Since my Art-Craft Model image was getting a little crowded, I decided to produce a different version to help explain what people mean by 'culture'. This ios my first version, and I am sure that I will be adjusting it and trying to make it more user friendly.
You can find many attempts in books, on courses or even on the internet where someone attempts to define what art is. They fail for many reasons, but one of the chief ones is that they fail to understand that a great chunk of culture is missing from the standard definitions. A good sign as to what is valued and what is ignored in society, and I do not mean what is good or bad, is how much language there is devoted to it. Cooking is chock full of language that is freely borrowed from other languages to express ingredients and methods. Here, though, that large white area exists without a vocabulary, and without a vocabulary something does not, or almost does not exist to most people.
A good and common example of this can be found here in Poland, where I live. I am English, but I am not described as a Polish-Englishman - yet if I were Polish and went and lived in the USA I could be a Polish-American. Culturally, I do not exist. My case might not seem important to you if you are not having to live a life of being a permanent outsider. Worse still is the case of Jewish people - neither English nor Polish have a term for Poles who are Roman Catholics, and therefore history texts talk about 'Poles' and 'Jews', as if 'Jews' were not Poles.
There are many unmapped areas of culture, and each removes the rights to be from those who exist in those areas in favour of those who lived in well-marked areas.
My Art, that little note below the question mark, sits in the unmarked zone - you cannot ignore it because it has Art, and yet it would be difficult to sell it because the lack of Craft is so obvious. If, instead of photographs, you saw my actual Art as thoughts about how humans interact with human systems, and realized that the photographs - and graphs like this - were nothing more than attempts to communicate to you from a land with little vocabulary, then is the lack of Craft in the photographs so important? The high Craft elements of my Art are largely invisible and yet in my working life continual to generate irregular extra income. How? Well, once I transform my Art into a visible concept - some diagrams for example, they change the way managers think about their industry, their departments or whatever.
Their are many ways that I use to communicate my Art, and I do not have time to become high Craft in each method - there are too many, and I rather need the time to perfect my Art.
If any of my images or my texts alters your perception of the world, then my Art has touched you - even though it might be through an imperfectly utilised channel of communication.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Art_Craft Model and Tradition
I have now added a few elements, some just to try and make it more clear the difficulty of achieving Art, and one to show another cause for the easy drift away from the search for Art.
Tradition can set in at any time - you might decide that some ancient religious value should prevent you from some area of Art, or that photographs cannot be arty if they are not black and white and taken with a German Leica camera from the 1930s. Perhaps, even, that you must use Photoshop.
If you fail to recognise Tradition, it will push you away from Art into the acquisition of Craft, or event push you out of the arena entirely.
It is worth remembering that if you allow yourself to be blown by Tradition, your works will contain less and less of you and more and more of the people who have gone before you. You may find that society, or some part of society may prefer you to do this, because there is a strong element in society that wants to prevent the discomfort and envy comes when other people achieve things that are new. You may even recognise this feeling within yourself.
You have to decide for yourself how much of yourself are you prepared to sacrifice in order to ensure the comfort of the more restrictive elements of society.
Tradition can set in at any time - you might decide that some ancient religious value should prevent you from some area of Art, or that photographs cannot be arty if they are not black and white and taken with a German Leica camera from the 1930s. Perhaps, even, that you must use Photoshop.
If you fail to recognise Tradition, it will push you away from Art into the acquisition of Craft, or event push you out of the arena entirely.
It is worth remembering that if you allow yourself to be blown by Tradition, your works will contain less and less of you and more and more of the people who have gone before you. You may find that society, or some part of society may prefer you to do this, because there is a strong element in society that wants to prevent the discomfort and envy comes when other people achieve things that are new. You may even recognise this feeling within yourself.
You have to decide for yourself how much of yourself are you prepared to sacrifice in order to ensure the comfort of the more restrictive elements of society.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
What you see you think
This image is available for sale at Photo4me, framed and ready to hang!What we see and what we think we see are not always the same thing, although a lot of the time it really does not matter. You might see what you think is a broken table in someone's garden, but what it might really be is a temporary slide for the owner's children. You might argue that it is still a table - but how many table's do you know with two legs that sit in the garden and children slide down it? It could be made into a table again, but the inability to see it as an object with many potential uses is your own block on your own perceptions - how can you ever create something new if everything you see is already categorized?
The table-slide issue seems irrelevant, and yet we use exactly the same process in people - or at least we allow politicians and journalists to use the same process on us, blinding us to any alternative view. You do not believe me - go read some forums on different subjects and see how other people perceive humans by categorising them as Black, Jews, White, islamic, Buddhists, and how they speak about them. As a White Roman Catholic Man in Poland i should be equal to the average Pole, one might think, but I am not because most people only see me as Foreign, and I am treated as such whatever the legal position might be. Imagine then if I were not White Roman Catholic Man, but Black Jewish Woman?
If you see people by category first instead of Human first, then you are part of the problem, unwittingly you are removing these people of some of their most basic of Human rights, their right to their own identity.
When you see people as Humans, such concepts as 'mixed marriages' no longer have any meaning as what can you mix in the Human race Is the intention to deliberately breed humans so that they are no more than cats, dogs or farm animals, each variation proud to be that variation?
If you feel a need to be proud, be proud of the good achievements of individual Humans, just don't classify these Humans by the nations they happen to belong to. You do not have to love everyone around you, just make sure it is you who makes the decision on what Humans you love or hate, don't hate a Nation just because they have members who believe in hateful actions, for they do not all believe in such things, just as you do not believe in all the hateful things members of your own society engage in.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Limited creation by pressure of society
If you live in a society, you cannot expect to be able to do just as you please, as what you do may affect other member's of the same society. Life in a society means giving up some freedoms in order to gain safety and protection. However, there are some problems.
If you have a book, it might be useful or it might not - and if it is not then you have to consume some of your resources in maintaining that book - such as dusting and storing it. If the book is of importance to you, you might wish to give it to your children so that they can treasure it to, but if it means nothing to you you could try to sell it, give it away to a friend or donate it - or even just throw it away or burn it. Book printing companies destroy books all the time, just as any other manufacturing operation there comes a time when you produce to many things and the cost of storage outweighs the products value.
Many people will object, because they have made their image of 'book' to strong, and now it hurts too much to break that image. At this point, you are no longer free, either your book image is too strong and you must maintain them all, or someone else's book image is too strong and they will make you life unpleasant if they discover you breaking their image by destroying a book. You have to dispose of unwanted books in secret or be on the receiving end of unpleasant looks, gossip or even heated words. You are a criminal because someone else lacks the ability to change.
Why do people lack this ability, and why does it seem to get worse with age? Well, a good part of the pressure comes from other people and their poorly examined values, or from education. And it does not just involve books, but any concept that we have, and because many people find it easy to create unbreakable images, they are easily bent to the will, unwittingly, of people of malicious intent.
If you have unbreakable concepts and you wish to create something new, such as a work of art or a new project at work, then your solution is likely to be deficient in any area that involves your unbreakable concepts. Good, you may say, but only because you do not realize what you are missing - you can always reject something new, but only if first you are able to create it. At a company party the other week, a group of half dozen people who would never usually mix remained together until six in the morning chatting, a feat some would never engage in. They broke the unbreakable, and discovered that although they were all different, there was some benefit in being together.
Even temporary breaking apart of concepts requires practice, as does any skill, you become much more confident and more able to tackle a broad range of tasks through the practice. To many this practice is silly, as they cannot see the immediate connection between freeing up the mind and eventual application of the process. The company I work with is suffused with my solutions, which I have been able to create simply because I practice throwing away the rule book. I move against the pressure of society, and therefore I find not just the cracks, but the opportunities and the fixes they relate to.
I both embrace and reject tradition, and somehow my mind does not come apart in the process. I am not a slave to tradition, nor a loose cannon on deck because i can always find my way home. Here we dug through our wardrobe to create tradition out of modernity, not by just wearing clothes, but wearing in ways and combinations that achieve what we want to say. It cost us nothing but the time and wear, and no we have a great image of us to share and to recall.
If you have a book, it might be useful or it might not - and if it is not then you have to consume some of your resources in maintaining that book - such as dusting and storing it. If the book is of importance to you, you might wish to give it to your children so that they can treasure it to, but if it means nothing to you you could try to sell it, give it away to a friend or donate it - or even just throw it away or burn it. Book printing companies destroy books all the time, just as any other manufacturing operation there comes a time when you produce to many things and the cost of storage outweighs the products value.
Many people will object, because they have made their image of 'book' to strong, and now it hurts too much to break that image. At this point, you are no longer free, either your book image is too strong and you must maintain them all, or someone else's book image is too strong and they will make you life unpleasant if they discover you breaking their image by destroying a book. You have to dispose of unwanted books in secret or be on the receiving end of unpleasant looks, gossip or even heated words. You are a criminal because someone else lacks the ability to change.
Why do people lack this ability, and why does it seem to get worse with age? Well, a good part of the pressure comes from other people and their poorly examined values, or from education. And it does not just involve books, but any concept that we have, and because many people find it easy to create unbreakable images, they are easily bent to the will, unwittingly, of people of malicious intent.
If you have unbreakable concepts and you wish to create something new, such as a work of art or a new project at work, then your solution is likely to be deficient in any area that involves your unbreakable concepts. Good, you may say, but only because you do not realize what you are missing - you can always reject something new, but only if first you are able to create it. At a company party the other week, a group of half dozen people who would never usually mix remained together until six in the morning chatting, a feat some would never engage in. They broke the unbreakable, and discovered that although they were all different, there was some benefit in being together.
Even temporary breaking apart of concepts requires practice, as does any skill, you become much more confident and more able to tackle a broad range of tasks through the practice. To many this practice is silly, as they cannot see the immediate connection between freeing up the mind and eventual application of the process. The company I work with is suffused with my solutions, which I have been able to create simply because I practice throwing away the rule book. I move against the pressure of society, and therefore I find not just the cracks, but the opportunities and the fixes they relate to.
I both embrace and reject tradition, and somehow my mind does not come apart in the process. I am not a slave to tradition, nor a loose cannon on deck because i can always find my way home. Here we dug through our wardrobe to create tradition out of modernity, not by just wearing clothes, but wearing in ways and combinations that achieve what we want to say. It cost us nothing but the time and wear, and no we have a great image of us to share and to recall.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Art_Craft Model - improved
After knocking the first model together for first art-craft blog, I realized that it was not quite right, it lacked somethings and was really too much like a graph in some text book. I mean, I wanted it to look like something from a text book because i feel that this would appeal to the kind of people who read technical data and are put off by the art world, and yet I also wanted it to appeal to the art world too, as my intention is to try and bridge that artificial gap between art and crafts, art and science, real and unreal. I wanted a map.
The first bit to go under the knife was the area called 'fine art', which I trimmed off on the left hand side to make it easier to exclude some things, like high-quality, machine made furniture that few people would call art. I had to be careful since there is an idea that factory made articles are somehow poorer quality craft than hand made - ignoring the basic precept that everything automated machinery produces is produced by machines designed and set up by humans - and nothing that we humans do is without at least a tiny bit of Art, since it is Art that makes us more than mere responders-to-stimuli, like a toothbrush is.
Seeing as I had a whacking great lump of fine art, I realised that something was needed to mark where we all come from, those first attempts to make an impression on the world when we are but newly born. You cannot hold a spoon or stand on your own feet, and yet those craft skills are gained within a few short years. Your abstract thought is able to express base emotions, and yet how long before you can express fine divisions in these emotions, or to conceal them? Hence, the graph now has a large 'juvenile' area, where often we start when we move into a new area.
Interestingly enough, once you have accepted that Art is within you and independent of subject, and if you can improve that Art to a sufficient level, then moving into a new subject area does not mean you start in the juvenile area, but to the right of it. This means you can start producing quality work in that field, even if your craft skills are very poor. Annoying as it may be to those with high craft skills, your opinion in a new field based on a high level of Art can be very valid.
Finding your way through to the high areas of Art, on the right hand side of the graph, is treacherous as it is wild and unmapped territory, where few people can help you as first you have to let them into your head to learn how you think - and, of course, that also means you will not progress far in the search for your Art if you spend too little time in your own head, finding out how and why it works.
In comparison, learning skill is relatively easy because the world is full of experts, your only real limitation, other than access to the right expert, the tools required and adequate time, is your own potential ability. The training path is clear, easy to follow, even as it takes you into strange lands. You can almost always check your progress on the map of exams and peer opinion.
I have added a new line to the graphy bit, to show how easy it is to float off in the direction of Craft achievement while trying to improve the Art. If you pursue Craft, it is easy to shift focus from the innovation phase to a process one - where once you have achieved some Art, you then continue to refine your presentation of that Art (process) rather than continue to explore the potential of your Art (innovation).
if you ever wonder whether you show much Art in your highly skilled work, or whether you are producing work equivalent to the 'Photographer's Eye', then you need to abandon all your fine tools and find the most basic implements you can and then see what you can produce with them. Do the resulting pieces have any value? This will force you to use your tools to their full potential, and you will be conscious of their limit. To get beyond that limit requires the use of Art.
Now that you have recent experience of inferior tools, now try to do something in an alien field, one in which you neither have the skill nor the tools. If you have never cooked, cook on a camping stove. If you have never been a teacher, try teaching someone in a basic environment. You will probably find yourself desperately looking for books or internet sites to read, not because you need that information but because Craft skills and the knowledge that underlies it have become your prop - your confidence has become intertwinned with learned process instead of raw innovation - your Art.
Finally, Art really is only in your head, what you produce are works of Art, not the Art itself, that remains in your head. If you ever find a finely worked flint arrow head dating back to prehistoric times, it is like a glimpse into someone else's mind, into their Art, as well as being an example of their skill.
The first bit to go under the knife was the area called 'fine art', which I trimmed off on the left hand side to make it easier to exclude some things, like high-quality, machine made furniture that few people would call art. I had to be careful since there is an idea that factory made articles are somehow poorer quality craft than hand made - ignoring the basic precept that everything automated machinery produces is produced by machines designed and set up by humans - and nothing that we humans do is without at least a tiny bit of Art, since it is Art that makes us more than mere responders-to-stimuli, like a toothbrush is.
Seeing as I had a whacking great lump of fine art, I realised that something was needed to mark where we all come from, those first attempts to make an impression on the world when we are but newly born. You cannot hold a spoon or stand on your own feet, and yet those craft skills are gained within a few short years. Your abstract thought is able to express base emotions, and yet how long before you can express fine divisions in these emotions, or to conceal them? Hence, the graph now has a large 'juvenile' area, where often we start when we move into a new area.
Interestingly enough, once you have accepted that Art is within you and independent of subject, and if you can improve that Art to a sufficient level, then moving into a new subject area does not mean you start in the juvenile area, but to the right of it. This means you can start producing quality work in that field, even if your craft skills are very poor. Annoying as it may be to those with high craft skills, your opinion in a new field based on a high level of Art can be very valid.
Finding your way through to the high areas of Art, on the right hand side of the graph, is treacherous as it is wild and unmapped territory, where few people can help you as first you have to let them into your head to learn how you think - and, of course, that also means you will not progress far in the search for your Art if you spend too little time in your own head, finding out how and why it works.
In comparison, learning skill is relatively easy because the world is full of experts, your only real limitation, other than access to the right expert, the tools required and adequate time, is your own potential ability. The training path is clear, easy to follow, even as it takes you into strange lands. You can almost always check your progress on the map of exams and peer opinion.
I have added a new line to the graphy bit, to show how easy it is to float off in the direction of Craft achievement while trying to improve the Art. If you pursue Craft, it is easy to shift focus from the innovation phase to a process one - where once you have achieved some Art, you then continue to refine your presentation of that Art (process) rather than continue to explore the potential of your Art (innovation).
if you ever wonder whether you show much Art in your highly skilled work, or whether you are producing work equivalent to the 'Photographer's Eye', then you need to abandon all your fine tools and find the most basic implements you can and then see what you can produce with them. Do the resulting pieces have any value? This will force you to use your tools to their full potential, and you will be conscious of their limit. To get beyond that limit requires the use of Art.
Now that you have recent experience of inferior tools, now try to do something in an alien field, one in which you neither have the skill nor the tools. If you have never cooked, cook on a camping stove. If you have never been a teacher, try teaching someone in a basic environment. You will probably find yourself desperately looking for books or internet sites to read, not because you need that information but because Craft skills and the knowledge that underlies it have become your prop - your confidence has become intertwinned with learned process instead of raw innovation - your Art.
Finally, Art really is only in your head, what you produce are works of Art, not the Art itself, that remains in your head. If you ever find a finely worked flint arrow head dating back to prehistoric times, it is like a glimpse into someone else's mind, into their Art, as well as being an example of their skill.
Friday, December 5, 2008
This WAS a Honda C70
As an attempt to describe my Art, which is an exploration of the mind's ability to conceptualise without a reliance on high levels of skill (Craft) or significant financial outlays in order to achieve an artificial skill boost. This was once a Honda C70, a very rusty and generally decrepit fifteen year old example when I bought it for twenty pounds (and the opportunity to make my face known to the manager of the university hall of residence where I found the machine and where I wished to spend the final two years of my university studies). The resulting machine only contains the cut and rewelded frame from its donor, the rest is a collection of motorcycle and other bits that I found to fit and which met the needs of my intended use of the machine. Scruffy and cheap it may have been, but the redesign was all mine, and I rode it all around England, around the Alps and even took it for a long weekend to Germany.
The Art was in the conceptual design, and although I trained as a mechanic and an engineer, what you see here is a sound design nailed together with limited resources, one which impressed large numbers of motorcyclists once they saw it perform (yes, they often sniggered when they first saw it). The point is that Art will make itself known, once you see past the lack of Craft, but that most people will assess on Craft and assume that if Craft is lacking, Art is lacking too. compare this with two women - one beautiful and one not, which will people first want to be seen with?
I think I took this shot with my old Pentax ME Super SLR camera, which I had with me because I owned it and the zoom on it was good for pictures of bikes and distant mountains. However, this photo is one view on a particular Art-into-reality process, and a better or worse camera would have made little difference as at the time I only intended recording an interesting event. I am not quite sure how I could have recorded the Art that was going on, I would have to think about it, to produce a new Art expression of a twenty year old art event.
The event happened in the Alps, when the bike ground to a halt with an electrical fault that had been bugging it for days. The sun was shining, it was a quiet back road snaking up a pass, the electrical problem had been bubbling in my head for days - rather than carry out a fix back in the car park, and despite the lack of special tools, the perfect moment had arrived to combine body and soul into solving the problem. If I had repaired it as a mechanic in a workshop, I would have followed procedures, and bought specific products, an almost totally Craft procedure. Instead, I turned my back on tools and used what was available at the moment when the combination of problem, landscape and a matured concept of what I had to do came together.
I used the lack of tools to kick-start my innovation, something that I have been practising at least all my adult life by avoiding specialising in the gaining of a limited number of Craft skills (there are enough of these required for my working life). If I had bought a shiney new motorcycle, I would have had great riding experiences. By struggling to create this machine, I had even better riding experiences because I knew that they were the result of my own creative efforts, not simply the result of the creative abilities of other engineers. The same goes for that fancy digital SLR or revered Leica - your contribution to the final piece includes all the efforts of all those other people - their Art.
The Art was in the conceptual design, and although I trained as a mechanic and an engineer, what you see here is a sound design nailed together with limited resources, one which impressed large numbers of motorcyclists once they saw it perform (yes, they often sniggered when they first saw it). The point is that Art will make itself known, once you see past the lack of Craft, but that most people will assess on Craft and assume that if Craft is lacking, Art is lacking too. compare this with two women - one beautiful and one not, which will people first want to be seen with?
I think I took this shot with my old Pentax ME Super SLR camera, which I had with me because I owned it and the zoom on it was good for pictures of bikes and distant mountains. However, this photo is one view on a particular Art-into-reality process, and a better or worse camera would have made little difference as at the time I only intended recording an interesting event. I am not quite sure how I could have recorded the Art that was going on, I would have to think about it, to produce a new Art expression of a twenty year old art event.
The event happened in the Alps, when the bike ground to a halt with an electrical fault that had been bugging it for days. The sun was shining, it was a quiet back road snaking up a pass, the electrical problem had been bubbling in my head for days - rather than carry out a fix back in the car park, and despite the lack of special tools, the perfect moment had arrived to combine body and soul into solving the problem. If I had repaired it as a mechanic in a workshop, I would have followed procedures, and bought specific products, an almost totally Craft procedure. Instead, I turned my back on tools and used what was available at the moment when the combination of problem, landscape and a matured concept of what I had to do came together.
I used the lack of tools to kick-start my innovation, something that I have been practising at least all my adult life by avoiding specialising in the gaining of a limited number of Craft skills (there are enough of these required for my working life). If I had bought a shiney new motorcycle, I would have had great riding experiences. By struggling to create this machine, I had even better riding experiences because I knew that they were the result of my own creative efforts, not simply the result of the creative abilities of other engineers. The same goes for that fancy digital SLR or revered Leica - your contribution to the final piece includes all the efforts of all those other people - their Art.
Art-Craft Model
By observing how people deal and speak about Art and Craft, i decided to create a simple model that combined their views with my idea of the separation of Art and Craft. Assuming that any Art and Craft action at any moment in the history of mankind can be rated as being between zero and a hundred percent quality, I was able to plot on several interesting points.
The green band at the top is 'Fine Art', a concept I am sure is different for everyone, but which in the practice of society (as opposed to mental idealising of what we might be taught), Fine Art is merely any manufactured (in the loosest sense) article that people generally think of being 'good quality'. Actually, while I have drawn the limit line horizontally, maybe it should be canted at angle to capture more Art at the right hand end, and less Craft at the left hand end. Possibly the more someone knows about the art world, the higher and more to the right the green Fine Art area may be.
I have also plotted on three points: Mona Lisa (top right), Photographic Eye (top left), and My Art (bottom right).
Mona Lisa: I chose this painting as being a generally known and accepted work of art that is also done with a high level of painting skill, or Craft. This work contains a lot of thought in terms of Art and a lot of practiced skill, the opposite would be a point in the bottom left of the graph where someone daubs paint on a sheet of paper with little skill and little thought beyond wanting to create an image of a person, house or similar - which we could call 'juvenile' in terms of Art and Craft.
Photographer's Eye: Most people take photographs and either like them or not for what they show, but there appears to be a body of photographers who are highly skilled in the use of their equipment and choice and manipulation of their subjects such that they produce extremely competent images, but, to be honest, these images could be compared to very well designed, expensive, craftsman-made furniture - nice, but the craftsman is knocking out similar pieces every day. However, if you asked average people on the street (by which I mean not a street full of artists), they would see no real difference between the Photographer's Eye work and an Art piece because they lack experience in Art in these terms.
My Art: I am not a photographer, photography is not my 'medium', I express my Art through whichever medium is to hand and which seems to fit that idea i have in my head. A lot of what i produce is not really recognisable as Art by many people because our education systems give relatively narrow definitions of what Art is. This graph is a piece of my Art, although I would admit it is an early test piece, my Art in my head has not fully formed this concept yet, I am still working on it as I type. Many artists produce series of related images as they try to express that idea they have - and it is worth observing that Art is not the piece that is produced, but the idea that is in the head of the artist. Hence the artist can make many attempts to reproduce that idea, and each time different influences occur.
The three large arrows are different possible directions one can take in developing an idea - improve ones skill in reproduction (Craft), improve the quality of the basic idea (Art), or a combination of both. i am not suggesting that the actual path one takes is straight, or that one cannot go backwards or go in circles as one adds or removes artistic or craft content.
Education tends to lead one in the vertical direction, to improved Craft. Any movement to the right is very hard and has to be one's own effort - although the encouragement of others definitely helps. Hardest of all is to move horizontally - to improve one's Art without improving Craft, as the very use of tools to reproduce the idea improves your ability to use those tools. The tendency to move vertically up is natural, and it takes deliberate effort to stop sacrificing your Art as you get caught up in the intricacies of learning to use a camera or photo-editing software. People who end up at the Photographer's Eye point may have originally set out to produce or improve their Art, but in the end confuse the improved quality of their images with producing better quality of Art.
If you really want to improve your Art rather than your ability to produce your current level of Art in pieces demonstrating better quality of manufacture, i suggest you forget all ideas about a Leica film camera shooting black and white producing 'better' art than a cheap digital camera can achieve - Art is about refining your ability to think up new ideas that have never existed before. The Leica may eventually give you better Craft, but the throwaway digital may force you to think your ideas through and to innovate more simply to achieve even a half decent piece. You might even find it helps to define your own Art, rather than you becoming a pale shadow of some Leica diva.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
More on What Art Is
Art is completely independent of the tools you use to express it, your art resides inside your head, and you can use whatever tools you like to with any degree of skill that you possess to demonstrate that art, through whatever medium you choose. Aside from the requirements of some art course or the necessity to sell or otherwise dispose of your pieces, there are no categories of art, only your satisfaction in what you achieve.
To get others to appreciate what you have achieved, you have to go through a process of coding their brains with information and processes they can use to understand your work, which is both an important process and one laden with problems. the biggest problem other people will lay before you, or perhaps attempt to bludgeon you with, is the idea of purity. By purity, I mean how close your work resembles some category system in their head, either based on some kind of classical-historical golden age (Ancient Greek, for example), or teenage memories (i.e. wot i lurnt on my art course).
Since art really happens in your head, you have to keep thinking about it. I recently saw someone respond to someone's image on flikr, saying that they did not want to say why they liked a picture, that it was nice was enough. Well, they are free not to write, free even not to think, but it is that process of thinking that forms our Art and our Craft. Our Craft guides the tools that we use, but only in replication of the pattern in our mind that is our Art. Both processes need extensive thought, for without that thought both or either our Art or Craft will remain juvenile.
Talking about Art in terms of labels, categories is nothing more than a form of Craft, these are tools that we use to describe our Art, not the Art itself. What is more scary is that we lack vocabulary to describe in anything but the tritist of terms. This is partly due to the advanced thought that is Art, located ahead of Craft description, but mainly due to very Craft orientated education systems which leave us able to count and list information, but unable to express why we think something is nice without wandering off into a dim and distant geek-land of which most people lack an atlas.
I think it might be the lack of any requirements for skill in tools that would be the stumbling block for many people - the idea that you could pick up a paint brush and slap paint on a canvas and say you have produced Art seems to hit the brick wall of common sense. However, you are not just splodging in a juvenile way, because what you should have formed in your head is a mature Art form, whatever that may be, and you are now using whatever tools that come to hand to produce a hard copy of that Art idea. When Jackson Pollock 'splodged' some paint on large sheets, he had a mature Art image in his head, but what many people thought they were seeing were there own juvenile art thoughts 'splodged', they expected Art to be painterly. Painterly, or fine art, is a mix of Art and Craft, the latter to a high level, the former to some level between juvenile and mature, depending on artist and his or her intentions.
What is really strange to me, is the problem that some artists have with commercial work, as if an external trigger for an idea is somehow worse than an internal one. At some stage, somewhere, every artist is supported by commercial work, even if they are living off family money, that money arrived in the family through some striving or other. Selling one's own Art is still commercial. Artists hating the fact they have to engage in commercial work is very elitist, does the worker in a factory have that choice, how many are blocked from their Art by their need to feed their family and because their education failed to instil in them a sense of their own Art? If an artist fails to create Art in their commercial work, they are not thinking enough about what they are doing, even having to satisfy the needs of others, even the strange requirements of the customer, is in essence an opportunity for more Art expression, no matter how bitter might be the task. Dislike is merely opportunity unrecognised.
To get others to appreciate what you have achieved, you have to go through a process of coding their brains with information and processes they can use to understand your work, which is both an important process and one laden with problems. the biggest problem other people will lay before you, or perhaps attempt to bludgeon you with, is the idea of purity. By purity, I mean how close your work resembles some category system in their head, either based on some kind of classical-historical golden age (Ancient Greek, for example), or teenage memories (i.e. wot i lurnt on my art course).
Since art really happens in your head, you have to keep thinking about it. I recently saw someone respond to someone's image on flikr, saying that they did not want to say why they liked a picture, that it was nice was enough. Well, they are free not to write, free even not to think, but it is that process of thinking that forms our Art and our Craft. Our Craft guides the tools that we use, but only in replication of the pattern in our mind that is our Art. Both processes need extensive thought, for without that thought both or either our Art or Craft will remain juvenile.
Talking about Art in terms of labels, categories is nothing more than a form of Craft, these are tools that we use to describe our Art, not the Art itself. What is more scary is that we lack vocabulary to describe in anything but the tritist of terms. This is partly due to the advanced thought that is Art, located ahead of Craft description, but mainly due to very Craft orientated education systems which leave us able to count and list information, but unable to express why we think something is nice without wandering off into a dim and distant geek-land of which most people lack an atlas.
I think it might be the lack of any requirements for skill in tools that would be the stumbling block for many people - the idea that you could pick up a paint brush and slap paint on a canvas and say you have produced Art seems to hit the brick wall of common sense. However, you are not just splodging in a juvenile way, because what you should have formed in your head is a mature Art form, whatever that may be, and you are now using whatever tools that come to hand to produce a hard copy of that Art idea. When Jackson Pollock 'splodged' some paint on large sheets, he had a mature Art image in his head, but what many people thought they were seeing were there own juvenile art thoughts 'splodged', they expected Art to be painterly. Painterly, or fine art, is a mix of Art and Craft, the latter to a high level, the former to some level between juvenile and mature, depending on artist and his or her intentions.
What is really strange to me, is the problem that some artists have with commercial work, as if an external trigger for an idea is somehow worse than an internal one. At some stage, somewhere, every artist is supported by commercial work, even if they are living off family money, that money arrived in the family through some striving or other. Selling one's own Art is still commercial. Artists hating the fact they have to engage in commercial work is very elitist, does the worker in a factory have that choice, how many are blocked from their Art by their need to feed their family and because their education failed to instil in them a sense of their own Art? If an artist fails to create Art in their commercial work, they are not thinking enough about what they are doing, even having to satisfy the needs of others, even the strange requirements of the customer, is in essence an opportunity for more Art expression, no matter how bitter might be the task. Dislike is merely opportunity unrecognised.
Monday, December 1, 2008
My Bond Gurl
Continuing from my previous post, here is Ania being three very different people dressed in exactly the same clothes, and using props found around the home.
Choosing an odd number of objects is very powerful, more so than even numbers, especially if you intend to put things in a line. Three is especially important for images as they can form a triangle - the ultimate pointy object. Note that the chair and the ladder are both aligned along the sides of the Ania triangle, facing the most powerful person of that trio. Note also the slight separation of Geek Ania, a common feature of society, achieved by that area of bright wall.
Bond Ania is very exposed,and yet her crossed arms show her power, and with her sunglasses there is the mystery you will never really understand. Bond is the least safe, and yet the most desired.
Geek Ania, the isolated, is achieving new things, pushing back the borders of our understanding, she is dynamic but difficult to understand as she is always changing.
Passive Ania is like a rock, pumped full of knowledge and yet unable to create new knowledge with it like the Geek, or put it to use like the Bond. Being passive and consistent, she is easy to rely on because today, tomorrow and in ten years time she will still be the same.
Choosing an odd number of objects is very powerful, more so than even numbers, especially if you intend to put things in a line. Three is especially important for images as they can form a triangle - the ultimate pointy object. Note that the chair and the ladder are both aligned along the sides of the Ania triangle, facing the most powerful person of that trio. Note also the slight separation of Geek Ania, a common feature of society, achieved by that area of bright wall.
Bond Ania is very exposed,and yet her crossed arms show her power, and with her sunglasses there is the mystery you will never really understand. Bond is the least safe, and yet the most desired.
Geek Ania, the isolated, is achieving new things, pushing back the borders of our understanding, she is dynamic but difficult to understand as she is always changing.
Passive Ania is like a rock, pumped full of knowledge and yet unable to create new knowledge with it like the Geek, or put it to use like the Bond. Being passive and consistent, she is easy to rely on because today, tomorrow and in ten years time she will still be the same.
Monday, November 24, 2008
The Classical Road to Success
The classical model of education is that you read lots of books and then wow the lady of choice with your erudition. Poetry, quotes and other passive knowledge is supposed to spill from your mouth, converting the woman into a quivering mass of worship. Yes, well, it's really like getting yourself a set of tools and some instruction manuals, and expecting to become a professional DVD repairman by showing your customer your tools and quoting the manual.
The only worrying thing is that sometimes it works, people are fooled by someone who quotes knowledge at them without realizing they should check the ability of the person. Here in Poland there is a lot of trust invested in certificates and qualifications, despite the equal knowledge of how easy it is to forge such things, the level of corruption and the sheer experience of qualified people not knowing what they are doing. The trap is that most people have no real idea of how they can test for quality themselves, they have been sold on the idea that 'someone should do it who is qualified to do so'. duh!
Poland has a high rate of alcholism among artists, partly because it is a nation taught to have faith in authority and qualifications, imagine how tough it must be to say 'look at this river!' and to get the reply "Yes, it is 1200 km long and serves the 3 primary industrial ports of the nation.', when you meant 'feel it, breathe it, think about your relationship to it, touch it, taste it, watch it flow'. A philospher once observed that if you put your foot in a river one day, and then repeated it the next day then it would not be the same river, yesterday's water have long flown. To the classicalist, though, it is still the same 1200 km long river, nothing has changed - unless a new specialist comes along and remeasures the river and states it is actually 1201.2 km long..
The only worrying thing is that sometimes it works, people are fooled by someone who quotes knowledge at them without realizing they should check the ability of the person. Here in Poland there is a lot of trust invested in certificates and qualifications, despite the equal knowledge of how easy it is to forge such things, the level of corruption and the sheer experience of qualified people not knowing what they are doing. The trap is that most people have no real idea of how they can test for quality themselves, they have been sold on the idea that 'someone should do it who is qualified to do so'. duh!
Poland has a high rate of alcholism among artists, partly because it is a nation taught to have faith in authority and qualifications, imagine how tough it must be to say 'look at this river!' and to get the reply "Yes, it is 1200 km long and serves the 3 primary industrial ports of the nation.', when you meant 'feel it, breathe it, think about your relationship to it, touch it, taste it, watch it flow'. A philospher once observed that if you put your foot in a river one day, and then repeated it the next day then it would not be the same river, yesterday's water have long flown. To the classicalist, though, it is still the same 1200 km long river, nothing has changed - unless a new specialist comes along and remeasures the river and states it is actually 1201.2 km long..
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Writing: More Basildon than James
Back when I was still living in the UK, I had a place near the new town of Basildon, created largely in the 1960's and with a reputation seemingly more based on the under-age pregnancy rate than on reality. I rather enjoyed my time there, and the town centre including some architectural elements I became almost proud of - not including the town square which became a miserably bleak prairie in winter, hardly encouraging the casual shopper. Basildon, though, has no apparent links with that brand of letter writing paper available almost everywhere while I was growing up of Basildon Bond, the poor man's posh paper, staid and blue, everything that James Bond wasn't.
Today I would like to explore reading and writing, those core elements of any school program, although from many a pupil's perspective, chore components might be more apt. Why do we need to learn to read and write, isn't the power of speech enough? The two prime arguments for it seem to be, and fair enough arguments they are, their use in the workplace and the ability to expand one's imagination through the reading of books. What, though, if these reasons were based on an arbitrary reality and in holding them we were slowing or preventing the development of human culture? And what, while we are at it, has the non-brothers Basildon and James have to do with it?
Writing is dominated by the intelligentsia, the middle to upper IQ people and propounding the belief system of this group, the beliefs of lower IQ people are generally quashed, their systems of belief discarded like an empty hamburger box. One of my best and oldest friends, while we were still at university, had authoritarian right-wing views, and he believed, for example, that people who were unemployed were essentially lazy. He was the product of a middle-class farming family, middle class at least in views and intelligence if not in money. This is a good example of not understanding how other people think, a common phenomenon we all fall for sometime or other. How much people can be different I showed in my James Bond Theory. If you think it is difficult to understand people from other cultures around the world, how much less do you understand people with a lower or higher intelligence? We often think of geniuses as being a little strange, but how strange are we to them, and how strange are people of middling intelligence to those of low?
Assuming that we have our ideas of learning and culture, how do they compare with those of other intelligence levels? Is what we feel to be interesting or useful an alien imposition on the culture of others? Perhaps we are not even right about ourselves? If you are an authoritarian, then now or soon you could be getting a little warm under the collar as I threaten what you hold dear, but bear with me.
If we just examine reading on its own for a while, we read to learn what is happening in the world, to do our jobs, to expand our imagination or simply for pleasure. A great deal of our reading is entirely passive, it leads nowhere because we do little beyond absorb it or pass it along. We absorb ourselves in pleasure and knowledge, and feel we understand the world better because we have widened our ability to compare what we see with what we know. However, while we absorb and share, what are we adding? Do we let ourselves become nothing more than a culture consumer, in our appreciation of 'great' books we become nothing more than the owner of the latest mobile phone, pair of shoes, video game or car? All are nothing more than the products of other people's minds. Going to art galleries if you do not create your own art is consumerism of the educated classes.
So, at last, we come to Basildon Bond. One of the battle cries of sections of the educated classes is that culture is deterioating, because people do not write letters any more. Who wrote them in the past - well, the educated classes, so if the educated classes no longer write letters, is this the fault of the illiterate or the semi-illiterate, or even the literate? If we go back a step to a time before reading and writing were available to the masses, what did people do then? Did language and culture crumble?
When there were no books available, what were the choices? The very fact that we have language in an advanced form, and in a form that has hardly changed since the advent of literacy, suggests that we were doing somerthing with it beyond grunting across the field. How about telling stories, stories are hardly a product of the literate age, we can be fairly sure that the day the first cave painting was made, someone somewhere was telling a story. Most of those stories have been lost, as a normal loss as new stories replaced old, but this proces has accelerated with the advent of the printed word, where standard versions of traditional or new stories have mown down the infinite variations that once existed. Remember I said that reading the 'greats' was nothing more than consumerism, well, just as manufactured products largely replaced their individual handmade counterparts, so the printed book has replaced the hand craft told story, words repeated precisely as the stamping of a machine.
In a world where we sell the idea of the printed 'greats', is it any surprise that many people do not write letters? Why write letters when anything you write is going to be compared to a standard 'great'? Other forms of letter writing content, such as gossip and my-life, has transferred to other more convenient forms of comunication, such as the telephone, something more closely resembling individual human communication than the learned third person style that is writing.
Let us assume that we all start writing letters, what are we prepared to sacrifice in order to give us the time to write all these letters, plus read all the incoming including those to family that are intended to be read by a number of people? How long before you run dry on ideas or get bored with endless letter opening and start to simply scan the contents as you do with endless reports at work? Most of what anyone would write would be gossip and about-me, to create anything more adventurous would require more time and there is no guarantee of anyone reading it, like creating a painting that never gets hung. There is always the question, like painting, whether you have the ability to produce writing beyond the gossip or informational level, and if you cannot then why the pressure to write?
Reading and writing are largely taught as a way of communicating information, despite what one's own memoroes of schooling may be, the fact that so few people engage in it as an art. There is very little left in the way of individual story telling as a respected part of culture, stories swopped at work, at home or at the local bar are mere informalities. Reading itself is a way of gathering knowledge and pleasure, and writing a way of distributing, but for most people the addition of original thought is minimal outside of recording professional opinions. The value of reading and writing to different segments of society is little understood, and certainly not part of the common core of written work. What, then, is all the fuss from the educated reactionaries?
Today I would like to explore reading and writing, those core elements of any school program, although from many a pupil's perspective, chore components might be more apt. Why do we need to learn to read and write, isn't the power of speech enough? The two prime arguments for it seem to be, and fair enough arguments they are, their use in the workplace and the ability to expand one's imagination through the reading of books. What, though, if these reasons were based on an arbitrary reality and in holding them we were slowing or preventing the development of human culture? And what, while we are at it, has the non-brothers Basildon and James have to do with it?
Writing is dominated by the intelligentsia, the middle to upper IQ people and propounding the belief system of this group, the beliefs of lower IQ people are generally quashed, their systems of belief discarded like an empty hamburger box. One of my best and oldest friends, while we were still at university, had authoritarian right-wing views, and he believed, for example, that people who were unemployed were essentially lazy. He was the product of a middle-class farming family, middle class at least in views and intelligence if not in money. This is a good example of not understanding how other people think, a common phenomenon we all fall for sometime or other. How much people can be different I showed in my James Bond Theory. If you think it is difficult to understand people from other cultures around the world, how much less do you understand people with a lower or higher intelligence? We often think of geniuses as being a little strange, but how strange are we to them, and how strange are people of middling intelligence to those of low?
Assuming that we have our ideas of learning and culture, how do they compare with those of other intelligence levels? Is what we feel to be interesting or useful an alien imposition on the culture of others? Perhaps we are not even right about ourselves? If you are an authoritarian, then now or soon you could be getting a little warm under the collar as I threaten what you hold dear, but bear with me.
If we just examine reading on its own for a while, we read to learn what is happening in the world, to do our jobs, to expand our imagination or simply for pleasure. A great deal of our reading is entirely passive, it leads nowhere because we do little beyond absorb it or pass it along. We absorb ourselves in pleasure and knowledge, and feel we understand the world better because we have widened our ability to compare what we see with what we know. However, while we absorb and share, what are we adding? Do we let ourselves become nothing more than a culture consumer, in our appreciation of 'great' books we become nothing more than the owner of the latest mobile phone, pair of shoes, video game or car? All are nothing more than the products of other people's minds. Going to art galleries if you do not create your own art is consumerism of the educated classes.
So, at last, we come to Basildon Bond. One of the battle cries of sections of the educated classes is that culture is deterioating, because people do not write letters any more. Who wrote them in the past - well, the educated classes, so if the educated classes no longer write letters, is this the fault of the illiterate or the semi-illiterate, or even the literate? If we go back a step to a time before reading and writing were available to the masses, what did people do then? Did language and culture crumble?
When there were no books available, what were the choices? The very fact that we have language in an advanced form, and in a form that has hardly changed since the advent of literacy, suggests that we were doing somerthing with it beyond grunting across the field. How about telling stories, stories are hardly a product of the literate age, we can be fairly sure that the day the first cave painting was made, someone somewhere was telling a story. Most of those stories have been lost, as a normal loss as new stories replaced old, but this proces has accelerated with the advent of the printed word, where standard versions of traditional or new stories have mown down the infinite variations that once existed. Remember I said that reading the 'greats' was nothing more than consumerism, well, just as manufactured products largely replaced their individual handmade counterparts, so the printed book has replaced the hand craft told story, words repeated precisely as the stamping of a machine.
In a world where we sell the idea of the printed 'greats', is it any surprise that many people do not write letters? Why write letters when anything you write is going to be compared to a standard 'great'? Other forms of letter writing content, such as gossip and my-life, has transferred to other more convenient forms of comunication, such as the telephone, something more closely resembling individual human communication than the learned third person style that is writing.
Let us assume that we all start writing letters, what are we prepared to sacrifice in order to give us the time to write all these letters, plus read all the incoming including those to family that are intended to be read by a number of people? How long before you run dry on ideas or get bored with endless letter opening and start to simply scan the contents as you do with endless reports at work? Most of what anyone would write would be gossip and about-me, to create anything more adventurous would require more time and there is no guarantee of anyone reading it, like creating a painting that never gets hung. There is always the question, like painting, whether you have the ability to produce writing beyond the gossip or informational level, and if you cannot then why the pressure to write?
Reading and writing are largely taught as a way of communicating information, despite what one's own memoroes of schooling may be, the fact that so few people engage in it as an art. There is very little left in the way of individual story telling as a respected part of culture, stories swopped at work, at home or at the local bar are mere informalities. Reading itself is a way of gathering knowledge and pleasure, and writing a way of distributing, but for most people the addition of original thought is minimal outside of recording professional opinions. The value of reading and writing to different segments of society is little understood, and certainly not part of the common core of written work. What, then, is all the fuss from the educated reactionaries?
Monday, November 10, 2008
Shadowland Poland - death by cheap comparison
Watching any kind of review of Polish music, television or film here in Poland is often a sad affair because no one has ever achieved anything original, everything and everyone is 'in the style of'. This is a pity on two fronts, because there are many original people and productions, and people really would like to feel good about what is original. What is more, it must be quite annoying for the artists themselves, to be forever compared with other people, imagine what it must feel like to be called 'the Polish James Dean' simply because it is the 1950s and you are a risk taker, where is the space for your original work if you are forever compared to someone else. Do not bother to ask his real name, it is not important, for he was the Polish James Dean, that is all you need to know.
Alright, I admit that if you bind some printed paper together and put it in a cover, it is convenient to call it a 'book'. our experience of books is quite wide and we understand that a book can be many things and are written by many different authors, and as a consequence we know that you cannot open one randomly and be able to predict its content or qualities. Is it a children's book, 19th century literature or an advanced guide to some aspect of physics? However, there are not many James Dean, actor, around, it is pretty much defined in our heads what he is, and if you compare someone else to him your expectancies from the comparison are a lot more limited than saying he is 'like some book you have read'. The very act of naming to some degree excludes that object or person from being other things - once you call something a 'fire engine' you have pretty much excluded soft, fluffy bunnies from your mind, which is the purpose of naming anyway - distinguishing one type of thing from the rest of the universe. It is an extremely powerful tool, and like any such tool, they work best when you need all that power and work least well when the power is not required. The Polish James Dean is like a little nut - fine until someone hit him with a damn great sledgehammer. Now he is squashed on the floor for us to examine, and can never grow into anything else. One squashed nut looks pretty much like any other, they give no indication of the potential they once held, and this is a responsibility we all have when we describe other people and things.
When a field of human endeavour, in this case the assessment of artists and their work, is peppered with comparisons to other work, it is time that the kind of people making the assessments are reviewed, for they are demonstrating a strong lack of ability to assess quality on quality's terms. Comparisons, like counting, is the refuge of the unable or the underconfident, neither group being high on my list of 'hmm, yes, they are the kind of people I would trust for an opinion'. I can easily train my computer to count things, and with a lot more effort get it to compare things, much in the way of speech recognition software. With such an assessment tool anyone could compare any one thing or person in a particular field with another - we could use it to hunt down all the James Deans! Using such a tool we could create a database of all the typical forms of art, classify them, and hence classify all artists and their work in one huge database, and then forever more we could always find something we like, and we would even know how much it was worth.
The only fly in this ointment is that while I am similar to my brother David, and often think and do things in the same way as he does, sometimes we are not the same, we are often very different people. None of us are identical, and none of us even remain the same from moment to moment, year to year, and what we are depends on who is viewing us - how I see myself is not how you see me as me-me and you-me are two different people. If we take this idea a little further, if I am ever changing and ever different in this way, the work i produce will also be different. I spent ten years taking photographs of thousands objects and people in Lublin, and then this year I took 75 pictures of myself, 75 pictures that barely resembled any of the thousands of preceding ones, 75 pictures that changed my view of myself forever. In terms of photography, I had jumped ship.
Once categorised as a 'photographic recorder in the style of X', what chance would my 75 new images have? Even if they were accepted as being different, would I become 'Trevor Butcher, artist' or would I remain 'Trevor Butcher, photographic recorder in the style of X, oh, and he also made some art'? What would have happened if I had made the 75 images before publishing any of the thousands of other images?
If your description process involves direct comparison with limited interest concepts, you reduce the impression you give down to a shadow - and if enough people do this to a nation then it becomes a nation of shadows. Nothing is real, everything is copy. Quality description requires you not only to consider how you judge the object of person, but how the greater society will do the same. If you know that I am an engineer, husband, recorder and artist, make sure you know which one you are describing and assess how the description will be received.
Although it might be harder to find more basic ways of description, by doing so we give ourselves greater opportunity to say more. Once you have defined an actor as the Polish James Dean, there is little else to say about him, the reader would be better served reading about James Dean than anything else you have to say about the Polish actor in question. There is a risk that more basic description can be more difficult to understand, but that only begs the question 'what level of flawed understanding do you wish to propagate, the easy James Dean shadow or some harder level that is closer to the reality?'
Society's views are shaped by all of us, and change must start somewhere. I hope that this is one place where society in Poland will start to take a more responsible attitude to how people and their works are viewed, that people look for better ways to evaluate. Poland, a nation where people like bank managers still believe that possessing a driving license is permission to drive in any desired manner, deserves to learn that believing in the shadows of James Dean is like illuminating one's library by burning the books it contains.
Alright, I admit that if you bind some printed paper together and put it in a cover, it is convenient to call it a 'book'. our experience of books is quite wide and we understand that a book can be many things and are written by many different authors, and as a consequence we know that you cannot open one randomly and be able to predict its content or qualities. Is it a children's book, 19th century literature or an advanced guide to some aspect of physics? However, there are not many James Dean, actor, around, it is pretty much defined in our heads what he is, and if you compare someone else to him your expectancies from the comparison are a lot more limited than saying he is 'like some book you have read'. The very act of naming to some degree excludes that object or person from being other things - once you call something a 'fire engine' you have pretty much excluded soft, fluffy bunnies from your mind, which is the purpose of naming anyway - distinguishing one type of thing from the rest of the universe. It is an extremely powerful tool, and like any such tool, they work best when you need all that power and work least well when the power is not required. The Polish James Dean is like a little nut - fine until someone hit him with a damn great sledgehammer. Now he is squashed on the floor for us to examine, and can never grow into anything else. One squashed nut looks pretty much like any other, they give no indication of the potential they once held, and this is a responsibility we all have when we describe other people and things.
When a field of human endeavour, in this case the assessment of artists and their work, is peppered with comparisons to other work, it is time that the kind of people making the assessments are reviewed, for they are demonstrating a strong lack of ability to assess quality on quality's terms. Comparisons, like counting, is the refuge of the unable or the underconfident, neither group being high on my list of 'hmm, yes, they are the kind of people I would trust for an opinion'. I can easily train my computer to count things, and with a lot more effort get it to compare things, much in the way of speech recognition software. With such an assessment tool anyone could compare any one thing or person in a particular field with another - we could use it to hunt down all the James Deans! Using such a tool we could create a database of all the typical forms of art, classify them, and hence classify all artists and their work in one huge database, and then forever more we could always find something we like, and we would even know how much it was worth.
The only fly in this ointment is that while I am similar to my brother David, and often think and do things in the same way as he does, sometimes we are not the same, we are often very different people. None of us are identical, and none of us even remain the same from moment to moment, year to year, and what we are depends on who is viewing us - how I see myself is not how you see me as me-me and you-me are two different people. If we take this idea a little further, if I am ever changing and ever different in this way, the work i produce will also be different. I spent ten years taking photographs of thousands objects and people in Lublin, and then this year I took 75 pictures of myself, 75 pictures that barely resembled any of the thousands of preceding ones, 75 pictures that changed my view of myself forever. In terms of photography, I had jumped ship.
Once categorised as a 'photographic recorder in the style of X', what chance would my 75 new images have? Even if they were accepted as being different, would I become 'Trevor Butcher, artist' or would I remain 'Trevor Butcher, photographic recorder in the style of X, oh, and he also made some art'? What would have happened if I had made the 75 images before publishing any of the thousands of other images?
If your description process involves direct comparison with limited interest concepts, you reduce the impression you give down to a shadow - and if enough people do this to a nation then it becomes a nation of shadows. Nothing is real, everything is copy. Quality description requires you not only to consider how you judge the object of person, but how the greater society will do the same. If you know that I am an engineer, husband, recorder and artist, make sure you know which one you are describing and assess how the description will be received.
Although it might be harder to find more basic ways of description, by doing so we give ourselves greater opportunity to say more. Once you have defined an actor as the Polish James Dean, there is little else to say about him, the reader would be better served reading about James Dean than anything else you have to say about the Polish actor in question. There is a risk that more basic description can be more difficult to understand, but that only begs the question 'what level of flawed understanding do you wish to propagate, the easy James Dean shadow or some harder level that is closer to the reality?'
Society's views are shaped by all of us, and change must start somewhere. I hope that this is one place where society in Poland will start to take a more responsible attitude to how people and their works are viewed, that people look for better ways to evaluate. Poland, a nation where people like bank managers still believe that possessing a driving license is permission to drive in any desired manner, deserves to learn that believing in the shadows of James Dean is like illuminating one's library by burning the books it contains.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Jakraj - the voice of your self-destruction
Jakraj (ya-cry) is a Polish word that I have created to describe a very specific concept that is international in scope. "Ja Kraj" means "I country" or "I nation" or even "me nation" in that lose way that words and phrases actually describe reality as opposed to the sense of false definition that dictionaries mostly give.
This morning I slowed and stopped on a back road in the centre of the city to allow someone to back their car onto the road from a parking slot, not an easy task on this particular road as it is narrow and people often drive too fast. As I was only stopping and not turning or even parking, I did not use my indicators. The car coming up fast from behind did not even bother to check why i had stopped: it was enough that I was in his or her way. I hit my horn as they went by to warn the guy pulling out. luckily no contact occurred, but it is a good example of jakraj.
So, what is jakraj?
Jakraj is the me-centric vision of the world, where only your existence has any relevance, the world having its meaning totally defined by your presence. Other people are mere objects, placed in the environment to either assist or hinder you, much as characters do in a computer game. There are no real relations between other people or things, other than some objects withhold certain other objects to hinder your access to them. Jakraj means that you seek no responsibilities, only power.
The jakraj vision of life is incredibly common in Poland, even walking down the street can be a surprising experience because those people with an inflated sense of jakraj naturally expect you to move out of their way, and that means anyone with a job, for example, that has the slightest control over another's existence. The more power, the more jakraj, and the average citizen is adept at recognising the amount of jakraj in another at a glance on the street. What, then, when they meet someone from a culture or background that values jakraj less? Well, initially you steer around people, any people walking towards you, but are surprised when some of these people do not have the courtesy to do the same. Once you figure out what's going on you can play the game your way - dress in your most informal clothes and deliberately not steer out of the way of anyone coming towards you who make no visible effort to steer around you. The result is a bump, but remember to turn your head quick to observe that look of surprise when they think they have blundered and mistaken your level of jakraj.
Well, walking on the sidewalk, what does it really matter? In reality I generally ignore these people as I have better things to do, but on the road it is a different matter, because ownership of a bicycle gives you more jakraj than a pedestrian, and a car has far, far more than either. I have severely reprimanded my wife on a couple of occasions when she has been driving - as a university lecturer she has an unconsciously high amount of jakraj - after she has come very close to pedestrians while travelling at some speed.
In the workplace many managers have severe problems with jakraj, and a common theme is that one's subordinates should be treated like automatons, or, as the Victorian dogma went, they should be seen and not heard. How can one receive any critical assessment of your work if you are motivated by jakraj? Any criticism, whether positive or negative is an attack on the self-esteem, a deliberate attack and nothing to do with the content of the critique. If you are going to be critical in a negative way, it must be done in hiding, so that the person you are criticising does not know it was you who put the knife in their back.
I used to assume that in any country with such a high Christian profile as Poland, concepts as love, mercy, and responsibility would be strong. How wrong I was, the popularity or lack of religion has no positive relationship with morals, family values and all the rest, but it can severely damage it, and this is part of the burden of history that still oppress Poles. The Roman Catholic church is a major offender here, it ensures that community feeling is crushed, although I am sure this is not always deliberate, but when you see, week after week, that your religion does not care to engender brotherly feeling, does this not mean that to achieve salvation it is best not to respect your fellow man or woman? I am not going to say that I know the precise mechanism or mechanisms, but what I do see are some large elements that seem to have cause and effect links. The many people who are good, are good despite of their religion, not because of it, and that is the saddest thing I can say.
Jakraj is alive and well wherever you go in the world, and seems almost a prerequisite if you wish to be a successful politician. Fortunately, when you recognise your own, personal jakraj, you can begin to fight it. You can question the negative ways of society and how you can feel impelled to follow them even if you can see the result is less than good. And if you believe in religion, remember that at the end of the day it is not what society thinks of you that is important, it is what your god thinks of you, and if you are a jakraj-ridden priest then your chances of success in the afterlife are far less than the most despised criminal - for you pretend to represent your god, and gods have little patience with those who mislead their people.
This morning I slowed and stopped on a back road in the centre of the city to allow someone to back their car onto the road from a parking slot, not an easy task on this particular road as it is narrow and people often drive too fast. As I was only stopping and not turning or even parking, I did not use my indicators. The car coming up fast from behind did not even bother to check why i had stopped: it was enough that I was in his or her way. I hit my horn as they went by to warn the guy pulling out. luckily no contact occurred, but it is a good example of jakraj.
So, what is jakraj?
Jakraj is the me-centric vision of the world, where only your existence has any relevance, the world having its meaning totally defined by your presence. Other people are mere objects, placed in the environment to either assist or hinder you, much as characters do in a computer game. There are no real relations between other people or things, other than some objects withhold certain other objects to hinder your access to them. Jakraj means that you seek no responsibilities, only power.
The jakraj vision of life is incredibly common in Poland, even walking down the street can be a surprising experience because those people with an inflated sense of jakraj naturally expect you to move out of their way, and that means anyone with a job, for example, that has the slightest control over another's existence. The more power, the more jakraj, and the average citizen is adept at recognising the amount of jakraj in another at a glance on the street. What, then, when they meet someone from a culture or background that values jakraj less? Well, initially you steer around people, any people walking towards you, but are surprised when some of these people do not have the courtesy to do the same. Once you figure out what's going on you can play the game your way - dress in your most informal clothes and deliberately not steer out of the way of anyone coming towards you who make no visible effort to steer around you. The result is a bump, but remember to turn your head quick to observe that look of surprise when they think they have blundered and mistaken your level of jakraj.
Well, walking on the sidewalk, what does it really matter? In reality I generally ignore these people as I have better things to do, but on the road it is a different matter, because ownership of a bicycle gives you more jakraj than a pedestrian, and a car has far, far more than either. I have severely reprimanded my wife on a couple of occasions when she has been driving - as a university lecturer she has an unconsciously high amount of jakraj - after she has come very close to pedestrians while travelling at some speed.
In the workplace many managers have severe problems with jakraj, and a common theme is that one's subordinates should be treated like automatons, or, as the Victorian dogma went, they should be seen and not heard. How can one receive any critical assessment of your work if you are motivated by jakraj? Any criticism, whether positive or negative is an attack on the self-esteem, a deliberate attack and nothing to do with the content of the critique. If you are going to be critical in a negative way, it must be done in hiding, so that the person you are criticising does not know it was you who put the knife in their back.
I used to assume that in any country with such a high Christian profile as Poland, concepts as love, mercy, and responsibility would be strong. How wrong I was, the popularity or lack of religion has no positive relationship with morals, family values and all the rest, but it can severely damage it, and this is part of the burden of history that still oppress Poles. The Roman Catholic church is a major offender here, it ensures that community feeling is crushed, although I am sure this is not always deliberate, but when you see, week after week, that your religion does not care to engender brotherly feeling, does this not mean that to achieve salvation it is best not to respect your fellow man or woman? I am not going to say that I know the precise mechanism or mechanisms, but what I do see are some large elements that seem to have cause and effect links. The many people who are good, are good despite of their religion, not because of it, and that is the saddest thing I can say.
Jakraj is alive and well wherever you go in the world, and seems almost a prerequisite if you wish to be a successful politician. Fortunately, when you recognise your own, personal jakraj, you can begin to fight it. You can question the negative ways of society and how you can feel impelled to follow them even if you can see the result is less than good. And if you believe in religion, remember that at the end of the day it is not what society thinks of you that is important, it is what your god thinks of you, and if you are a jakraj-ridden priest then your chances of success in the afterlife are far less than the most despised criminal - for you pretend to represent your god, and gods have little patience with those who mislead their people.
Micro-adventures: Spice 2 Life!
Having spent 75 days taking a self portrait of myself every day to fit the group-of-the-day on Flikr Group Roulette (see my Fugger blog for all 75 pictures), I felt it was a pity to give up the fun part. Taking a picture involved dreaming up a suitable image, preparing for it, taking it, processing the resulting image, posting it and then encouraging people to come and see it. It all took rather a long time.
I did it to see if I could prove that art could be separated from craft, part of a long term project to show that art exists in all fields of human effort. That means that you first need to learn to recognise it in a particular field, and that in turn meant trying to define what we mean by art. High art was the first casualty.
Anyway, I quit taking part as a Fugger to give me time to write, including in this blog. However, no matter how much fun this is, most of it is merely writing down concepts I have already worked out in my head. What happens, then, when I eventually finishing writing down all those concepts? Comment on current affairs, write about my home improvements or my cats? I don't think so, there are already enough people doing that kind of thing. No, I want to talk about the harder concepts, the ones where you have to create the concept before commenting on it, more like the carpenter who designs a table, makes it and then comments on it, or the artist, rather than as a mere critic passing judgement on others concepts.
What I am trying to say is that I need a way of generating new ideas. Generating new ideas is the most effective when you do something new, when you get to know something more of your effort goes into maintaining your earlier ideas and pushing them to a conclusion. Fresh ideas means getting off one's metaphorical butt and doing soemthing different. Welcome, then, to the micro-adventure.
Everyday you need to set aside five minutes for an adventure, something that benefits only your personal development and not your work or home duties. It could take longer than five minutes, but that is my best first-guess. I have tested over the past few days, on Friday I went to a gym and signed up. Yesterday we explored the lifts and the underground garage in the city's largest and best mall. Today we explored the foot crossings at the northerly end of the train station platforms, near where they load and unload the mail, which we had not noticed before today when we went to get some photos of the station for a work project.
Fitting the micro-adventure into the working day, as part of a shopping trip or whatever is fine, it is the deliberate removing of five minutes from other tasks which is important. What is scary is not knowing whether I can continue to generate ideas for adventures every day; however, having generated adequate images for 75 days I do have some faith in being able to generate ideas in the future for things to do.
I did it to see if I could prove that art could be separated from craft, part of a long term project to show that art exists in all fields of human effort. That means that you first need to learn to recognise it in a particular field, and that in turn meant trying to define what we mean by art. High art was the first casualty.
Anyway, I quit taking part as a Fugger to give me time to write, including in this blog. However, no matter how much fun this is, most of it is merely writing down concepts I have already worked out in my head. What happens, then, when I eventually finishing writing down all those concepts? Comment on current affairs, write about my home improvements or my cats? I don't think so, there are already enough people doing that kind of thing. No, I want to talk about the harder concepts, the ones where you have to create the concept before commenting on it, more like the carpenter who designs a table, makes it and then comments on it, or the artist, rather than as a mere critic passing judgement on others concepts.
What I am trying to say is that I need a way of generating new ideas. Generating new ideas is the most effective when you do something new, when you get to know something more of your effort goes into maintaining your earlier ideas and pushing them to a conclusion. Fresh ideas means getting off one's metaphorical butt and doing soemthing different. Welcome, then, to the micro-adventure.
Everyday you need to set aside five minutes for an adventure, something that benefits only your personal development and not your work or home duties. It could take longer than five minutes, but that is my best first-guess. I have tested over the past few days, on Friday I went to a gym and signed up. Yesterday we explored the lifts and the underground garage in the city's largest and best mall. Today we explored the foot crossings at the northerly end of the train station platforms, near where they load and unload the mail, which we had not noticed before today when we went to get some photos of the station for a work project.
Fitting the micro-adventure into the working day, as part of a shopping trip or whatever is fine, it is the deliberate removing of five minutes from other tasks which is important. What is scary is not knowing whether I can continue to generate ideas for adventures every day; however, having generated adequate images for 75 days I do have some faith in being able to generate ideas in the future for things to do.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Tradition as the death of culture
Yes, I know that it is a commonly held view that tradition preserves culture, and it does, if you like your culture preserved in sugar, vinegar or brine.
What any of us knows about the culture of our ancestors is very little, and if you ever tried to live life as it was a hundred years ago or more then it would not be long before you discovered that you have little idea how things work or what people did from minute to minute throughout the average day. What we know are what people thought worth preserving, with little idea why they thought it was worth preserving. A good example is Polish cuisine, which is incredibly mind-bendingingly Cutlet, cold meat, cutlet, cold meat...
Find yourself an old enough cookery book, preferably one published before the 1940s, or perhaps a one recently published on some local cuisine, if you can track down one of the half dozen shops that actually hold or can order it, then the story changes, there really is a cuisine, with something called 'variety'. The problem is not restricted to Poland, most northern European cuisines have been shredded through a lack of respect, both at home and abroad. Polish cuisine never really had much chance, most of the country was still at peasant status before the Second World War, and then when great numbers of peasants moved into the now expanding cities after the war, they glutted on what was available and what they liked - cold meat, cabbage and cutlet, almost for any meal. Cabbage, originally an Italian import several centuries ago, was preserved in brine for the winter to give something vaguely fresh to eat while there was nothing much worth eating growing outside. These days cabbage, of various varieties, in brine is the staple vegetable, eaten almost every day and often for two meals. Lettuce, in its plain green leafy variety, is either used as a piece of decoration on the plate or drowned in cream and sugar.
Tradition has little to do with the preservation of culture, it is instead a wild stab into the past to justify present actions in which we all participate and yet fail to describe the reasoning for to later generations. They, as do we with our inherited traditions, assume that they have been passed on for the best reasons, in good faith, rather than merely as a set of conveniences.
What any of us knows about the culture of our ancestors is very little, and if you ever tried to live life as it was a hundred years ago or more then it would not be long before you discovered that you have little idea how things work or what people did from minute to minute throughout the average day. What we know are what people thought worth preserving, with little idea why they thought it was worth preserving. A good example is Polish cuisine, which is incredibly mind-bendingingly Cutlet, cold meat, cutlet, cold meat...
Find yourself an old enough cookery book, preferably one published before the 1940s, or perhaps a one recently published on some local cuisine, if you can track down one of the half dozen shops that actually hold or can order it, then the story changes, there really is a cuisine, with something called 'variety'. The problem is not restricted to Poland, most northern European cuisines have been shredded through a lack of respect, both at home and abroad. Polish cuisine never really had much chance, most of the country was still at peasant status before the Second World War, and then when great numbers of peasants moved into the now expanding cities after the war, they glutted on what was available and what they liked - cold meat, cabbage and cutlet, almost for any meal. Cabbage, originally an Italian import several centuries ago, was preserved in brine for the winter to give something vaguely fresh to eat while there was nothing much worth eating growing outside. These days cabbage, of various varieties, in brine is the staple vegetable, eaten almost every day and often for two meals. Lettuce, in its plain green leafy variety, is either used as a piece of decoration on the plate or drowned in cream and sugar.
Tradition has little to do with the preservation of culture, it is instead a wild stab into the past to justify present actions in which we all participate and yet fail to describe the reasoning for to later generations. They, as do we with our inherited traditions, assume that they have been passed on for the best reasons, in good faith, rather than merely as a set of conveniences.
Friday, October 3, 2008
The all-new Art and Craft movement
Back in the late 19th century, after the first real expansion in education for the people and the related change in society in Western cultures brought about by the industrial revolution, artists began to notice that the level of quality of things like furniture and furnishings had risen so much it was rivalling what they were producing, and what is worse, all those oiky-factory owners were now able to not only pump out vast quantities of similar, good quality goods, but a whole range of items. Ever wondered why Victorian homes were just bursting with fabric, wallpapers, furniture and the like? No, not as the usual pundits have it, because the Victorians lacked taste but, all of a sudden, they didn't have to be in the aristocracy to have a comfy home. Of course, if you were poor, you were still going to have to wait for another century before you could join in.
So, imagine that you were a painter and had been brought up in an art tradition that focussed on replication, and you have spent years learning about how to paint someone in a realistic manner. That's what artists were for, producing likenesses of real people and scenes from history or religion. Imagine, then, what happened when someone with a wooden box could come along and take a chemical image of your potential client, and then get a craftsman to add paint to the resulting image? What is worse is that they could reproduce these chemical 'photograph' images any number of times, and even print on paint using a machine, so that 'paintings' could be produced on a production line. How much art was then left in your reproduction skill?
Having competition can be a good thing as it helps people to realise that they cannot remain sitting on their bottoms while other people in the world live second class lives. When you see your own livelihood drying up because someone else has put the work into giving the customers a better choice, it forces you to re-evaluate your own product. And artists did, they realised what they could offer was originality, a product that had passed through human hands and contained that human's own input visible in the result, and so was born the Arts and Crafts movement. Even today, many people are prepared to pay extra for a product with the human touch. Sadly, the artists in the Arts and Crafts movement rather missed the point, because they really beat up the reputation of factory products, with the result that huge numbers of people today in the media still trash the reputation of factory goods - while typing on computers, talking on mobile phones and generally living lifestyles that would be impossible without the comfort of technology and the factories which make it possible.
Hence, it is time for a new movement, the Art-Craft movement, but this time instead of having the purpose of beating up the opposition, it will embrace it. We are looking for a quality win:win, and no matter if you are a roadsweeper, fashion designer, business person, painter (either kind) or university don, you are going to discover the art and craft in your life and work.
So, imagine that you were a painter and had been brought up in an art tradition that focussed on replication, and you have spent years learning about how to paint someone in a realistic manner. That's what artists were for, producing likenesses of real people and scenes from history or religion. Imagine, then, what happened when someone with a wooden box could come along and take a chemical image of your potential client, and then get a craftsman to add paint to the resulting image? What is worse is that they could reproduce these chemical 'photograph' images any number of times, and even print on paint using a machine, so that 'paintings' could be produced on a production line. How much art was then left in your reproduction skill?
Having competition can be a good thing as it helps people to realise that they cannot remain sitting on their bottoms while other people in the world live second class lives. When you see your own livelihood drying up because someone else has put the work into giving the customers a better choice, it forces you to re-evaluate your own product. And artists did, they realised what they could offer was originality, a product that had passed through human hands and contained that human's own input visible in the result, and so was born the Arts and Crafts movement. Even today, many people are prepared to pay extra for a product with the human touch. Sadly, the artists in the Arts and Crafts movement rather missed the point, because they really beat up the reputation of factory products, with the result that huge numbers of people today in the media still trash the reputation of factory goods - while typing on computers, talking on mobile phones and generally living lifestyles that would be impossible without the comfort of technology and the factories which make it possible.
Hence, it is time for a new movement, the Art-Craft movement, but this time instead of having the purpose of beating up the opposition, it will embrace it. We are looking for a quality win:win, and no matter if you are a roadsweeper, fashion designer, business person, painter (either kind) or university don, you are going to discover the art and craft in your life and work.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
071: Where Art, Thou!
Hide & Seek
Living in an open-plan apartment, even one as small as forty square metres, has its advantages - no messing around with lighting, doors, moving into cold rooms - and whatever music you are playing can be heard everywhere. It's perfect for us, and for everything that we do.
One of the uses is as a studio, where everything is a prop. it is quite common in films to follow the trail of discarded clothes on the way to the bed, but I wanted to show it all in one image, as well as try to give a bird's eye view of our apartment as opposed to all those horizontal shots we have at eye-level. One of my aims for the weekend was to create a kind of three dimensional image from a number of shots, which I have kind of done because none of these are vertical shots but done at about 20-30 degrees from the vertical, to give a subtle 'dish' view.
069: Rocker
Attention Whores
Anyone can be a star in their own bathroom, but I wanted to experiment with the concept. Forget the air guitar, let's make us a guitar and then some noise! Everything was just lying around at home, just waiting, and some of it has appeared before in other guises. If you want, you can have a front row seat, I'll be signing autographs at the end of the show.
When you buy things, like clothes or ornaments, try an avoid things that have a single use, it either ends up gathering dust in your wardrobe or on that shelf. Shelves are the ultimate death for objects - once there they lose any function other than as three-dimensional wallpaper. Finding your art means getting involved in your life, and that means getting better acquainted with all those objects that you surround yourself with. Remember, if you buy something because you think it makes you look cooler in others eyes, give it to them because it is not you.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
066: Red Hat
If I catch you wearing this...
It's amazing what I can find to fit in my wife's wardrobe ;)
Clothed and closed are very similar-sounding words, and the clothes you can wear depend a lot on how much society closes its minds. Different cultures have different mores, and even these vary with time. What I do not understand is the problem that people have with clothes - why can I not be free to wear whatever clothes I like without threatening the very structure of society itself. Society, in reality, is very flexible when push comes to shove, and I want to do some shoving.
The other element of this picture is that wearing the same clothes is a symbol of the single unit that out marriage represents. There is no leader, no his and hers, we do what we can, the best we can. Interestingly enough, society seeks to lever this unity apart by insisting that roles and clothes be assigned to suit them, and not our own preferences and abilities.
This was an interesting shot, as we had to position ourselves in a 3D space to produce a dynamic in an essentially 2D medium, some of the pose elements would appear artificial from another viewpoint. See the major power triangle with Ania's elbow, my hat and my lower foot. Luckily, as long as I can keep the major positioning in mind, my subconscious takes care of the details. Ania, though, has her own influence on the image, completely outside of my control.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
064: Partisan Rules
eye:hand
Rules are important for people who obey them, but they are even more important for those people who can make use of them for their own purposes. For the latter group, what the 'rules' say is not black and white, are not the surface appearance the obeyers believe. Rules have a purpose, but this purpose is rarely more than loosely defined.
Life by rules are like the images above - we choose the one that best fits our purposes; none of them are the reality.
I can't draw very well, and this image represents some stages of producing the 'hand' drawing from a photo, using the mouse to paint on the lines. I deliberately chose an image that was free of eyes, lips and noses, and then experimented with where to put the hard lines and the soft shading. Ultimately, though, it had to represent me, the explorer, the adventurer, and the techniques I chose were merely one of many possible routes there.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
060: Low Life, High Thrills
Playing Cards
This is my trinity.
The Dealer: Confidently playing the cards, relaxed, and sure of where he is going.
The Doubter: Weary, seen it all before, just knows that failure is just around the corner, taking the cards as they come.
The Darkness Within: The mysterious stranger that most people keep well hidden as it is often not very pleasant, but my Darkness Within is an acknowledged friend my other two turn to for help, the one that keeps faith and in touch with God. The cards? They are all the same.
As I rarely play cards, I was not sure where to go with this one, I found it hard therefore to find my art as my life seemed to have so little contact with them. However, when my Darkness Within spoke, I listened and set up this triple shot, and then later understood the relevance.
Monday, September 15, 2008
057: Hip Cat Walk
sixties psychedelic visions...
It is surprising what one can do with an old dressing gown and sweatshirt, they can be almost anything one wants them to be - with the help of a few things from my wife's wardrobe. Twiggy walks the cat walk again! I was a bit short of time for post-processing of this image, especially as i had to figure out a number of methodologies to achieve the desired effect.
Today's question is: if you are a painter then you are allowed to paint what you like, in any way you like, effectively, without any real attention being paid to the actual props. For a photographer the situation is different, as despite actually achieving acceptance an art, the image is still treated as being real life. Whatever you photograph is held up more strongly to some concept of public morals, and used as 'evidence of truth'. This amounts to a censorship of art, a restriction on the work of photographers.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
049: Dunce, the Knight's Away!
Copycats
Today I took a shot for a group that I didn't really want to do as I had already planned a different shot and then the choice was changed. Other than the disappointment in not doing the shot I had planned for Flikr Group Roulette, this one led me to a crisis of confidence - but then it also taught or reminded me of some things. Basically, I had to do a copycat image, and that meant I ended up doing a comparison between my image and the one that I had copied.
And technically, there was no comparison. Argh!
*breaks out the vodka, drinks himself into a stupor*
Once posted, it quickly generated some comments. It had made some people happy!
*screws cap back on vodka bottle*
Hold on, isn't part of my art the giving of simple pleasure?
*Puts vodka bottle back in the cupboard and washes glass up*
In ye olde days, several careers ago, when I was an apprentice mechanic, responsibility for my on the job training was given to at what the time seemed an ancient geezer. Fred, of the white hair and the impossible responsibility, had the knack for training up new comers to the trade, and probably welcomed the largely uncritical extra pair of muscles when man-handling Morris Ital gearboxes back into place while lying on our backs under those blessedly unreliable cars (we became a specialist team one summer with those gearboxes, doing around twenty of them).
It was a large garage with about fifteen mechanics and body shop people, plenty of technical skill to be in awe of. And yet with Fred I never felt that my lack of skill was a problem, nor do I remember him doing much in the way of direct teaching. In fact, I learned my skill by observation, and it was not just technical skills, for not everything one did was by procedure or repeating experience. Technology changed, and there were always new and unexpected problems that no one had seen before. What I learnt was to feel the cars as systems, almost like a person, to visualise what was happening.
I had, although I was not to realise it until many years later, was to stumble upon art in a car workshop. And my art was not the same as Fred's, we often arrived at the same or different conclusions, by dissimilar thought processes.
One day I was watching Fred as he tested the set of bronze rings from one of the gearboxes for cracks. He was relying on his experience, trying to physically pull these rings apart to see which of them had cracked through, the cracks being too fine to be visible. I then picked them up and carefully tapped them on the vice, and those which were fine went 'tiiinnng', while those with cracks went 'dnk'. Although lacking the technical knowledge, I had discovered a better and easier method of testing.
Other than being proud of myself, I did not think much about it, but several career changes later I began to realise how important it is to lay technical skill aside sometimes and rely on one's art. Without any particular linguistics training, I continue to surprise my wife, who is a doctor of linguistics and who has been teaching language and teachers of language at university level for over 25 years, with insights into her core skills. The secret is not to be overawed by knowledge and technical skills in others, but to look and try to understand what you are seeing.
The photograph I was copying was technically good, the art there for anyone to see - a sexy, feminine image. Mine was flat, rough around the edges and masculine, but isn't that one of the things I have been working with all summer? The contrast between the masculine and the feminine, often mine?
Then the original idea I had had came back to me, it wasn't a competition in technique, I was contrasting, my lack of technical skills was not a problem. I was not supposed to be working on fine skills, it was the contrast itself mixed in with humour that had driven me. Almost point for point I had contrasted the two images, leaving only the basic alignment of them the same.
It has been another piece of the jigsaw that is me, another step in bringing my life into focus, to understand my core processes better. And in line with the see-saw concept I outlined previously, my image had driven me to write all this.
046: Peer: Glass
Asymmetric
Our bathroom door is such a useful thing, it has appeared in so many of my images in many guises and disguises. This is the most mysterious so far. The hardest bit was sitting on the floor while I experimented with the positioning of me and the camera, but in the end I chose the second I took.
Notice the kind of waterfall effect of the light above my head? That was due to my Sony and its habit of corrupting some picture. The other, perfect shots I discarded in favour of this one. What is inspiration? Everything you deliberately choose to do or also what happens when you choose a deliberate path. I know that some of the shots will have the defect, yet I choose to keep on using that camera, nothing more than taking advantage of your camera's or your photo processing program's functions, except you can neve be sure when it will happen.
It is like using a special prop, the art is in how you use it, not in the fact that you have got it. Here I applied my art to the effect, draining the image of colour, tinting it and then putting two images in one, at different width compressions. I have no guide as to how to do it, no training, nothing more than experimenting with paints and deciding how best to use them to create an effect that I may not have consciously conceived off prior to the editing process. But the ideas were conceived.
043: Smile
Happy Sunday
Imagine you are at the side of a pool looking out along a diving board, are your pictures 'out there' on the board, while your diary writing is the real you safely on the land? Is there any risk that your art will just slip out too far, or that you and your writing might fall into the water? What if you walk too far out along that board to reach your art and then cannot find your way back? I mention this only because I notice that many people write about one thing, often the mundane real life stuff or technical description of the photographic process, and then their photographic images show something else. Can we tie our words and the expression of our images closer together, or is it necessary for some reason to keep them apart? Are our happy pictures a reaction to something else in our lives, or a striving for something we are not sure about?
Our words are one expression of ourselves, and our images are another, but neither are actually us, although together they give other people a better picture of us than either alone. Instead of imagining our lives and art as a diving board, perhaps it would be better to consider a see-saw instead, with our words at one end and our images at the other, with us as the fulcrum, that point of balance. Perhaps we use our pictures to express what our words cannot, together they better forming or describing our art, or to balance less positive elsewhere in our lives? If this is the case, if we change what we write about, does it also change what we photograph and display for others to see? If true, perhaps if we change what we write in our diaries, we will also change what photographs we choose to take or show - and vice versa? It might be easier to show in images what we lack the confidence to do so with words, or the other way around, and by experimenting with the form we have more confidence in might help us to do more with the other?
By creating this image of me pretending to smile, it helped me write that I was feeling sad that my wife had to stay on for another ten days in New York while I returned home. Would I have written that if first I had not taken the picture and then played around with it until it fitted my mood?
042: Badass Traveller
I'm a Flikr Badass.
Fresh back from New York. Don't you think that travelling can be so tiring, but I wonder why no one would talk to me on the plane? After a week out of the loop with the Fuggers, this was my return shot, incorporating my very recent travelling experience.
I came back to Poland with a number of books I had bought about the meaning of art, and finding these was harder than I had imagined because most books are either descriptions of technique or of artists' work. Reading them I can see the authors battling with exactly the same problems I have been, I do not always agree with their conclusions but I have found some very useful insights.
Art is your concept of the world. The only way to improve your art is to improve your understanding of people and the environments in which we live. It is not particularly relevant whether you choose to study poetry or physics, either will give you equal insight into the world and your art, as would market gardening or whatever else. You do not even have to study one thing, any and everything will do as insight is the key, not bodies of knowledge. Your personal art and the levels of art of the highest achievers in society have nothing in common, unless you wish to compete for awards - it matters not one whit what other people produce, you only have to produce your own art. Art does mean your best work under whatever conditions you live under, but not 'anything will do' as art requires patience, effort and, yes, some pain. Art lies along the limits of your abilities, and unless you push the boundaries of your understanding with each new piece the art fades into mere reproduction. Pushing boundaries causes pain, and events causing pain push your boundaries of understanding further out in some direction. If something is causing you pain, then that is not a bad place to look for your art. Remember, though, that there are many kinds of pain, but they all hurt! :)
041: The paparazzi are coming!
Paparazzi
Central Park is a great place to visit, especially if you do not mind the over the top 'romantic rustic' look, with the too many 'fallen logs' scattered everywhere around the Ramble. I liked the architecture of this gazebo, reminiscent of a Monet I remember, which made it excuse enough for a backdrop, what other excuse does one need?
On editing I decided to play around with the colours, simplyfy the palette a little. This brought out the pink in the hand, as a kind of warning colour against the cooler blues and greens - as well as the mysterious black silhouette that was me, blending in with the roof.
Ideas rarely come to fruition in one blinding flash, you often have plenty of thinking time somewhere between the stages of conceiving the idea, possibly seeking the right location or props, taking the photo and then finally processing it. The earlier you can get your thinking in, then generally the better, especially in a work environment. But one must not be switched off to later ideas, unless the delay they create is unacceptable.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
028: Off With His Head
The images were supposed to be accidental, but life is short and why waste a great image idea?
It is important to remember the relationship you have with the world around you, here the idea of a cut off head image and the shape of my new vase just came together and then sparked off the linking 'man who fell to earth' concept (it's a film from the 1970s).
Working on art in one part of your life helps to spark innovation in other parts, and with practice you can end up with more innovation than you can handle. Bu the practice is important, especially in a world where most people feel safer if you remain, like them, as a passive observer instead of a creator.
Creation and observation are two different skills, one passive and the other active, and most commentators are observers of other people's art and are quite happy if you restrict your thinking to their commentary. Creation, on the other hand, means your personal involvement in all phases of what you are doing.
Friday, August 15, 2008
27-Smile... It's Friday
Smiling, and a shot straight out of the camera.
Always be prepared to drop an idea when it begins to fall apart. This one was supposed to show the top half of my head in the main mirror, and my smiling mouth offset in the small mirror, but it was just too difficult to set up without the shower appearing in shot. So I dumped it, and went for putting the beer in the small mirror and then doing a series of shots until I was in shot - and by some luck I picked up some of the flash on the side of my face.
The camera I set to the 'dusk' automatic setting after quickly trying out several other settings to get the best colour - the indoor setting was washing out the colours, while the beach and the sunset settings made everything go too red/yellow.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
26: Nerds
Today I uncovered my inner nerd - not, although there is something of me in this image. After seeing so many repetitive 'silly walks' too close to the Mont Python original yesterday, I was glad that I had accidentally gone down a different road.
In a similar vein, someone wrote that they were staying in a hotel room, with no props, hence were frustrated they could not put together decent photographs. However, I think that their problem was not a lack of props but basic classicalism. It goes like this - you like taking pictures, and you look out for suitable things which would make good props. Once discovered, they become labelled 'props' in the mind, and we can use them in whatever way we feel in our photographs. However, a hotel room is full of 'hotel room things' like a bed, chair, mirror and such, and the chances are they are not what we would choose if we were looking for props.
What, though, if we were to rid ourselves of all sub-classes of object and instead just thought of everything to hand as 'things'. We exist in relation to whatever things surround us, our existence can be defined in terms of our relation to them. If we are always some form of 'we', and everything else is just 'things', then the only thing restricting us is our preconceptions of how we relate to the things. Dump that mind set, and then what you are left is the opportunity to photograph your present self in the present situation using whatever things are to hand at present. If you can achieve that, and it does require practice, then no where is frustrating because you always have to hand everything you need.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
11: Humorous Photos
This has proved to be the most popular image yet, hitting nearly 70 views in the first 24 hours. The task was to show a joke visually, but while most people used an old joke I created a new one and then photographed that, adding a simple text comment on the image to drive the meaning home.
After producing a series of humorous images prior to this one, having to deliberately create one seemed a daunting task as I usually wrap the humour around the subject instead of inserting the subject into the humour. Rather than try to remember a joke and then ponder how to photograph it, I used yesterday's gay lumberjack image and thought about what would be funny if I put him in a dress, in a way that would be appeal to adolescents and adults.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
10: Fabulous Embellished Party Hats
This one floored me, I didn't think I had any materials at all for a party hat, and the ones shown on the group were terribly bitsy and twee. Then I noticed the bottle of wine we got on sunday, and wondered if I could balance that on a hat along with a glass - much more like a party hat to me, I thought. Later I noticed wifies jewellery lying in the bathroom, and wondered if I could add that to my hat. However, pushing metal spikes through my cotton hat did not sound like a good idea - but my wooly, winter hat, that would be fine.
This image shows how much I have learnt over the past week about the best way to photograph myself - an angle shot and without glasses. Using a hand is also incredibly useful, a flat edge-on hand can chop the shape, while the almost-fist elongates the face chopped off at the top by the head, as well as the sensual near-mouth finger and the dominant thumb visible in a supporting role.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
7: Inspire & Be Inspired
Inspiration is not what we do normally, it is something that occurs in the dark depths of our minds. Here is my invention, designed to shed some light down those dark corridors of the mind, along which we creep blindly, felling our way.
Inspiration, like some kind of strange rabbit, can be encouraged to poke its nose out of that dark waren, but that means we have to do something specific. It is easy to go through life and only occasionally notice the nose of an inspiration rabbit, much harder to learn ways of encouraging one to appear on cue.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
3: Just Shots
Well, if I could get away with yesterdays, why not go the whole way, I thought. Originally I was going to take a shot of a small fridge-magnet taxi that came all the way from New York, but it turns out that the taxi idea was nothing more than a step to the one I needed to take. Today's group is about any picture that does not fit in any particular category, and I took the opportunity to use one of my favourite techniques - a collage. I was going to have ragged edges like it was ripped out of a magazine, but I did not really have the time to mess around or the necessary expertise with Gimp to get an adequately quality image.
I chose not to use the flash simply because my camera batteries needed recharging, but that muddy-green background effect is much like that you see with many portraits from the first half of the twentieth century, a suitable foil for the first exposure of my psoriasis. As I was putting the image together from the six shots I accepted, I began to notice how much it resembles one of those Hindu goddesses.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Quality Cheaper Better
Quality cannot be defined absolutely in terms of price, although a more expensive product might look better quality their is no guarantee that the quality really is any different to a cheaper product. Which we all know, great, it's good to know that we all understand the same things, but I would like to explore the idea in terms of some of my own experience, or maybe it is just that I feel a need to talk about my old motorcycle.
When you buy something new and you are past that initial stage when there might be a need for a few adjustments, the reliability for that product should level out and, if you maintain it well, it should remain reliable for some reasonable amount of time before the effects of wear starts to make themselves known. If the product is something fairly simple, like a shirt, you might at that point decide to throw it away or turn it into dusters, but if it is more complex do you get it repaired or replaced? Which decision contains the most quality and which decision will minimise your outlays in terms of money or time? Saving money or time can be a kind of quality, if you are able to use what you save successfully, although this can be almost impossible to define as we cannot really be sure how our life would have progressed if we had made a different choice.
Imagine we have a car and after a few years we have to decide whether to replace it or keep it and spend increasingly more time and money in maintaining it. If we use the car for business then changing it is likely to be the best choice as time and money spent on repairs should be more effectively spent on making more money. If the car is used merely for pleasure then keeping the car could be an investment in experience.
If we have a car that we need for work and something goes wrong with it - we know that garages repair cars, but do we really know how to get the best out of them? How to make the kind of requests, at the optimal time to get the kind of service that we desire? If instead we work in any service industry and come face to face with customers we quickly see that many of them fail to get the best out of us and what our company offers, and how easy it is to blame them, to think of them as being stupid or foolish. What, though, if the real problem was that neither side really understands what is happening when customer and customer service meet, both throwing away quality by a reluctance to learn?
Learning takes much more effort than blaming someone else, and learning will never occur if we continue to block it. In the customer service position, we have to ensure that what we present the customer is understandable in the same way the way you file customer information has to be understood without thinking by the other people you work with. You know that feeling when you start work in a new job - everything is different, it is confusing and not a little alien. Well, that is often how we make the customer feel when they meet us for the first time, it is not enough that we understand the logic and apparent necessities of what we do, they have to be transparent to other people, to them. We need to spend time approaching other customer service departments to re-affirm within us what it feels like to deal with that unfeeling expert that we can so easily and unconsciously become.
I once bought a very dead, 15 year old Honda step-thru motorcycle with broken plastic components and exhaust, disintegrated seat and nothing to kick the engine over with. It cost me about fifteen pounds, more than most people thought it was worth - but it was instantly available and it allowed me to get to know the person responsible for the student blocks I wished to move into while at university.
Buying things like this helped me to realise that a successful personal sale was also an opportunity to get rid of things that I did not want that would feel like bonuses to the buyer. The actual sale was only part of the interaction, the change in my circumstances that the process of the sale brought about were often of more significance. I now possessed a motorcycle that was going to significantly expand my horizons, I was going to get a room where I wanted to be and my ability to take risks was to be confirmed with all who knew me. There were some who thought I was mad, but I was not paying them any attention.
Let's say that you had a car that you wished to sell. The traditional business view, and peasant's view, is that you go through the car with a fine-tooth comb and remove anything of any possible value to maximise potential secondary sales (or to minimise value for the purchaser, if you are a peasant). There is nothing wrong with that, if you can successfully dispose of what you find without negatively influencing the rest of your life. Most people keep too many things for too long without generating a system for the effective disposal of these items.
The longer you keep something, the less desirable it becomes in terms of condition, and longer it consumes storage resources that reduce the quality of the rest of your life. If you keep something so long that it comes into vogue again, the basic storage costs to your life is more than likely to counter the financial gain. Before selling the car it does make sense to look through it in case we have left something we need under the seat - and I do not mean something 'we could use'. Next we look in the garage and see what we do not want - maybe that old footpump could be put in a clear bag and placed in the car as a surprise for the purchaser. Hide anything valuable, position anything you do not want near the front of the garage and leave the garage doors open at some stage. You are selling a car after all, a car a purchaser could fill with some of your unwanted goods. Which could you sell, and which could you offer for free simply to engage the quality of freed up space? It is this understanding of the qualities of time, money and resources that can put anyone ahead of other people in a similar position.
I know many translation companies where the managers are recruited from translators, and these managers continue to translate to make more money for themselves under the banner of 'reducing overheads'. This tells us that there is either not a requirement for a manager, or that the opportunities that focussing on managing should achieve are simply not being achieved. Perhaps this is partly due to a lack of training, where the managers are not able to fully develop the potential in their position through not being able to imagine the potential or having the skills to do so. We are all guilty of putting duties and pleasures before the task of assessing whether we are getting the most out of our life, and often the invisible costs of what we have not been able to do are not balanced by the profits of the things we actually do.
Motorcycles were not things that I was so familiar with, but this little Honda was stripped down to its essentials and then stared at. Conventional wisdom said that if I wanted to have a bike that I could ride both on and off the road, I should have bought a bike designed for that purpose. If I had done so, I most likely would have repaired it, ridden it and then moved onto other bikes or activities, and my level of wisdom and reputation would have remained at the conventional level. I looked at some books about off-road motorcycling, I stared at some bikes at the local motorcycle agent's and then I thought, drew things, made lists. I then cut, welded, sewed and, yes, tied things on with string and elastic straps before riding it around a local wood. It was fun to ride for an hour but, even forgetting the need to tie things back on every ten minutes, it was hardly a good bike. The riding made me think some more and over the next few months the bike evolved into a street legal, lightweight, high-performance 6 horsepower machine.
Eventually we packed the bike in the back of a van, along with my brother's and my friend's bikes and drove all the way down to the Alps. Once there I was on my own in terms of resources to support a shaky development bike, and when it broke down for the countless-th time half way up a mountain road with a mystery electrical fault, I knew it was time for some one-on-one communing with my machine. I waved goodbye to my brother and my friend and proceeded to remove every single wire from the machine, rolling each up and placing them neatly in a row. Brain-wire-bike.
If I wanted lunch, I was going to have to get off this mountain, and my bike was the only route I was going to consider. Aside from those limitations, I opened myself up to what was possible, not what had been done before on this or any other machine in the known world. From first principles I produced a simple wiring system for the bike, one that worked, and which would continue to work reliably for the rest of the bike's life. The solution was achieved not in the comfort of a workshop with an expert on call, but from within, using the minimum of tools. We all know more than we realise, because we learn everyday about what we like and what we do not like, what works and what limps along.
Working at a customer service point or as a branch manager we can often succeed without employing external resources by doing nothing more than becoming more familiar with how our own experience, and those of the people around us, can be applied to improve the way we work. One achievement builds confidence to look for the next, where failure becomes nothing more than a delay, an opportunity to consider a different solution. Living with our systems, rather than living with our head turned away from them, is one of the best ways of learning to understand it. Solutions come by tinkering and testing, looking for parallels in other industries, in other people's garages.
When you buy something new and you are past that initial stage when there might be a need for a few adjustments, the reliability for that product should level out and, if you maintain it well, it should remain reliable for some reasonable amount of time before the effects of wear starts to make themselves known. If the product is something fairly simple, like a shirt, you might at that point decide to throw it away or turn it into dusters, but if it is more complex do you get it repaired or replaced? Which decision contains the most quality and which decision will minimise your outlays in terms of money or time? Saving money or time can be a kind of quality, if you are able to use what you save successfully, although this can be almost impossible to define as we cannot really be sure how our life would have progressed if we had made a different choice.
Imagine we have a car and after a few years we have to decide whether to replace it or keep it and spend increasingly more time and money in maintaining it. If we use the car for business then changing it is likely to be the best choice as time and money spent on repairs should be more effectively spent on making more money. If the car is used merely for pleasure then keeping the car could be an investment in experience.
If we have a car that we need for work and something goes wrong with it - we know that garages repair cars, but do we really know how to get the best out of them? How to make the kind of requests, at the optimal time to get the kind of service that we desire? If instead we work in any service industry and come face to face with customers we quickly see that many of them fail to get the best out of us and what our company offers, and how easy it is to blame them, to think of them as being stupid or foolish. What, though, if the real problem was that neither side really understands what is happening when customer and customer service meet, both throwing away quality by a reluctance to learn?
Learning takes much more effort than blaming someone else, and learning will never occur if we continue to block it. In the customer service position, we have to ensure that what we present the customer is understandable in the same way the way you file customer information has to be understood without thinking by the other people you work with. You know that feeling when you start work in a new job - everything is different, it is confusing and not a little alien. Well, that is often how we make the customer feel when they meet us for the first time, it is not enough that we understand the logic and apparent necessities of what we do, they have to be transparent to other people, to them. We need to spend time approaching other customer service departments to re-affirm within us what it feels like to deal with that unfeeling expert that we can so easily and unconsciously become.
I once bought a very dead, 15 year old Honda step-thru motorcycle with broken plastic components and exhaust, disintegrated seat and nothing to kick the engine over with. It cost me about fifteen pounds, more than most people thought it was worth - but it was instantly available and it allowed me to get to know the person responsible for the student blocks I wished to move into while at university.
Buying things like this helped me to realise that a successful personal sale was also an opportunity to get rid of things that I did not want that would feel like bonuses to the buyer. The actual sale was only part of the interaction, the change in my circumstances that the process of the sale brought about were often of more significance. I now possessed a motorcycle that was going to significantly expand my horizons, I was going to get a room where I wanted to be and my ability to take risks was to be confirmed with all who knew me. There were some who thought I was mad, but I was not paying them any attention.
Let's say that you had a car that you wished to sell. The traditional business view, and peasant's view, is that you go through the car with a fine-tooth comb and remove anything of any possible value to maximise potential secondary sales (or to minimise value for the purchaser, if you are a peasant). There is nothing wrong with that, if you can successfully dispose of what you find without negatively influencing the rest of your life. Most people keep too many things for too long without generating a system for the effective disposal of these items.
The longer you keep something, the less desirable it becomes in terms of condition, and longer it consumes storage resources that reduce the quality of the rest of your life. If you keep something so long that it comes into vogue again, the basic storage costs to your life is more than likely to counter the financial gain. Before selling the car it does make sense to look through it in case we have left something we need under the seat - and I do not mean something 'we could use'. Next we look in the garage and see what we do not want - maybe that old footpump could be put in a clear bag and placed in the car as a surprise for the purchaser. Hide anything valuable, position anything you do not want near the front of the garage and leave the garage doors open at some stage. You are selling a car after all, a car a purchaser could fill with some of your unwanted goods. Which could you sell, and which could you offer for free simply to engage the quality of freed up space? It is this understanding of the qualities of time, money and resources that can put anyone ahead of other people in a similar position.
I know many translation companies where the managers are recruited from translators, and these managers continue to translate to make more money for themselves under the banner of 'reducing overheads'. This tells us that there is either not a requirement for a manager, or that the opportunities that focussing on managing should achieve are simply not being achieved. Perhaps this is partly due to a lack of training, where the managers are not able to fully develop the potential in their position through not being able to imagine the potential or having the skills to do so. We are all guilty of putting duties and pleasures before the task of assessing whether we are getting the most out of our life, and often the invisible costs of what we have not been able to do are not balanced by the profits of the things we actually do.
Motorcycles were not things that I was so familiar with, but this little Honda was stripped down to its essentials and then stared at. Conventional wisdom said that if I wanted to have a bike that I could ride both on and off the road, I should have bought a bike designed for that purpose. If I had done so, I most likely would have repaired it, ridden it and then moved onto other bikes or activities, and my level of wisdom and reputation would have remained at the conventional level. I looked at some books about off-road motorcycling, I stared at some bikes at the local motorcycle agent's and then I thought, drew things, made lists. I then cut, welded, sewed and, yes, tied things on with string and elastic straps before riding it around a local wood. It was fun to ride for an hour but, even forgetting the need to tie things back on every ten minutes, it was hardly a good bike. The riding made me think some more and over the next few months the bike evolved into a street legal, lightweight, high-performance 6 horsepower machine.
Eventually we packed the bike in the back of a van, along with my brother's and my friend's bikes and drove all the way down to the Alps. Once there I was on my own in terms of resources to support a shaky development bike, and when it broke down for the countless-th time half way up a mountain road with a mystery electrical fault, I knew it was time for some one-on-one communing with my machine. I waved goodbye to my brother and my friend and proceeded to remove every single wire from the machine, rolling each up and placing them neatly in a row. Brain-wire-bike.
If I wanted lunch, I was going to have to get off this mountain, and my bike was the only route I was going to consider. Aside from those limitations, I opened myself up to what was possible, not what had been done before on this or any other machine in the known world. From first principles I produced a simple wiring system for the bike, one that worked, and which would continue to work reliably for the rest of the bike's life. The solution was achieved not in the comfort of a workshop with an expert on call, but from within, using the minimum of tools. We all know more than we realise, because we learn everyday about what we like and what we do not like, what works and what limps along.
Working at a customer service point or as a branch manager we can often succeed without employing external resources by doing nothing more than becoming more familiar with how our own experience, and those of the people around us, can be applied to improve the way we work. One achievement builds confidence to look for the next, where failure becomes nothing more than a delay, an opportunity to consider a different solution. Living with our systems, rather than living with our head turned away from them, is one of the best ways of learning to understand it. Solutions come by tinkering and testing, looking for parallels in other industries, in other people's garages.
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