Time, Ladies and Gentlemen, please...

 There comes a point when I need a break from the seemingly endless French Flute Sonatas that haunt early morning (ie afternoon here) Radio 3, and I have had enough of shouting at yet another Tory who seems to have forgotten the UK has been suffering under the rule of the Eton 'elite' for a very long time.  In these times I turn to audiobooks, and scroll through endless stuff on Youtube in the hope of finding something interesting.

Yesterday I discovered a reading of J G Ballard's Kingdom Come.  This is set in the towns around Heathrow, and concerns the malign influence of a huge shopping mall and the rise of a fascist/consumer cult based on violence and racism, for when your life is defined by the wandering of a mall and the purchasing of consumer goods there is only violence to bring excitement.  Although deeply disturbing, there is an element of satire in the fact that the narrator is a failed advertising executive, and therefore partly responsible for the rise of the mall and the central position of shopping in everyone's lives.  I am still listening.

But yesterday there occured one of those odd moments, an strong sense of deja vu.  This was during a description of an apartment, the last home of the narrator's recently murdered father.  I knew the description, I knew every sentence before it had been uttered, and as the description continued there was a feeling of the world shrinking, of there only being the light on the table, the voice from the computer, and me listening to something I already knew.  I have not, as far as I can recall, read this novel, but at sometime I must have read that description, for the sense of familiarity was overwhelming.  But it felt as if I was split in time - there was me listening in the present, and, in a not too distant future I was listening as well, so that the present me was remembering what the future me was listening to.

At this point I should reach for various philosophical and scientific tomes on the nature of time - which is an illusion, and lunchtime doubly so (spot the quote).  But I think it is mostly due to present problems, to not venturing forth often enough as the weather has been less than friendly lately.  I do not like summer, and endless hot days fill me with despair, I am a child of winter and much prefer autumn. 

That sense of deja vu has caught me a number of times recently, is this because I am mining my own memories for ongoing artworks?  Maybe, maybe...

To quote Week Ending, "Makes you think...."

Angry Old Man 1

 

It has been some time since I last posted anything here, and I can't really understand why.  Except that, too often, I put stuff on Facebook or into turgid emails my poor friends have to wade through in order to discover the state of my mind, and if I need help, or cake, or coffee.  Mostly it is the last two.

However, I think it is time I began to write again, rather than discussing my views with the dog on our short walks taken before the heat rises from barely acceptable to utterly intolerable, which latter may in fact be how I feel about the artworld.

Having reached that stage where new opportunities have ceased hereabouts, and the only worthwhile things are in Europe (oh, and the UK, I forget we 'got Brexit done' and have utterly buggered the arts - and sciences - for years to come.  But hey, we got control of our borders, something we already had, but don't tell the Surrey rascists who still think Brexit a good idea) I have fallen to musing on (dot dot dot) curators.  I am sure that once upon a time there were more gallery directors, exhibition assistants, and curators lived mostly in museums.  Now there are more curators than artists it seems, and the curators vie for funds to produce publications and attend conferences and, and here is the point that affects my reason, get money for exhibition proposals and then search for artists to 'respond to the curatorial concept'. Meanwhile the artist just sits and waits, devoid of any ideas, a mere automaton requiring the magic formula of the curator's concept to kick start the corpse into life.  I am a mere lump of clay and need the slip of paper to animate my base material.  

I object to this, to having to bend my ideas to fit the views of a curator fresh from an MA in Curatorial studies.  Maybe curators should, post MA, do some on-the-job training - five years of being a technician in a gallery building walls and painting things white, a few years standing in a gallery looking after exhibitions, that kind of thing.  Actually, this would be good for everyone in the artworld.  Especially those cloistered in academia.

This is all deeply unfair, and many of the curators I know have indeed spent their time painting walls white and fiddling with lights while the opening deadline for the exhibition looms.  But I wish there were more open calls were curators would develop ideas with artists, rather than proscibing what the artist(s) can produce.  And then that artist can make the work and the curator can deal with all the other bits, like getting money, arranging transport, painting walls white...