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.

The complexities of land use

Food painting / sugar mountains / cocoa trees and tea harvesters / too many paper coffee cups / too many coffee shops and nobody cares why

all our demands are met so far away

The world's priorities are etched onto the borders of the Amazon with geometric precision

The line divides the world's most productive soya field from the world's greatest carbon sink

keepsake vines and forest shrines

what should have stayed intact and raw is now adorned with decorations, pictures of home to make us feel satisfied and fresh. We fantasise about dense jungles and fruitful foliage and print patterns of it onto the Primark cotton, actually we make people in the places where those patterns originate form print it, and sew it. We cover forest products with pictures of other forest products.

Shrine to the past forest 

Conjured representations of what we wished was still here line the way, Majestic trees.

Mountains of what we've cultivated lie at the bottom of it all.

Postcards of local and indigenous communities and what the colonisers and conquistadors made them do. POSTCARDS!?!? it's not a holiday!

Soil erosion (land degradation) occurs from floods and melts (ice cubes in Starbucks coffee cups made from forest pulp)

A projection of a forest walk plays on the shrine, catching the layers and vines that obstruct its beam:

the layers of social and cultural and natural history within that forest.

Here, now, we can ponder on the choice we still have; we can feel the peace of the forest and prevent it form disappearing forever, or we can let it diminish and all we'll have left are 'monuments' to it's impermanence (our streets littered with pulp and paper packaging and endless cups of coffee - ephemera. Monuments are meant to be permanent. These aren't. But the effect of their realm is; the realm of consumerism).

The fleetingness of first world excess vs. the longevity of impact from destroying a forest.

Keepsake vines.

Are you gonna cry into that or cover your face from pollution with it?

funeral pyre? the great farewell, a religious rite? or a slashing and burning?

life raft? or timber transport?

monument? 

layers of fields of produce for us?

a pile of waste?

The usual culprit is here representing the usual crime

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Just a selection of the food imports of Rye Lane, Peckham

Postcard imperfect

Above are scans of some of the postcards i've been buying from ebay. 

All of them show a scene linked to deforestation and land clearance.

(clockwise from top left)

1 - Coffee sacks being loaded onto a cargo ship in Brazil

2 - Felled trees for timber in Arizona

3 - A log jam caused by low water levels in the dam in 'Sawdust City' (Eau Claire), Wisconsin. The trees were felled upstream and floated down via a manmade flume that was caused by water pressure and gravity from the dam.]

4 - Water Street Bridge, 'Sawdust City' - the main bridge road that improved exportation of commercial products

Postcards are a way of inserting oneself into a narrative, in one of two ways:
1 - as the person who writes the postcard, you are the one 'away'; who is exerting some sort of ownership of an experience space by telling others about it.
2 - as receiver, who hears of that related experience and can imagine it form afar.
Either way; you are both in a situation that tells of a removal from the evryday and normal happenings. You are tapping into a demand for what is not yours: this in some sense is an exploitation of another place or culture (that doesn't mean bad exploitation by the way):
The postcard can be a vehicle for expressing a want for something that is not yours; it is a demand.

Demand in the commercial and manufacturing world often leads to exploitation, of either people, animals of land.

(I've thought about postcards often before, and what they signify; the photographing of their subject, the writing of them, and the receiving of them. This is an old post I made about postcards: http://battle-sponge.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/postcard-perfect.html

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And below are all the main products in my studio that are produced abroad in areas that are heavily deforested to do so.... :(

DEFORESTATION

Storyboarding for a low-fi film/immersive filmic installation i'm making

Hinting at the fact that the ground you own, and ground you work on, the ground you walk across, has an impact on something bigger than you; on an elsewhere and other people.

I'm working on developing my past project I Wander Weather (which is a filmic installation and event that looks at walking as a way to experience both the physicality and the social histories of the natural world).

My development is turning the basic installation structure and some of the ideas about physical experience being linked to immensity of experience, into a project specifically about deforestation.

The aspects of deforestation that I am focusing on (the implications of it, and social difficulties associated with it) are:

Food security

Food sovereignty

Globalisation

Other effects on local and indigenous communities (slave labour, cultural exploitation etc)

Habitat degradation (due to erosion etc)

I am looking at how consumer demand in developed countries fuels deforestation.

This is because that's the only direct experience surrounding deforestation that I have known. I have obviously seen land clearance and deforestation in places near my home, and this is currently about to happen exactly outside my house, due to human demand for burial sites on local wilderness land. I have been to a meeting of the group that is campaigning to save the local wilderness and have it classed as a nature reserve.

I am particularly interested in effects on indigenous and local communities. I can however only speak for my very local, very low scale versions of that: because I live in a city in a developed country where none of us have to rely on the local forest areas to supply us with food or jobs. So the message wouldn't sink so deep for an audience that lives beyond my postcode area - and even then we'd only be worried about the local wilderness as a space for tranquility and preservation of habitat for a few butterflies and insects etc. I obviously find that totally important, but I don't think the importance translates to the masses. 

I also cannot attempt to make any specific comments on effects on, or exploitation of local communities in deforestation areas such as Brazil, Peru, Equitorial Guinea, India, Kenya or Bulgaria. To do so would be exploitation in itself because I know nothing about it, other than what i've read. I can't claim to be a voice for such communities.

Nor can I say much about local communities' impact on deforestation (such as subsistence agriculture, slash & burn farming, bushmeat hunting) - many of which I am aware are in motion because of demands from developed countries.

e.g Petrol industry has attracted many locals to urban areas of Equitorial Guinea leaving remote agriculture with a minimal workforce.

SO - i've decided I'll draw attention to the demands of people like me that affect those communities and those forests: by making a point of the large amount of everyday products that we consume that demand deforestation and forest degradation.

The video above shows how Brazilian authorities are trying to, and succeeding in, halting deforestation.

And above is a great documentary about the Amazon, that we may not be aware of

And this video is just great

And above is a beautiful and sad song by Aussie musician Tully about the wrong choices humanity is making for the environment.

Why I like certain sculptural elements and why I like fabric.

Still trying to work out the reasons for choosing certain materials and sculptural elements. 'The art world' isn't really my audience, but I guess sometime you gotta try to justify your work within an aesthetic OR/and theoretical framework to make it sit nicely with arty people, in the hope of getting some more exposure... so for my evil plot of bringing seriously ecologically concerned but very accessible and attractive art to the masses, and for ecological art to be taken seriously as a communication method for environmental concerns and climate action info.... I must cover my back in all situations!

I wanna make pragmatically beautiful instances of communication about our species' position in the natural world.

So I think there are probably three main reasons to choose certain sculptural or visual configurations, elements of materials.

1. aesthetics

2. message and connotations

3. materiality (largely this is because the artist themself is interested in the material, and enjoy working with it

I pick, in this order: 2, then 1, then 3.

And the shapes, arrangements, and elements I like are:

- thresholds,

- arches,

- pits,

- caves,

- tents and dens

- canopies and rooves

- sheltering structures of any sort

- drapery and swags of fabric

- and any arrangements that create or indicate a space for either flow/movement or remaining decidedly stationary/reflective/beings slow

- any arrangements that let you choose a path through a space, and sit down, lie down, jump, climb etc.

- stuff salvaged from skips that  is big or intact enough to offer obvious re-use potential (card, wood, glass, bricks, fabric)

With all the above things, I want to learn to create narratives (pre-ordained or open-ended - but probs the former) with the help of

- absence

- space 

- gaps 

- presences

- ephemera

I don't much like Phyllida Barlow's attitude to her role as an artist, but I do like what she's said about why she likes making such large sculptures with hefty and hard to work with materials, about the fact that preliminary drawing are pretty useless and it's actually the making of the work that needs doing:

'Thinking and doing become synchronized. Time becomes a material"

She also said that the installing of her work is "a highly performative act". - This could be useful if I ever decide to communicate to an audience about waste and excess and our responsibility.

But one thing that Phyllida Barlow said that I think it bloody annoying is this:

"concern for the audience... attracting and audience... is something I find repellent"

Well then why did she ever say yes to her exhibitions in galleries? What a waste of an important public feedback platform, and an unbridled activism/demonstration/discussion opportunity.

I think her outlook is so disconnected from the concerns of real human life. And certainly now, we don't have the time or money (socially, economically or environmentally) to waste such massive exposure opportunities. If an artist is annoyed about audiences seeing their stuff, then I can't see how they can oppose the UK Government spending cuts in the arts.
I helped the Mexican artist Pedro Reyes on a project two years ago, and he said he liked his role as an exhibiting artist for it's opportunities to experiment with human behaviour and understanding. The exhibition space is the only place in the world where you can get away with just about anything that you couldn't get away with, or find the audience for, in everyday life. You have the chance to operate situations and suggest ideas for real life.

Anyway - there we are. More thinking about space, materials and audience.

Onion skin dyed found fabric, batik lettering

The availability of the fabric here has dictated the shape and size of the piece. I've sewn bit together to create a canvas. It echoes an animal hide shape, and with the dye, the beeswax batik method and the sort of scratchy caveman-ish type, this sits in my imagination like a native American Indian entity.

Work in progress

Shrivelled banana

Flow 

Black bean screen

sketches

Above are some sketches for a sculptural thing i'm thinking up. It comes from a mix of tipi designs, banana leaves, insect anatomy and the practice of American Indian of gutting their dead ponies in winter, and carrying the hollow carcus on sticks on their shoulders across the wilderness, but with the tribe's kids inside the dead pony to keep them warm.

My favourite location in Home and Away - the bridge behind the Braxton's and John Palmer's houses.