Amongt other incredibly cultural outings I have made this weekend (go see Mary Kelly at Whitworth Gallery if you want some anally retentive art to move you in ways that you hadn't expected
http://www.creativetourist.com/city-guide/womans-work-mary-kelly-at-the-whitworth; or to see Grayson Perry at Manchester Art Gallery if you want to see five bits of work, admittedly good, but still squished into a corner like the filthy cock-laden crockery it is
http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=79), I will show you the work of Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson (
http://www.croweandrawlinson.net/) who made this rather glorious and threatening symphony of lahvly bleeding fireworks. I could tell it was art because i wasn't so compelled to go "ooooh" and "aaaah" when stuff exploded:
After a while, all the throbbing and wheeling and screeching subsided, and the ephemeral clouds of colour seemed all that there was. They reminded me of all those beautiful images taken by Hubble and Spitzer of the "star nurseries" - the enormous nebulae which sprawl across the canvas of deep space and which are nothing more than dust. This dust makes everything that it is possible to make, in a roundabout way. (To perve at some stars have a gander at this:
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/iotd.html, although skip through the duller than astronauts pictures of dull astronauts and their machines and faces.)
So perhaps it is fitting, since my current tip seems to be about finding parallels betwen the perceived world and the world as it actually is, that I should come across such a beautifully succinct representation of all the explosions that we will never see, but explosions that echo within us, like ancient tinnitus, of our births and ultimate deaths.
I am about to start reading some Jungian psychoanalysis (snarf snarf) about the collective unconsciousness - I have only sniffed the pages and pawed at the colour plates as of yet, but the idea is that we all retain memory, on some inner, inpenetrable level, of the wholeness of the human community - hence why there are such similar stories throughout history. It would be nice to think that we all love fireworks because of some collective memory of creation, but I fear it is beacuse we monkeys like to clap our paws and squawk at brightly coloures explosions and loud noises. That's why we all love war and X Factor, I guess.
Hi Miss Muggy,
ReplyDeleteHope you don’t mind me posting another comment. I just wanted to say that I also would rather watch a good fireworks display than look at the pretentious art of an “anal retentive” – so thanks for the thumbs down on the Mary Kelly exhibition; I definitively won’t be going to see it.
I was also minded to comment because I have a great respect for C G Jung. He’s very much out of favour these days and no doubt Brian Cox and all the scientists you’re reading at the moment would describe his views in two words – complete piffle. My hunch, however, is that Jung will have the last laugh. It’s many years since I read most of his stuff, but I did recently come across a very strange work called Seven Sermons to the Dead, which he wrote after experiencing something akin to a mental breakdown (or perhaps it should be called an epiphany) in the years of WW1. It’s available as a free download at the following address: http://www.gnosis.org/library/7Sermons.htm.
Anyway, coming back to “jizz”, I hadn’t appreciated that this term embraces female liquid as well as semen (and I agree that these female liquids are amongst the finest natural products, and furthermore I cannot resist mentioning in passing that I have had great pleasure in assisting their production over the years). You must forgive my ignorance about the meaning ofcertain contemporary words but I’m now of an age where I’m not altogether familiar with the modern vernacular. So I consulted the urban dictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jizz) and blow me, I see the word jizz is also used for the secret ingredient of the Big Mac! Did you know that? What a thought: jizz in a beef burger! An explosion of male jizz is very definitely the result of what the French call la petite mort. So what does all this add up to: explosions, beef burgers and death? Reminds me of that John Cooper Clark poem Psycle Sluts (http://www.cyberspike.com/clarke/psycle.html) in which he paraphrase T S Eliot: “For you that’s how the world could end/ not with a bang but a Wimpey”
Take care,
Ted
You got the wrong end of the stick there, Ted. Mary Kelly was very good indeed.
ReplyDeleteSorry about that. If you have muggy peepers then I obviously have murky peepers, or at least I do when it comes to looking at that dense forest. The expression “anal rententive” is most often used to imply that something is annoying. I know certain words have come to mean the opposite of what they once meant – “wicked” for “good” – but you usually can sense what the speaker or writer means from the context of the sentence. Even so, I can’t help feeling that the English language has become very ambiguous. Really love the blog, though.
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