ARTISTS TALKING

# 7 [12 July 2007]

Well I am afraid to say I saw nature but she didn't even bother to give me a second moo. No one knows what they are doing. This isn't true. Artists look for analogies. Or metaphors. We want to say something without actually saying it. Because if we could actually say it we wouldn't need to say it. We are always ahead of ourselves and images, metaphors, music, in short the language of art, are what we bring back, or transmit back. Dreams are the expression, the transmissions our 'unconscious' sends to us.

I have fallen out of the spell of my art. The cows didn't come and the spell was broken. But I will magic myself up again. Life is an act of imagination. If it isn't then you are a machine. What humans have that machines and animals will never have is imagination. We have it because we need it. We need it to protect ourselves from the knowledge of our mortality. Imagnation is a necessity if we are not to succum to despair or become machines. Do something creative every day. Dream yourself awake. The cows will come to you.

# 6 [6 July 2007]

Tomorrow I am going to Buxton to film some cows in a field. I was up there last weekend on a mate's stag-do and I escaped from the horrors of all-male company to go for a walk. I was drawn to this field full of cows. I stopped and just looked at them. I love animals. I haven't fully understood why that is. Something about my childhood, about innocence. When I was a kid there was this neighbourhood cat called Tabatha who would climb on the conservatory roof and hop up to my window. I would long for her to come and when she did I was in heaven. It was bliss. So something about being loved, being recognised in some way. Any way the cows began to notice me way over in the field. They were all different breeds. They began to nice me and stop chewing and gaze at me. And then they began to all come towards me. About ten or fifteen minutes passed and these cows had all come up to the fence and were standing there looking at me. I was deeply moved. So I am going up again tomorrow with my video camera and a couple of still cameras, my digital and my medium format, to try and film it. I just imagine a big screen with no sound and all these cows slowly coming towards the camera until they are all eventually standing right there, right up in the front of the picture, as it were. I like this because it seems to me somehow unpretentious. It isn't pretending or trying to be 'Art'. It's just a thing that happened to me and touched me and I want to communicate that in the hope that what touches me might touch others. But there is more to it than this I think. Kant's idea of the sublime is hovering about there. The idea of something beyond human understanding. Shades of Romanticism too, nature being something from which we are forever excluded, alienated. It's interesting that I have quite extreme reactions to animals, as probably a lot of us do. I love cats and little dogs, absolutely love them, love them so much it hurts. But spiders and insects I fear and loathe. Cows and horses and the like I am equally spellbound by, but it is neither love nor hate, more like fascination. Animals are alien to us, and yet we are part animal. In this sense we will never know our own nature. We are alien to ourselves. When we look at nature perhaps we see a part of ourselves, then, from which we are excluded and nature offers us a way back in as it were, back from the Fall, back to mother. And, as in my video (if it works), more importantly perhaps, when nature looks at us, what does 'it' see? This fascinates me: what does an animal see when it sees me? They say - in fact it might have been Freud who said it - that a dog never misrecognises its owner. So what does it see? Who does it see? And when we go further into nature with animals that are less domesticated, like cows, what do they see in us? We will never know.

# 5 [3 July 2007]

I am doing these two red drawings called Resistance 1 and 2. They are red ink on council tax bills. I wrote about the first one in an earlier entry. They continue slowly. Every evening I get home from work and I sit at my kitchen table and just do a bit more. The idea is of resistance. My council tax bills are representations of the force of the state. They are the Law. The continued red ink I am scribing over the top of them represents a sustained resistance to state force. It is red because the force of the state makes me angry, makes me see red, and because the bills were both 'red reminders', with some of the writing in red and clearly showing through the little window in the envelope. We all know what its like to get home and see one of these on our door mat.

Of course I know my drawings will achieve nothing politically. And I have now paid my bill. But it's not about that. Adorno, in his essay Resignation (The Culture Industry), talks about the fallacy of making 'praxis' (action or practice) more important (potent?) than theory. (And I think Foucault actually said theory is practice.) But Adorno says that the prohibition of thought in favour of action just results in 'greater production of the means of production'. In other words it's dumbing down and it's oppressive.

So I am not refusing to pay my council tax bill. I like living where I live, I have a good job (even if it stresses me out massively at times), and I don't want to go to prison or pay a fine. But I do object to the way our society is set up at this time. I don't think rampant capitalism is good for people and I would like to see it replaced by something else, a system of social relations that is not underpinned (undermined?) by monetary exchange.

The anonymity of cash makes us all less than human. But I have no way of bringing about that change. And not paying my council tax bill will only change my life and change it for the worse. Doing a drawing however, transforming state force into art, will bring about a transformation in my experience of myself. It is called resistance. I resist being forced into a state of objectivity by turning the object of force into an object of art. And I transform myself in the process. I have created something new. I have also spent time (and this is really the important thing) doing something which makes me feel good, makes me feel human, makes me feel alive. Resistance is not, as the Vogons would have it, useless.

# 4 [2 July 2007]

I have started photographing the wild-life that enters and dies in my flat. I am giving the series the working title of 'Things that have died in my flat.' So far I have a bee, which buzzed its last in my bath; a wood louse, which came to a final halt on the new wool carpet in my bedroom; a clothes moth, which I stood on because it was threatening to eat the new wool carpet in my bedroom; a spider, which I discovered spinning round and round on the surface of the water I had run for a bath; and a reddish-brown legged/winged thing (not a daddy-long-legs), which came to rest on the windowsill. So I am aware, acutely aware, of these living things, of life, of life entering, invading, my space. This Alien life. And then tonight I came home and there was a stag beetle traversing the floor. Unfortunately it was not dead, and since it is not a threat to my carpet or anything else I can't justify killing it. So I am faced with a dilema, a decission: do I break with the precedent of only photographing dead things; do I open out the brief to include live things, afterall (and especially after Roland Barthes), to photograph something is to both kill and preserve it; or do I simply start a new series called 'Things that have not died in my flat'? Or, do I photograph it and simply claim that it is dead? Stag beetles only live (in their adult beetle form) for a matter of months so it is likely that by the time anybody gets to view the pictures that particular stag beetle will be dead any way...

Perhaps its worth asking, firstly, why I am photographing wildlife in my flat, and secondly, why must it be dead? Well, the reason we photograph anything is because it caught our eye. So the question is why has (dead) wildlife caught my eye at this particular time? Any suggestions...?

Note (July 17): The stag beetle met its end despite me. I decided  to try and free it but its hooky legs had become entangled in the fibres of the carpet. I tried to pull it off but I was afraid its legs would be left there. So I left it over night under a glass (despite it being apparantly stuck I couldn't bare the thought of it freeing itself [perhaps it was not stuck at all] and secreting itself somewhere in my bedroom), with the aim of getting some advice the next day. When I awoke, however, the beetle was dead. I think I might have suffocated it. So I took some pictures of it. But this isn't the end of the story. As I was down on the floor with my camera it started to move. It wasn't dead after all, or if it was it had come back to life. So I tried again to free it but again it wouldn't, or couldn't, let go of the carpet. I had to go to work and so I had no choice but to replace the glass again, and when I got home it had died again. Eventually I did manage to prize its carcass from the carpet and I threw it out of the window.

# 3 [26 June 2007]

I have just made a second video of my knob in the bath. I was a bit more deliberate about it this time and I stayed in the water longer. One of the things I like about making videos, or doing any kind of 'art' is the space that opens out inside you while you are doing it. I suppose this is that whole thing of transformation again, the transformative power of art. One minute you are doing one thing and thinking one thing and perhaps not feeling too great, or you're worried about something, and then you think, hold on, could I turn this into art? and the positional shift is profound.

With me yesterday it happened when I was lying in my bath. I have been eating really badly lately, partly because of stress and unhappiness at work, and partly because its just what I do at the moment (my relationship to food is fucked, which is a potential subject for art of course...), and I was feeling disgusted at myself, especially the way my inner thighs pressed together more than I would like them to. And then I thought to myself, why don't I make some art about that? And suddenly I was looking at my body as if it were a readymade.

Tonight was different of course. Tonight was a consolidation of yesterday's experiment. And one of the things that opened up as I was lying there with the camera trained on my parts was the idea of resistance. (The other was a notion to develop the work by getting other people involved; i.e. advertising for other men either to film their penises and send the films to me or for me to film their penises whilst they lie there in the bath..) But the idea of resistance came up earlier this evening in a conversation I was having with I.S. We were talking about the RCA show (see yesterday’s entry) and how the film I had made of my penis (all soft and flaccid and non-threatening and, well, just there…), was perhaps in a way a reaction to the overwhelming authority of the RCA. I said this to I and he said , “Yes, resistance is always important.” Any way, so I thought maybe I’d call the film ‘Resistance.’

I made another film yesterday actually. When I came out of my bath there was a tiny moth fluttering around the kitchen. My flat seems to be a breeding ground for moths. In fact all sorts of animals seem to live and die here. (I am planning to start taking photographs of all the things that turn up dead, just as soon as I get my camera back from work.) Any way this moth, despite looking like just a tiny baby… hang on, do moths ‘grow’ as they age like mammals? Or do they emerge from the chrysalis fully grown?… hmmm this would make it more understandable why the moth quickly seemed to die and just flake out on the floor. Any way that’s what it did, baby or not, and so I got my camera and pointed it at the dead moth. (My video camera I’m talking about.) I didn’t know why I was doing this I just did it (it is important I think to ‘research’ in this way, by just doing things without questioning why, this is the way we discover who we are, not through following the ‘rational’ demands of the conscious mind, don’t you think?)

Of course a film of a dead moth doesn’t really go any where (not that this is necessarily a problem) so I began to think about an alternative. The camera was on its tripod pointing at the ground between two of the feet. So I just started to turn the thing around on its axis. I noticed that if the camera was pointing at one of the feet and with it zoomed in like that, it couldn’t get itself into focus. On the screen this blured shape, vaguely phallic, looked like it was sort of breathing or something as the camera’s auto-focus struggled to bring it into relief. That’s interesting, I thought, a bit like John Baldessari’s Camera recording its own condition, and other such conceptual type works from that period, where self-referentiality becomes the actual subject of the work, the constraints of the medium an end in themselves. So I left it running and went and had a cup of tea.

# 2 [26 June 2007]

I have just been in the bath filming my knob. Now my camera is in the kitchen trying (in vain) to focus on one of the legs of the tripod it's standing on. My knob and balls were just floating there so serenely I thought they'd look good on film. After a while I let the water out and they kind of deflated. It looked great on the camera's little LCD screen. As I lay there with the camera trained on my parts I was thinking, is this Art? And then I thought the fact that I have to ask means that it probably is. Because if you know when you're making it that you are making Art, you have already gone wrong. And I don't mean the kind of wrong that is right.

I went to the RCA show yesterday and there was a lot of stuff that was self-consciously Art. It seemed to me to be so cautious, like it had to reference everything in the History of Art to make sure you knew it was what it appeared to be: Art. And you can understand why. I would be intimidated if I were studying there. But the trouble is it just puts you on edge when you're looking at it. And, no doubt, the Artist who made it would say they want you to be on edge, they want you to feel confused, because if you are confused then perhaps you will have to think for once instead of just consuming. Fair enough. I think it was Laurie Anderson who said of her art that she wanted to make something that “Would never be on telly.” Well I couldn’t agree more. But the trouble is it doesn’t always work that way. And it’s not enough just to make the viewer confused in the vague (and arrogant) hope that once confused they will automatically progress from there to a position of anti-capitalism.

I went mainly to see the film and photography because that’s what I’m into and there was quite a lot of it, much of which was as I have just described. There was this one massive photograph of just black. I don't know if the film even went through a camera or if there was a film, or if the paper was just stuck in a room and the lights switched on for a bit – it doesn’t really matter. There were some other prints that were barely visible, just really dark and really light, again really huge, with the slightest hint of detail. Actually these were relatively interesting because the detail slowly emerged as you looked at them, and then when you moved your eyes they did funny things like Op Art... And it’s not as if I’m a philistine. I know Malevich did a black square in 1913. I know about Kant and Lyotard and the presenting of the unpresentable. I know how interesting it is to think about photography’s unique relationship to the world; that it must have a “referent” as the course director Olivier Richon says in the accompanying catalogue. But at the same time I couldn’t help thinking, this is small beer writ large.

It was like these photos were printed big to disguise the cautiousness I spoke about earlier. Like a phallus, it never actually appears except symbolically. Like the Wizard of Oz, all flames and smoke and then it takes a little dog to pull back the curtain and there's the shrivelled old man, the real penis. How embarrassing. The irony is we all have (metaphorically I mean - and at least half of us literally) a real penis, and surely art doesn't want to go hiding that fact. That’s the job of advertising. Buy this and no one will know you’ve got a little willy; come and study at the RCA and no one will know either. It's one of the things that tie us all together: the frailty of human existence. So maybe that's why I felt compelled to film my knob in the bath - just a little soft bit of gristle and a covering of skin cells, just gently floating there like a, well like a penis - because I wanted somehow to say to those people at the RCA that it's ok, its ok, you don't have to try so hard, you don't have to be so guarded, because what are you guarding yourself against? We all know you've got a little willy, and you would have thought, wouldn't you, that with the backing of possibly the most respected institution of art education in the country, in short the biggest dick of them all, you wouldn't need to pretend otherwise?

There was one piece of work in the show which was not trying to inflate itself. It was a 3 minute single screen video projection by Claire Wheeldon called Samantha Singing 2006. It's just this young teenaged girl singing along to Suspicious Minds by Elvis. And she is just so unaffected, like she has no interior/exterior, like she has no concept of herself at all. And then you realise that she's blind because her eyes are moving about in that way that certain blind peoples' eyes do. And the song ends, and you hear a woman’s voice (probably the artist’s) saying, "Ok Samantha, shall we do it again?" or words to that effect, and Samantha smiles and says "Yeah," and the video loops back to the start again.

Now this video raises some interesting questions. For example, what does it mean to photograph someone who has never seen their own face; to make an image of someone who has no concept of, or at least no physical experience of (as far as I know) an image? And this points to psychological questions about how we constitute ourselves as individus. According to Lacan we project ourselves into an image that exists outside of us (the famous Mirror Phase). How do we do this if we can't see? And then there are the moral and ethical questions that are activated here too, questions about the potential exploitation involved in photographing someone percieved as vulnerable.

These questions are very interesting (much more interesting than the one raised by a photograph of nothing, which is so unspecific - What constitutes a photograph? - as to be meaningless), but the point is, when you are faced with genuinely powerful art theory is secondary. And the proof that this piece was genuinely powerful was the crowd that had gathered behind me to watch Samantha singing. Like me, this crowd of people had come to see the big dicks and feel lke a big dick in the process, but, again like me, they probably felt much better for being reminded, by a girl who couldn't see singing Elvis, that they weren't big dicks afterall, and what's more, they didn't need to be.

# 1 [26 June 2007]

Some times when I feel really bad I do some art and this makes me feel better. I try to turn bad things into art and make them good. Like when I got a red reminder for an unpaid bill and I was just about to go out and the bill was threatening to ruin my day. Instead of letting it ruin my day I turned it into art. I got a red biro and I taped the bill to the wall and I started to colour it in with the red biro. The repetative manual action and the concentration required to get an even colour both chanelled my frustration and distracted me from it. I thought about the meaning of the bill and of what I was doing to it whilst I was doing it. I realised that the bill represented the arbitrary violence and aggression of computer mechanised beurocracy. Instead of allowing that agression to affect me I deflected it and used it in the production of the piece of art. The process of transforming the everyday into art has an equally transformative effect on us. And hopefully when the work is viewed it can have a transformative effect on the viewer as well. The piece isn't finished yet, its on the wall of my studio and I just add to it now and then, especially when I am wound up.