My Puddle / Sentinel Post
A Brief Hypothetical Conversation with the Artist in Order to Understand the Field of Knowledge in Relation to the Sentinel Posts (or a Tentative Explanation of the Viewing Platforms as Fulcrum Points for Optimum Leverage and Increased Profit Margins)
You’ve described yourself as an unnatural optic intuitive, and you’ve often appropriated new age theory to augment your interest in futures trading as a speculative knowledge that can bring about positive enhancement.
Well, they are investments that provide me with leverage. Leverage is an important mechanism. There’s such deferral to quantifiable knowledge, to define, not that that’s a bad thing, but there seems to be too much desire for instant, pre-packaged meaning. You can, though, ask questions and not provide answers, which is what leverage allows. So whether you’re trying to create financial wealth or emotional wealth, or projecting spiritual happiness, you’re still acting like a futures trader or an astrologist; you’re still developing resources that you are willing to reinvest for larger gains.
What are the tools of analysis in current use?
I have a computer, scalpel, Blu-tak, masking tape, some old newspapers… I have shaving foam, and tinfoil is very important. So are the Michelangelo ceiling tiles.
Why don’t we talk about your use of fragments? There is a marked tendency towards collation in your work.
Maybe. I like the absurdities of the age we live in, the total saturation, the ridiculous amounts of information and the machines we are building to process it, analyse it, to make sense of it.
It’s almost a runaway process, isn’t it? Do you think such collections are merely an arbitrary gesture?
Well, I like the way you can bring it together, I like to look at it in terms of the way you can itemise and process information. Like with a food blender, like flushing a toilet, it integrates and re-integrates, it homogenises disparity. It’s this challenge of bringing together various bodies of knowledge whether it’s the futures market or neurological processes.
Right, like a synaptic challenge?
Yes, look at the index as a great example of trying to map information.
Do you think it’s important to apply knowledge across fields? Everyone seems so specialised these days or at least if they’re not special they fall into the happy apathy of individualism. There’s that reoccurring phrase in the Brett Easton Ellis novel, Less than Zero, that ‘people are afraid to merge’.
Yes. But I am interested in visual reception, and of course, aren’t most artists? I’m interested in developing a conception that attracts a neurological level and I want to address how we deceive ourselves, how multiple directions lead us to convergence, and it’s this obsessive process that I’m interested in tracking. I want to engage people on a physiological level that interrupts these deceptions. On one level I’m interested in developing an optical response that is visually challenging and calls into question the process of viewing. I like how you can interpret and reinterpret through some kind of particle accelerator, how an anti-gravity device is like some sort of filtration system. It’s the idea of processing all the meaning, all the knowledge and yet it’s absurd, it can never be really completed but it’s what we try to do, what we attempt to do. It’s like the more obsessed we become the more compelled we are to follow our desires into this object mire.
So, you’re prioritising the physical act of interpretation and the costs that are incurred because of this need?
Yes. Abstraction is the process of receiving a common quality or qualities in different things, and forming ideas. I like to express the uncertainty of that. I’m interested in the calamity of knowledge. It’s a cultural obsession. It’s caught up with the advancement of civilisation itself.
Is that why humour is important?
Sometimes, a sense of the absurd is important. Dark humour, like anti-matter, like dark space…
So can we take refuge in your art?
No, no don’t say that.
