Went to speak to Will at the start of the week regarding a letter sent to me by email from the course - designed, as Will later put it, to give me a kick up the arse. Which I suppose it did, sort of. Hardly made me feel any better however. The bullet points of the causes for concern were as I remember:
- Failure to submit journal for the January deadline
- No evidence of blog
- Lack of appearance at Whitworth talks
- Lack of appearance at 1:30 Course Talks
Something else too, I think there were five points. Fair enough - I haven’t got the blog up yet due to not having the Internet here at my flat so yes I’m behind on that. The Whitworth talks are shit though and just not relevant to the kind of work I’m interested in. It’s always just contemporary gallery stuff and both words make my skin crawl. Going to the seminar afterward is often even more of a patronizing waste of time: briefly skim over the content of the Whitworth talk, exchange a few worthless opinions about that, then sit about being asked “how could the course be made better?” Of course I don’t care at all how the course could be made better because I won’t be there to experience it being better, so why should I? My only recommendation is this – the university ought to have a tougher selection process for getting onto the course in the first place. No pain no gain kind of thing. There’s too much variation in the levels of knowledge, interest and ability amongst everybody and as a result nobody ever bothers to get a decent debate started about anything interesting, let alone art.
Anyway I digress. I also spoke to Will about my current state of mind and that I was considering seeing a doctor/counsellor. I’ve registered with the doctors now but I’ve not made an appointment yet. I don’t know really what to do about it...
This week Mosley Street Gallery opened a new exhibition of Grayson Perry work so on the Wednesday Mont and I went to have a look. It wasn’t great but there was some nice work and it got me a little more interested in GP, enough at least to watch some interviews on YouTube later in the evening. I’ve written my first gallery review for the year on it all so details are in that.
Thursday I went on the train to Liverpool to meet with Will and the other IAers that hadn’t gone on the Berlin trip (Dan, and later Mont) at Fact cinema. It turned out there was something going on in the city about Nam June Paik and so Fact and the Tate both had work. Fact had one of these shitty “artist response” things like at Grayson Perry the day before (evidently the latest trend) and a large canvas cone with laser projections on it, neither of which I enjoyed particularly. Upstairs though they had some interesting videos of international satellite-linked music and dance performances organised by NJP in the 1980s with some hilarious footage of David Bowie and Merce Cunningham. The Tate exhibition was more interesting as it had all the TV sculpture stuff and a decent section on Paik’s collaborative work with John Cage including prepared piano and tape experiments. Generally though it was a depressing day, I felt shit, found it hard not to be sulky and communicated poorly with people. Liverpool is always so fucking bleak anyway. They only gave it Capital Of Culture status to dupe people into going there.
In better news though I won the bids for, and received, two items from eBay - a Boss DD3 Digital Delay pedal and a Sony TC 280 reel-to-reel tape recorder which I intend to use along with my mixer for getting on with some new sound work. I haven’t done a lot with either yet as I’ve just been fiddling with the two seeing what they do. Plus I need to pick up various cables and connectors before I can link everything up and get going properly. I did spend Saturday evening cutting and splicing some tape however, making randomly compiled loops to feed through the TC 280. Results varied...
Meantime I began some video tests with Mont in an attempt to loosely combine our work and kill two birds with one stone so to speak. As his project is focusing on super-positioning I thought we could combine the idea with the documenting of my sound recording processes and so we made a couple of videos to test this (and yes this is a belated version of our proposed Edge Of The Wedge re-enactment. Belated and a bit shit):
- Tripod standing on record deck turntable with Rode Mic elastic banded to the top and dictophone connected and sitting on the turntable below. Player then spins at 33 1/3 rpm while I sit holding a note on my Stylophone, which I hold toward the player from my stationary position. Result on the final recording is that the tone, rather than staying at a monotonous volume, audibly swipes past the microphone creating a kind of WOM-ing pulse of quiet and loud. Nice effect to bear in mind... Monty sorts out some angles to film from with his two AV store camcorders.
- Camcorder wrapped into a ball of bubblewrap and dangled on a length of string. Stylophone also dangled on string with the stylus taped/white tacked in a note-playing position. Both are activated and held over the banister into the stairwell of my flat along with the Rode Mic in its foam windshield, and Christian and I swing them about below while Mont films it all from the break part of the stairs. It was fun to do but the result wasn’t very interesting, mostly nauseating infact as the camera wouldn’t stop spinning.
Below: Top - Sony TC280 Reel to Reel with Boss DD3 Digital Delay
Bottom - Turntable/Mic experiment
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