Stupid Art School Ideas

A day into the holidays, my head is already starting to meander into different avenues, many of them daft. Like the following paragraphs, brought about by a chat with J last night about relationships with objects and the ‘meaning’ of what we do as artists… Oh, that and thinking about the Animals That Swim album that I was writing a review for. This train of thought came off of that, and was going to be the review but I figured, uh, no, really I want to say something ELSE about Animals That Swim, like how they are one the greatest groups of all time and how Faded Glamour is like one of THE re-issue/retrospectives of the year. But yeah… pretentiousness follows. Feel free to stop reading now.

But I think my existence is given meaning through the things I create and consume, is given form through the blending of those moments. As such it’s all about fleeting thoughts and visions, is about words and scents and sounds and thoughts that have burrowed deep and which then seep out through the cracks of consciousness over time. This is why it seems to loop, seems to come back around to familiar points with strange regularity before embarking on a new route. And on that route I know I will pick up more parts of the puzzle, will soak up more music, images and touches that will themselves add to the spectacle and will in turn fade to the mist that clings to my face bringing tears of confused melancholia.

And will the puzzle ever be resolved? Will I ever see the whole picture? IS there a whole picture other than one that is a naturally strange collage, a multi-layered image like one of those ripped and torn Mimmo Rotella advertising hoardings?

I wonder sometimes though if this kind of looping of life is natural or if it is merely a media construct. And then I wonder if that’s not being altogether too black and white, if it isn’t more a case of our lives and our media being symbiotically linked, each affecting the other in a strange dance of meaning and counter meaning, of movement and reaction flowing in a state of constant flux. In other words, do I feel these moments of a return to some kind of beginning because the media has a well honed faculty for repackaging the past, or has that entire industry developed out of a kind of subconscious understanding of our need for nostalgia?

I mean, I guess what I’m really wondering is, did the notion of nostalgia exist before there was the media to distribute it and encourage it?