Participlex if you please...

More about the 'use' of leisure time and pursuits: coming from my idea that everything is mindless until you recognise that it is.

<<< Sketch paintings for more 3Dish things. >>>

The possibility of civil agency in going to the cinema.

Cinema is usually escapist; the boundary of civil responsibility. When you step off the street and into the lobby, you're already released of your worldly duties and obligations. 

Or not? Maybe the time when you're left to your own devices (after work, before work, on the weekend, on holiday) is the time when you should be fully engaging in the world. In fact, almost always I think this is the case.  We're not working our jobs so we can switch off from the planet and our surroundings after each day. We're working to be part of it; to afford to live in a certain house, eat a certain way, dress a certain way. Why? Why are we choosing those lifestyle choices? That's what we should examine... what do they mean for us and what's the alternative? Which probably translates to what are our desire and fears. Which is important to examine and engage with for two reasons: 

1 - It's what makes us recognise personal successes when they happen (and failures and set backs) and this can help us empathise because.....

2 - Desires and fears are what all humans have in common.

So... that became more in depth than it needed to be for this really, BUT... what i'm starting to say it... going to the cinema has the potential to be an act of civil agency/community and cultural engagement and response.

so.. 

The cinema: passive vs. active experience

Highlight a viewer's leisure behaviour (and level of engagement) to themselves 

Screen screens?

The viewer is off the camera but is still in the frame of experience. They are implicated by their knowledge of whatever scenario is occurring within the screen frame... because out the other side of the screen frame are all the cultural scenarios and events of real life that bought about whatever the film is showing... whatever observations the filmmaker, actors, director etc have made; they all came from a common knowledge of a certain set of signifiers and connotations, or events and characters... all of which can only hold their weight for an entire cinema audience by having some semblence of real life; something relatable. Something to empathise with. So the screen is a frame of composite experience that human empathy can take place around. 

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Bananas are ecologically very vulnerable so this links that idea of personal responsibility to engage.

As does the fact that they are historically a very political fruit, famously in Colombia and other parts of South America, but also nowadays all across hotter climates where work regulation are not that fair!

They will get squashed if you sit on the bench.

The bench is not inviting.

You can't really sit down and relax.

So stand up.

Don't rest.

Watch and engage.

Maybe you can eat the bananas and so pull the passivity out from under people / yourself.

Also, I have a problem with the huge divide between contemporary art-market art /gallery art, and/vs. social and political (ecological) art.

The frame of art seems to be a boundary also, where civil responsibility ends. 

And then there's the issue of cultural exploitation for the silver screen;

of communities, practices, people, emotions, events... twisted, revealed, enhances, mis-told, stolen... all for a paying and admiring audience.

And the general exploitation of 'other' cultures for art. I don't know where the line between curious admiration and arrogant exploitation ends... maybe where you acknowledge it or not? Dunno... 

The indigenous practice of animal hides being stretched

A piece of transparent perspexy stuff balances on it. (some pretentious art school material)

A piece of velvet cinema seat fabric falls across it like a red carpet or a bloody ribbon or a ceremonial throw.

Bananas hold it up.

You can see what you're sitting on.

Maybe it's all balancing on the bananas, or maybe it's also having some of it's weight held by bungee cords from above.. who is supporting who now?

Are we supporting people we colonised?

Or are their ideologies supporting our sanity now because our own is a bit savage and wasted?

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Banana split fabric pile, making me drool!

Below.. some details of a fun painting I made on some old cardboard on Sunday night listening to Lorde

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And token Home and Away atmosphere shot, like a massage for my little eyeballs and my soul.

P.s there's a lot LOT more than I ever imagined to know about bananas.. i'm just getting started

p.p.s If I see any more of these things in degree shows and general contemporary art (namely sculpture...) - I will write pleading letters to the person who made and ask them to tell me what it means! Everyone uses these things and I STILL DON'T GET IT!!!

- plaster

- messy concrete in 'organic' forms

- propped up cheap (likely not FSC!) lengths of pine, or cast concrete anything 

- upholstery foam!!!!

- marble or mock marble

- anything pale pink

- especially pale pink styrofoam

- and pale pink things made from latex

- scrunched up paper or drapes of paper 

- plastic shopping bags

- putty

(I guess some of these maybe allude to either industrialisation or wierd eroticism)

Just sayin' - it seems to be this universal visual lexicon going on amongst recent fine art graduates, but in the form of a super secret club where you have to have a password, that I don't have!

It's too far out. I'm not loose enough. Someone please explain.