Bit of a rubbish one

Well I tried to go off the beaten track I didn't get out much last week so it's another dog walking one. I like the red berries as they are a winter colour but really rich. I like winter light it feels somehow more important and the dawns and dusks stretch your shadow long. I then explored a bit and found the remnants of some sort of binge smoking which I couldn't really work out - if it was one person chain smoking or a gang of kids. I've seen a woman crouching down having a fag a few times. I think she is hiding her habit but if she had smoked 3 packets of Bensons surely even with chewing gum the smell would give her away. So that's it very much not contrived but then the whole thing is very contrived which is a good thing. Perhaps a conversation and then something which connects the blog or website to the real world like a sort of marker - you know how you tag files so you can recognise it on a computer. I've just got some gold leaf for a project I've been thinking of doing for a while and I thought of badges then I thought of the marks workmen leave on roads or the crosses on trees that are going to the chopped down - this is a bit like the Geo site website we talked about but it could a lot more personal.

dogma

well my first attempt at following the dogma of photo the start of off roading and then photo the find or place, is here. i wanted to go to mr straws house but it was shut, so what i found was this faty matty graffiti. I initally having known nothing of the house and not wanting to look it up before hand was hoping to find a house of straw, or a house where everything was made of straw, but instead what it is timewarp. In an attempt to find the house i had to ask directions and asked a man in the middle of worksop, who was happy to talk of mr straw and his story. I was in worksop for a meeting and told fellow meeters of our of the beaten track mission and so they wanted to join me. It seems that this may be turning into an community engagement project. I was keen to enter a time warp, like an alice in wonderland moment of heading off the track and finding something magical, like your 7ft juggler. I like the romance of this digressing, that we hope for or perhaps expect something unusual by moving off our route. Well what we found, my band of merry digressors and I was the 'faty matty' graffiti. It such a kind poetic slur, and I like its link to mr straws name - matty is a faty and mr straw is ...well, im hoping he is made of straw.
I like also how the graffiti subverts the national trusts timewarp romance, bringing us back to the reality of now. So faty matty keeps me in the present and reminds me to not get caught up in the meaning of something, but to focus on the actuality - its a house, in worksop.



Which leads on to my second attempt to go off the beaten track, i diverted from my route back from wirksworth. I turned off to Southwell, home of the catherdral. It was the cathedral that was the start of my idea, i have seen it on antiques roadshow and have always wanted to visit. So my first pic is the cathedral, linked to seeing the sign and then thinking of antiques roadshow. My second photo is of the graffiti i saw as i drove into the town. I love how in being rightous about one thing it upsets another. The graffitti spoils the persons desired pristineness. I like how it links to the cathedrals underlying desires.
In following my new dogma of speaking to people whilst off roading, i asked a woman in the cathedral about the site where the graffiti was and what she thought about it and she said she didint know, but she would look. I like how the engagement with people makes me and perhaps them think and see differently. I like my new addition to the dogma.

My last photo is a window inthe catherdral, its made from small broken pieces of glass collected from the site when they rebuilt/refurbed the catherdral after the civil war. Its like a patch work quilt, its an improvised thing. When i asked another lady about it she said something i really liked, something like - the glass became treasure again. Which linked really well the the gordon matta clarks - fake estate work i was talking to you about - the slivers of land that he bought in new york. But also made me think differently about the pieces of broken china i find and keep and what all this says about place. So i have started reading about place again and also more of gordon matta clark. He did a piece for the centre of architecture and urban studies, where he shot all the windows out with a rifle - nice.

heidegger

last night i was reading about heidegger and his ideas about dwelling and came across of course the wikepdia entry about his nazi connections. in the entry is this picture of a path that he walked daily to think. I was reminded of it by your entry of paths and thinking. But as a picture and an entry it made me laugh how a path was elevated like charlie chaplins cane and jackson pollock paint tins, as a object that could bring you nearer to him.
Is your route determind by the view; the following of the same route so thinking about which way was removed; what you know/nomadic dwelling; OCD, or time taken, etc........Perhaps the iraqi youth will cause the breaking of the OCD. And so we return to paths or routes and wayfinding.

I wonder if the sheer fact these conversations exist and are read, like with me it, makes you see the world and things differently. and so we could encourage the audience to digress and rather than just looking to find something that they then post, they ponder their digression, their find, their path and flys free will.....
Today I have not digressed, i didnt feel like it.

Off the beaten track

Well I tried it last week. It's funny because since we had the idea I've thought about it a lot and once squeezed through a hole in a fence into someones garden but didn't have a camera or a phone so this was a conceptual of the beaten track and I found a lawn so it wasn't very good really.

My beaten track is the cemetery at the moment - twice a day I walk the dog always the same way around always around the outside path. Kim calls it my OCD route as I make her run it. I'm not sure why I do this probably because I now use my dog walking time for thinking Niezche said that he had never had a good idea when he wasn't walking and my time in the cemetery is my thinking time. Although I now have a posse of Libyan kids who follow me around throwing sticks for the dog. I have to be nice to them as everybody else tells them to bugger off but there are about nine of them now and it's getting a bit much.

So here is the first picture - the camera on my new phone is shit compared to my

old one and like I said before I think I may start using my SLR and really thinking about the quality of the pictures rather than just taking a snap - I think this may be important and part of a ritual - not going out to take a picture but going out to record a moment, a thought , in the best way I can rather than on my shitty phone. So here is the fork I've never been down this bit before as it's a dead end so I wondered down actively looking for something to photograph and found a grave which was recently dressed but the weather hard aged everything down. It felt funny as you notice the graves which are kept well on the main drag - like it's a outward sign that people still care but it felt different to see these things on a grave which was on it's own like the stuff was more personal connecting the living to the dead or like the tree in the forest which nobody sees or hears fall. It almost feels like it may be wrong to post the picture - perhaps I have no right to make the private public - perhaps . Then I felt quite smug with myself and started to walk home really pleased in the idea and excited and reminded of years of thinking about setting up Dogmas in my arts practise and I thought about you saying if I set up rules you would break them. I thought about this and that you could do this idea and just pretend you had come across something and if it was more interesting than what you actually came across maybe this would be better art . Then on the way back I came across a 7 foot tall fire juggler which made me think about big fish so I photographed him to prove I had not made him up and then wondered if I could get him to juggle his things at the end of my transgression from the OCD cemetery route. So I suppose we need a comment on the integrity of a dogma and how important it is and how we convey this idea or concept in whatever we produce. For me the idea is to get the "Audience" to start to make the digression and change the way they look at things - the product which would perhaps be a website or book is the vehicle to engage people in doing this but most importantly to alter the lens they look at the world - or at least their journey to work through. I think if we could make this work it would be a good piece of art - we are not their yet maybe we have to do fifty digressions and edit them before it becomes a workable idea I'm not sure but I do like it. I'm thinking more and more about the idea of mapping a point in time when a decision was made and it makes me think about the scientific proof that even flies have freewill which I read about in new scientist last year.

sorry its taken so long

its probably a bit small but you might see the line of lights acting as a false horizon line- a high tide mark of waters past [just this is a nice idea - function to meaning again]. Its charles' piece from wirksworth [[nightstations.com - is his site worth a look] also i wonder as an aside if he is one of our 7 sights artists?]]. I picked it as a link to the turrel for many reasons - it makes you look differently at a site/the world, its a gentle land art piece , but i like it more that that because its perfectly atunned to the place/site. Especially on the last day after end of festival the locals after waiting for weekend to be over rearranged the piece into a giant penis how more perfect, light graffitti. I know its not offically off the beaten track but it is invisible for most of the day, unseen by many.
I wanted to post up something that reinforced your point about looking at the world differently - "which is what good art does" , but that also reinforced our thinking about making work in sites. It made me think that perhaps these sites are not inside or organinsations but could be anywhere, but that engaged with people, as charles did due to the relationship made to create the piece.
And this made me think about something that i read that said someones work engaged with the social rather the was socially engaged and they didint mean relational.
And then i thought maybe we make lots of works over a long time and dont worry about finding one place like an artemis place.
Which made me think about alec finlays work that seems to rienforce the romantic notion of poetic observations that perpetuate the myth of the countryside, in that for me its really superficial, but interesting perhaps
And then i thought what you said about dwelling people and habitus and needing to dwell which made me think of nomadic dwelling like delueze and guatarri spoke about.
And then i wondered if we journeyed
and then i wondered what that might mean.
And the i worried about not really wanting to abandon the archive because what i see it as now is a large body of work that represents landscape and so it can include anything and no it doesnt mean i am going to draw ink drawings all the time, but it does feel like something i want to be engaged with as a focus or area of research. So yes i want to make new work but that will always be at the core.
And then i think this is a good place to consider these points and that by sharing them we learn more about each others practice, yet at the same time we need to explore the idea of - off the beaten track in the search of a site - as a concept, a visual document and theoretical idea and let it come as it comes and not to try and pre think or work out what we are going to do.. But reflect on it as we do to it - isnt the act or doesnt the following our set task become the habitus.
By doing as the quest states i find just by having a focus that isnt perhaps part of my normal thinking about work means i think differently about it and consider new ways of looking. Also since doing this i now look at the landscape more or perhaps in a different way.
And then finally i worried that this was a thinking through making senario and i held my head in my hands.

Is this good?

I kind of understand why you are cross but I don't really agree with you. When we talked about the Jackson Pollocks and I said how disapointed I was about seeing them "In the flesh" in Moma you put me straight by saying I had to think about what they meant - how they fitted into history rather than what they were. I think you were rite to say this and it made me think about the context of history. Kettles yard is all the things you say about it but I think you have to view it in it's historical context as a museum rather than something that relates to your work or your thinking then it's ok and a nice place to spend a few hours. For me it connected me to the art of that time in a very different way to visiting a gallery and I was pleased that it existed as a place and it was unlike anywhere I had been I also thought the way it opened up was really interesting. Much of the art from that period is very british and very middle class but it was a fresh way to see it.

I think we are both in a similar situation in terms of work because we feel like we are coming to the end of something - a sort of Phase of work and we both want to do or make stuff which feels original or challenging but we are not sure what it will luck like. I keep thinking about places and people and objects and Habitus and change and challenge but it doesn't ever get further than that - perhaps it's because this approach to work is like we said all about learning to dwell and most people make work "About" something rather than "of" something if that makes sense. Anyway I post a picture of the Turrel as I like it because the best works function I think is to get us to look at the world differently and thats what he did for me and maybe it's this idea of the effect on the audience we should explore rather than something inherent in the work itself.

sickening

i pondered your post and liked the visual, conceptual link, which made me think of some more of tim ingold texts about wayfinding...Which after our weekend visit to cambridge made me think of maps, we didnt use one, but there is one on the web. We didn't use one because we know from experience which way to go. Which then made me think of andy talking about using the tom tom and that it sends him the back way and that he always finds good places he wouldnt find by taking the wrong turn and it correcting itself to get you to the destination. I liked that the tom tom becomes a collaborator.
I know its not off the beaten track but it is somewhere i havent been so am posting up the kettles yard photo next to its pinpoint map. I went with excitement, felt overwhelmed by good taste and came away feeling slightly claustrophobic due to it being too wierd and all a bit too nice too kept too sickening too middle class too beautiful too many times looked at too full of meaning. Perhaps made worse by the fact one of the assistants had an outfit on that coordinated with the natural colours and the bright pink of the micheal craig-martin piece thats part of the current show. I loved it but hated it more and it made me worry that i had somehow without ever seeing the place had made work that is very derivative of it - have i made work thats too nice, too considered, too tastefull!!! god i hope not.
But my point was is this the kind of place i am interested in working? In some sense yes as a way to subvert it, but mostly no as its done.. so considered so laden with an artist residency history, so i wanted to show an off the beaten track that i was happy to never visit again, and kinda wish i had never been to.