WALLY'S BLOG 2019
Scraps from an unkept diary
December 31
BLAH BLAH BLAP
I'm banishing the following paragraphs from the STATEMENTS page over to here, since I only ever produced a few words on making art I was halfway happy with. Those few words are still over there. The rest is blah blah. I tried to rewrite it recently but got in a worse mess. I've also removed most links to this blog. Never mind why.
GENERAL BLAH BLAH
I make art about life and death and the human condition squashed in-between. Like most other artists. Apart from that, increasingly concerned with the reluctance to tackle acute over population (of ourselves) and wonder if the human species demonstrates the perfect example of fascism - against itself and all other life on this planet.
Which would prove that god, if he exists, is a fascist. At the very least, a vindictive enabler. Religion is brainwashing by the way, in case you are offended by this. (More along those lines here)
My interests and practice are fucking broad. I thought of myself once a fucking poet, later a fucking painter, more recently a fucking sculptor. Photography has played an increasingly prominent role. For fuck's sake. Parallel to making art, in Berlin and Zurich I was busy too as a curator of independent fucking spaces, focusing on exhibitions, events, performances and visitor fucking participation.
Thought and process are as important as finished works. Blah, blah. I mix disciplines, blur boundaries, etc, etc. Some of my work is unsettling, some deceptively pretty. A lot is story-telling, however opaque the story might be. Blah, blap, blop. Art is not always about communication. It can be concerned with the opposite, like, er, awkwardness and frustration and blah, blah.
Sting and the Police sang of poets, priests and politicians:
"And when (words) eloquence escapes me
Their logic ties me up and rapes me
De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
Their innocence will pull me through."
Here follows a bunch of wordy waffle I may soon edit or delete.
Big money will always control politics.
Visually I never left behind my childhood fascination with the surreal and the fantastic. Later, these and other interests merged into a preoccupation with the absurd. Hmmmmmmm.
Meanwhile dot dot dot variety of themes dot dot dot human and animal rights to monumental doodles dot dot dot returning at intervals etc. Art is always an exploration dot dot dot I am inclined to change direction, method dot dot dot dot dot if you lose the buzz connected to discovery, i.e. through manufacture of work because others like it, then you're not making significant art. Further pompous remarks, etc.
The opposite of love is fear.
Puzzle-solving has been underlying in the thought and making process since the 1999 painting series Learning Games For Babies. I stared at it every night from my bed for two months until it was finished. Barely worked on it at all. Pointless comment goes here. Nothing is ever finished. Not really. Everything I do is a sketch, a work in progress. A game still to be mastered.
How exciting.
In 2016 I enjoyed a two month solo residency called "Elevation" at the West Gallery here in the UK, after returning from 22 years making art and taking drugs in Europe. It was by now recycling art, involving odd and broken parts, laughingly assembled (for a one time architectural model-maker). It was grandly presented rubbish. Just like this page. It was site specific - a preferred way of working, whether that interests you or not - with everything constructed on location. Interfacing with a given space is crucial to whatever I present.
I really like rubbish. Piles of it. Shiny plastic eye-pleasing trash. Thinking about it, as I sometimes do, I always liked it, and always made rubbish of one kind or another. I've given and thrown away more lovely bits of art than you've had hot dinners.
This may be exaggerated.
If anything connects the tiny multitude of ideas to find within these pages, it is subversion. If a bit of art is not in some way subversive, or innovative which can amount to the same thing, then it is decoration. Decoration is not art.
TEMPORARY HUMAN INSTALLATIONS
In 2014, MM and I embarked upon a project in which I would wear a bucket on my head for 100 days and she would document our escapades. Spanning five countries, this little odyssey was filled with memorable moments, captured in many photos. We didn't know where it would lead, only that we enjoyed working this way, and that some day a book might appear for posterity. Since then we've developed similar projects, surrealistic, avant-garde, experimental. We love discovering locations, making absurd costumes, and inventing fake cultural snapshots around them which are not easy to categorise - even for us.
These are Temporary Human Installations, but could also form more permanent sculptures, specific for given sites.
A few words from my past might help explain. Apparently I was an active toddler known as Atom Bomb, who giggled a lot. I liked to take part in school plays, and might have become an actor, an early dream. But with the onset of Big School, among other pressures, depression set in. I preferred to disappear, literally, behind a book or in a dark room lost in music. As an adult, discovering art as both therapy and drive, I began to feel balanced and alive, more often at peace. Much later, I found that creating art in the shape of objects no longer sufficed. I was drawn out into the world - still an uncomfortable place - to awkwardly pose amidst sundry life. A shy exhibitionist, exorcising demons.
So I myself became the work's focus. These photographs address those feelings of shyness, angst, and related personal challenges still faced. Dressing up absurdly, yet not wishing to be approached, is a paradox. One compromise has been the use of full or partial face coverings. Whilst blind or partially blind, anonymous to others, other senses and inner atmosphere are accentuated, and a sublime tranquility can be achieved.
Blah, blah, blap.
March 21
LAST NIGHT'S BEDTIME STORY
Stressy week at the mother-in-law's in Zurich sorting through the container of stuff we left here on moving to the UK, the home I used to be proud of. Now an embarrassment. (Brexit rant goes here.) Boxes, boxes, massive sofa and flatscreen, art, more boxes. Dumped almost everything of my own, including that very personal box of very personal letters and scraps I've kept close since Wimbledon in the eighties. Painful to look through, so a glance had to do it. It felt like burying people alive, regret it already. But I did find the Nikki Sudden recordings among loads of others, assuming they are still readable, which someone enquired about recently. Still don't know what to do with them.
On the very up-side, a breakthrough putting Matilda to bed changes everything. After two and a half years of hellish bedtimes and nights which nearly did for me, one way or another, she's not only sleeping better, but will now nod off lying with one of us on the bed. Mercy be. Doesn't always work, can still take hours, and my back and nerves will never fully recover. But I've started to almost enjoy add-libbing the songs and stories in comfort. Here's one of last night's.
Children go into a very long, very dark tunnel. (Quickly, cheer it up!) They all have torches. They see that the walls and ceilings are covered in drawings and paintings of beautiful animals. (Lots of animal descriptions.) The children have never seen animals because they are mountain children. Half way along the tunnel they find a table on which there is a message for the children. It says that the pictures are for them. The animals made them. It says that all the animals are waiting to meet the children outside at the end of the tunnel. They are excited and hurry on, still admiring the pictures. (More animal descriptions.) They finally emerge into the sunshine to be greeted by all the beautiful animals waiting in the surrounding fields.
March 18, 2019
AFTER A TWENTY-SIX MONTHS BREAK
Coming around to putting some words back here.
Was it writers block? Midlife crises? The end of dreams? Laziness?
A combination I suppose. Not out of it yet, but getting on a little better.
BLAH BLAH BLAP
I'm banishing the following paragraphs from the STATEMENTS page over to here, since I only ever produced a few words on making art I was halfway happy with. Those few words are still over there. The rest is blah blah. I tried to rewrite it recently but got in a worse mess. I've also removed most links to this blog. Never mind why.
GENERAL BLAH BLAH
I make art about life and death and the human condition squashed in-between. Like most other artists. Apart from that, increasingly concerned with the reluctance to tackle acute over population (of ourselves) and wonder if the human species demonstrates the perfect example of fascism - against itself and all other life on this planet.
Which would prove that god, if he exists, is a fascist. At the very least, a vindictive enabler. Religion is brainwashing by the way, in case you are offended by this. (More along those lines here)
My interests and practice are fucking broad. I thought of myself once a fucking poet, later a fucking painter, more recently a fucking sculptor. Photography has played an increasingly prominent role. For fuck's sake. Parallel to making art, in Berlin and Zurich I was busy too as a curator of independent fucking spaces, focusing on exhibitions, events, performances and visitor fucking participation.
Thought and process are as important as finished works. Blah, blah. I mix disciplines, blur boundaries, etc, etc. Some of my work is unsettling, some deceptively pretty. A lot is story-telling, however opaque the story might be. Blah, blap, blop. Art is not always about communication. It can be concerned with the opposite, like, er, awkwardness and frustration and blah, blah.
Sting and the Police sang of poets, priests and politicians:
"And when (words) eloquence escapes me
Their logic ties me up and rapes me
De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
Their innocence will pull me through."
Here follows a bunch of wordy waffle I may soon edit or delete.
Big money will always control politics.
Visually I never left behind my childhood fascination with the surreal and the fantastic. Later, these and other interests merged into a preoccupation with the absurd. Hmmmmmmm.
Meanwhile dot dot dot variety of themes dot dot dot human and animal rights to monumental doodles dot dot dot returning at intervals etc. Art is always an exploration dot dot dot I am inclined to change direction, method dot dot dot dot dot if you lose the buzz connected to discovery, i.e. through manufacture of work because others like it, then you're not making significant art. Further pompous remarks, etc.
The opposite of love is fear.
Puzzle-solving has been underlying in the thought and making process since the 1999 painting series Learning Games For Babies. I stared at it every night from my bed for two months until it was finished. Barely worked on it at all. Pointless comment goes here. Nothing is ever finished. Not really. Everything I do is a sketch, a work in progress. A game still to be mastered.
How exciting.
In 2016 I enjoyed a two month solo residency called "Elevation" at the West Gallery here in the UK, after returning from 22 years making art and taking drugs in Europe. It was by now recycling art, involving odd and broken parts, laughingly assembled (for a one time architectural model-maker). It was grandly presented rubbish. Just like this page. It was site specific - a preferred way of working, whether that interests you or not - with everything constructed on location. Interfacing with a given space is crucial to whatever I present.
I really like rubbish. Piles of it. Shiny plastic eye-pleasing trash. Thinking about it, as I sometimes do, I always liked it, and always made rubbish of one kind or another. I've given and thrown away more lovely bits of art than you've had hot dinners.
This may be exaggerated.
If anything connects the tiny multitude of ideas to find within these pages, it is subversion. If a bit of art is not in some way subversive, or innovative which can amount to the same thing, then it is decoration. Decoration is not art.
TEMPORARY HUMAN INSTALLATIONS
In 2014, MM and I embarked upon a project in which I would wear a bucket on my head for 100 days and she would document our escapades. Spanning five countries, this little odyssey was filled with memorable moments, captured in many photos. We didn't know where it would lead, only that we enjoyed working this way, and that some day a book might appear for posterity. Since then we've developed similar projects, surrealistic, avant-garde, experimental. We love discovering locations, making absurd costumes, and inventing fake cultural snapshots around them which are not easy to categorise - even for us.
These are Temporary Human Installations, but could also form more permanent sculptures, specific for given sites.
A few words from my past might help explain. Apparently I was an active toddler known as Atom Bomb, who giggled a lot. I liked to take part in school plays, and might have become an actor, an early dream. But with the onset of Big School, among other pressures, depression set in. I preferred to disappear, literally, behind a book or in a dark room lost in music. As an adult, discovering art as both therapy and drive, I began to feel balanced and alive, more often at peace. Much later, I found that creating art in the shape of objects no longer sufficed. I was drawn out into the world - still an uncomfortable place - to awkwardly pose amidst sundry life. A shy exhibitionist, exorcising demons.
So I myself became the work's focus. These photographs address those feelings of shyness, angst, and related personal challenges still faced. Dressing up absurdly, yet not wishing to be approached, is a paradox. One compromise has been the use of full or partial face coverings. Whilst blind or partially blind, anonymous to others, other senses and inner atmosphere are accentuated, and a sublime tranquility can be achieved.
Blah, blah, blap.
March 21
LAST NIGHT'S BEDTIME STORY
Stressy week at the mother-in-law's in Zurich sorting through the container of stuff we left here on moving to the UK, the home I used to be proud of. Now an embarrassment. (Brexit rant goes here.) Boxes, boxes, massive sofa and flatscreen, art, more boxes. Dumped almost everything of my own, including that very personal box of very personal letters and scraps I've kept close since Wimbledon in the eighties. Painful to look through, so a glance had to do it. It felt like burying people alive, regret it already. But I did find the Nikki Sudden recordings among loads of others, assuming they are still readable, which someone enquired about recently. Still don't know what to do with them.
On the very up-side, a breakthrough putting Matilda to bed changes everything. After two and a half years of hellish bedtimes and nights which nearly did for me, one way or another, she's not only sleeping better, but will now nod off lying with one of us on the bed. Mercy be. Doesn't always work, can still take hours, and my back and nerves will never fully recover. But I've started to almost enjoy add-libbing the songs and stories in comfort. Here's one of last night's.
Children go into a very long, very dark tunnel. (Quickly, cheer it up!) They all have torches. They see that the walls and ceilings are covered in drawings and paintings of beautiful animals. (Lots of animal descriptions.) The children have never seen animals because they are mountain children. Half way along the tunnel they find a table on which there is a message for the children. It says that the pictures are for them. The animals made them. It says that all the animals are waiting to meet the children outside at the end of the tunnel. They are excited and hurry on, still admiring the pictures. (More animal descriptions.) They finally emerge into the sunshine to be greeted by all the beautiful animals waiting in the surrounding fields.
March 18, 2019
AFTER A TWENTY-SIX MONTHS BREAK
Coming around to putting some words back here.
Was it writers block? Midlife crises? The end of dreams? Laziness?
A combination I suppose. Not out of it yet, but getting on a little better.