Living and Being

A Tree

2011-08-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

Made with Microsoft Photosynth

2011-08-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

Near where I live. Stanley St.

Nietszche and Dog Copulation

2007-05-25T04:54:00.001-07:00

I've been doing some reading on Nietzsche of late, which reminded me of some drawings I did a few years ago. Went and dug a few out of my portfolio. Apparently we are on the same wavelength. It's like this:Schopenhauer (who precedes Nietsche) thinks that the world is made up of "I" and how I see the world. But there's one thing more. The world is really made up of "Will" and it is this will that I am constantly striving with: condemned to struggle in life to conform the world to my will. The Will is purposeless and irrational; don't ask me why it is, it just is. All my life, I must struggle against this will, suffering results.Nietzsche agrees, with a big difference.

You see, Schopenhauer thinks we do get occasional respites from this struggle. For instance, when we contemplate art, without "interest", we can get moments where our will cancels itself out. But Nietzsche says that suffering is part of life, so why try to avoid it. Swallow it instead, incorporate it, experience it as part of who you are.Nietzsche also thinks that, for a long time, in Europe, rational, bright, decent "Apollonian" thinking has been promoted at the expense of an equally important compliment: the dark, sexy, irrational "Dionysian" side.We need both sides, thinks Nietzsche, to have a semblance of balance.

Some stuff we did at home...

2007-05-14T23:06:00.001-07:00

As one does...

technorati tags:Art, Aesthetics, Cartoons, Death

SOme more images about death and I

2007-05-11T20:20:00.001-07:00

technorati tags:Aesthetics, Art, Death, Anxiety, philosophy

Pyre

2007-05-10T02:15:00.001-07:00

This monotype, one of a series, is a visual exploration of our awe at the immanence of death.

technorati tags:Aesthetics, art, philosophy, death, monotype

It's War Time...

2007-05-08T07:26:00.001-07:00

technorati tags:Philosophy, Aesthetics, Art, Cartoons, War, Sadism, Bombing, Iraq

And More

2007-05-07T01:29:00.001-07:00

technorati tags:Aesthetics, Art, Surrealism

Dogs, Teddy Bears and Sex

2007-05-02T05:39:00.001-07:00

technorati tags:art, aesthetics, cartoons, sex, desire, phobia

Some more drawings... again....

2007-04-30T03:38:00.001-07:00

technorati tags:art, aesthetics, cartoons

Some more Drawings

2007-04-24T17:13:00.001-07:00

technorati tags:art, aesthetics, cartoons, psychology

Apathy and AUstralians

2007-04-23T05:11:00.001-07:00

On Australians and political and moral apathy:

A couple of Sunday afternoons ago I was laying on my sofa watching Sunday Arts on the ABC.
My somnambulant ease was momentarily disrupted. A young theatre/film director was pointing out how so many Australians lie back on their sofas all weekend, reaching out for another stubbie, flicking between sports and arts programs. His thrust was that this is no way to make things happen. It is a squandering of our positive freedom. We ought not be like that. Get up off
your sofa you slob and go out there and conquer the world. Make a difference, to
your own life if not to that of others.

Was this worth thinking about? Sure, I had a knee jerk prick of guilt; and I'd guess that everyone else who saw the segment did too. A natural reaction to being accused: "Who? Me?"

So in between being too bored with Gaydar to bother, and actually getting up long enough to grab some fresh porn, I did think about it. Is Australia a nation of pathetic, apathetic slobs who don't deserve the freedoms and standards of living that they enjoy (as this young man seemed to be suggesting)? Even if so, what is the reason? Are Australians naturally formed to be apathetic slobs? Are most people in the world actually so disposed, so that given half the chance they'd be slobbish and apathetic? Is it a natural fault that we have to fight against? Is it social conditioning: get it easy and you get lazy?

I think there's a degree of truth there; but I think there is a lot more to it than that. On reflection, I thought this young director exhibited unconsidered views: rash, self-sure, vivacious youth led him to error, but he definitely deserves a good spanking.

For various reasons, it has only been during rare moments of great social crisis that the bulk of people in any population have been energetically, positively active in society, outside their ordinary, weekly routines.

One reason is that no socio-economic system could sustain ongoing effervescent agitation by all its members. The result (at an extreme) would have to be something like an inharmonious anarchy, a lurching social animal ever in danger of reverting to an unpleasant "state of nature." Can you imagine what Australia would be like if every Sunday afternoon the Domain and the foyer of the Young Liberals were over-run by enthusiastic, well meaning intendant caesars? What if every second gay boy in your building decided he was going to emulate the disclosing, chasing victories of Chas and the Lads?

In fact, during the early days of democracy, back in Athens, citizens were expected to actively participate, though not in a Chad-ish way. Were you a landholder, you'd be expected to spend a lot of time in the agora (market and meeting place). You'd be expected to judge too: when the Chad-ish Socrates was brought before the court on charges of infecting the youth with impious thoughts, he was judged by 500 of his peers. Socrates, by the way, claimed that he was guilty of no more than asking people to think clearly. Death by hemlock.

Of course, this Athenian democracy didn't include all the sweating, naked bodies you'd see labouring in the fields: slaves didn't count. To be worthy of being called a citizen you'd have to be born to the aristocracy or at least be in the free upper classes, and definitely not be female. The politically empowered actually ruled courtesy of the surplus created by the working poor. A good labourer was a productive, quiet labourer.

European fiefdoms worked much the same way, right up till such events as the abolition of the "rotten boroughs" in England, mid-19th century, and women actually started to get a political say, a century ago. Marx may have had dreams of a peaceful post-industrial utopia, but that final revolution never happened and we are still living under what it was supposed to replace: capitalism.

Can capitalism work if everyone hops up off their Sunday sofas and starts getting politically active? Hell no! What if everyone refuses to buy over-priced iPods (over 100 000 000 sold during the last 6 years: I've owned three) or Nokias, let alone refuses to work for the companies that produce the iPods and Nokias that they buy? Gawd!!!

True, there are certainly times and places when individual mass civil disobedience are comely things: times when the platitudinal untruths the system feeds the people just cannot be swallowed anymore. Roll in the suffragettes and Lech Walesa.

True, even the well oiled machine needs occasional maintenance, and our particular society is hardly a well oiled machine, despite its manifest virtues. We do need people to jump up and down, paint pictures for galleries, direct economically unsuccessful theatre, bring down the house with a too-soon ruined tenor voice, paint slogans on the side of the Opera House, write to their M.P's about immigration laws, stand up and heckle during Condelisa's guest lectures at the Con., and so on.

But through training and necessity, we cannot all so act.

Nor, I think, through nature. Most people are born to watch Mardi Gras and strip shows in the Manacle, not to participate in them. Nature has endowed the many with the blissful propensity to be followers, not agitators or leaders.

Apathy may not be a virtue, but it isn't about to vanish.

technorati tags:Philosophy, Morality, ethics, apathy

The hidden city

2007-04-20T05:18:00.001-07:00

So often it's in cities, where the most people are, that you get a great sense of isolation. Lilfe seems to be full of oxymorons. Empty side streets and litter covered footpaths lit by neon signs: but no one around....

technorati tags:photography, aesthetics, art, sydney

My locale

2007-04-18T21:02:00.001-07:00

People say the camera cannot lie. I say it cannot speak truth. All is filtered under the necessary conditions of what we want to see. This is the job of a photographer: to interpret and proclaim, performatively.

I see it as this and then so it is this...

technorati tags:Art, Aesthetics, photography, philosophy, sydney

The Bug Squashing

2007-04-17T04:18:00.001-07:00

technorati tags:ohilsoophy, art, aesthetics, cartoon

Sex and Art

2007-04-14T21:08:00.001-07:00

I'd lilke to do a Lacanian analysis of this. But not today. I have to clean my mirrors...

technorati tags:sex, art, lacan, psychoanalysis, aesthetics

And another...

2007-04-12T20:04:00.001-07:00

Not that I'm interested in psychonalytic interpretations of art or anything....

technorati tags:art, aesthetics, cartoons, angst

Penis Anxiety

2007-04-11T22:24:00.001-07:00

A Howler

2007-04-11T01:40:00.001-07:00

You get the picture (well, an electronic facsimile)...

technorati tags:Art, Cartoon, Anxiety, Aesthetics

Some Paintings

2007-04-10T01:21:00.001-07:00

Here are some more of my paintings, using as their starting point the local built environment.

technorati tags:Art, Abstract, Aesthetics, Painting, Landscape, Sydney

A Maverick

2007-04-09T01:05:00.001-07:00

Just did one of those personalilty tests and got back the following:

Do I agree? I 'll march to my own drum, thanks!

Three Heroic Acts

2007-04-08T19:15:00.001-07:00

Some more drawings of mine. These were all dont in Photoshop, incidentally.

technorati tags:Art, Aesthetics, Morality

Derrida's Invaginations

2007-04-07T03:52:00.001-07:00

I was looking at Jacques Derrida's deconstructed idea he calls "invagination" and wondering how to react to that in an abstract image.

Think of invagination as the folding space between two complimentary systems: the interaction is not simple but keeps folding back on itself in a way that is and isn't. A bit like the crack in the centre of a book which is there by virtue only of the pages around it, but which also inflects on those pages.

I decied to use Photoshop. I used only two colours in each image, and just a large brush. But I set the brush to "difference" mode; which means that where you paint over a colour, you don't get the colour of the brush you are using, instead you get the difference between it and the colour that happens to be already on that part of the image.

Repeating this many times meant that the "seam" in these images became more and more complex.

Invaginations I, II, III

Past and Becoming

2007-04-07T00:12:00.001-07:00

These "virtual" sculptures were made by looking at different states of an object as it changed through time. A cloth fell and I took "snapshots" of it at different times. Converted them into chrome, because after I combined them, they'd refelct each other in unpredicably complex ways.

The 19-20th century philsopher Henri Bergson highlighted the fact that out present state and the future states that we will become inflected by "memories" of our past states. We are constantly becoming the past: the past is more real than the present.

technorati tags:Art, Sculpture, Aesthetics, Philosophy, Bergson, 3DS Max

More Black Stuff

2007-04-05T23:21:00.001-07:00

I submetted these to the editors of the indie art mag Neomu.

They said they loved them, but din't publish them.

One thing: the fashion of what was published was definitely "softer".

Is all this trendy, sad, cartoony art that you see around tinged a bit with sentimentality?

Portrait of My Mum

What Me and K Used to Do

Which reminds me...

2007-04-05T23:18:00.001-07:00

Emotion in art? of course! But why and how? I mean, how can humour in art lead to somethign deeper? Think about Kant: he says, sagely, that art has to include a "purposiveness without a purpose". It has to have a purpose, yet not have one at the same time.

Crazy huh? But many people since have agreed, and a whole swathe of Continental thinkin gsince has relied heavily on "antinomies" or oxymorons.

There's a "gap" between purposfulness and purpose, and art fits uncannily within. Lacan couldn never have discovered his formulation of the Gaze without this kind of thinking.

Humour in art amplifies the gap, catches us unawares, makes us suddenly this uncanny gaze. Slips us up.

Yet too often artists dicount humour.

Here are a couple of drawings I did a while back. One ended up on the front cover of Australia's oldest literary journal. Hey, I think I managed to get the first ever erect penis there!

technorati tags:humour, black-humour, graphics, art, penis

The Mighty Boosh

2007-03-23T06:26:00.001-07:00

Just saw this in telly... it's The Mighty Boosh: Vince and Howard up tho their usual.

These guys gotta read Leibniz!

Need to see more? Watch the show!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/mightyboosh/

technorati tags:Boosh, Existentialism, humour, perspectivalism, phenomenology

Dormition

2007-01-11T21:56:00.001-08:00

...Am I cold to wish for a speedy

painless dormition, pray, as I know she prays,

that God or Nature will abrupt her earthly funcion?

W H Auden

My Current Series

2007-01-11T18:33:00.001-08:00

I've been working on a series of paintings, of which hese are the first.

It is a foot by a foot; a size I like here because of its anthopomorphic connotations. The series uses as its starting point various texts, largely either Bach cantatas or poems by W H Auden. The composition is determined by anylising the phonetic structure of the words, and thinking about their semantic meanings. The aim is to apply my own semantic response through the painting of what Deleuze calls percepts and affects.

Another From the Same Series

2007-01-04T01:16:00.001-08:00

Another painting from the same series.

Considering what I claim about horizontal lines equating to horizons, it is not surprising that these paintings read as landscapes.But there is no specific imagery intended in them. Rather, the idea is analogous to Bach's dance suites: they are certainly in dance form, but certainly not intended to be danced to, except perhaps with one's mind.

A Painting About Horizontals

2007-01-03T20:38:00.001-08:00

Here is one of my paintings. What is it? Rather, what is it about?

My basic intention was to do a series of paintings of horizontal stripes.

One of my teachers once said to me: "In sculpture, there are basically two motifs. Verticals are standing figures and horizontals are reclining figures."

I think this is pretty true. Extending the notion: I think that verticals represent the human struggle to live; horizontals suggest rest or death, or subsidence into the infinite horizon.

technorati tags:JonathanChristie, Painting, Expressionism, Heidegger

"I'm sorry, but putting a pile of used cigarettes on a gallery floor might be art to some people, but it isn't to me."

2007-01-03T19:42:00.001-08:00

That's and old question: what is art? It's always been one that has no clear answer.

Until a century or so ago, it was a question that didn't come up much. Even if we couldn't define what art was, we pretty much knew it when we saw it. A painting in a frame, of a person or forest; a cathedral, a poem by Shakespeare: all these things were indisputably art.

But about a century ago, European artists started to be strongly influenced by artifacts from other cultures; things like straw and wood masks that did not at all fit in with European conceptions of what art should be. Painters like Matisse started using gaudy colours, forms in painting became 'abstract' and Cubism was born, and, infamously, Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in a gallery.

And then came Pop Art - Andy Warhol.

And popular movies.

Go to a major gallery these days and you are likely to be confronted with a plethora of forms; a bewildering array, all claiming to be valuable and high art.

Ask a person on the street "What is art?". Likely she will have trouble saying what it is, but equally likely she will have an opinion on what it is not.

"I'm sorry, but putting a pile of used cigarettes on a gallery floor might be art to some people, but it isn't to me. In fact, I don't think it is art at all."

Fair enough. The woman is really saying: what the canon of art is a cultural 'narrative', determined by an elite group of people who have little in common with me, and who are playing a game that has become so obtuse and metaphysical that it is absurd. Develop that line of thought systematically and you may have a very valid argument.

So, if the 'artworld' (Arthur Danto's term) of self-referencing artists, curators and critics is not going to determine what art is, then who does the job fall to?

Press the poor woman on the street with the point that the fact that all these urinals and blobs of paint do fill our art galleries, and she is as likely as not to say:

"Well, art is whatever you say it is, I guess."

Is that a valid argument. Well, it is, but it isn't a very useful one, for it is too inclusive. We don't want to consider everything in the universe as potential art, because that devalues what 'art' means as a term to describe and classify things. Take an analogy. Let's replace the word 'art' with 'cuisine'. By the same line of thought, we'd be saying that anything you can eat is cuisine. OK, so I can barely boil an egg, and I always burn the toast, and that's all I can cook. Is what I serve up to you really on par with what is presented in a top notch restaurant? Is fast food on par with it either? Surely not.

Similarly, if everything is art, then let's say that everything that has colour is grey. I look around the room: everything is grey, I have to say. But I feel a need to classify and distinguish. I have to say: my sofa is orangish-grey, my carpet is greenish-grey, and the wallet on the coffee table is blackish-grey. Why not just use the terms: orange, green, and black? By being too inclusive, 'grey' becomes meaningless. And so it is when we say that anything is art, if we want to call it that. We can say that, but it is not productive, it makes the word 'art' pretty useless in language, and we are still going to retain opinions about particular examples or categories of art.

So, what is art?

Rather than say that, I'm going to suggest that a more useful question is: What does art do for us?

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