PAINTING THE BIBLE
Immigration:
Biblical narrative, contemporary politics &
the relationship between text and image
3rd January 2019
Residency
17th December 2017
The Wives of the Dizygotic Kosabuski Twins
|
7th August 2016
Back to colour field work and Exodus 3:14. Here are more images (text & representation) for another series of stamps.
6th August 2016
Microcosm and macrocosm analogy
As my art practice is focused on creating text and representation in small-scale production - stamps - I wanted to convey how microcosm and macrocosm correspond with each other. To illustrate the economy through which a microcosm has the power to express a macrocosm, I've found a quote by Benjamin that speaks about how memory as a kind of fancy begins as a light-hearted 'dalliance'. He's talking about Proust here, and the feeling of playful expectancy when a memory is aroused. A mercurial spark of a, say, childhood recollection, instead develops into a highly-nuanced and darkly-complex saturnine spatial event. 'Memory, the staging of the past, turns the flow of events into tableaux' (Susan Sontag, 1979:9, One-Way Street).
He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside; that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance advances from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier Benjamin, 1979, 'A Berlin Chronicle', One-Way Street, pp.293-346(p.296).
10th July 2016
What's the difference between an immigrant and a refugee?
An immigrant moves in order to improve their standard of living, i.e., to work for higher wages. Choice is implied. A refugee moves from living conditions that are oppressive, dangerous, life-threatening, and only after all other options have been exhausted. If a refugee were to have a choice, it would be to remain in their homeland or place of domicile. For a refugee, then, moving is not a choice but a necessity; their flight is a bid for freedom in order to escape oppression. Here's Bertolt Brecht's poem after hearing the news of his friend's suicide on 26th September 1940. Walter Benjamin was one amongst a group fleeing from Europe and heading for the U.S. Benjamin had a travel visa granting him safe passage, but after crossing into Spain, the group received the news that the Spanish police had been given orders to return the refugees to France, which had fallen to the Germans in June 1940. Benjamin died from a self-inflicted overdose of morphine.
An immigrant moves in order to improve their standard of living, i.e., to work for higher wages. Choice is implied. A refugee moves from living conditions that are oppressive, dangerous, life-threatening, and only after all other options have been exhausted. If a refugee were to have a choice, it would be to remain in their homeland or place of domicile. For a refugee, then, moving is not a choice but a necessity; their flight is a bid for freedom in order to escape oppression. Here's Bertolt Brecht's poem after hearing the news of his friend's suicide on 26th September 1940. Walter Benjamin was one amongst a group fleeing from Europe and heading for the U.S. Benjamin had a travel visa granting him safe passage, but after crossing into Spain, the group received the news that the Spanish police had been given orders to return the refugees to France, which had fallen to the Germans in June 1940. Benjamin died from a self-inflicted overdose of morphine.
On the Suicide of the Refugee W.B.
I'm told you raised your hand against yourself
Anticipating the butcher
After eight years of exile, observing the rise of the enemy
Then at last, brought up against an impassable frontier
You passed, they say, a passable one.
Empires collapse. Gang leaders
Are strutting about like statesmen. The peoples
Can no longer be seen under all these armaments.
So the future lies in darkness and the forces of right
Are weak. All this was plain to you
When you destroyed a torturable body.
7th July 2016
Here is a final note, before breaking off for the day. The movement of the Syrian people had been escalating during Spring/Summer 2015. Multi-perspectival points of view were being broadcast in the newspapers. From irritated holiday-goers who were experiencing holdups to cross the Channel, to Westminster politicians who were weighing up the economic pressures of hospitality, and also socially-minded people, for example my friend Jeannie Etherton, who from the outset worked tirelessly mobilising food, clothing and care packages to the refugees in Calais. Despite various expressions of concern (political speeches, editorials, opinions, letters to the editor, etc.), what stopped the systematic machinery of left-right political ideology was the widely circulated photograph of the tiny drowned body of Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish shore on 2nd September 2015. The publication of the photo recast the refugee crisis from being an inconvenient economic issue to a humanitarian tragedy (not for all politicians, mind). Although there was ample coverage from many viewpoints, it was the power of the image that marked an urgency to offer generously sanctuary and asylum to the scores of homeless refugees.
In a beat, it was the photograph that prompted a deepened understanding of the scale of the problem. Here's a quote from Susan Sontag's book Regarding the Pain of Others, New York, Picador, 2003, p.85:
In a beat, it was the photograph that prompted a deepened understanding of the scale of the problem. Here's a quote from Susan Sontag's book Regarding the Pain of Others, New York, Picador, 2003, p.85:
"... sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan. And photographs help construct - and revise - our sense of a more distant past ... "
7th July 2016
Lots to discuss today. First, here is the report of the meeting I had yesterday with lovely Jo Parkin, one of the Chaplains at FCH. Second: the continuation of the yellow field work featured below.
6th July 2016 Meeting with Jo
6th July 2016 Meeting with Jo
- Jo heads up the University of Gloucestershire contribution to the Cheltenham Welcomes Refugees campaign
- It is a student/staff collaboration
- The focus for staff is in these areas: scholarships, education, welfare, events and fund-raising
- STAR - Student action for Refugees
- As a student at the university, I agreed to help with a stall at the Freshers' Fair in September 2016. ACTION: Contact Ben at Oxstalls
- As a lecturer at South Gloucestershire & Stroud College, I can be a part of the staff group too
- Art Workshops: check with Angus
- When good intentions go wrong, i.e., the misinterpretation of the stamps: certain respondents thought that the stamps were relating an endorsement of the quote rather than a criticism of its 'bad' attitude. ACTION: Contact Adele Owen, Director, GARAS (Gloucestershire Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers)
- Religious responses and biblical references with regard to refugees and immigration: Paula Gooder, What does the Bible say about refugees; and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and his New Year message, Jesus was a Refugee. Here are some links to the articles that covered the message: The Guardian , The Huffington Post and The Independent. St. Alban's Church, Copenhagen: Jesus was a Refugee.
20th June 2016
I want to continue making stamps, but at the moment, I'm inclined to explore a different kind of digital work. To represent Exodus 3 (the burning bush dialogue between Moses and God), I am using the colour field technique that is most often associated with the American Expressionists, and Mark Rothko in particular.
This work (200cmx80cm) consists of about 100 different layers. There are about 50 layers of yellow. I produced a 'burning bush' image and created about 25 thin (20% opacity) layers of it. I found an image of a protester running from a tear gas explosion in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt (<http://english.ahram.org.eg> 19.06.16). In this project, I am incorporating contemporary imagery with biblical narrative to produce a kind of political commentary. I layered approximately another 25 layers (again, thin opacity) of the image. There's more work to do. Perhaps hundreds of layers. At the same time, I want certain other words to accompany the work. God says to Moses, 'Say this to the Israelites, "I am has sent me to you".' To be continued tomorrow ..
8th June 2016
Continued from Home page. I selected poignant images and quotes and re-built meaning by creating pairs deliberately out of context. As it turns out, certain respondents have understood the meaning of the stamps as an endorsement of the quote by Philip Hammond, i.e., '"Marauding migrants" threaten our standard of living', rather than a protest against this shocking attitude. Taking into account my intention, the stamps couldn't have failed in a more successful way.
3rd June 2016
Points that I would like to add to the project today are as follows:
PRACTICE
"Painting the Bible": On-going sketchbook exercise
THEORY
Howard Cagill (1998), Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience, London and New York: Routledge.
PRACTICE
"Painting the Bible": On-going sketchbook exercise
- Take this literally, i.e., Use a Bible as a sketchbook
THEORY
Howard Cagill (1998), Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience, London and New York: Routledge.
- word & image also takes into account: space and time, history, technology, politics
- perhaps word and image is to aesthetics what space and time is to epistemology (for Benjamin - as for Kant - the discursive and the aesthetic must in some way be aligned [Cagill])? i.e., intuitions (perceptions) come under adequate concepts
" ... Benjamin's speculative account of experience ... introduced the infinite into experience through the argument that time is not linear but a complex formation of past, present and future" Cagill 1998:81.