Serfs

Four years of wandering fields and making cycle rides gradually getting further from home but never making an expedition. Camping in back gardens or at a campsite but never going hiking, backpacking, carrying all your gear and heading out into the wilderness. Now I was in the scouts the twelve mile hike was a requirement and for me one of the best things about being a scout. Trinder and Dorn were to be my companions. Trinder was the only boy in our troop who went to private school- he was a ‘Royce’s boy’ as the local Independent school was known- and though he had a slight superiority of manner he was liked and accepted by everyone. He told me his ambition was to become a skin doctor so that he could cure his father of the skin disease he had. He said this with a certain fervour which impressed me and yet at the same time I knew there something hopeless about such dreams. Life did not work out like that. Dorn was from the opposite end of the social scale. He was an oik alright, a real local, a boy who could catch snakes and tickle trout; he spoke in short inarticulate observations but he was sharp. His kind of lad I knew from my own comp and it was very unusual for them to become something as lower middleclass and naff seeming as a boyscout but I suspect that Dorn’s dad had been a scout and like mine had passed on a love for that organisation. Dorn showed me a gruff tolerance; that I went to a similar kind of school to him meant I could not be a snob. With Trinder it might be different. Behind his back references to Royce’s poofs were made constantly. Despite the large size and manly bearing of the Independent school’s Rugby team, all privately educated boys were considered effete and quite probably homosexual. The generalisation always stands despite individual cases that proved the opposite.

So Trinder led the way and me and Dorn followed though it was Dorn who got us water from one farmer and even some milk for our porridge from another. We walked four miles one evening along the Ridgeway and eight miles the next morning to Goring Gap where Trinder’s dad picked us up.

And so it seemed most extraordinary that Trinder should eventually be beaten up by Dorn among others for putting a safety pin in his ear and telling everyone he had taken acid when we had it on good authority that he had been palmed off with an aspirin and his trip has been nothing more than stumbling around in the rain for four hours in soaking jeans and a tee shirt. Trinder turned up seemingly stoned to a scout meeting when he was fifteen though we all suspected he was putting it on. Then the older scouts and patrol leaders of which I was one by then lured him to a hut while on a winter camp and beat the shit out of him. I would have been there but for some reason I missed that camp and often think what I would have done if the group had decided to pick on Trinder who I still quite liked and even if I didn’t the obvious cowardly nature of the attack appalled me. What had Trinder done to deserve such rejection? I think it was simply some kind of cumulative resentment against his privileged background, which was made much worse, brought into focus by his embracing of punk culture. Punk music at my very ordinary comp was for middle class kids, arty types. Hard kids, people who came from council estates and caravan parks, liked northern soul or nothing at all. Was it the fact of Trinder pretending to be ‘out of it’ and therefore trying too hard to be cool? Was it Trinder’s attempt to gain acceptance in a duplicitous manner and double the perceived already injustice of him having higher social status owing to being a Royce’s boy? I think that was it. The messing with the natural system, the age old feudal hierarchy of serfs and gentlemen and I think it was Dorn who got him to come to the hut where they were all waiting for ‘the meeting’ that resulted in his beating. Dorn- the only genuine serf among us if by that I mean someone with the same knowledge of the land as someone from a thousand or more years before. Trinder never returned to the scout group after that.

Exploring

The job of an explorer, a real explorer is to go into a country where the locals only have silly long names or stupid to the point words like ‘river’ for river and ‘sea’ for sea and give them lovely nostalgia inducing names usually those of old world places or names of their relatives or their kings and benefactors back in smokey old London or other places of where dreams and teeming desires are brought to the boil by sheer pressure of population numbers, impacting on the city, compressing the ideas of everyone into something that becomes real and solid on another continent half a world away.

When I was six we moved to the country to a wonderful house with an orchard and stream running down one side and willow trees that had once been pollarded but had now long shot their crown with great high fat fingers of branch stems reaching skyward and swaying in the wind. (The symbol of pollarding may be something important as oddly enough my father had lived his teenage years in a house in Croydon on Pollard’s hill.) These willows had been pollarded for basket making perhaps fifty years earlier, anyway that orchard was a great place and beyond it were fields of wheat and some barley that stretched away for miles. There was track you could follow along a stream that lead to a sewage farm and a pond with a beach we played on but we never got to the end of the track for years it seemed as it was too long then one day, on a holiday I decided to ‘go on an expedition’ and see what was at the end of the track and beyond. I had by then- I was maybe eight- learned how to read an ordnance survey map- kind of- and using my dad’s map and taking my notebook and magnifying glass all in the army surplus gas mask case that I treasured I set off to on my first expedition.

I went across the fields when I came back and my shins were all scratched from the cut stalks of corn in the fields. But going out I stuck at first to the track which was a dry rutted tractor track that lead past the sewage farm that mostly entirely unmanned. It had a chainlink fence we sometimes climbed and once I got one of the ‘shit stones’ from the bed being watered by the sprinklers but then I threw it away. I went on along the empty track past the empty sewage farm and empty fields of just cut corn. The fields had been burned only a few days before and they were black and burned but the stalks still stood up. When they burned the leftover straw in the fields it was very exciting and the roiling black smoke and encroaching lines of fire made us scared but also pleased that we were in the midst of real farming and understood it. 

The fields were empty and there were empty drums of pesticide and fertiliser at every gate entrance. The streams were all dead and you never saw even a stickleback or a newt or frogspawn. I didn’t see a frog until I visited my cousins who lived in surburbia, far from any farm. One stream was called the ‘polio stream’ because people still remembered the polio outbreak in the 1950s and how it could be spread by bad water. The polio stream had slow muddy water in lazy shit coloured swirls that hardly moved and made it hard to tell what was water and what was the bottom of the stream. We were careful to stay out of the water and only fell in a few times.

I was going along the track and checking the OS one inch map that I used all the time, or looked at all the time and though I knew the signs for Church and train station and other such things easily learnt from the key at the side I was not good at guessing how far I had come from looking at the map and I was also almost unable to orient myself in a landscape using the map. But still I loved and cherished the OS map with its beautiful colouration, contour lines as fine as banknote illustration and precise coded secrets of the landscape. I also loved my compass which was a small brass compass about the size of a watch and good for little except finding out where north was.

I realise now that the game of exploration, the game of travel started then, along that track and then further past the huge abandoned quarry which I just stumbled upon (the faint markings on the map I had missed altogether, did not realise I had come that far till I got home and used a thread to measure my distance gone- almost the best bit of any walk). A couple of seagulls wheeled above the quarry and it felt as if I had come a huge way, perhaps near to the sea even though we lived about as far from the sea as you can get in England. The promise of seeing the sea over the next hill was one the most powerful feelings generated by any holiday we went on. The sea, the sea- more than simply a place to play with boats and floats it was the way wilderness could enter our unexciting lives. Apart from the imagined wilderness and pockets of overlooked undergrowth between fields and marked out woodland this was the only wilderness I knew then.

By acting as if I was an explorer, making notes in my small notebook with a wire spiral so I had to be careful not to detach the pages, I became an explorer. Following the instinct of children I gave my own names to places. Past a wood of wheeling birds and discarded 12 bore cartridges I named it Pigeon Poacher’s wood. The old quarry was simply that, the word quarry was charged enough. At the end of my wanderings that day, when the track frittered away to nothing but  large field scored with the arrowed prints of tractor tyres, I clambered under a barbed wire strand and jumped a ditch to find myself on an island about 100 square metres with a single willow tree low enough to sit on an outstretched branch. The island was formed by two streams, diverted with ditches going off but leaving a central half wooded wild patch of land. Big enough to stand or sit upon or light a fire. I called this place Compass Island.

The naming of places I had no doubt assimilated from Arthur Ransome, who makes it an explicit part of his books. Dick and Dorothea are somewhat reluctantly accepted by the Swallows and the Amazons because of willingness to invent names that weren’t too bad. Dick was the silent egghead professor figure of the later books and I idolised him, especially when, despite the handicap of specks and wimpy physique (compared to the literally Amazonian Nancy and the butch maturity of John) he performed some heroic act of endurance. Early on, owing to an inability to run more than a few yards without getting wheezy, I switched my attentions to acts of toughness and survival rather than athletic prowess.

Returning over the fields as the sun was setting I had been out for hours. In long corduroy shorts my shins scratched from the stalks of corn I strode through I looked forward to the ritual of checking the distance walked with a piece of cotton thread, drawing my own map in my notebook, writing up my ‘notes’. The act of walking and looking for strange islands locked in the farmed and regulated world. And then naming them with my own lexicon of names the ones that just came to me, there was no thinking about it. The right name always appears when you need it.

real teaching

Real teaching always happens in the inbetween moments. The rest is just what a video tutorial can provide, plus a book or two.

Think about the implications of that in light of current models of education, schools, universities etc.

cars not sexy

Cars are simply not as sexy as they used to be. Insurance kills the zest young people wanting to zoom around, forcing them into micras and other crap cars. Electric cars are simply uncool, however fast. Formula one is neutered by all the safety precautions (naturally I hate to see anyone die in any sport yet I also know that the real danger of motor racing is one of its attractions). Buying a new car is seen as a mini eco-disaster- all that water used and carbon emitted used to make something essentially pointless- plenty of great used cars already out there. Old cars from the sexy cars era will always be in demand, but the car boom which started with Henry Ford is levelling right off. The car becomes like the carriage of yore, with computer assist replacing the driver, just a way to get from a to b. Status value: diminished. Motorcycles however are different. Look for where freedom is opening, vitality more easily expressed or encouraged.

big data con

Big data is a con.

That's all you need to remember when someone uses the words 'big data' in preference to the research findings under discussion.

Unfortunately we are living through strange times when those who make important decisions know very little about computers and what they are capable of. If they even kept this thought in mind they would be better off. But organisations reward the appearance of competence over actual competence so the problem persists.

Eventually, in a century or so, people will be as wise about computer 'experts' as they are about plumbers.

So, not an entirely trouble free vista ahead.

outsider art handbook #3

Outsider artists need just as much help as anyone else. Often this takes the form of telling them not to worry about any of the preconceived ideas about art that others try to foist upon them. What may be a cliche to a highly educated mainstream artist may be a revelation to an outsider artist. It all depends on the use made of that thing. Blondie used classical music to get ideas for their pop songs- and unless you know the classical music involved it is very hard to notice. Other pop musicians borrow unconsciously from the classical cannon and it may take a critic to tell them such a thing. All that matters is that you keep on making things. No one said it better than Andy Warhol when he commented that the job of the artist is make things, the job of the critic is to say whether they like them or not. The artist must keep churning stuff out, (as Warhol said, "the answer to the critic is always the same- make more work") and whether it finds a home or not is no business of the artist. He is in the production game not the liking or disliking game. Whether people like your work or not is of no matter- your answer must always be: make more art. 

That said, here are ten more outsider art ideas.

21. Art is not pure. Speak of something real. Use it to say something important.

22. Think about straight lines, subtle lines, outlining.

23. Is black a colour...sometimes.

24. Think about vitality rather than 'how good is it'. Does this picture have vitality?

25. People are scared of the heroic and drawn to buffoonery, irony, undermining. Find a place for the heroic, even a small place.

26. Primitive art parallels the rediscovery of the bass note, the bass line, the heavy bass. Repeating a bass note may be all that is needed. Find where the bass note is in your picture or art.

27. Beauty is like a pure note.

28. Art can be seen as two things: talent and vitality. Don't let your talent cripple your vitality.

29. Beauty is like harmony, a focusing, a bringing together. Some untrained folk singers warble around a note which they can't hold but can hit on and off. The effect is like wobbling around the beautiful, if you hit it by chance a few times that is enough.

30. Art is a minority interest. Always has been, always will be. If you can give your art away you're ahead of the game.

outsider art handbook #2

Outsider is a convenient catch-all term for art that unprofessional, uncool, unhip and lax on things like perspective and graphic accuracy. It resembles children's art, or can do; it resembles the art of the insane, or can do. It includes so-called naive art as well as clever experiments by formerly or otherwise mainstream artists. Like the term 'street photography' it is more use as a description of how the artist feels and how it can motivate the artist; it is what you might call 'a permission description'. And that is a jolly good thing as many people feel as they formerly did about writing pre-internet (the internet made writing democratic) which was that it was the preserve of the skilled and devoted and sunday painters beware....

So, having justified its own existence here are 10 more bon mot for would-be outsider artists:

11.  Installations are fun. All they need is a clean white space as a frame. Anything goes after that. The key is to create a fun or interesting experience for the viewer.

12. A wall makes graffiti.

13. A frame makes a picture.

14. Almost all of art is a reconciling of positive and negative space. The main thing and the space around the main thing. The flatter something is, the more the space can count.

15. Beauty can be in the decor, the negative space rather in the thing depicted, the positive space.

16. Think more about lines, shapes and colours and less about what the thing looks like.

17. Ugliness can be a lot more VITAL than beauty, the downside is...it's ugly.

18. Straightlines are to curves what black and white is to colour. A useful thing to master, good enough on their own. Limiting yourself to only straightlines (lots of artists have done this, turning a curve into lots of little straight lines) is one example of a limiting frame that gives pictures verve.

19. Perspective just means things further away are smaller, things nearer are bigger. Always mess with it is a good watchword.

20. Dots, lines, squares and circles form the basis of all caligraphy. Just using these four things you can go a long way.