Started the day brightly and walked into school. Had a talk by Simon Lewandowski about his interest’s influences and some of his work, and got to ask some questions.
It was good to hear someone talk about there influences being something other than the prescribed texts of philosophy and art history and critique. Simon enjoyed Fiction as much as anything and one particular book stood out “The Third Policeman” is a book which I read over the summer. A curios book that I should read again when less committed to other tasks. Simon made particular reference to one part of the story where one of the Policemen shows the main character a series of boxes he is making, each smaller than the next each fitting inside the next until so small as to be indiscernible to the eye. The halving of halves, is a task without end.
“Six years ago they began to get invisible, glass or no glass. Nobody has ever seen the last five I made because no glass is strong enough to make them big enough to be regarded truly as the smallest things ever made. Nobody can see me making them because my little tools are invisible into the same bargain. The one I am making now is nearly as small as nothing.” (18)
Popped across the road at lunch but they were all busy, so bought some paints and returned to the studio to try out some of the black and white images on the test barrel.
Left James and Hammam in the studio playing chess, now a regular occurrence. On the way back home an obscure memory was triggered by god only knows what and I thought of the baseball bats I had seen racked up in Amsterdam in 1984 and how each bat was accompanied by a gas mask. Really rather an interesting idea. I surfed the net on the job seekers computers at work looking for baseball bats and gas masks. I will make the bats from layered ply like the bullets but will have to buy the masks I decided.
After work I picked up Jake and then went around to see Duncan. Duncan’s life long mate Neil was there. I hadn't seen Neil since I had made his partner cry. After seven years in her company and several incidents where I felt that she had deeply insulted me I had made an effort to stay clear until a night down the pub and I was forced to sit next to her. I was very drunk and became abusive at every utterance from her mouth. Not my finest hour and frankly made myself look a bit of a dick. The irony is that the discussion was about a list I had compiled off all my transgressions and how I wanted to use it in my work somehow. The list contained 72 transgressions or things I later realized I had regretted or simply should not have done, by the end of the night the list was up to 73.
Saturday morning I spent in the library followed by spending some of my Euro millions winning down at maxi Chinese restaurant while reading this months copy of Artist News Letter. I then walked home and went to the Showcase to watch breaking and entering. How gay am I, I thought. Saturday night alone at the cinema watching a chick flick. Still it kept me out of the pub.
Sunday morning I cleaned the house and car, ready for a flying visit by the parents on the way to the airport and Prague. Took them for dim sum and green tea. Dropped them at the airport and then went down the local to watch Liverpool get stuffed by the Arsenal. The new landlord is a Glaswegian and supporter of the Hoops. We had a good chat, his name is Kevin. Kevin had lived in Leeds for 5 years and this was his first time running a pub. He had that stone grey parlour that only Glaswegians can carry off without actually being dead.
“The Britannia” is on the wrong edge of Holbeck and there is always an interesting mix of Africans, White bread Yorkshire, settled Gypsies, alcoholics, prostitutes, criminals (selling moody goods) or just gangs of rowdy drinkers and sometimes me. An ambulance arrived and the medics disappeared into the ladies, half an hour later they wheeled out an unconscious woman. She looked about 60 but given the neighbourhood, she was more likely 40 and a regular of “The Britannia”. Despite the incident all of the punters carried on about their business. One of the bar staff enjoying a day off got up and collected the mop and bucket to help the landlady clear up whatever mess had been left. If there was not so much abundance in Britain at present I would call upon words from “The Road to Wigan Pier” to help put this existence into some context. Holbeck is however still made up of the type of housing described by Orwell when he wrote.
“Towns like Leeds and Sheffield have scores of thousands of back to back houses which are all of a condemned type but will remain standing for decades.” (17)
Houses that are now unaffordable for nurses and teachers. So these are different times, albeit some of the problems of the 1930s remain. Nietzsche might possibly summarise modern Britain as follows.
“I call it the state where everyone, good and bad is a poison drinker: the state where everyone, good and bad loses himself, the state where universal slow suicide is called life.” (18)
Ok so he’s not actually talking about the first entry in the Oxford “Alphabetical book of Poisons” (Alcohol) but he is talking of that which goes hand in hand with this problem, and I’m sure when he used the term “Poison” , Nietzsche knew full well its multiple meanings.
“The state is the coldest of all cold monsters, coldly it lies, too: and this lie creeps from its mouth “I the state am the people”. (19)
There are many ways to poison the mind of the people. In the age of the internet, the tirelessly hungry 24 hour news, marketing, PR and political spin the people are attacked from all quarters by the state message, “be frightened, be afraid you have comfort and wealth and others want to take it from you”. So when in my work I ponder why it was so easy for the state to take us into an illegal and barbaric war some 90 years after the 1st World War I need not look any further than our duplicity through ignorance and fear. If the world is to change then people must change and throw off the suffocating system that restrains us. First though, we need to sober up.
“Only there where the state ceases does the man who is not superfluous begin, does the song of the necessary man, the unique and irreplaceable melody begin.” (20)
Ensconced in a small remote cottage on the Isle of Jura, Orwell produced a work of fiction that says all you need to know about our current State. The eternal war with Eurasia, the ever-present big brother watching through cameras, the double speak the rewriting of history and the paralyses of fear.
“WAR IS PEACE
FREADOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”
(21)
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(17) George Orwell “The roar to Wigan Pier” pp 23 (18) Fredrich Nietzsche “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” pp77. (19) pp 78. (20) pp 77 paragraph 7 (21) George Orwell “Nineteen Eighty Four” pp 7.
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