#uwtsd

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"I got all the images any hick poet ever shit out." - William S. Burroughs

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17th January 2019

Had a really productive day today! I have a 5000 word project due in May which I need to research so I’ve been reading an article and writing detailed notes on it this afternoon. Only 6 articles and 13 books to go!

Hoping to get at least a 70% on this project so I can finish this year with a 2:1 but it’s going to be very difficult work.

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In Pictures: 160-image photo gallery from UWTSD Swansea transportation design show > https://www.formtrends.com/pictures-swansea-uwtsd-2017/

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Studying in Lampeter!

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What I love and what fascinates me most about William S. Burroughs is that, for someone who lived such a full and extraordinary life, he strikes me as someone who was dead. Not believing in the existence of a soul, I find in Burroughs my exemplar of a soulless being, with space hypothetically occupied by the soul instead filled with a veritable "interzone" - rather than a black hole, a black soul, as it were - of intense energy producing forms from ingested light.  He not only always seemed dead, but the writing has that quality too. That dead writing could only come from WSB, who had a great run, but was never alive, one way or another, simply inhabiting existence in a singular way. His writing captures that suspension.  

This reflection led m to wonder after the idea of “soulless art”.What would constitute soulless art? My own experimentation with what I call ‘Zero Art’, amongst other things, is in a sense soulless art but doesn’t nail it. Art made entirely by a machine might be considered soulless, but in my lexicon, if a human has a soul then a machine, does too, albeit radically different. So what would soulless art be? Look and feel like? “Soulless art” yields very little on Google, and then only laterally to the point of irrelevance. There is, therefore, a gap in the market for art without a soul. “Dead art.” Another term unloved by Google search. I have my work cut out (cutup?) for me. 

And just as I finished inputting the above, a line was spoken on the television that could caption the photograph above and with which I identify in my practice and being:

“They were both searching for something that didn’t exist.”

Image: Francis Bacon and William Burroughs, London, 1989 

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“The space of a (social) order is hidden in the order of space…. How is this possible? How could such capabilities, such efficacy, such ‘reality’ lie hidden within abstraction? To this pressing question here is an answer whose truth has yet to be demonstrated: there is a violence intrinsic to abstraction, and to abstraction’s practical (social) use.” - Henri Lefebvre    

In my reseach around my Degree Show work, Gallericide, I have come upon the work of Henri Lefebvre and his theme “the politics of space”, which strikes me as relevant in the extreme to my own context for my work. I am aspiring to create an abstract space (-within-a-space) that, it occurred to me, is indeed a political statement. 

This is then a connection to my 1st and 2nd Year work that eventually became my “Less Poverty Is Needed” theme where I exhaustively explored the politics of space as regards homelessness and poverty. In a sense, Gallericide is a logical culmination of these strivings, bringing right into my studio space, with which I am so intimate and to an extent attached to, a sense of the poilitics of space, from inclusion to alienation, creativity to ambiguity. 

In his book The Production of Space, Lefebvre says, “Space is a social morphology: it is to lived experience what form itself is to the living organism, and just as intimately bound up with function and structure”, and this is what is happening with Gallericide: the production of space, quite literally.

The above then meshed with my discovery lately of the work of Gabor Maté CM, a Hungarian-born Canadian physician with a background in family practice and a special interest in childhood development and trauma, and in their potential lifelong impacts on physical and mental health, including on autoimmune disease, cancer, ADHD, addictions and a wide range of other conditions. 

The correlations he draws between repressed material - emotions, trauma, abuse etc. - and its eventual manifestation as illness, mental illness, diseases and so on made me wonder after the development of autism et al in some of the students I have worked with in London at Eltham Hill School. And then how our work with them provides a holistic and therapuetic outlet for that material that then offsets pathalogical outcomes. I know for a fact my own creative and artistic compulsions must have spared me physical and more acute illness as I am able to release that material in safe ways. In just the same way I can see how in some ways the art college experience is, for some students - when it is a happy one - a therapeutic, safe conduit (and safe space) to process and release material as creative work that might otherwise energetically become, if repressed, pathological and deleterious to their health.

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The computer is my favorite invention. I feel lucky to be part of the global village. I don’t mean to brag, but I’m so fast with technology. People think it all seems too much, but we’ll get used to it. I’m sure it all seemed too much when we were learning to walk. - Yoko Ono 

My research into Fluxus has led me to expand my knowledge of the practice of Yoko Ono. An extraordinary artist and woman. Utterly inspiring. I can relate to her work to a degree I can with few artists, and can see how and why she had a connect with Gustav Metzger. My own work, new images from which appear above, is very much in the Fluxus spirit. Ono’s work inspires me with its subversion, perversity, visionary qualities and adamant dedication. Reading her remarks on art and being an artist, she very much resonates with Metzger. I may consider writing my MA dissertation on her practice.

“ I like artists who have something to say, not wallpaper”, Ono says, and this appeals to me partly because in my own practice I would love nothing more than to make my work wallpaper: anodyne, neutral, faceless. Yet, I can’t get there. As with Ono and Metzger, I am all over my work. I can take everything from my art except myself. Using a computer doesn’t mean I am removed, it just means I have found a worthy, wily accomplice. I am not just able, but enabled, through use of technology. How can I get rid of myself? 

Ono says “The cynicism that you have is not your real soul,” and this is the crux of it. Some people find me and some of my work cynical, but it’s my “real soul” that is speaking through my work; any perceived cynicism if just a device. This whole world is through the looking glass - to understand and navigate it you have to realise that everything down here is exactly backward to what is real - and the same is true of my “cynical” art. 

Ono says “It’s a waste to not say anything with art,” and this I resonate with, too, because I have made a God out of trying to say nothing with my art and failed. And this failure has proven its success.  Because the artist wants to say something, even if it’s to try to say nothing. And, there is no stronger statement than nothing: Everything comes from, goes back to, and is ultimately only nothing. Say nothing with your art and you command the universe. Warhol knew this. 

“There is an incredible love in creating art unless somebody is saying, ‘Hey, let’s just make money,’ because it doesn’t work when you do it that way, ”says Ono, “If you are aiming for that, forget it.” This is where she is totally in sympathy with Metzger. I’m not aiming for money from my art. Who the hell would buy it anyhow? I love reckless and profligate production of work aimed at recklessness and profligacy. Less is less, sure. But more is more, too. 

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#Jaguar Autoroute by Gökhan Eryigit & Flavio Guillen. One of the standout concepts at the 2017 UWTSD Swansea degree show > https://www.formtrends.com/pictures-swansea-uwtsd-2017/