Does Where we come from really matter? – Here are my paternal Grandparents:

Sam Bright, was what you would call a real character. He couldn’t wait for the moment to tell a story or crack a joke. A soldier, a coalminer, a chef at Blackpool Casino, a fish and chip shop owner, a shopkeeper, a pallbearer, these were a few of his careers.

During the First World War he found himself as a cook, responsible for the well being of his comrades. The meagre rations that the army supplied needed supplementing by scavenging. Often he went on ‘raiding parties’, sneaking into French farms, pilfering this and that. He once found himself in a Frenchman’s dovecote. This was nearly his final mission. The farmer gave chase and then levelled his loaded rifle at him. He wasn’t really proud of his thieving but as he explained, it was war and his mates were hungry. One of his most poignant tales was about a march to the ‘front’. In the hedgerow Sam spotted a ham bone which had a bit of meat left on it. They got to the frontline and as the history books tell us conditions were appalling and the rations were low. Sam remembered the ham bone, and on the march back retrieved it from the hedge to use in the next stew.

Trench warfare lost him many friends and the sight of an eye. He spotted a German sniper who unfortunately spotted him. He was wounded and his commanding officer suggested that he remained at his post to give his comrades a better chance to fallback, promising his family a medal for his sacrifice. I’m not sure what he said but he was invalided out of service and was treated at Guys Hospital in London, where they patched him up and cosmetically made a fine job. Apparently this damaged eye was assisted by a rabbit’s nerve.(?)

When Mary was in her teens she was aprenticed to a chemist in Sheffield, travelling by train every day from her home.

She was the woman behind the scenes in their grocer’s shop, where they were famous for their home made ‘ice lollies’. People still remember them for their delicious treats, which they made from ‘Tizer’ and other bottles of ‘pop’.

She was a ‘Spiritulist’ by conviction, with local business men and tradesmen alike knocking on her door for advice and guidance, and her ‘messages’ influenced deals and life changes all around her. The respect she had was far larger than her diminutive size.

There were many artists during the 1880’s who were trying to claim freedom from nature, to allow themselves the pleasures of more self expression but who were held back by the simple fact that man himself was tied down with his links to nature. A break from naturalism was not to materialise until some twenty years later with the birth pangs of abstract art. The steps these artists of the 1880’s were looking for was a break from observed representation. Paris was a hotbed of ideas within the young educated (or being educated) middle class. Symbolism and its search for new the boundaries of creativity within literature and poetry began to point the way for these young men, their almost post modernist approach to their art looked to steal ideas from every form of intellectual discipline. These painters were a clique and were accused by their contemporaries of being too intellectual to be serious painters.

Now (maybe?) to be considered as a serious painter you have to be (too) intellectual. Paintings cannot be simply viewed for their ‘pleasurable’ effect they have to be explained – this is a shame.

The Aesthetics of Failure and Crisis of Identity

The history of art has always been in crisis and artists have responded to this constant state of flux by trying to break the rules of current traditions, either with destructive or constructive methods. These crises are sometimes described as ‘fractures’ however in reality the process of change (retrospectively) is an organic transition. The modern world of business could be described in a similar fashion, markets appear quickly, there is a scramble to gain market position, the market disappears and the process starts all over again. This stuttering of continuity may be considered to be chaos but in reality it is a mirror on life itself…birth, life, death. This condition has been explored by artists, economists and scientists.

It is ingrained into our psyche from an early age that failure is a bad thing. From birth to death we are compared, or we compare ourselves, with people that have failed or succeeded. To be successful is to appear to our peers as socially, financially and intellectually superior. To fail is the complete opposite, to be ostracized by this successful society. Our preoccupation with success and its consequent obsession creates within us a crisis of identity. ‘Am I successful?’ ‘Do I appear to be successful?’ ‘Do my friends think I’m successful?’ Is it all just a facade, we have been  taken in by what we see and what we are being told.

Success and failure depends on circumstances and elements of chance, it also depends on your definition of success and failure. To be successful involves a considerable amount of risk and judgment. A successful individual relies on the principles of efficiency; success is that knife-edge that teeters between effectiveness and catastrophe. An understanding of failure is important and should be incorporated into a life business plan. Embracing failure is a useful tool for achieving goals, this measure of disorder is needed  in a system – this is entropy.

Robert Smithson, ironically, just before his accidental death, was involved with the processes of entropy within his ‘Land Art’ pieces. ‘In information theory you have another kind of entropy. The more information you have the higher degree of entropy, so that one piece of information tends to cancel out the other. The economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen¹ has gone so far as to say that the second law of thermodynamics is not only a physical law but linked to economics. He says, ‘Sadi Carnot could be called an econometrican. Pure science, like pure art tends to view abstraction as independent of nature, there’s no accounting for change or the temporality of the mundane world.’’²

Is this what is happening to the Internet? Is there too much information? Have we turned the internet into a mirror of our ‘mundane world’? Has it failed to comprehend the Aesthetics of Failure?

The Mick

As an old punk (nearly goth) I still enjoy the newer exponents of these genres – passion of these newer bands (and the old ones) is still there.

My favourite online magazine is THE MICK. Issue 44 is available so have a look at the zine’s MySpace for details. You can also read the journal of the journalist Mick Mercer on his website