There are these two young fish swimming along,

and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

I’ve just been reading that article that you mentioned Jess [an adaptation of a lecture given by David Foster Wallace in the review section of the Guardian, 20.09.08 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction].

I thought it was really interesting what you said about awareness and how that relates to the project. It seems to be all there in the title “What do artists do?” but maybe that can seem like an external question, as if asked by someone who isn’t an artist, or by one artist to another, or as if we might just be debating or contrasting personal approaches or models, but models that we know – studio based v project based, making objects v ideas / events, commercial v non-commercial etc. I think it’s more subtle than that, asking questions of what it is that we don’t realise we’re doing. Like fish not knowing what water is. The things we’re wet with, without even realising it - not the ideas in the work, or the subject or the content or the form or the relation of any of those things but the way you go about being and doing and the assumptions you make that mean you reject certain activities and directions. Yes, maybe more that, the things you don’t do, the things that don’t touch you, aren’t your methods, the negative space of what artists do.

And why should travelling to a light industrial estate in Clapton help? But I think it does, perhaps because it can act as a container or a frame for things. A distancing. And I thought that the water is all the daily stuff we’re embedded in too. Like what you might pass on your daily journeys or read in the paper. I particularly like the way you’ve incorporated what you’ve seen in the newspaper into what you’ve been doing during the project – the phone videos on the blog and the images you’ve been painting.

Being here and thinking about being here.

Mark Twain's Writing Hut, Costcutter etc

I spent the first stipend on one hundred 60x40cm ‘off the shelf’ canvases. I took these to the space at the same time as Anna completed her platforms. These platforms and the parameters of having a task gave me a place to be and an activity. I believe that if I had worked at one of the trestle tables I wouldn’t have had the same experience. The planes of the platforms at various heights motivates physical and mental movement. Their rhomboid and triangular shape take you away from the walls. They reminded me of Mark Twain’s octagonal writing hut

“…octagonal with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window…perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city...”—Mark Twain, Letter to William Dean Howells, 1874

A Costcutter is on the corner of Theydon Road. Costcutter is a franchised local and urban convenience store. The ambience of the new community in which it has been located, is not yet established. In its' newness it seems not settled. The ‘project’ of rejuvenating and giving this area of Clapton a use, will descend down the other side of the sine curve into a ‘real’ situation. That is without the fabrication of investment, it will be the people who live in this area and their economic situation that grounds it’s atmosphere. The mise en scene in this sense is not yet entrenched. The environment as ‘the totality of surrounding conditions and circumstances affecting growth or development.’

There is an all-round congenial atmosphere in this shop. They have introduced an in-store bakery, broad sheet newspapers, newsmagazines and periodicals including New Scientist and The Economist, alongside photographs of healthy consumers as an apparently integrate part of an aspirational whole, perhaps improving the mode of living of this community.

On Theydon Road the businesses keep to the excepted set hours of industrious activity. There is a lot of movement of loads out of and in to warehouses. Many interactions happen on the street itself. This visible and audible backdrop are marked by its absence after five thirty. In the quiet, out of working hours, the view from the upper space becomes more noticeable. It is unusual to be able to see across such a distance as Walthamstow Marshes in London.

I think this present position, the difference felt by working as an artist in this community and it’s binary nearby rural location (I have seen tractors plough sections of the Marsh set aside for some kind of agriculture) have enabled a sort of objectivity. The 'difference' was the push to start making work. The paintings are allowing me to take on new subject matter and the expanding content informs new subjects. As a sculptor I also feel free from the painting is dead argument. The mobile phone videos posted on the blog are part of this project.

Imaginary Companion

In response to August 30th Performance Event my friend SD and I contributed an unobservable performance. SD has been a performance artist but recently discontinued this aspect of his work. In preparation for the event we discussed how artists who do not perform could take part in a performance event. SD gave me texts to explain his position as resistant to performance. These texts are about invisibility and camouflage. We also considered Clare Bishop's argument against participation in her anthology Participation.

Together we non-performed or didn't perform. If I had explained or drawn attention to the non-performance at the event, the explanation would have served as an adjacent or alternative performance, and the non-performance would have no longer been invisible. SD also wasn't present at the event or had any knowledge of the non-performance taking place. The event may have been changed by the non-performance, by some kind of transfiguration, but more likely not, as no thing was added and no thing was taken away.

The immateriality of the non-performance lends itself to Romanticism (Scheonberg the Late Romantic composed Transfigured Night, the compositional structure based on poem that tells of the night being transfigured by the revelaton of a secret), the history of Identity Politics, insanity and delusions.

“It came as the third instalment of a series of political movements that grew out of the increasingly radical politics of the 1960’s. It was the third of, in retrospect to what we now know as Identity Politics…that is politics based on who you are and making that the centre of your political commitment and political action. Obviously the first of these movements, and the historically most important, was the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960’s in which African-Americans made this issue the centrepiece of their political endeavours. The second manifestation was the Women’s Liberation movement… in which the issue of gender was made the principle of unity in political action. You know, Gay liberation came along as an obvious extension, logical extension, of this Identity Politics to a group that felt equally or comparably oppressed and in need of political action …I think it’s fair to say the centrepiece of this movement, and what distinguished it from the preceding Identity Movements… was that Gayness unlike African-Americaness or femaleness was, or at least was perceived to be, invisible. This was not a population that you could identify visually in most respects. It is more complicated than that but this was the common perception. Indeed the issue of invisibility became the central issue from the point of view of the people leading [intellectually] this movement because they came to the conclusion that the foremost problem, the central problem, of the Gay population in this country [America] was precisely that it was invisible, which was theorised in it being in the closet. The closet is a metaphor to indicate this invisibility and it also suggests that the invisibility from the point of these figures was largely self-imposed…”
Paul Robinson, Historian, Stanford University

The imaginary companion or friend is arguably a dramatic idea but even if it is only known to the creator existing in fantasy it can contribute socially. The unobservable companion effects some kind of change to the atmosphere or events, although it requires language to be revealed beyond that of the creator's imagination. The Lemur, who's name is taken from "spirit of the dead" in Roman mythology, appears to the alcoholic, a mischevious ghostly companion. Franz West's Lemur Head contains a rubbish bin, in Henry Koster's film Harvey (1950) the Lemur takes the form of a big white rabbit. "And then I introduce them to Harvey... and he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed."

This text is here given as the language form of the Imaginary Companion performance, with the aim of it functioning as a map or diagram.

One version of Franz west's Lemur Head was included in the exhibition Pre-semblence and the Everyday. The following quote is taken from his essay for his exhibition poster:

"It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or "window shopping". that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. they allow us to grasp only a relic set on a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. these fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. the trace left behind is substituted for the practice."
Author: Franz West
http://www.renaissancesociety.org

The clip below is given as an example.

Jess

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBvpxzl54D8&feature=related

...from Maria

[I]t is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.

(Jean-Francois Lyotard, What is Postmodernism? - Answer to the Question, 1979)

She looms large

She looms large, tilting herself forward. The angle slants the room towards the windows with blue metal frames.

Her head is abnormally big, even for a body her size: she stretches about three meters into the air. The limbs are uneven, monumentally wrong-looking, constructed rather than modelled. She wears a dress, but has no feet.

One arm reaches forward, grabbing the air in front of her. The other arm lies flat against the space between chest and stomach. Rectangular patches of white lie flat over the top of the head, the arms, around the waist. The rest of her body is reddish brown, unevenly coloured, with a rough-looking surface. Various shades of red blend into the sand, cement, and filler mixture that covers most of her exterior.
Her dress opens onto a light wooden frame, drilled and screwed together; displaying large holes in the wood where the screw has disappeared into the material. The wood is planed, smooth, with splashes of burgundy lumps.