals, are all part of a coherent system on which the native conception of the universe is founded. The sick woman accepts these mythical beings or, more accurately, she has never questioned their existence.  What she does not accept are the incoherent and arbitrary pains, which are an alien element in her system but which the shaman, calling upon the myth. will re-integrate within a whole where everything is meaningful.

Once the sick woman understands, however, she does more than resign herself; she gets well.  But no such thing happens to our sick when the causes of their diseases have been explained to them in terms of secretions, germs, or viruses.  We shall perhaps be accused of paradox if we answer that the reason lies in the fact that microbes exist and monsters do not.  And yet, the relationship between germ and disease is external to the mind of the patient, for it is a cause-and-effect relationship; whereas the relationship between monster and disease is internal to his mind, whether conscious or unconscious: It is a relationship between symbol and thing symbolized, or, to use the terminology of linguists, between sign and meaning.  The shaman provides the sick woman with a language, by means of which unexpressed, and otherwise inexpressible, psychic states can be immediately expressed.  And it is the transition to this verbal expression - at the same time making it possible to undergo in an ordered and intelligible form a real experience that would otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible - which induces the release of the physiological process, that is, the reorganization, in a favorable direction, of the process to which the sick woman is subjected.

In this respect, the shamanic cure lies on the borderline between our contemporary physical medicine and such psychological therapies as psychoanalysis.  Its originality stems from the application to an organic condition of a method related to psychotherapy.  How is this possible?  A closer comparison between shamanism and psychoanalysis - which in our view implies no slight to psychoanalysis - will enable us to clarify this point.

In both cases the purpose is to bring to a conscious level conflicts and resistances which have remained unconscious, owing either to their repression by other psychological forces or - in the case of childbirth - to their own specific nature, which is not psychic but organic or even simply mechanical.  In both cases also, the conflicts and resistances are resolved, not because of the knowledge, real or alleged, which the sick woman progressively acquires of them, but because this knowledge makes possible a specific experience, in the course of which conflicts materialize in order and on a level permitting their free development and leading to their resolution.  This vital experience is called abreaction in psychoanalysis.  We know that its precondition is the unprovoked intervention of the analyst, who appears in the conflicts of the patient through a double transference mechanism, as flesh-and-blood protagonist and in relation to whom the patient can restore and clarify an initial situation which has remained unexpressed or unformulated.

All these characteristics can be found in the shamanic cure.  Here, too, it is a matter of provoking an experience; as this experience becomes structured, regulatory mechanisms beyond the subjects control are spontaneously set in motion and lead to an orderly functioning.  The shaman plays the same dual role as the psychoanalyst.  A prerequisite role - that of listener for the psychoanalyst and of orator for the shaman - establishes a direct relationship with the patients conscious and an indirect relationship with his unconscious.  This is the function of the incantation proper.  But the shaman does more than utter the incantation; he is its hero, for it is he who, at the head of a supernatural battalion of spirits, penetrates the endangered organs and frees the captive soul.  In this way, like the psychoanalyst, becomes the object of transference and, through the representations induced in the patients mind, the real protagonist of the conflict which the latter experiences on the border between the physical world and the psychic world.  The patient suffering from neurosis eliminates an individual myth by facing a”real” psychoanalyst; the native woman in childbed overcomes a true organic disorder by identifying with a “mythically transmuted” shaman.

This parallelism does not exclude certain differences, which are not surprising if we note the character - psychological in one case and organic in the other - of the ailment to be cured.  Actually the shamanic cure seems to be the exact counterpart to the psychoanalytic cure, but with an inversion of all the elements.  Both cures aim at inducing an experience, and both succeed by recreating a myth which the patient has to live or relive.  But in one case, the patient constructs an individual myth with elements drawn from his past; in the other case, the patient receives from the outside a social myth which does not correspond to a former personal state.  To prepare for the abreaction, which then becomes an “adreaction,” the psychoanalyst listens whereas the shaman speaks. (Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, volume 1, basic books, inc., 1963.)

I want to enlarge upon what Levi-Strauss has written here.  But it is important to understand that I am not coming from a scientific perspective but from a creative/artistic one.  I imagine the beginning, when both cultures - I’ll describe them as the Shamanic and the Analytic - had a common ancestor; this we can understand in both a metaphoric and literal sense, to be a child, for I am going to relate to how a shamanic culture could conceivably grow out of childhood mechanisms for understanding and survival - this it is important to note is not a suggestion that the shamanic culture is more primitive than the analytic but is simply an attempt to verbalise a hypothesis on the mechanisms of shamanism from the point of view of someone raised within an analytic culture - which opens up the debate on the importance of the the individuals isolated experience.  The child first begins to understand the world around him by developing a sense of good and bad, in this world monsters are real, which helps the child to define an understanding of bad.  The fact that monsters are real tangible beings means that they can be categorized and unltimately defeated, allowing the child to accept and deal with living in a world full of uncertainty.  If we accept this as an innate evolutionary device that has remained because it is essential somehow to our survival, then we can assume the two cultures of adulthood are borne out of this, refined and developed in different ways that result in answers that are acceptable to each culture.  The development into adulthood involves the continuing categorization of unknowns into compartments that can be neatly titled and shelved away, yet this maturation process necessitates the negation of factors that can’t be neatly shelved under specific compartments, resulting in a limited understanding.  From the analytic perspective it has resulted in an understanding of outside factors upon health, such as germs, viruses etc but has somewhat limited the effectiveness of internal mechanisms to dictate health and healing properties.  In the shamanic culture, whether consciously or not, there has been a more conserted study into the effects of mind upon health, by rendering the unknown maladies that we would understand as bacterial, or viral infection as real monsters, the shaman categorizes the illness, making it real and thus susceptable to defeat itself.  This, performance based realising of the beast coupled with knowledge of local medicinal herbs has resulted in the shamanic tradition surviving for millenia often with a decent success rate of healing.  Indeed it raises the issue that, if an individual or culture believes in the reality of something does this not make it a reality by the sheer fact that they believe it, an individual only exists within the confines of he or she has experienced previously.

Tom de Freston- diary entry

I purchased a  tube of Acrylic Vermillion today, having fallen in love with a tiny tube of Goache Vermillion that I had in a multiset. Its like Cadmium red, but better. Its got such a vibrant, luminous glow. It seems to have a particular potency when applied reasonably thinly, so that the light can work its way through. I can only imagine how sublime Michael Hardings ‘Chinese Vermillion- oil’ must be. Its bloody £80 for a small pot.

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Jeff Walls photography often makes deliberate and open references to past imagery. Often the imagery is from the Canon of Western history painting. This is the case here, with the nod being towards Delacroix’s ‘The Death of Sardanapalus’.

Wall does not borrow the specfics of the subject matter. Instead he takes something at its core, and then also pulls on the formal advances of the images.

Delacroix’s sub ject is of a meglomanic king, determined to outlive all his possesions. Aware of his impending death he orders all his possesions, horses and wives included, to be destroyed. The manic and uncontrolled violence is told through the deep reds which pervade the whole image, the violence and pace of the brushwork and the web of curving lines which mount up the picture plane. The whole image seems to have been tiled up, as if collapsing and pouring down across the surface.

Wall tells a parallel story but set in a contemporary, real and domestic setting.  It seems to be a story of domestic tensions having exploded in a fit of rage. We are left with the aftermath, once the cast (presumably of two) have left the stage. It is like the scene of a crime.

The red stays, filling the image with that sense of violent passion and lose of control. There is a strnage balance between chaos and stillness. The nature of photography and the abscence of any action or figures gives a sesne of increadible stillness. yet the chaotic spread of colour and objects creates a pattern of energy, as if remembering the recent past.

Wall sits comfortably and intellignetly on the boundary of painting and photography. He is a photographer in that he takes photographs, recording real visions. Yet he fits closely to a tradition of image making more traditiaonlly assocaited with painting. For the vision is constructed, it is composed, it is a synthetic ordering of parts. In this sense it has the theatricality and artificiality of painting.

‘A Lovers Discourse- a reply’

This is a reply to Roland Barthes ‘A Lover’s Discourse’. The original text sees Barthes writing about a single figure and the nature of their internal discourse caused by the ‘other’. The protagonist is sometimes present, sometimes absent, sometimes imagined.

The book is not organised in a linear narrative or in some form of philosophical hierarchy which moves clearly through varies levels of thought. Instead it is disjointed musings, displayed as fragments, on the condition in question. The fragments are organised alphabetically to provide a structure which does not turn the text into a singular doctrine.

The further I reached into the book the more I realised that numerous threads seem, to me anyway, to link into concerns in some of my paintings; these being predominantly desire and the single male figure and its relation to a female protagonist.

It feels important to try and make sense of the thoughts that emerged from the text. These vary from direct analyse of specific ideas to the development of an idea which derived as a tangent of reading the book but which has, perhaps, broken totally from the book as a source.

At this point I feel that the thoughts would be restricted if I either worked through them chronologically (as they came about within the book) or into some thematically (as this could limit the scope of them to what I think, in a preconceived manner, they are about.) So it seems logical to mirror Barthes. To take the fragments which have emerged as a deconstruction and reaction to the text and to reorder them alphabetically, under titles which loosely summarise the theme/content of the particular thought. Read the rest of this entry »

Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University invited a series of contemporary painters to give lectures on the role of the human figure in their work. The following is my notes for my lecture.

Why I paint the human figure.NB The following is merely notes written in preparation for the talk, it therefore has a fairly loose and conversational feel in the writing.

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This piece of writting considers the notion of perceiving emotion in art. It is a response to the ideas discussed in an essay of the same name by Damien Freeman, whose essay considers, amoungst other things, Wollheim’s writting on the matter.

 The unique experience of perceiving emotion in a painting seems to come down to a discussion of four parts. Two of these parts are relevant to the production and the others more directly to consumption. Read the rest of this entry »

As contemporary image makers I think Crewsdon and Rauch are in the same mode.

They are both products of an approach which seeks to find the unique properties of their medium (be it painting or photography) but which borrows liberally from other art forms in this quest. Filmaking, collage, graphics, advertising are all disciplines which inform their practise.

 In both cases they seek a certain kind of narrative. They are fully aware of the limits and tendencies of narrative in still images. They avoid the temptation to play literature at the game of unfolding a story over time. Instead they make the most of the causal ambiguity inherant in the stilled moment.

For both artists the narratives are always of a poetic sort. That is we are but into a situation where the mood, the drama, the sense of tension are palpably present. Yet the specific nature and context of the scene is not completely clear. How a figure relates to its surrounding, how the various parts combine to a coherent whole and what has happened before or will happen after are unclear.

 The lack of clairty is played upon to give a heightened sense of tension and unease. Crewsdon’s work, for instance, could come straight form a scene in American Beauty or Magnolia. It like some Hooperesque image  but modernised and laced in excess.

In both cases we are left with the sense that this is a point of dramatic tension. That something is on the verge of collapsing, imploding or to be revealed. The moments, in Rauchs particuarly, are constantly left in a state of flux, as if everything could collapse in front of our eyes.

For Rauch’s saturated and unreal colour range read Crewsdon’s move style lighting. They are the formal tools they use to find theatre. It is theatre (in terms of performance, play and a sense of tragedy) which is the central tennant linking their practise.