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.