Not fit for purpose / Soul Train

RTomens, 2021

Wassup? 

Lying on my side in bed this morning I could feel my stomach gently nudging at the waistband of my comfy home wear slob about trews and I didn't like it. No, I didn't. It's not a new feeling. To be honest, I've had it since about July last year. So I lay in bed feeling a bit...fat. LJ is always saying I should do more exercise. She's right. 

People are right about a lot of lifestyle advice but do we obey them? Perhaps you do. Perhaps you're one of those Peloton addicts. Every other TV ad these days features people (mostly women) in lycra, exercising. Obviously, exercising is big during lockdown life. And jogging. It's a fad. People who would otherwise just get the bus to the tube and walk five minutes to the office running, running, running around as if that's what they'd do if they were working.  Annoying. 

LJ was also probably right whilst we were on a walk the other day and she predicted that London would one day be populated only by the middle classes and their immigrant servants (cleaners, nannies, delivery drivers etc). A cheery thought.

One sure way to cheer meself up is to watch a Soul Train dance clip. The fashion, style, attitude and, of course, music. The Temptations' Glass House has been a fave of mine since buying the album, A Song For You, in 1975. Everyone was slim in 1975.

Priority Art / Mess Around with Art and Ray Charles

RTomens, 202o

You have to mess around, don't you? Oh the joys of being an amateur artist - mess around as much as you like! How awful it would be to make good money from art and never be able to mess around. Hold on, perhaps I'd rather make good money and have to be serious.

What? 

I was messing around at the week-end - experimenting with different styles. I like to think (delude meself?) that despite exploiting various approaches my playthings have some kind of...unifying style...or theme...or some...thing. Someone once told me they did. But he was friend, not, you'll be surprised to learn, a serious collector of art who had just been to see me and buy several pieces for thousands of pounds. 

Priority Art (above) resulted in the desire to mess around, more casually than usual. To parody, yes? To be ironic, of course. To call one's own work a 'priority' must be a joke, of course. Mind you, I know one or two artists who actually seem to think like that. The text is from a manifesto by Naum Gabo. I wonder if he ever messed around?

Well, here's Ray Charles...classic tune!

Vispo/Text Art: There's Always More / Of Melancholy Lost

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How can I have lost my copy of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy? It's ridiculous! Our flat isn't that big and neither is my book collection, but Burton's book is, big I mean. It's 1392 pages long. I just read a review of a radio programme about it, which inspired me to dip in but it's nowhere to be found. Perhaps, I thought, I'd used it to prop up our handmade wardrobe which has taken to leaning precariously of late and needs books wedged between it and the handmade standing next to it. No, it's not there. Scan my bookshelves again...no. Not being able to find it has, I confess, made me feel pretty melancholic, as does the thought that I could ever have sold such a book. Burton himself may have appreciated the irony, but I don't think losing books was a subject he covered.

Print: The Human Tomorrow / Ornette Coleman: Tomorrow Is The Question

RTomens, 2020

This piece, The Human Tomorrow,  is comprised of text from my old cut prose project, Shadows, the totality of which has never been edited into 'shape' but the contents have provided a few choice lines, plucked from one context and placed into another. All the lines in Shadows were plucked from somewhere, rearranged and sampled over the years, usually combined with images. 

Ornette Coleman questioned tomorrow in the classic title of his album. Few other musicians were capable of posing such a profound question. Coleman's very presence in 1959 questioned the 'meaning' of Jazz and what it's 'tomorrow' might be, what it would sound like. But if what he was playing then sounded 'alien' to most, with Free Jazz in '61 he sandblasted Jazz completely. It's as if he got something off his chest before resuming his journey on a far from ordinary path. Perhaps he had stared into an abyss and didn't fancy submerging himself in it.

Drawing: Inexplicable

RTomens, 2019 

Drawing outside this morning, sunlight filtered through golden Autumn leaves, air fresh and cool. This is from the drawn pages series, which will appear in booklet form later this year, or early next.

Print/Text Art: Stranger / Reading Brion Gysin

RTomens, 2019

I'm on the 91 bus this morning reading Burroughs and Friends: Lost Interviews (RE/Search), the section with Brion Gysin talking about art, how he didn't attend art school, when I get off in Crouch End, grab a coffee and sit outside the cafe where two men are talking...what? I don't know. Some Middle Eastern dialect? They could have been Moroccan. I like to think they were, coinciding with reading about Gysin in Tangier. It would have been a coincidence Burroughs would have appreciated and more than that no doubt had a theory that it was no coincidence.

Destruction In Art Symposium/Guardian Review/Text Art: Wandering About

Flicking through Boooook: The Life and Work of Bob Cobbing (highly recommended) the other day the image above caught my eye, again, so I thought I'd post it. No surprise that a critic from the mainstream press didn't 'get it'. The passage below stood out, even chimed with me, you might say. 'Destroyers-in-art'? Yes. The urge to destroy is inherent (?), at least from two perspectives; one being the creator's dissatisfaction (occasional?) with his/her own work, the other being a nihilistic streak possessed by some (me, when I'm disgruntled) to burn every gallery down, all the museums and with them the reverential claptrap they endorse, yes, even for artists I admire...oh to see, as the character in JG Ballard's Millennium People does, Tate Modern in flames as I cross the bridge! 

But wait, no, come on. Not really. BUT, as I've said before (you weren't listening?) in the spirit of Punk, Futurism and Blasted Wyndham Lewis it's not bad thing to have an iconoclastic streak spurring on a healthy self-regard as opposed to potentially poisonous hero-worship which can lead to feeling inferior to the Gods of Art.

'Words are displaced and lines transposed in a new and meaningful way' doesn't sound like a negative statement. I must re-read the review. It's the final line that leans towards dismissal, yet even that could be a positive view. 'Perverse, ugly, and anti-social'? He could be describing a Sex Pistols gig. Ah, the shock of the old.

Well, I've been displacing lines and words (and letters) on the Remington. Here's one of the latest results...

Wandering About, RTomens, 2019