SATURDAY, SATURDAY... SATURDAY!!!
What do you do on a residency on a Saturday? I feel a bit cheeky laying around the studio in my pants, reading every section from the Guardian apart from the actual news...
I'll just restrict myself to reading an interview with Lady Gaga from the Saturday Times website. Sigh.
Right, so yesterday I spray painted this Henry Moore sculpture gold, but it look sort of silver and gold because I bought cheap spray paint. That's alright, it goes with the wonky, bad paper mache of the piece. I've had to fashion a huge, golden, cardboard penis to cover the hose pipe for the water feature.
With water features, I feel like I've found my spiritual home. This absurd gesture of pushing water through a hose just so it can fall back down in to a pond or whatever and then get sucked back up is a nihilistic confirmation; eternal recurrence. But a confirmation that feels very accepting. And that feels, in turn quite particular to British sensibilities.
John Gray (not the John Gray who wrote Men are From Mars; Women are From Venus, not him. The other John Gray, who wrote Straw Dogs and Enlightenment's Wake which is what this next paragraph liberally paraphrases. Though I would be interested in setting up a meeting between these two philosophical giants and seeing what comes of it...) talks about finding coherent ideas of belonging in a multi-cultural society, about the acceptance of difference through the acceptance of realistic core agreements (yeah, I think I've not only liberally paraphrased him, but badly too). I would definitely say that acceptance in the face of impotence is a core feature of British society.
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I'm off to Maplins to buy a motor for a maquette of Monument to Sir Cliff Richards Unborn Baby. It's going to be a wooden pole with a spinning cardboard cut-out of a baby's face, only with the features of Sir Cliff Richard.
I've been looking for youtube videos about public sculpture, especially in Birmingham. There is a Birmingham in Alabama, and so I inevitably stumbled upon this.