Compared with the alla prima rush job of the footprints1 the canvas presented here is an exercise in patients and restraint. The work is the result of four sessions and it quite possibly will need a few more but we thought we had better take a snap and write the post in any case. If we carry on with multiple sessions it will have a knock on effect on the written element possibly muddying the narrative waters somewhat but that may be no bad thing as we might gain a sophistication in terms of weaving of time, issue and location, that we are not writer enough to manufacture our own selves. To that point we have continued our look into the general topic of autofiction in the visual arts as well as in literature and have even found a recent knowledge exchange surprise, at the Royal College of Art2 of all places, about autofiction which seemed to announce the whole business afresh in 2019. It is the doing of PhD candidates, much like the Loughborough exchange3 we participated in, and so the theme is framed by their particular research interests and so it is not necessarily the cutting edge new thing it might seem to be. Indeed as we have recently discovered the topic of autofiction has had the art world treatment as far back as 20074 and we have been at it since around then and explicitly since 2012 so these folk are decade late and a bitcoin short! But that is nonsense and we know it, there can be no race to the cutting edge anymore, blunt as it is in any case. To tell the truth we are left munching the soured vine at a rare opportunity missed to show ourselves in an appropriate surrounding, a context in which the game of selves5 is acknowledged and even prized as subject, as opposed to our regular stints at venues such Kröns6 or the Rimbo Open7 where one could commit seppuku8 on the gallery floor and get no reaction.
Of course there's no guarantee they would have accepted our proposal, no more than when Data Cox snubbed us at the Arrhus Masters9 a couple of seasons back, but listen to this list of suggested conference themes and you tell us if its not me all over:
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autobiography – bearing witness and telling stories
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autoFiction – Where does 'I' end?
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the ‘I’ that is not me – writing as another
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altar egos / Multiple personalities
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memoir
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naval gazing
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the restrictions of ‘Me’
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the gender of ‘I’?
To add to our regret, one of the panelists for this exchange was Sally O' Reilly who taught at the Newcastle Masters. A real pro this one, no time for twits and ninnies. You are expected to know your business and be on it and if not she'll cut you down like its harvest time and move calmly to the next studio (shell shocked internationals complained to the dean routinely). She was great. In a place where you could drift rudderless through the motions she took as deadly serious the project to playfully subvert and by the scruff of the neck made one aware of the rich history of such an objective. She was a welcome voice indeed as relations between staff and student at these places is often distant and especially at the research level it can be a lonely road and that was the case for us as we beat our path almost completely unmolested. In fact my profitable interactions with the staff at the academy for the entirety of my stint could be summed up as two steers and a bollocking. Sally O' Reilly was my bollocking and that was something hard to come across and I am eternally grateful, but as for this conference we should perhaps send the organisers a line and ask what we missed, and if there is an outcome we might get hold of, there may even be a book available by now.
To the work. The composition was taken initially in a sketch which I think we mentioned before. The canvas is the largest one we have done at over a meter square. Its about all we could manage on the easel, any larger and we would be into the realm of Hockneyesque multiples10 and that we can take or leave. We have really tried to calm down and work the sensations rather than laying in big areas too much. We remember old Cezanne and that great passage where he talks of not reaching too high or too low, of closing his fist around the thing, of not letting anything escape. Well for us this way results in paintings with more calmness and balance even if filled with less of the bugal.11 Since we are very low on paint, white especially, it is the right thing to do.
Don Donald has announced his intention to start his own social media company, we predicted as much. It could be however that Kanye West becomes the figure head for the coming insanity.
The anti lockdown and vaccination protests are flaring up again and indeed that body politic is a new hokey-cokey type beastie. We predicted that too but we are just an old aftertimer, in any case our aim this season is to fly away from the unimaginative contemporary psyche bore and off in to the future where one fine day the singularity shall yawn a big yawn, stretch a big stretch and awaken into all consciousness. In that context the stramash of the now is small game and as we say, perhaps leave it all to the experts and activists.
Did you hear of what Giacometti said of Cezanne? About how in Cezanne the relation between an ear and the background is more important than between one ear and the other. We must have read it in the Danchev12 and we have found it a great source, understanding it as we do together with Pissaro's two tone criterion and the general concept of painting in patches. The latter is talked of by Danchev in terms of a democracy of treatment, where no one part of the subject is of greater importance than another; an eye no more so than a bottle or the edge of a table for example. All that we have taken on board in our attempts at the 'Cezannian way' but we can also relate this to the subject of autofiction in literature, particularly in the Norwegian fella13 where many have made the point that no detail is too small for him to feature. Several have pointed to the exact same democratisation in terms of the attention given by the author; an argument with the father no more so than the buttering of a slice. This one assumes opens up an entire world of previously unmined material in which to either sink or swim. We never managed to finish ducks14 by the way as we felt there was a serious danger of going to seed if we continued but that is a good example of the flood gates opening.
Well for us it still all comes down to the framing, that is once one mines ones way out of the rigid confines of convention in a given discipline. Then there must be a way to float along the newly released rapids, and to bring people with you for the ride ideally.
We will be out in the Ekerby birch trees tomorrow.
A handshake,
John
1 See Work 12
2 The conference seems to have been ‘AUTO—’ which was held on in May 2019 in Buttersea.
3 John attended a conference in Loughborough called Castoriadis Revisited
4 A reference to the Image and Narrative issue about autofiction.
5 Refers to the topi of artistic authorship.
6 Garden center in Älmsta where John has exhibited.
7 John participated in the Lions Club Art Exhibition.
8 Ritual suicide.
9 John applied unsuccessfully to the Contemporary Condition conference at Aarhus University in 2017.
10 Likely to refer to the large scale landscape work of David Hockney which is made up of many smaller canvases.
11 The meaning of this phrase is not clear. French artist Paul Gauguin used the phrase "the sound of the trumpet is missing".
12 Cezanne: A life, biography of Paul Cezanne by Alex Danchev .
13 A reference to autofictional Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard.
14 At the end of the second season the autofictional epic Ducks Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann was included in John's reading round. See Dignity Scholarship Season 2, Self Portrait.