Gotta start something

Summer Holiday

Some snaps of train station platform cafes and waiting areas: gonna do a photo project maybe on this; get people to calm down and stop rushing, and enjoy waiting. I spend SO much time waiting in these places, at one point 9 hours on a station platform in the Serbian/Montenegran broder in a wierd trucker town with nothing but a supermarket with a motel above it (which we actually stayed in and were charmed by drunk truckies trying to break into our room in the night and being woken by the sound of vomiting men outside in the morning mmmm). But anyway, all that waiting was therapaeutic; i learned to chill out!

Podgorica, Montenegro

Poland

Timisoara, Romania

Czech Republic

Bratislava, Slovakia

Bratislava

Mostar, Bosnia

Mostar

Serbia

Poland

Tatras Mountains, Poland

Montenegro

Romanian 'dining car'

Krakow

Early morning walk in Prague to avoid the tourists

Godinje, Lake Skadar, Montenegro

Virpazar, Montenegro

8am walk to Virpazar 

Budapest

Gottfried and Bruce. Mainly Bruce

I’ve been wondering about the different sorts of art I would like to make, not in terms of whether I shall make sculpture, paintings, performances or prints, or whether I will focus on social balance issues, environmental issues or therapy (I will do all of these), but more wondering about the attitude I will use to communicate.

A few certain practitioners, artworks or figures I think are very successful in saying what they want to say. Today I’m mainly thinking of the following two gentlemen.

I visited Austrian painter Gottfried Helwein’s exhibition in The Albertina in Vienna this summer. He uses the persecuting imagery of violence towards children and paints extremely photorealistic figurative pictures. He doesn’t use abstract concepts or compositions, he uses blatant, unreserved suggestion to shock the viewer. The sheer number of paintings which depict such sickening scenes does much to put into perspective the bystander victims of war; one is slightly repelled by Helwein’s ability to paint one after another, but he turns this repulsion back on the viewer, asking them why these paintings disgusts them so, when they can view newspaper images and TV broadcasts one after another. His lifelong dedication to the subject suddenly drives home the realisation that this has been going on that entire time, and that one moment when we see a child killed by war on TV, is our only access to that suffering, but for them it continues. Helwein seems as if he has tried to access this continuation himself in order to keep us from allowing our distance from the situation to justify our passivity.

This is a negative but powerful address of passivity. Helwein’s reversal of responsibility back into the audience’s hands is a tactic I’ve been playing with, and I think it’s one of the most successful. Sadly his method comes from a negative place and the results can be demoralising and overwhelming, and therefore may possess the danger to incite further inaction.

I have all these issues with people’s attitudes towards the environment, social equality (feminism/mental health stigmatisation etc) and I think the main factor that causes this passivity is that people don’t know how to care; they don’t have the capacity to care, or the incentive, and I think it’s partly the fault of the escapism of the internet generation (where people constantly have a device on which to escape not only society’s problems, but their own too) but also because people don’t think to absorb their surroundings and get excited about them anymore. It’s almost become cool to be passive; to just grind on and mong out; shameless, unadulterated, mindless leisure is the Western world’s hobby. Granted I’m being a bit judgmental – but everyday in London I see people returning from their bureaucratic and autocratic jobs where they are not permitted nor required to exercise personality expression or autonomy, and they are all glazed over staring at their i-phones or tablets. The dynamics of modern capitalist labour have undermined human capabilites; at work the majority of us are labourers who simply conform to a company outfit with no chance for personal input or individual expression, and therefore no opportunity to build up trust. This lack of responsibility and creative effort has kept us out of practice, so when home-time comes and we have the hours to ourselves, we just lie back and continue to be led by something other than our own imagination.

There are artists who are extremely active and dedicated to maximising their creative brain power on a daily basis, but amongst these artists are too many self-referential circles or practitioners, whose only communication context is their own personal life or art itself; making art that builds only on other art without extended reference to real life progression, creating a long lasting trend of self indulgence without regard to one’s place in a (ideally) co-operative society. This is the opposite end of the scale from the inactive passivity, but is nonetheless passive in term of caring only about one’s immediate influence and consequences.

The ultimate creative antidote to both of these (inactive passive and self-referential passive) attitudes is Mr Bruce Springsteen.

His music; the lyrical content and the musical atmosphere, comes less from a place of inert doubt than from a hope for progression. His international power does not come from an appeal for solidarity through cynicism. He doesn’t dramatise the issues he sees in society and single out groups who make them so; this alienates the audience in the long run as it creates only a hostile solidarity. Instead Springsteen encourages interest, excitement, hope and pride in his audience’s individual and collective hearts. He tells stories of lives and worlds that draw us in with their continuous forward thinking positivity; never a note of nostalgia or of dwelling on problems. He creates types of characters we all know or identify with so that we feel socialised and co-operative towards our fellow citizens and an appreciation for the possibility of positivity in everyone.

His velocity of message in every song and the everyday, timeless reality of their subjects make it seem as though we all can, and we all ought to be doing something. Logic and reasoning doesn’t come into it, neither does judgment or duty. He simply appeals to the heart and to our ideals, he allows not a millimetre for apathy. Its beauty is that it is all so straight forward, timeless and real; he didn’t make any of it up. We know instantly that everything he says is true and that life is all plain sailing if you’re willing to accept it’s not; because you expect the best (know you might experience the worst) and get up and work for it.

 ‘talk about a dream, tryin to make it real’

            - Badlands by Bruce Springsteen



(I don't wanna put a Helwein picture here, it's a bit too upsetting. But that helps to prove how successful his paintings are!)

Humans are lucky enough to be connected at all, even if it's just by the table between them - Leonard Cohen

Today Dom and I made an 100% recycled table pieced together from wood gathered from various skips and rooftops of Peckham.

Oh what a frightful state we're in

I hereby pledge to be more active in writing about things that I think/see/do. Writing every day is a really good habit and makes you more eloquent and sure of your ideas and opinions (or at least be aware of different opinions you or others might possibly hold), and generally if you leave your home every day your writing will be socially engaged in some way, which is also a very good thing. Also putting writing on a blog means you can link images and videos and chronologise (new made up word) the thoughts you have and the things you see, so you can be more reflective and establish a more relevant chain of thought.
Therefore, with no further ado, I bring you the photograph 'Iolanda' (20110 by Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, which I saw today at the David Zwirner gallery.

This photograph is part of DiCorcia's show East of Eden which is basically a comment on the collapse of society (i personally think mainly the collapse of co-operation, individual and collective ambition, and positivity) that uses concepts and structures from Eden and The Fall to express that. DiCorcia particularly criticises the American political situation at the end of the Bush administration. The press release for the show is deffo right in saying the photos 'convey disillusionment'.

In this photo, Iolanda, the woman seems to be passive but aware of her surroundings and environment. I think she knows humankind has dug itself into a hole and has passed the point of no-return, but she doesn't know what to do about it. I think this exemplifies a general feeling amongst the citizens and governments of the U.S and the U.K - they are dissatisfied but don't know how to change their situation; authorities and communities are grating against each other and jarring within each other as nobody quite knows where they stand so nobody knows where (or has the drive) to begin making a change.

Her location, a high-rise apartment with large windows, both traps her in society and also releases her from it; it traps her above the workings of the Capitalist city in her cage of old-age redundancy, unable to offer much more, but it also releases her from the fruitless efforts of trying to participate or intervene.
Her calm physical poise, between a televised natural disaster and a vessel of consumer capitalism cruising through the city, reflects her feelings of intertia and powerlessness in the midst of this modern downfall.
She knows everything beyond the panes and screens is trouble, bue she keeps them there, behind those barriers, because she's too far deep into passivity. These screens are a motif of such passivity that has become a norm in modern culture; keep it at a distance and you won't even have to care about it.

The age of this woman plays quite an important part in the photo; her advancing years suggest wisdom and experience, making her helplessness to intervene all the more powerful. This may be because her age is casting her into the shadows (as literally depicted by the lighting in the photograph) of society; she's not useful to the economy anymore therefore she knows she has less impact. This concept makes it a bit of an anti-Fascist scene.
In fact it is ironic that it's her age which alludes to helplessness, because she is in fact the aspect of the image whose situation can most easily be changed despite her having the least time left to do so. Everything else seems in too deep; the leisure cruise ship with its revellers and all they partake in and represent, the solid modern buildings of industry whose inner-workings chug carelessly on, and the twister (a motif for environmental destruction) are wrongs that will take so long (if ever) to right. It is their dignity which is far more fragile than this woman's. She has witnessed the modern western economy and society cave further in, yet she can still keep her decorum.

Above all what struck me was her neat appearance, which suggests that all she can do now (and I expect this is symbolism for why Consumerism continues to accelerate) is maintain personal appearance and superficial dignity; that's really all she has energy left for; silence and instant gratification.

*

All this dramatisation of the destructiveness of modern economy and also of passivity, are likely only to make viewers all the more passive; it's too big a fish to fry. So don't believe it all.