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.

What is a hermit?

In the Middle Ages, someone who believed that living in a monastary or nunnery was not bringing them close enough to God may have chosen to live alone, often in wild or deserted places.  They spent their time thinking about Gods ways in the hope that it would bring them wisdom and allow them to better serve God.

Some would live near a ford or marshy swamp to act as a guide to travellers.

Sometimes a nun  would have herself shut away in a tiny cell next to the church, with only a tiny window looking into the church, a nun who did this would be called an anchoress.  A famous anchoress from the 14th century was Mother Julian of Norwich, she saw a series of 16 visions realting to Christ.

What is the difference between a vision and a hallucination? 

The Desert Fathers

Antony is known as the first christian hermit, he was made famous by the biography of St Athanasius of Alexandria.  He became the model for ascetic training and resistance to temptation.

However some accounts, particularly that of St Jerome stated that St Paul was the first hermit.  He fled from persecution when a teenager and found a great cave in the Egyptian desert, with plenty of water and palm trees, where he lived for the rest of his days, until he died at the age of 113years!

Although this story is questionable in its truth, it does seem to represent one of the defining qualities which is at the heart of why there is a continued interest in the people who choose to live there lives in solitude.  The ability to surround a life which is impossible to understand in myth. To exaggerate the truth is a persistent attraction for us, and a hermits life is so mysterious, it offers ample opportunity to do this.

The Hermit of Tarot cards

In tarot the hermit is a sage, not simply seeking truth and justice in solitude but bringing them to others.  He stands at the edge of a precipice, like the Fool, but knows when to stop.  He is not, like the Fool, on a quest for adventure.  He seeks to bring the light of enlightenment to others.

Info was sourced from www.hermitary.com

It seems to me that the limiting down of preoccupations is a form of dieting, and dieting to be a form of purification that allows one to focus their concentration onto matters that are found, in the time of solitude and reflection, to be matters of true significance.

It is perhaps a tenuous link but is this the reason why slim is seen to be attractive in modern society?  Slim suggests abstinence and abstinence suggests mental fortitude and purity.

Abstinence is living off nothing other than yourself, to be self-sustained, at its most extreme it is Christ taking bread and wine from his own body.

This is the ideal we have been bombarded with in the western world.

Splendid Isolation

It is a suggestion, in itself, of perhaps a greater truth. The existential realisation of the impossibility of understanding anything or anyone outside of your own sphere of experience.  Of how we are isolated sacks of flesh and blood and memories, and we only ever have this to feed off when trying to interpret or understand anything outside of ourselves.

Maybe the suggestion is that by understanding this premise we can find wisdom.

The Allotment

On a slight deviance, the allotment is gowing in strength again.  I don’t think this is solely because of a reaction to the economic downturn, but in fact also as a reeaction to the corrosion of the publics trust in politics.  We are cloaked in a climate of fear, largely the governments doing, so people are retreating metaphorically and literally into their own back yards.  To find sustainability at close quarters, relying less on institutions that have such a grip on the control of the country that even if we were to succeed in changing  the people in office, the end result would be pretty much the same.  This secret and seruptitious erosion of freewill has caused a zeitgeist of mistrust and no hope that has resulted in an attempt to gain some more control over our individual lives.  The increase in daytime tv programmes that include gardening and agriculture as part of their remit is a response to this shift, as is Jamie Olivers (the UK chef) most recent cookery book about growing your own.

 This waffled blurb could actually become something far more coherent, I could like to spend some time later looking into this notion…

Throughout the History of painting light has played a central and crucial role. A painters ability to excavate light from the stuff of paint has been a continuous fascination. The nature of the search and the type of light found has shifted, as if in some dialectical discussion with the zeitgeist itself.

 It seems that before now the various incarnations of light have tended to be the product of a meaningful, often spiritual search.

 A discussion with a friend yesterday made me reconsider in more depth the changing role of light in paint. He commented how the invention of electriicty must have significantly changed our relationship with light. before this point its existence, from either than sun or flame (notably in the form of candlelight) seems to be rooted to various religious belief systems. The sun as a symbol of God’s creative power, the candle as a ritulisitc tool in a various guises.

 We need only look to the type of light seen in medieval manuscripts or renaissance nad post renaissanace paintings. The type shifts hugely from an illuminated manuscript to a late Titian alterpiece or late Rembrandt self protriat. In eahc case, however, the light seems to glow from an inner depth, it seems to be conujured the medium itself. It seems weighted with a deep and moving spirituality. The light itself seems to be a manifestation of a deep and profound set of beliefs, imbued with a spiritual energy.

The invention of the electrical light bulb is a facet of the enlightenments wider program. Technological and scientific developments led to the deconstruction of previous belief systems and the arrival of doubt. Man repositioned himself as the centre of his own universe.

 The late modernist program seems, to me anyway, to be an attempt to find a new set of absolute ideals by which to measure ourselves and lead our lives. If we look to the late painting’s of Rothko it seems that this is one of the purest examples of this search for a new spirituality, a humanisitc one in his case.  The result is a form of light no less powerful, no less imbued and rising from the paint itself, than that seen in any religious altarpiece. The transformation of paint into light runs parallel and the notion of light as a motif of a deep spirituality continues. The context and framework of such a belief system seems more fragile, having been searched for rather than being the proudct of a certainty.

The biggest shift, however, for me, seems to be in the light of paintings beyond this date. The attack on the ideals and monolithic structure of the modernist program, as a whole, has led to the fracture and doubting period of postmodernism.

Along with this more philosophical and wide ranging shift have been contiued developments in the existence of light itself. We now have light everywhere and in various false forms. Television screens, computer screens, cities which never sleep in dark, mobile phones flashing constantly. We are surroudnign by a constant hum and glow of artifiically created light. Running parallel to this is a seeming lack of any credible and singular belief system to hold onto. Everything has been attacked, deconstructed, doubted and exposed as bankrupt. It feels, to me at least, a fragile and fasle existence, empty of any sense of divine prescence.

It seems both false and impossible to have the kind of light in painting now which exists, with great power, in a Rmebrandt or Rothko. Rather our light is more superficial, more surface based, more artificial. it is the light in a Daniel Richter painting, figure glows as if radioactive, burning form inside but due to some nuclear disfigurment or x-ray malfunction rather than any divine prescence.

Or the figures of Neo Rausch, a sickly sweet green or yellow glow often emminates, as if form within. it seems powerful and moving, but consciously false and unreal.

I think it is this form of light, deep and movign, yet false and artificial, which i want to imbue my figures with.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

The relationship between the artist and theory is very different to the one the philosopher, critic or historian has. For the artist there can be a certain elasticity in the understanding of the source. They can manipulate and formulate ideas for it for their own, selfish, and painterly ends. The accuracy of understanding is secondary to the impact, influence and development within the artists own practise.

Everything collapses

Everything falls

Every structure constructed will eventually come under the impact of some equivalent to gravity.

The combination of intrinsic flaws of idealism and the exterior dependance of change ensure that the rise is followed by the fall

In all cases, whether outside or existence or central to it, we just stand by and watch the beauty of the spectacle

The tragic inevitability of the collapse is the one constant drama we can rely on

New Era?

I can’t help feel that this American bail out is necessary, in some form, but actually heralds a end to a particular type of capitalist mentality. I’m not suggesting some kind of ideological shift but an altering of the mechanics. This crumbling of the financial structure is inherently connected to intrinsic flaws in the way the system we, the west, have run. It seems to perpetuate itself on a variety of levels from that of the individual, through the financial sector, institutions and then whole governments.

Options 

The hypocrisy of Brown really fucking grates me. To argue he is the man to steady the ship! This being the man who believes that investing huge amounts in national institutions amounts to measurable improvements. When the sun was shinning he did not mend the roof, but rather employed overly priced tradesman to fuck about with the foundations.

Now is a time for an experienced hand? Do wereally want a hand which is experienced at bleeding an overflowing pot dry just to pour the contents into spreadsheets and stat graphs without overly improving anything? I’m not claiming that the last ten years have been a total disaster, but that Brown has certainly been behind some horrific irresponsibility with the tax payers money. I can’t say the idea of the Tories being in charge fills me with much more joy. We are kind of optionless at a time when we need real quality.

 In 2002 Jean Baudrillard first published a transcript of his lectures on ‘The Spirit of Terrorism.’ It is an ontological deconstruction of a sensitive and contentious subject; not least the chapter which deals explicitally with the collapse of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. The idealism inherant in the vision was what was attacked, the destruction of concrete and lose of life was a by product. Read the rest of this entry »