James Whittingham

ALAS, POOR YORICKE

DREAMING DAVID MUSGRAVE

The last thesis I wrote was during my BA at Chelsea College of art in 2005. David Musgrave was my supervisor.

Recently I had a dream in which I was waiting to eat in a pale-coloured restaurant. I was sitting at a table with David Musgrave, opposite a woman and him. It was a pleasant atmosphere, although nobody was talking.

My current thesis was on my mind.

David Musgrave’s work will be one thing I look into. I will also discuss (certain elements of) my previous thesis in a kind of remote sense. Like the casting process, there will be a reverse of that piece of text within this one. I think that could be an interesting method of working, to tell the story of that previous slab of work as a memory. Also, there were things in that work that I am still concerned about in my work now and I think it could be fruitful to reassess those thoughts anew. There will not be any direct quotes from that piece of writing. I will rely on what I can remember of it.

At the time David said he thought I should look at the novel Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Stern because of its strange punctuation as part of my research into elements that leap from the page and disrupt your reading of the text. Text is meant to carry meaning and be in itself invisible and I was writing about what happens when it doesn’t function that way – when it instead disrupts your eye and takes your mind elsewhere, away from the writer’s intentions.

David suggested I buy a new edition by the Everyman press that had recently published because it had the original layout and punctuation, including two entirely black pages, each replacing a page of text with a monochromatic block of ink.

Tristram Shandy is a man who is trying to tell the story of his entire life, from the moment of conception onwards but keeps getting distracted and instead ends up working backwards in time from that moment.

COLLATED (BITS OF) WRITING

I have written a number of ‘letters’ and stories. I have also recorded in writing some of my dreams. I would like to collate these texts so I can see how they function together and maybe work them into the thesis.

I have shown some of these texts as works before but mostly they have remained unshown and seen only by me. One that I did expose to other human beings was a text called My island, which I memorised and acted out as a performance. This text began life as a confluence of thoughts that occurred to me in a dreamlike state immediately prior to falling asleep. So this was not exactly a dream – I had some control over the directions of thought, it was not entirely a product of my sub-conscious and so was a sort of lucid dream.

My thesis will be partially about dreams. I will start by describing and discussing the visitation by a spectral David Musgrave in a ghostly dream-restaurant.

I will read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Jung’s Red Book.

My island came to me as a lucid dream in a state of near sleep. It is told in the 1st person, from the point of view of a character who was inspired by a real person – ‘Lawrence’, my family’s next-door neighbour until we moved house when I was 10 years old. Over tea, we would have conversations about mandalas and Jung’s theories on dreams. ‘Lawrence’ owns a huge, encyclopaedic collection of Jung’s books and it was the book on dreams that he would talk about. As a product of my intention of using dreams as a topic in the thesis and Lawrence’s underlying presence in my My island work I would like to make a special research trip to visit Lawrence at home in Birmingham to finally read the volume on dreams for myself and have a discussion with him again about the book.

MY WORK

The thesis will contain analysis and discussion of my artwork. I might use the works as anchors or markers to guide the text through the other ideas or they might form the primary part of the text. Or both.

Again referring to My island, particularly the impossible abundance of life, I have been thinking about a quote I read in which Robert Gober spoke about his early kitchen and bathroom sink sculptures. One commentator had referred to them, having been made by a gay artist, and their uselessness, the obsessive remaking of a functional item, the sink, as a functionless object (obviously forgetting that as sculptures they have a defined use). The next thing he did with the sink sculptures was to introduce taps with running water, which of course one would expect of a sink, that it would have taps and water would be passing through them. Except in this case, water ran constantly through them without cease, into the sink, down the drain and back round to the tap. A fountain. However, Gober spoke of his sculptures, instead of being functionless or somehow broken, as they had allegedly been before, as working “beautifully, almost to excess”. To me, if something works to excess it isn’t working. It is working to excess. In other words it is still broken. It depends how you look at it. For example, when I discussed this with Vivien Sky Rehberg she said she thought Gober’s quote sounded like a description of a system working well, efficiently. She thinks my take on it suggests I think there is somewhere a “sweet spot, where things work perfectly”.

I said that’s not what I meant, just that if something is working too much it is not working as intended. A tap is not meant to run forever, it is meant to go on and off.

Then I thought of gay culture and camp and said, I must read On Camp by Susan Sontag. Vivien agreed that would be a good idea and so here I am announcing that I will read On Camp as part of my research

KIPPENBERGER’S BUCKET

In discussing my own work, something I already know I will bring up is the ‘indestructibility clause’ which I regularly build into my work. My ceramic sculptures are individually so fragile but as a body of work have the potential longevity of an orally transmitted legend or Sol LeWitt piece. They can’t be physically destroyed by tidal waves or graffiti because there is nothing physical to destroy. They exist only as information and are therefore only as fragile as society.

There are many examples of cleaners destroying artworks; or school kids unleashing onto the unframed works in the Tate Modern’s latest survey into the œuvre of Sigmar Polke, a shaken-up 2 litre bottle of Coke; lipsick on a Twombly or graffiti on a Rothko. I read a news report about a gallery cleaner. The cleaner had scrubbed the inside of a bucket completely clean of paint. The problem was that the bucket was an integral part of a very valuable sculpture by the late Martin Kippenberger. The news report reported the sculpture destroyed. My thoughts on the matter were that we put too much value on the hand of the artist. In other art forms we do not expect the props on the stage to be the very same props that say, Samuel Beckett selected for the play’s first performance for it to be a worthwhile experience of theatre. We don’t expect the big jars or the grubby wheelchair to be the very same ones from all the previous performances. But in art we do. I know often we need to: if we’re talking about a drawing or painting and the hand of the artist is very present for example. But in the case of the Kippenberger bucket, I felt that one of the vast conservation departments of the museum or a university could reapply the paint and we could all once more enjoy the sculpture, unhindered, unaffected by the fact that Martin Kippenberger didn’t himself apply the paint. I thought it was important to make some art that had contingency plans built-in in case of any minor or major disasters.

(John Gray)

RESEARCH/READING

David Musgrave

Lawrence Stern Tristram Shandy

Sigmund Freud Interpretation of Dreams

Carl Jung The Red Book

(+ another book from Collected Works)

Susan Sontag On Camp

John Gray Straw Dogs