Knowledge – Acquisition – Escapism
I will work backwards – escape to acquire knowledge
Escapism – this is perhaps a visual thing and sometimes I find reading to be so terribly visual that I find it distracting and have to draw or just sit and think instead. I am terrible at finishing books and rarely read just one at a time from cover to cover – I prefer to dip my toes in to test the water: if the text is more than tepid and excitingly hot (which it often is) then I have to take my toes back out again and leave the heat to settle. I seem to be able to escape in a lot of ways and not just through reading alone – writing is just as useful a mode of escapism. Its like taking a walk in some respects – in the rain – the typing is like the tapping of rain drops atop my huge white, black, red and green golfing umbrella. Glasgow offers a lot of wind in the rain – I get to take off from time to time – this is fortuitous if I am bored of the pavement and prefer the direction of the sky: an anti-gravitational pull towards potential energy in thought, writing, thinking, reading, observing, documenting. Next time you open you’re umbrella think of me.
Acquisition – this depends upon funds and time and resources. Acquiring ideas comes from watching the world and the passing by of people: their interaction, their concentration, and pre-occupations. Acquisition is therefore the impact of my observing others – it’s a regular but fast exchange that takes a few seconds that I can then stretch over time into a paragraph, a page or a few bits of paper with pen and pencil. With acquisition comes dialogue too. An internal or tangible dialogue that matches what you understand with the conceptual process of ideation – language is therefore an offering of acquisitioned process in this respect. Whether this is non-verbal, bodily, mentally or indeed translated through reading. Reading is perhaps the most historical of acquisitions. There is food for thought in this as text is often sustainable if stored properly – less oxygen and less outsider affect. Next time you read something read it as quickly as possible and then put it away again – do not expose it for too long.
Knowledge – the latest piece of knowledge came around about the same time I learnt that Western edges of most cities are better off than Eastern edges because of the direction of wind. Is knowledge affected by smoke? If so then people who lived in the east end of Glasgow or London during industrial revolution did not have as much of an education thanks to geographical and natural circumstances: the prevailing winds of the UK would have seen to that murky dusty fact. So the other fact came from a fire training exercise – health and safety and common sense. How much does common sense match with knowledge and does it restrict the mind’s capacity for more knowledge? Is the circulation of knowledge convectional like the movement of smoke within a room – and does it influx into empty spaces according vacuum or pressure, once it has maximised one space and is ready to fill another? Is it safe therefore to gain knowledge in a lift? Next time you want to escape (fire hazard or no fire hazard) and you’re acquiring knowledge – try thinking about the process physically as you’re walking or panting from one room to the next.
text by me – Richard Taylor
In exchange with Sophie Frost – writer and thinker and potential art doer.
http://plightofthebritishartspostgrad.blogspot.com…
