Tony Cragg at the Lisson Gallery / Vispo-collage: And Reveal / Talking about your art & talking bollocks / Sex Pistols

 

Reflections at an exhibition - Tony Cragg at the Lisson Gallery. We sat on the low white wall in the courtyard and ate some cake. LJ thought the sculptures would be easy to steal, looking at how low the boundary wall was. But we wondered how heavy they were. Too heavy to lift? And how would they be sold? 

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And Reveal, RTomens 2025

Another collage of old vispo pieces, this time against type on a photo of material found in the street. Sometimes I would like to say more about my work but perhaps that is only the effect of the idea that artists should say/be able to say something about their work - something...profoundly illuminating, perhaps? But I am not in the Art world. I am not in the academic world, that's for sure. Do I play dumb, like Warhol, or am I really dumb? 

All I can talk about right now...no...not even talk, only mention, is the poor performance by Chelsea last night in losing to Arsenal with barely a shot on target. That and the fact that this morning, at 11.04, my mind is asleep and my eyelids yearning to close so I stare into space frequently, out the window at the rare occurrence of sunlight illuminating the houses opposite and really I should be outside in that sunlight, preferably on a clifftop with the cool sea breeze on my face instead of hunched over this keyboard in the city...

Someone leaves a comment on my FB post of a recent artwork but it is an obscure (to me) reference which I don't understand, possibly because I am dumb, or because he is a lot younger and is saying something only under-25s would understand. Which reminds me, when I said 'bollocks' as we walked down the road the other day I wondered if Young People would even know what that means/refers to. It feels like such a 70s word, even though I think it's still commonly used (amongst men) today in the UK. Americans never say 'bollocks', do they?  Now I think of the Sex Pistols album, Never Mind The Bollocks and realise that it must, to some degree, have introduced the word to a previously ignorant world, although not to the extent that it then became part of their language. The thought of people all around the world puzzling over the word in 1977 amuses me.

I presume it's common to talk bollocks about either someone else's art (hello critics!) or your own. That's a stupid sentence. 

I mean...

...artspeak is widely recognised as bollocks and artists either willingly puff up their work with pretentious bollocks or are encouraged to do so by galleries. Perhaps I'm envious of their vocabularies being greater than mine, along with their ability to concoct clever-sounding sentences in relation to their art.

Or perhaps I'm just...a...lazy sod!