Too many magazines!

Stage 1: sorting

As part of a recent spate of moving "stuff" on to a new life, I've released some art magazines. There seems no point in hanging on to them for perusal at some distant and perhaps never-occurring time - send them out into the world so that someone else can enjoy the pictures or perhaps even read an article.

Having categorised the magazines into neat heaps, I take a pile - these have up to 8 recent issues - and flip  quickly through each one, stopping only if there is a truly arresting image (max 2 per magazine, those are the rules), which gets snapped. A truly riveting article - those are rare! - gets bookmarked for breakfast-time reading. Once I've sucked out nourishment in this way, and more than 6 items have accumulated, they get offered on Freecycle as "art magazines, suitable for browsing or collage" - and someone comes and collects them, takes them away.

Yet another system for keeping chaos at bay. Oh, all the stuff that accumulates over the years!

Art Quarterly has an interesting page at the very end, where they ask an artist a question. This is quick to read and I've found some nuggets there, which need to be written down.

"remaking [a missing tree at the Whitworth, Manchester] in polished
stainless steel that will change with the seasons, and
putting it back in the line like a ghost" 2015 (via)

Anya Gallacio was asked about the role of trees and flowers in her work. (This article is online, here.)

Historically people planted trees in the belief they would be used for something. It was an investment in the future, a legacy, proof of faith in a continuing existence. It’s like the story about the hall at New College, Oxford, and how the people who built it planted a grove of oaks at the same time in case, hundreds of years hence, the beams would need replacing. I’m interested in that kind of economy, in the social aspect of plants.

(via)

John Stezaker described the influence of the surreal and uncanny in his work. Unfortunately this isn't properly online but you can just about read it here.

Paul Nash, Stezaker says, focused on what was in front of him, rather than on an inner world; he opened up a sense of the uncanny that was equivalent to "the sublime" (the vastness and unknowability of the world). This sense of the uncanny "is to do with something much smaller, a kind of subversion within the knowable. In a way, that makes it all the more terrifying."

"When I am making my work," Stezaker says, "I need to allow myself to be distracted. I tend to work late at night when the system of consciousness is at its minimum. It's about somehow subverting my own conscious intentions. ... Now [my work] follows the image rather than the concept. The concept gets in the way. ...

"At its best, a work creates itself. If I have a habitual place to work, like a desk, I'll do anything but work there. ... I try to avoid habits. I'm often pursuing certain ideas, but it's the moment I digress from those ideas that things happen. The sifting and sorting process itself throws things up."

My "rescued" images, a distillation of a 10cm-high heap of magazines...

And a quote from John Berger:

We who draw do so not only to make something visible to others but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.