The snow is melting away fast in Norrtälje judging by all the gravel everywhere and it's been playing havok with my mothers rollator which has broken down due to the bumpy terrain loosening the bolts. We're just from fixing it. We were in ByggMax so we had a look at possibilities for supports and found some good hardboard sold in more or less double square format should we have no luck at the church loppis1 on Saturday. I was actually there last week hoping to pop in whilst retrieving groceries but there was an enormous queue to enter with the organisers adopting the 'et ut et i'2 policy of the night club it seemed. We must find time on Saturday however as our canvas shortage is getting serious with only two large squares and a 90 x 60 that I've been saving for a particular composition from the path.
In the above video we return to the spot of the previous message to take the oil study which we managed to do between the rainfall. We continued our dialogue with the singularity and showed it our business but to tell the truth we spent most of the time chatting in the car while it was raining and when we finally got out there we ran out of memory. The work itself went according to plan and represents another little step forward I feel in the sense that we took a view from far greater distance than normal, something that we were forced to do in order to keep the blue bank of trees properly behind the main tree for the colour effect. We read in the Danchev biography that Cezanne preferred to work from approximately an 18 degree vision span meaning the he stands very far from the motif, much further than Van Gogh who paints nose to nose. The latter is how we have always done it but taking a step back not only allows for a natural simplification but also offers quite different angles and perspectives. It's like we have been shooting with a 24mm lens and have just discovered the telephoto.
Getting back on the video saddle has caused us to again face the fact of our lonely individualism once more and ask whether our rationale of breakage3 is a product of circumstances or just an 'orderly management of decline'4 or is it, as we peg our hopes, a timely introspection? Of course in general terms a follower of the critical arts will say that this type individualistic monologing that we have begun cannot be taken seriously but we say that its much worse than that. This is capitulation, the collapsing of the tent, the sinking of the boat, the rock at the bottom, the state of wretchedness we discussed last season, a psychological version of our rationale of breakage where all mental cladding around our 'art' is stripped back. To those that say that this is an unnecessarily negative position well I would ask whether theirs is falsely positive? Of course they will say also that we provide the most tiresome, self absorbed monologues one could imagine being uttered never mind shared publicly and to all that I say yes its true, but take a look around. TAKE A FUCKING LOOK AROUND! TAFLA! Glance at you tube, at instagram, see how people avail themselves to the great collective of warts and nuns5 like an old friend, letting it all hang out in filter bubble6 safety until at last the appeal; "don't forget to subscribe". But look here, we are not some kind of lamenting middle aged bugger (old Faircloth7 saw that in us and set us straight with a line and an night of grand theft auto) and it is not our intention to mock or look down upon 'the way things are now' - the new culture and its dissemination, despite our relative horror at some of the fair our children absorb on the you tube video service, but rather we want to recognise how this type of individual forth holding exists, is commonplace and runs through all subjects and activities like a new cultural architecture or some such.
Not new really, it's been building and evolving for years but it is now, especially post pandemic, entirely ubiquitous, data curated, bound ever closer to the logic of money and resulting in a precariousness unimaginable even a few years ago. That's why there is often a sense of desperation in the activities and the voice of the jobbing vlogger as they make slime and curry favour, but our position is not to look down at this changed and may I say very unchic, very un 'contemporary critical art' way of addressing publicly, rather it is to take it up with both hands and weave our Doing into it. To use the platform but to be aware of its conventions and framing and to edge in the direction of playful but critical, appropriation. And is there not a lack of the latter? Every radical conference and seminar one can imagine is helpfully available on the you tube video service, and 'radical contemporary art' is there too but only in the promotional videos of institutions. What we cannot find much of is actual critical art using the platform, appropriating the platform and the culture formed from it (although Miranda Sings is splendid). In all likelihood we have not looked hard enough, or the Borg has refused to show us, either way to come where we have come from (the world of the dark matter critical artist) then to behave like we do in taking up the brush, the Van Gogh gauntlet and then exposing ourselves in the fashion of the 'you tuber', well it is really not a goer. At the very least it will be fraught and possibly not taken at all seriously even for a split second. So why do we insist on the correlation? One is like this, the other is like that, so what? Well the correlation and evolution from one thing (University bred radical, anti capitalist artist/researcher) to the other (solitary, sheltered, hidden, plein air painter) is very important at least to us but let's not go over it again. It's all been said in the Torpoint Art Service, the first two DS seasons and in the Wretched Painter series so instead we shall go forth using the tools available to us and say what we have to say and leave it at that. We must remember that through the games of framing it is the material Doing that remains long after our ideas and postulations are tomorrows chip paper.
1 A large second hand shop open only on the sabbath.
2 One out one in.
3 John's name for his own artistic rejection of contemporaneity and the embrace of plein air painting in the Torpoint Art Service project. See TAS Work 8 View of Devonport, paragraph 3.
4 A phrase associated with British politician Margret Thatcher.
5 Appears to be word play on 'noughts and ones'. Refers to binary code. The great collective of warts and nuns refers broadly to the internet.
6 Describes an intellectual isolation arising from an individual absorbing tailored information selected by an algorithm.
7 See Dignity Scholarship Season 1 Work 14 note 3.