Month: November 2009

I got a little money recently, enough to pay most of my bills or at least keep people reasonably happy, and a bit left over to get a bunch of DVD’s. I always tend to wait until I can get them in the recent releases and watch what I hope are a big bunch of good movies almost without rest. Anyways last night I got a movie called “The Wrestler” with Mickey Rouke and I watched it first simply ’cause I wasn’t expecting much and while I watched I didn’t feel I was getting much. It kinda lopped along on the border of bad acting but after a while I realised what was seen as bad acting was actually incredibly good acting because the people came accross as plain ol’ human. Kinda like the reality shows with all the stupid people but without the playing up to the camera, the edge of idiocy removed and starkly honest. Wow, this is kinda good I thought, but I still couldn’t see the point. So it’s still just lopping along and then it’s over… no bang, no twist, just over and I go to bed thinking, well, I wasn’t bored but I wasn’t excited either… oh well. I just didn’t get it but this morning it kinda resurfaced and the subtle details were so subtle it took sleeping on it to realise how great a movie it actually was.

I also read a book lately, by the guy who wrote the last king of scotland, the book prior to the movie (the wrestler) I guess, and it was kinda like the movie. It lopped along but it’s real significance didn’t really hit me until I’d finished it and put it down and a few days had passed. I kinda knew it was good because as I was reading it there were some passages that stood out, I didn’t really get them, but I knew they were gold. Gold I couldn’t see yet but I knew it was there.

I went back into it yesterday to find one of those golden passages, before I watched the movie in the evening, and now I’m going to write it down and it’s eerily similar to what the movie was actually about. I like this eerie stuff where you know theres something there but you can’t quite put your finger on it and it kinda replicates itself in different areas until it dawns on one what it all kinda means… but you never get the whole story and have to take it all in on faith that its significance to your own life is important.

The book is called Turbulence and it’s by Giles Foden.
” So many of our deepest feelings, in any case, come to us as doubtful, tangled, compound experiences. Events themselves as they happen condition the way we see previous events, making us recalibrate the chain of causation even as we teeter along it, casting all the while a speculative eye at a web of possible futures… This is what living – conscious living – is.”

Isn’t that absolutely wonderful?

My workshop is full of turbulence but it’s not turbulent. Not to me.

I’ve just written up a three page statement of intent as an artist, to give to people who view my furniture at Aesthete Gallery in Parnell, because there has been a little argument going on about whether the furniture can be seen as art. It’s always been art for me simply because, though it may be a chair or a table, thats merely the frame that it sits in, that which allows it to hung in a life, and the way that its put together and the way that I acheive that is of far more interest to me than the final intended use. To me it’s an alchemical process where I take the raw lead of utility and seive it through my own reflections on existence, it’s possibilities and myriad of interconnections, to make finished articles containing further orbits of electrons to make gold.

Also it’s a process of hard work and I’m not going to make it easy for people to accept what I do as art. I worked hard so I’m going to make the people who might seek to acquire my work work hard as well. I’m going to make them question what I’ve acheived and make them have to dig in territory they may not be inclined to dig in to find the treasure I feel sure I have made. I raise the question that if it is obviously art then is it really art or merely the dying off of art as it again finds growth in new areas?

One chair back from its sojourn at the Nathan homestead and two more unfinished.

My plan for a grant from the Pollock Krausner trust, referee’d so far by John Radford and Phil Dadson (I need one more), is going to be about building artworks that, as people meet them, are first sculptural, then sound and light making, then furniture, then musical instruments… Thats really going to have people wondering what I’m up to.

The subframe is all finished and the steel protected against rust so it’s onto the sewing up this weekend.

We have this monthly competition over at DIY stompboxes and I’ve already won two times, the first time for something that didn’t end up working, the second time for something I haven’t actually finished, and I’m up for the third time for something that I quickly designed after talking to Paul crowther and possibly have no intention of building…

Admittedly the first two were quite long winded in their construction and may have been quite inspiring to some concerning the scope of their actions but the simple fact that they haven’t yet made a sound ranks me as one of the worlds few who seem to be able to win at things without actually keeping to the unspoken rules.

This morning I had a first look at the voting thread and had a bunch of laughs that a drawing has garnered the first vote… well, I haven’t actually checked the voting but lets re-phrase that… the first published comment. I do find it incredibly interesting that, with my incredibly limited knowledge of electronics, and believe me that it is limited, that I could have so much acknowledgement by what can only be the worlds most intense collection of guitar FX builders. I don’t mean intense in that they’re all beady eyes concentration freaks hanging out for their next fix of solder fumes but that as far as this tent is concerned a vast majority of the best are crammed into it… in – tent.

I think, if anything, it’s my constructional abilities combined with my efforts to keep doing things that are completely beyond my actual abilities, to walk the high wire line between patience and frustration that keeps testing my ability to keep at a task, and I think that may be the thing that this collection of fellows see as something worth… admiring?

I had a saying, I made up, below a drawing I did years ago “we chased away the apathy of modernity and … became the divine losers.” and that kinda sums up my life I suppose. Well, I hope it does.

The saying was at the bottom of a poster I drew with Shakespeare on a skateboard and I did it because a movie I was in, about the early days of skateboarding in NZ, had just come out and my old boss, Frank Edwards, had talked about doing a signature board and so I was doing an artwork for the bottom of it. Nothing happened but I did do a drawing.

The name was taken from a Stranglers song which has that infamous line about Trotsky getting an ice pick in the back of his head.

Theres a photo, I’m rambling now, thats one of my favourites and it was taken in Mexico and features Trotsky, Diego Riviera and that guy who was the father of surrealism, thats him, Andre Breton. That photo, for me, is or sums up the greatness of the twentieth century. I’m not a great fan of Breton, nor one of surrealism ( except for the art of that Spanish woman who went to live in Mexico, really alchemistic and obscure, nope, can’t remember her name at all. She influenced a whole generation of woman artists but has never really found popular favour… alike Lee Bontecou… who is my favourite artist of all time. Got it! Remedios Varos! check her out. ), but it was a great thing to have happened when it did and tempered the excesses of materialism which were the all prevailing concept of that century of industrialism turned to consumerism. Combine that with the greatest social experiment to go completely wrong, socialism, and the peoples art of Diego Riviera and so that photo of those three men goes down in my personnal mythology as one of the best and inspiring things to highlight the meaning of an epoch. And each man got into lots of trouble during their lifetimes, they just wouldn’t hold to prevailing attitudes and kept pushing the envelope that was their own life. I suppose thats what I’m talking about when I say Divine loser. It’s kind of about winning by default I suppose, never actually winning within the time one lives, almost being onto another climb when the flag is finally raised, and the cameras are rolling, on the previous mountain of acheivement. Or maybe it’s about knowing when you can see the top that thats enough and actually standing up there to be seen to be on the top isn’t what its about at all.

Here we have the ottoman with material on it and below that the chaise lounge basically finished, constructionally, and awaiting cleanup and protecting layer. Easy as!
Today I did another bunch of work on the ottoman support structure and fitted it to the base. To come is the decoration and a little work to “spread” the support structure somewhat. Then I’ll sew up the top and it’ll be finished.

So no photos… finished the construction of the chaise lounge and am beginning in on the tidy up ready for coating of the protecting coat which is called penetrol. Basically linseed oil with a few additives and it works really well. Refurbished one of the chairs I made way back in about ’94 and given it has been rusting away ever since, except for the initial coat of protection the chemist at the electroplaters put on it, it has built up a very, well, what can we say, tarnished coating of iron oxide (rust) which has eaten into the surface and upon cleanup it has an age to it that is really quite fetching.
Also go some 75mm foam for the Ottoman and have stapled a layer of black calico over it and have laid out the (to be removable) cover of black drill, black indian cotton and the black leather and it’s going to be really nice. I’ll start in on the metal substructure later today. Right now I’m off to the gallery to drop off the chair and to get out of the house for a few hours. Go a bit stir crazy just spending all the day long welding, bending steel and grinding.
But I’ve troved through my old photos and heres one I took of Kierans house, out in the bush to the right of Paparoa, from when I was up there helping him with some building.