Recent Drawings
I made a decision to draw more. I want to start exhibiting my drawings - showing things as opposed to time based work. And not just that, but things which are of things. That show off their thing-ness. Drawings of dense, weighted things. Things with mass.
For the last week I've been drawing for about an hour a day. Here are a selection of the ones I like.
Chain of Spheres, pen on paper, 2012
Closed Dark Box, pen on paper, 2012
Coffee Cup, pen on paper, 2012
Coin or Chip, pen on paper, 2012
Connected Balls, pen on paper, 2012
Cup and Liquid, pen on paper, 2012
Curled Tape, pen on paper, 2012
D, pen on paper, 2012
Dropped Pringles, pen on paper, 2012
Fingerbob 1, pen on paper, 2012
Fingerbob 2, pen on paper, 2012
Flaming Torch, pen on paper, 2012
Growth Rings, pen on paper, 2012
Monitor, pen on paper, 2012
Open Box, pen on paper, 2012
Precious Ball, pen on paper, 2012
Precious Balls, pen on paper, 2012
Return, pen on paper, 2012
Scissors, pen on paper, 2012
Stepping Stones, pen on paper, 2012
Weighted Feather, pen on paper, 2012
Y and Right Bracket, pen on paper, 2012
For the last week I've been drawing for about an hour a day. Here are a selection of the ones I like.
Guston
Paintings and drawings of clearly defined things (i.e. distinct, separately discernible objects or figures) by Philip Guston from the MoMA collection in chronological order
J A P A N
I make music under the name of Dogtanion and today my first album, JAPAN, is released.
I'm excited for obvious reasons - it is my first album! You can buy it in the shops! etc. etc. But I'm not excited in the way I thought I would be when I first started writing and recording music as a teenager.
But then I was thinking about it, and I realised that my teenage self would still be really proud of me, even if he was annoyed that I wasn't rolling a massive spliff to celebrate, because this is an idiosyncratic collection of songs, all made by me, my own way, without any feeling of compromise or pandering to what I think people might like. The album is stupid, serious, obvious and complex, and as a 16 year old hard core music fan - which is the best, most devoted sort of fan - that would have got my approval.
And that is more than enough for me.
You can buy it digitally from iTunes here.
or
You can order it in physical reality from HMV here
Thanks to everyone who has been involved in Dogtanion at any point, for whatever reason. But special thanks go to Will Evans, head of Tape Club Records, for devoting himself to music that he believes in - and for some reason that including me.
xx
Attendant
Attendant, two channel sound installation for gallery toilets (male, female), 2012
[Commissioned by South Square gallery]
[Commissioned by South Square gallery]
Fame at last
So, really this is just a re-blog from Vanessa Bartlett, a writer and academic in London.
Vanessa kindly wrote an introductory essay for the last film I made with Ben Jeans Houghton as the ARKA group. It was a brilliant dissection of the themes and references in what was quite a dense, experimental film.
(You can read Vanessa's essay, From biophiliato bibliophilia……and then back again, by clicking here.)
Yesterday, Vanessa posted on her website a new version of the text, a parody authored by one Chris Warren, a second hand bookseller and typewriter aficionado. The parody is called Three Miles Wide: a decontextualised mushroom omelette, and I can say, as someone who has read Vanessa's essay quite a lot, it brilliantly re-works the language and scholarly references in her original text.
It's funny, picking apart the technical language of critical theory without being cynical, and what fascinates me the most is that, in its own more visual, anecdotal way, it manages to make pretty good points about the film, without the author having seen it.
Also, now that the ARKA group has been parodied (well, parodied by proxy), does that make us famous?
Vanessa kindly wrote an introductory essay for the last film I made with Ben Jeans Houghton as the ARKA group. It was a brilliant dissection of the themes and references in what was quite a dense, experimental film.
(You can read Vanessa's essay, From biophiliato bibliophilia……and then back again, by clicking here.)
Yesterday, Vanessa posted on her website a new version of the text, a parody authored by one Chris Warren, a second hand bookseller and typewriter aficionado. The parody is called Three Miles Wide: a decontextualised mushroom omelette, and I can say, as someone who has read Vanessa's essay quite a lot, it brilliantly re-works the language and scholarly references in her original text.
It's funny, picking apart the technical language of critical theory without being cynical, and what fascinates me the most is that, in its own more visual, anecdotal way, it manages to make pretty good points about the film, without the author having seen it.
Also, now that the ARKA group has been parodied (well, parodied by proxy), does that make us famous?