2020 Vision

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2020

Just in case you forgot what year we’re in. That’s how I felt, walking along Piccadilly in the rain, lo and behold, ‘2020’ is written vertically and spanning the entire height of the Fortnum and Mason’s building. Why do I need to see a giant ‘2020’? Do they put the giant year we’re in up every November? I hadn’t noticed. The next level of absurdity is that I don’t think it is meant as a joke. How is it meant? All that can be gleaned from the rest of the display, which is as extravagant as any other year, is.. that it’s not a joke. But what is it? Yes, I am walking along, but my sense is not so many will be seeing this display this year. You’d think they might opt for a more modest version. The monolithic ‘2020’ was just baffling though. I should have taken a photograph. (Here is one I just found online). Anyhow, here we are. I have written and completely re-written the intro to this blog entry almost a handful of times over the last few months, but keep coming back and starting again. Why does it even need an intro? I will refrain from further deviation and just skip ahead to not all the tumultuous things (well, I’ll try), but the resulting art:

Monochromatic Minds – Jennifer Lauren Gallery – Live Artist Talks Videos

Jennifer Lauren Gallery continue to achieve innovator status with their various approaches to engaging with artists, dealers and collectors, which it looks like others are catching on to and building from also. Hats off. On this occasion, I want to flag a series of talks initiated through the use of video communications program Zoom that many who use computers have become familiar with during Covid 19 lockdown, if not before. For three consecutive weeks, Jennifer spoke with several artists in realtime, showing a few of their images, and taking questions from others that had signed up to take part in the video calls. There were also prerecorded talks with artists who were more comfortable with that format, or couldn’t make the live sessions. All the artists in the talks had work featured in the groundbreaking Monochromatic Minds exhibition Jennifer Lauren Gallery put on in London earlier in the year. I’ve written and posted images and videos relating to that in previous blog entries. You can view the hour or so long talks with me, Daniel Goncalves (Portugal) and Robert Latchman (USA) in part 1 here (Alternatively, a transcript is available here) and I recommend checking all the parts out for insightful words from artists Mehrdad Rashidi, Julia Sisi, Cathy Ward, Aradne, Judith McNicol, Zinnia Nishikawa and curator/archivist Vivienne Roberts speaks on the art of Madge Gill.  Below is an image of my set up for the artist talk. I admit, I like to have a certain degree of control over what I say in terms of not forgetting anything that might be relevant, but also about how precisely I can convey what I mean, which in theory is best done by using considered and recorded wording. I ridiculously entertained the idea of actually reading a lot of information out, but in the end directly referenced just three or four sentences out of all my typing there! However, the act of typing reinforces the memory also, so I like to think it helped in a different way. 

Drawing Dec 1999- Aug 2020

On August 19th, 2020, I completed the seventeenth instalment of my diary drawings, and the eleventh on A4 format, out of twelve. I won’t tread the path of associated pedantic details as to why here, other marginally more significant meanderings entail. This drawing clocks in at 27,659 words. In 2015, the then diary on A4 contained 11,273 words, which was the most in relation to its size, by that point. In November of 2019 I completed an A5 (half the size of an A4) diary comprising of 12,627 words. That half size diary contained more words than any of the ten A4 diaries preceding it. The current A4 diary is double that in paper size and words, with an additional almost 3,000 words. It surprises me every time this sort of thing occurs. The feeling of completing this diary is indescribable, really. The level of euphoria reached, and the value of that euphoria lingering and resonating with aftershocks, it prompts a lot of questions which I won’t go into here, but anyhow, here are the recent ongoings:

Raw Vision Weekly  #169 – Art In Quarantine 

On June 19th, 2020, Raw Vision published their weekly newsletter featuring myself in the ‘Art In Quarantine’ series. You could do worse than to subscribe to their weekly newsletter. It is insightful, inspiring and if nothing else without fail can add colour to grey days. Read through or scroll down in this edition and you’ll find me below Mr.Imagination. I answer some questions they asked me in the newsletter, and they published a few images. Here is one of them..

Raw Vision issue 106 / Summer 2020

It was an honour to be asked for a contribution to the reviews section of Raw Vision magazine earlier this year, and when summer came I found my name attached to the only exhibition review included in the Summer/Autumn issue, for Scrivere Disegnando (“Writing By Drawing”) at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland in collaboration with the Collection de L’Art Brut (Lausanne, Switzerland). I must admit, though my name is at the bottom, I do not myself read it as my own writing. It is well written, more academic than the way I write, and includes at least one or two words that I would not choose to use and didn’t include in my submission. I am still pondering whether adding words is normal practice for magazine editors? Or to not consult the writer at least. I feel uncomfortable taking the credit for this piece, feeling it should have been credited as co-written by myself and the editor, who made considerable changes. For example, there is a part in my review where I speak on the poetry of moving through the space, referring to the curation. The editor took the word ‘poetry’ and contextualised it differently, saying that many of the works and their content have a poetry to them. A different application of the word entirely. In the end, the spirit of my review is gone, which is a shame. So anyhow, I felt I needed to clarify this and put it somewhere in the universe. I can now channel that energy elsewhere.

Bittersweetness aside, it is a great issue otherwise. The Joe Coleman feature is great, honing in on a specific painting and its story, with beautifully reproduced foldout images. I’d learned about this painting in a Lydia Lunch podcast interview with Joe Coleman not long before the Raw Vision came out, which can be heard here. The David O’Flynn cover story on artist Gwyneth Rowlands is beautifully put together, and the Tony Thorne article on Albert is potent too. I love Beth Elliot‘s photograph of Albert working. I remember first meeting him in around 2011 when I visited Bethlem (before refurbishment and relocations) to help him and others write their artist profiles and to photograph their work for the Outside In website. His work was incredibly affecting then and I’ve loved seeing it whenever and wherever I do ever since.

Scrivere Disegnando Book

Apart from the somewhat sensationalised text and muddied facts about me and the diary drawings, I was both surprised and alarmed to discover an image of one of my diary drawings was blown up to take up the entire page beside the title page a few pages into the book. Of course part of me is honoured to be chosen for such a position, and I’m sure my folks are into it, however, I have learned a valuable lesson. In future, I will make sure to forbid enlarging my diary images beyond actual size, without my consent and signing off. I have only had myself to blame for such results, but no longer. I can understand why and how it may be an interesting thing to do, as a publisher or curator, but being a living artist making work of this nature, somewhere in me I expected more sensitivity I suppose. In any case, this little video below gives you some idea of what the book looks like..

Frieze Magazine, no.211, May/June 2020

I was late to the party on this one, but there is a review of the exhibition in Geneva included in this issue of Frieze magazine, and they’ve used a really nicely reproduced image of one of my diary drawings to accompany the review. Of course I am surprised to find myself in there. I am in good company, with a review of Nnena Kalu‘s exhibition at Studio Voltaire in London included. Incidentally, Kalu was making these works just a few doors down from me along the hallway in the building we both work from in South London. Elsewhere in the magazine, there is an article on art critic Jerry Saltz‘s book ‘How To Be An Artist’. Jerry Saltz has crossed over into my world on two occasions that I am aware of. Firstly, at an exhibition in New York called Bring Your Own Art, at X-Initiative in 2010. He critiqued my drawing with a negative view. He made an analogy in the form of a question, to paraphrase ‘Is this the work of a drunk, or a stoner?’, and then moved on. A few years later, of course, he pops up on Instagram here:

Lastly, I found it interesting, and disappointing to discover though Cindy Sherman is on the cover of the magazine, there is no article about her in the magazine! This is the issue though:

Art & Mind film on Sky Arts channel

Amélie Ravalec’s film, narrated by John Maizels (Raw Vision magazine), is a fascinating attempt at exploring 500 or so years of art in the context of madness, the mind, perceptions and how they evolve over time. I’ve written about this before, around April 2019. What I loved most was experiencing the flow of the 350 or so carefully selected images sequenced on the big screen, as well as some insightful or interesting commentary by interviewees. Here is the blurb from Sky Arts, ah yes, so, you can now see the film on the Sky Arts channel: ‘An exploration of visionary artists and the creative impulse, from the Flemish Masters of the Renaissance to the avant-garde movement of Surrealism. Featuring Bosch, Van Gogh and more.’ Note: I am included in the ‘and more’. Meaning, an image of my work is used in the sequence of images.

Currently Drawing…

I am currently drawing the twelfth and last A4 sized diary drawing and simultaneously on the fourteenth text based drawing in the The Disadvantages of Time series. I’ve just scrolled through my phone and realised there is no evidence of this, but it gives me something to show you next time I embark on one of these blog post frenzies I get myself into.

Be well,

Carlo