LEGENDARY HAPPINESS

LIFE—PART III

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I wrote this a long while back, and there were some pictures BUT I DONT’T KNOW WHERE THEY ARE. The following might be boring, but who reads this shit anyway?

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Today I just got back from seeing the Gerhard Richter exhibition at that Tate place. There’s so much good stuff on at the moment—well, I say that but I’ve only been to Grayson Perry and this in the last few months, so what do I know?

You get the impression from the show, and also from the excellent video at the end of it, that Richter has spent his whole career exploring aesthetic and artistic choices that interest him. Shall I paint it this way or this way? Well, let’s just try it and see how it comes out. He doesn’t seem precious about the work that he creates. That’s not to say that he just churns it out without a thought given to how it’s executed, but that he’s not afraid to try things and add to his repertoire. So many of the works are responses, both personal and professional—sometimes to experiences, news events or other pieces of work; others seem like tests. But the whole show makes this wonderful fabric of experimentation and optimism, which is weird, given the sometimes quite morbid subject matter. And some of the experiments are less successful than others, but that’s all part of it.  

There were two huge highlights for me in this show, which weirdly weren’t paintings but were things that solidified thoughts I’ve been having lately, I mean, I’m vain and these two things made me feel like a genius, ok?

Firstly, there a painting of him and this old man. It’s probably the least exciting painting in the entire show, to look at at least. The caption tells us that this bloke is Benjamin Buchloh, a pretty famous art historian apparently, who has been writing about Richter’s work since the 70s. So far, so unremarkable. But then in the film there’s a scene in which Serota is taking Richter for a final pass of the show before it opens, and he pauses in front of this particular painting and says ‘ah, my teacher’. That was a lovely moment. Buchloh has been contextualising Richter’s work for him for the past 40 years, giving it meaning, teaching Richter what it means and where it stands in the larger whole. Amazing. This just frees him up to explore and experiment even more, and have someone help him frame it, give it meaning. Teamwork. I really wonder how influential Buchloh has been on shaping Richter’s work. It’s great to have those relationships, those sounding boards for open ended work.      

The other thing he said in this video was that he’s interested in painting because it shows what isn’t there. It takes a space or object or whatever, and forces you to look at it. It reframes, recontextualises, then there you are, looking and noticing in a way that you never looked at this thing before. It’s like a big magnifying glass or amplifier, and as a result you ask yourself what is interesting about this thing, and you start filling in the blanks, noticing what isn’t there. That was nice. Man, there was so MUCH nice stuff in this exhibition that I might have to try to write up some DAMN NOTES or something or whatever yeah? LATOR.  

LIFE—PART II

Gordon and I went down to Winchester to kick off a little zine project that the first years are undertaking just before Christmas. It was good to be forced to explain what it is that we do with Zineswap, and make it somehow coherent. I think it made us both realise that we should and could do more with Zineswap if we took our fingers out of our arses. Faced with doing that short presentation made us think carefully about the last 3 years of Zineswap, what we are doing and where we are going with it. It was a positive thing to have that brief period of reflection (even if we end up doing nothing about it).

Aside from that, the main great thing was to be around people that were thinking through making: trial and error; it doesn’t matter if you get it right or not, you’re just feeling your way through, and eventually you’ll get around to crystallising your thoughts later down the line. It’d be great to apply this process to the real working world somehow. That’s what this B-LOG is for I guess—just chatting rubbish, chucking enough shit at the wall and seeing how much of it sticks. My new motto for this blog is ‘no-one fucking reads it anyway’, sorry.

But then we went back to Winchester last week to chat to the students about their creations (and stay at St Margarets B&B). It’s always very difficult to give feedback about these types of things. We can in no way claim to be an authority on zines, but there we were, happily employed by the university to provide constructive criticism to expectant students on their publications. We took a design angle (both coming from design backgrounds)—did the ideas extracted from the previously completed research projects come trough in the choice of words and images, and the way they worked together? Were the production methods appropriate to communicate these points in the desired tone? Basically, had they made informed choices, and how were they informing their choices?

Everything they had done was so well finished, it was extremely impressive that everything looked so professional. But the flip side of that was that any evidence of this ‘thinking through making’ had been erased, there wasn’t much evidence of the process of making these informed choices. There was no evidence of exploration a lot of the time. We’d been out of the university for 2.5 weeks, and they’d been having tutorials along the way, so that’s when I guess they discuss these choices with the other tutors, but it does make it extremely hard to provide useful feedback. Just made me think that sometimes, in order to appreciate something, or to evaluate something, you need to know a bit of the journey. And in order to end with something successful, you hav to have been on that journey in the work. Nothing ever turns out right first time.

After that we went and got shitfaced and played question of sport. Sally Gunnel.

LIFE—PART I

This began as one looooong post, that I never really finished writing, so I’m splitting it up into a few, all headed ‘LIFE’. Yeah man, we’re on a totallife vibe.

Paul Rand (or was it Bruno Munari?) reckoned that you couldn’t possibly separate your personal life from work. As frustrating as Randari is, I gotta agree with him, I mean it’s all experience, right? The last few weeks have been this weird collage of many things half-happening that are gradually seeping into my mainframe brain. 

Work

Work is one of those things that can be pretty boring to read about, mainly because people can get so pathetic and self-pitying about it. It’s also not the most comfortable thing to write about either for the very same reason — but I’m going to try anyway. I reckon it’s probably good to get a bit Adrian Mole every now and again, plus no fucker reads this anyway, so who gives a shit?

Anyway, ages ago, when my eyebrows weren’t so bushy (May) I started a new job. A few weeks ago one of the many things I have been working on came out. It’s a book about this chap. He’s mental. Absolutely. But in that way that enables so many completely unrelated things to come together to create ground-breaking ideas. He’s full of killer insight and the worst kind of jokes imaginable — but they work together in amazing ways. Read it. 

We ended up with a one-word brief — Schizophrenic. Then we had about 2 months to pull all the content together (including interviewing the brainbox himself) and to design the thing. Actually I think the time limit really worked to our favour, it gave us a panicked energy which I think comes through in the book. Super-mega happy with the final result. Big thanks to Gordo for doing about 100 illustrations in a week. They’re great.

Hanging out

One’s cleaning the window, the other’s cleaning the wall. Let it be said that they are both equally vigorous, as you can see. Not sure why they’ve left the light of the van on. This got me thinking. Surely, in this day and age of internettism, there must be an easier way to clean the windows? George occasionally asks why he has to bother himself with cutting his nails—in this day and age! Surely, there must be an easier way.

We have these.

We even have these. I don’t know what they are. Mini volcanoes? So why are we still pissing about with poles?

Stamp

Gordon made me a stamping stamp.

Restart

So, it’s been a while. No real reason, just been lazy I guess. Or busy. Or business is an excuse for laziness. Actually, I made an almost conscious effort to be more lazy this year, to try to allow time for things (things being just the everyday shit-storm of information) to filter through my interminably slow mind.

It could also be all those burgers. 

Anyway, step aside conscious effort, say hello to a stream of half-baked bollocks—no longer am I going to try to write ‘well’ or sound ‘clever’, from now on, you get what you get.

Timing is something

It’s late and it’s early, and probably all those things in between. At the current location it’s 4 hours later than where we left 9 hours ago, and at our final destination it’s currently the same time as it was when we first boarded the plane. We’re somewhere in a time warp, somewhere with an LCD TV showing Arabian football, somewhere with a palm tree and two crossed-swords for a national emblem. The past doesn’t exist yet, or something.

In the pub once (or maybe in a book), someone pondered as to how people could have the audacity to predict that the world will end ‘tomorrow’ when it’s already ‘tomorrow’ on the other side of the earth. Well, we’ve just been to the other side of the earth – what are you going to tell those guys? Does the world end there first, and the apocalypse gradually spread over the rest of the planet, paying close attention to the designated time-zones? Nah, didn’t think so. Anyway, apparently the apocalypse is an entirely western concept, so perhaps it just misses out those guys that can’t be bothered with it.

It’s not just all this time and this ‘earth’ stuff that divides us up either. Even those divine beings that are meant to transcend all that mortal nonsense have trouble joining up the dots. We went down to the temple to pay Buddha a visit. It turns out we don’t speak the same language.