Integrity? Or Giving In?

Allow me an indulgence, if you will.

I have a memory. '93 - '94, some time round there. I'm at college. The lecturer down the front.  It's an art history class, which usually meant sitting watching a film or a documentary and taking notes.  But today is different.

I don't remember the inciting incident, although I remember it as a generalised occurrence, but he'd heard about a teaching practice, and decided that we needed to be taught something in turn.

So he stands there and he says something like "You should not ever, let the teachers here attempt to demonstrate how to do something on your drawings.  How to draw something correctly.  If they insist on doing so, tell them, as politely as possible, to fuck off.  Make sure that they get a scrap of paper over yours, or draw in a corner, far from your composition.

"Because the instant that another hand touches your work, it ceases to be yours. When someone else adds a line or a shade, even in demonstration, you have not learned how to do that. You have learned that that person values their vision over yours.

"And as an artist, there is no worse a thing."

I do wonder if this is why I am so uncomfortable with what our current lecturer is attempting to do. 

Never mind my discomfort with people sanitising our work in general and trying to spin it as positivity when it blatantly isn't. A younger me would have walked at this point. And I don't know if it's maturity or weakness to be able to swallow the bile and allow her to change my work-- our work - in this way. For while my work may be the only one being changed physically, the context of the cohort as a whole is being altered. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

I grew up learning, believing, that to be an artist was a calling. That what we made came from the soul, same as music, same as writing. And to take something that comes from the soul and to change it, to have it changed, it hurts. And it's not right. 

As Cesar A. Cruz said, art should disturb the comfortable. It should provide a place to cause thought, to examine your own feelings.  Why does this make me feel like this? And to sanitise that strikes me in a way that says my lecturer/curator does not understand art at all.

Escape

 Escape (2021)

A photographic series of works around the theme of escaping reality, through self destructive  hedonistic, ways.

Pills, drugs, sex, music, alcohol, death?

Mostly monochrome, Instagram formatted and filtered.  Pushing the boundaries of what will and will not be censored.  This series is taking me to a darker place than before, and Instagram’s censorship is a source of concern.  Means I need to get my own webspace up to spec again. 

The work has given me a very visceral reaction to it, moreso than most other works I have created recently.  Tapped into something inside myself that yearns to break free?  I don’t know, I don’t fully understand it yet. The need to draw closer to death by blanking out the day to day existence.  Skirting close to edge of life.  A thrill seeker or just trying to take the edge off the days?

There is loss here too, the loss of previous partners in the crime, lovers of the edge. Memories and depression, highs and lows.

The first image of pills carries a sexual undercurrent to it, something I have tried to enhance with a warmer tone to it.  The second a brutal realism, as I have no wish to romanticize anymore than necessary the realities of drug use. Where the series goes from here, the shape the next images will take I am not clear on yet.  They exist, half formed ghosts. And while it is tempting to leave them there, memories of events that have not happened, the series should be bought to its conclusion.

Is there an irony in knowing about how destructive this all is, yet yearning for it anyway?  An addiction, my obsession, my mulatto, an albino…

Still Alive

 I see the Tate is celebrating a queer art month.  I'm not sure how I'd feel about my work being pushed or celebrated purely because of the orientation of my sexuality.  If it forms a basis underpinning all the work an artist creates, sure but...  
I mean, if all I painted were waterlillies, would I still be included? Where's the relevance?

It makes me doubt my always shaky claim to queerness.  As a few things have this past days. Not ready to detail yet, but as far as myself outside of art is concerned there is a lot to think upon. Whereupon these spectrums do I lie?

Anyway, I'm sorry it's been a while since I posted.  The Lockdown gives me nothing but time to think, and yet I am ever reluctant to put anything down for posterity.  Commitment is my enemy, even to holding thoughts accountable. I draw, I paint, I submit. I wait.

Art is diminished.  The things I want to do I cannot.  I have neither the space nor the resources. I am reduced to creating only that which I have always created, except I am cut off from the fanart side of things.  I hold myself lacking in comparison to my peers, and they are so far above me...  so, mentally, I have given up.  Especially harder when the one guy that everyone fawns over is my brother.  I exist in his shadow, and I cannot compete. Deservedly so, as he has been more committed than I, but it still makes me all the more aware that I am Not Good Enough, and so I cease, and so I am diminished further.  

 University continues to be a bitter waste of my time.  But I have wasted more time these last twenty years, so I shall keep my head down. If I am to fail, it will not be because I have not tried, moan though I may.

That'll do. Thanks to the Tate for sparking this post, I guess.

Peace.

Sundays, am I right?

 Very low .  Dug too deep into myself and now... well, the floodgates aren't open, but a steady trickle of bad feelings and memories now provide a background noise to my life, all the worse when I am on my own like this.

The constant pressure of 'You should be doing something more productive' when the less productive things are music and reading, relaxing and just trying to switch off.  No, I should be working, producing, during all my awake hours.  How can a mind keep going like this?  It's not healthy, but even knowing it, I can't stop it.

Since finishing the last torso, I've produced nothing for university, I simply cannot work at home, and the pods are too isolating.  I'm not allowed to book workshop time yet, and my peers are not in regularly.  Even before the new lockdown, which means I suspect those students commuting from further afield will just not bother, three hours a week, spread across twenty students, means your chances of crossing paths with someone, much less being able to spend time with them, is small.  This is not what I signed up for.  

Memories.  Of a brief period when I was at least...  I don't even know if I was happy. Content?  Or was I as unhappy as now, but memory lies to make me feel it was a slightly better time? I can't trust my mind.  My work heads into using symbols of suicide more overtly.  Sex and drugs and rock n roll and the incumbent death associated with it.  Death and suicide that has touched my life this year, and I have not been allowed to close that door, and I do not resent the people responsible.  They hurt me so much, what more was one more gut punch?

A lot, it seems.  The selfishness and fear of others, and of what?  Of me?  What the hell can I do?  What the hell did I do? Enough to justify all this?

And here and now I am lost and alone and afraid of the people who reach out.  Because I am a terrible person who will do something so bad that I deserve all this.

And still I am not working.  How does one channel all this hopelessness into art? With but a short divorce of time from my work earlier this year, it is all but meaningless to me, a collection of stuff that just means I passed time. Nothing has meaning.

Fuck.

I still miss her.  I still love her, in that stupidly hurtful way. An instant connection, a feeling that this person gets me and makes me feel so right, even when as friends and having that severed is worse than any cold turkey and has lasted so much longer.  Years of turmoil and pain and I can't let go of that one time someone got me.  Or at least, enough to make me feel something other than loathing for myself. 

The vulnerability of the spoken word

I have had many thoughts about the spoken word/video piece I created. (preliminary title: Hidden In Plain Sight)

(https://www.instagram.com/p/CGyQWVqJTeI/)

 It does not seem to have gained much traction amongst my peers, I wonder if I should have specified that it was a spoken word work, and not relied on natural curiosity? That at least is a lesson to be taken on board for next time. The piece itself was actually very taxing for me to make and post.  I am not comfortably putting my own self out into the world.  My voice, my feelings, in such a brazen manner. So it was a huge positive that I was able to do that.  Whether that is repeatable. I am unsure. Certainly the source for the piece is somewhat exhausted now, as I shall attempt to explain shortly.

The words I spoke.  They had no preplanned emotional expression, I just wanted to read them and see how they fell.  Thinking on this, I then wondered how they would have come out had I expressed them in a different environment.  My original plan was to recite them while walking at night, recording my steps through a rainy city, the lights reflecting off of wet surfaces, but that proved to be too difficult, logistically at this point in time.  But would those words have had different cadence, different subtle intonations, had that been the situation?  They certainly sounded different, more broken, in the environment they were expressed in. 

I could, one supposes, take those same words and repeat them in different places, if just to see how different they can sound, but I am unsure of repeating myself.  It’s not something I feel comfortable with.  Familiarity could potentially dull the impact, even if new facets could emerge from new locations.  It’s something I need to think about.  After all, the songs themselves would have been performed in multiple locations, to multiple reactions, across the course of their existences.

The words themselves relate to my emergent theme of love, loss and obsession.  An ex friend made a mix CD for me, many moons ago, when that was still the done thing.  I took a line from each song in

order, in an attempt to see if a narrative could be crafted from it.  That there was one, and that it emerged so strongly was a pleasant surprise. 

The way that even the German language line seemed to fit perfectly into the ‘right’ place in the narrative… it makes me wonder about the person who made the CD even more now.  The work was fed on obsession, and feeds my obsession in turn, an ouroboros of feeling and emotion and art. Rather nice, really.

So, I am recontextualizing words, lines from songs.  Strip them from their original context almost completely.  No music, no cadence, no rhythm, not even the context of the verses and choruses they were originally part of. But keep them as a whole, like the CD they came from, and try and find an emotional newness.  Fueled by the person who made the CD, her touch, thoughts, intent still present, but stripped and changed.  These are deep concepts for me, at least.

I have never considered myself a performer or actor.  That might have to change.  If I am still not comfortable seeing myself on camera, maybe I can learn to live with my voice.

Heart beats faster from inside.  Thought it was a big charade.... truth of the matter is I'm complicated. You're as straight as they come. Take it away, I never had it anyway.  You think it's all for show? But this is the only way I know.  When the truth is found to be lies and all the joy inside you dies?  You can feel his disease! So, are we lost or do we know which direction we should go? Now you've disappeared, I hear you breathe so far from here, and now it's starting to rain.  We'll tell lies about each other. I love you.  I hate you. I can't get around you. We'll never be the same again, never feel this way again.  Speak the truth about me.  It's taken so long to come true, it's just a kiss away. Whatever tomorrow brings... tut mir nicht leid. Pick me up now, I need you so bad.

But see how deep the bullet lies.

Spotify link to CD playlist

To Reflect

 All right, lets reflect.

Time to sit and think about my work for a bit, what's working, what's not, and why.  And maybe work out why I'm struggling to get going again.

Broadly speaking, my art can be split into two groups.  The work I make to derive an emotional response from myself, and the work I make to derive an emotional response from others.

Within those groups: From the first; I make art based on a person I am incapable of getting over, and cities at night, from the second; more conceptual, larger ideas form.  Installations, lights and sounds.

What links them?  Lights in the darkness.  Vibrant colour in the night.

The outlier? The work based on a person.  A part of the work, yet seperate from it.

Is there a reconciliation?  Or must one strand remain seperate to the rest, as much as that person is seperate to me now?

Where do they connect?  Where does the person fit in the city, is she light or is she dark?  Is she both, the unifying filament?

And an idea presents itself.

So anyway, what do I 'like' about my work thus far? What works about the work? 

In terms of the clay pieces, the hand crafted look to them is working for me.  Ties into my summer work of touch and memory of touch.  My fingerprints on the clay, moulded from memories of her skin.  There's something to enjoy there. I've done a lot of erotic drawings this summer, but the clay pieces are almost erotic to make.  

So, next stage.  I want to make bigger, and extend further down the body.  Bring more of the curve of the hip in.  And then we shall see where that takes us.   I'm not keen on just making a sculpture of the female form, that's a bit passé, but something that evokes the feeling of a Goldin photograph?  Dirty and grimy and sexy and real?  I can get behind that.

A negative however is the scale.  The scale works for me and where I'm working.  But without the advantage of being a more true to life scale the piece edges more towards abstraction.  Not in itself a hundred percent bad, but enough to lose some of the essence of the pieces I'm working on.

Soon I'll start another, with the same general shape as now, but more integrated to another idea, when the things I need arrive in the post.  Further thoughts on that when it happens.

I am no sculptor, and I think that helps.  I'm having to make my own mistakes and find my own solutions, and that's fine, that's fun.  This is better than being given rules, I think.  If I do work bigger and need to use an armature, that's where more expert advice will need to be sought but for now, on my small scale, I think I'm good.

I have stumbled across the Tokyo works of Cody Ellingham.  Work I like.  Lines and shapes and neon and darkness and cities.  I need to get to Tokyo.

Brave New World

 Quick check in, it's a while, hasn't it?

Like most people, the ongoing Covid on again/off again lockdown measures have taken a toll.  I have only seen two people socially since March, and one of those was a meeting to compare notes on dealing with a part time return to University.  Much needed and a good time, but hardly the drink and drug fueled bacchanalia I am (allegedly) used to.

Still.  Here we are now, with the dawning of a new year of Official Art Practice ahead of me.  I am, as ever uncertain of my practice or how I'm going to make it with effectively no studio and no peers on a day to day basis. I suppose, I just need to start and see what transpires.  

That start will happen on Friday, my first three hours in a studio, and assuming it is remembered I am there, my first work based conversation with the tutors. Hopefully the first step on a path will present itself.

More interestingly, the possibility of doing the weekly critical reflection as something other than a written piece has been floated.  I am considering options, and at some point want to try and vlog the reflection.  I've been tying with the idea of getting some video work done, and this seems like a fine chance to experiment there.  I just need to deal with my self esteem and body dysmorphic issues and it's plain sailing. 

That'll do for now.  I'll try and check in again on Friday or Saturday, and really get into a routine with this.  

Salut.