it shook me by the hand, and then it punched me in the ear is now available from independent publishers Tulenizdat. Click the image to go to their site...
I wrote this last October in an email answering a question about an old piece of work. The text got edited and used on a website in a way I wasn't happy with, so I haven't really thought about it until now. I just re-read it and though it doesn't depart massively from a lot of other writing on here I have decided to put it here.
Zen Arcade Precision Collider was a project that I started work on straight after the completion of my MA and with hind sight I can see that it focused on some areas of what has come, through understanding as well as development to be my over all defining interest. This would perhaps be the questions of how we can reconfigure our position to Modernism and extract the spirit of this so as to apply this to ourselves, right now, as we are. This is against the attitude to history that we are justified in simply borrowing language as long as we demonstrate knowing, that we can rely on the newness of the day to remove our ideas from those we reference and that "holding up" is enough commentary. I would argue that there is something in Modernism which remains after the bracketing out of things like attitude to history, attitude to aesthetics, attitude to form and so on. I'm not sure how best to describe it, but this thing that is left, this ghost, this poetic hum is (in my hypothesis) a primal driving force that defines an authentic position between us and the Other, between our capacity of Agency and the action/space of nature.
I think that this thing I'm hunting is present throughout time, and might be defined as an authentic existence, to "do it right". I think that we, the generation present at this thin and questioning stage of Modernism (as opposed to our grandparents who had only to fight against the detractors who still wanted neo-classical columns on their public buildings and recognisable tale of conventional morality in their novels) have a chance at unpicking the threads of the day to day that hide this ghost, but even now these threads are being picked up by others and the whole endeavour muddied as the whole radical and untamed aspect of Modernism is being assimilated back into the canon, not to be lost but at least to be hidden yet again.
So that, you could say is my concern, and what I do and have been doing is researching how I might find this thing, how I might understand it. The things I make are in a specific position in that they are not really items of display, they may be presented to the world in the for of exhibitions or books, but they aren't looking at you. By this I mean that these objects are the things cast off in a process of research, they're still frozen in the last dialogue with me as I made them, like a tool constructed and then set down at the table after use. To this end, I work with a combination of observation, improvisation and then later on reflection.
I try and follow a path that like the titular character in Tarkovsky's Stalker is often based on intuition as much as knowledge and is often an intentional losing of the outside observer self. Keeping the relics as a language of documentation and then making further relics in the process of examining these.
To this end Zen Arcade Precision Collider was driven by a few things but centrally a search for something in the growing up a of a hero, the Bildungsroman. I thought a lot about survival, the individual and the landscape. I tried to plot the lines that connected the film Badlands by Terrence Malick, the album Zen Arcade by Hüsker Dü and the poetic resonance of a building that is both a space and something that interrupts space. All of these lines I followed on a hunch that something was present, indicators above ground pointed to something beneath it.
