I can't seem to get this to upload as a comment on 'Amanda's Work' post. i've tried a hundred times!!! so i'll have to place it here. if anyone has any thoughts on what i might be doing wrong, please let me know, and i can remove it and post it as a comment - anyway on response to Chris's comments....
i love the comments you made, you couldn't never off piste! there is no such place! It is your reading of the work, but in any case, it is spot on... I love the thought of all time and labour captured and used, without care for importance, this i think is really true. All activity for me is part of the work! Re. grey matter, I have been thinking about this for the paper i am writing, particularly in relation in the pursuit of an elusive image, the dream photograph i have been trying to make in Dust Passing, which was inspired by Robert Shapazian writing on Man Ray's Dust Breeding, the long exposure of settled dust on Duchamp's The Large Glass, in which he describes how the came about. Whilst I was reading the text, I envisioned a kind of anti-photograph. Almost everything that a well-made photograph isn’t. Instead of an image made from various tones of grey. It is a thick fog, a magical, amorphous haze of grey grain on the photo paper. And within which one can imagine any and every image… You also talked of grey matter, in relation to the works in your show, on the phone as well. Is there anything you have been reading about grey, dust, the imagination, the sublime, boredom and generation? I have found some references in some essays about Benjamin by Teresa Stoppani, e.g. Dust Projects: on Walter Benjamin’s Passengen-Werk (have a photocopy of if you want me to send by smail mail?)
and also i need to find Andrew Benjamin ‘Boredom and Distraction: The Moods of Modernity’ in ‘Walter Benjamin and History’ (London, Continuum, 2006)
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Sorry, it's taken a while to respond. For some reason I was drawn to 'grey' in the lead up to my show. I was reading about Jasper Johns' use of grey throughout his career. I even exhibited the book in the show (which is something I've taken to doing for reasons I'm not entirely sure of) along with two others: a monograph on Juan Gris and a book called 'Gray Area' by Julie Meheretu. I liked the three different spellings of grey. Then there was the flour and coal-dust piece on the floor which when swept up became an ash-like grey. I also liked that coal-dust and flour were both regenerative materials in some way. This piece - an anamorphic motif of a white elephant called DEAD BEAT DESCENDANT was a kind of logo, if you like, to represent how the creative spirit might be seen as a ruinous burden. I'd been reading D.H. Lawrence's 'Sons and Lovers' - all about fathers in coal mines, mothers in kitchens and sons intent on an artistic career. I didn't purposely set out to illustrate that scenerio but somehow seemed to have done so anyway in the most oblique way possible. I'd have been quite amazed, though, if someone had looked at it and asked - 'you'be been reading Sons and Lovers, haven't you?' I felt like my work is also hovering in some kind of grey area, so to speak. At the crysallis stage, which is where I hope it stays. In limbo. Springing forth from a number of sources but never quite becoming. Nothing was quite what it seemed in that show. Paint made to look like stretched canvas. Dust that looked like spray paint. No wonder people kept walking on it! Theatre I suppose. Anathema to some artists, but not me. (I've been looking at Philip Treacy, Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood recently). I used lots of colour, but then not really. All the colours were straight from the pot, artificial, unmixed...bordering on garish, truthful, dishonest. A strange mixture of objectivity and subjectivity. I saw them as grey... like Jasper Johns, I'm not at all a colourist. I'll use what's there. If I made work on Mars my dust pieces would generally be made up of the colour red. I would love to read anything you recommend. I haven't yet got round to reading anything recommended on this blog yet, but I will and look forward to it. Please forward anything.
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