more face paint drawings

Is it arts job to be critical?

Following up from a subject raised in last Friday's seminar.


I do believe that art is inherently political, for reasons I think I have already stated in this blog. But does political equal critical?


A non-critical practice seems impossible to me. An artist working totally intuitively is still making decisions about what is good and bad, is this not a form of criticality?...


But, then again, this is about an artists criticality and not art's. Is art/should art be critical of the world? Is it a default position?... How can it not be. As Neil pointed out, this seems to be fairly recent way of thinking, after modernism... (but then the dadaist were pretty critical weren't they?)... but even if it is a recent thing, to go back on it seems a bit like trying to take the milk back out of coffee, (to borrow another Neilism... not to be confused with nihilism...) isn't that what Ranciere describes as the difference between the representational regime and the aesthetic regime?


Art is made up of contradictory ways of seeing and doing and thinking etc. can we just accept that they are all equally valid?...


What is criticality proper?...


It is certainly a baffling truth that if we take the idea that arts job is to challenge known truths, then this is in itself a known truth which art must challenge... i.e. there is no outside of anything. no external position from which to be objectively critical. We cannot judge the wall street protesters hypocrites for drinking coke, they have no choice but to criticize capitalism from within it... 


I think the question of whether art should be intentionally critical and the question of whether art is inherently critical are two different things... in the same way that taking a party political position is different from the fact that art is inherently political. Art is there - it's uses are different from its modes of productions or reasons for being...


It just feels odd to be arguing for anything other than criticality from the position of being on an MFA... 

Face paint drawings

Self cling....

window posters... seems like a reasonably priced site, at first glance...


window dimensions 138cm - 69cm

It all went a bit braveheart...

Yellow = Noel F/Sin City

Green = Leigh Bowery/zombie

Blue = Braveheart/smurf....

Wonder whether it would be better to pass over the painting to a professional? costume department maybe?

James Randi at the Magic Castle: In Conversation with Max Maven

Where is my mind?...

What am I doing? A desire to start something new/different has rendered my impotent. College/the studio is starting to piss me off so I'm at home again, trying to let ideas pop into my frustrated noggin. So, what do I have?...

1) Another Rope Escape... Ok so this isn't new/different but the first one was so fleeting and not at all what I was doing at the time. I have toyed with the idea of being tied to a chair and escaping for a while, maybe I should just do it?....

2) I watched a bit of the 1985 film King Solomon's Mines yesterday, it's awful. But there is a tribe in it who, badly paraphrasing, "dissatisfied with the world as it is, live upside down in order to change it." To which Sharon Stones character states, "how sad." I think it's the best bit of the whole film... not sure how I'd spend time upside down though...

3) The roof... I got an email back saying I could go on the roof of the Hunter building but as yet have had no reply to my email saying when... Still don't know what I'm going to do on the roof. I wanted to spend some time on the main building roof but the Hunter building looks less interesting... I'll still go up if I can. The fact that I can't go up alone means that there is already a relationship between participants to deal with what ever I do... I might just show my guide a card trick or something like that?

4) Face paint... what is enough to delineate a performance/a work? Is costume, or in this case face paint, enough to declare work? Can I just paint my face and go about my business? Would that be work?

Noel Fielding...

How much does Noel Fielding's comedy rely on costume? there are other obvious references that spring to mind...

Leigh Bowery

Vulva: David Walliams in Spaced

Also, is it too close to what Keith has been doing for that last couple of years? I have no intentions of stepping on anybodies toes

Keith Farquhar. Painted nude cut out.

5) Degree show, degree show, degree show. (To the tune of DeKooning, DeKooning...) After yesterday's meeting with Neil, I am once again in the same boat I have been in before... due to the nature of the work i make I have to present documents to be assessed... It's not easy to think about making work whilst at the same time being asked to consider how you might present documentation of it for assessment... I'll get over it... stuck is definately the word though...

I need to loosen up but everything around me is doing the opposite... Onwards