Like the new design? He asked sheepishly. I am not sharpening pencils. Not at all. This is all part of a cunning plan … I think.
Over the holiday I discovered, to my horror and delight, er and bewilderment, that there are actually walking, talking, breathing people who read this stuff. That didn’t make it easier to write? — I’m shocked.
So the plan is: less tarty stuff getting in the way, new project, trick myself into getting down to work.
Enough navel-gazing — I hate all that shit …
Getting going again after the break has been murder. Of course it’s never easy but this time I am faced (literally — his Janus faces stare blankly but accusingly (can you do that?) at me whatever I’m doing — bastard) with a half-completed piece, terrified of just starting another one in such a void and belittled and bewildered by the book I’m reading at the moment: Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh.
In fact my piece is coming along — as usual I’m working my way through the process in private (I know, I know: it should be a sort of collaboration with critics and collectors, each piece a discreet essay, an uterence contributing to a dialogue but what can I do?), stage by stage, hypothesis, experiment, analysis, synthesis, new hypotheses and round and round until I’m confident that I’ve answered some useful questions, posed more interesting ones for the future and that I can stand proudly behind the proposition. Sort of. He is less cartoony, generalised, more honest and specific but not a person, not an image of a person, he is a thing, an idea, a constellation of ideas, a canvas, a palimpsest, a story, a christalisation of the process of his making, he is walking, walking out of a dream. “He”? Hmmm … And three or four months is a hell of an investment in one statement though — like stem cell research, the temptation to massage your data, or at the very least to rewrite your hypothesis to fit it, is a leeeeetle overwhelming. Ach, so what? I do promise photos, honestly.
And as for a new piece — it’s really just an ectomorphic twin, burned away, cauterised, withdrawn. And as usual it’s just money to buy the bloody materials that’s caused the freeze.
And the book is fabulous — I’d really recommend it: an intellectual antidote to all those heavy feather-light coffee table picture books which are the gruesome arty siblings of those spectacular but vacuous TV nature “documentaries”. And just because someone like Marcel Duchamp said x doesn’t mean he was right … or telling the truth for that matter.
And it’s worked! You just read it. Monster brilliant. Well alright, it’s a start.
And today is Barney’s birthday. 103. That’s the excuse for the image. I’d always thought Newman was sterile and all his kabballistic nonsense was just nonsense (as though he would care) until the Tate did a huge show 5 years ago (five years — where exactly does time go?). It was a revelation — utterly convincing and quite exhilirating. I have a sneaking suspicion that it was very carefully put together (ever so slightly cynically telling little white lies) to avoid being repetitive but still … weird. He read philosophy too — oooh, so, like a real intellectual then … maybe but that kabballistic mumbo jumbo is still nonsense.
Still, he’s the patron saint of late developers and I don’t walk under ladders.
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I have a cunning plan
- Posted on Tuesday 29 January 2008 at 17:56
- Category In the Studio, Notes, Rambling, art
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[…] 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 […]