ARTISTS TALKING

# 30 [12 September 2010]

Okay so the Internet isn't morphing our brains into weird malfunctioning humanoid organs. Phew  http://tiny.cc/6tyis

# 29 [12 September 2010]

I've been feeling a bit shy about writing on here of late. Its because I know that I'm struggling a bit with my emotions at the moment and although this is supposed to be a blog where its okay for me to talk about the above, I really don't want to constantly post big chunks of text featuring my melancholic self analysis. Its not that interesting! I guess I have to find a balance between honestly presenting myself as what I am (a depressive, introspective, obsessive) and also knowing that I have plenty more exciting, enlightening and rewarding things to write about!

ON THAT NOTE: next week Rachel and I are hosting Brian Catling http://www.briancatling.com/Site/INTRO.html at the Bluecoat. He's doing a three day durational performance come installation for the opening of Liverpool Biennial. There is going to be so much going on in the city next week it's mind blowing to think of. I'm actually really excited! I need to make sure that I don't spend the whole time sat in my office and that I get out and see things across the city. I'm particularly looking forward to the Biennial conference which I hope will have some relevance to a few of my earlier posts on issues around trauma and embodiment http://www.biennial.com/articles/event/Touched%20C...

Also, after some encouraging words from Emily and Andrew who commented on my post from the 5th September I've managed to full my finger out this morning and piece together (another) MRes draft proposal. I've sent it off to Sid V for some stern critique. I've also sent it to my old dissertation tutor Ross Birrell who hopefully will see the connections with my undergrad work.

And just to prove that it really does exist and that I really am going to actually submit it this time..... I'll post the synopsis as a sneaky preview....

Frankenstein's Monster: Masculinities, mental health and new technologies

Synopsis
Mary Shelly's Frankenstein pioneered a literary archetype: a dangerous creature created as a result of reckless experimentation with new technology. Authored at the dawn of the industrial revolution, it warned against the dangers of replacing human workers with machines.    

I propose to survey contemporary art and culture to identify 21st century Frankenstein's monsters: archetypes that embody undercurrent fearfulness toward new technology. I expect that while some of these examples will be literary; most will not. The focus will be on the specter of Frankenstein haunting the popular imagination.

With Frankenstein as a model, my thesis will interrogate the present state of contemporary masculine archetypes and their relationship to new technologies. Within this I give particular attention to recent thinking on mental health of the male population and speculation that the overuse of technology may be changing human bodies and brains.

# 28 [7 September 2010]

I've started to read this really interesting book called 'The Melancholy Android' by Eric G Wilson. It documents the practice of android making: when an inventor builds a robot or creature that emulates human form. Frankenstein’s monster would be the classic example although the practice extends to puppeteering and scary ghouls from horror movies such as Chucky from Tom Holland's movie Child's Play.

Wilson's main assertion is that androids personify the repressed psychology of their creators. He says that "The humanoid embodies characteristics that its creator pretends to loathe. It is a register of what humans most desire and fear, what they hate in life and what they love in death." As the title may suggest Wilson argues that what is manifest in this release of repressed desires is a deeper sense of melancholy. The role of puppetry in Spike Jonze's film Being John Malkovich is used as an example of how narratives created by the film's protagonist Craig Schwartz express his inner most longings: "Marionette forms of Heloise and Abelard from separate chambers, pine for erotic contact." The puppeteer lives out fantasy via the products of his craftsmanship.

I've only read the first few chapters so far but I'm beginning to ponder in what sense this theory might apply to the work of the artist, or how much of an artists output could be understood as an actualisation of subconscious material. I'm thinking of artists like Paul Macarthy and his performance persona Bossy Burger, who managed to make me feel physically sick during his retrospective at Tate Liverpool a few years ago. While film directors such as Michael Haneke (who makes grueling and extraordinary films such as The Piano Teacher) may not create androids as such, I wonder how many of the actions of their lead characters could be interpreted as material out of the subconscious of the auteur. I’m thinking particularly of Hannke because in some ways he trumps my theory off the back of an interview I read with him last year where he boasts about his own psychological stability and his very happy childhood. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/oct/25/intervi... I’m not sure… I need to keep thinking on it.


 

# 27 [5 September 2010]

A therapist once told me that I've got an agent provocateur. What he was inferring was basically that there's a sort of self-destruct button in my head that I'm likely to push at times of great pressure. Lots of people have these buttons and some people get to do really glamorous things as a result of their decision to push, like misguided seductions and ludicrous spending. My provocateur is not nearly so exciting, but she is pretty powerful at times. I quit therapy by letter a few weeks ago; a move that I know wasn't healthy for me. I did it anyway because we had been getting into some difficult stuff and I couldn't deal with it so I legged it.... This is me at my finest: illogical, cowardly and a dead cert' to be the first person to disappear when people try to help and support me.

Anyway the reason that all of this is relevant is because for the past two years at around this time of year I have began to draft a masters application. I've usually gone on and completed it, got references and in 2008 I even went down to London on the train to hand deliver my application to Goldsmiths, but at the last minute I decided that actually the application was rubbish and that I would be a fool to hand it in. Similar story in 2008...... when it came to finalising the proposal my provocateur kicked in and it got no further than my lap top. 
We all have the voices in our head that tell us we are a load of old rubbish. In Transactional Analysis (model for understanding human personality developed by Eric Berne) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_analysi... these voices are called introjects and are often critical influences from childhood that we take on as component parts of our subconscious. For example the voice of a critical teacher who thinks we have no potential, whose views we integrate into our own perception of ourselves as our early personality develops. Sometimes these introjects can have particularly malevolent intent, maybe the influence of an incredibly negative force that we encounter during childhood: like a mother who becomes pregnant by accident and subsequently spends her child's early years wishing it dead (this sounds like a horrible thing to talk about, but it happens). An agent provocateur can have many origins and although I have not identified the origin of mine, I know that it often encourages me to sabotage any possibility of getting what I most want in life.

So while for the past four years I have been craving to go off to London and study for a masters, I've not done it, for no other reason than the fact that I have lost faith in my own ability to be successful it at the most critical moment. 
This year, this blog and the subsequent Group Therapy project that I am planning form the basis of what would be my 2010 masters application. I think I have some really interesting potential here and I am desperate not to fuck it up by loosing faith in myself at the last minute. I am trying to set myself deadlines so that I cannot meander and procrastinate my way into loosing my focus. I am also going to try and share draft proposals with people like Sid and Andrew who are interested in the blog and the subject matter. I've set myself the target of proposing the project to FACT before November this year. This will give me a real world dynamic to my ideas and hopefully a bit of faith in the fact that what I'm working on in my little study in Cheshire is of interest to the wider world.

These reflections come off the back of a particularly black Sunday, when everything I write seems stupid. I'm mainly just exhausted, as I've worked six long days this week. I'm enjoying my new promotion at work and relishing the challenge. I've been doing pretty well so far and have been keeping the provocateur at bay.... lets hope this means I'm winning the battle in a more long term way!

# 26 [28 August 2010]

Today I need to take a brief detour to examine the term 'curate.' I am writing with reference to the thoughts that I noted here on 15th August about a conventional gallery exhibition and how this may not be the most appropriate or interesting outcome of this blog and project. If I decide not to produce a white cube exhibition containing artworks in space as the end product for 'Group Therapy', have I curated an exhibition at all, or have I just organised it? Or is it in fact my artwork? AND does it matter anyway as long as the project manifests something of interest?

Luckily I am an obsessional collector of books and whenever such ponderings overtake me I can usually reach for one volume or another to begin to resolve things. On this occasion I've come straight to JJ Charlesworth's essay Curating Doubt in Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance. This essay tracks the progression of curating from practice based archiving and display of objects in museums and galleries to a discourse based theoretical paradigm that generates its own creative perspectives. Charlesworth says that "curatorship can now be understood as the synthesis of institution context and artistic content- the product of an 'artist' rather than a curator." He goes on to quote the warning that Paul O'Neill made in Art Monthly, on the inherent danger that "we are becoming so self-reflexive that exhibitions often end up as nothing more or less than art exhibitions curated by curators curating curators, curating artists, curating artworks, curating exhibitions."

Over the past three years I've been fortunate to partner with some very unusual individuals who have blurred the boundary between the archetypical roles of artist and curator. In 2008 my work as an assistant to Hannah Hurtzig http://www.mobileacademy-berlin.com/ on Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge No 11 On WASTE: The Disappearance and Comeback of Things & Values certainly involved a process  of assembling and framing a collection around a theme, although Hannah herself did not refer to this process as curatorial but as artistic. The project offered visitors the opportunity to book an appointment with an expert from various fields and to sit for a five minute conversation which would relate to the central topic: waste. The process was catalytic of conversation and functioned almost as a 3D library which users could draw on to inhabit new perspectives. I would love to find a way for Group Therapy to provide a similar discursive space, but still wish to include some conventional elements of an exhibition.

Let me also add here that buried within the multiple academic references that permeated Blackmarket No 11, I often wondered about 'the talking cure' or psychoanalysis as a reference. Hannah talked occasionally about friends who were taking anti-depressants or her own brief depressive experiences.... I often wished I had pushed her to talk more about this, but I was quite young back then and really quite frightened of the woman...... Have a look at the images and I am sure you will see why the low lit intimacy of these face to face conversations puts me in mind of some kind of therapy.

I have used this blog so far to talk about the work of other artists, to look at some commentaries on mental health in the media, to discuss books that I have read and to retell some of my own experiences. I am not sure if it becomes to ambitious to attempt to include all of the above in the final project, or if I ought just to be content to show artists work and accompany this with an interesting conference. Maybe that it enough for now and maybe anything more gets too close to Charlesworth's fears around excessive curatorial complication?

# 25 [15 August 2010]

By the way..... given that I am basically a massive egg head, I sometimes get excited about the most abstract of things. I nearly wet my pants earlier today when I discovered that that temple of academic sexiness The London Consortium is running an Mres short course on some of the very same topics that I am discussing on this blog. Its called Down: Melancholy, Depression and Regeneration. To be honest its more about manifestations of depression as a cultural and economic concept than a direct link between technology and mental health. But it's close enough for me to feel that I'm working with issues that are academically vital as well as interesting to me for personal reasons. My god check out the beast of a reading list that they have given..... http://www.londonconsortium.com/courses/down.php. I think I'm basically going to have to lock myself away until I have read every book on here.....

Nah I'm only joking...... kindda.....

# 24 [15 August 2010]

I've been going a bit nuts for the past week or so. This is often moment when I have my best ideas so I have been holding onto my hat and hoping that something good comes of it.

While sitting in my hotel room in Edinburgh on Thursday morning something about the Group Therapy show started to form in my head around the idea of research and resource. This blog has become such an interesting and useful forum for my ideas over the past three months and has provided a catalyst for really good discussions with so many artists. It almost feels that a highly polished curatorial 'show' as an outcome would somehow neglect to address the many open-ended questions that surround the field that I seek to engage with. I feel intuitively that to propose further questions rather than seek to provide answers might prove a more interesting process at this stage.

Having said all of this I would love to commission some new work and Hans from Ubermorgan would be the favorite at the moment. I am also still visualising video installations having a presence in some sense as I have discussed so many good ones on here. However I would really like to propose Adbusters as a partner in the project (after reading their ecopsychology addition) and work with them to curate a programme of talks and actions on the the theme of ecopsychology. A library (or web archive) is a possibility and then there is also that whole other area of how technology is being used in psychotherapy which I have not even started on yet (but intend to soon). We could bring in examples of the equipment and software being used. 

God its exciting......

I think my next step might be to approach someone from the AND festival http://www.andfestival.org.uk/ as it feels to me that the 2011 festival would be the perfect context for this project to reside in. If I have their buy-in I can think about talking to Adbusters and MIND or CALM as I still really want to see if I can get a mental health charity on board in some capacity.

I need a proposal and a budget....

I think it might be admin time......

# 23 [8 August 2010]

I've been intending to blog about Matthew De Kersaint Giraudeau http://www.dekersaint.co.uk/ for some time now, following an email exchange that had with him in June. I know he's performing at the Royal Standard in Liverpool tonight at 7pm http://www.the-royal-standard.com/events/, so thankfully my procrastination means that the post will be 'timely' rather that just 'late'.

Matthew first came to my attention via the April issue of New Art Criticism where I found his video piece "The Sadness Of Mark Speight." It tells the tragic tale of the children's TV presenter who took his own life in April 2008 after his girlfriend died of severe burns and a cocaine overdose. http://www.newartcriticism.co.uk/markspeight.html. What I loved about the film was its 'youtube' type viral video aesthetic (its made entirely from found footage), coupled with Matthew's deadpan voiceover. Images of Mark "gurning around and generally looking enthusiastic" sit awkwardly against a disassociated commentary by the artist, that conveys minimal emotive intonation toward its subject matter. In our email conversation Matthew says:

"I'm personally interested in psychological dissociation and its implication in the possibility of a chaotic reality (the possibility that meaning and coherence are imposed on a nonsensical series of events by an incredibly powerful, fully functioning mind - the idea that normal life is a psychosis)."

There are moments of nostalgia within the narrative and an analysis of how suicide might be a difficult concept for a child to grasp, yet in essence the video unhooks tragedy from the emotive experience of grief in order to express the view of a distanced observer. In doing so it questions the usual trajectory of response and the sense of psychological order that we use to impose this, suggesting that no single mental process is more sane than the next.

The video is an outtake from a performance lecture which I have not seen, although I do believe that he is doing a performance lecture tonight at the Royal Standard. I'll be there!

Matthew also has a series of "Psychosis Drawings" on his website which are inspired by a repetitive behavioral tendency called Stereotypy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotypy, often seen in autistic patients and children with developmental difficulties. He describes the imagery used as "paranoid hallucinations inspired by mass media." I particularly like Networking and Coverage posted here.

# 22 [7 August 2010]

After my previous post on ecopsychology, I decided it was time to finally get around to watching a film called You Live In Public by Ondi Timoner. On the whole it made me want to do a digital detox (yet here I am blogging about it doh!)

The film documents the life of Josh Harris, who made his fortune during the 90s dot com boom. He used his riches to create projects that predicted the revolutionising impact of the internet on human relationships. In 2001 he and his girlfriend Tanya Corrin turned their home into a lavishly designed webcasting studio where they broadcast their entire existence online via webcam and hosted their own chat room where users could comment on the minutia of their existence. Needless to say the relationship and the experiment broke down after 81 days, when both appeared to be suffering psychological consequences from their unusual existence. Of course the project predicted the format of shows like big brother as well as the rise of surveillance culture.

The portrayal of Josh Harris feels quite indicative of a certain male archetype that we are seeing more and more in the media: lonely man with an abundance of money, technology at his finger tips and no capacity to make real relationships, who lavishes himself with obscure riches and hedonism with little regard for the feelings of others. The dot com boomers seem to be portrayed similarly to how we might understand the portrayal of rich bankers in the current media climate, greedy, hedonistic and detached from reality. I raise this because I am interested in how technology, money and power converge around specific instances of emotional and psychological disturbance.

Its clear from the film that Josh Harris had his own longstanding psychological problems stemming from a lonely childhood spent in front of the TV and its no surprise when his obsession with living publicly manifests itself in a particular kind of madness. Whats more surprising is how quickly participants in his millennium project Quiet http://post.thing.net/node/2800 started to show signs of extreme disturbance after living together for a month in a New York basement that was populated by surveillance cameras. Under constant pressure to perform for the cameras participants became distressed, depressed and startlingly hedonistic. A worrying fact when you consider how rapidly our social and digital environment is evolving to mean that we all live in public to some extent.

# 21 [5 August 2010]

This week I have discovered a new movement called ecopsychology http://www.ecopsychology.org/ which advocates that the health of the planet can have an impact on the well being of it's inhabitants. It makes sense that the condition of a person's immediate surroundings could change their psychological state and that things like noise pollution, traffic congestion and overcrowding in cites could contribute to rising numbers of mental health issues within the population.

I made the discovery when I picked up the most recent copy of Adbusters in my local indi bookshop. There is a featured essay by Kalle Lasn and Micah White called Ecology of the Mind https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/90/ecology-mind... which makes the claim that

"in the last couple generations, we have largely abandoned the natural world, immersing ourselves in virtual realms. Along with this transition to a new psychic realm, we have also seen the exponential rise of mental illnesses."

The article outlines six contributing causes of mental atrophy which occur as a result of digital culture: noise, infotoxins and infoviruses, the erosion of empathy, loss of infodiversity, the fragmentation of our psyches (jumpy brain syndrome) and running out of culture. All of these are caused by our ongoing dependancy on computers and digital devices, particularly the internet. The authors quote Nicholas Carr http://www.roughtype.com/ when he claims that

“Over the past few years, I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory… what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles."

When writing about new technologies I have always been careful to avoid the reactionary riot of technological determinism that was prevalent within early critique of the internet. At the inception of platforms such as Second Life it was often fantasied that humanity might depart earthly realms in order to eat, sleep and reproduce virtually. What this edition of adbusters points out is that almost 20 years on from the birth of the internet, our bodies have not been so easily abandoned. While a little occasional internet use is in no way detrimental, when combined with 24 hour TV, constant use of iphones and ipods and the fact that more and more people sit alone at their laptops during 12 to 15 hour work days.... it could easily be changing the way our brain functions.