Drink from this cup?

Miroslaw Balka: How it is

Miroslaw Balka's installation 'How It Is', in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, is only on show until 5th April. Go and see it, preferably on a week day when there are fewer screaming children and touristic types with cameras and glowing mobile phones which ruin the effect of the piece.

The bunker style box which can be entered with a ramp, contains no light source, demanding total trust from the interactive viewer. You have to make a decision as you reach the top of the ramp and approach the threshold of the bunker; whether to proceed into the pitch black, or to turn back. If you do decide to go on, your senses will make you aware of others around you whom you can't see but can hear. As you progress into the darkness, fear may intimidate. Will you go further? How much further is there to go? 

The installation provides an astonishingly accurate metaphor for the experience of living. The darkness ahead isolates almost totally except for the dim impression of others journeying with you. When you turn back, you see more clearly where you have come from. Wow.

 

How it feels sometimes..

Thought Processes

   

  


   Perhaps I can write about the things...

   bit by bit, like meat into an intestinal tube, i’ll spit 
   those things, like growing sausages of meaning with which to learn
   about the heart and its happiness, out. 
   Those things i’ll spit, project from within as i sit 
   on the toilet seat, passing solid packages of thought into 
   the basin, bowl and chain, flushable waste to whoooosh away 
   away, away... 
   gargling, gurgling.. 
   gone, i’ll say 
   be gone!  With haste and heady resignation 
   flow, founder, follow through    
   my mind and out the other side,  these soluble dreams dissolving  
   into solvent pools of long since passed by 
   times, written under my skin  
   as veins recalling intoxication 
   of the blood, bowing under certain pressures 
   until i splosh them out; 
   memories in the washing machine, 
   rinsing  
   sad and sore from those days before  
   spinning the load,  
   spiralling tears sent circling outward 
   to leave me dry, 
   and higher,  
   to leave me,
   sigh-

Living art: every little choice

Here's part of my hypothesis - creativity in relation to living. Every choice is a creative pathway. Life is art. Or, life as art.

Each turn we make both selects and invites further choice. We therefore create our individual living experience, regardless of whether we are party to a conscious thinking process or swept along by a current.

Self maintaining living art. The image of a life. 

Thought for the day at Tate Modern

Shame on me for not bringing my sketch book. What limitations i have unwittingly placed upon myself. A reduced opportunity for self reflection, all i can do is to say 'the pigeon fluffed up his feathers and now has flown away.'

In your own skin

Here is something from a collection of body pieces i am working on entitled ‘More than myself; these animals in me.’ The pieces, which are all made using different animal parts, are inspired by ideas of transformation and masquerade, involving a childlike discovery of the animal within. The pieces lend themselves toward movement, dance and play, and can be seen purely as suggestive, precious objects glorifying the beasts they represent, or as an intimate performance in the mind of the audience or on the body of the wearer.

Alongside the skin corset, there is a shark jaw headdress, a fox face headpiece, crows claws, and a crows wing harness. The leather skin corset, which is worn on the back and tied around the front using leather thongs, highlights the sexual play within the collection, questioning what the wearer will become when they wear their own skin overtly...

 

This project is about the attraction of an object which sparks the imagination and provokes personal discoveries.

Focus in...

...on where you are heading.

A creature's home

Some kind of tree prison? I came across this in a clearing behind warren pond in epping forest, and felt strangely as though i was trespassing on some other creature's layer.. there were all sorts of signs of living...

I wonder who lives here... i would like to observe them from a safe place, and listen in to their discourse. I wonder if they are dangerous... i wonder what they eat!

Self Series

This is a project i am currently working on, a narrative delving into experiences of living to facilitate a sense of self. Nothing new, something we all do every day, live. It is a piece of live art because it came to be and continues to progress through the simple process of living. It is both an organic and a self conscious or self reflective process.  I am creating a 'book' to go alongside a series of images and films, which all pay homage to a series of happenings that took place at a significant moment in my life. A momentous occassion you might say...

At the time everything felt imbued with meaning, there was much to feel, much to learn and much to contemplate. Emotions were heightened, thought processes magnified, and i was acutely aware of myself. This much hasn't changed but time has plodded on, distanced, re evaluated and added new filters for interpretation. Through the book i am creating, i choose to share a series of images in the form of photographs, ink drawings, words, emails - evidence of a previous time which is now open to review, and a record of absurdly unimportant details which without some kind of glorification, would otherwise fade into nothing but dim recollections. The life of an artist, perhaps..  

Photo me: Jim Golberg

This guy is AMAZING. He sums up everything i said in my previous post. First he lets you see a world through your own eyes, let's say a stranger in their home, and then he shows you that world through that stranger's eyes, and their perspective, whether familiar or not, suddenly becomes personal to you. His approach is so simple, using intimate stories, anecdotes, reflections, but what he reveals is a picture of someone's life that you can actually 'feel'. I love these stories, little windows into other peoples lives, intimate encounters, nuggets of meaning. They take you out of yourself, they transport you, they open you up to new perspectives.

Fresh like a new lover..

...this blog of mine, all new and spangly! So what's the deal? Nothing much, just thought i'd share some thoughts. I have this sometimes inconvenient habbit of thinking, and an even worse habbit of wanting to communicate that process! Actually i'm lying, i love it, translating what i see through all the filters i've accumulated in my modest amount of living (quarter of a century, give or take a few days), and then imagining it through someone else's eyes, and trying then to see it from no particular perspective at all, if that's even possible. Experiences, encounters, happenings, all these things can be as significant or as neutral as the eyes that observe them choose to define.  

What do you see? What do i see? How does it make either of us feel? 

In this blog i want to both glorify and strip away those filters we use to interpret. I want to hear what other people think. I want to share.