Forgive the long delay, I actually had the bastard painted a good few days ago but I have been taking my time over the entry as we have arrived I feel at an important juncture in our thinking and in addition I have been trying to remedy the damp issue1. On the latter it turns out that everyone has their own ways and means to keep out the damp and I can tell you that the topic is more far reaching than I had imagined. One fine girl suggested an elaborate system of hoses tacked around the boat at deck level with holes drilled in at 50 cm intervals and this attached to a submersible pump which pumps sea water around the boat keeping the hull permanently moist, as it would be at sea. Well come again I say, does this not sound counter intuitive? But she explained that the damp that we suffered on the Olympic was caused by rain water getting in through the seams which have opened up because the hull has dried out and the planks contracted and keeping the boat moist would prevent this. A fantastic idea which would never had reached my mind otherwise and although she has convinced me that that is the permanent solution I will begin by caulking2 the seams in the conventional fashion next week.

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Now to the present work. It shows again the damp art theory books3 interspersed with fire wood birch log but look here, it is not my wish to suggest that the books be cast on to the fire as peat, rather it is the desire for practical application of knowledge gained I want to hint at. The idea is that in the changed neoliberal context, unveiled in all its authoritarian glory in response to anti austerity social protest in 2011, it is time for all the brilliant analysis, the inventive and inspiring ideas within these sodden volumes to be brought to bear on the practical level as we began to see in Occupy. Of course we can only achieve this ambition in our artistic return to the more practical methods of the 'plein air painter' but the ambition of the painting stretches beyond, into the realm of carved wooden spoons and beyond that.4 And so we have represented the usual selection of critical art and anticapitalist texts plus Kafka, Capitalist Realism, and the "official" art theory book ammended to conclude in 2011 when, I believe one can say objectivly, the world ended. The logs weaved through. We have references aplenty to Van Gogh, we have our project represented in signature which also provides the wider institutional framework that is the key to all our hopes. But what now of our basics? The important juncture I speak of is that we have reached a point in the project where we are beggining to carry out some of our ideas in practice and now I feel it is time to revisit these ideas to put a little more flesh on the bone.

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Of the three key ideas I signed up to tackle I want to say a little about number two: to make a conceptual, theoretical and aesthetic break with the notion of the contemporary. This is not as impossible as it sounds and first and foremost this does not mean to escape from the present which the word contemporary encompasses. No, the aim is more to rip the present away from the "contemporary" framework which surrounds it and by this I very much think it is a psychological framework and one that operates well beyond matters of art and in fact has a profound effect across society. Yes yes the contemporary is a mental state that serves the needs of capitalism, keeps the networks greased, helps create a sense that the physical demands placed upon people by capital that governs our life is just how it is. This is the real danger in the concept, much more so than the inherant corporate nature of the contemporary art system.

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We can say then that we have two definitions of the contemporary, one a big 'C' (relating to capitalist hegemonic society) and the other a little 'c' (relating to contemporary art) if you please. But these overlap a great deal and are part of the same construct and what we have at stake in the psychological construct of the contemporary I feel is the very possibility to think about what the world is, what society is, and how it may be transformed. Or perhaps more accuratly it is this construct that limits/prevents/contains/co-opts/represses this thinking. We can see everyday how the contemporary performs its arachnid smothering of all that is original, revolutionary or threatening. Recall the Galloway blowhard5 when he said "the grimmest dictatorship is the dictatorship of the prevailing orthodoxy." He was talking about the BBC World Service of all things but I feel it is entirely appropriate to to think of the contemporary condition as a dictatorship.

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But what more about it? We can say that this construct is quite new, perhaps trapping us in the way religion used to, but it was not always so. Can we say that the origins of our neoliberal contemporaryness are to be found in the revolutionary revolts of the 1960s? In part yes6. The books in the painting are full of such ideas, and it is an irony to be sure but if the 'contemporary' ever contained any progressive, emancipatory potential it is now gone and it seems to me has instead become a force that now helps create the psychological prison we now inhabit which, by our volunteering ourselves to social networks and the underlying world of algorithms for life therein,7 is almost complete. Indeed it is at a time of great crisis like this that we see the contemporary in action in its ability to just carry on slowly reestablishing its orthodoxy, ironing out any psychological cracks. Yes yes we have seen what a dangerous construct the contemporary has become in its ability to contain the present in stasis at the expense of history and the future. At the expense of any historical perspective with which to give meaning to society and the individuals presence in it and of any possibility to imagine future worlds. And to be sure it is a contradictory nature we must overcome in that the contemporary only moves forward in order to stay the same and trying to jump ahead in the avante garde sense is just like showing it which way to go. Like laying the tracks. Traveling back in time in the way the TAS has makes sense in this light but it is only any good if our political noscream8 is tight in the weave.

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Well we have bitten off quite a chunk and we must also concede that the like of what we speak of has been said before many many times. We can see the like in Debords spectacle and in terms of castoriadis' ideas of the societal 'imaginary', in lefebvre and de Certeau's analysis of the everday and more generally in many and varied bids to escape the stasis of the post modern condition. These are all involved but we need some new ways of saying these things. Our analysis however can only fall short, we must leave it to the likes of old Holmes9 and the gaggle of jobsworths left in the humanities and social science departments to make it out. What we can offer however, humble as it may be, is a practical approach to the present crisis: our rationale of breakage.

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This rationale is our main idea at the end of the day. It is to do with our little 'c', the practical, aesthetic matters and the world of art and of course contemporary art and generally about new ways to do doing. Underpinning this is the desire for our doing to be politically radical in an anticapitalist fashion and so saying we are raising our humble pursuit to the level of a 'strategy' to be presented as repeatable by others in their own ways. Our rationale begins with a desire for breaking away from contemporary art, but why? Firstly because the blatant corporate nature of the whole business is truly beyond the pale and the cosy relationship with high finance which has always lingered but in 2011 this simply cannot be tolerated no longer. No more blind eye! Added to this is the transparent and dismaying farce of not only of the gallery/dealer/curator/bienale/posh idiot system but also the role of contemporaty art in gentrification where it really has become just another leaf in the property developers well thumbed playbook. More basically still, the  sheer conventionality of the procedures involved in the thinking, the doing and the education of contemporary art which, it seems to me, is as tired as Van Gogh's charwoman. Played out, old world, pre crisis.  What, I asked myself, might be the antithisis of the conventional contemporary art method?

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The next and most crucial reason for breaking and starting again was directly political and originates from our third idea as stated in the project introduction about the desire to mark the shift in global political reality we have witnessed due to the financial crisis - austerity politics in contrast to the rampant expansion of neoliberal capitalism of the recent past. This change in the world of capitalism is stark, it is day and night and it is all the more so in the UK where the newly "elected" and bloodthirsty tory government continue to capitalise by ushering in their own ideological revolution. Its party time for conservative governance! What are they like. It is of the upmost importance to mark the shift I fancy because it begins to address the fearsome ability the contemporary has to erase or manipulate collective memory and let us not imagine that this ability is an entirely natural phenomenon either. No no, to be sure those in power are well aware of this feature of contemporainety and rely heavily on it and manipulate it to assert their reality. 

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So the point is not only to say that there has been a change in the story of capitalism and what we are being asked to believe and participate in but also to mark the way that the contemporary played a part in normalising a situation that was in 2011 absolutely charged with revolutionary anger. Manipulation by power normalised by the contemporary. Sosaying, we have our reasons for breaking away conceptually, aesthetically and psycologically but how to do it? First thing is that our break needs to be more than simply deciding to do something radically different or reaching into the past and reviving some traditional methods or other in contrast to whatever is 'contemporary' now. That would be to still sit squarely within the realms of avante garde contemporary business as usual framework. We need a change that occurs prior to 'action', or rather a change that transforms our understanding of creative practice so completely so that any and all doing, from carving wooden spoons to the most sophisticated installation, is now charged with the politics of breakage. What is needed is a way to keep the foundational politics of breakage in the foreground so that it is not only the conceptual origin of the 'doing' but is weaved into it throughout. The logic of the political break must impinge upon both the form and subject of the work, and become percievable. Did oldman Negri not say somewhere that we must begin to move in the determinations of a new epoch without ever forgetting the episode of this shift10. Well that is it exactly but we are looking for this to be applied practically.

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The ultimate goal of our breakage then is to reframe the base coordinates of creative action, to reframe human doing in the broadest senses concievable and attaching new meaning to both the doing and the done. In saying that our return to van gogh seems all the more absurd; is it really as crazy an idea as it sounds to do Van Gogh again and hope for radical politics? Well, yes I believe it is, but that is precisely the point as the absurdity of the premise is its strength in that it ensures that the logic and politics of breakage remain foregrounded and all that is built is built on that foundation of delicious absurdity, but becoming less and less absurd as progress is made. And for all that has been said against the contemporary I must say that it is not only the obvious corporate ties with contemporary art that are objected to but the contemporary art critical discourses the like of which are on display in the painting above can be a problem also. Yes yes the critical contemporary is a prison also or at least an infinite cycle of wingeing about critique and recuperation. Escaping this cycle is part what attracts me to the idea of traveling back in time and starting to build from there as opposed the would be avant garde, cutting edge approach which all too easily falls victim of the shelob11.

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So to return to Van Gogh and start again from there (even though we're still here), what does this mean, what does it give us, what options for creative work does this open up? Well there are many points, Firstly, the story of Van Gogh, the 'myth of the mad genious' routine, is so well established in so many minds (inaccurrate as it is) that it makes it a germaine ground for appropriation. Secondly, Van Gogh 's position as one of the major influences at the origins of modernism is important for us in the sense that we have reached an end point in our contemporary stasis and we want and need to start again. Thirdly, a slightly technical point but relevant is Van Gogh's dogged resistance to abstraction in contrast to Gaugains focus on the inner subjectivity of the artist. Van Gogh's priviledging of that which is materially real  and in front of the eyes so to speak (our duty is to think not dream) is I think an important quality to re-engage with in reaction to the financial crisis and financial capitalism generally and its apparently wildly abstract financial instruments. It has been pointed out many times that there is an uncomfortable parralell to be drawn between high art and high finance on the question of value or rather the demiterialisation value so to say in the neoliberal era.  Now is the time to change tracks.

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But perhaps the most useful aspect in terms of appropriation is Van Gogh's correspondence with Theo which provides a model for theorizing practice. This is something that interests me a great deal from my self institution work. I do not have a brother however and my sister is an academic, so the Torpoint Art Service acts as my Theo Van Gogh to which through short and regular texts accompanying each work we can describe, explore and theorise what we are doing just as Van Gogh did. Ideally the written and practical work will begin to be woven together so that each influences the other to create new subjects and new meaning. In Van Gogh the written ideas often prefigure his practice. He was able to write about what was not yet possible practically but it did come and his articulation created the future. This is the ideal. theoretical thought becoming practical reality. Theory into action, into activism, into social movement, changing the world.  In adittion, by delivering our 'contemporary' prose in a manner befitting a  ninetinth century creative we provide ourseves with a literary tool to reference our breakage. Which carabien poet is it who shows how we can refuse our master through the canabalisation of language?12

 

So the Van Gogh saga gives a nice little multiple authorship vehicle, a good little runner,  which we have fashioned into the TAS. This self institutional framework is of my own imagining but we need not dwell on it or be ashamed, the needs do must. I am not yet at the point of direct authentic communication and actually more and more I feel that it is not possible but I want to get there. I want to tell it how I feel it as much as the next one but its a process and one day we may come out of the other side of a struggle for a new left imaginary and be able to be 'real' without the feeling that too much is left unsaid in doing so. For now at least what we have to say will be said through the TAS and did not Holloway say that the time to dispense with metaphor will come but we are not there yet. Well its just possible that "there" may never come for me and we shall have to be satisfied with ourselves. But what of dignity? We have dignity, i believe, in our practice and purpose but not so much in our theory where we are less than straight forward.13 But even in our game of self institution can we not claim a scrap of dignity due to our very refusal to submit to a false singular authorship position? In any event I would dearly like to continue this work with a view of coming out the other side in singular voice. In fact I have absolutely no choice; we are of course all bastards I'm just that sort of bastard. To fracture oneself in desperation to remain free, to try to control the means of perception, to resist capture, and then to work to put the pieces back together again to create a quite new singular, well thats a project! Lets call it a lifes work, yes yes I feel more dignified already.

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Do forgive me. this entry has taken on a most unfortunate confessional bent. I think I need to get out of this shipping container and out of this boatyard. Perhaps I'll clear my head with a study in the town tomorrow. There is a whopping great ash at the Carbiell Inn that has been on my mind. It weeps so low over the homes.

 

Back to work.

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John

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