This is the artistic blurb that went with it. I hope it explains.

MediaMediocritas is a cut up film wherein Melvin Bragg talks to Alex Walsh about his cut up films wherein Melvin Bragg talks to Alex Walsh about his cut up films wherein Melvin Bragg talks to Alex Walsh about his cut up films wherein Melvin Bragg talks to Alex Walsh about his cut up films wherein Melvin Bragg talks to Alex Walsh about his cut up films wherein Melvin Bragg talks to Alex Walsh about his cut up films. Etc, etc, et cetera, ad nauseam.

Do we or is it a quasi emotional state?

 ‘Sarbin’s (1986) collection of essays’the first explicitly devoted to ’narrative psychology’.

 Sarbin identified its project as an exploration of the way individuals make sense of their world

through stories. ‘

Meaning by proxy

Puppets.

Demagogues.

Cover, spin pr, the heart of the matter. Influence (paleolithic potter). Stories and understanding the world.

Hip hop referential

opera overture, recurring theme

A film written like opera.

The film Network.

Thursday 08 March 2007

Aw Bolix.

I have busted in my head.

part1

Writing about Writers.

by Warren Ellis

(I wrote this for Bad Signal this afternoon, but it didn’t go through. So I’m putting it up here, so I can get a look at it with some perspective.)

There’s an oft-spoken rule in the writing of fiction: don’t write about writers. It’s the cheapest version of “write what you know,” and it’s often creepy and self-serving. You run the risk of being labelled the writer of a “Mary Sue” by people who know nothing about writing — the term comes from a fan-fiction writer who’d insert herself into Star Trek stories to save the day and fuck Spock or something, and denotes a character who stands in for the writer within the fiction to act as the hero. There are tens of thousands of people out there who still think I’m Spider Jerusalem, which is the irritant penalty for breaking the rule and spending five years writing about a writer.

But there is a Romance about writing. There’s a truth in Cronenberg’s NAKED LUNCH, with Bill Burroughs rubbing bug powder into the clitoris of his monstrous typewriter. Cronenberg himself spoke about the difficulty of externalising the Romance of writing: it’s just a guy sitting there writing, maybe he wears a hat, I dunno. That was one of the big problems I had to solve in TRANSMET.

There’s Ben Gazzara as Charles Bukowski, reciting poetry as he slides into Ornella Muti from behind in TALES OF ORDINARY MADNESS; not a perfect film, but I like it better than (the better-made, better-acted) BARFLY. Stephen King’s MISERY, of course, every known author’s nightmare.

You even get hints of it in STUDIO 60 (and there could stand to be more, but Sorkin probably feels he’s airing enough dirty linen as it is): Matthew Perry in a black suit and tie, exhausted as he slips out of the wrap party early, ten years of stress cut into his face now, his brain clearly shot, leaving alone. That hideous clock in his office, ticking down the seconds until drop-dead, is a masterstroke.

There’s Romance in it, because it wrecks us all the same way. We’ve all been Jack Kerouac, sitting in a cafe writing as the sun comes up, blasted by sleeplessness and sex or drugs or music or booze and just trying to get it all down while we can, because we’ll be somewhere else tomorrow and we’re dead longer than we’re living.

One of my favourite films is TALK RADIO — I’ve stolen so many camera moves from that film – and particularly the climatic sequence of Eric Bogosian glaring at his microphone with wild hatred and just blasting his audience in one long monologue. Writing on the fly. The Romance is in his ex-wife going to a phone to call into him while he’s on air, and when asked why, she says, “He’s all alone out there.”

I bring it back to TALK RADIO because for the last year I’ve been thinking about writing something set in the near future about a radio monologuist. I was struck some years ago by Peter Biskind’s description of Jack Nicholson’s characters in THE KING OF MARVIN GARDENS, a broadcaster: “he soliloquises into the wee hours, getting lost in the tangle of his own memories.”

TRANSMET is my personal haunting, now: I can’t let myself repeat that book. But broadcasting fascinates me, as do people who speak the truth, or at least speak to something in us. Radio seems weirdly archaic now, even with the recent innovations of podcasting and Visual Radio. It comes from another time: for me, it comes from my childhood. To half of my audience, it probably comes from their parents’ lives, a previous generation. Podcasting has given rise to things like street monologues: the likes of Jean Snow or Momus will stick an iTalk on their iPod and record their thoughts as they walk around Tokyo or Edinburgh, and upload it when they get home. There’s the real-world scaffolding for a story about a live street monologuist, whose voice is shot straight from the device on to the radio waves. It’d be nice to write someone verbal again: Jones is always either listening or muttering.

(JONES breaks a crucial rule of heroic drama: Steve McQueen would always have scenes of him listening to explanations rewritten, because, in his words, “I don’t want to be the man who listens. I want to be the man who KNOWS.”)

I’m rambling, and have probably broken the K limit on this posting. Let’s see if this sends.

Part 2

Melvyn Bragg: Lord of the Arts

The South Bank Show, launched 30 years ago, changed Britain‘s cultural landscape. Liz Hoggard meets its creator

Published: 28 January 2007

In 1977, Melvyn Bragg had an idea for a new kind of arts programme. Alongside the “high arts” of painting and opera, it would cover comedy and pop music (considered too lowbrow for serious criticism). “I wrote a manifesto,” he recalls, “arguing that the singing of Elvis Presley was as interesting as the singing of Pavarotti.” London Weekend Television commissioned the show and Bragg named it South Bank after LWT’s riverside headquarters. Michael Grade, his boss at the time, added the word “Show” to the title – and a TV phenomenon was born.

This year it celebrates its 30th anniversary, but back then Bragg expected to be sacked at any minute. So he took risks. The first programme profiled Paul McCartney and the cartoonist Gerald Scarfe. “I thought, ‘Sod it, let’s do it.’ It got me into a lot of trouble.”

But it worked. Last week ITV announced it had commissioned the show until 2010, which is virtually unknown for an arts series on a commercial network – especially one that goes out in a Sunday graveyard slot.

For people like me, growing up in the late 1970s, The South Bank Show was our only contact with alternative culture. Tracey Emin says she started watching it aged 10, hoping that one day she’d be on it. A young Damon Albarn tuned in to hear Morrissey insisting that the Smiths were the last great pop band – and started writing music just to prove him wrong.

The new series of The South Bank Show, which starts next Sunday, is as eclectic as ever, with shows on W H Auden, Joan Didion, Tim Burton – and June Whitfield. “She is a very interesting comedy artist,” argues Bragg. “Why shouldn’t we examine her work in the same way as Judi Dench?”

Our interview takes place at the House of Lords. (He was made a Labour life peer in 1998.) Now 67 he looks absurdly youthful, with that luxuriant whoosh of hair and the best-manicured nails I’ve seen on a man. But there is nothing foppish about Bragg. Although you’ll often see him out on the party circuit he is not a flirt. Friends say he is essentially a shy man. “I’ve just been ridiculously lucky,” he says.

And yet Bragg hasn’t always had it easy. He experienced a “massive onslaught of depression” in his late teens, and then came a mental crash in his late 20s after the suicide of his first wife. Today he is president of the mental health charity Mind.

Bragg is one of a unique generation of 1950s working-class grammar school boys who benefited from the 1944 Education Act. Although his father ran a pub, he was encouraged to sing in choirs, take piano lessons and visit the cinema. But growing up in a small market town in Cumbria, he also experienced terrible lows. During one period of undiagnosed depression he sank from being in the top three in his class to the bottom. With no possibility of confiding his crippling anxiety, he became, he says, good at subterfuge. There is still an unknowable quality about him.

He managed to pull through, and won a place at Wadham College, Oxford. Aged 25 he published his first novel. Still too fragile to hold down a regular job, he survived by writing film scripts and taking part-time work in television. To date Bragg has written 19 novels.

Bragg has a horror of what he calls class hierarchies in the arts. “The idea that it’s better to appreciate a deeply indifferent opera than a really fantastic concert by a great group is still unchallenged. It is quite simply foolish.”

Bragg has no time for intellectual laziness. A polymath, he is seen by many as the true voice of Radio 4. He has done much to popularise modern science, and his unapologetically brainy radio show In Our Time gives academics of every field the chance to talk at length. He is, he says, humbled by scientists who know everything about the arts but get asked “damn all back”. He is convinced the true source of culture will eventually turn out to be the sciences, not the arts.

Before he went up to Oxford, he lived in a boarding house in Victoria – sleeping seven to a room with Irish labourers – so he could afford to go to galleries. Today he lives an extremely privileged life as part of what he calls “the media middle class”, but he insists the barrier to entry is always talent.

Eleven years ago he launched the South Bank Awards – the only awards ceremony that deals exclusively with the arts. “Where else would you get members of the Stones and The Who in the same room as people from the Hallé Orchestra and the Royal Opera House?” he says.

Today he lives in London and Cumbria with his wife, the author Cate Haste. He is a besotted Arsenal fan – that rare being, an elitist who believes in popular culture. He says he’d rather be on ITV than any other channel. “You don’t have to have been to university to watch an arts programme; you don’t have to dress up and go to the opera house. You just turn on the box.”

The South Bank Awards are on ITV tonight at 10.45pm

Protest

On some days I wake up oppositional, every bloody thing is a thorn in my side. I want to be a thorn in the side of every bloody thing.

I woke up grumpy about the gallery project, I must have been running over the things that happened the previous day. Swimming through my head was the fact that I and other members of TAVA2 feel that there is not enough training as part of the course. Physical training, improvisation etc. There have been some technical training and some academic but there is not enough to sustain energy for creativity.

Also in my head running around and around was what I am going to do as part of the gallery project.

These three elements, opposition, lack of resources, gallery project mated in my sleep. What I have now is the suggestion that I should make our lack of training known as part of the exhibition, in this way I can make the matter known to as many people as possible, other members can too adding weight. I have raised concerns over the content of the course and its shortcomings with a lecturer. There is a system in place, a feedback meeting, where these concerns can be raised. This may be a token gesture. A herding pen where inconvenient voices can be easily managed.

With this in mind I am seriously considering making my project a protest to get listened to. I would like other people to take part in this too. I don’t know how to approach this without implying that I want to change other students pieces, which I don’t want because they are so good. This isn’t something I should engage in totally alone.

Things to do.

Go and speak to the student union, ask them what the official channels are for making requests of the course content.

Find out when, what, why and where the feedback channel.

Speak to a knowledgeable and sympathetic lecturer.

Matt Rudkin seems to be the sharpest, his sympathies towards uppity students are a known unkown. Strong voice, able to hammer out greater resources in previous years.

Susanna Hutchinson, official, helpful

Andrjez Burkowsky, only present on one day a week.

Jane Whittaker, sympathetic towards direct action, knowledgeable not the strongest voice.

Technicians Bill and Louise. Provided one or two very useful technical lectures. Probably neutral as they are not part of the teaching infrastructure. Bill has expressed nostalgia toward more experimental eras.

I cannot expect too much help from staff if any. It shall come to a point that they will be put in a position where they will have to act, this shall be for their benefit. This is a thing that concerns their careers. Above all this is a thing that concerns our education.

Things to bring up.

The lack of arts training, performance skills.

Having these things will raise general level of focus and energy.

Lack of space dedicated to TAVA.

Visits to exhibitions, shows.

Why TAVA tends to be neglected. Tradition of underfunded theatre work is not a good enough reason.

Questions. Will this project go ahead with the full knowledge of the lecturers and technicians who will be able to see the productions as they are built and are organising the space. How to maintain covert. Is that necessary?

Leverage.

First action,student union, second action email all tava, third action integrate into project, fourth action talk to mava and tava, fifth action, extra support great, sixth action the exhibition, seventh action, get signatures take record of the event to show support.

This model has a number of benefits

1. It publicly addresses the problem. Therefore it is less easily ignored

2. It fosters public support.

3. A definite record of the complaint is made.

4. It serves as a reminder to get what is needed.

5. It is a spectacle.

1. Agencies outside of the university will be made aware of the problem of the underfunded arts course.

It may not be third world debt but it is a problem close to home. Is the corporate model working well with the institution? Is it at odds with the aims of the organisation?

Make TAVA aware of these things.

Spacehopper.

Like from the seventies.

Art excess

The course does not offer enough training, it offers too few trips to see some of the things we are meant to be engaging in. As a poor student a free trip or one subsidised wouldn’t go unappreciated. I could bring my own beer.

Either way and putting those gripes side for the moment, we, TAVA2, went to see ‘View from the shore’ at the Royal Opera House. The opera house is one of those buildings that was revolutionary in the 19^th century. The Crystal Palace and a train station in London were both based on the same design. Pillars doubled up as drains to take water from the roof.

Sandwiches cost £6 and a glass of house red costs £8, the same price as the ticket for the show we were there to see.

There were two performances separated by the interval.

I don’t know what to make of the first performance, it was movement to music. It was good movement to good music but this seems insubstantial to a person who has loud flashing entertainment shot at him on demand. Clearly there were dancers who had different strengths and weaknesses, different training and styles. The dance featured repetitions of movements at different times so that one could see how one dancer performed the sequence and how that differed from another. The performance space was wide compared to the audience, this meant that it was not always possible to see the whole of the action. I think this was deliberate, moments of virtuosity were contrasted with stillness, one dancer standing away from the action yet still quite clearly in the performance space and quite clearly still performing.

The second piece was an honest to goodness show, it has been so long since I have seen something like that. It was based on New Orleans jazz and featured mixed samples of music and interviews with musicians. It was humorous, well some people laughed. They laughed in that over loud way that people laugh when in theatres. The same people guffaw violently at the ‘funny’ bits of Shakespeare plays, strangely in order for them to have understood shakesperean jokes they must have studied the text, if there is anything that is clinically proven to kill humour then it is studying humour. Back on track, I couldn’t accept the humour as a thing in itself, I was expecting it to be the prelude to a horrific scene, contrasted with violence and tragedy like A Clockwork Orange. I decided to wear white trousers, a white tee shirt and braces that day. My fashion sense could have me arrested in some countries.

Before all this, which began at 20:00 we arrived in at London Victoria at about 13:30. Took in the Tate Britain Gallery and the Tate Modern Gallery. Tate Britain displayed placards, banners and various protest paraphernalia like swords and shields hung on the wall of a baronial castle that commemorate a great battle. They belonged to Brian Haw a protestor who has maintained a watch in front of the houses of parliament since 2001, recent legislation prohibits protest in that area to a distance that I forget. The area that Brian Haw may protest in in three metres square.

One of the banners featured a quotation by Daisaku Ikeda.

Drank, ate, window shopped.

‘You’re going to reap just what you sow.’

Lou Reed, Kirsty MacCol, various others.

A great many people chanting

What is it like for the devout when lots of them meet, when they chant in unison and feel the energy of their faith in the wide eyed smiling expressions? They are riding a great wave made of their belief in action. They seem to know where they are going, where the wave is taking them and they open their faucets to pour into the manifest. They seem to either know or not mind.

This Sunday I attended the Nichiren Daishonin Buddhists annual general meeting for district held in a function room in  Moulsecoomb leisure and sports centre. It was a bright day, it was a sunny day in winter. If you look out of the window on days like this the sun shines brightly and looks warm, if you go out the cold wind stings your nostrils and tries to turn your hands to stone.

It was one of those red brick leisure centres with smart corrugated roofs, all sorts of healthy people in tracksuits were going about purposefully doing what they had set their minds on doing. Vending machines, charity boxes, poster boards.

Spent half an hour in that pre meeting state, when some are yet to arrive and the early ones entertain themselves, groups separated themselves, I didn’t want to guess at the demographics or what held these separate groups together, obviously they remained diplomatically friendly with other groups and sent ambassadors to one another, now and again they’d meet and talk group to group.

Large gatherings of religious people, no matter what the faith, are not places where my mind rests easy. The act of personal chanting and chanting in groups has a very different dynamic. I could speculate, but that would show some prejudice, suffice to say that I believe in the essential autonomy of an act of devotion. This may be a paradox, but so what? I never said I was consistent.

A deep blue carpet with gold designs on. A well lit room with bare brick. Dartboards covered in banners with ‘Nam myoho renge kyo’ and other positive words like ‘friendship’, I can’t remember the others. A pool table held up the Gohonzon (the shrine, direction of prayer) I recognised it by its barrel legs even though it was covered in cloth and a board to flatten the top.

Roughly 60 people found their places on the ranks of chars facing the pool table.

Chanting is meant to improve ones breathing, we chanted. Maybe it’s because of the films I have seen, but I get uncomfortable with this type of behaviour, that’s what the cultists always do. The pitch and tone rested in that humming range that the Benedictines have perfected. I imitated Johnny Cash’s baritone and reminded myself where my mind ended and others began. Buddhists understanding of the world is that everything is connected, scientists will back this up as long as it is phrased right. No one expects world view from 2,500 years ago to tally precisely with the scientific understanding of the modern world. Do not  have faith in science (that’s a literary paradox.). Nevertheless it is important to me that my mind is my own, things that seem good can easily hide things that are not. Part of this entry draws reference from a book that was very kindly given to me as a present, for all my cynicism and grumpyness Buddhism is mainly a good thing to think about and practice. I have a healthy respect and fear for what groups of people can do.

A number of testimonials, people recommending and verifying what is written based on their own experiences.

By this point I was already bored, I wanted to go outside for a cigarette, no I wanted to stay inside for a cigarette that’s an increasingly rare thing. Some entertainment, someone who looked like Malcolm McClaren read a poem, it was pretty good

Dreamt about a Buddhist statuette.

Rose early, earlier than I am used to.

This is something I should get into the habit of doing. Alarm set for 8.30 duly roused me from slumber (avoid clichés like the plague) I duly ignored it. I would have been sleeping still had I not received a phone call, wrong number incidentally. Lectures with Jane Whittaker, more useful than previous lectures. It helped me to focus what I wanted to research. As it happens it is my usual topic of obsession, coercion. I plan to make a link between social coercion (by whatever apparatus, social, governmental or whatever) and phases of artistic expression.

Lecture finished at 12 o’clock so that meant I had two hours to kill, spent the latter one talking with Rupert. The previous is a mystery lost to time. I don’t know what I was doing, wandering aimlessly probably.

2 o’clock, Nicholas arrived as DAVA and TAVA (Or part thereof) were waiting outside the dance studio for a lecture from a visiting artist on how to secure funding from the arts council. I may be able to sound out Sabrina if I get really stuck in the application process; she swung £4,000 earlier this year to develop her writing.  Borrowed Nicholas’ guitar, a nylon stringed classical, I can play three chords now. I can’t necessarily play them one after the other…well I can when I really apply myself and trust my fingers to know what they are doing. This has really ignited an interest in the guitar, I was never too concerned about it before, being mainly into drums…well no, I can’t say that it didn’t interest me but I did think it was a talent beyond my means and my hand size. Lecture was excellent, the visiting artist, Rosie Ward managed to make three hours of information about getting funds from the arts council engaging. I am slightly less intimidated by the application procedure for the arts council now. Before it was a thing that I thought well out of my field. A pattern is emerging here what with the guitar, this pattern shall continue and extend to other areas of my life.

I copied out a section from Daisaku Ideda’s diary (It’s okay, he published it. I didn’t sneak into his room and steal a peek.)

‘I am 21 years old

Since setting out on my journey of life, what did I contemplate, what did I do, what did I make the wellspring of my happiness?

From this day on, I will advance bravely.

From this day on, I will live resolutely.

I will live within the life of the great law, win over my sufferings.

True sadness inspires one to lead a great life.

I now see the Great Path and perceive the true nature of life.’

 Here’s a thing, as I began this section relating to Buddhism, a recorded track on iTunes began, it is Juryo-Hon.

So in many ways this is the cause of a more upbeat and less self deprecating thrust to my entries.

Visited Nicholas, talked, chanted, ate Bangers and Mash, played the guitar. Played a bin for a while, it was a more than adequate drum I could make a nice sound with it my striking the right point in the right way. Then I began writing this entry for the 19^th January 200. It went thus…

19 January 2007

Vermic acquisition

Dreamt about a Buddhist statuette.

Rose early, earlier than I am used to.

This is something I should get into the habit of doing. Alarm set for 8.30 duly roused me from slumber (avoid clichés like the plague) I duly ignored it. I would have been sleeping still had I not received a phone call, wrong number incidentally. Lectures with Jane Whittaker, more useful than previous lectures. It helped me to focus what I wanted to research. As it happens it is my usual topic of obsession, coercion. I plan to make a link between social coercion (by whatever apparatus, (social, governmental or whatever) and phases of artistic expression.

Lecture finished at 12 o’clock so that meant I had two hours to kill, spent the latter one talking with Rupert. The previous is a mystery lost to time. I don’t know what I was doing, wandering aimlessly probably.

Until 2 o’clock, Nicholas arrived as DAVA and TAVA(Or part thereof) were waiting outside the dance studio for a lecture from a visiting artist on how to secure funding from the arts council. I may be able to sound out Sabrina if I get really stuck in the application process, she swung £4,000 earlier this year to develop her writing.  Borrowed Nicholas’ guitar, a nylon stringed classical, I can play three chords now. I can’t necessarily play them one after the other…well I can when I really apply myself and trust my fingers to know what they are doing. This has really ignited an interest in the guitar, I was never too concerned about it before, being mainly into drums…well no, I can’t say that it didn’t interest me but I did think it was a talent beyond my means and my hand size. Lecture was excellent, the visiting artist, Rosie Ward managed to make three hours of teaching engaging. I am slightly less intimidated by the application procedure for the arts council now. Before it was a thing that I thought well out of my field. A pattern is emerging here what with the guitar, this pattern shall continue and extend to other areas of my life.

I copied out a section from Daisaku Ideda’s diary (It’s okay, he published it. I didn’t sneak into his room and steal a peek.)

‘I am 21 years old

Since setting out on my journey of life, what did I contemplate, what did I do, what did I make the wellspring of my happiness?

From this day on, I will advance bravely.

From this day on, I will live resolutely.

I will live within the life of the great law, win over my sufferings.

True sadness inspires one to lead a great life.

I now see the Great Path and perceive the true nature of life.’

I changed 21 to 24 to taste what it would be like to type it. Here’s a thing, as I began this section relating to Buddhism, a recorded track on iTunes began, it is Juryo-Hon.

So in many ways this is the cause of a more upbeat and less self deprecating thrust to my entries.

Visited Nicholas, talked, chanted, ate Bangers and Mash, played the guitar. Played a bin for a while, it was a more than adequate drum I could make a nice sound with it my striking the right point in the right way. Then I began writing this entry for the 19^th January 200. It went thus…

19 January 2007

Vermic acquisition

Dreamt about a Buddhist statuette…

No I won’t repeat that ad-infinitum,that would be strange. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.

The preface and the ideas in it. 

‘’Thinking in primitive conditions (preorganic) is the crystallisation of forms…In our thought, the essential feature is fitting new material into new schemas,…making equal what is new.’’

Der Wille zur Machts, Book 3&4, Neitzsche’s Werke (
Leipzig, 1911) part 2, vol 16, p. 20.

Opposites, defined by one another and their opposition. The erasure of opposites.

‘’Levi-Strauss will always remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument that whose truth-value he criticises, conserving…all these old concepts, while at the same time exposing…their limits, treating them as tools which can still be of use. No longer is any truth-value [or rigorous meaning] attributed to them; there is a readiness to abandon them if necessary if other instruments should appear more usefull. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces. Thus it is that the language of the human sciences criticises itself.’’

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Translation, interpreting ,making a metaphor. From text to understanding.

‘Sous rature’ words. Erased, yet remain. Not quite totalness of intention.

Words, pictures that represent thought, are not the thought itself.

Well that’s enough of that, I think I have misunderstood the preface. Or the intention of the preface. The Christmas period has been a bit of a stasis in my activity. I did little or nothing. I planned to continue writing the script for the false artist, I did not. I did get a moment of clarity for the acting of the character though. I believe that I am being discouraged from using the outside elements of the project by lecturers. They are hesitant in accepting the gallery’s outside windows being hosed.

Numerous late night text speak conversations with Sabrina S and Alex M spoke of Alex’s interest in chemicals (that goes beyond his training in science). Also discussed was he and Angela. The terrible crimes committed by the Potassium Potassium Potassium, racist organisation of hooded eejits.

I continue to spend too much, I get the notion that there are things (such as body armour, lego, books, etc) that I cannot do without. Most days have been exercises in rampant consumerism. I have paid three weeks rent and repaid the £150 loan hat I took out from the university in the first few weeks. It is not a relief, it is not a weight from my mind.

I was out walking one day when a man stopped my in the street and asked my to confirm that this was indeed planet earth. ‘Oh yes, most definitely.’

This week sees hiring of video cameras and all sorts of electrical equipment that I might have something of the artist character to show. He is a cross between John Lydon and Marsha, the landlady from Spaced. (which is Will Self) Part of my project is to make a video documentary (in the style of the southbank show) that showcases this characters work. I hope to make it clear that he considers the documentary a work of his art in its own right, hence it is being exhibited. This is one element of the project, one which features a lot of falsehood and red herrings. I hope to devise a way that I might make it clear that the work I am undertaking in the gallery is actually the work of the artist character. It should not be clear where the art artefact itself is, where the physical element of the artwork is. There will be more surrounding the work than there is work itself. You could call this an aura, you could say it is gossip, you could call it marketing.

I am bored of writing about my project now. I have started practising a form of Buddhism. It involves daily observances and chanting. Nicholas whose second name I don’t know introduced me to it.

Proposal Things 

Peformance art has suffered from ambiguity in definition. Thanks to the limited resources of artists in the early phases of performance art ‘happenings’ the image of non traditional theatre has been cemented as a loosely held together collection of events. It is with this in mind that I approached the prospect of using a gallery space to show a performance.  Imagine a theatre; you have just sat down ready for the performance to start, the house lights goes down, the crowd hushes and the curtains part. On stage you see a painting pinned to the back wall.

Well that’s an odd thing to happen. Odd and boring. Well if I transplant a performance into gallery conventions that is what I am doing. The recipient would reject the donors organ and die. I would thenceforth have to live as a recluse spending my time constructing forced metaphors.

 I plan to use the vague and misunderstood definition of performance art to influence the project. For this reason, the as yet untitled piece is based on two separate elements. The first is a video presentation, this is ostensibly the ‘Billed act’. This section represents a diversion or a decoy. It is a video pastiche of the image of the artist and the performer. This section of the performance will be shown on a monitor through a video or dvd player. The video is not the work in itself, the work is the combination of the video and the structure that houses ir and the way it is viewed as a result of this.

The housing for the electrical components will be made from MDF.

The second section is the ‘real’ element of the performance. Both the decoy and the genuine performance are part of the same overall piece and should be considered as one single performance. This will only happen once. At a time I will decide beforehand with no particular reference to the expected numbers of gallery visitors present at that moment, I and four other people will arrive outside the gallery. We will be equipped with a high pressure water hose each. We will turn the hoses at full pressure on the plate windows that face the street side of the gallery. This will last for one minute. We will then leave the area. I am aware that in the summer there were heavy restrictions on the use of hosepipes. But this is autumn, and by the time of the performance it will be winter. I am not relying on the short memory of the public, nor am I relying on a direct link being noticed between the ban and the performance. This is not the motivation of the piece, it is a consideration.