Getting a pickle

I did this drawing as a joke while I attended the Glissant reading group seminar.  That was yesterday, it was a joke for Kate Genever as it was referring to a drawing masterclass Anthony Gormley had done which irritated us both.   This week has felt mainly not to bad in terms of getting through it although at the back of my mind I keep getting in a pickle.

In simple terms after doing all the Odd jobs and bits and bots and pretending to be busy  I could be making art.  I have some ideas for my PhD and some thoughts of works I have never got around to doing and some stuff to learn about projection mapping and a feeling of self doubt.  I could also learn how to use Photoshop better and shift from final cut to Premiere as I am now paying for a subscription.  I now have space to get around to the things I thought I would do with space, well the only thing stopping me doing them was not having the space.

This morning I came up with my best excuse so far in that whatever I do apart from drawings with coffee and a Graphite pencil in the back of a notebook will become the 'thing '.  My arts practice is a bit of a mush but one of my few successes is to carry on as an artist but actually avoid the "thing' that art gets hung on.  I used to think of this as the simulacra.  I understood this to be the golden calf, the distraction away from the truth by the false idol or image of the truth.   I read in Jane Bennets Vibrant Matter that the simulacra is actually the essence of the thing that comes off as a skin and therefore communicates its thingness to the senses. In writing this down though I'm not sure it makes any sense or if I dreamed it.

The worry would be that anything that I made about something in my studio would become a representation of that thing rather than part of it.  The other bits and bots of art in the work that work l are always marginal but still part of the projects.  The unicorns horn, Carlos the Binauarial head, the pirate ships wheel, these things are minor gestures holding a position in the middle of things.

The idea of going to my Shed and renaming it studio and making an art object about a research project is not what I'm doing or what I'm interested in.  For me it would be a useful distraction but for the project this working with art at a distance and producing an object for an inevitable reductive decoding would be an abomination.  Like Freddy Kruger from the nightmare on Elemstrrt films - the bastard son of a 1000 maniacs.

This feels a useful way to think about the lack of desire to make anything.  Firstly why would I do something to muddy the already opaque water, secondly it would be confusing and deliberately distracting thirdly it would be bad art and bad research.  The good thing it makes me feel is I'm taking PhD research seriously and for this 6 weeks of locking down this is what I have been doing.  I have recognized that this is important, the writing reading and thinking. The making can wait until its on the inside again and not a thin skin like Teflon to fly off and strike my senses with its form but not let anything stick.