The street as an event

"And then began the tour of that strange building situated in a street that looked forbidding, although it was distinguished and not gloomy. As seen from the street the building was reminiscent of a German Consulate in Melbourne. Its ground floor was entirely taken up with large stores. Although it was neither Sunday nor a holiday, the stores were closed, endowing this part of the street with an air of tedium and melancholy, a certain desolation, that particular atmosphere which pervades Anglo-Saxon towns on Sundays." Translated by Margaret Crosland, Peter Owen, London 1964

Thus begins Giorgio de Chirico's beautiful novel, "Hebdomeros".

I lost details of the passage in my memory, forgetting the "tedium" and only remembering the sense of tranquility, perhaps conflating de Chirico's text with his paintings which are often melancholy but never tediously so.

I used to detest Sundays in the UK: the sense of desolation depressed me no end, and caused me to resent the church. I believe nowadays the UK is more of a 24 hour culture so younger British readers of de Chirico will be unable to understand his reference.

By contrast, the centre of Florianopolis is dull at weekends, the shops closing early on Saturdays and remaining resolutely shut until Monday. There is not a strong work ethic here: there are restaurants which close between noon and 2pm so the staff can have their lunches. However, it is this dullness which makes for easy architectural photography, because such movement that there is assumes a special significance. I especially like the fellow fixing the pink roof at the left of the picture.

The street as stage set. In de Chirico, the street is a stage set: an idea also present in Balthus's The Street (1933):

What makes the street interesting, in contrast to the mall, is that it is a relatively uncontrolled environment. In the mall, even the climate is controlled, and the level of visual interest is in direct proportion to the lack of surprise. Sectors of the population are excluded in the mall because the shopping mall does not provide facilities to suit their pockets, or because security guards prevent their entry. And, of course, the mall excludes many functions that are offered on the street: churches, natural sights and historic monuments. This prevents the sort of chance encounters that make Balthus's picture amusing. Also, the speed and direction of movement in the mall is controlled too using escalators and lifts.

There is a revolt among the moneyed classes in Brazil against spontaneity because of the high crime rate in large cities. The street is a casualty of this revolt. Instead of reclaiming public space with improved security and reducing the massive disparity between themselves and poorer classes the bourgeoisie have retreated into their malls, condominiums and motor cars.

Blogger, Twitter and Flickr

This is a little review of what I've been doing online and why.

Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28509471@N05/collections/

This is where all my images are kept, and is a complete catalogue of almost everything worthwhile. I have about 200 followers here. Any image put there receives in first three days between 0 and 20 hits.

Blogger.

I 've been blogging fairly steadily for about 2 months now. I shall continue to use Blogger as I have been- that is, I shall be using it to comment on particular pieces and projects in Flicker, and my artwork in general. I also use it to publish short stories and asides about life and art in general.

I haven't used it to talk directly about my private life, primarily because I perceive an "invisible line" between the artist (blogger) and his personal life. There has been a considerable amount written about this sort of thing, where someone has written pieces based on their own family experiences and this has caused some sort of controversy or other: to me this is intrusive and an abuse of power. Even if people agree to be written about they are unlikely really to know the consequences. And if the pieces are in any way negative then they rarely have the literary skills or legal will to gain redress.

To me the artist necessarily adopts a persona for his work- art is artifice, after all- and the re-invention of self is simply part of this (that is why, for instance, attempts to uncover the "real" Bob Dylan or Pablo Picasso are so silly).

Twitter.

After four days, I have about 20 Followers on Twitter. I've been sending Twitter messages to ensure that when various subjects such as monoprinting or artists appear, so does a link to my work. Clearly, the results of this will take some time to show

I have been experimenting with individual links to specific blog entries and to individual images. if I post a link to an image I usually get between 10 and 20 hits. But I am not sure how many of these hits turn into sustained "loyal" followers. People seem much more reluctant to click on Blog entries, possibly because they know they will have to read something as opposed to simply digesting an image.

Also, when viewers access these linked images they seldom go on to look though other related images which are on the same Flickr page. Also, they rarely "favourite" work- so I can't help feeling that they are simply clicking as a sort of motor response to seeing a link and a keyword that appealed to them.

What's it all about?

The objective of all this is for me to pass my time in a way that I find reasonably amusing. For me, that means engaging in a dialogue with the public- the Internet is potentially a magnificent tool for this, combining the constrictions of diary, gallery space art review and discussion in one easily accessible location - specifically a dialogue where my artistic interests meet those of the wider public.

Gaining individual hits is good for an ego buzz, but in the long term is neither here nor there if I do not thereby create more "followers" (ghastly term) because it's the dialogue with these followers that I find enjoyable. Postings tend to have either a wide and shallow or narrow and deep base. For instance, images of girls have a wide general appeal and will receive a good number of hits, but they are too ubiquitous and superficial to create lasting followers.

Contrariwise, monotypes on Kafkaesque themes will have a much narrow but deeper following and are much more likely to create the loyal blog following that I desire.

I shall come back to this in about three months time for another review.

Image above is from "The Universal Alphabet"
http://www.flickr.com/photos/28509471@N05/sets/72157608815122656/

The Secret Friends

Back when I lived in London some 15 years ago, I began producing a series of pictures called "The Next Generation of Poets" in watercolour and ink. I love toy theatres, and had the idea of using these characters in a series of scentarios. But the project never quite got off the ground- perhaps it was too ill-defined.

But the idea of creating imaginary portraits remained - ergo this recent collection of paintings.

They are all the size of a conventional playing card.

The rest of the series can be found here-
http://www.flickr.com/photos/28509471@N05/sets/72157610575984189/

Before the Party

Before the Party was painted back in 1993, when I was living in Maude Road, in Camberwell, London.

It shows four men- three are dressed to go out, while one remains in bed. He is ill, or sleeping. A putto urinates in one corner; there is an elephant, a fantastical bird and a giant snail in the room too. A demon lurks behind the bed.

It was a breakthrough painting for me, bringing to a close several years of doubt about what sort of creative art I should be doing. I had graduated unhappily, knowing somehow that the art I'd made for my graduation show did not do what I knew in my gut art should do, which is, in Hamsun's words, to reveal the "unconscious life of the mind".

I'd been oscillating uncomfortably between art that was essentially impressionist and art that was very directly autobiographical and illustrational for some years. I'd wanted to incorporate elements I'd gained from the sort of literature I like - (fables, fairy tales, Kafka, Bulgakov and Waugh) - into my work but hadn't been able to find a format. I think I'd felt embarassed about how close my work was to children's book illustration, as if that wasn't sophisiticated enough.

The themes of the painting are friendship and strangeness and death, but I do not understand it entirely myself. I made it very instinctively, following no sketch. I think sometimes art is made like sleepwalking, following deeply set patterns of movement and consciousness. Perhaps it's a false idea that art can be "understood", anyway? No-one would talk about "understanding" a game of football or a plate of asparagus, other sensory experiences.

Artistic breakthroughs are solutions, but the solutions they bring bring problems, -artists often get stuck repeating the same solutions for their entire lives (the worst case being Chagall, I think, whose work turned into a a series of catch-phrases with the same forms, colours, settings, faces and hands used over and over again from 1930 until his death in 1985. Miro likewise, alas). For me the risk was that I would do "room" paintings forever, and I baulked against that, going on to produce a lot of architectural pictures in a sort of realist style, while continuing to work on these more idiosyncratic images.

It was painted at an odd, lonely juncture in my life, but after I painted it things improved for me, at least temporarily.

A Social Gathering (sketch for an unpainted painting)

Various people meet at a party, their intention being to consume alcohol and debase themselve in different ways.

It's significant where they meet. It has to be a very large room, grand and gloomy and sparsely furnished. Such furniture that there is is Empire Style, so heavy it is almost immovable. A fireplace scarcely warms the freezing room.

All the people at this party are male, but sometimes women with loose morals attend. They are all High Tories: utterly reactionary. They declare themselves to be patriots, but they despise their fellow nationals as peasants. They enjoy ceremony: the parties always have a ritualistic feel, with patriotic speeches and toasts. They dress to suit the solemnity of the occasion, in dinner suits.

Alcohol, preferable deep red in colour, is served by waiters whose obsequiousness knows no bounds.

As is often the case with such people, they are surprisingly liberal in terms of private conduct. And although the former part of their meeting is formal, later this liberalism dominates, as the gathering transforms into a bacchanal: not only do they become copiously drunk but they allow their latent homosexual urges and sado-masochistic desires to manifest themselves.

Yard

A choice between two images. The former (black and white) is too relentless, as if a specific interpretation of the scene -that it is a depressing place- is the necessary response to it.

I'm happier with the coloured one. Such places are not classically beautiful (classicism = the beauty of order) but they aren't without aesthetic interest or curiosity. I guess they show the private lives of cities. I did not enter the yard and explore it because I saw a policeman there and I didn't want to have to explain myself (actually, the police here are rather laid back and pleasant -at least, in my experience- but nonetheless...).

And I suppose such photos are part of a tradition through Bernd and Hilla Becher and Stephen Shore, to Sickert to Eugene Atget, going back to the Dutch painters of the 17th century. They remain incredibly unpopular with viewers, however, receiving very few "hits".

Two points about the photo:

1. To the right of the white police car is a flatbed truck. Behind the truck is a grey building. This is connected to the fawn building by means of a funny little sloping corridor.

2.If the tree beside the telegraph post is not cut soon, the telegraph post will fall.

3. The picture was taken on a Sunday, which probably explains its peacefulness.

Me

Here I am.