Relocation

My new website is now live. To carry on following blog entries click on: www-g-johnston.co.uk. You can access all previous blogs through the new website which combines material from my other blog, the Transparent Gallery.

Many thanks

GJ

Sucking: or, Blowing in the Opposite Direction?

My old physics teacher (the late Robin Armstrong), something of a mentor in my teens, used to have some great one-liners. Not, as in gags (actually, his out-of-class jokes were always filthy and obscene), so much as little confrontations to our assumptions. One of my favourites - which popped up in a recent blog - was his assertion that there is no such thing as sucking. Vacuum cleaners, for instance don't suck air in; they blow it in the opposite direction. At first it seems daft to think of the physics being counter to what is intuitively perceived. But, it was a valuable lesson, in more than one way, and while I can't say that it's been a guiding principle, it signified a questioning, open-minded approach by Robin which, reinforced by other teachers and positive experiences, I've aspired to ever since.

The irony with physics is that I was never very good at it - I mean, I passed my Higher Grade, but, like Maths, had to build up to it over two years rather than the normal one. And I think that the only thing that kept me motivated was the development and encouragement of an ongoing curiosity about what makes things work.

As a child I was what was commonly called, in Edinburgh, a slitter - one who slitters, from the Scots verb to slitter; to walk or work messily in water (it also means to eat or drink messily - another trait some might recognise in me to this day!). If it rained, nothing would please me more than to put on my waterproofs (I seem to remember having a bright yellow sou'wester) and follow the flow of water along the gutters to the drains on dreich suburban streets. Or, if my Dad washed the car on a dry afternoon, I'd be off down the road seeing how far the little soapy river could get. Usually I'd intervene and either help or hinder the flow, or set some floating thing off on a journey.

Playing with water in the kitchen sink was a regular torment for my mother.

Water is the perfect attractor to the curious - it responds beautifully to the forces on our planet which have shaped and make life possible: it flows with gravity - evaporates in sunlight - freezes in winter - precipitates in clouds and falls to the ground again. I'm sure metaphysical thoughts weren't on my mind when I was launching fleets of discarded ice-lolly sticks in those gutters and yet I feel a strong connection with what drew that wee boy outdoors in his wellies to spalsh about in puddles.

In many ways, my studio today is my slittery place now - somewhere to muck about and experiment with liquids and powders. At art school, I remember being introduced properly to oil paint and the pleasures of coming to grips with it as a material - a medium: the various thinning chemicals; the smells (there is nothing quite like the reek of natural turpentine); the way the paint reacted and dried (or didn't dry); the different finishes according the amount of linseed oil and turps added to the pigment. All this is still fascinating. Acryllics have their place, but they seem one dimensional compared to oil - water is their only thinner and they dry quickly in a blandly predictable way (unless you count the host of chemical additives that can mimick the characteristics of other mediums). I use acryllics a lot but for sheer slittering pleasure, nothing beats oil.

It's only in the last few years that I've returned to oil painting in earnest, and it's been a bit like going back to art school. For one thing, there's been a reminder of the process of unlearning assumptions or habitual thinking that was the keystone of those first months in higher education. And the other reminder I have of those early student days is the experimenting thing - the process of just seeing what happens with the medium and reflecting on the worth of the results - which is probably what painting is all about for me on a day-to-day basis.

Yes, you can get all philosophical and cosmic about the metaphors inherent in the material - or it's equivalence to vital natural elements - and that's before you ponder the cultural significance of making art in general and painting in particular. But, when it comes down to it, the thing that gets me started in the studio is an engagement with the material - and most refreshing thing about that is that, in spite of decades of reading about how artists work and going to galleries and arguing about the merits of this art over that - the best things I do, the things that strike me the most (and as it happens, other people), seem to emerge from what can only be described as play.

What's fascinating about the medium is that it never seems to run out of ways to surprise me. The studio process is about devising ways to interact with the medium, possibly based on a premise or concept - a plan - and then seeing what happens and reacting to that. Paint and mark making seem to have an infinitely adaptable capacity to shape themselves around the user - no two painters' use of the medium looks alike.

The worst thing is returning to the studio with the self-imposed sense that I must finish something - as if a standard of image is there to be achieved. A commission adds another external burden of expectation. The process only truly comes to life when something emerges from the playing. This doesn't just mean that painting is a spontaneous, happy-accident process, although these are important elements. Every stage in making a painting requires the deployment of accumulated knowledge and experience; no less so than if I was using wood to make a piece of furniture.

Yet the destination remains substantially unknown with a painting. It's a bit like going for a walk in a new locale: the first decision is to say, let's go that way and see what we find. Decisions are made on the way. Skills might be needed to overcome obstacles. And then a moment of pleasure or satisfaction indicates that this might be the right place to stop or end. Usually, that point of closure in a painting or drawing is one that chimes with other people - something is recognised in the material both by the maker and the viewer.

Like I say, the cosmic significance of that is not what gets me back into the studio. There's a virtuous cycle of activity for me which goes something like: looking at the world provokes responses; these stimulate the desire to get them out - to mark them down somehow; reflecting on these marks then leads to new ways of looking and new responses which are in turn richer and deeper. And so it goes on. If you like, an optical/emotional loop.

Occasionally someone will ask me, where do your ideas come from - and the only thing I feel certain about in this is that ideas are not invented, they are the result of the editing of reflections on experience. Of course, that observation in artists - as different as each individual, artist or not - is unique. And the focus of any observation - the centre-point - is, equally, infinitely variable.

That focus for me has something to do with the observed world - how we see things - sights or events that stir an emotional response and jumping on them if they throw up an icon to play with. That icon is a hook for a strategy of play with materials - and the result of that play might in turn throw up something recognisable from that initial emotional trigger. It feels like a process of editing - editing what is seen; editing materials; editing outcomes.

I've only ever directed a couple of theatre productions and in both cases I was lucky enough to work with generous, imaginative actors who were constantly coming up with interpretations and ideas for their characters. It felt like my job was to edit those contributions together with other aspects of the production to make a cohesive whole for an audience. I'd have been lost if the actors - or the stage-managers, or the lighting designer, or the music composer - had not offered up so much raw-material.

In some ways that collective process clarifies the solitary painting process as it works for me: see; reflect; edit; excecute; edit. The hard thing is finding a satisfactory end point. And that's maybe because the process is about working things out - finding out how they work - as much as it is about a desire to say something or even to share it. Sharing is important - a monumental part of developing - but I find it a hugely uncomfortable passage. Maybe that's just me.

But what really strikes me is that the world out there is a much broader reality than we are capable of seeing, and we are all limited by the received assumptions handed down to us through the authoritative stamp of the media, the state and cultural institutions; it's hard to see what is true in the things that are in front of us.

Back to that sucking and blowing thing.

For me, artists in any medium, fulfill a role of looking as objectively as they can at reality - beyond received objectivity - and to edit away the existing assumptions and obstructions to seeing an alternative to the culturally-specific, limiting points-of-view that lie in the way. To make visible to themselves and others, the things that emerge from playing with a medium.

That's if you really think about it.

Me, though? I'm just slittering about.

GJ
FEB.10

ILLUSTRATIONS: ALL IMAGES FROM MY STUDIO

More Is Less

I've only seen one of the new generation of 3D movies currently breaking into the mainstream cinema repertoire - 20th Century Fox's Ice Age 3 (hey! - the kids wanted to see it) - and the technology is absolutely stunning; up to a point.

A fuzzy image is what you see until you put on a pair of specially polarized spectacles and suddenly the screen jumps into a full colour illusion of volumes and depth. The pleasure was marred only by the distinct sense of having a headache at the end of the screening but my prejudice against 3D movies (sustained by memories of screenings of the crappy efforts of sensationalist 1950's and 1980's movies) was, I have to admit, substantially overturned. At least with respect to an animation. Within minutes, the technology is largely invisible, and what drives the movie, in this case, is the way in which plot and character is revealed; true to the best animated movies it's achieved through movement coming from the observation and imagination of human animators. The 3D element is more a case of added value rather than the engine of the film. But, my headache was real enough because watching a 3D movie is essentially an elaborate optical trick which skews our normal optical processing.

For example, when we look at something, our brain is computing it's location in space in three primary ways. The first is more the simple to describe - our eyes are constantly focusing and refocusing on the objects we are looking at and these are either nearer or further away.

The brain notes this.

The second, a bit more complicated, is that most of us have the use of two eyes and this means that we have two points of view on the world which gives the brain data to pinpoint objects in space using triangulation. You can try this at home - look at cluster of objects near to you (something on the desk, or a nearby chair). Quickly look at them alternately with your left then right eye. You'll notice that some objects appear to jump left or right. The brain synthesises these two images and calculates the relative positions of objects.

A third element is the body's constant movement relative to the objects around it - even when you're sitting down, your eyes are not fixed in space. The resulting 3D perception of the world we have does not exist as some kind of screen projection in our brain - it is a highly complex physiological/perceptual interaction which chews up a massive 25% of the brains processing power. We think that what we are seeing is simply a picture recorded by the eyes and take it for granted as if we are some Hi-Def TV camera. In fact, it's much more than that; it's a stunningly complex, continuous interpretation of sensory data which we've come to accept, in a rather simplistic way, looks like a picture - but really, pictures only look like our optical perception.

Pictures are not what we see. Seeing is thinking.

It must have been extraordinary, in some cozy neolithic cave, when someone translated thoughts into marks on a wall - marks which isolated and made real thought perceptions of animals, activities and experiences. I can imagine this because I've witnessed people enthralled by a similar process since I was a child; people look at an artist's work (and I'm not talking about masterpieces) and say something like 'I see that'. What I mean by this is that from their continuous consciousness artists' will isolate some part of that thinking and find a way of visually transcribing it. Because humans share the same input devices, and because we share the same planet, what the brain comes up with as a transcription is not too alien to others and so the veiwer can share in the artist's source through their own perception and experience of the artwork. It's a complex interaction between artist and viewer utilising perception, memory and imagination - call it, emotional lateral thinking. Photographs, in contrast, are simply physical manifestations of the first stage in our optical perception - the focused fall of light onto the retina (our eyes being the model for all cameras).

All of which brings me back to that headache. 3D movies essentially use the fact of our binocular vision. Two camera lenses, spaced apart like eyes, record two different points of view (POV). These are then screened in a relatively conventional way except that the projected frames alternate between left and right POV - frame one, left eye; frame two, right eye, and so on. Each point of view is also treated with a different polarizing layer which is then cancelled out by the respective lense in the polarized spectacles - each eye only receives its corresponding left or right image, because the other is blanked by the polarized filter. When the brain synthesises what's coming in to each retina - bingo - that's enough 3D data and the illusion stands up. But in this stereoscopic system there's also a lot of data missing.

Our eyes, for instance, are expecting to change focus on objects in relative space, but they are locked in focus on a screen of fixed distance. So, although action moves things nearer and further away, our brain is confused because our eyes are locked in focus at the distance you are sitting from the screen. Additionally, even the smallest movement of the head, left or right, should reveal a bit more information about objects masking those behind, but the image is counter-intuitively stuck - you can't see round something no matter how much you move. The result of this is that 3D movies can seem to be made up of flattened objects in a picture space like a strange cut-out theatre.

These conflicts are at the heart of the physical head-ache. Essentially, you've been had - it's an optical illusion, and to sustain it you have to shackle yourself to the limitations of the technology.

But there's another head-ache which I can't shrug, and this lies in more aesthetic territory. At the heart of this is the notion that we don't see in pictures; visual perception being something altogether more complex. Pictures are simply frozen optical compositions contained within a frame. In some ways, the subtext of western art has been about mapping what you might call the pictorial genome - the genetic code of composing images, even abstract ones. By the second half of the 2oth century all the possibilities of pictorial art had been identified - the genetic code had been fully mapped leading to a loss of confidence, as if the end of art history had been reached; where do you go next? A huge catylyst for rushing into this temporary cul-de-sac was the invention of photography in the 19thC. This helped drive pictorial art away from the optical based representations of the world towards more analytical approaches; if you're representing the world, after all, there's no point in doing it in way that competes with the mechanical process of photography. Equally, photography on it's own - the capture of light on a picture plane - cannot convey the complexity of experience. Photography required a more poetic layer to allude to human experience and the great photographers have always, intuitively or by design, plundered the grammar of pictorial art to achieve this.

That poetic layer - what I'd call visual poetics - is a key ingredient, here; pictorial art is inadequate without it. No picture records what we actually perceive because it is incomparably less complex than our perception - how can it begin to contain what we experience? The poetic in this context, is about compression and equivalence: compression of an experience (and the life experiencing it) into a situation, an image, a gesture; and in that one thing finding a comprehensible equivalent to the source experience. In other words, taking a unique moment of experience and making it transferable - shareable.

No mean feat - and a defining human one.

Paradoxically, the simpler, the more compressed the form, the greater its potential to touch the greatest number of people. Perhaps this is because there is no clutter of specific information. It's as if an essence has been found - a rare and reduced substance which somehow triggers an awareness of a whole, rich, complex experience.

Less is More.

What seems to be happening at the moment between conventional moving image technologies on one hand and 3D cinema and the race for a viable 3D television technology on the other, resembles the 19thC. tussle between painting and photography. Then, the questions were: is photography art; was painting inherently superior? Now, equivalent questions lay bare again the schism between art and entertainment, a split which surely erupted in the 19th century with the new mass audiences

and the mass entertainment industries. Entertainment became about sensation - the fair ground, the music hall, the nickelodeon. Simply to be present, to take part assaulted the senses with some provocative invention: physical excitement at the fairground; bawdy language and song at the theatre; remarkable illusion at the pictures. The common link between them all was that they were all low-admission-fee democratic businesses; to attract the customers back you had to offer something new. None of this has changed, even in the 21st Century - the fairground still has the bright lights but modern engineering throws bodies about in ever more fantastic ways; live comedy has supplanted the music-hall but it is arguably the heir of beyond-the-limits stage entertainment; and cinema has become ever more spectacular and fantastic.

The problem is that a form that engages with sensation in a market place must constantly seek to provide more sensation in order to compete with rivals and bring audiences back. Hence the need to have more. More thrills, more risqué language, more on-screen spectacle; more bangs for your bucks.

When I began writing this, I'd planned to invoke the German psychologist and film theorist Rudolph Arnheim, whose 1932 book Film As Art (Film Als Kunst) - which I read as a student -

has skewed my notion of cinema. In a good way, I think.

For Arnheim, the apotheosis of cinema was the black and white, academy ratio, silent feature, with live orchestral accompaniment. Far from being technically limited, he argued, this form provided a narrowing of view in which the greatest artists would find ways of depicting the world in an essence which then required the audiences imaginative engagement to complete. For instance, blood in a black and white movie is deep black (a photographic phenomenon - reds read as black on film). But it is likely that an audience will see a more intense blood 'colour' because they have had to imagine it or recall it; an imagined blood red will be more accurate and vivid that 'bad', ketchup, technicolour red. Equally, black and white photography, free of the distractions of colour, renders texture powerfully. In addition, the subject of any frame or scene can be foregrounded by artificial lighting to great expressive effect.

Writing in the 30's - with full length feature-films still a young art - Arnheim must have been propelled to write his defence of the international medium of silent-cinema by the recent arrival of sound pictures (The Jazz Singer, 1927). For him this was a disastrous return to parochial theatrical forms with audiences segretated by language. And indeed, following the sophistication of cinema's early masters - Eisenstein, Griffith, Gance, von Stroheim, Keaton - the first sound films were turgid 'filmed-theatre' affairs, shackled to their technical crudity.

But as the technology evolved, Arnheim was no less critical. As he saw it, the coming of colour movies continued the downward slide, as did the evolution of wide-screen formats in the face of competition from television. His final revisions to subsequent editions of Film As Art berated the innovation of 3D experiments.

Arnheim was no traditionalist - no Canute-like anti-popularist. His objections seem more about defending the essential, unique qualities of what was, after all, a massively popular, international cultural phenomenon. The argument he puts forward is disarmingly simple - advances in film technology are simply in pursuit of the unachievable - rivalling reality. They might mimic our senses but, for Arnheim, this process lacked that essential quality - poetry.

But, although Arnheim's thinking has massively influenced the way I look at and think about art, not just cinema, I can't go all the way with his purism. Reluctantly though I might admit it, 3D films do utilise compression and poetry - they compress time and use allusion at the very least. 3D films are also a young form - film-makers are still coming to grips with the best way to stage scenes - perhaps mastery of their artistic potential lies beyond what we currently understand cinema to be; afterall, painting today would baffle the Renaissance viewer except in the fact that paintings are still generally rectangles on walls.

What troubles me about 3D cinema is its convergence with the fairground experience - the thrill ride. In the fairground (and I love fairgrounds) each entertainment lifts you from your normal environment - you can shoot things - crash dodgem cars - generate loud noises - be flown in the air - assaulted by the dead in a ghost train. In each one you are equipped using extra-normal tools or machines to expose you to and lock you into a particular - usually adrenal - experience. In 3D cinema (and in forthcoming TV and computer game technology) you must wear special glasses - you cross a threshold of normal to extra-normal experience; you are locked in by the glasses and are, in fact, altered.

This tethering of our optical senses to 3D media almost works: in the cinema you are already constrained by the auditorium seating; in computer games where you are fixed by interactive consoles it could be revolutionary; day-to-day TV seems more of a longshot though the TV industry is banking on sport to be the grandstand event to lure audiences (as the Queen's coronation and a colour Wimbeledon were for previous TV innovations). But the inescapable constant is those spectacles; no matter how familiar the wearing of something identical to sunglasses might be, we are, in quite a profound way, filtered.

The result is undoubtedly a thrill-ride. It will no-doubt generate new audiences. However, it's not so simple to say that technology-based art is merely about sensation and so, in order for it to advance, must find greater and greater sensations; the whole trajectory of cinema could be summed up in this way - black and white nickelodeon to surround-sound, 3D widescreen. But there's a more complex relationship going on here, I suspect, because since the Renaissance, the link between knowledge - especially the sciences - and art has led to new ways of seeing. The mathematical breakthroughs which led to perspective imagery didn't exactly destroy the poetic in representational painting. It's arguable that painting took 400 years to assimilate perspective and not be bound by its limitations. It will probably be a long time - maybe not that long - before we assimilate the nature of 3D motion pictures enough to acquire mastery in its production, to see through its filter enough for it to be able to offer up a condensed, individual equivalent of someone's life, and then for that to be recognised as part of our shared human experience.

Maybe.

For all it's technical sophistication, for all its increased sensation, when we don those polarized 3D spectacles - when we apparently enhance our vision - we are actually using less of ourselves. And surely, the real value of art, its real purpose, is the engagement of one complete individual with another through a medium - across time and space - unfiltered, unaltered.

As so often, more is actually less.

GSJ
Jan.2010

Illustrations from Top: 3D cinema audience; Camera Optics, Human Optics; Human Pupil and Iris (detail); Panasonic Prosumer 3D video camcorder; Antique Merry-go-Round; Cover, Film As Art by Rudolph Arnheim; Film poster, My Bloody Valentine 3D, Canadian Film Development Corporation, 1981; Contemporary thrill ride (unknown location); Avatar, 20th Century Fox, 2010.

Drawing a Line Round It

I was watching a fantastic BBC science documentary the other day about the history of the discovery and understanding of the cell - the kind which form the building-blocks of all life on earth.

In the first part (The Cell: The Hidden Kingdom, BBC 2009), Dr Adam Rutherford hops around Europe illustrating the great scientific breakthroughs in the human journey to identify and comprehend microscopic cellular matter. At each stage scientists drew on paper (or commissioned illustrators to do it for them) what they believed they could see through their evolving microscopes. The drawings of small creatures and vegetation were astonishingly accurate - almost photographic in detail. Yet, when they were studying things which they could only just pull into focus, they were unable to overturn their own preconceptions - what they expected to see - with what they were actually seeing. So, cells were read as tiny animals, "little animaliculi": nuclei became heads; human sperm would be drawn as miniature human tadpoles. Theological influences among others meant that these scientists - although seeking out new truths - found it hard to deny what they believed was there, even when their instruments were powerful enough to show them otherwise.

It was this idea that really struck me - that we see what we think we see, not what might actually be there.

I always remember, when I was younger, doing drawings of something or a place and then being surprised when people would admire it's likeness or details as if they had not seen the details of the subject with their own eyes. I realise, now, that drawing is in fact more a way of thinking about things rather than simply a facility to connect the hand and eye as a photographic tool. What you're thinking about while drawing is, I think, to do with the relationships of objects in space - walls, floors, openings - and their exposure to the eye by the fall of light. Reading the optical information of the eye and how that affects our mood was a huge part of the visual education I received, particularly at art school, and recording those two elements - optical experience and one's response to that experience - is still a challenge and a compulsion for me today.

Most people will not analyse their emotional judgement of a place - mostly it will be a matter of 'I like this place' or 'I don't like this place'. Nobody, for instance likes a cramped place, or a dark place. Such restrictions would surely set our primeval survival mechanisms on low alert - can I move freely in here; can I see any danger? Bright, spacious places, conversely, invoke security and pleasure. It strikes me that this is a profound part of human experience and is something which is manipulated by architects and designers, amongst others, to trigger responses - these days linked to commerce, more often than not.

I don't think it's much to say that, as someone with a hand-to-eye facility and an art education, I find I have a keenly developed visual awareness. I don’t mean this as a declaration of superiority. Other people have a facility for numbers, for balance, for memory or speed of reflexes. All I mean by the aptitude and training that I have is that when I come in to a space I’m measuring it up in my head - constructing a mental model from the information delivered by the eyes: height of walls; size of windows; textures; shapes. It’s all at a very low level but it is part of my conscious experience of a place. And this becomes useful when I want to draw somewhere or photograph it or even re-design or rearrange it because I’ve already started the computations necessary for deciding what angle to show something from to best represent it; what forms will be the more complex to explain it in a picture.

For most people its not like that. I remember as a schoolboy being caught by a friend as I closed one eye and rocked minutely from side to side so as to line up foreground and background verticals through a window.

Strange kid.

Mostly, I think, people experience a space they know as much, if not more, by what they think they know about it as what they see in front of them. In a familiar space I'm sure that optical awareness is switched to a low priority - it’s mostly about not bumping into things; seeing things you need to see. Which is why when something is revealed in an image it can come as something of a surprise even to those who think they know it but have not looked at it thoroughly.

It's the old chestnut of looking without seeing.

Thorough looking was a skill that had to be honed when I was at Art School and it’s one I still hold as precious because, more than ever in our digital age, the ability to see thoroughly is compromised by the view of the world we are presented with culturally, through the media, through commerce. More and more we are bombarded by images, peer into our TVs, computers and magazines and absorb a second-hand, vested-interest notion of how the world is - which in turn infects what we know about the world and therefore limits what we actually see.

We see what we know.

More than just looking, Art School instructed in the skill and language of representing two-dimensionally what we perceive in three. This is no mean feat when you think about it. However, there is a link between how we see and the main element in drawing which goes to the heart of human optical perception: humans are very good at spotting edges; edges are easy to represent in line.

It's probably a survival thing; the ability to spot the edge of a cliff, prey or predator, or even an inconvenient stalagmite was probably pretty useful to our cave-dwelling ancestors. We're the same. Visually we're constantly scanning our environment, picking out objects and shapes and matching these to known items in our memory database. Although that edge can then be represented by a line - an outline - even this requires a sophisticated level of visual translation and comprehension - children begin with diagrammatic representations and matchstick figures; outlines come later. In fact, I know plenty of adults who must still draw matchstick figures to achieve any sort of visual sense.

Edges leave us with a world defined by cardboard cutouts. The use of line to suggest volume becomes difficult when you move beyond those objects which have nice sharp objects - how do you, for instance, suggest the volume of a sphere with line when it's only edge reference is a circular outline? All an outline gives you is a flat pancake. These were the sorts of problems we were posed in drawing class, and the ultimate challenge was the smooth surface of the human figure (as an aside, of course, the human figure represents all sorts of profound, philosophical notions of existence, but also it's just bloody hard to draw). In fact, it makes you wonder if we haven't devised a world of sharp edges so that it's easy to navigate.

Mostly, people are just busy navigating. There's not the time - especially not in our advanced societies - to sit down and enjoy what we see, let alone ponder the wonder of how it is that we see things at all. And maybe that's part of the role art has to play. As someone involved in making art, that process in itself takes me outside normal, everyday navigation. For me, that process is deeply tied up with the optical. But common to what I know about artists in any medium, I think that the work artists produce is a kind of offering - partly coming from an awareness that other people will not have the time to look at things - but also because the navigation of everyday life can seem to be a constriction. For me at least, through making art you connect with a fundamental aspect of what it is to be human - here and now - and try to share that.

When a work connects with someone - it might be as simple as them seeing a space or person or object they already know represented by another hand - something is clarified through the translation, the selections made in the process of making a drawing, for instance (of course, it could just as easily be an abstract or conceptual piece).

The point is that, standing outside of the hurly-burly of everyday navigation - if only for the time they make art - artists are following their individual explorations of what is an essence of their experience - not the essence (which is what you'd think great artists had discovered if you believed much of the literature on art - don't get me started) - and when this is then offered to others it becomes a shared experience; to the viewer, if successful, a revelation, to the artist an affirmation.

I once read a quote about art which stated something like; a thing is not seen until it is revealed by an artist. There's an equivalent to that in every art-form - and I've certainly been on the receiving end of that equation myself. So, perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised when people who don't draw, look at something I've sketched and say, "That's amazing," even if I don't think it is. As we stagger through our screen dominated, multimedia, consumer-oriented, goal-oriented lives - there's maybe never been a more important time to have a clan of people standing just outside (or maybe way outside) the normal of point-of-view, who, whether they use charcoal or biro or performance or electronic media, draw a line around what they see or imagine and offer up work which says: it's like this, isn't it?

GJ
NOV.09

Illustrations from top: Human Red Blood Cells; "Little animaliculi" Spermatozoa as seen by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, 1678; Internet Cafe; Life Drawing Class.

Digital Ache

Don't get me wrong - I love computers. I use one almost every day. I'm directly dependent on them for information and communication. At least half of my income comes from creative work facilitated by computer software...

But.

There's something troubling about staring into that screen interface - it's like a glass film in front of some endless tunnel of data. There are times when my attempts to shape my own destiny by interacting with this digital universe seem puny and futile and make the selection of keys or the stroke of the mouse feel like impossible tasks in a demonic puzzle. I can get to the point where I've pulled down too many menu tabs - tried and failed too many times to select the exact pixel - that I have to stop. And it can feel like I'm suffering from some new affliction - an anguish I've come to know as Digital Ache.

Digital Ache breaks down into two categories for me. The first is the ache induced by contemplating the seemingly endless data behind the computer screen. It would be bad enough if was just the things that I'd loaded onto or created on my computer, but then beyond that there's the world-wide web of data and interactivity on the internet. Perhaps that interactivity is the clue - is the ache really just choice fatigue? After all, a computer can only do what it is instructed to do by its user. This data now, is surely just a part of our developed-world landscape - just as are busier streets, bigger supermarkets, more TV channels. At times it can feel like a tussle - a struggle; am I bigger than the computer, or is it bigger than me. Sometimes the struggle to be in control is too much and the temptation is simply to yield to the flow of the machine's artificial intelligence and surf: surf the links; the info; the games. The ache, perhaps, comes from not growing up with this stuff - will my computer-comfy children feel the same way I do? I'm not sure they won't. But either way this ache is the price for a vast range of benefits, I'll just have to lump it.

The second form of digital ache stems from our physical interaction with computers and this one troubles me more because it comes back to an old obsession with skill and its virtuous role in creating a sense of well-being.

Since my first proper computer, an Apple Mac, I've been unhappy with input devices. When I say proper, what I mean is not that Mac's are proper computers and PC's are not, I just mean proper as in - when computers that could do sophisticated graphical tasks became widely available. The main input devices that we all know are the mouse and the keyboard. Using a mouse to draw shapes on a screen is a bit like trying to do life drawing with a brick. So, almost as soon as I acquired that first Mac, I've used a drawing stylus and pad. This is simply a special pen which draws on a sensitised screen shaped pad; where you move the pen on the pad, the pointer or cursor moves correspondingly on the screen. After a little practice it becomes very intuitive. It's not cheap though - a good A4 sized pad and pen will set you back a fair few hundred quid. And you'd think that more of that kind of technology would make the process of working on a computer more intuitive - more seamless - remove this second form of digital ache.

Here's how, I reckon it can't.

First of all though, interface technology has moved on a lot. Most people will have come across an interactive touch-screen somewhere (why did British Tourism Offices become such eager early adopters?) - these enable the user to select from a number of virtual push-buttons on display. Most Railway stations have some kind of touchscreen ticket machine. These screens have reached fantastic levels of sensitivity nowadays, and have begun to make their way into the personal computer market; there's a widely available (and very expensive) table-top screen that allows you to write and draw with a stylus directly onto it - the screen is the tablet. Research institutions have produced table-sized interactive displays which respond to fingertip manipulations and this 'multi-touch' technology has seen widespread application with compact computer products such as the iPhone. The phenomenal success of the Wii computer game console also points towards a rethink of user interfaces.

But here's the rub - although these interfaces are seductive, they cannot overcome digital ache because they are tied to an operating system devised by someone else. However simple that interface there will always be a dislocation. It is never going to respond immediately - you have to learn how to manipulate it. There are parallels to learning a language but a language is a thing in itself - interfaces merely facilitate the use of languages, visual or literary. The computer interface is an extra layer - a complex layer - between what you are thinking and what you want to communicate.

Perhaps this can be best illustrated by going back to the drawing board. There's some obvious differences between drawing on a piece of paper and drawing on a computer screen. Let's look at the hardware. Cartridge paper @ £0.10 per A4 sheet and a good pencil @ £0.65. A mid-range Windows computer @ £600; drawing software (free with a tablet) and drawing stylus and tablet £200.

That's quite a difference.

But let's assume you've got the materials. Take the pencil and paper - there is a direct tactile feedback. The physical contact has immediate cause and effect with a simple range of variables (paper texture; pencil softness; hand movement and pressure) which you are directly connected to. This responsiveness allows for a massive range of individual expression. Add one further tool - an eraser - and corrections and changes are easily incorporated. All you need to add now is human curiosity; give a pencil to a child and immediately they start to explore and assess - the weight of the pencil - the pressure from the fingers - the grain of the paper. Within minutes that feedback loop will produce all kinds of marvelous output. These things are profoundly simple interactions - indeed it's not hard to make the connection that that curiosity around mark-making is at the source of all visual communication - alphabets included.

Present someone with a computer and the learning curve is somewhat different.

Computers are, after all, just fantastically sophisticated calculators. The mass-market computer age was really heralded by Sir Clive Sinclair's digital pocket calculators; computers with very simple functionality. However, his Sinclair Spectrum computers showed that arithmetical tasks could be compounded by stringing together a code of instructions and that the dots of a screen could be controlled by these code programmes to create simple moving images. Those early machines spawned a generation of code geeks (not me, I have to add) because to use them required some programming skill and effort (definitely not me). The leap from then - the 1970's - to now, is astonishing. Computer power is so vast comparatively - it has doubled every three years - that the screen is now a highly sophisticated graphical interface with the programming skills once required by the end-user displaced by colossally complicated operating systems which present the computer as a useful domestic or business appliance, accessible to anyone through the graphical veneer of interactive screen pages. But this facade is still just a series of arithmetic calculations interactively manipulating tiny coloured dots on a screen according to the users input. The sorts of graphics rich pages or windows we take for granted on domestic computers is the end point of mountains of code and calculations and software programming. I still find it slightly miraculous, what a computer can do with say, word processing let alone video editing.

But this is also the problem - because, even though we no longer need to learn how to input computer code, we still have to learn the formalities and grammar of the operating system and use a remarkably limited set of input tools. The data that the computer is manipulating has to be parked, retrieved, stored, actioned - all in specific sequences. Although this process seems transparent to the experienced user, its density is revealed when you are forced to switch operating system - how many Mac users struggle with Windows, or vice versa? Has anyone used a Unix based system or Linux and had to adjust. It can be painful and frustrating. The computer shackles us by these limitations - like writing in a straight jacket.

Nearly.

So here's my problem. Digital technology is marvelous. I still get a little rush of excitement when I hear that boot-up chime and the whirr of the computer fan. The first moments of interactivity are fresh and I'm ahead of the machine. But then the constrictions begin. The interactive process will not do what you want or expect - there are too many drop down menu options - the screen is a constant homogeneous film, never changing with the light in a room - your body is locked by proximity to the keyboard, mouse or tablet - you are tasked with actions and prompted to respond by the operating system, or stung by its 'error' messages in your desire to make progress. All of which become achingly repetitive.

Of course, I'm being glib. Any manual skill or tool requires a learning curve - but few manual skills are bound by the restrictions of an operating system. Usually, when we handle manual tools, we are the operating system with our own built-in limitations of skill or perception.

Our fantasy is that computers are our servants - like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the disembodied voice of the spaceship's computer in Star Trek - that do our bidding by responding to our spoken requests. But our reality is that we are locked in a drudgery with our servants: locked into their system; their hardware design.

It will ever be thus.

And so, I think, will Digital Ache.

GJ
SEP.09

Illustrations from top: Bad hair PC family; Ghostgoblins computer game; Graphics Tablet; Microsoft's Surface multi-touch technology; Sinclair Spectrum ZX computer; Astronaut taking notes from the HAL 2000 spaceship computer, from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Aspect Aspect: or, What You Leave Out.

If there's one Obsessive Compulsive behaviour trait I'll admit to, it's watching movies in their correct aspect ratio. I'm sure everyone's familiar with the letter-boxing (the black strip of masking at the top and bottom of a TV screen) that occurs when a wide screen format (16:9 ratio for example) is shown on a less than widescreen telly (4:3 ratio), but only a few people will know the spectacle of me wrestling with remote controls until I'm satisfied that we're watching what the film-maker originally intended. The problem is that since the 1960's there have been scores of different screen shapes to increase the sensation of cinema by widening our field of vision in the hope that this might attract us into theatres and away from the box. Now we're full circle - TV's have gone wide screen and home-cinema systems can deliver an impressive punch. What this is about, though, is not the difference between the collective experience of cinema against the less-than-a-crowd one of home viewing, but rather the importance of the frame of an image to both the maker of that image and those viewing it.

My school physics teacher - something of a mentor to me - once pointed out with a vacuum cleaner that there's no such thing as sucking; it's actually blowing in the opposite direction (you can see, though, with mentoring like that, why I might have problems in later life). The history of the image needs a similar flip in thinking because it seems to me that it is defined as much by what is left out as much as what is put in. It's easily demonstrated; next time you're using a digital camera or a mobile phone camera don't look at what's inside the screen - keep looking towards it - but take in what's all around it. Whatever kind of image is being made it's a massively reduced field of view compared to the human eye (alright, fish eye lenses might exceed it but their view is extremely distorted).

So, the image maker's first role is as editor - making choices about point of view (and all that that implies). It would be easy to conclude that the shape of the image is unimportant compared to this choice of what to put inside the frame. But that frame contains a powerful and complex dynamic - one on which there have been libraries worth of publications - the elusive art of composition.

Actually, most people probably have an intuitive sense of composition. Visual grammar is now so long established and professionally photographed images in print or onscreen so pervasive that we absorb hundreds of well composed images daily. It's little wonder that most people are a bit sheepish about their own personal snaps - they are easy to compare unfavourably with 'proper' photography. But, the mobile phone camera and digital photography have made taking pictures a less precious (certainly quicker and less expensive) activity and radically altered our attitude to photography because this new genre of personal image-making focuses on the recalling of an event, the familiarity of faces and places. These are images without ambition to express or manipulate. Composition is about containing essential facts within the frame - they are, in the majority, private archives - documents in time and place, not artistic endeavours.

Common to all images though is how they are looked at - the observer's eye sweeps and scans an image for recognisable handles. Certain things are magnets in this process - eyes, light sources, contrast. The analysis of this is also a huge subject, but the point is this - image makers (abstract included) seek to direct this scanning of images - lead it by the composition of elements - in order to heighten the viewer's experience. Read reviews of an old master and you'll come across phrases like 'the eye is led up this diagonal', or, 'the viewer is drawn'. This kind of processed structure can be seen in most painting from the Renassaince to the 2oth Century - sometimes to great effect (Rembrandt for instance). Sometimes it's just nakedly manipulative (take the arch-propagandist Jacques Louis David). The apprenticeship's of artists and the acquisition of this visual grammar was consolidated in academic painting around Europe in the 18th and 19th C. and reached a stultifying peak (high-Victorian art) just as new ideas were being informed by new technologies: photography offered an escape route from this stifling formalisation; oil paint in tubes offered portability and freedom from a studio. Many works by Degas for example are believed to be derived from or influenced by the accidental cropping of the subject in photographs. In fact, influences poured in from outside art. Subjectivity, intuition and spontaneity were in - objectivity and academies were out - it was an era of individual points of view and in many ways has defined the course of modern art.

But, back to that frame thing and the scanning eye. It stands to reason that the eye will scan around a circle in a different way than it will across a wide rectangle. The words are the clue: around; across. I remember during still-life classes at art school, a lecturer pointed up that a square is the hardest shape to compose an image on. The reasoning was that a square is perfectly balanced between horizontal and vertical - you have to be more clever to create and control eye movement around the picture space. Place your subject at the left hand edge of a cinemascope screen, however, and your eye is immediately drawn left. At the same time the right hand side becomes an area of latent movement. You've got less room to manouevre in a square. It's no co-incidence that portrait has given it's name to the vertical rectangle generally used in individual figure paintings - after all, we look people up and down. This portrait and landscape orthodoxy makes sense when looked at in that kind of anthropological or physiological way - we scan people vertically, the horizon horizontally. It states the obvious but, our eyes are side-by-side so our field of vision is wider than it is high (shut one eye to check this).

Breaking that orthodoxy can be powerful and disorienting; the effect of a massive high definition screen flipped on it's side for a vertical composition by American video-artist Bill Viola in his exhibition 'Love and Death: The Tristan Project' had a stunning, surprise impact which then acquired a rich emotional impact as the subject is carried aloft out of the top of the screen. It was a perfect match of subject and composition.

When cinematic language was in its infancy, the pioneering Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein proposed using an infinitely adjustable camera which could photograph scenes within any aspect ratio - squares; vertical rectangles; horizontal rectangles - the frame could be perfectly married to subject rather than fixed for every shot. In contrast, the German academic Rudolf Arnheim makes a case, in his classic 1930's text on the cinema Film as Art, in defence of the classic Academy ratio screen (roughly the shape of a standard 4:3 TV) as the ideal norm. Even colour film was too much for Arnheim. Black and White silent film had power, he argued, because by leaving out aspects of reality, it presented a compressed, poetic view of the world which was universally understood; the Less is More principle. Talkies, he argued, took cinema backwards, towards theatre. Colour introduced an element of reality which diminished the imaginative engagement of the viewer by overriding it with sensation. Wide-screens extended this by aping the human field of view, increasing what could be accommodated in the frame and the giant IMAX screens take this even further. In later issues of the book Arnheim is appalled by the developments in 3-D movies (Aldous Huxley satirises this trend in Brave New World by imagining the citizens of his future utopia going to the feelies). Each step towards an impersonation of 'reality' was a step away from art.

I've got a lot of sympathy for that view. Powerful art forms don't show all of reality - they compress it. And in the process of engaging with that compression - decoding it - viewers might return to reality with a fresh perspective.

In terms of images, I wouldn't want to see that compression based on the formulaic strictures of the 19thC. French Academy. Nor am I wholly sympathetic to Arnheim's view. But it does annoy me when I see the lazy use of the frame across much of contemporary screen culture. Too many directors of film and TV currently favour the shaky, 'realistic' wobbly-cam affectation to bring a fake sense of urgency and realness in anything from action movies to cookery programmes (the final irony in this was seeing a BBC documentary last year set in the middle-east in which interviews in an official's office used an 'edgy' hand-held camera). And, if squares are hard to compose in, it's a short step to realise that wide screens are easy; you can place a subject almost anywhere in a wide screen format and it will look good - whether it leads the eye on a meaningful journey is another thing. Any movement, any diverting activity within the frame has become a substitute for considered composition. There are many exceptions of course, and many fine cinematographers. But perhaps we've reached a new academicism - a new orthodoxy in screen and image culture which asserts a drive towards fact and an impersonation of reality as opposed to the essence of what art is - artifice. Art is a compression of reality and not its imitator. The power and impact of art is in what bounds that compression and how original it is. In image making, that boundary - the frame - is the first and arguably most important aspect in containing and revealing that compression.

But really, what all this mildly obsessive criticism reveals is an aspect of my own prejudices and priorities.

Composition - making art - lies somewhere between analysis and intuition - skill and accident - rational thought and emotion. To contain those aspects - to isolate their results - requires a stripping away of all unnecessary elements. To see them cleary requires a reduced form, uncluttered by the busy-ness of reality. Painting is a very particular fission which is contained within the frame. Subtle changes can set off new chains of reactions within a frame that hugely affect the impact of the whole. For a long time though, I felt other forms must do things better than painting. Maybe it's a Scottish thing, but painting came too easily for me - it wisnae hard enough. The irony is, I've come full circle - the challenge of juggling these things was there from the first oil painting I did at high-school. Other forms are bigger in one way or another, but painting fuses everything for me - it's an alchemical process that draws on aptitudes I have by accident or have developed through education. And, in my own particular OC universe, you have clues and illustrations towards the reasons why the visual and emotional content within a frame hold me in such thrall.

But, if there's one thing that strikes me above everything else - it's not so much what you put in a frame, so much as what you leave out. Sucking? Or blowing in the opposite direction?

GJ
June.2009

Illustrations from top: Screen aspect ratios; Dyson vacuum cleaner; Rembrandt Self-Portrait; Jacques Louis David Death of Marat; Bill Viola, still from Love and Death: The Tristan Project; my first oil painting (after Goya) c. 1986.

Tension's the Thing, Man

Growing up as a kid in the 1960's it was hard to miss the hippie movement. The peace and love message epitomised a counter-culture ironically incapable by its very nature of fomenting organised revolution. But the message was shocking to my parents' generation as it threatened social order - it was as if hippies carried some virus that would infect us all. I remember how news of some new mode of behaviour would generate a kind of confused tension. My parent's disdain for the Beatles' long-hair-and-drugs departure was a classic example - and as for that Yoko Ono! The lads from Liverpool hadn't exactly become hippies, but it was pretty close; the influences were clear. By the 70's the word hippie was already an established term of derision - like the character Shaggy in the contemporary children's TV animation series Scooby-Doo, hippies were seen as spineless, cowardly drop-outs, unable to concentrate on anything other than their own appetites. And as a child of that era, you absorb the mainstream. Hippies were not hip, they were silly, and the America which spawned them would surely carry on invincibly towards it's technological destiny - which was somewhere beyond the moon, chasing the democratic/imperialist fantasies of Star Trek's Space Federation.

But the churn and violence of new ideas demonstrating against superpowers or orthdox ideologies in the late 60's - civil rights and anti-Vietnam in the US; student radicalism in Paris; the Prague Spring seeking its own path in the shadow of the USSR - utimately saw the establishment survive only through the use of force. However, this reaffirmation of old order was undermined by the failures of the 1970's: America was humbled and humiliated by defeat in Vietnam; the Space Race between capitalist and communist rivals proved a pointless and expensive cul-de-sac; Soviet power could only be maintained through oppression; and the social contract in Britain seemed on the brink of collapse as industrial strife brought power cuts, economic decline and the spectre of fiscal bankruptcy. It seems to me that in that uncertain decade - before the earthbound New Materialism of the 80's kicked in - some radical, maybe even hippie'ish, ideas were reached out for and smuggled into wider society.

Long hair (for men), jeans and t-shirts are perhaps the most enduring gifts from that era; so ubiquitous now that it's hard to think when they might have once been symbols of rebellion. But the sixties dismantled swathes of social rigidity in western societies. And just as technology was about to go into overdrive, mysticism from the East was explored as an alternative to the frantic, automated rat-race. Nothing seemed to sum this up more than contrast between sun-soaked, sensual California and the wealth and squalor of New York city. The striking thing is the hippies retreat (or was it an advance?) towards something timeless - nature; spirituality. It was a great - albeit unstructured - challenge to the ordered, top down societies of Europe, North America, and the Western Pacific. But there was only going to be one winner. The convulsions of the 60's seemed to lead on to uncertainties in the 70's, but under Reagan and Thatcher global capitalism took hold in the 80's and a frantic cycle of consumption and material luxury was unleashed.

Which left me as a teenager in the 1970's - torn between the technoligical promise of the BBC's Tomorrow's World programme and the ecological wonder and concerns of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. And the thing that strikes me now is that the legacy of hippies (it's odd, but I still find it hard to really embrace the hippie movement), was that they reintroduced a Dionysian spirit in the face of Apollonian dominance. In other words they adopted a sensual, spontaneous, emotional, tree-hugging attitude to the world in reaction to the rational, technological, ordered, industrialised society squashing them down. Cousteau's crew played out this conflict, and it's probably no coincidence that this tension was also the key dynamic running through so many of the relationships between the characters in the hugely popular late-60's TV show Star Trek - particularly between intuitive, gung-ho Capt Kirk and his emotionless, logic-obsessed 1st Officer Spock.

Science-fiction was the perfect millieu in which to explore the contradictions of the human spirit in a technological setting - no surprise that I'm something of a sci-fi fan. And, looking back, that Dionysian vs. Apollonian struggle was present all through my school years - on the one hand there was a new sensuality, a hedonism, an absence of censure - and on the other there was a received order, structures, obligations. Creativity was the bridge for me, and it's the same today. Technology provides the means to explore the world - to find truths, facts and proofs. Creativity is a way of applying them or reconciling them, or maybe even criticising them, in terms of human experience.

Tomorrow's World and Jacques Cousteau, though, were never really that far apart - in fact Cousteau's services to ecology were entirely facilitated by advanced technology - not least the aqualung (which, incidentally, he invented). And I'm sure that Tomorrow's World was one of the first places I heard the idea that the cost of progress might be global ecological damage. What seems essential - from a human point of view - is to maintain a healthy tension between opposing forces. Hippiedom points to a kind of free-love druggy anarchy - indutrialisation to a restricted, alienated conformity. Tension is a way to keep all points of view active.

Tension is a concept I've long regarded as good. It was first articulated as a positive by an art-school lecturer who was describing elements in a painting composition whose contrasts played off each other. I remember that moment really clearly because the idea of tension as good chimed with something I already felt but hadn't been able to articulate.

So, this is tension as in tight, taught, strong - not tension as in something bad's about to happen. You need opposing forces to pull something into balance. Which is more like the Classical view of Dionysus and Apollo; they are complementary - both are needed for completeness.

One thing I regularly find in creative work is the playing out of opposing ideas. What I mean by this is that I may think of two or more ways of doing something and may hold these ideas simultaneaously even though they might be totally conflicting. Each pulls against the other, and something of both will exist in a finished work. One might dominate, or they might achieve a balance but the presence of the one is essential in strengthening the other. Their oppossing forces pull the whole taught - strong. Of course, sometimes the tension will be too great and the pull will snap any connection apart. So - and I think this is the vital bit - the process is a constant renegotiation.

The 60's feels like a time when, societally, that balance had shifted towards the state. Perhaps a democratic disappointment percolated through after the euphoria at the end of the second world war had given way to New Orders of state and corporate control. The rebellions of the sixties - the cultural rebellions and the actual rebellions on the streets, look like they had to happen - the line needed to be pulled back towards one poll, and the hippies were a vivid, peace-loving tug in that direction.

Leaving the 70's and entering my 20's I thought that if I could acquire skill the tension of trying to achieve a piece of work would be banished.

It's never happened.

I've come to realise that tension is the thing - maybe in all things. The need and ability to renegotiate tension is a vital practice. It's probably what gets me up in the morning. Not as a worry. Not as a chore. But as a way of being.

Er. Did anyone say hippie?

GJ
MAY.2009

Illustrations from top: American Hippies; Hanna Barbera's Shaggy from Scooby-Doo; Soviet tanks occupy Prague, 1968; Raymond Baxter and James Burke in BBC TV's Tomorrow's World; Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner in Star Trek, 1968; Jacques Cousteau.