variousing

Cheers * The doctorate was nothing short of a rite of passage for me. In some necessary and basic sense, I needed to do something sufficiently, kind of, ritualistic; I'm tempted to say shamanistic - solitary, at least. From being an egg, I'd always been told I was clever, artistic, etc. Get this, mate - and no trumpet-blowing intended, merely for illustration - I was top of the class in every subject except maths, all the way until the old fourth year. Then...fuck knows... I lost it. I left school with nothing really. I did discover women; but it wasn't just that. These days an educational psychologist would be carted in. I left school in 1980 - and St. Helens, where I grew up, was a real unemployment blackspot; so I drifted in and out of crap, temp jobs, college, and bands. But all that cv discontinuity gave me thinking time. By-the-by, I gravitated towards night classes, GCSEs, A Levels, a Foundation, then Degree, then MPhil, then PhD... I knew I had to kind of ratify that supposed clever/artistic side of myself - to close the wound I made by fucking up school; to see, really, whether my talent was actual or imagined. I had and still have a heap of energy and verve. Difference now is that I am calmer, less charged-up, more patient, less precious - as I said. University was a test for me; a test I passed; and I went as far as I possibly could. I did it for me, though; not as a careerist thing. I did it as medicine, in fact; or as exorcism. It was - on another plain - political to me, also. I come from a very working-class background; I should've been an electrician, at most; or gone down the pit; or worked at Pilkingtons. All of that was fucked up by 1980. No options, in the end, gave me freedom to decide my own future. Doing a PhD was, I suppose, the most rarefied thing I could have done. It helped me get to the very bottom of myself. It's so solitudenous - so singular, so testing - that it is like 40 days and 40 nights in the desert! I am Catholic after all! - and a Celt, too! Weird you should say 'po-faced'. PhD is about as seemingly po-faced as one can get! Yet, in being so serious it helped me to really let go and to have a laugh. I think the fact that it nearly kind of killed me doing it was key, too - my having almost constant migraine headaches for the last three years of the research, massively overdosing on aspirin. Mad to think of it now; but all I wanted to do was finish the thing. I just had to. What, I ask myself, gets one through such a thing? Ideas is my answer. Where did I find ideas? In books, friends, songs, experiences, on the top of Scafell, from a Sony Walkman, from my past, from supposing about my future.... Everywhere. So the idea that franchised surrealism - chance encounter of, was it?, an umbrella and a sowing machine on a dissecting table - via my Northern, working-class, idea-drenched brain, via Vic and Bob, via Chris Morris etc. etc., becomes Porno Adorno et al... because, as you and Paul said in the Queen Ad one time, everything IS information. Porno meets Adorno this way: a friend mused, politically, that Adornian soberness was the only viable way for art to proceed. I mused back what about fun, sex etc.? You can't have Porno and Adorno; or can you? Grievance Dave Mignon was similarly mashed from real life and a joke. Chance meetings of such and such in such and such. And if it's funny, all the better. The friend in question will 'get' the Porno Adorno reference; someone familiar with philosophy will have a reading of it based upon that familiarity; someone ignorant of such things might miss all of this, but find it quirky... Etc. The looseness comes from accepting the artist's inability to prescribe, prefigure, and control his/her audience's feelings about and understanding of the work made. The intentionalist fallacy applies also, and in fact mostly, to the artist him/herself. One's only sane option is to let go, to let one's work go into the world, autonomous and free. In turn, one gains autonomy and freedom for oneself - exactly because one has recognised and then chosen the sane path. Zen you mention - yeh. John Cage. Cage was key to me in the second year of my degree. I made a painting - which hangs in our livingroom - called 'John Cage Saved My Life'. That was intuitive at the time; but the sense of letting go, and of freedom for the objects one makes and freedom, therefore, for oneself was something I was drawn to instinctively. Cage knew environmental sounds are not separable from music, and that the attempt to do so is eminently hierarchical, a folly, and, in the end, inefficient and even inhuman. Similarly, his embrace of chance was an awakening to the limitations of control-freakery. Mail Art inclusively is purely an expression of the same thing; as is the willingness to surrender to the logic of collaboration. There's a lot in the above, mate! - offered for all the right reasons. Conversation to me is king. Thanks for prompting. Best wishes, Anthony