I thought this picture would do. I've been saying its a group of art students making PPE equipment as a joke but does make me wonder what art can actually do in this crises. Lighten the mood, could be one thing I suppose.
I wake up everyday with the intention of trying to make some sort of sculpture out of the bits and bods that are left over from Abi's exhibition. A constructionists hopscotch assemblage that I project images and films onto. I've downloaded Naum Garbo's communist era manifesto about sculture, it's beautifully emphatic. The recording is from a free 45 inch single that was attached to an art mag in the 60's I'm sure this means something significant. It made me think how conceptual art and pop art happened around the same time and wonder if one was a reaction to the other or just a fork in a river that we could then think of as a river as it happened before the end of history when rivers were still useful metaphors.
I got up and tried to read a chapter of 1000 plateaus, then I got distracted as it mentioned Arthur Conan Doyle and professor Challenger and a book called When the world screamed. I can vaguely remember the character from 1960's British films like At The Earths Core. In the book he is formidable larger than life, disliked but respected, in the films I think he was slightly bumbling more idiot savant than force of nature. The Chapter is called the geology of morals, it is a struggle and I have broken off to listen to a reading of the Doyle story on You Tube. I wonder if this is what I was supposed to do, I read a bit of Conan Doyle science fiction as a teenager and am drawn to his strange spiritualism. He also worked as a junior Doctor on Spital hill which is very close to my house. I think that Deleuze and Guattari in choosing Challenger must be constructing the earth as living thing not as literally as Conan Doyle where volcanoes are spots and earth quakes shivers but also not as loosely as James Lovelock with his Gai theory.
And the pricking of the planet to hear it scream is a very funny approach to checking if it's alive or more to let it know that we, us humans are here on its surface. All this said I did not fall into this chapter well with its Dali esk lobster illustration to kick it off. Strata and layers and materials and planes and matter and materials and stuff that is and isn't part of the layers that face the body without organs and don't face it. I wondered if some of the point was to dislodge the reader from a root of sense. This is implied in the writing Deleuze and Guattari at a few points, though i suspect this may be Massumi as translator, cross the 4th wall and in a paragraph or two return to hold a hand a while, suggest that perhaps what you are looking for in the text was never there and all you need to take form this reading is this. There is no single root/route to dig up or to follow.
Alongside this I read Glissant an altogether different text and difficult in its own way. preparing to talk about it or listen to others talk about it later today. I was moved by the start where I was put on a slave ship and taken across a sea of violence to a place of violence and I think told that this violence will shape who I and all my ancestors could ever be, not exile or nomad or migrant but something born of a violence that will never be left behind as I have nowhere to leave it but where I am.
I wonder what my excuse is for not making the sculpture even as an experiment and a bit of fun. I think it may become a simulacra and a dangerous thing. Stand in for what art can do, was doing on the project, be more than a game at the edges, attempt to redistribute the sensible in a direction that could be dangerous. I don't think anyone could accept it as a playful distraction without a colosal amount of irreverence which would be counter productive. I am making excuses but there is also nothing stopping me just having a go and seeing what comes out of it , to write a couple of days off to vanity and exploring materials. On telly last night Anthony Gormly was making dots on blotting paper, he has OCD and it sometimes makes interesting art and sometimes makes dots on paper.
I like the chaos of this writing I want to be like professor Challenger proved right as the world screams.
No comments:
Post a Comment