Legally, I Own the Thoughts of the Dead

Born in the Twentieth Century.  Working in the Twenty-First Century.  Not dead yet.

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A Memorex for the Krakens – Vid Biz As one narrative moves forward, so another regresses.  Two films with ghostly themes are in disjointed conversation with one another, jarring in a way which echoes contemporary culture and feeding back on itself in a perpetual time-locked state.

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Krakens, etc. (being an updated version of “R. Totale XVIII Has Left the Building” for projected installation)

Krakens, etc. (being an updated version of “R. Totale XVIII Has Left the Building” for projected installation)

  Differance is the funeral held for the meta-narrative.   The time of year I remember most distinctly from my childhood was those strange weeks when the nights drew in.  Halloween, Bonfire Night…the cheap masks at the shop at the end of the twitchel (because that’s what they were called in North Nottinghamshire), the divine aroma of potatoes being charred on the backyard fire which, these days,…

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Mangez-Vous Plus en Forme

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A la Recherche du Temps Illimite

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Fall Painting #1 – Hideous Replica

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Fresh Fruit from Rotten Vegetables (part four): Neither For Nor Against Architecture, Yet Happy to Pit Wodiczko Against Bataille

Fresh Fruit from Rotten Vegetables (part four): Neither For Nor Against Architecture, Yet Happy to Pit Wodiczko Against Bataille

Bataille and Foucault would have it that our day-to-day existence is governed by architecture: the tomb, the prison, the government office, etc. I have previously surmised that the 21st Century is a schizophrenic age, and what could be more schizophrenic (if we accept Foucault and Bataille) than a climate in which architecture is endlessly toppled and reconstructed? In my more languorous moments,…

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Concerning Tension (aberrant) A cacophony of typewriters clashes with text and a succession of imagery relating to tensions and releases.  

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Fresh Fruit from Rotten Vegetables (part three): The Tension of Kafka's Bureaucracy

Fresh Fruit from Rotten Vegetables (part three): The Tension of Kafka’s Bureaucracy

    Why is Kafka so relevant ninety-three years after his death?  Simply because his milieu was one of pure bureaucratic tension: not only did his works comment on the bureaucracy of his age, they foreshadowed the docile bureaucracy of the decades to come.  Today’s bureaucracy is so sluggish and short-sighted that it needs the smiley-faced, epigrammatic lexicon and cheery-voiced affectations of…

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Fresh Fruit from Rotten Vegetables (part two)

Fresh Fruit from Rotten Vegetables (part two)

The word tension is probably old-hat these days (for, as Mr Virilio would no doubt point out, once a concept or term has been applied to any discipline it is already old-hat, ready for supersession).  But tension is without doubt the cultural vernacular of the Twenty-First Century: our Western, capitalist existence is based on myriad tensions, all applying pressure upon one another.  We have…

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Fresh Fruit from Rotting Vegetables (part one) There comes a point in any artist’s trajectory (be it an established artist, or an unknown student who can’t even visualise a time when someone would respect them enough to give them the time of day), when they must take stock of everything they have done before. 

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Ryan Gander - Night in the Museum @ Birmingham Museum & Art Gallert

Ryan Gander – Night in the Museum @ Birmingham Museum & Art Gallert

There is an infamous scene during John McNaughton’s Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer in which the film’s two protagonists are seen torturing and ultimately murdering an innocent family, which is disturbing enough in and of itself, until we then cut away from the scene to find that we have actually – and chillingly – been watching the killers watching themselves perform these deeds. It is in…

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“Thomas the Obscure” (Print Proof) Thomas the Obscure (1941), Maurice Blanchot's "ultimate post-modern fiction" re-framed in an old Dandy cartoon strip.

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Roger Hiorns @Ikon, Birmingham

Roger Hiorns @Ikon, Birmingham

The Birmingham weather beating its seasonal tattoo upon the roof of the Ikon provides a soundtrack of no small irony as, accompanied by the spirit of Antonin Artaud and my six-year-old Son and with a handmade poster declaiming human BSE as a conversational topic-starter, we are politely informed of the explicit content beyond. We take heed of this caution and, indeed, there are penises to behold,…

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Stalker

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How Do You Make Yourself a Body without Organs?

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Ubu Roi (back to my old tricks) I have not done such a thing for three years now, but Alfred Jarry's absurdist classic needed a Peanuts re-framing.

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Decalcomania: Rhizomatic Analogy of the Art Object and its Simulacra - Where is the Precious Essence?

Decalcomania: Rhizomatic Analogy of the Art Object and its Simulacra – Where is the Precious Essence?

There are two instances within this essay of previous journal entries being spliced into the main body of text.  This works on two levels: the first level is the most logical, in that two short passages lay dormant in relatively spurious pieces of writing, and as an author I decided that they would be put to better use to illustrate similar points herein.  The second reason is more pernicious,…

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