My latest booklet: Back To Earth / My Trumpet, Miles Davis and The Art Rut

Back To Earth...back to reality? Heaven forbid, reality being so...(insert appropriate text according to outlook).

24 pages of art so relatively slim by my usual standards but as you know, it's all about the quality, not the width. And it's full of quality visualisations from the typewriter - it is! I'm blowing my own trumpet because no-one else is going to, are they? Or are they? Perhaps out there in the online universe someone is, at this very moment, blowing my trumpet for me. Heh-heh. I tried blowing an actual trumpet once. You can imagine how painful it sounded. I've nothing but admiration for anyone...no, not just anyone, anyone who blows a trumpet in a style I enjoy. Like Miles Davis, of course, but you know what he did, he started playing fast and smart Be-Bop in the commonly recognised hip style of the day, but never one to rest on his laurels, two decades later he could be heard yelping, squealing and barping (not a real word, is it?) along with his cutting edge crew of musos moulded to his own sound/vision. 

Dare I say (yes I do) that I have an affinity with Miles Davis with respect to my typewriting? Pretentious? Perhaps, but I thought it, now I'm committing it to the screen. I mean, like him, I'm always looking for new ways to say something with my visual poetry. I'm not saying one should always 'make it new', just that I like to move on and around themes, ideas, methods. I revisit some, expand others, test new ones and so on. We all know the Art Rut. An artist hits on a style then does it over and over again. I don't care. Carry on. It's not always to the detriment of the work. It creates a familiar style and as with, say, Warhol prints, if you like that style, it's good.

I suspect people like the familiar. Yes, in the sense of finding the avant-garde difficult, but also familiarity with an artists's style because it's instantly recognisable therefore somehow comforting...reassuring. The problem with an artist varying what they do is that the viewer, liking one style, may not like another and therefore gets grumpy, disappointed. Oh well...

All that said, I've been told I have a recognisable style. I can't second guess how others view all my work. I was, however, just a little disappointed, thinking 'Oh no, I'm predictable!' I can't tell when I'm making all those marks on all that paper...I don't get an overview, just something like one when, as happened recently, a collector visited and I had to go through the boxes, choosing a selection. Then I look back and sometimes think 'Damn, that was a good one!' If a piece really strikes me as great, I might think 'I should do more like that'. Sometimes I try but, you know what? You can't go back. In my case, perhaps the typewriter used broke forever and has been chucked away. But more...profoundly(?), it seems to be impossible to actually do it again because I've changed, somehow. 

Anyway, here's my latest booklet, inspired by science-fiction, all quotes coming from old sci-fi mags. If you'd like a copy, it costs £10 and is in the shop. 

TTFN!

Collage: The Working Day / Miles Davis Day / What I Say / Novel: The Death of Grass - John Christopher

 

RTomens, 2022

More constructionist art. 

It's been a Miles Davis kind of day - not 'kind', an actual Miles Davis day - not day, afternoon, to be precise. His electric era. Actually, his 'live' electric era. Which as you know is as good an era as any musician ever had. You don't know? You don't care? OK. Or not OK. I could get funny about it and tell you to bugger off then because anyone who doesn't appreciate electric Miles Davis shouldn't be spoiling my page with his/her eyes because despite your eyes working OK your ears definitely aren't. 

Miles Davis and collage are not so far apart, are they? Miles Davis and his producer, Teo Macero, actually, because as you know Teo was the master of sound collage, cutting and pasting together sounds (solos) by the band and making tracks as he went. Since the advent of CDs we've been able to hear the original versions, unedited, but it's not as if we could hear the joins as they were pressed onto vinyl. 

What I Say in an interview conducted by Green Linden Press is yet to be revealed. It will be on their site to coincide with the publication of my book, You Would Say That. You can pre-order a copy here. 

Self-examination is an interesting process. It forces one to...well...think about the whys and wherefores of creativity. Unlike many artists, I don't work self-consciously, with a constant flow of ideas and reasoning behind them as if prepared for an inevitable questioning. I don't intellectualise with a view to presenting myself as...a...clever, conceptually-aware artist.  Well, as Miles Davis famously said:  "If you understood everything I say, you'd be me!". Replace 'say' with 'did', of course. 

*

Imagine a virus from China that wrecks the world! It could only happen in a sci-fi novel, right? Wrong? Anyway, I recently read John Christopher's The Death of Grass. I actually read it all the way through, which for me is some feat because in my experience Philip Larkin's notion that most novels are a beginning, a muddle and an end is absolutely right. You know how it is, you start enthusiastically, all the pages to come promising so much, only for that enthusiasm to gradually ebb away with each turn of the page until there's none left - next! That's my common experience anyway. Me telling you that I finished The Death of Grass should be recommendation enough, not because I'm a well-read Lit Critic, but for the reasons previously mentioned.

TTFN 

Vispo: the evolution of You Don't Know Me (with help from Miles Davis)

 

RTomens, 2021

Then the last set they start playing what they don't know; which is out of sight!

- Miles Davis

With this quote from Ian Carr's book Miles Davis (first edition) in mind having read it this morning I rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the Imperial with a view to 'playing' what I don't know as if I usually do know (not true) - yes, inspired! - the typewriter keys are like those of a saxophone, aren't they? - that's what I imagined I 'play' anyway even if their horizontal nature suggests a piano (OK, I could be Chick Corea but instead I'm...Wayne Shorter?) - starting my 'solo' with trademark (ha-ha) straight random uppercase letters in lines at angles the please me before sliding the sheet side on to type Os which are the first surprise (I don't knOw where they came from) then more straight lines of letters growing down the page before the title (which I already knew) is typed towards the bottom, typed wrongly, as it happens, but as Sun Ra once said: 'Why don't you do something right and make a mistake?' although that's hardly a credo a typewriting vispo artist can live by because to seriously go wrong after a lot of typing just plain upsets the typist yet since I rarely make formal pieces requiring precision I can afford a mistake or two that will barely be noticed - onward - I start freeform (paper released from the grip of the carriage) Os snaking out from the top, through the straight lines towards the title, then red dashes (paper horizontal) aimed at the title in order to form a link, then thinking 'I'll unify it all' I type more Os, first at slightly altered angles then settling into regimented lines in black but shortened each time by one space with a view to landing on the title only to find they wouldn't therefore altering the position of each line to finally do so - add more Os to underscore the title then, finally, feel the need for more freeform Os as if breaking away from the (loosely) regimented lines of their other-way-up relatives...and I'm done.

A word about the title. It means to acknowledge the relationship between online viewers, me and my work. If they did know me better, would they still 'like' the work? Still, Miles Davis was no saint yet that fact cannot/should not prevent anyone from appreciating one of the 20th century's greatest musicians.

Vispo: No Longer Part Of The Language / Miles Davis

RTomens, 2020

This is one of three - playing with letters this afternoon.

What else did I do? Had a bath (and it's not even my birthday!). But I made the mistake of tuning in to Jazz FM before submerging myself and had to endure a lot of what we used to call 'Wine Bar Jazz' back in the 80s - godawful 'fusion' - oh how I suffered! Then, miraculously, the host played It Ain't Necessarily So by Miles Davis - whaaaaat? So, all was well, for a few minutes...and if THAT moment at 35secs isn't one of the finest in music I don't know what is...

Vispo/Collage: Exploiting The Upgrade Urge / Creative Fusion

RTomens, 2019

As always, the urge to reconfigure text is strong, though I must have some breaks from the word collage Vispo/concrete world and do so as the mood takes me. I'm waffling. A bit. If not waffling...meandering...struggling to construct proper sentences, perhaps as a result of so much sentence-mangling in search of visual 'poetry'. It's the only kind I can bring myself to read nowadays.

Once upon a time I wrote poetry...or rather, I ranted poetry, as was the popular mode in the early 80s. In an (unconscious) bid to cross Kerouac with Attila The Stockbroker, I probably fell a long way between stools. Serves me right. 

Yet still, today, I find myself fusing influences. I rarely adhere to a genre's strict boundaries, assuming we can claim they exist. There are many forms of Vispo, of course. Fusion of all kinds intrigues me - film, literature, music. In the case of the latter, Miles Davis' 'electronic' phase is an endless source of wonder and intrigue. William Burroughs' literal 'fusion' in the form of cut ups and his genre-tasting as in Clem Snide, 'private asshole' (and other pulp genres).

Exploiting The Upgrade Urge fuses paper collage with print. 

TTFN