Two Chevrons Apart

Hello You.

It’s almost been two months since I last wrote to you, however thanks to the way calendars work on the page everything seems very close together.

I heard someone say the phrase “the psychic life of time” the other day. They meant it as a way of describing the way time survives in our heads. The mutagenic nature of time not just on our bodies but in our minds. Their project was specifically related to waiting times in healthcare and their impact on the individual. More information can be found here.

When I was young I had a fundamental misunderstanding of Einstein’s statement that Time is Relative. Einstein means that Time is relative to your physical state, for example if you’re travelling at the speed of light then time will move differently than if you’re sat in Flamingo land. My understanding was that of an individuals experience of time in relation to their mental state, for example if you’re in Flamingo Land time would move much faster than if you are sat in the DVLA waiting room. This is the distinction I would say between the passage of you through time versus the passage of time through you.

The “Psychic life of time” is then the infectious nature of time. That waiting for something can be a stimulating or damaging thing. Delayed gratification is apparently a thing but as an ADHD sufferer I cannot attest to this myself. Death Row Phenomenon is a thing however, where the psychological impact of waiting (in some cases decades) to die causes horrifying damage to people mental health. That’s an extreme example but think instead how does a long wait time for a surgery impact you? How does waiting in the queue at the Post Office impact the rest of your day? Alternatively how does spending a long day with a friend impact you? How does it feel?

Think not of what we do with our time but instead think of what our time does with us.

Anyway Happy Birthday Christopher and Michael.

It’s been a big month, hence my lack of time (or maybe times lack of interest in me) so I have plenty I want to write about. However I will limit it to the below and pack future emails full of exciting words:

1) What I’ve been up to.

2) When do we start/stop (A brief discussion on when does creativity begin and end)

3) Nick’s Music Corner (music that I have found out about or enjoyed this month)

Please skip a head if anything takes your fancy, if not, lets hit this thing.

Before we talk about anything else there is this:

I am hosting a two day Comic and Zine fair across the August Bank Holiday weekend. Tickets are free but can be obtained here. Its important people buy tickets so we know the number of people are coming. But it would be great if you were able to come and bring everyone you have ever met so we get a healthy crowd.

More information on this as it develops.

Alongside organisation of this, I have been really busy doing PhD related jazz. I have had my first major hand in where I had to present what it is that I will be doing to a series of Professors and have them bombard me with questions to make sure what I am doing is all well and good. So far what I have learnt about Academia is that its filled with weird little ceremonies that have to take place but no one really knows why they’re taking place but they have to. I am put into the complex and unknowable arcana of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast where the colour of the Earl’s boiled egg holds great spiritual import but no one knows why.

I then presented my thesis at the Post Graduate Research Conference, attended the School of Art’s end of Year Conference, and attended Drawing Articulations: A Radical Drawing Symposium where artists from all over the world got together and discussed the work currently ongoing in the field of drawing and how it can be pushed to the limits of its definitions.

It was a really empowering day, I met people doing absolutely wild stuff, pursuing art projects that were astonishing brave. One of the highlights, pictured above, was Dr Simon Ringe’s performance drawing where be bound himself with rope and dragged his struggling body through a path of graphite, communicating his anguish into the page through sweat and movement. The final pieces stands on its own as a shape of fury and frustration, but seeing the actual creation of it was a mind expanding experience.

The research is coming along nicely and I am waiting for new things to begin. I don’t know if I mentioned before but my ethics have been approved so I can now go out into the world and start meeting people and gathering up their thoughts and experiences to help improve my zine making workshops. Somethings have to wait until October as the academic world takes a big sigh and uses the student free time to do their own work and projects, and have conferences with free lunches. But things are good.

I have been thinking a lot about the role of the artist and where that role begins and ends. This week a Reddit post has been doing the rounds where a guy posted on a Stable Diffusion thread talking about the What’s next of AI art. This bloke had created in his estimation over 200,000 pieces of AI art, and professed to spending hours and hours firing prompts into a plagiarism machine that shits out an image at which he would smile, save to his computer, and then forget about entirely. He was asking his brothers in arms in the tech-bro fraternity what’s next. What does he do with them? What’s the point of them? He had come to the conclusion he had made content instead of art.

As you well know I am a proud foot soldier in the war against content. We are at a point in culture where everything is now classed as content to the operators of the attention economy. Anything that keeps you glued to your device long enough to harvest your data or shoot an ad at you is content. Content is the glowing ball on the Angler Fish’s gangleon that lures you until you’re hypnotised enough to reduce you into nutrients. This has a foul and reductive effect on art and creativity, and ultimately I think this has been the end game of the endless scroll all along. Photographs are just reasons to stay on Instagram, hate-bait is a reason to stay on Facebook. Films are reasons to stay on Netflix. The quality of them to the service runners is measured in hours of attention above and beyond the way it makes you feel.

The argument could be made that this has always been the methodology of capitalist art. Movies are all about box office takings and bums on seats, the galleries that got the most visitors are the most important, the books that sell the most are the best. But I fell there is a matter of longevity to quality that supersedes sales and immediate popularity. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. It was not in the top ten best selling books in America in 1925. The best selling book was called Soundings by A. Hamilton Gibbs and doesn’t even have a wikipedia page. For a book to be 100 years old and still considered one of the greatest examples of literature doesn’t seem to have much of a connection to its initial sales. Its a trite point to make, but as the fastest selling paperback in the history of books, will we be talking about 50 Shades of Grey in 100 years?

But I think that content as a concept is getting far worse. 50 Shades of Grey at least provide the people who read it and the author of it something. I saw an ad for an AI programme that takes what it calls “Hard Books” and converts them into “Easy books”. The example it used was The Great Gatsby. It took the opening sentence and reduced it from 23 words to 9. It was a magical device that turned Art into content, removing its sentence structure, personality, and flourish. There are AI voiced “audio books” on Spotify that summarise pieces of great literature into 20 minute podcasts. There is nothing to be gained from these sound blaps that couldn’t be gained from reading the Wikipedia page. Essayist Thomas J Bevan says that:

“Content is a transaction presented as utilitarian exchange, art is an emanation of the spirit presented as a gift.”

Content is the 1000 word information blast about a bloggers relationship with the tomato that comes immediately before the recipe for tomato soup.

I am not saying that art is inherently important and that the hand crafted, pain soaked, canvases of a white walled gallery are automatically important because they’re in the gallery. Modern Art has its own form of generative art, provided by big artists having an idea on the toilet and then handing a napkin sketch to their staff who go off and make their formaldehyde sharks and aluminium balloon dogs for them. Art is not automatically good. Art is made for a variety of reasons, whether corporate or financial, spiritual or emotional, or for one of my favourite reasons; for fun. My sister once spent a couple of weeks enjoying doing Jewel Painting where she plopped little plastic diamonds onto a printed framework showing some gnomes having a lovely time around a toadstool. She had a wonderful time and thoroughly enjoyed herself. Am I saying that this jewelled toadstool is more meaningful than Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog sculpture that sold in 2013 for 58 million dollars? I don’t know, but I take a guess at which one had more of an emotional impact on the person creating it and I feel pretty confident in which creative had more fun.

So I really want to hammer home the point that I think that art created for the individual only is equally important to any piece in any major gallery, as long as that individual finds importance in it.

If that’s true then, the big question for me is where does the creativity begin and end. In January, as I talked about in this newsletter, I did a performance at The Bury Museum and Gallery. After discussing it with the other members of Slumberman we agreed that we wouldn’t replicate that again. We had a recording of it, and the video that was projected over the top, and we would likely make this into a bit of a show reel to demonstrate what our future performances might look like, but we would never have the chance to replicate the experience of playing in a scale model of Captain Beefheart’s cabin again. In 1977 Marina Abramovic and her partner naked stood in a doorway in a gallery and visitors had to squeeze between them in a moment of forced intimacy with strangers. Whilst this was replicated last year with 37 models standing nude in the entrance way of the gallery the discomfort of having to slide past the naked bodies of tow people you don’t know cannot be captured in a photograph or a video. The heat of a person, the strange feeling of meeting their eye, the catch of their skin on your clothes, their hair on your neck, cannot be documented only felt. This cannot be sold or sampled, only felt. It exists only in the individual in that moment and will be different for every person.

So if we have art that cannot be contained and only exists in the experiences of the individual, and art work created by the individual is important the question I have to ask is how much of that artwork needs to exist to be counted as art?

One of my colleagues (called Tom) at the school of art is doing his doctoral research on the process of photography and at what point of the ritual of creation the artist becomes a photographer. In simpler terms, if you break down the steps of taking a photograph when is the art made? Across the world cameras are everywhere, in our hands at all times, and people record their lives and experiences through thousands of photographs and hours of video. Is this art or content? Especially with photography is there a tipping point where things become art? Maybe this is a different conversation in the three way split between Art/Artefact/Art Object, but instead let’s stay with this particular brand of trouble. Tom takes his camera out with no film and goes through the act of taking photographs without actually capturing a picture. He looks for scenes, considers his framing, holds the camera to his eye, presses the button. Nothing happens. He writes about the experiences and how it felt and what he gained.

But does he have to press the button? Does he need the camera? If you go out into the wilderness and look at scenes, consider their surfaces, their texture their light, and just view them through a square made of your thumbs and forefingers have you made an artwork that was only perceptible to you?

How does this translate into the world of drawing? If I draw a picture in sand and then it is devastated by the tide, did I make an artwork? Similarly if I arrange some twigs in a pattern on the surface of a pond and let it drift away into nothing what have I achieved? Drawing for pleasure has a provable positive impact on mental wellbeing, so the impact on the individual is noteworthy. You are your own audience whenever you make something. That shouldn’t be under valued. So using the Marina Abramovic experience as a comparison if creating an artwork that is personal only for you, that cannot be captured and exists only in the experiences of the audience, and that audience is you, does that artwork even need to exist?

One of the things I tell people when doing the Zine workshops is that they don’t need to finish anything. Making half of a zine is better than making none of a zine. A pressure that constricts people’s creativity is the responsibility of finishing things. Further more there is the pressure to make something good. Further more there is the pressure to then distribute or sell that thing. Within the world of comics this is crippling. The comic book is an extremely commercial medium, they are things to be sold and distributed. Even personal diary comics are seen as things to be put online which I believe so many of them are shit, because they’re made with a wide audience in mind rather than with the audience of the individual at its heart.

Let’s take this to the next step. If we are making artwork for ourselves, with ourselves as the intended audience, that exists within our own emotions and art, and we don’t even need to finish stuff, then do we even need to start? David Lynch talks about day dreams.

I dream, but I don't go by night-time dreams, it's day-dreams that I love.

He talks extensively about the power of day dreams, of imagination in the real world, and the creative fuel of meditation. Lots of his films and paintings start as day dreams. His impulse to make films was started when he had looked upon one of his paintings and imagined it moving. There is a value in giving yourself space to imagine, to invent, to play around with things in your head. I was at a talk recently where we were given a stone and asked to hold it in our hand for thirty minutes whilst we listened to some poetry and explore the feeling and the sensation of the stone in our hand, and then after the session be silent for ten minutes and draw how it felt. But if we didn’t draw a line, and instead experienced the stone mindfully, were present in its moment, it would have left us changed.

I have asked a lot of questions here, and I am not suggesting we stop making art and instead think about the things we could make and never make them. What I want us all to think about is the different interactions we have with our own creativity, and how our creativity interacts with us. Make art for you first and foremost, think about how it makes you feel, give yourself space to feel, to dream, and to think about not just what you’re making but why you’re making. What you’re saying. Do not undervalue your own experiences of the things you have made.

Success shouldn’t be measured in sales.

Welcome back to music corner, a list of recommendations of music I have discovered during the month that you might like. But also written down in a place I won’t forget about it later on.

• After forgetting they exist for a few months after being really into their first singles, the two piece Jazz band O. have released a debut album called WeirdOs. Its energetic, exciting music played on only a drum kit and a saxophone. Following in the footprints of Melt Yourself Down and The Comet Is Coming its loud and catchy stuff.

• If you like your French psychedelic rock accompanied by arty nude photos of the lead singer then may I suggest Omertá, an atmospheric sextet whose music fit together into a mesh of installation and performance art, sculpture, photography and writing that is either hugely interesting or hugely pretentious depending on your world view. Either way their music is really listenable and I’ve been lost in their second album Collection Particuliére for about a week.

• I have been really enjoying the uncomfortable, unnerving, and angry album The Collective by Kim Gordon. Its the Sonic Youth founding members second solo album and it is an noisy exploration of modern angst and righteous anger which is at times brutal and funny. Singles Bye Bye and I’m a Man are stand out songs. It feels cutting edge and present. I hope I am this aware when I’m 71 years old.

• Sounding a bit like a gospel album recorded by a bunch of heathen gnomes, Dang by Eola is a 2016 album that has got a lot of rotation from me the last few weeks. Its made up entirely of vocal loops. No instrumentation other than the human voice, and it is used to great effect to make incredibly deep, playful, and sometimes unsettling songs that are incredibly listenable.

Once again any boost you can give this newsletter in popularity would be appreciated. Social media sharing is great, but I would rather if you could tell someone in your life about it who you think would connect with it.

I hope this signal finds you Earthling.

As always, yours faithfully.

Nick Gonzo.

[email protected]