Category: tools

Tom Waits said in an interview somewhere (can’t find it online but have a copy of this so I think it’s in here) that the problem with having some deep familiarity with a tool or instrument (talking there about guitar as a songwriting tool) is that after a while your hands keep automatically going back to the same chords on the fretboard like old dogs returning to a resting place.

There is a descending riff from C to E minor to A minor that I learnt in a guitar lesson in my early teens, basis of many acoustic folk tunes, that was so magical to me when I learnt to play it that the imprint of that first joy has led me back to variations of it for decades. Admittedly I’ve got a lot out of those changes over time on lots of different musical devices but they are also hard to avoid whenever I pickup a fretted instrument.

On one hand this is just craft skill, a thing you are fluent in and know how to do automatically, a little like body memory. The thing that allows you to drive a car or use a fork without thinking too much about it, the basis of much in our daily autopilot. On the other, you can also view these these techniques and habits as zombie ideas, still trying to animate whatever you are trying to do long past their useful lifespan. These are commonplace in mental models of finance and markets (this Krugman book is a heroic attempt to unpack them) which perhaps share with creative arts practice deep unknowable uncertainties about what might happen next at any moment. Both being so in the moment for different reasons that any scaffolding from the past that might guide the future or the next decision can be a welcome life raft. Though possibly a counterproductive one that’ll just lead you down the same paths.

Over the past few years between working on more archive derived projects I’ve produced a series of video works that lean into a more abstract visual music style approach to moving image. Part of a landscape painting tradition is how I often think of them, the source material is often field footage of flora textures, rivers and clouds. Then so processed in coding, scripting and software that they can appear to be entirely synthetic, procedural pieces made formally from carefully defined processes.

Given the mind bending open ended complexity of the layered techniques, I sometimes wish the outcomes and ways there were more defined, but the long way round seems to be the only satisfying way to stay true to the feel of the underlying imagery. Even though I can easily see traces of this imagery going way back in my video work in particular it seems often that inventing these complex winding processes is a way to get lost in a mode that breaks the habitual way things have always been done.

At this point in making things there are now some fairly deep craft skills in lots of different areas and fields with some tools I’ve been using for decades. Circumventing this baggage while keeping the long accumulated fluidity of practice that this history brings you can be a complicated dance. Ways forward always appear but you never know from where or who or how they might emerge.

The pic above is taken from the Chair (see previous post) where as pov pictured I’m sitting & staring at 10 Perfect Storms which went out to a couple of shows in Europe late last year. That piece seems now to be the end of that body of work, though that is a very recent realisation. The next thing is certainly coming, appearing in titles and phrases, it’s bulk still underwater there somewhere. No doubt full of hundreds of the previous things that I didn’t know were connected.

While perambulating around the local area last month I encountered a chair left out on the curb with a white piece of cardboard that read free sitting prominently on it’s seat. It had not as yet been rained on and I immediately recognised that this possibly, was the studio chair I had been searching for without knowing it. Standing with affected disinterest so as not to attract attention from local pickers I took a picture to send to my two person interior design focus group who gave it grudging lukewarm approval.

Before power walking home to pick up the car. And then carrying it back through the house to my studio where it sat awkwardly in the middle of the room.

This attempt to bring a studio chair into my life has a pre-history. As an undergrad and in the years following I would often visit friends who were painters or producers of objects in their studios. Spaces that carried the full romantic mythos of the artists studio, laboratory, stage, cauldron or incubator, no matter how small or encrusted with paint and cluttered with materials. Central to these (sometime rooms, sometime high walled cubicles) was the Chair. In this piece of furniture you would sit back reflectively to consider work in progress often while smoking. The chair (or couch) while being as speckled with art materials as everything else was ideally an old sturdy armchair with arms big enough to balance an ashtray.

In the studios I started to ad hoc create for myself where the central business was writing or video or sound you were already seated in a chair as dictated by the logistics of desktop computing. Your material was behind a screen in front of you and from the viewpoint of an observer there was a distinct lack of atmosphere. You were essentially in what looked and felt like an office, whether at home or in any of the other temporary spaces I set up shop.

While this has always suited my work methods, I was I now fully realised unable to completely escape the pull of the romantic painterly studio chair ideal. To smoke next to my canvases while posed on an old couch like Monet.

Or to live inside an ever expanding studio as artwork in the mode of Kiefer in Sophie Fiennes 2011 film about studio as immersive never ending project.

While I am still sitting daily in a studio where interacting with screens or electronic instruments is the default activity there is now space enough for three “stations” for different modes. Visual work, focused writing or music. A fourth station is now the street find studio chair, positioned so as to gaze across at the other workspaces, mainly while eating lunch and thinking about very little. These stations represent the different mindsets required by different overlapping processes and if given the space it would be helpful to add another one for admin and online tasks.

Being able to sit “outside” them in the Chair while pandering to my classical artist’s practice fantasy also seems to have the effect of allowing ruminative breaks to be taken while not completely mentally or physically leaving the process (or the studio) while doing so. It has also been the reading chair I never knew I needed.