I’ve always despaired a little with surrealism: it seemed to run out of energy so soon after it began. I think that a part of the problem was that it seemed to be very symbolic and, well conscious, and grounded in theory, so what it presented was almost like an anthropological report of the subconscious. When I looked at it portrayed back to me, it reminded me of what it must be like to read a report of your strange and remarkable civilisation, dictated in fragments over telephone to a writer of potboilers, hidden somewhere within London literary society.

For the real depth, I’ve always found illustrators like Austin Spare more forthcoming. (There’s surprisingly little of his “automatic” sigil-form illustration on the web).

So I was overjoyed to find a similarly engaging book in Heffers today: 50 Drawings to Murder Magic by Antonin Artaud in English translated side-by-side facsimile. A short poem of intent is followed by ambiguous and semi-automatic sketches, with a real coherence and shared structure. Most are little more than scribbles, but have real subconscious grip. I can see it being a real source of inspiration.

As he writes of his drawings:

merely commentary / on action that / has really occurred / merely a limited / figuration / on the paper / of a rush of feeling / that has occurred / and magnetically / and magically worked its effects.

Interestingly, I now see that one of my favourite dramatists, Heiner Müller, used Artaud as inspiration. This suggests that I should might Caryl Churchill, too, whose work I’m not aware of.

I’m trying to do a drawing a week with GIMP and the graphics pad, to try to develop some technique therein. Even if to start it’s just some naff scribbles: the only way is up, .

I’ve got a thing, at the moment, for kind of putting the mythical and romantic (in the romantci movement sense) into civil engineering, and for magic realism, and the like. So expect a few things along those lines. After finishing the Weston Hills Tunnels picture, I’m starting on one where a dragon is hanged on a gibbet at a (slightly modified) Filton Roundabout in Bristol. There are good pictures of Filton on the web, and it’s a reassuringly prosaic roundabout. The dragon is based on the D&D black dragon, except it’s now red and yellow, like fruit salads, . I’ve only done half an hourish of a rough scribble so far, but it’s probably enough to give people the idea. I wish I’d done more roleplay-ey stype stuff as a kid now: I get the impression that most sixteen year old geeks can draw dragons in thirty seconds flat, it’s the first time I’ve tried, and I’m not sure where all the bits go, .

I really do feel like a duck out of water, here, drawing rather than writing. But it’s always good to stretch yourself, I guess.

I should have this one finished by about this time next week, if I want to stick to plan,

Update 1 week later: Okay, so the plan was more, um, aspirational. Last scribble before I draw it proper. I thought the previous one was too much thing in landscape so I’ve added loads of street furniture and stuff going on, also sorted out the perspective (a bit), as well as general tidying. Picture is kind of depressing which I guess is good, because it means it’s at least vaguely engaging.

Update 2: two weeks later, I spend a bit of a day starting the “paint” phase. I need to get quicker at this. I’m hoping practice will help!

Still going, from time to time. Goodness, this is slow!

(click image to enlarge)

One of my favourite pieces of recent civil engineering, the Weston Hills Tunnels. This is one of the first things I’ve drawn without tracing a photographic original, though I did have photographic references to consult by eye. I wanted to represent a kind of transition going through the tunnels, so I did my best to make through-tunnel Constable/Gainsborough stylee (best seen in the closeup), and in brighter colours, and to make the nearside all a bit grey and imposing, and machine generated, like a diagram. The idea is that the tunnel would stand out as a thing a bit like an SF jump-gate, as a kind of alien artefact embedded in a natural landscape, which is kind of like the way we escape from the modern world by its own agency. On the other side, of course, is Letchworth, which was the first Garden City, which was a similar kind of attempt.
I’ve no idea if any of that comes across, as I’ve not really got much in the way of technique!

I particularly love the shortness of these tunnels, so that when you go through them, the change is so abrupt, and the way they are curved in almost every dimension, which made it a real pig to sketch. The arrows are great, too, leading you on. It reminds me a bit like the end of 2001 when I go through them.

One of the best views of these tunnels in their landscape is from the train, on the left just before Letchworth station. I tried to make the plane the focus of the image to lead people through by making it the only red thing, and a cross, right in the dead middle of the image. The most fun bit was doing the textures of the grass, fields, etc. Ubuntu+GIMP+Graphire. Took a long time to do, but I’m getting quicker, I think, .

For me, one of the threads which unites modern art, science, and philosophy is the thought experiment. Both relativity theory and quantum mechanics have their ultimate foundations in thought experiments; modern conceptual art typically incorporates a great deal of the thought-experiment aesthetic and practice, and many philosophical problems, particularly ethical issues, are thought of within the thought-experiment context.

For me they essentially amount to a depiction of a tension between a symbolic, or theoretical consideration of a problem, and intuition, experience, or sensation. They’re things which start to bubble up when a symbolic or theoretical approach is insufficient.

One difference which conceptual art tends to incorporate, however, is embodiment, despite the location of the art essentially being the mind of the observer. Which got me wondering which philosophical gedankenexperiments could be embodied, and what the reaction might be.

For example, consider two rigid castings of a human body approaching a machine, for example something like a starwars stormtrooper, or a riot policeman, or spacesuit. The difference is that it would be entirely immovable, and covered. You make two, and put them in a gallery. Then, inside one you place the artist, or an artists (hopefully well-paid) assistant, with sufficient life-support wotnots. Externally there’s no sign of the human embodiment. And you just leave the two in a gallery, and see what a reaction might be.

There could be all kinds of modifications to this, of course. One would be to go down the goldfish-in-blender route, which starts becoming a bit Foucaultian, and a bit BDSM. For example, to each suit could be attached a button to cause minor pain (and perhaps one to cause pleasure). Or a button could cause particular images to be flashed before any occupant’s eyes. Given the opaque and inconsequential relationship between any occupier and attendee; given the possibility of you having chosen the empty container; (and so on) is there value to the various invocations available to the attendee? Does it lead to satisfaction at such a distance? The encapsulating sarcophagus could differ in gender/age/weight to its occupier, and similar variations.

That’s only one kind of thought-experiment gedankenexperiment originated intervention you could create. I think it would be useful to extend such an experiment to realisation. There are many other thought experiments in philosophy, for which I think a gallery realisation could be valuable.

Any thoughts? (Sorry for the quick, crude sketch. Visual arts have never been my strong point, , but I thought it was worth not being overly meta, .)