All things been equal

 I have left the mould, which has gone moldy, for this hope soap on a rope at my old house. It is one of the last things to pick up. It holds the potential of new hope soap in its negative space.  It is relevant today as I have been talking about putting together a new Festival of the Mind proposal the last one I did was with Kate and this was when when I first made the cast. On Friday we have explored radical hope in my trees-scapes project. I have also had two weeks of work that have felt more like the good old pre-covid days.  Jumping on the train and going places and meeting real people in offices and cafes, sat on chairs inside and outside. I have enjoyed it but its also tired me out in a place deep inside, not under the skin tired not something easy to shake off.  I am a little worried about my stamina levels so I'm booked in for a suit of blood tests tomorrow morning.  I haven't really done any PhD writing for a couple of weeks but I recon that's fine there really hasn't been time and I have had to manage a few things at home that needed managing. 

I have just finished reading Radical Hope, a book that uses the story of Plenty Coups the chief of the Crow tribe to talk about hope in the face of cultural annihilation.  I kept thinking about artists and how I sometimes feel I am part of a tribe that follow a different set of cultural codes.  My idea of what courage is and a successful life is somehow slipping out of view. Perhaps not within society as a whole but to an extent I, or my subjective self is falling away from it. A coup is a small victory for the Crow, like steeling a horse or hitting a rival Sioux warrior on his breastplate with your Coup stick.  The Coup stick was a way of marking Crow territory, the warrior would plant it in the ground and the enemy could not pass it or remove it.  Plenty Coups was good at getting Coups but then the white man came with his forked tongue and killed the buffalo and the Crow were moved to a reservation and counting coups became irrelevant.  I don't think the story or the history was supposed to be a metaphor or an allegory but I kept thinking about trying to win coups as an artist.

On my PhD I kept and keep planting my Coup stick and bashing my supervisors on their chests with none fatal blows yet as I've moved from the world of artists, counting coups has lost its relevance.  My world and all its principles have not being destroyed by external forces yet an internal malaise, a loss of faith has taken hold. The cloud was always there but a clever idea would hold it just enough at bay.  How then can I look at where I am and find some sort of radical hope?  I occasionally find a piece of practice that feels like a coup, building Derek Jarmen's prospect cottage in my garden perhaps. Only last week I had a slight buzz when I thought of constructing a machine of capture that would take the ideas and images of children and produce a giant identity collage.  I felt like this could be a coup but the nature of an artists coup is that it needs nurturing - you can find the seed of an idea but that is not a real coup unless it grows into something. 

Radical hope then takes me four years into the future when I have moved past the planted coup stick of my Phd and I'm living in a world that at this moment I cannot quite imagine.  It is not a new place that is built from the present it it a raveling of the significant threads that's I hope to find again.  Perhaps I was stupid not to drop a long line of breadcrumbs for the birds to eat so I could follow their migrations on the  the warm winds of hiemat.

Frayed at the edges

 My friend Gary just said I looked a little frayed at the edges, perhaps this is what happens when you try too hard to make a raveling.  My black nail is slowly growing out, like the cut on my finger the transformation is always slightly slower than expected but luckily it is inevitable, like entropy.  

 In late October I had a good week of writing then it got busy and it's kept busy since.  I should probably of managed the odd half day of writing but somehow I never got to sit down and get some focus.  I had a good supervision with Kate on Monday she is coaching me to think I am further on than I am, I know I'm not though, the bounce has gone from my bungee.

I've done no writing for two weeks and I've just eaten a double-Decker.  We have a plumber in fitting a new boiler and the dog is slightly mad, he doesn't like the long term intrusion or the noise.   Kate says I should decide my fieldwork is finished and start to look at what I have that is as Boris Johnson says 'oven ready".  Like the Brexit deal its about as oven ready as a chicken running around the farm yard, feathers, neck and innards intact. 

 I'm relatively happy though its nice to have a few bits and bobs of other stuff -arty, creative work.  I know my knowledge and thinking have moved on in leaps over the last couple of years yet my practice has suffered.   I have felt the little bubble of abstract confidence gradually slip away.  Non-sense was so much more fun before I started to read what Deleuze had to say about it.  Nobody drew attention too or cared about what was opaque until I read Glissant. Opacity was just there fizzing in the background, the pop pressurized with potential in the bottle before the introduction of a Minto. 

Life moves forward and changes happen and I can't regret my deep dive into theory or the privilege and joys of doing something slightly different for a few years.  The changes are ringing in now though and I'm thinking a bit more about the future.  At the very least the PhD thinking and writing will need to be contained somehow and the paid work and thinking forwards will really need to happen.

Kate was good at the supervision to remind me that I will need to have something ready to submit by the summer of next year but I am not going to start to worry too much just yet. 

I'm going out now to project on a giant Starling

Amal and the poet Laureate

 

 

Last week was busy and a bit stressful.  I did a projection for Amal the puppet on the Friday night then showed a film for Halloween at the Adventure playground on Sunday.  Last night it was the Simon Armetage performance with my film of the Peak District showing in the background.  It was the end point of two little projects that I had enjoyed been a part of. I was pleased with each pragmatic, yet better than expected outcome and it was refreshing to have big audiences present at all three of the events.

I have decided to go easy on myself today and do a bit of reading and to blog.  Although I would not say it was a busy weekend there were lots of stress points and the potential for things to go wrong or at the very least not work out.  I suppose the work I did this weekend is actually what people see me as doing. It is my professional profile, it does not really feel like a practice though. To an extent I have misplaced my practice,  I'm hoping to find it again at some point and recognise it when I do.  

Over the last few weeks I have been musing about building Dereck Jarmen's Prospect Cottage in my garden.  I think a prospect cottage is something many older artists desire in some shape or metaphor.  This thinking has had a twinkle of a practice at its edges.  The impossibility of it the crassness of it , the fact that if I were to construct it, it could be nothing other than a magical space.  Deep inside I have a little energy flash of excitement again.  This is held in the detail of the making but also in the idea. 

 

The original has parts of this poem by John Donne inscribed on the side.

The Sunne Rising

by John Donne

 

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?

Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide

Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,

Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,

Call countrey ants to harvest offices;

Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,

Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.

 

[Thy beames, so reverend, and strong

Why shouldst thou thinke?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,

But that I would not lose her sight so long:

If her eyes have not blinded thine,

Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,

Whether both the'India's of spice and Myne

Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.

Aske for those Kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.

 

She'is all States, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is.

Princes doe but play us; compar'd to this,

All honor's mimique; All wealth alchimie.]

Thou sunne art halfe as happy'as wee,

In that the world's contracted thus;

Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee

To warme the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art every where;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare. 

 

I was musing with the idea to  inscribe 

eeeba gum 

can ya belly touch ya bum

can your tits hang low

can you tie them in a bow

can your balls go flat

can you put em in a plat

eeeba gum can you do that.

In this private musing I see myself living much more in line to a  practice.  Hard learned through the years of anonymity.  Perhaps it is something of a musing about the potential to do things differently or perhaps within the raveling of a new making there exists a potential for or at the very least a kernel to hope , a longing for difference. 

I will return to my PhD writing this week - I was getting quite well stuck in yet it is always good to have a breather  as it helps to nudge things along.  This weeks nudging has made me think about territory and form.  I googled it to see what came up and I was sent to the home office website where you have to fill a form in to enter the territory of the UK if you are a foreign national.   I was pleased with this transgression,  a short but interesting diversion rather than a full rabbit hole.

Form and territory from the inside of a residency, there is probably enough there for a PhD  and much of my most current writing hovers around this area even if it struggles to say anything about it.

Art affords a scaffold which enables the creation of a territory.  (Historical/institutional/ through identity/philosophically)

residency happens within a space/( place/site/event) and holds that space open for a purpose.

Territory relates to form, we must resist saying gestalt.

The scaffold is about holding things open so something new can emerge, it does not have to be art. 

There are many ways for art to hold the space open in our minds and in our hearts and in our actions but not all of them end up raveling something recognizable as art.

 

 

Writing writing writing- stumped

 I have spent this week writing.  It has felt very unproductive.  So much so that at 5 yesterday I had to go out and try and dig up a tree stump.  I used a mattock and the dog kept barking and getting in the way, after removing half of it I left the rest for another day.

I am working on a literature review and it does not feel like it is going well.  I am procrastinating although I have focused on it for three days.  It was a document I started two years ago and have returned to now. I couldn't face an empty page with the title literature review.

I spoke to Kate briefly on Tuesday as I think things were getting to me a bit.  I keep trying to put some sort of framework in place for the future that I can feel better about but it doesn't seem to work very well.  Kate said I should keep things simple and as I try and write with some of the theory, the overarching philosophical content it all feels very out of touch with the work on the ground.  This is the issue I am addressing in the writing but it does not make it any easier.

 My literature review needs to frame why I am using research-creation as a method and that I am inquiring into the idea of the artists residency in  relation to nomadic  thought - or perhaps what Glissant would call Errantry.  In relation to what research -creation can do I am choosing two pieces of thinking or concepts and putting them to work within the body of the project.

The writing of the the fumbling literature review has at least brought me to this point - In a way what I am writing now may end up as a single paragraph that explains a focus and a gap in the literature.  I will  then have to turn the focus on a few bits of reading which I will have to do well and unpick in more detail and relate to practice. And do a much better scoping of where they emerge in secondary writing and this will become a second layer of the lit review.

This is feeling like a sort of plan - a plan in a long line of plans that only just seem to get started.  At the moment I'm reasonably happy with this one.  The stump is only half removed

literature Review

 

I have spent a big chunk of the last 3 days trying to write my literature review.  I have not got very far and I am feeling somewhere between lazy and distracted. 

I have always had a problem with the lit review for a number of reasons.

1. Whatever I write doesn't really look like a literature review.

2. Whatever I give Kate and Laura to read does not seem to cut the mustard.

3. The literature I have most enjoyed reading does not condense well.

4. The PhD is really about trying to work with a set of ideas and concepts in context.  This is messy and I can't seem to write anything that does not abstract theory from context I'm working in.

5. It is a task that seems a little pointless - technically I think its purpose is to convince the reviewers that I have understood to the extent required the literature's I am drawing on. As I have chosen some difficult texts I am not confident I have done this or demonstrate it within my writing.

In the gap between thinking and writing something has started to emerge but there is a lack of clarity and purpose.  I thought today that I should write as simply as possible what I want to say and hold points or the point of it in short glimpses or flashes of practice.  This may work well if I adopt a slightly more practice orientation and limit the concepts I tackle .  So the point of the literature review is to give some context to the concept.  So it isn't just floating - The key thing to all this work is territory and capture, after a more general introduction that contains the why it is into these two concepts that I will need to dig a bit deeper.

Eric's Funeral

 I went to my friend Eric's funeral today and said my public and private goodbyes. I will miss him as a person in my life and as an easy friend. His service was very similar to what I would hope for for myself.  Secular in a lovely spiritual building, surrounded by the people he loved and who loved him.  I will have my body present at my funeral though. I need its visceral already decaying flesh, absent of any mind, to allow my spirit an unlikely chance  chance to attend.  My sadness has gone but the funeral was a reminder of it, pulled it back from the edges and into sharper focus.  Death has an uncanny way to thrust itself into thoughts in a way that takes your breath away.  I would never use the loss of a friend to make a point within my writing yet in writing anything at all serious about life it is difficult to keep death at bay.  In a modern world filled with rationalism it is difficult not to feel that death is a passing, a stepping across some sort of threshold. An extreme edge of at least a singular life, a life that is bounded enough to have an ending.

I did a projection on the Crucible on Saturday and I  have been trying to write for my PhD.  I think last week was constructive, Although I got very little done on my literature review.  I almost felt  like I was at school struggling with my childhood shyness and dyslexia a little embarrassed.  Trying to hide  the bits I don't like about myself from myself.   This is the long journey to having something that looks like a PhD to submit though and I did put the work in. I made a start.

When I read through my blog I noticed some points where I had tried to draw attention to a serious thought or a step change.  This provided a texture and a structure to the writing- it also felt like I was trying to pay testament to a moment. I have gradually stopped doing this so I thought I would have a go at reviving the practice.

 My PhD is about residency as method, there is something residency can do for art practice that helps to let it live through time and space. It is a line of flight that allows art to escape the object in all its ontology.  I have been mapping terrain for an arts practice that unfolds through time within social research.  This is a space I have occupied before but there were no maps and therefore the space was unknown.  My blog and my writing and my thinking has started to map the terrain differently - chart some new waters because the ideas are located in a unique space.  My residencies only exist in all their relations making this new terrain and unique.  There are similar spaces, similar practices but they hold different maps and different insights.  I have woven a series of Deleuzian folds that generate a baroque pattern, a mesh work, a practice, a set of relations.  There is some strong writing some new things, a level of banality and what I can feel now, a raveling towards some degree of closure.

It feels like things are moving on and I am growing ideas that will develop into an acceptance of where I actually am and what I can contribute.

Reading my Blog

 Its about four months since I paid to have my blog printed.  I wanted to have something solid that felt like work.  I have managed to write once a week or so for three years which is in itself an achievement of sorts. I read it over three days in chunks as some of it was not that easy.  It holds the journey and it holds to an extent the disappointment of Covid in all its affects. At points looking back without the detail the pandemic feels like an excuse but reading my thoughts from the time I feel the sheer scale of its impact running through the last 2 years.

In the middle phase of the blog  I seem to fall into a slightly manic state where I worry about myself.  This is a good reminder of the time when I was building the loose parts play platform and reading 1000 plateaus; diffracting their affects through the event.  I create Tim as a Socratic interloper or Jungian wise man who occasionally visits me with advice.   We talk of Shaman and bodies without organs and I ask him questions of life, death, magic and enchantment. 

In the middle of reading it I was amazed how coherent it seemed as an object and how it mapped a journey in and out of darkness.  It needs a close reading and a level of forgiveness and immersion yet it does contain at many points flashes of knowing and perhaps even brilliance.  I do not know what to do with it but as it contains my best work. Part of me wants to edit and reference it and submit it along with my platform and say here is the best I can do as a PhD.  I know it is not really a PhD but it does contain something between the building and the thinking. Many parts of it are not banal. 

As I move towards the end of next year I suspect the only option I will end up with as the the puddings proof is in this writing. The blog is full of excuses and false starts but it does not read as if I have been at all lazy.  I seem to have fitted the work in and expanded the field of my practice.  held within the blog is growth thought and challenge.  The brilliance within it is in the struggle and the mess and the struggle never really seems fruitless it just does not produce anything that could be called insight or clarity. It is a stream.  

When I get to moving house and the new puppy there is a lull. Interestingly the first real lull and also some repetition the ideas from the start take center stage again and it feels a little circular . Covid is fascinating as the time that is now condensed into a single raindrop stretches out again and the anticipation, disappointments and fear that are now forgotten are mapped out within the text.  It really was a bit of a shit storm and we were more worried than we remember.  

Although the best bits are in the middle they would not work without the start or the end the flowing into and out of a certain type of madness. It is at least a thing but I have no idea at the moment where to take it.  As it is the whole of the residency in all its relations I wonder if I can edit a chapter or two directly from it.  It would be an interesting thing to do but without the in between bits it would lack the journey and its strength  lies within its journey.