'One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words'. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)
Below is a poem written by the wonderful Sapphire Mccullough.
We shall soon be collaborating on a marvellous piece, whereby I will illustrate one of her poems, but not in the ordinary sense, that we have seen already done. Looking forward to this immensely.
I think how she writes is sheer brilliance, and this is just one of my favourite pieces. XXX
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Feel your thoughts. Thoughts that penetrate my mind, and make me feel we are closer.
Closeness never seems more apparent, than when you smile softly.
Softly I approach you, so that I do not disturb the quiet concentration, Concentration of thoughts provoke you, to whisper them compellingly.
Compelling me, I find myself wanting to turn your chin, to search deeper. Deep in my memory, I escape reconciling only gentle needs, that linger.
Lingering pathways, that hold such moments in their cooling narrow pass. Passing by again, and if ever, I would never let you go so far away.
Away in some place, that I felt compelled to seek you out, suffering softly. Soft smile, and then fiercely is this the way, that you always look in pain.
Pain that fills the entire room, when you are absent from such special times. Timing each move again, I surrender the source of my thought process.
Processing each idea, and then let it go to a place where you are very still. Still I hope and wonder if you can be persuaded to say something now.
Now you are still quiet, and peacefully tranquil in your own private dreams. Dreams from which only I in wakefullness find your every move fascinating.
Fascinating touches of colour and hues that blend across your body of work. Work that never has an end even when it appears tedious to pretenders.
Pretences have no place in what you would call your creative space. Space that widens with the misunderstandings that others have of you.
You always place me in a special way a little too high to reach or fall. Falling, I wonder if you would move fast enough to catch me or never to.
To carry a small tray of delicacies, star-fruit, fancifull sweetmeats to share. Sharing, only this morsel of figs, and sip this mead cup sweet with honey.
Honey shaded eyelashes that flicker when caught by the winds cold breath. Breath that is only icy when the window is open and our body heat is all.
All that I am holds you now in such a conceptual place as only art can. Can art lead you back to where we commanded truthfulness in silence.
Silent gestures leave us both to ponder our knowing smiles, sans fatality.
Tuesday 11 August 2009
Monday 10 August 2009
Internationally Renowned Video Artist...TONY OURSLER.
The pioneering video artist talks about the pernicious influence of TV, society's "emblems of need", and the fragment of madness in all of us.
Ouuurrrrrsler Studio" - as Tony Oursler's answering machine intones with gravelly drama - is a frenetic place. As I arrive, its abiding presence is padding about in shorts and T-shirt, trying to make travel plans whilst also readying a metre-high white model light bulb to be sent off in the mail. He seems harried. That may be because it's nearing 100 degrees outside, but it may also be because he'd rather be doing things at a slower pace. He sometimes likes to spend a part of the day drawing. Sometimes, he likes to write. And sometimes, he tells me, he just needs to get out and gather his thoughts, "to read and snoop around". It makes you wonder if he'd rather do without a traditional studio. After all, so much of what lends his work its vitality is almost phantasmal, ghostly, televisual.
But Oursler likes a perch, and since he arrived in New York back in 1983 his have been at various places in downtown Manhattan. For a time he lived on Fulton Street, close to the World Trade Center. (He made a memorable free-form documentary about the morning the twin towers collapsed, when he ran around the area frantically with a camera, recording his own confusion as much as the city's.) But a few years ago he and his wife, the abstract painter Jacqueline Humphries, moved to a 19th-century brownstone on Henry Street in the Lower East Side, once home to a synagogue.
He works from two of its downstairs floors. The upper one holds relatively peaceful offices and places to lounge about, the lower is the grimy pithead, where assistants carve the white, sculptural components of his installations, and where Oursler tinkers with arrangements of objects and backdrops and projections to create his finished work. The latter is a process almost like the composition of a sentence: recently, he even started to assemble a library of motifs to give him more range, but he has been finding the process difficult. "For a while I was trying to shoot another element every day," he says. "A burning dollar bill, or a spinning penny, maybe someone dialling a cell-phone. But then I realised that all these small tasks are actually big tasks. How do you shoot these things?"
It's enough to make one a little neurotic, although Oursler firmly believes we all have a little fragment of madness lodged within us. It's simply the modern condition, he says. Yet as he hopes to demonstrate in a new series of work on show at London's Lisson Gallery in September, the triggers of neurosis are spreading and multiplying. He explains the new work. "It's a suite on the subject of filling a void in someone's personality, or vice-versa, like a personality extending out as an appendage. So there are images of chronic gambling, compulsive cleanliness, over-eating. They're all linked by this idea of a need, a desire to complete a missing part of the person."
Thus, Oursler has given each "need" its own inflated emblem. There are giant scratchcards, a mobile-phone whose screen pulsates with dancing girls, a cluster of towering cigarettes which burn down - and miraculously reform - to the sound of sucking breath, and a £20 note with a talking Queen (Oursler was still working on her lines when we met).
It is, if you like, a tour of the seven vices. "Thing is," he says, "I don't know if we're going to have enough room to have all the vices in one gallery show!"
Ouuurrrrrsler Studio" - as Tony Oursler's answering machine intones with gravelly drama - is a frenetic place. As I arrive, its abiding presence is padding about in shorts and T-shirt, trying to make travel plans whilst also readying a metre-high white model light bulb to be sent off in the mail. He seems harried. That may be because it's nearing 100 degrees outside, but it may also be because he'd rather be doing things at a slower pace. He sometimes likes to spend a part of the day drawing. Sometimes, he likes to write. And sometimes, he tells me, he just needs to get out and gather his thoughts, "to read and snoop around". It makes you wonder if he'd rather do without a traditional studio. After all, so much of what lends his work its vitality is almost phantasmal, ghostly, televisual.
But Oursler likes a perch, and since he arrived in New York back in 1983 his have been at various places in downtown Manhattan. For a time he lived on Fulton Street, close to the World Trade Center. (He made a memorable free-form documentary about the morning the twin towers collapsed, when he ran around the area frantically with a camera, recording his own confusion as much as the city's.) But a few years ago he and his wife, the abstract painter Jacqueline Humphries, moved to a 19th-century brownstone on Henry Street in the Lower East Side, once home to a synagogue.
He works from two of its downstairs floors. The upper one holds relatively peaceful offices and places to lounge about, the lower is the grimy pithead, where assistants carve the white, sculptural components of his installations, and where Oursler tinkers with arrangements of objects and backdrops and projections to create his finished work. The latter is a process almost like the composition of a sentence: recently, he even started to assemble a library of motifs to give him more range, but he has been finding the process difficult. "For a while I was trying to shoot another element every day," he says. "A burning dollar bill, or a spinning penny, maybe someone dialling a cell-phone. But then I realised that all these small tasks are actually big tasks. How do you shoot these things?"
It's enough to make one a little neurotic, although Oursler firmly believes we all have a little fragment of madness lodged within us. It's simply the modern condition, he says. Yet as he hopes to demonstrate in a new series of work on show at London's Lisson Gallery in September, the triggers of neurosis are spreading and multiplying. He explains the new work. "It's a suite on the subject of filling a void in someone's personality, or vice-versa, like a personality extending out as an appendage. So there are images of chronic gambling, compulsive cleanliness, over-eating. They're all linked by this idea of a need, a desire to complete a missing part of the person."
Thus, Oursler has given each "need" its own inflated emblem. There are giant scratchcards, a mobile-phone whose screen pulsates with dancing girls, a cluster of towering cigarettes which burn down - and miraculously reform - to the sound of sucking breath, and a £20 note with a talking Queen (Oursler was still working on her lines when we met).
It is, if you like, a tour of the seven vices. "Thing is," he says, "I don't know if we're going to have enough room to have all the vices in one gallery show!"
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