Breaking at the elbows

One thing that becomes apparent as I cast my memory back over the last 3 months of contributing, with a lazy eye and torpid wrist, is that the overall flavour, the gist and direction, seems to be a whinging self pitying and paltry kind of squirming around this notion of poor old tortured me, how difficult I have it here in my creative ivory tower. This odour, this washing left in the machine over night and only starts to reek as the body heat warms it up type dawning of understanding I am now seeing as I peruse all that is written before me is a little disturbing. It is unsettling because the odour is lying- it is not actually telling the truth as it seeps from the page like invisible mist, carbon dioxide maybe, as it lies to people about the teenage angsty artistry of struggle... because it is not artistry or struggle that I have tried to capture. It runs deeper. To whinge, to bemoan, to lambast the world which I have created for myself as a creator, a creative, is teenage and angsty. Perhaps even cowfold. Thats what I am not doing. What I am doing started at a cafe in Prague, at a small metal table, tin like and rocking, as the elbows of Jody and me rocked the ideas and the round metal back and forwards from one to the other. As he reached up to relieve his mouth of the rolled up cigarette, so the table would rock to me, and as I reached for another sip of my beer bottled, so the rocking would incline jodywards, usually carrying on its crest another idea, or same idea half volleyed back. Other than the table's unique movement, the other crystal memory is of the ash tray- loaded with greyed burned golden virginia, and atop this a beautiful and perfect mobius strip, roughly fashioned from daler rowney sketchbook page and cellotape (or was it purely saliva and epiphany that held togeher its magic ends?), as sole testimony to the previous three hours' interchange and rocking, to the world-changing universe-encompassing god-devouring art that we had just created, baptised and inaugurated to the world at large. What I meantersay, is that the creative thread that runs through this encounter, and as many after it, through the creative encounters that perforated our remaining 2 years at college, and indeed beyond, was actually my/our chosen language, voice, artistic being-reason-style-whatever you'd like to try and pigeonhole it with using your cumbersome and clumsy written language. What Jody and I discovered there in prague, aside from the worldchanginguniverseencompassinggoddevouring ideas themselves, was the mechanic of, the route to, the method to our collective madnesses, In discussing 'it', 'that', 'them', 'us', 'art', (or more diabolically 'illustration') we were happily and gaily producing the finest work either of us had ever achieved (...jody will I hope forgive me for tying his greatest achievements to this particular phenomenon, which so blindly ignores his entirely competent and beautiful canon of figurative painting, his photography and his sculpture, not to mention his writing- though indeed that may have had lots to owe to our 'art of conversation'...) Its was thus that our joint exhibition, my first and finest hour, was conceived and executed. Show and Tell was a hastily thrown together and beautifully opportune carpe diem, an ambitious and dynamic crystallisation of the rocking table, the stella artois, the elbows and the cheap crystal ashtray. When the Hoxton Biblioteque folded, and shrank back into the minds of its creators, no doubt leaving debtors and sobbing partners, it left a vacuum on the corner of Old Street and Pitfield Street. It was a shell in which the vacuum was allowed to exist for just a handful of weeks, two of which Jody and I procured for the handsome fee of 200 quid. To have a gallery in hoxton to yourself, for 2 weeks, for 200 new english pounds was at this time (to us) a miracle. On reflection the fact that it was not a gallery but an empty shell with some DeWalt industrial flourescent tubing left over from the demolition of the biblioteque, and not much else, was probably the reason for the nominal fee. That and the fact that it was completely illegal, and if some person of even vauguest legal persuasion had bothered to notice the exhibition at any time during its glorious 2 weeks, they would have notified the authorities and we would have been arrested for squatting. This aside, the environment suited our needs perfectly. Jody and I spent £30 and 36 straight hours constructing 18 5'x2' canvasses with cheap B&Q timber and end of line canvas from covent garden in my one bed flat in victoria park road. We then hauled the canvasses to Old street in a wheel barrow via Hackney Road, and hung the primed blanks on the wall. Over the next 3 nights Jody and I resumed our dynamics and conversations, this time aided with diagramatics and explicatory glossaries and thumbnails. The ideas swung from the nature of art, illustration, creativity and the contradictions between the three, to religious literatures and different types of lager. We covered the reason behind exhibiting, for a person, an artist or an animal. We probably covered the legal implications of mounting a display in someone elses old biblioteque, without prior consent. It was a beautiful, fresh, immature and precocious effort. The end result was not entirely satisfying, neither for the creators nor viewers. It was however entirely honest. It was also the starting point, the launch pad, the seed crystal for this and any other blog I may attempt to produce. When I smell that odour- the clothes in the machine too long reek, the whingeing self important self pathetic struggling rant- I am reminded that I am not whingeing, not reeking, not pathetic... I am merely carrying on where I left off. The conversation has not changed. Perhaps the medium reflects the decade- and indeed we are tuned in to mono (logue) not stereo- but the essence is the same- shit the whole thing is the same. Its the same dialogue, the same conversation, the same voice- its the same fucking day as the dawn that broke in prague at the elbows.