DoubleWatcher

Spaceship

2012-01-25T07:16:00.000-08:00

Inter

2012-01-12T09:20:00.001-08:00

Stella

2012-01-10T13:32:00.000-08:00

X_File

2011-12-20T03:43:00.000-08:00

Extra File Formats

Fast Light

2011-11-14T16:15:00.001-08:00

Auto-Jam

2011-10-12T16:35:00.001-07:00

Portrait B

2011-09-28T03:47:00.000-07:00

Po_OrDif

2011-09-21T06:50:00.000-07:00

Colour Cycle (Runner)

2011-09-21T06:42:00.000-07:00

Gamma Pencil

2011-09-21T05:34:00.000-07:00

The Bus in Profile (Clerkenwell Portrait)

2011-09-21T05:27:00.001-07:00

MMMMMotor_ay

2011-09-13T09:28:00.000-07:00

Fernando Passoa In Matter

2011-09-13T05:53:00.000-07:00

An extract from Matter.

"A red cloud billowed above the monoliths and contoured an apex over the lines of bitumen that rolled and traversed across the landscape like neurotic marks of a pubescent child."

I worked on an idea, for some time, to build a picture through fragments much in the vain of Pessoa did in his writings, particular The Book of Disquiet. And like Pessoa the observations were through a protagonist, an alter ego, who in my case takes a discerning interest in the visual.

Pessoa’s book takes on a cubist like form in its shard like bits of perception that slowly builds a view of Lisbon and the greater world. The overall effect is of man centred, the subject in a tumultuous universe, trying to realise and breach the patterns and structures that surround him. Disquiet is the emphatic understatement of the work where to Pessoa, visions and perceptions are the prison walls of the intellect; the creative mind is the one of dreams and the aspiration of freedom but one that is locked in the prism of reality. The political mind is one of subterfuge to the creative individual, but more importantly the only real mind because its concern is social and its course is action and combative. This romantic concern is at odds to an older attitude of the heroic man, standing above and alone, absorbing the tumultuous nature of the world. Pessoa’s hero, if he can be called that, is a man defeated by other people, retreating into the cocoon and ferment of his imagination. He is swathed in the relativistic universe of the imperial state, of social tyranny, rooted in not in the Byronic hero but instead the everyman of lowly ambition and petty manners. His character is not fallen but the bureaucratic tread on, but like Milton’s (Passoa’s great literary hero) Satan his burdens are the shackles of his oppression. He is the ego defined, social creature of the twentieth century.

(.....)

That juxtaposition of the Byronic and Freudian were the starting points to this. They impart lend themselves to the heady picture of the rockstar, Men (invariably) of intense passions and physical articulation but must of all to that quintessential Byronic character the Vampire. The channels of neurosis and ego are nothing new but the idea was to here workout fragments that convoluted but expressed ideas of the enigma of perception, the real and illusory in intense subjectivity. What came out was a fetishistic voice of desire and repentance inhibited by words, lost in thought. But both like the Byronic and Milton variations our character is one at odds with the world.

Solitariness of the character is somewhat defined by a second party which acts as a particular vent to the protagonists inert separation and alienation to the world. Now the character is only loosely defined as a lover but I would suggest that he is in fact an alter ego an conflated other which is bounded to a physical materiality which our protagonists wishes to escape but at the same time control it’s vastness and shape. Here we have a psychosis of the wounded man succumbed in his own convalescence, impaled in his own physicality which torture becomes the expression of his own determination and ultimately his presence as a sexual being. Sex is considered as transcendent but ultimately a folly of a closed system which the mind inhabits. It thinks itself into oblivion, the trauma, taking shape in apparent visimilitude to the physical apparatus but instead shaped by the patterns wheeled in psychotic conflation. Our protagonist however is not mad but pursues an extension of himself as the physical universe so that the landscape and the things with in it are the objects of his neurosis. Ego and omnipresence are the real in there effect but the delusion and illusion are the very things which compel his thoughts

In all this is the image, the gothic, is the heightened neurotic architecture of the protagonist. To contrast this literary reality the comic is at first a stylistic representation of the characters and events. It serves not as literal device but as a conceit, to serve illustrative purpose, to inveigh the world in which the story inhabits. It’s place mirrors the marginal dictates of the world in providing a curious sense of plasticity in part due to the way it provides a malleable configuration of word into image. Its guise, however, becomes a singular experience which sides between contemplative abandon and transfiguration. It provides a separate reality in conjunction to the word and the Reader, a natural coded equivalence of time and space, which acts like an archaic form of geometry conjoining narrative and the real through the strip as if it were a stage like parenthesis. Fragments become abstractions, and abstractions the adumbration of ink on paper. The space between naturalistic and material equivalence becomes the point of convergence between thought and event, articulating at that moment.

This all suggests a stage of forms but the veracity of the language is dependent on a reflective relief between image and words. Each has it’s own sense but Where the mirror ends is within the space between the protagonist, the reader, the viewer, the author. The words set a picture which is yet to be framed and the image, fragments of narrative to be divulged. Each is it’s own theatrical conundrum, atrophied and superfluous made up only when the archaic subjective body is constituted as if it were a mosaic of consciousness. Fictions are the very words, images and patterns that convolute, protract, engage and embody existence. Materiality is just another form of mediation. A mental trick which turns the metaphysical into conditions of preambling determinism, rather than the possible figuration of forms and celestial geometries.

Curves

2011-09-06T13:53:00.000-07:00

Click the Gif!

Arcade Reverse Snip

2011-08-25T11:44:00.000-07:00

Daemon

2011-08-16T16:34:00.000-07:00

Squid

2011-08-16T16:25:00.001-07:00

Portrait A

2011-08-16T16:21:00.000-07:00

The Mannered Loop

2011-08-02T10:27:00.000-07:00

Hard Sweets

2011-07-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

3D Glasses

2011-07-18T11:46:00.000-07:00

Arms

2011-07-12T14:09:00.000-07:00

Grid Portrait Seen

2011-07-07T11:21:00.000-07:00

Marilyn Mess

2011-07-07T11:04:00.000-07:00

Harriet Hair

2011-07-03T11:40:00.000-07:00

Floating Cat

2011-07-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

Armed

2011-07-03T07:03:00.000-07:00

The Pinned Fluid Frame

2011-07-03T06:58:00.000-07:00

Paw Guston

2011-07-03T06:55:00.001-07:00

Blurred Lines

2011-07-03T06:47:00.000-07:00

Green Eyes

2011-07-03T06:19:00.000-07:00

Head

2011-06-29T08:55:00.000-07:00

Geometries And Ghosts (Part 1) Joan Miro And Future Painting

2011-06-28T07:33:00.000-07:00

The further things seem to be, for most part, the longer they drift in the memory. I should qualify that circumspect observation by asking that the persistence of things in memory as a qualitative distance, as momentary grasps of time cutting through the gaze of the mundane, the situation, the temporary. To all those things abstractions berate what at first are occurrences of real, as in outwardly formed, apart from us, experiences. Memories are maybe, more concocted as an apparition of language its symbolic valence in the phantom of emotions meta morphed, morphed by the shape of the world in its enduring connectivity.

Take a photograph which I found the other day of a urban landscape capturing the carved early evening light over a terraced back alley occupied with wheelie bins, bits of junk, left items and scattered street furniture, an innercity, urban environment common to many English towns. Here is an image full of the semiotic semantic of code and symbol, which we read clearly as language, as known things subscribed in a mutual consensus of the named, be it a bin or a street lamp. Like any language though it has derivatives and colloquiums that accent and form, give cadence to a scene, which we recognise within the image (english, urban, innercity) but also we read the image through its very apparatus, the photograph itself, which gives the very sense and nature of what we mean by the word image. The code and the language, describe the world but they don’t penetrate it because fundamentally it is a system of equivalencies and equations in which we centre ourselves. But this curious structuration bubble seems to inhibit language to an automaton of surplus code generated in the inertia of metonymic and metaphoric association. As if language was separate construed against its own material objective. That would make language as something after the physical that is read and recounted but would seem to be nevertheless counter to the experience of it everyday.

But then If I take another look at this photo and try to expand the vocabulary of the experience further from the collective of semiotic distribution and therefore begin to apprehend the physical image I see a photo and image that are stubborn in their flatness. As if the image has no direct interpolation in simply existing because its materiality is in some way obscured by the very image and its code, so that I see the photograph as image before its constituent make up of colour, surface and texture. The diametric image renders a gap, a suspension derived directly from its real presence. What maybe described as a lag or gestation of experience, as the sum of the recalled, the reoccured at the same time becomes/is the experience, the nowness circumspect to a contingent separation with the past it encapsulates. This may be known as the uncanny in the semblance of physical sensation but also in the recalled apparition of memory as a functioning structure of language enabling the image as something seen in the world, at once and always both past and present.

Memory provides a physicality to language in that it tenders on the experience but fundamentally is the concoction of word over what is seen and felt. There lays a further figuration of cognition that rests with the photograph and the photographed which implicitly marks the image as the one taken and experienced by an individual. If we return to our example, the photograph, I act here as the photographer and viewer of the said image. Its physical manifestation acts directly to me recalling as it were the particular state and time as I then felt it. What builds up is a mental gestation of the physical valence of that sunny evening, surrounded by contrary emotions and apprehensions. This historical I is felt through the inscription of the photograph as a presence. An I projected from the present but of the past, where the pictorial apparition acts as locus of cognition. My own entwining personal histories then and now experienced as a radical form of the present as if the past becomes its future state in the same instance. Language here becomes more than a structure but the adumbration between the seen and felt and its subscription into memory.

At this point I and we are a symbiotic form contrary to a myth of instances and historical contexts. Something comes of, who is both prior and now the 'I', constituted in language as if rendered on an elliptical, moebius like surface shifting in time. Painting provides an example to this constitution and use of imagery that is transmutable and pliable as a form, that however presents another type of captured reality in its history, image, process and material sense. It would be acute to provide many examples of genre and style but the notions of a pluralistic world, of material consequence, of that fathomless reach of the political and corporeal in the spectre of the individual are peculiar presentiment in the modern. What does that say of our analysis and our purported demiotic demonstration of language? That the evolution of experience has changed? That somehow our consciousness has shifted? What is certain is experience, debated here through knowledge and the consequence of knowledge is the cognition of our corporeal and atrophied bodies. Mass education, the dissemination of knowledge through technology and media has transformed the physical world. How that persistence considers our own consciousness, its traviel to future presents is always through the rhetoric and tautological caprice of language itself.

Miro provides us with an example of a painter that grapples with this political self as a means of expression and painterly gestation. His works provide a series of motifs that apply directly to the act of the painting in colour shape and form but also to histories and landscapes that all the while resemble a kind of idiosyncratic cartography where ladders and geometries weave through flaccid and bloated protrusions, hats and ephemera. What Miro's work contains is a figuration, a universe according to the mark of an artist, his history, his identity but not a floating void detached in the mind of an inscrutable pose and hermetic jargon of art and its abstractions but a grounded firmament balanced between men and the world. This is more clearly seen in his early works in which he paints the land and places that surround him in the towns and farms of Catalonia. These early paintings transform from their expressionist roots into something other in a rapid course of a few years. This furtive period of Miro's seems to be set between a sentiment that he clearly feels but one against or unsure of it's certainty in the apparent clarity being in the world and a wider significance of things, asitwere of the world.

If we take at look at one of his last conventional farmyard landscapes The Farm 1922 we begin to see a language that entwines artist and the world. In it we see a wall of farmhouse situated to the left of the picture where an opening shows a stable and horse, a barn and pen are situated to the right both stocked with other animals and apparatus. A large eucalyptus tree rises from the central foreground, surrounded by the instruments and processes of the working farm, fanning out into the dusky blue firmament with an opaque moon quietly laying to its right. The painting serves to compose a scene which is a much a systematic diagram of a working farm than as a capturing of an image in nature. This pictorial and symbolic equivalence works to sustain itself as an image as well as to reveal the balance and checks that are invested by man and by nature. Art speaks of the world as the world in the formalism of pictorial representation and technological abstraction but also to commune between the picture and the land as a space shared, worked, consumed, worshiped even. This synthetic equilibrium becomes the defined space in which the artist transpires the now and the being between men and individuals as a mutuality of pertained corporeality. This is ideological art in search for its efficacy in modernity as a political act that enables the I , the we to be articulated as a mythic space in which the painting lays in accordance to the real. Where the image transfigures the geography, the body, the experiential as a transaction between artist and audience through the shared events and processes, which are both depicted, worked, apprehended even in the surface culmination of symbol and allegory.

Miro conspires to paint the trajectory of men as political animals that articulate the ideological through a shared significance in mythic structures. In preceding works (such as Head of a Catalan Peasant, 1925) the ephemera of Catalonian hats, points, ladder like structures mix with the landscape pictorial devices of colour and form that were the mark of his previous pantings build a geography and a figuration which is as much a symbolic avatar appropriate to the shared histories of the many than the mere situation of the artist. But the presence he portrays is the conflation of history and myth in the modern articulation of equivalence and radical form that intonates both the process and progress as the occupation of becoming in the mind of men. His paintings become elliptical variances of past and future where all the while the artist acts in the determinate now in poetic infiltration in the antecedences of language, symbol and allegory. The artist in Miro's case is the individual in creative assertion, in the malleability of language that empowers the present in its very act. Miro acts also as the Unfolder of the sacred, the bearer of means which art is the vessel of material and superstructure coordination. Painting here becomes its own form of sacrificial artifice quite apart from its sense as an elucidating reliquary of the physical world. But what modernism asserts in its cause is the manifestation of worldly apparitions is the circumspect view of individuals in language. It allows the fragmentary and geometry equations of the particular to be the apparatus that electrifies the body as a thinking machine in time and place. Where the patterns of language and the fabric of the visual world become instances of the same experience that separates and binds each and every one.

Screens 2

2011-06-20T05:10:00.000-07:00

Tabs

2011-06-15T05:04:00.000-07:00

Screens

2011-06-15T04:17:00.001-07:00

Vertical Bins

2011-05-24T18:07:00.000-07:00

Mirrored Walls

2011-05-24T04:26:00.000-07:00

Knoll

2011-05-23T16:30:00.000-07:00

Protest Banner

2011-05-23T04:52:00.001-07:00

Arch

2011-05-23T04:50:00.000-07:00

Palestine

2011-05-23T02:28:00.000-07:00

Shallow Seas

2011-05-22T17:05:00.000-07:00

Currents

2011-05-22T15:59:00.000-07:00

Pi

2011-05-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

Warplanes

2011-05-19T09:48:00.001-07:00

Doggie

2011-05-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

DK Dress

2011-05-19T06:41:00.000-07:00

Beach Yellow

2011-05-19T05:44:00.000-07:00

Drawn Union

2011-05-19T05:32:00.000-07:00

Common

2011-05-19T05:10:00.000-07:00

Strip Light

2011-05-19T04:49:00.000-07:00

Park Girl

2011-05-19T04:16:00.000-07:00

Belgium

2011-05-19T04:08:00.000-07:00

Prescott

2011-05-19T04:01:00.000-07:00

Camberwell Cat

2011-05-19T03:16:00.000-07:00

Trouble

2011-05-18T06:09:00.000-07:00

Claire's Legs

2011-05-18T06:00:00.001-07:00

London Bridge

2011-05-18T05:50:00.001-07:00

Atom (Raster Noton)

2011-05-17T17:22:00.000-07:00

Concentric Circles

2011-05-17T17:18:00.000-07:00

Prophecy and blindness were inextricably linked with the Greeks. In their myths the great circle-eyed giants were the foretellers of the fall of the Titans. But with great foresight, as the Cyclopes were, comes a stubbornness embodied in there brutish nature. Their strength and industriousness as forger’s of the Olympians panoply may be seen as a metaphor of material progress, to go beyond natural consequential limitations, but also prevails in them a notion of consciousness as something robbed of sight, a selective blindness that allowed them to overthrow their masters and yet enslave themselves.

The eye for the Greeks then is all seeing and yet blind. As if light were evasive, caught in a vacuum of space, unable to escape.

If we were to think of light as the evaluate truth what does that say of things made up of pure light as opposed to a sensibility of the image and the visual as a form of manipulation? For example a television screen is a thing that emanates an image from hundreds of light diodes. Light-waves blend from their primary gestation to map the tone and hue of what we see in the everyday world, an illusion but also an allusion to the way things are deciphered into objects from their inert ocular presence within the world into a form and object codified into language. May be the the electrical transmission of television and the picture we form in our minds are separate systems of logic and design but I feel the construction of one comes in our cultural manifestation of the other. In that our very understanding becomes the technological mechanism of the mind’s desire; of the internal expression of order. Television becomes in that way a form of allegory meditating at the heart of our consciousness.

The lines of code we interpret, however are made up of emitting waves of light that bounce, pop and sparkle back and forth radiating and irradiating. As language forms objects, objects form language. This tautological rendering creates its own inertia. Part of consciousness, in its unknowing, is to find things as means to supplement our state of autonomy through the secretions that radiate across matter and space. Consciousness maybe then a free state that our imagination beholds in the patterns we make but is also the very illusion that binds us to the world. Our bodies are separate but consciousness creates the inevitable collusion of every other thing to ourselves.

Maybe god comes in here somewhere, the unwavering light, the seen and the unseen, as a thing that exists between things, the eminence in precedent before language. But as the limits of consciousness show, aberration is human in it as much an illusion, as the thought that order and law are precise determinants given to things. That would suggest that god is a kind of ego but one that is indefatigable to the men who dreamt him up (or for that matter any kind of sex he/she is there to clothe). In that may lay the stubbornness of men.

Libya

2011-05-17T12:31:00.000-07:00

Waterfalls

2010-01-24T05:45:00.000-08:00

This is an odd post because it relates to two small seemingly desperate events that happened recently to myself and a third that occurred sometime ago.

I spent Christmas helping out Chris Cairns out doing visuals for Boxed a 'beatbox' opera that had a limited show at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank. This was a bit of fun. I designed the time machine which was to transport them back through the history of pop all sonically rendered in beatbox. Certainly a crowd pleasing and Schmaltzy affair, it was a hard not be taken in by the effervescence of the performances.

The other thing happened to be a meet up with a friend in a cosy small bar in Kennington. We were sitting on these large Chesterfield couches taking in the pastiche occidental and oriental mix of walls adorned with the gilded picture frames of 18th Century English society portraits and landscapes posed next to large decorative Japanese fans and neon signs in kitsch ode to Ginza. The time machine analogy is adroit but I suppose obvious in these circumstances. The shrinkage of space and distant distorts time in the revelatory field. And both here in popular social constructs. Infact its not hard for anybody to realise this as a perennial relapse of what one might call the contemporary gaze albeit in the strict culture codes of fashion.

But then I was sitting there with my friend talking nothings and I heard this.

Excerpt from The Stone Roses "She Bangs A Drum-EP" ©

The sound I actually heard was not the recording that is played here but the sound of something that I felt 15 years ago. It was the growing pain of adolescence chiming through the fuzzed minor chords of a pop song. I was standing in somnambulent state in a small room waiting for a girl, half drunk on some cheap alcohol. Content and unhappy, lonely and yet more alive then ever. Nostalgia maybe, as it was kin to something like loss but it was a moment that was as real as I first felt it. Because it was loss then. A momentary fragment of 18 year old boy.

I think it made me think what pop is, for all its superficiality and obsolete rerenderings and its consummation of itself, is a machine of codified reality which works in the most unexpected ways. A piece of Sibelius can conscientiously construct the sounds of nature in a symphonic harmony while instead pop blinding plobs to a preambling beat of derivation. It however is a machine that entwines contemporary consciousness with the everyday. The beat and rhythm is the motion of mechanics, measuring time, working like a clock, a clock that has particular significance to the spatial agglomeration of our modern era.

In that sense I see pop isn't about music, or the words the singer may sing but rather a semblance of musicality which is pointless to be judged as either 'good' or 'bad' except in the idles of fashion. But on that edge it can be the revelatory source of things real in a world surrounded by artifice and separation because it is able to bind the insignificance's of personal occurrences in common trajectories which are suggestive of the things that make us.

Angels

2009-11-20T14:25:00.000-08:00

I was thinking of Angels the other day. I was part reminded of Della Francesca's St Michael. But this came about because I was thinking of Ed Ruscha's paintings, particular his relatively recent works with text superimposed onto mountain tops (Who incidentally has a retrospective at the Hayward gallery at the moment). At least Della Francesca and the image of St. Michael popped into my head at the time of thinking. Loosely connected as they are I think geometry is a major aspect of each artists work, a technical apotheosis, if i can call it that, in which their image making and thematic concern conjoin.

One artists work is the expression of mathematical sublimity the other of a pseudo 'reality' of advertising and political coercion. Francesca's is the world of faith as expressed through enlightenment and that of Ruscha's a dystopic, managed now.

Ed Ruscha ©. The Mountain. (1998)

Piero della Francesca. St. Michael (1469) The National Gallery

Well that in it self is not specific about Angels apart from St. Michael himself. I suppose I got thinking that angels exist as articles of faith because they are conduits of it. That is they're more tangible than a pure Omnipresence. Maybe that relates to their origins in antiquity. Greco-roman gods as we know were connected more to fate than morality. And fate is matter of circumstance albeit one that manifests itself in the troubles of men (though circumstance may lend from personal providence). The gods then are the expression of that epiphany like a celestial hologram which realises in temporal significance at a mans place, which he and god can concur in despotic despair. And of course the monotheists relinquish despair not from the roll of the dice but in faith and faith alone. I think I see in Ruscha's paintings a dialogue in which they try to objectify through manifestation. It's there on the painting lies the figures of angels.

Asterix!

2009-11-04T12:53:00.000-08:00

© Goscinny & Uderzo

He's turned 50 and this has to be still my favourite comic. Sure there are more serious comics than this but the chaotic word play, ebullient imagery, gentle mockery all without the slightest sense of whimsy and more to do with a sly ticklish chauvinism. Goscinny and Uderzo made comic art without the shame of it being a cartoon. And It's a shame there isn't more bande dessinee available in english. The rich versatility of Bande and its envious presence in continental culture is easy to see in any FNAC store or Hypermarche. Anglo-amercian comics may have more grit and intense subculture verve (although arguably Metal Hurlant was as much a precursor as the underground comics scene) but dessinee has an artistry and richness of its very own.

Claude Levi-Strauss 1908-2009

2009-11-03T14:50:00.000-08:00

Claude Levi-Strauss, who died last week.

Structuralism, I was always told, was such a dry theory of things. A Technocratic idea of orderation. A logic to apply to all human societies, away of measuring all men through common principles. All societies have structures but to state that the very structure was the commonality between men would always be philosophical issue and consequently of interest to those outside the field of anthropology. This, maybe, was much to the chagrin of Levi-Strauss but much to the richer understanding of the complexities that we in habit for people like me, who read some of his works. But the credit that Thinkers should give to him was in the simplicity that he gave to such complexes. Logos, myth, magic and science, the real became that much realer imbued in creation like a phantasmic fabric that makes up the order around us. From that it doesn't take much to realise the poetry involved in the Analysts code is the very code itself and that difference between painting and maths maybe just a matter of percepting that code that unravels in chromatic plurality.

I was in my last year of college when I think I began to some what understand this. And somehow trying to get past the screen of words which was to be my final essay I came to a fruition that words and thought and logic where the consummation of order through there own internal magic. I think in my own way I began to understand the importance of what I read some years before and the ideas of Claude Levi-Strauss.

"The position of culture is always in the circumstantial initiation of political and temporal manifestations... Art is always compeled into a form of deliberative action or considered indifference. However, Art's paradox becomes its own search for the truth of human desire and suffering in the immediacy of reality. Culture's difficulty lies in its own ambigious function and meaning in proximity to temporal forces. (Post-modern) culture may wallow in political subterfuge but the desire for the real is not only a Baudrillardian fetishism bounded in the rhetoric of apathy and nihilism but the very compulsion of human conciousness. Realism's persistance is in Culture's conjunctive 'praxis', as the agency of performance and conduct which constrain social structure. Foster touches on the anthropological contention in mimetic ritual, what Girard's theory ascertains as the violence with which the origin of all things human is in the eradication (almagamation) of truth into mythic representation, the disturbance of reality. It is the proximity of violence which considers the real, yet its immediacy is the compulsion of all things too human in its incompleteness and trauma."

JG Ballard

2009-04-20T03:09:00.000-07:00

J G Ballard

Sad news to hear the death of JG Ballard. A man of ideas who saw the future in the consequences of everyday actions multiplied and transformed. I wrote a little about his novel Crash in a correspondence to a friend. Although I talk of other artists I suppose this is my own little homage how is work affected me, though his own words say so much more.

"Those poems quite affected me. They made me feel all funny and sad at the same time. The last time any art did that was when I watched Mulholland Drive, I couldn’t sleep for days. As for what I said you’ll have to forgive me I’m not really a literary person. I was thinking of Jacob Epstiens Rock Drill (the one that looks like the creature from Alien) as I was reminded of it by reading one of the poems you gave me. J G Ballard sprung to mind as a Novelist.

In Crash Ballard writes about the possible consequences of a biological and technological synthesis as a kind of transgressional bathos; sex with cars basically. Although that otherness is combined (man and nature) in the likes of Epstien and Ballard, I think a strong sense of alienation or separation emanates like a gaze of purged morality and empowerment. In that lies their ambiguity.

With Bishop it seems to me the ambiguity lies in the abject nature of her body. There is cathartic subjectivity that floats between revulsion and fascination of her flesh, which appears, as you said, categorised between sight (or to be seen - appear as the Other) and touch where physical sensations unify and sanctify.

Maybe versus is to strong an assertion (maybe to masculine) but it seems to me that nihilism seems suggestive of a masculine tendency to transgress beyond nature, beyond God, beyond the function of his own biology. This is reflected in an aloofness which pervades the art of Epstien and Ballard. Bishops tactile femininity is the awareness of her biology as that Other, those naked breasts remind her of her sex and her maternal make up, that rootedness. With Epstien you see the same fusion of culture, technology and biology as in that point in In the Waiting Room but its very form is of the Other, separate and contingent."

Me & Rodchenko

2009-04-19T06:55:00.000-07:00

Rodchenko posters

There's currently an Rodchenko exhibition at Tate Modern. I always thought of him as an inspirational character in his expressive use of different media, in the graphic quality to his works, in the application of ideals and aesthetics. A man who thought alot about aesthetics in an almost pure way. History has possibly tainted the use of political aesthetics but the fresh directness of his approach is something, I think, to admire.

My Banners project have been in some way been inspired by that approach to the graphical arts. Here's some of the exhibition at the NGCA last year.