ARTISTS TALKING

# 31 [25 August 2008]

I'm suffering from extreme physical inertia at the moment. I've spent a good proportion of today pricking holes in 16mm film so I think I need to get out. Surface Gallery have invited me to a closing party for the show which is now their last. As I missed the opening due to malaise I might give this one a go. Hayley (www.hayleylock.com), also in the  show, might be going too so I won't have to hire an escort. Both of the readers of this blog will have already noticed, because of my constant moaning, that I am uncomfortable at openings (& closings).  Apart from free drink and company I usually turn up at private views hoping to be struck by lightning. It does happen, but I always feel stupid standing there waiting waving my umbrella in the air. 

The show at Studio Voltaire got a review in Time Out. Reviews are  something else that I also crave. Something to do with lack of confidence or megalomania or both. Here's an excerpt:

Elisabeth Lecourt’s painting of a greyish, blank-faced female head reverberates, in its inhumanity, with Alex Pearl’s economically unnerving, half-comic DVD of what appears to be a backlit effervescing tablet in water, the holes in it representing malevolent eyes and mouth, disintegrating and ascending.

Break such works down and their tension dissipates. In the moment of reception, though, they cast small but effective spells.

By Martin Herbert

I was pleased to be mentioned alongside Lecourt's painting and that they used a photo of my favourite piece in the article (Reflect, 2008 by Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth). Most of all I liked what I take to be mild criticism in the penultimate line. When I dream about eating; as I bite into the apple, donut, whatever, there is always nothing there. I've always wanted to make art like that.

# 32 [2 September 2008]

Alex!! felt so slow in the head today that I forgot to ask if you were still up to Nottingham? If so, then I think I am going for it, stay the night in that hotel you mentioned and head back on the saturday....do you want to come along? and yes I can be your escort.............Hx

So hotel and escort booked I headed north on Friday.  Hayley was driving using her newly borrowed satnav. I loved it, or her, a slightly condescending lady of indeterminate age (the sat nav, not Hayley) who kept us almost entertained for the whole journey. She beeped repeatedly if we went too fast and was extremely calm when we appeared to leave the road entirely. I'd sworn blind that I had stayed at the Nottingham Ibis before but I clearly hadn't, it wasn't where I remembered and it looked completely different. Still once we had staggered down the inexplicably swaying corridors and I had prised our twin beds the regulation six inches apart the room seemed very nice indeed.

We found the gallery easily and spent the first few minutes eavesdropping conversations about untimely evictions and vol au vents while manoeuvring ourselves in front of the fan. There was drink; lager, cava and wine, much drink, too much drink. The show itself was friendly, it had similarities to the Studio Voltaire show but was not as cool, more humour, variety, colour and frivolity. There was a bizarre sequinned toy tigerskin rug which would have sneaked into a school craft fayre and a rather magnificent injured giant  rabbit slumped on the floor. My favourite things were Bruce Ingram's two fabulous mythological assemblages made out of paint trays and magazine cutouts.

After a while we introduced ourselves (well Hayley did) chatted, got directions to a show at the Fame Factory, drank more drink and took Hayley's drawings off the wall before beating a hasty retreat into the night. 

Later we finished off a bottle of wine while watching a serial killer film. We never found the Fame Factory, probably because Hayley insisted on calling it the foam factory.

I'm not going to write about the next day, as I'd prefer to forget all about it.

# 33 [8 September 2008]

I'm traveling again tomorrow, heading off for a meeting about this new online magazine Refutation. The launch date has been put back a bit which I'm not too upset about as I'd only just begun to cobble together something approaching ok. I'm meeting Mark in a pub in Shoreditch although we haven't decided on how to recognise each other; maybe looking lost and hesitant will be enough. So far I've come up with a sort of rambling text about the technological devices I own which lead up to one of my filmic attempts to recreate the universe. I suppose they deal with connections between: technology and human experience and the world which almost responds to the brief I was given. As usual I feel stupidly nervous about the whole thing.

# 34 [10 September 2008]

I think the meeting went ok although I made the mistake of arriving too early and filling the gap with beer. The appointed location was the Commercial Tavern in Shoreditch. Admittedly I manage to feel out of place in most places but this highly mannered dark rococo hostelry, although very friendly, tested my chameleonic abilities to their limits. I might as well have been wearing a sign sayin "old, ugly, untrendy and awkward." Mark and Lesley arrived before I got too incoherent and we went over the magazine's aims and the stuff I had sent them. I don't think they were too impressed by my writing but they did like the film and my very vague ideas about developing some sort of text based computer game. I shouldn't suggest things when I am drunk, I have no idea how to make a text based computer game.

# 35 [28 September 2008]

Yesterday I went to 'From the Picturesque to the Demolished' an evening of video and performance organised by Jon Purnell and Julika Gittner. On the way down I found myself suffering from ticket anxiety. It often happens on the Lowestoft line. I join it from a one-track abandoned station and often the guard fails to get round the train before he/she inexplicably abandons us at Ipswich. I then sit surrounded by threatening signs until we arrive in London. I know I deserve a ticket and will probably not be forced to pay a huge fine for defrauding National Express but it doesn't stop my fear as I explain myself at the ticket office. 

I arrived at the Railway Tavern on time after a refreshing meal at Burger King (it was that or Subway) These were the only places to eat at the entrance to the 2012 athletes' village. The event start had been postponed because Arsenal were playing Hull on the big screen. Passions were running high. One vocal drinker had a huge accumulator finishing on Hull beating Arsenal so I sat where I could watch that and a showreel of videos. The art mostly lost out to the colour, noise and spectacle of the football although Victoria Melody's stroppy 'Bastard Bee' stood out.

I had intended to introduce myself to Jon but I wasn't sure who he was and by the time I'd worked it out the event was about to start and he was busy, and I had been conspicuously sitting around for so long that I felt a bit of a tit so I went to the bar for another pint.

The bar filled with a new clientelle of arty types, a woman fainted and an ambulance called. A young woman I'd met on the internet introduced herself (not as seedy as it sounds although I did manage to blush for the first five minutes) She showed me a new article in AN about The Black Flag Game which looked really good but the evening had started.

It was a friendly, pleasantly shambollic event with leaflets, speeches and presentations and a dodgy dvd player.  The feelings for the loss of Angel Cottage were sincerely expressed and the work looked interesting but I missed the second half as my last train left at nine. As I ran out the door Sonya said she'd facebook me to tell me how it all turned out. 

On the train home a woman sitting opposite me was trying to learn Hebrew and reading psalms. One line read: "My zeal wears me out"

# 36 [16 October 2008]

I am returned once again from two days of London visits, meetings and strong coffee. On Tuesday  I visited the Free Art Fair at Marble Arch. Hampered, as usual by my Gallery finding skills, it took two laps of the area to find all six of the converted shops hosting some lovely little shows. I must admit I didn't know much about the ethos of the Free Art Fair, although the clue is in the title, on the free catalogues, posters etc. When one of the invigilators asked me if I would be camping on Sunday I became quite flustered thinking it was some sort of urban code. This occurred in the 'Gallery' I enjoyed the most, it hosted a lot of painting and two conjoined plastic cups containing Bob & Roberta Smith's toenail clippings. It was the paintings I liked best especially Alex Gene Morrison's Erupting Head and Geraldine Brigid Swayne's Ancestor from Hell. Both left me with the feeling that I needed an extra name. Later, though I love painting (mostly I think for the reason that I've never made a good one myself) I felt a bit overloaded and guiltily walked straight past Sam Dargan's show at Rokeby. The purpose of my Tuesday jaunt was a meeting with Mark and Lindsay who are the young artists behind Refutation http://www.refutation.net/ I showed them the videos I had made with great trepidation (as usual). They seemed to like Small Stargazer a new film made by pointing the video camera straight into the lens of a 16mm projector. I've used this method once before but this version was sufficiently different to fit their requirements for previously unseen work. Needless to say unlike the rest of my stuff which I tend to bung up online willy nilly this one will remain secret until the grand opening event in November. On the train home an elderly man asked me to make sure he was awake when we arrived at Ipswich, the responsibility kept me tensely alert until he had left the train.

Wednesday was more of the same including a visit to The Future Can Wait at the Truman Brewery. The artists there seem fascinated by exoticism, sensuousness and pornography in equal measure - best group show I've seen this year.
I went with Hayley who was meeting Larry Achiampong to discuss some collaboration they are cooking up. Hayley is becoming some sort of Facebook arttart at the moment making friends with lots of Bigwigs - I am, of course, highly jealous.

I'm reading two books at the moment Susan Stewart's "On Longing" picked mainly for its title and E.E. 'Doc' Smith's "Masters of the Vortex" picked mainly for its cover. Flitting between "Neal Cloud... extrapolating his sigma curve by the sheer power of his mathematical prodigy's mind, sat appalled" and " ...the realization of re-union imagined by the nostalgic is a narrative utopia that works only by virtue of its partiality..." I feel completely lost.

# 37 [19 October 2008]

I've been collecting arctic/antarctic 'souvenirs'. Although strictly they are not and could never really have acted as souvenirs as I am sure they were not made for or sold to real ant/arctic visitors. Anyway this is the first, a delightful glass paperweight containing what I assume are a pair of seals (possibly)

# 38 [29 October 2008]

I am recovering from a curatorial visit. Lotte Juul Petersen came round to the studio to select work for a show she is curating at Wysing in January. I had had a bit of a tidy up and set up a few video screens which created a pleasing cacophony (to my mind). Upon her arrival I proceeded to bombard her with stuff until she had seen everything I had ever made including photos of my dog, although that last one was an accident. She wanted a range of things old and new, broken objects and films and I found myself mentally balancing all the things I would need to reserve for San Francisco and Bedford and another little show I'm organising in Ipswich, and actually having to say no (rather inneffectually it turns out). I'm still making stuff for my transatlantic jaunt: TRYING TO COPE WITH THINGS THAT AREN'T HUMAN and I've bought a massive suitcase to cram it all into. I'm thinking about American films, making tiny giant alien machine creatures and buying up old matchbox track on ebay so I can race cars through the gallery in a sort of SciFi car chase movie. When I dropped Lotte off at the station for her three hour (sixty mile) train journey we were both a bit hollow eyed.

# 39 [2 November 2008]

Instead of making my usual pilgrimage to London I decided to head north this weekend to see a show by Lucy Harrison at Norwich Outpost. So for a third of the fare for the same distance I washed up in Norwich, literally it was tipping it down. Admittedly as far as getting your money's worth goes there are fewer galleries in Norwich (as far as I know its just Outpost now) but the shows there are invariably good. I was even moved to write a review as I really liked the books on show. Its a bit rambly and oblique but I've never wanted to write properly. Anyway I need the practice as, inexplicably, Josie Faure Walker at Space emailed me asking me to come along to ‘Schematic: New Media Art from Canada’ to write about it. I will probably fail miserably to think of anything to say, or hate it, or get in a mood and not turn up. We shall see.

In the studio I managed to make a sort of landscape viewer for the show of starscapes, landscapes and interiors I'm having with Andrew Vass in March. Its only in Sproughton which has to qualify as the middle of nowhere but I'm using it as an opportunity to put together a new body of spectacular work (I think that's the word). Some of the work is up on another bloody blog, www.shedchat.blogspot.com

# 40 [9 November 2008]

I got in a mood and failed to go to Space - that's only partly true, I realised I'd been spending too much money going to London and as I'm off to Amsterdam this week I thought I'd better give it a miss. Speaking of cash I've started to think about winding up my Arts Council grant, which is already rather overdue. I've done most of the things I set out to do (with revisions and diversions) but the one thing I haven't done is be mentored. I did tentatively arrange to meet up with Jordan Baseman but upheavals at home interrupted and I feel too embarrassed to get back in touch now. It occurs to me I could put an ad up on the opportunities page: 'mentor wanted must have the key to artistic success'. To get my evaluation started I've been looking through my cv and at my work in general to try and work out if I've moved on, plateaued, or got worse over the last two years. Its not that clear, and I'm not totally convinced its that important. The only measurable change is that there are a couple more solo shows and a higher proportion of the things I'm involved in have come about by invitation. I could say I have been sought out, but to be honest I've become such an internet whore that I think these people probably trip over me and become entangled.

 This navel gazing could become redundant soon as tomorrow I am taking 50 students on the ferry, storms are forecast.