Private thoughts

This blog was set up as a way for me to engage in some other form of dialogue about my work and to try to bridge the gap between this place of digital and the out thereness of making things artwork in the world. What it has done to some extent is to reconcile another area of practice with this, it has become as personal as the sketchbook.

what this blogs main focus has been so far is failure, failure of myself to reconcile these things to be distracted by all the other things in here to do and my continued failure to make work which really impresses me. Maybe I have just got harder on myself about it than I used to be but this cant be a bad thing.

what I have been grappling with and what is the main focus of my note making is what is the nature of art in itself and how things like concerns exist and in what form these concerns can manifest them selves, how they are then evaluated and some how prescribed a status. I really should try to use simpler English more often.

I don't think this is the only focus my notebooks, notebooks have been a key element in my art making practice since the beginning of my BA nearly 10 years ago now. And in those early days they were much more about me using them as a way to locate myself track my behavior and thoughts to understand really what it was that I am. Now some of the biggest questions I ask in these books are are (were) these books simply ways to make myself better and whether any of these things I found out (revelations) have much artistic merit in themselves?

Hey folks this sure sounds like sex and the city to me.

i guess something i have always wanted to put down somewere is all that i have learnt and discovered since making art if I don't make any more great art I don't mind, I do really like doing it and think there are things to be done more to be learnt, but maybe I just just don't have a niece. Or maybe I just don't have the talent fantastic. Once you leave art school you really need that semi continual boost to your ego that is some external source justify your art making.





I had a good day in the studio today completed or at least made a non light light box totem piece which I think is called end of things and did some more work on a painting which is the second of a series trying to make the painting as object like as possible and the object painted as false or false in a pictorial sense. A play between the two.

There is no project

after long and hard thinking , i have decided that :

There is no project

PROJECTS NON



i guess i began to think about this when i was in latvia and named this work

there is no project




the title was more in reference to several things going on at the time there on the residency , the organisers really wanted me to have a 'project' to work on " come on dai your a sculptor, dont just take pictures of these old soviet buildings". PROJECTS NON and also the title is referencial about the failure of the soviet 'project' and the crumbling buildings were a visible symbol of this.

so i am going to concentrate on work about no projects: END OF THINGS.

as someone once said

dont believe the hype

no more lonely nights

what might one stand for these days this is a question that has been rattling round my brain recently , post whatever we cant stand as artists who are interested in making our careers happen, and any idea of political motivation seems well quaint. so we or i am left in this quagmire of non despription, this gloupy hole were we are all scrambling for some ground to take hold of . thse are just my excuses of course i want to make my career happen and i think somewhere in here is an idea of what is right in the world. how i can apply both or either of these things seems some way off. fascinating as it is how an artwork operates the pressure drop that is induced when a certain level of criticial conceptualism from the work is released is exciting an artworks fall from grace. is it but i trick i learnt a long time ago and do i now actully have no critical content left, the disection of the artwork from my critical faculties is complete , i make garden ornaments.






this isnt as bad as it seems i am searching for something with out a doubt something that i believe in, just wish i could get there quicker, 6 years of study and i am back at the begining. 3 months of full time work and the transformation is nearly complete. i will be out the other side soon. i have rediscovered a love of drawing which is fantastic and i have been thinking about where this is going how to pursue these goals.

The project

good evening , so its another late Monday night. And what is there to think about art. About how my practice is getting further away but becoming more clear and through this period of self analysis of the work accepting that this may be it , I am not going to come up with great conceptual leap and radical change , those days are long gone since art school. This is what I do.

if I am critical of it is pretty middle of the road average sculpture it doesn't have a trick and its only strength gets lost pretty easily through my doubt and need for more. This attitude doesn't really sell the work to people ( mental note remember this).

but what I am seeing is many people not all of them not even my close friends but people I have known, doing well or at least having shows but not really believing or trying even to make belief in the work, beyond a work that gets them shown, this isn't that important but I wish they could know so they could make the work they should be making. Don't we hate it when our friends get successful , young mi chun has done very well and her work has grown with her but kept some of the original spark that she had, sure she loses the way quite often , but she always finds her way back to some fresh good work well done young mi.

http://www.youngmichun.com/

As you can see I am quite 'philosophical' about things at the moment, what might this mean well a journey to attempt to discover what really interests me, so lets see; I am always distracted when I am not working, by to many things and not spending enough time thinking about this , is this a symptom of our times? i Have been reading classic philosophy works one thing i see is how easy it is for them to come across as a prescriptive doctrine, of how these other people un educated should behave. We all do things behind closed doors that were ashamed of and there isn't any way to not have these things happening.

reading and re-reading these works opens up a great way of thinking for me and hopefully this method leads to some fruitful outcomes, not just more opening up of ways of thinking. i think this blog acts just as a thought pad and feels like plans, well not really but parts of something that hasnt come together yet. If your reading this you could well be the first!
so its an idea of another way of another space for some thought to exist , i still feel are thoughts are bombared by distractions and stopping them is pretty difficult, There addictive.

i should stick a few images in here:






so its the oldest trick in the book but hey rock and roll kids. So what might this faith and belief that i am looking for be, well it is not in something instead its in me and my ability to understand what is going on around us. Something i have been thinking about a lot in relation to this belief is something i have had in several guises through out my life , that i am special that i have secret knowledge or that i have experienced things that have given me an insight into matters that most people cannot see. When i was younger this got me into lots of trouble, my behavior wasn't bad in the usual sense really eg i wasn't a menace to society rather more a victim. Through making art a was able to find a really useful position to take up, of i know something that i am showing you that you don't know. Now really i am thinking about this and wondering if i do or rather wondering where this has gone this feeling of specialness also and most interestingly these feeling where strongest when i was most alone and hurting they seem to be some sort of mechanism for the psyche to look after itself, well not exactly look after but contain counteract.

incidentally i don't really feel like this now so much, what it is i am explaining are the results of my enquiry into these things which is somewhat different than the actual effects that one feels whilst these occurrences are happening. And what i am wishing for is some reconciliation of my artistic endeavors to these things of interest and some way for me to understand them and to place my practice within an informed position of strength. Relating to these things.

its a work thing..

so its the typical thing for an artist to moan about , working full time . we all end up here we dont know how we got here and we all want to get out of here and back into the studio or at least the space of making art.

so i havent been making much art , ive been reading a lot of philosophy and working as an artist assistant, selling computers for the little man at the same time. what i need to do is to consolodate my working time and make some new work!

critical thinking?

i have been in this crisis about what i am doing for some time and really discovering what i am interested in is a philosophy , which through thinking about this is allowing me to understand why things are as they are. what irks me about contemporary practice is a scientific methodology to the work or rather a scientific outcome from a methodology of research , i think that art is much better than this and not really about proving something but uncovering the hidden mysteries , which by there own nature will still be mysterious once uncovered(for references see Bruce nauman, bill viola and franz west off the top of my head).

i am not setting up a them and us and find that my thinking can take on this form.

( a work of visual art that seems to of been arrived at through a process of logical methods with an outcome which talks about the way it was conceived not through material or processes but through a conceptual framework. this conceptual frame though now seems to me to reek of one of necessity for the artist, to allow governmental funding or theoretical placement within a body of knowledge, rather than the artists wanton enjoyment of the ideas at stake)

but maybe i am questioning the value of works which simple visualise a theory or obvious point of view which are then held up to be important. so there is a way for art to be more subtle and powerful than i feel it is currently. This frustration could be my own difficulties in coming to terms with some of the elements and interests that are contained within my own practice.

noon day demons

i was having this chat with one of my friends the other day and what was very reassuring for both of us was that we agreed that are work is what it is and that its not really going to change that much, we will most likely keep plugging away in the same ways we have been. this seemed very reassuring to me and hopefully i can keep chugging.

i am involved in a collabrative art project at the moment the noon day demons. we starting and swaping with each other drawings every week or so and then continuing to work on these new drawings that someone else has started. we have all swapped about 4 or 5 times so far. its a really good way to keep yourself busy and a good aside to your practice.

begin

hello and welcome to the blog

This is my studio, and what i have been feeling is a distinct lack of union between what occurrs there and what i spend my time doing here. hopefully this blog may assist me in getting these things together.

what is it i will communicate and to who.

i have been doing some research about rodchenko and i think the otherness of this work and the consructivists in general is one of the overeaching facts of my enjoyment of it . What else this blog might do, is to let me say research is looking at things i like