aaronbroadhurst.org

I’m not sure I’m ready to put this into words. No, I’m sure I’m not ready to put this into words. But …

Studio
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As you can see, I’ve been busy. And the way things are going I’m going to be a lot busier.
I’ve finally found a way to get it out, work it out … shall we say: less glacially. And I absolutely love it. It’s so exciting, engaging and surprising.
My ideas only move, develop and evolve at the pace of completed pieces. Well now they’re ganging up on me, positively insurgent, demanding democracy cheese string and Starbucks.

As to exactly what I’m doing — it’s hard to put into words.
I’m doing what I’ve been doing for the past few years, only the media have changed.
I’m working with photographs and memories, photoshop and graphite, analogue and digital, back and forth and back and forth, sampling and multi-tracking, quoting and referring, remixing.

TB
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Knowing … one can never know … they can look and record and measure and type and stereotype and watch and spy and invade and intrude and photograph and swab and finger print and x-ray and image and test and examine and compare and store and look and fetishise our faces and watch and watch as much as they want … but they will never know … me, you, us, anyone.

It’s seductive and addictive. But I am powerless and want to remain that way.
And I don’t fool myself that there is anything objective about the exercise.
A face is a face, it doesn’t mean anything … and a face belongs to someone … else.
Can these things accurately record the process, the attempts to understand, empathise, to poke, prod and pry and explore, something truthful about the looking … not so much about them?

What there is to know is both too deep to fathom, too foreign to translate, too complicated to grasp and too diffused into the world to be found. And, not being ours, we could never understand it if we could pin it down.

I can’t pretend I’ve never seen inside someone else’s body via MRI, as if I haven’t seen Hubble’s images of distant nebulae or Google Earth’s omniscient scan of our own home, or seen Warhol’s grainy screens, Bacon’s slips and slides and slices of flesh, as though I hadn’t seen every pore and hair and blood vessel in a digital photo or every sad, resentful, sordid paparazzi subject, or voyeur-vision cctv faked-footage of bombers or lovers, or mobile-phone video’d emo murder.

Rembrandt isn’t irrelevant, fuck, but neither is the omnipresent computer screen.

I have widescreen, stained glass, pixelated dreams.

Snowflakes
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I think our extremely-little ice age is over though up in England it’s due to continue through the week.

I came across these extraordinary images on the New Scientist site [LINK] and a link to SnowCrystals.com [LINK] — where Kenneth G. Libbrecht at Caltech shows off more his beautiful images captured by a specially-designed snowflake photomicroscope.

Science really reveals the wonder and magic of nature, it’s all that god stuff that seeks to steal it.

Snow
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Year Zero. Day One.

Hmmm … that was the plan.
We spent the weekend clearing out, clearing up and cleaning the studio.
Today, hump having been got over, Gordian knot having been cut, Linus blanket, dead weight of endless unfinished projects unceremoniously, cathartically chucked, a new, solution-focussed, cleansed, eager me was going to stride onto the stage and enact something or other, embody something else, conquer whatever and generate sublime thingies.
Didn’t happen.

It was so cold my breath was freezing.
For a moment I was sure this wasn’t Cornwall.
Then it went dark and started to snow.
And I knew … it wasn’t Cornwall.

But, as you can see, it was, it is … it’s weird.

I’m too old for this frozen boho garrety shit.
The poor cat is three and she’d never seen anything like it.
She touched it, sniffed it, licked it, looked around and then gave me a withering, knowing look: “you’re messing with my head, aren’t you? You must think I’m really stupid.”
Two whole inches. I can sympathise with blog posts on the BBC and in the paper: call that snow? Ha. Where I come from, when I were a lad, don’t know you’re born and so on.
But it’s still snowing and it ain’t gonna thaw tonight.
Tomorrow might actually be interesting.

Told you I wasn’t ready for this shit.

Having just said I can’t think, I just had a little thought … listening to Handel on the radio.
Does it matter why a piece of music was written or for whom?
To entertain a camp commandant as jews are herded into a gas chamber … or to soothe the troubled spirit of a torturer in Lubyanka, if you like?
OK, it’s a bit extreme perhaps but obviously, if you knew this, it would matter. Wouldn’t it?
So it does matter. Well, at least it can matter; it’s relevant.

The Handel was beautiful and exalting; if only the words had not been intelligible.
It was written to celebrate the coronation of George II and spouted a stream of nauseating patriotic tosh. Urgh.
I’m sure George was not a complete monster and Handel was much more than just a creepy sycophant but there’s so much I’d rather listen to.

Err … but Mozart, who you were extolling the other day, didn’t exactly keep his devout catholicism or his masonic twaddle out of his work either did he?
And while we’re on the subject, Barnett Newman said things like:

We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.13 June 1943 – Brief Manifesto with Rothko & Gottlieb

Aye, aye, aye …
They’re beautiful paintings … but sublime? I don’t think so.

Art can ever be viewed totally without context but should it only matter when some ugly views or perspectives are directly expressed? What if you merely sniff a rat? And anyway, who decides?

It’s easy if you’re the audience — you just turn it off, turn away, don’t go.
It’s easy if you make the stuff — if it comes through, it comes through, what else can you do? I’m just a innocent lickle artist. Hmmm. Easier then.
But what if your role is to interpret? You can’t just deny the effect of something that really works. I suppose you have to tackle the crap head-on somehow. Whether it’s Shylock or Wagner. There is no ur-production. The “Art” is what it is now, here, tonight.

But what if it’s not Art with a capital A? What if you’re dealing with entertainment? Lionel Bart’s Oliver is on again, and I love a lot of it, unreflecting in its gruesome grasping, lisping Fagin, unreconstructed in its tart-with-a-heart who has to die to prove her worth, etc, etc. Walk away — move on — do something else. But there they go again with Fagin’s joke semitic nose delineating the L on the posters once more. What planet are these people on?
I’m glad I don’t have to make those sort of decisions.

Alright, alright, all I’m saying is that it’s complicated.
And that one can’t just ignore it.

It’s taken me so long to string together a few words, the evening concert has started and my Bete Noir, Petroc Trelawny, is smarming ignorantly, as is his wont, on the telephone to Rachel Podger.
We’ve had about 5 minutes of music and now it must be interrupted, as it will be every few minutes throughout the evening, in case we get bored, to bore us to death with the soap opera, reality TV, biographical contextualising bollocks that is used to pad out concert programmes.
(Live concert in this context, meaning “recorded live” — how else exactly do you record something? It’s either “live” and therefore engaging and exciting, requiring one to accommodate the schedule but connecting you to thousands of other people across the world, or it’s not. It’s dead.)
Where was I? Yes, the stuff you read just before the lights go down, in the interval, or in bed later that evening. Not between each fucking movement.
Too much fucking context is even worse.

Now I don’t know what I think.

Help.

Barnett Newman
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My brain, the logical, wordy part, is evidently not back online yet.
It’s Barney Newman’s birthday today and I looked back at what I wrote last year [LINK] — I was reading and thinking then.
All I can do now, is make images. But that’s something. Considering it’s supposed to be what I do, it’s a pretty big something.
And I am trying to post again, more than anything at the moment, as a way of getting said brain back in gear.
Even if it’s just a doodle a day, in the way some people do some life-drawing or meditate (another thing that’s just not happening at the moment) before they start work. Discipline, routine, practice, all that.

There’s a lot of contradictory biographical stuff both on the internet and in some of my books at home so it was fascinating to read Melissa Ho’s chronology [LINK] of his frustrating roller-coaster life on the Barnett Newman Foundation website, which I suppose is as authorised as you can get.

Sorry … don’t expect much in the way of ideas … just enjoy the pretty pictures. One step at a time.

Jackson
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In some ways it’s hard to believe that Paul Jackson Pollock was born so long ago, almost in a different age: today in 1912, in the tiny, parched and windy wild west town of Cody, Wyoming.

Maybe oneself is a necessary subject but, alone, it is neither sufficient nor reliable. Nor, ultimately, endless, as the breadth and depth of one’s oceanic unconscious at first suggests.

Still, in his too short life he got so much done.
Never really “pure painting”, never just wallpaper, he was always more than “nature” incarnate — structuring, embodying, giving voice and form to, dancing with, the creatures of the void.

Not exactly a nice guy, particularly when drunk, the booze didn’t kill him, life did that … but it did mean that he killed Edith Metzger when he lost control of his car on the evening of 11th August 1956.