Pete Ashton’s Blog

If you are used to using your socks as a reminder as to when to do your laundry, you may find, during the summer, that you run out of pants because you haven’t been wearing quite so many socks in the hot weather.

This next week or so I’m going to be a painter and decorator, or rather a painerandecraer, as I believe is the correct job title. While doing this job - slapping a few buckets of Magnolia over the walls of a semi-detached house, rather more carefully popping some gloss on the skirting and touching up the front door - I will be resident on-site.

What’s ever-so-vaguely of note is that the house is in Kingstanding, the arsehole suburb of Birmingham I recently escaped from. Punchline: it’s my old house. Sam, the ex-housemate, is moving out (to Moseley! Yay!) and the landlady is selling, so it needs a quick tart up, nothing fancy. And if it’s nothing fancy you want for a little under the going rate, I just happen to be your man.

So, a return to Kingstanding. I must say I’m so looking forward to it.

My chum Kath was needs a banner. One of those large PVC things with holes in the corners that you can stretch across a wall advertising something. Only she needs it on the cheap.

I mentioned that I’d stumbled across a company that does them on some weblog I was reading the other day. They were apparently quick, cheap and recommended. They also were kinda ethical, doing banners for Greenpeace and other orgs.

Of course not being in the market for a banner myself I didn’t make a note and I can’t for the life of me remember which blog it was now. So I’m posting this here.

So, I asked Mark as we walked out of the cemetery, did you feel a sense of personal catharsis?

Not really, said Mark. Me neither, said I.

Funerals, as has no doubt been said before, are quiet odd things. They provide a space for ritual, a place to do what needs to be done in the company of others. A focus point. And probably many other things. But while they have these defined procedures and structures, they’re really about emotions, and those are so much harder to predict.

In a perverse way I’d been looking forward to Andy’s funeral. I’d put my feeling of being lost and confused down to not really being in the middle of things, stuck up here in Birmingham while those closer, physically and emotionally, were dealing with it as a group. Not to say I envy them in the slightest, please don’t think that for a minute. I was just looking for an explanation. I was expecting, hoping, that by being with others who were feeling what I was feeling, who knew him in aspects of the way I knew him, that I would have some kind of emotional moment to break the numbness, probably involving crying or something.

But I didn’t.

Okay, I nearly did. Having queued up for what seemed like hours to write in the condolences book (there were a good 200 people present) I suddenly realised I didn’t know what I was going to write, so I wrote a short note to Andy himself, and a brief moment happened. It’s perhaps interesting that this happened when I was on my own with everyone else keeping a respectful distance.

What I realised, though, was that while I’m really glad I went and while it was really good to be with other folk and talk, however stiltedly, about Andy, this is something I need to deal with myself, slowly, over time. And once I realised that I felt a lot better.

Maybe it was cathartic after all.

When posting paranoid rants to mailing lists and message boards, please observe the following tips.

Paragraphs are your friend. No more than two or three sentences per paragraph please. Speaking of which…

Sentences are not paragraphs. They tend to be shorter. They also have these things called commas which divide them up.

Sumarise your actual point, assuming there is just the one, so I have a vague idea of what it is you’re rambling about.

Capitalisation is not an either/or option. Upper and Lower case characters can co-exist peacefully in the same sentence when employed correctly.

If you don’t do this and just post a massive block of obnoxious text I am unlikely to read it and respond and you’ll never know how much of an idiot I think you are.

Actually, carry on as usual.

One of the most potent criticisms of ‘conceptual art’ is that you have to read the short essay stuck next to the piece in order to understand it. I remember a good cartoon in something like Private Eye or the New Yorker showing three paintings. The first is a detailed traditional landscape with a tiny card. In the middle is a somewhat abstract piece with a few paragraphs next to it. The final piece is a blank canvas accompanied by a block of dense text larger than the work itself.

Ha ha. Stupid conceptual artists. We’re on to you.

Coming, as I do, from a comic strip background visual art tends to be pretty functional to me. It serves to tell a story, to express an idea and most importantly, to move the reader on. The meaning of a comic book panel comes not as you might expect from the dialogue or caption but from the other panels surrounding it. Context and juxtaposition gives sense. Without them you just get a pretty picture.

So when I approach a piece of Art art in a gallery sitting there all alone on the wall with acres of white space surrounding it I’m looking for the context. I expect the piece to work for me, to trigger in my brain some synapses that make it move. I’m not saying I need it to move in a top-left to bottom-right action kind of way, but it has to take me from somewhere to somewhere else. If I don’t get this then I find myself looking at the technique and craftsmanship which a fair amount of contemporary artists lack because that’s not the point. So what is the point? We’re back to the short essays.

I’ve come to the conclusion that these essays aren’t actually a bad thing in themselves. A painted landscape is a functional piece of work. Yes, it can be beautiful and inspiring but it everything you need to understand it is there in the work itself. Trees, hills, a few cows, a delicate sunset - it’s self contained and refers to things easily experienced. Conceptual art, on the other hand, is like the single panel from a comic book separated from it’s neighbours. It needs context, to be juxtaposed against something, be it other works by that artist or the ideas and processes that led to its creation. In other words, it needs that essay.

You could argue that if it cannot stand alone then it it doesn’t deserve to be displayed (and most irksomely sold for vast sums of cash) as a solo item, but I’d argue that it’s not standing alone. It’s part of an intellectual dialogue, feeding from previous works and ideas and informing future ones. The essay serves to point the viewer in the right direction, to give it context and juxtaposition.

Of course it doesn’t help that a lot of conceptual art is devoid of substance and that those cards are mostly self-serving inane twaddle, but the principle is there. To take a current example, critics of evolution decry it for being “just a theory” to which sane people reply that the notion of “theory” in science is a quite different beast from everyday parlance. The God-botherers are looking at it out of context, blinded by their myths, but it doesn’t help that the scientists have written their explanatory cards to preach to the converted. It seems absurd to attack something because you don’t understand where it’s coming from yet even perfectly intelligent people do this all the time with modern art.

Remember, the panels don’t stand alone. You’ve got to read the whole comic.

One of the things Andy Roberts did was make mix tapes for other people. Carefully tailored for the recipient with hand-made covers, you know the drill, you no doubt made a few yourself.

Paul Schroeder and Jenni Scott have digitized a few and Paul asked me if I’d be interested in hosting them. I of course said yes.

Here, then, are Andy’s Mix Tapes with an RSS feed for podcasting or just to make sure you don’t miss any, though bandwidth allowing they will be kept up for a few months. The first one is side A of Everyone Wants To Be Happy and they’ll be posted up at most weekly, one side at a time along with the cover art and tracklistings where available.

It’s also nice, in a strange way, to have Andy join the podcast station, which now has a name: Bonfire Radio. I checked it with the other ‘casters and they approved so if you don’t like it, tough.