My Chest of Drawers – Notes from London

London Oct 2007


"The only thing that the world will not have enough of is exaggeration." Salvador Dali


Salvador Dali
Pablo Picasso
Tate Britain (Turner)
Banksy


From Dali's chest came the drawers of consciousness, sub-consciousness, secrets and dreams.

The Anthropomorphic Cabinet (1936)

In an age that seems to me to increasingly lack reason, perhaps it is time to loosen the ties to perceived realities and embrace the unreal, the surreal; images of perceived untruth and fiction that may offer more truth and thought than the lies and conditioning that we are force fed daily create.

Why for example is it acceptable to punctuate our city landscapes with golden arches and perfume selling celebrities but graffiti is seen as an eye sore, vandalism and so immediately and with distain removed? We are bought and sold every square inch of our city lives. We are conditioned to accept these acquired normalities and to reject the unfamiliar and different.

Are we are slaves to the accepted mediocrity of our lives, bought and sold by corporate sales and political lies? Dumbed-down by the capitalist suction, which conditions us to be more interested in the boring and mundane than the real. If we are inspired to really think… to REALLY think, then the world around us could collapse and even those of us who sometimes try to think beyond the everyday are frightened of the possibilities should be abandon apathy.

Some of us care enough to discourse but we also see the futility of the thought process, the bullshit it sounds like to say these thoughts aloud. In expressing these thoughts and ideas we are more culpable than those who didn’t know or don’t think about such things. There is no superiority or pride in exploring these ideas in ink or words; in fact it may show us as flawed and inferior to those who are unaware, as we knowingly fail to act.

Banksy

Today I decided to live to be one hundred years of age!

A trickle of salvia at the back of my throat has of late started to habitually catch my breath and force me to cough. I think this may be a psychosomatic symptom of the stuttering engine of my creativity. Christ that sounds pompous! That trickle of moisture may be my body’s way of breaking the rhythm of my contentment and reminding me that there is something missing.
Now back in the centre of the world, surrounded by the brutally beautiful spoils of Imperialism, stimulated by the presence of great creators, my pen re-emerges and starts to produce. Profound nothings will perhaps evolve into something. Attractive word combinations and stolen ideas might manifest themselves in something real and simple. For now the fact that there is ink on the page is enough, I am waking up!

Artists, as people are limited…art is limitless!

Grey clouds, heavy and dark drag the sky closer to engulf us. Grey buildings are columns to this grey ceiling, closing in, making us feel tighter, claustrophobic, imprisoned. But, then the drops of colour come from the grey sky to the grey ground. They fall, invisible until they splash up in a rainbow of surprising colour.

I’m drawn back to Ryan, my hibernating, narcoleptic protagonist from “5 Prime AMP”, the only me capable of putting all these images and ideas together in a cohesive context. An exploration of dreamscape, sub-conscious and jumbled influences; my hero, the host of the plain between worlds, at times the only me who makes sense, my only self that I understand.

Incomprehensible at times he is a picture of psycho-analysis, a source of creative exploration who owes more to what I don’t understand than what I do.

Dali said something about the meaning of his work which I like. He said that while sometimes at the time of creation his work may have had no meaning, which is not to say that that they are without meaning.

Human beauty is vulnerable to time and inevitability fades. Art is true immortal beauty.

The difficulty I face with these little streams of consciousness is that I want to avoid some dangerous pitfalls. Grasping onto profound nothingness, condescending preaching and self-importance are unpleasant by-products of letting the mind wander. The safety net is, as always, to fain ignorance and use the guise of subjectivity in interpretation, but this a hollow defence for poor writing.

The persistence of memory




A number of images and ideas stay with me from the couple of days I spent in London that have been crying out for exploration.

Dali’s melting clocks are fascinating. He used these repeatedly both in his sculpture and painting. He was drawn to the idea that the passage of time is entirely in the realm of control of the individual. Time passes according to the state of mind of the person experiencing that time. In simple terms if you are having fun, ‘time flies’, if you are not having fun, time drags. And, so his clocks melted and time became an intangible. Richard Powers writes that time exists only to prevent everything from happening at the same time. We fear death more than anything else yet we spend our days passing time, killing time, living for the weekend, watching the clock. Melt the clock. Follow Dali’s example and confine time to a place of less importance and use that time better.

Dali’s sculpture of the unicorn penetrating the wall, with the blood dripping from its horn had me transfixed for ages. Far from subtle in its phallic and sexual nature, it is still hugely thought provoking. Thoughts of masculinity and male female dynamics linger long after the piece has been left to others to discover. Man as the protector, the perpetrator, the distributor of pleasure and pain, the threat of danger and the security of protection. As men we are seen as the threat and the shield, we are the ones who perpetrate the wrongs but also the ones who must protect from these wrongs. Sexually we must be strong and gentle, we have perceptions of the expectations women have of us based on our cultural influences. The lines are clear at times but so blurred at other times. When does the line between sexual strength and penetration cross over to aggressive violence and who determines that line. In solid relationships these lines are more clearly defined and understood but in the world of random action and self gratification when does the phallic unicorn cease to be a beast of mythic strength and virility and become the perpetrator of something more sinister and hurtful. To continue on the alliteration of the letter ‘P’, perception and pre-conditioning are central to this idea.



When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."from Boswell's Life of Johnson


I am repeatedly reminded in London that I am enjoying and very willingly so, the spoils of imperialist politics and exploitation. Why am I happy to do this? Simply because it is quite a cool place to be and the images that funded the creation of this place are a million miles away. Here in this grey town I see drops of colour bounce off the pavement; beautiful girls of every shade, handsome buildings tastefully pepper the streets and dilute the capitalist bunting that is everywhere. The different tongues and general pleasantness of most people belie the crude brashness of the late night revellers celebrating sporting victories in the manner I imagine their ancestors did the conquering of foreign lands. These football and Rugby supporters celebrate in a manner not dissimilar to how my friends and I would celebrate our equivalent yet in the context of this monument to imperialist Britain it seems distasteful.

Colour and passion, art and inspiration that has been absent from my life recently are in abundance here. There is a positive legacy that I see from the multi-culturalism; the prioritising of the arts, the new fashion of turning to organic and natural produce. It is a place of contradiction yet I feel more hope here despite the very real violence and drugs springing from a very real hopelessness here. I feel more hope here than I did twelve months ago when it was harder to see past the abuse and neglect, the hate and prejudice so prevalent in this place. More content in my self now I am more positive. A fleeting position, perhaps precarious, but one I’m happy to hold on to. England, a place of contradiction tips heavier in both directions than most and so with the tilt and roll more extreme so the ideas and emotions are more abundant.