Well that is it! The show is over once more. Our open has been turned to closed, our little sign on the road carried in, our lights off, our curtain down, our pictures tucked back into their proper place in storage upstairs. Not a single viewer today to add to the tally of not a single viewer yesterday and this despite our increased best efforts to advertise all last week. Needless to say we have no sales. We must now concede that we have once again fallen prey to the commercial motive, leading us astray, up the steep garden path to the lofty platform of hope off of which we have just fallen. The task now is to pick our wretched selves back up and carry on. In this self pitying mood is it any surprise we looked in the mirror?
We stuck ourself up in a heady 45 minutes on a yellow green background, our head framed by hair white, the face daubed on in thick splodge. It rather looks as if our head is on backwards which for a dozen reasons I thought was an appropriate idea so it has been left. Say what you will of the gazed navel but I still find the self portrait process to be cathartic and somewhat mood changing and having just laid the brush down we feel grateful to be back in the wretched state of hopelessness which, we have just been reminded, is the place to be for the real work; bye bye commercial motive, ta ta town studies, hail fellow well met1 to the punters. See you next year!
It is getting to be just a touch predictable though, our yearly failed exhibitions. We must do more to either recognize that it is not worth it, these low octane barn shows, or try to take it up a notch and actually aim for a genuine public exhibition at some institutional setting. But that too is another steep path, a jungle track, thick with bamboo which must be macheted down with every step and in reality no painting gallery will have us and ditto for the lost ark of the contemporary critical art space. The best hope of those two options would be the latter but only if we were able to succinctly put together a good tell which articulated our position from rationale of breakage back in 2011 to our embracing of the singularity in 2021, the full ten years, but that would require a good deal of time which if we were to take would be at the expense of the painting and so saying at the expense also of our endorphins and as things stand we cannot afford to lose those. In the final analysis perhaps the odd modest public display set on our own terms is the best way to succinctly deal with the inevitable commercial notions that arise as spring turns to summer. We have learnt to accept our wandering between ideas of Cezanne and Van Gogh as ultimately a matter of fluctuating temperament brought on by seasonal change, so why not put the want to exhibit and sell down to the same? Recognize it and accept it knowingly and go through that motion with a link and a waugh2
Forgive the spoonerism. Together with our liking for the sporting analogy the spoonerism is a quiet, pleasure of ours. Indeed the first batch of crypto art text pieces that I have supplied is chock full of spoonerised couplets. Ill be keen to see how your assistants light them up in GIF form so do send me some samples will you. I rather think that a crypto art section of our Dignity Scholarship page really is the best way to bring that whole block chain netherartworld into our Doing and this is particularly apt in light of our little theme. Of course we are not imagining minting anything until palm.io shows its hand and we can asses its merits but having checked recently I saw that we are still met by their ever less convincing landing page, so we wait. In any case it is the context of the nft world as future that we must address and to my mind we can do that from here.
You know the crypto art world continues to increase in size and farce judging by a quick browse of the nft marketplaces but there is no sign yet of 'art' as we know it making much of an impact among the cats, dogs, chimps, AI apocolypse fantasy imagery, Elon Musk references, 8-bit fancies and general bored loser aesthetic. Granted that last one is a contemporary art staple, it's just in the nft world 'bored loser' always seems to be of alt right origin rather than the whimsically intelligent fumistes of contemporary critical art; the dark matter3 art slackers of just a few years past. But we must remember that it is precisely because of this new stewpot of imagery and reference that we feel it to be worthwhile for us to enter the fray especially in light of our most general ambition to merge Doing with the times (social environments actual and possible as the man said)4 and also because the context is experimental and exploratory and even if some of the conceptual maneuvers are old hat to any art creature worth their funding, it is still a live context filled with a bit of energy where quite simply 'things' can be 'said'. So I'll keep filling out my little nft idea book and wazz them over to you and we'll see.
Regards the immediate future of our Doing, we are probably best getting back to some simple nature studies.
High Five,
John
1 We do not know what this means at all.
2 The swapping of the first letters of wink and laugh is known as a spoonerism.
3 Phrase originates from Gregory Shollettes book Dark Matter. John uses the phrase often to describe someone involved in critical creative practice it seems.
4 Refers to George Lewis. See Torpoint Art Service Work 22 Three Crisis, note 10