Extruding Such Shapes

Hello You,

I wrote out 900 words for this and then canned them.

I might revisit them at a later date, but I felt that what I had said and how I had said it no longer applied to how I feel. It is weird the difference a week can make to your mood.

I have one thing I want to walk about and another that sort of birthed itself from an explanatory introduction. So as always I will let you know about the format of the news letter so you can skip to the bit you give a hoot about.

1) An explanation of the deleted newsletter and an insight into my personal philosophy.

2) Writings on Avant Gard art and a reflection on my own performance in Bury Museum Last Month.

If either of those ring your bell then Hallelujah and praise the lord. If they don’t maybe tell me what you want to hear about. My email address is [email protected] 

If you’re going to email me keep it cool.

Don’t worry, I wasn’t blasting anyone out or anything. You’re not missing out on me starting beef with someone. I just wrote a big old piece that I felt was a little too negative, a little too cynical, and I must go away and think about what I really want to say before I say it.

With age I increasingly believe that cynical voices have less of a role in online discourse. Its very easy to sit in judgement of others and decry behaviours and values as lesser than your own without ever turning your analysis inwards. I try and be as self reflective as I can, a skill I learnt through my development into sobriety, so if I am trying to do everything I can to be my best person in the real world that it doesn’t make much sense to then be a jerk online.

Whenever I write fiction I try and ask myself “What am I trying to say here” and usually if I cannot find a central question I am looking at answering I bail on the idea. I have started doing the same thing whenever I make a comment or a post. My sister said that something she practices in the world of online discourse is the idea that if someone has already said what you want to say in the comments of a post then your input isn’t needed. There are a lot of online voices saying the same things so it doesn’t always help to have more. Maybe use that energy you were going to commit to the comments section to something which has a more effective outcome. Even if that thing is sending an email to someone who you haven’t spoken to for a while, or spamming the Republican backed Idaho State School Reporting system (that allows parents and teachers to anonymously report teachers promoting “Woke” ideologies) with pictures of Danny DeVito’s bare arse from the Christmas episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Whilst we are on the subject there’s another question I often ask myself when I do something, which I should really apply to everything I do, which is: “Does this make the world a better or worse place?”. I came across this idea from a post by Nick Cave on his Red Hand Files website where he answers his fans’ questions in an earnest and heartfelt way. The post in question was about his conversion to Vegetarianism, something I undertook in 2018 after eating too much Pork at a Chinese Restaurant midway through Thought Bubble. The reason I decided to quit eating meat was because I couldn’t truly justify why I should keep eating it whilst caring about the worlds problems. This worked, but it was very much white knuckling not eating meat as I knew it was the right thing to do (for me, I am not going to evangelise to you on matters of the stomach) I did feel like it was the right thing for me to do. When Nick Cave talked about his dietary change I was excited to hear his perspective to see if it resonated with me. He writes the following:

That clicked with me.

Not just in terms of my relationship with our animal friends, but also the world writ large. The mechanisms of the world are both largely miserable and largely outside of our means of control. The best lesson I learned in life was to see where I could make a positive impact within my reach and see if I can apply my efforts to that. Sure I do a lot of work with community groups through my Zine projects, but I like to think that the positive impact we make can extend far beyond the formalities of charities, donations, and volunteering and into our every day lives. My friend Ed says “the best thing you can be is Kind”. He’s a good guy and his work with drawing based talking groups has been a fantastic thing to see develop. For me its not necessarily about being kind, because as a writer you have to be an absolute bastard to fictional people to make drama happen, but if I can happily look at what I am creating and think that it doesn’t contribute to the existential suffering of the universe that its a worthwhile thing to do.

Sometimes the worthwhile thing to do is to abort a newsletter post until you can think of a constructive way of framing what you want to say without it just being an exercise in telling people they’re wrong for liking a certain kind of entertainment.

In December I took myself off to Ayr on the west coast of Scotland to see Rachel Maclean’s installation Don’t Buy Mi.

Rachel Maclean is a Scottish artist whose multimedia artworks explore a variety of themes but always in a candy coloured so-cute-its-sinister way. In fact she did an exhibition at the Birmingham Gallery called Too Cute where she curated together a combination of art, taxidermy, and found objects to create an overwhelming collection of objects that in the surface should be nice to look at but in practice was very much not. She also lived in the Bull ring centre for a month as part of a Channel Four documentary called Artists in Residence which was hilarious and soul crushing in equal measure.

When I heard she had done an immersive art piece in Ayr I was very excited. Taking over an empty shop and she had turned it into a nightmare from which you cannot awake'; part sculptural installation, part performance art piece, part video installation. The shop, which just sat on the corner of a street with no fanfare or announcement, blended into the high-street despite its vivid colours and strange signs. It did not look out of place which only heightened its unnerving aura. The teams responsible for griming it up had done a convincing job of making it look like it had been there forever, slowly rotting, like a plaque stricken molar.

Going inside the attention to detail continued, weird sounds coming from the backroom, the walls covered in cryptic and reversible graffiti. Even the attendants outfit was grubby, having been painted to look stained and old. The artist working behind the counter told me that it was a bit of a difficult outfit to wear as outside of the shop she just looked like she didn’t wash it. The place was stocked with dolls, half of them happy plastic dolls with recognisably up beat rictus grins and blonde pigtails. The other half were withered and ancient looking. Grey and old and miserable looking.

The dolls feature heavily in the film playing on a giant discarded iPhone laying amongst piles of boxes in the stock room. I won’t give anything away as its currently touring Scotland and I think knowing as little about it as possible helps in its immersive nature, but Maclean described it as an artwork created for her daughter. Thematically its all about self image, social media, idealised beauty and the burden of positivity which is placed on us by a machine intent on making us feel awful. The pincer attack that Instagram launches on us to both embrace our inner beauty and maintain out wellbeing and mental fortitude whilst also living only our best life and constantly achieving a homogenous aesthetic perfection.

It was great, I loved it. The shop in isolation would have been enough to call itself successful. It was disorienting and menacing. It spun a narrative all of its own of the collapse of consumer culture and the throw away nature of internet fame. It was also disruptive in its location, its presence an artistic mystery. Being inside the shop and seeing passers by looking in, curiously trying to see around the signs and through the caked in grime proved its success as a puzzle for onlookers to solve.

But the thing that struck me most about it was that it was in Ayr. Not Edinburgh, or Glasgow, but a small seaside town. The artwork is Avant Garde to its core, and the fact its engaging with a working class town rather than an urban environment was exciting. I have for a long time believed that the art world shuts out people by trying to convince them they can’t understand it. The Avant Garde is where this really rears its ugly head the most, as things that are meant to illicit emotional reactions via strange and inexplicable images and sounds are forced to have a singular meaning when they don’t. I’ve had people tell me they dislike the films of David Lynch because they cannot understand them, and my response usually is that there is nothing to understand. There’s no right way to interact. There’s no one clear message, its all about how you feel. The nature of curation and funding application processes mean that artists have to write down at great length what their artwork means and when they go on the Culture Show to talk about it at length they will extrude words like “pedagogy” at to big up their art works. But ultimately when you’re in a gallery contending with an artwork whatever the artist has told Lauren Laverne about the piece doesn’t mean dick. Its about you, and how you feel, and the reaction its had in you. No one can shut you out of that.

So when Maclean chooses to miss out London and head straight to where ordinary people are and creates a challenging piece of work to bring the people of Ayr into the joke that art has no fixed meaning she is absolutely talking my language. The line between art and comedy is so blurry its practically a semi-permeable membrane. I know there is the image of the Warhol like collective being super serious about their artwork whilst multitudinous hangers on nodding in agreement, but most of the artists I know use humour as a core element of their artworks. What is the career of Vic and Bob if not direct action Dadaism on your TV.

John Waters says it best when he says “I'm against people who think the avant-garde is only for the elite”.

So recently I was asked to put together a performance art piece for the Bury museum as part of their Rooms to Live exhibition. The exhibition described itself as “Combining fact and fiction, while referencing 1960s counterculture and 1980s environmentalism, Rooms to Live investigates the alliances between music and art as vehicles for the imagination.” A large portion of this exhibition was a recreation of the property where Captain Beefheart concocted their 1969 album Trout Mask Replica, and as a lover of music and the strange I went about putting a band together to perform something pretty out there in the space.

Bury and Ayr have quite a bit in common. Both are working class areas and both have been hit hard by austerity. I kept Rachel Maclean’s work in mind during the conception of our performance. I wanted to make sure I created something I was completely dedicated to. I wasn’t prepared to cut corners and dumb anything down. That’s not the way to go about things. Don’t Buy Mi was challenging and disturbing, so I felt this gave me licence to do the same. The thing Maclean used to engage her audience was familiarity and humour, so that was the driving force behind our creative process. It had to take a form people would understand so it was accessible, but then pushed to its very limit to a point it was no longer recognisable and therefore; thrilling. The band, which we called SLUMBERMAN, was made up of myself on vocals, the talented Michael Waters of Perfect Writing on Guitar/Synths/Noise, and the expert drummer Loren Lepton of Eruers. The end result was exactly what we wanted and viewable on youtube in full here.

Michael’s music was so good at times it was hard to stay in character. Music is like magic to me, it’s a skill I wasn’t born with and have had to work very hard at to give the illusion I know what I am doing. But comparatively Michael is onstage sawing audience members in half whilst I try and convince children I can detach my thumb. I was in awe the first moment he played his demo of the bed music to me, comprised solely of repurposed sounds from Beefheart compositions, but to see him let loose on the guitar is mesmeric. How he makes the sounds and how he knows where in the storm we unleashed they best go is a mystery to me. I am constantly in awe of his skill.

The video collages we projected don’t really pop in the video like they did on stage and we are working on doing our own version of a recording in order to demonstrate the kind of act we do and try and get more shows. But it was such an exciting and liberating thing to do. We worked very hard on it, and I think that shows in the end product. We had a few people come up to us and tell us we blew their minds, and I have had a few really sweet emails off the back of it too. But more rewarding was the look of bemusement and absolute confusion we managed to instil in the majority of the audience. We opened a door and pushed them through, much like the door way to Maclean’s shop. We lured them in with the promise of a band and then performance arted at them for twenty unrelating minutes. With a bit of luck their lives will be ruined forever. Always thinking that just behind some narrow door in all of their favourite museums, artists in red robes are getting incredible kicks from things they’ll never know.

If anything here resonated with you then please do either tell me or a friend. Social media is a toxic place for people creating stuff these days, and with so called Artificial Intelligence spewing out nonsense its becoming harder and harder to stand out from a sea of words. Any shout out you can give me on whatever platform you have would be really helpful. Organic interactions all the live long day please.

Have a great day… could you do that for me?

Kind regards,

Nick