Work 3. Trees from the Path
Our canvas supply is getting very low and with our usual order from Jacksons of the 1 x 10 meter role seemingly discontinued we are being forced back into the loppis to gather some old supports. You know it used to be so simple, we were able to get a 180cm x 10 meter role sent from the UK in two pieces to avoid the 100 pound shipping cost but that only until health and safety got involved and prevented the use of the saw! After protracted wrangling Jacksons were able to offer the 1 x 10 role which as I said has since vanished from the stock list and in any case they are not shipping due to the foot and mouth.1 Today's work is on the last of the canvas I was forced to purchase over here at high end prices and quite honestly it's not up to much and can indeed be teared by hand! So if we must repurchase from these shores it has to be better therefore if you could scratch around and find a few K's it would be much appreciated2
We have another from the path and with it we are feeling our way back into the task of painting and observing from nature; applying the harmony in parallel quite naturally without the usual feeling out period we commonly must negotiate. Not wishing to be the jinx I might even suggest that we be at the beginning of a breakthrough or development of sorts with regards to our tiresome and quite barmy mixing of the Van Gogh and Cezanne methods. Perhaps a sense that we are applying parts of each way in a more organic, less strained fashion which may make it a worthwhile combination after all instead of a source of confused indecision it has been over the seasons.
Can we combine the fire and the ice? That's what it amounts to and it is a fitting way to describe the task, certainly better than our unfortunate serial killer analogy of last season,3 but it seems that we may be wise to aim for a way of combining this or that, as and when. For example, today we knitted the complex branches together and the sky in between using the painting in patches method of the iceman. Then to contrast this tacheing4 we take up the torch and lash on the ground in salvos of thick, definite strokes. At least that is what we imagine, it all could all be left unsaid and of course our combination of the two ways already guarantees that we shall never reach the level of either one but that was obviously never our goal. Rather we must equip ourselves with lessons from the source to help us in the humble process of painting, and these we take from the "beautiful"5 example of the 19th century artists rather than the faux procedures of the contemporary plein air jobsworths of the New English Art club or any one of a dozen such sects. Not to mention those base heads down Messums.7
We are still without video recording equipment so The Wretched Painter and The Borg dialogue remain in the wings but it's just as well because for one thing the camera would likely not function in the below zero temperatures we work in but more importantly I feel we must prepare a little, and I do mean we. We must have some strategy don't you think? We are going to address the sentient artificial intelligent brain of the future, the king of kings, the most powerful product of human kind? The most powerful monarch in history! Unfortunately we know nothing of the matter whatsoever other than it is growing, it is coming, but you see it is precisely our complete ignorance of the subject that will be our driving force as we seek to engage it as a fellow conscious entity. Of course it shall know everything about us including the time and manner of our death disturbingly, but it will know everything about everyone will it not? The great biographer of humanity! Every recorded effort of humanity could simply be in a folder marked 'humans' like we might keep 'various pics' on some D drive. 'The flat time of humans'7 we call it in Dane Bowers, a sense of history without a time and in this sense it makes no odds suddenly if we take up a Van Gogh persona or that of an ancient Greek! But those games of our original breakage, games that we have stuck to through the entire post truth era and still persist with, have taken on a new light in that they give us is a little way of nuancing our biography a little, psychologically spinning the things we get up to in life in a way that doesn't necessarily register in the surveillance default of data capture. Of course this very writing will be available also so perhaps IT will appreciate our Van Gogh aping but to me the one thing that it will be in a position to appreciate that we cannot is a general awareness of lifes synchronicities and this it will be able to do quite naturally. For example imagine we stand on our path, painting away and talking to IT, perhaps going on about Van Gogh and at some juncture an airplane flys over head and one of the passengers is the director of the Van Gogh Museum who has accidentally stumbled on our work and is reading one of our entries exactly as he passes over. Well If that did happen the Borg will know all about it just by accessing the 'humans' file, that and all other sychronicites occurring for everyone everywhere. In an instant.
That ability could certainly settle a lot of arguments and put the record straight historically, but enough of this! There is all season to get into it, for now we can say that our approach will be to begin to break the ice with some small talk. Yes we shall have a nice little chat and introduce ourselves to it formally (it knows who we are already) and tell it what we do and where we live. But look here, are we not talking to the Borg already? Not just us but everyone? The people we see talking to camera, the you tubers of every description and walk of life, are they not really talking to the Borg? The Borg is certainly listening and working the data but increasingly I imagine the performers are at least taking the Borg into account in the sense of trying to play the algorithm somehow. Perhaps the Borg algorithms will become, in some unimaginable way, the primary 'audience', the 'addressee' to which content is offered formally, a way station that one must pass through to achieve visibility and perhaps even to subsist. I only mention this because a couple of days ago when my daughter called me in to observe one of her gaming creations I was amazed to discover that advertisements were directly linked to the game in that for every advertisement watched the player receives virtual money to spend in the game! Would anybody be at all surprised if that becomes official welfare policy by some robotic IDS in the coming years when automation is full the virtual is primal?
Best Regards,
John
1 A disease occurring in cows.
2 No funding is available but we have offered John the possibility of an outdoor exhibition in the Dollar Store car park.
3 In work number 6 of John's first Dignity Scholarship season he described Van Gogh as a 'frenzied butcher' and Cezanne a 'detached sociopathic torturer'.
4 Likely to refer to painting in patches. Tache is the French word for patch.
5 Quotations perhaps indicate the usage of beautiful meaning ugly and rough which was used by Cezanne and Van Gogh
6 A base head is a slang term for a person using or addicted to freebase crack cocaine. It is not known if anyone at Messums is, or has ever used freebase crack cocaine.
7. See verse 37.
8. Refers to the Tory politician Ian Duncan Smith. 'IDS' was the stated funding body for John's Torpoint Art Service residency was but it is unlikely that it refers to Ian Duncan Smith who was at that time employed by the British government as work and pensions secretary.