Beuys at Tate

There's going to be a big Beuys show at the Tate Modern in May. This is good, because it means I can begin to construct some better ideas of what he means to me. is he a charlatan or actually a magician? Is it lazy to expect someone else to do all the transforming for you? I'm looking forward to it. Not least because I found him a tricky winkle to pick when writing a few lines for my visual database. (I've got to find a better name for it. Some sort of "cabinet"? http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/beuys/

Voodoo...and Farnsworth.

Send the day futzing with VoodooPad and putting together a visual database of artists books and writing notes for things ranging from Doug Aitken's "Electric Earth", to Tony Meeuwissen's "Key to the Kingdom" deck of transformation cards. Projected work over the next couple of days, apart from the library, includes putting together the first few sketches for the ale and porter show.

I just heard that I will be paid, albeit nominally, for the piece about Spike Island Printmakers. It's great just on principle to be paid for one's work, even if it's just a peppercorn. It's not merely a question of vanity, nor indeed of the money itself, though Lord knows I've got to keep my belly from rumblin'. More importantly is the way it helps me take myself seriously as an artist and writer, and helps me envisage things all the more professionally.

I've also uploaded Farnsworth to Flickr, preparatory to invoking the mighty engines of CaféPress to produce some Farnsworth-based daftness.

bachelard notes

p 155, the chapter on miniature:

"...the miniscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details of a thing can be the sign of a new world which, like all  worlds, contains the attributes of greatness.

Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness."

p 161

"Why should a metaphysician not confront this [miniature] world? It would permit him to renew, at little cost, his experiences of "an opening onto the world," of "entrance into the world."...Such formulas as: being-in-the-world and world-being are too majestic for me and I do not suceed in exoeriencing them. In fact, I feel more at home in miniature worlds which are, for me, dominated worlds. And when I live them I feel waves emanating from my dreaming self. For me, the vastness of the world has becomme merely the jamming of these waves. To have experienced miniature sincerely detaches me from the surrounding world and helps me to resist dissolution of the surrounding atmosphere."

My thoughts on temporary structures, meaning, for me in this study, books, would tend towards enclosure, but also towards a miniaturisation of the life-support-systems of cultural operation (the systems pertinent to the ontology of making artworks, if you will). I relate strongly to Bachelard's words here, and his words later on the commerce between inner and outer that is a containment, a predicate, a problematic that encloses the miniature whenever it occurs- for it occurs as a virtual world within a real world. But that does not mean that the phenomenology of the miniature is altered. It still harbours imaginations like Bachelard's and the poet's (and the maker of books) in a nurturing, enabling structure.

I want to mention a thought that occurs to me now on Tarot. That the world of relations in the Tarot is a miniaturisation of the real world, a schematic of an individual's understanding of his surroundings, past present and future. But the Tarot paradoxically asserts that it has not only a miniature view, but a wider view than that afforded by reality. It purports to be a window onto a universe with further dimensions. So the Tarot asserts a triple identity:  as a miniature, as a comprehensive scheme of the real, and as an indicator of something beyond normal reality. My understanding would be that these identities are furnished by imagination rather than by some supernatural force (unless one allows that imagination itself is super-natural). I wonder if the Tarot's model of input and output, and its agglomeration of an identity by our questing interpretation of it, by our interaction with it, can tell us something about how we encounter artists' books. There are many differences to be sure, but I want to note this observation to myself.

p 184 "intimate immensity"

"Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are alone. As soon as we become motionless, we are elsewhere; we are dreaming in a world which is immense, Indeed, immensity is the movement of motionless man. It is one of the dynamic characteristics of quiet  daydreaming."

Isn't reading a way of producing this state of aloneness? Isn't the book's act of enclosure tantamount to the study of Saint Jerome: a paradoxical immensity and openness achieved by enclosure and miniaturisation. A comparison, also of the differences in presence of a panorama or virtual reality artwork and one which is actuated by a reader through a narrative immersion. Different immersions. One is foisted on the sensorium of the viewer, the other depends tenuously on the quiet daydreaming intention of the viewer and is all the more immense for it, since it enlists the imagination, the inner senses.

quotidian reality

I bought an external drive the other day: the lacie 250gb thing "designed by porsche" although, how much design can go into an anonymous grey box that makes barely perceptible whirrs when it gets really overwrought is something I am not qualified to speak on. Suffice it to say that it almost doubles my capacity and introduces my firewire ports for the first time to something other than dust. Would I be correct in thinking one can daisy chain powered firewire devices? That would be theoretically interesting. Anyway, I now have a way to work with larger projects on my laptop, with its measly 30Gb disk.

Today I'll be working on some stuff to do with a personal visual/textual database of book artists and people/stuff/films/events I find inspiring or important. It started out as an assignment in the methodology course, but- partly thanks to freemind- it has become an interesting contraption for me, and in a way a manner of conducting research, since many of my picks- Roni Horn...Isaac Julien...Bookworks as a publisher...were kind of fringe presences to me about whom I could have put forward vague feelings of approval but no opinions as such. I'm not sure I'll conquer this grey empire of cultural fogginess but I shall certainly generate a lot of writing. This is good because it shows I am Industrious and Serious About My Studies. It may be useful. At the moment I am considering a policy of doing whatever interests me (with some sense of guidance and steering) with the understanding that it'll do one of two things a) it'll become part of my PhD studies b) it'll get me kicked off the course: either of these two outcomes are potentially the correct one in the sense that they would reflect my preoccupations' suitability for this type of research (as if I knew what type of research it was) and my readiness to undertake it. I don't want to give the impression of being unable to take the rough parts of things on. I'm not declaring a policy, merely meditating the position, that, under a regime of total imaginative and research freedom, things would fall out in this way. The reality is much more guided, moderated and hedged about by both my own cognisance of my putative research and the guidance I receive in fits from others. I'm loosening myself from a sense of doom about it, and trying to reclaim my own interests. It would be impossible to visualise an outcome, I think, without knowing what one wanted. I must find this out, and this may mean thinking about other ways of achieving it. I'm not merely having "second thoughts" (although that's one way of putting it). I'm hoping that I'm giving my creative, research and compositional skills the freedom to find a better way to express themselves.

underthewire_03

underthewire_03
Originally uploaded by aesop.

A final group from "Under the Wire". Images from my traipsing around Whistling Copse in 2004 and bits from the original newspaper reports of the murder of the gamekeeper in the 30s.

underthewire_02

underthewire_02
Originally uploaded by aesop.

More pages from Under The Wire.

Thank-you to the people at Bristol Museum for trusting me with guns.

underthewire_01

underthewire_01
Originally uploaded by aesop.

A preview from my new book "Under the wire", related to my whistling copse project.

Shown are approximately 6 pages. The whole thing's done on a wide-format printer and accordion-folded. Kittle work with the bonefolder and scalpel!