The Circumflex

I did not finish reading Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism – not at the last attempt anyway.  It wasn’t that it fell by the wayside.  It wasn’t too difficult.  (it was difficult but it wasn’t TOO difficult).  I got to the end of the 5^th chapter – Sentences –and I couldn’t go on.  More than hard-core pornography, the BBC news and films by Mel Gibson, Postmodernism was ( I decided) bad for me.  OK : I was a bit frayed at the edges anyway at that point….and I was reading it whilst touring California… but I couldn’t endure the relentless exposition of nothingness.  It’s a shame.  I really wanted to finish it.

When I was a boy of about fourteen I was quite good at drawing.  I had a knack of drawing fighter planes and such…got high marks in exams until my art master (allegedly ex-RAF) leaning over my shoulder to see what I was doing, said,  “That’s very good.  Are you thinking about doing art next year?”

“No,” I said.  “Latin.”  (One couldn’t really ‘do’ art and ‘academic’ subjects together – you were one or other.)

“Oh,” he said.  That year I almost failed my art exam.

I returned to painting about 10 years ago – landscape watercolours –  but gave it up again because it was taking up too much of my writing time…it’s gratifications were too immediate…it was a distraction from the big task – TO BE A WRITER!

Now, I have Fredric to thank for my reconnection with drawing and painting. 

It started as a sort of meditation. 

I had a psychotherapist who said, in the context of my writing and my life, that I refuse to gratify.  I withhold – not truth, not even pleasure but hope and reassurance.  Comfort.   My writing is a telling of tales – clyping we say in Scotland – at best a bearing of witness. 

This occurs.  This is how it is.  You should know this.  And/but…

My work could only be worthwhile (I thought) if it achieved ‘likeness’ – though the likeness I achieved was rarely ‘likeable’: it failed to gratify.  And this prejudice was stronger in drawing and painting (where I had invested little in learning and practice) than in writing.  Though my  taste is for Schiele, Goya, Picasso, Rothko, Emin, Breugel,  Currin, Koons, Serra, Freud I wanted to draw and paint ‘likeness’.  Which leads to the inevitable question – like WHAT?

In part, of course, it is a matter of craftsmanship – draughtsmanship and mastery of colour.  Picasso apparently emphasised the importance of ‘drawing’ in ‘an artists’ development, though perhaps he meant ‘looking’.  But then he was more of a draughtsman than (say) Matisse or Gauguin and perhaps less of a painter.  But both elements (and any consideration of colour must surely extend to texture) must be integrated in pursuit of likeness – the value invested in the reader’s recognition – for a graphic image is read/decoded just as surely as a text. 

Ah!  THAT is what it is like!

A dissonant chord.  A sensation of vertigo.  A focus on the fetish.  A colour beyond nature but apprehended.

And then there is the matter of form…

Ezra Pound in his 1962 Paris Review Interview commented on the ‘enormous correlation of particulars’ inherent in the camera and observed that this threw up the question of ‘what needs to be done and what is superfluous?’  Mechanically captured images and recorded sounds saturate experience.  Almost everyone has seen or heard (or can see or hear) everything ‘public’ encapsulated in one or other of the canonical forms of reproduction.  The world of stuff is continuously mined for ‘images’ and the images traded globally, essences extracted, derivatives devised and by this populist/corporate mapping and cross-referencing of the space, reality is fractured not healed.    

And yet, as artists, we must offer resonant likeness, the subject’s realisation of how-it-seems/ how-it-feels that evokes an entirely novel increment of solidarity in the reader – a moment in the physical not temporal sense – an opening up of space, the creation of reality through new recognitions.  An art-work is a device after all – Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

I suppose, name-dropping again, it’s the Gramsci thing – the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will…or Beckett’s ‘Fail again. Fail better.’

I hate stories.  They are not true.  Life’s not like that.  And yet they are all we have.  We.  The bedrock of solidarity..a make-it-that contingency, an ironic smirk.  Our only access to shared ‘reality’.  Ah well!

Back to the drawing board.