不知道 i don’t know

. . . and what a couple of years it’s been!

When I began posting to this blog it was because I was bored with my life and wanted to start developing an interest that to lead on to bigger things. The writing served this purpose for me and blogging seemed a good way of forcing myself to practice this.

To begin with the posts were sporadic and varied, covering anything and everything that I thought was interesting. As time went on the writing became a bit more concentrated on the art side of things, moving away from technical concerns, this also matched changes in my work situation. In 2006 I left work and started college, taking the Postgraduate Diploma in Contemporary Art History at Goldsmiths College in London, so not only did I stop working and returned to education, but I left my home in Cambridge and moved back to London.

The course has possibly been the best move I have ever made, although I still feel that I have long way to go to actually realise much of the potential that could come from it.

However the greatest thing to come out of this year has been meeting my fiancé, Shi Li. To be fair, nothing else matters quite so much to me as this. I have found love when I had more or less given up on it, and she has completed my life to this point and allows me to go on to the next stage in marriage and in work.

I feel that I can do anything.

Here’s to another two years, and many, many more!

I’m very excited to find that Global Warming Your Cold Heart have added me to their ‘A set of links’ after I quoted them in a previous post! Rather scarily, this puts me in a list with Edward Winkleman – I’m not sure I deserve such lofty company.

We were asked to visit the Freud Museum as part of the Framing Art course and in the process think about and try to articulate our responses to it.

At the same time as being the home of Sigmund Freud for the last year of his life, with everything that that entails physically and symbolically, the Museum was also hosting an exhibition of contemporary artworks based on the theme of ‘paranoia’. This juxtaposition of two powerful, potential attributions led to some interesting situations and feelings in the house.

At first glance the house is a fairly typical suburban detached house, in a well-off neighborhood in North London. The first indication that all is not as it seems are the set of three wooden signs staked in the grass on either side of the path to the front door. On them are painted “NO ENTRY”, “NO TRAVELLERS” and “KEEP OUT”1 and—to be fair—caused us to think that there must be another entrance somewhere round the side of the house. If that’s not effective art, then I don’t what is.

Having negotiated our confusion over these messages, we were able to get inside the house. It’s really quite small, with 5 rooms on the ground floor and 3 on the first. The rooms are again styled in a fairly typical British suburban manner, all persian and chinese rugs throughout, and antique furniture. However interspersed amongst this are Freud’s large collection of antiquities from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Orient, which Freud used as symbolic of the activity of the unconscious: “They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation”.

The objects also have a life of their own, beyond simply historical artifacts from Sigmund Freud’s life. Many of them are accompanied by small typewritten labels which give them further meanings relating to Freud’s psychoanalytic analyses. This makes the progress through the house somewhat unsettling, as one is forced to see the house through two sets of eyes concurrently, on the one hand regarding it as a historically significant residence, with all the social and quotidian meanings involved with that; and on the other as a screen through which to read each object as holding symbolic meaning.

The entry of the exhibition to the house add yet a further layer of meanings to the space. The objects are a mixture of photography, painting/drawing and free-standing objects. In many cases the objects are created to work with the existing milieus, and one finds oneself performing a process of double-take at certain points, to try and negotiate the potential readings of any particular view. Glass flamingos2 drink from antique bowls in the study, while others crowd round a table as ghostly remnants. Swimmers with missing limbs are projected onto the ceiling in the library3, as if we’re underwater, below them. Less effective for me were the myriad monitors placed around the house showing videos. Their lack of integration with the surrounding settings seemed jarring, they demanded you mentally remove yourself from the house and enter their little world. Many of these videos seemed trite, however Jean Gabriel Periot’s piece4 impressed me with its mélange of music and snapshots of roads leading to the gas chamber. Having just watched this me and my partner sat on a sofa in the next room and discussed in front of the beautifully effective wolf and deer video (with gunshot)5.

Overall the exhibition was pretty average, with a the few outstanding pieces mentioned above. The premise was a good one, but I felt not dealt with well by most of the artists. If I was to look at one aspect of the house from a Freudian perspective (not that I know much about Freud’s work) I’d have to draw attention to the pacing dog outside in the garden, trying to get in. I’m sure I could read something into that.

1. Daniel Baker, Wish You Were Here, 2007 installation
2. Nike Savvas, Zero to Infinity, 2004 installation
3. Tatjana Struger, Positions, 2004 video
4. Jean Gabriel Periot, Dies irae, 2005 video
5. Mircea Cantor, Deeparture, 2005, video

Here are my notes for today’s presentation. A recording of the event is at the end of the post.

Introduction

As I’m sure is true for all of us, I’ve found this course to be a bit of an emotional roller-coaster ride. Not only from day to day, but from lecture to lecture, and even within each lecture I can go from elation to depression in the course of a few minutes.

What I think this shows is that I’m at least being challenged by the work we’re doing, which has to be a good thing, when all is said and done. I keep telling myself, when the tasks seem insurmountable, that if I wasn’t feeling this way I wouldn’t have any way of knowing when I was up against my limits and potentially making progress.

There is a distinct difference between this presentation and the first. The first was an introduction to me and my life up until the point at which I entered Goldsmiths, concentrating on personal, anecdotal evidence.

Review the first presentation

List of objects:

• DVD: Jacques Tati’s Playtime (my sense of humour, modernism, architecture in general)
• Some Monopoly houses (suburbia – my upbringing, architecture)
• my iPod (music, electronica)
• A small maquette for a sculpture (lovely objects, my interest in art)
• 2 of my own artworks – the erratum slips and the Malevich book (the work I was producing while at College)

New objects

List of objects:

• Performance
• Blog
• Deleuze and Guattari

This time around I’ll talk about specific things which have developed during the course and which I hope will develop during this term and beyond.

Perhaps the main theme (or problematic) of last term was my search for a hook within the course subject-matter on which I could hang my own interests and (potential) work. This has only very recently started to become clear to me.

Up until the end of last term I think I was somewhat at a loss as to how the course actually intersected with my own interests. The main problem being that I’m not sure what my interests are at this point, which obviously makes any kind of connection and subsequent progression difficult. This has always been a problem for me – even before we started this course I was viewing it as more of a move away from a negative than towards a positive, real goal.

Diagrams/Performance

But the presentation that I did with Ian in the last week of term clarified some things for me. Certainly what I enjoyed most in this presentation was the analysis of the display of the Beuys work at the tate, and—perhaps more pertinently—the representation of that analysis through diagrams and performance during the presentation itself.

In relation to this presentation I’ve started making links with aspects of previous work I’ve done (specifically my activities at Middlesex University doing my first degree, where I would write and “perform” those writings). So the writing, and performance of those writings; the concern with space and perceptions of space; the systems of awareness and control of space—I can see this as a method for future work which will now be placed on a far more informed basis than anything I was able to do in the past.

Blog

As a parallel exercise, over the past few years I’ve been keeping a blog on my website. This serves as a repository of thoughts and comments on what’s been happening to me. At the same time I’m seeing this more and more as another performance space for my writings, another area in which they are being presented.

Deleuze & Guattari

Another thing which is developing is my interest in Philosophy.

In what at first appeared to be a huge mistake I chose to take the Philosophy and… course. I originally came to it wanting to improve my knowledge and experience in this subject, but wasn’t prepared for the obscurity of the teaching. To begin with it was very disheartening to have to sit through lectures week after week and not be able to grasp the point of anything that was being talked about. Here was a situation where I felt completely out of my depth, but at the same time knew that I was learning something completely new that could only expand my thought processes, as painful as it felt.

At this point in time I don’t claim to have much more of a clue about what it’s all about, but I have been introduced to some authors whose work I’ve found interesting. I was particularly taken with the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. Right now I’m attempting to write an essay on the concept of ‘the refrain’ as a musical motif as well as a wider concept applicable to other forms of art and society. This is described in frustratingly obtuse detail in their book A Thousand Plateaus. Needless to say I’m finding it quite ‘interesting’ (and challenging). For me, it’s a new way of thinking and thinking about thinking, and I’m keen to see where it leads me.

Conclusion

So essentially my objects are the writing – represented by the blog; the performance – represented by this presentation; and the philosophy – represented by this book, as my objects for this presentation.

I can’t tell you what implications these objects will have for my future activities – that remains to be seen.

Recording – 24mins (Ogg Vorbis format – 10.6MB)