What happens when you realise you are not Francis Bacon or Gilles Deleuze?

Me and Kate did a keynote yesterday about creative methods - its the fourth talk on methods I've done in 6 weeks.   We were talking about our Fishing as Wisdom project, I decided to explain Carlos who is in the image above.   His origins lie in my artistic belief that during the 1970's technology, in the modernist sense of progression, was still full of the potential for good.  Cine cameras were used to record a baby's first steps or a wedding, the idea of video surveillance was a Science Fiction fan's dream.  Carlos and his tripod are from the 1970's; apart from his ears that were purchased from the Scarborough based company Harmony Supplies who sell equipment for  Chinese medicine and were the only company I could find who supply a left and a right ear to practice acupuncture on.  The head has a tea towel soaked in plaster of Paris inside to try and simulate the density of a human brain/head/mind.  The ears have some plastic tube used in home brew connected inside which is sealed at one end and contains a specific amount of air designed to give back pressure similar to a human ear drum.  Binaural recording uses the two channels of a stereo sound recorder to capture the sound as close to the point where a human would hear it. When played back through headphones it gives a sense of the space of sound. It is a bit like surround-sound in your head - you can judge space and movement.  I used Binaural sound as a homage to one of my favorite artists Janet Cardiff but also because it's a way of recording that pays attention to space.

When fishing I noticed that one ear attunes to the outside, to the noise of the water and nature, and the other attunes to what people are saying or to conversation.  The sounds come from different sources; the space is open on one side and intimate on the other.  The head bought from Ebay has the name Carlos written on the back; it is his brand name. Carlos was a recording device and he also became the symbol for art in the project.  I struggled to explain this in the talk: I intended to show the film with its Binaural sound but the equipment was working on a single channel. The sound cut off due to a technical issue half way through the clip.  It didn't seem to matter.  Carlos and Binaural sound are probably best left in the margins, they were never meant to take centre ground.

In my RD2 progression meeting we had a long discussion about how to make arts practice and writing work together.  I said lots of it is none linguistic but this isn't a good enough answer in the context of a PhD, it doesn't move us forward.  My description of Carlos is not like Deleuze talking us through Francis Bacon's painting, it is not on the same plane of immanence.  However hard we try it will not fold in.  I'm happy with that as I think that failure is something that carries its own momentum.   I don't think practice can always align well with words.  Words can struggle towards meaning and practice can maintain itself in a place of whimsy on the edge of meaning; they are chalk and cheese or chalky cheese.  In a way, Carlos is art like Francis Bacon's paintings are art - Carlos points to more than he is, more than he can ever be; he is art and in a way he is change and movement. Carlos fails in reality as art, as device, as recording machine.  He fails to ask the questions that need to be asked, he is a silent witness who does not bear witness as I had intended.   It is impossible to articulate what Carlos does, that is why he can still represent art an intentional object with no intention.  He lives in a cupboard in my studio - the cupboard is called Mick, it is named after a cupboard in my Grandad's garage which was called Mick - he would name his cupboards to help us find things.

I need the warm winds of Johan

When I first started working with Johan I would talk to him about Lacan and trilectics and spacial theory.  He would talk to me about death the gap and the void - Johan taught me how to float. When I was at the sweat lodge on the new moon I prayed to the spirits and it was hot so I laid down on the earth floor which acts as a heat sink and holds its coldness.  For a moment forming from  the smoke I was visited by my spirit animal and without any irony it appeared as a wolf; a lone wolf.  The last time I used this image in a blog the title was - The day Johan wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another.  I am having my mischief squeezed out of me and this is no good thing.  As nobody is reading this blog and its probably far to introspective to be of any use I will put down some notes as a marker as I prepare for next weeks mini ViVa that sounds like a mini Valet at the car wash - a surface clean.

I can see the need to focus down and the simplest way to do this now is to take a deep dive into new materialism.

The justification for this is that my artistic practice as a sculptor weaves in and out in an entanglement with making that involves my body, others bodies and active materials.  The idea of what sculpture is and can be is not in question but it is my clear tradition, my line and linage.  What this  new approach excludes from the sphere of the study to an extent is the agentive qualities of what artists bring to research.  At the back of the study is an inclination that the place holder that research makes for art is an abstraction and a projection and sometimes within social science research it is filled by an imaginary – so when you put an actual artist in there, things fall apart.

  
This I know on paper is a very loose justification for having Ruskin in my lit review,  he stands for the romantic idea of the artist which persists and isn’t taken that seriously but is embodied within artists.   It is part of their material or embodied self and so their potential agentive role, there vital power.  See how I am trying to turn this towards a New Materialism – it is an awkward fit – well really no fit at all. 

I have to now accept that I was doing a recon a butchers hook  – a once over a skim or a thin slice.  I was asking what is post-qualt social science research and why do we need it?  I was trying to read properly but the reading was all over the place and in this all otherness I was dropping down wormholes – I was a kid in the sweaty shop of theory, deciding between 2 ounce of Yorkshire mixtures or a gobstopper.

But then when you talk to anyone outside of the very small bubble I’m floating in nobody has a clue about any of it - not even academics working in what may seems like a similar field.  So my seam is too wide and it sits in a mountain side. I am digging in and have not got the energy or equipment to go up or down into what sits below or above.  All this is necessary and I can already feel a shift in the level I’m working at theoretically. Yet the point is to take this into the world you need to come up from underground or dip out of the clouds Whiteheads flights of the speculative imagination seem a long time ago. My problem is not the digging into the seam it is the inability, as Geoff would say to come by - the walking back up the drift at the end of the day into the world. 

 I suppose I never really made a separation between theory and practice or process and product and I could,  as it says in the the Hanson family song "let myself feel like when I learnt to float.'

You need to learn to float but sinking comes naturally especially if you remember to inhale.  I read my RD2 this morning and I was worried it would be shit but it is in fact very good – it holds its effort and if you give it a tiny bit of space and make allowances for me  it is someone’s struggle to learn to float.  Floating is not treading water or swimming it is expending the least amount of energy possible to let yourself be in water.
 

I think I can address the comments on the Rd2 document and keep a strong sense of the things that are quite good about it, some of its struggle.  I have a lot to do though I need to build a platform where loose parts transcend themselves become vibrant and glow in a flat ontology where I am their equal – I also need to spin a yarn that goes from here to there and enter back into the worked out coal seam.  

In defence of R2 D2

I have finished most of my work and after a week of restless nights and a grinding of teeth I have started to feel better about the RD2 process.

Strangely this feeling better has come from the same kind of thinking too deeply that put me here in the first place.  Deeply here does not mean productively as I have being flitting around in the realm of theory like a fly on scatological shit.  Or perhaps more poetically some sort of insect pollinator traversing a meadow of wild flowers.  Although I think I have been producing tins of artists shit  rather than the Bill Woodrows bee keeper honey.  I thought it may be good to reference artists work here as it is another strand of the useful process of defending my RD2.  Art has it's traditions and its foundations and interestingly in creating hyperlinks the mind and the clicking tends to stop at the specific work; they are points on a map. The flight of the speculative imagination is held in the image, they stand in for more than what they are, without representing what they are,  at least that is for us artists.

I have ended up at a cross roads and feel like I need to quote Ruskin - he is in my PhD for this reason as he was a great thinker who to an extent understood the artists of his day.  Better I think than Deleuze or Lacan as they created art and the artist in the image of their own desire or drive, the artists of the gap and the void.  Ruskin gives us the artists in full flight, in the lofty mountains of the alps or the cold Gothic beauty of a Northern cathedral .

‘And nothing is ever taken seriously or as it is meant but always, if it may be, turned the wrong way, and misunderstood; and while this is so, there is not, nor cannot be, any hope of achievement of high things; men dare not open their hearts to us, if we are to broil them on a thorn-fire.’

John Ruskin Modern Painters, Volume 2

 This indeed is the point of him and I have had my heart broiled on a thorn fire.  The  fears the fast rampaging flames crackling all around, yet my heart slowly cooking in a pan of congealing ontological stew.  Ruskin is in my RD2 because of his difficulty; I am told that we need to stay with the difficulty.  My problem is one of capitulation, I am aware of what it is thought I should do with my work, I am aware of its logic and its neatness, it course of least resistance. Yet I am at a point of refusal and I am not sure where to locate the stoppage.  As Ruskin tells us nothing is ever taken seriously or how it is meant but always turned the wrong way.

I haven't reread my RD2 yet because I remember writing it and I remember all its faults, naive and under researched, it is an honest deep dive into an ontological soup, a short treading of water, a little broiling a re-emergence and an attempt to swim to the side of the pan where the liquid is cooler and there is potential to bide a while.  I wrote it at the wrong time and I was ill prepared for the critique. Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? tell us that philosophy is the development of new concepts, they say this quite plainly.  This is the endeavor and the reworking of old concepts is not philosophy yet as you read on there is a realistion that the new concepts sit on a plain of Immanence which unfolds towards an event horizon that contains its limits yet not its territory.  At least within my RD2 I didn't aspire to create my own plain of immanence limiting my self creation to new concept and methodology.

 I met with Kate and Laura who did an emergency supervision as I probably come across as needed help.  It feels like it was decided that I could look at a New Materialist reading of informal areas of learning and narrow my field of view.  Instead of wondering why social science in its late stages of the post Qualitative turn needs a flat ontology that de-centers the subjective I should just adopt the parts of the thinking we can all cope with and apply it to the area of study.  

This is a shame really as I was in the middle of thinking that my problem was somewhere between Deleuze and Lacan.  Both after and before Oedipus  on the road between drive and desire.  I was making some progress in the unpicking of thought and was taking myself probably too seriously.  I wondered whether the dissolution of the subjective and the absence of organs, the human as organic machines and the collapse of the ego super ego and the id did not leave a constitutive gap. The fact that Hegal personified has become a dialectic utterly active in any argument both for and against this  despite Deluezes protestations, an active and constituted gap within Delueze through his enforced absense , his body without organs.  I can find lots of interest within a turn to New Materialism and I'm enjoying reading the texts that emerge from an encounter with the world through this thought path.  I think though that it should be necessary to put this desire for a different way to think through the world in a broader context of it emergence, the need for it - what it is against. 

If I were my supervisor I would encourage an active defense of a deep dive into an ontology that requires more than passive reading it requires a visceral and active change in the way we/I /they comprehend the world and this struggle is valiant and salient it is a struggle that we/I/they would always need to come back from and it is both productive and counter productive yet for the sake of the gap that used to be god in the context of my journey it should at least be recognised as necessary.  

here endeth the rant. 

I found this image in a sketchbook from 1984 - it is part of the artists way - it is what we bring in all our difficulties and it does not flatten well.