Urinary tract infection
The image above was put together today and it arrived out of a complex series of decisions and experiences. The most pressing was an attempt by myself to respond to a very painful urinary tract infection before I began to lose my memories of what had been felt. One of the most startling aspects of having the infection was the sudden appearance of blood in my urine. I was needing to urinate while in a hospital waiting area, eventually getting to a toilet and instead of getting the relief of urinary pressure, I was shocked by the sight of red blood against the white of the ceramic toilet. I had had and still have pain in my left testicle, although due to antibiotics kicking in this is much reduced. This is linked to pains in my lower back. But the worst conjunction of pain was a combination of constipation and ache caused by the infection, alongside a need to both urinate and defecate, neither of which I could do. I have been making drawings and trying to respond to my feelings about this, and have been attempting to find an image that is for myself a summation of what I felt, something that compresses several days pain and worry into itself. Eventually I found that I could bring together two previously existing images to create a new one, mainly due to the fact that I enjoyed the surprise for myself of the conjunction of a red soaked form with a black and white one. I had been using linocut recently, for the first time for years, so that the language of lino was still something I was in touch with or feeling inside. This was an image made as a guide or study for a lino print and was constructed digitally, and working on a computer was more of a necessity because I was working from bed. I needed an image that at some point within it squeezed everything into a narrow channel, an image that felt as if it was too full, an image that was spiky with pain, but above all an image that was about the dangling nature of an in the mind, damaged testicle. So there you have it. I will at some point make a proper linocut of this, but that will be dependent on access to facilities. But is it a good image? In fact, what is a good image? Does it do the job? Can it communicate in such a way that it seems to make sense, without it being simply an illustration? What as an image does it bring to the table? What is the 'extra' it offers?
Edward Hopper carried in his pocket a slightly altered quotation from Goethe. It stated, "Art is...the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me." My own interpretation of this being that our inner feeling tone creates a sensibility by which we filter out a particular view of the world. That is what I am at times looking both when I'm exploring the possibilities inherent in trying to depict our interoceptual understanding of ourselves and/or when I'm trying to visualise how I see any other aspects of my experience. But not always, sometimes I think I work backwards or upside down. I'm an artist driven to look for images that for one reason or another hold attention and break through to people, even in a world already 'image soaked'. But what do I mean by this? Again I suppose I'll have to circle around the idea in order to begin to tease out some sort of understanding, as these things are never straight forward. Perhaps I'll begin with Barthes.
Roland Barthes In his 1980 book 'Camera Lucida', used the word 'punctum' to describe an unintended, sharp detail in a photograph that unexpectedly pierces, wounds, or deeply moves the viewer on a personal level. I was very taken by this when I first read it and have often misused the word 'punctum' as a way of asking myself and others why any image, not just a photograph, may stick in the mind, or become memorable in some way. Barthes uses the word to refer to a specific element that "jumps out" of an image and 'pricks' the spectator's conscience or emotion. This is for him something unplanned and unexpected, as it relies entirely on the viewer's private history, memories, and associations. For instance a small detail in a photograph may cause you to remember an incident from your past that was very meaningful to you, but perhaps would not be to anyone else. Barthes contrasted this to what he called the studium; the polite, educated understanding of what the photograph is about and what the photographer intended, the punctum in comparison being the disruptive element that breaks through our detachment and striking the viewer with visceral, emotional intensity.
This is one aspect of the search for an image that I'm interested in but it is just that, an aspect, for instance some images hold your attention because of a intellectually stimulating conjunction of image and idea, such as those produced by Mark Tansey, others are simply uncanny (das Unheimliche) having that unsettling psychological feeling such as when something simultaneously feels deeply familiar and strangely alien, such as Meret Oppenheim's 'Object', her fur covered tea cup from 1936, which even after all these years of being exhibited as a classic surreal object, is an object that sticks in the mind.
Meret Oppenheim 'Object',
However I cant use the tropes of Surrealism any more because they are of a type, or what I would now call if using the term beyond the world of photography, the 'studium'; the educated understanding of what the image is about. Finding an 'image' is a hard thing, because it is doubly hard to surprise yourself, especially when you are like myself someone who has been in the art business for a long time, and have therefore seen a wide variety of approaches. Perhaps it is easier to be a naive artist, or perhaps not, as people sort of expect naive artists to behave in certain ways, thus beginning for myself, to eliminate the unexpected before I've even seen the work. What I'm thinking about here is that when I went to a gallery focused on outsider art, my first thought was that it all looked similar to 'outsider art'.
That old idea of Goethe's that art is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is in me, can of course be inverted, the reproduction of the the world that is inside me by means of the world outside me, is a pretty good description of how I sometimes work when I'm trying to visualise interoceptual experiences. Again I'm looking for something that sticks or pricks that image of 'normality' or expectation. It's perhaps the opposite of 'like'. It is not 'nice'. An image is always 'uncomfortable' in some way. Therefore it has to have an element of surprise.
In order for the unexpected to be be revealed you have to get lost. To get lost implies action. You are doing, and this is very important, you need to do stuff in order to makes things happen, but you also don't need to 'know' what you are doing. Jasper Johns said, "Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that." This is good and a starting point, but it only gets you so far. You also need to be able to pull out of the process in order to notice when something has happened. Johns also said, "I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort." I think this is more like it, something is found "to hold a kind of energy", an energy that is created by some sort of active juxtaposition of the elements that make up the image. There being some sort of friction that as it rubs off against itself, it sparks some sort of energy into life. If you can hold on to this, stick it down in some way, without smoothing it out, without finishing it off, well, then you might have an image.
I was taking to my old friend Steve Carrick about this not long ago and he recommended that I read 'Unknowing' by Rebecca Forman, a book by its very title I could see that it was touching on the subject, but as yet I've not been able to find it. Perhaps he gave me a false trail, but if he did, it did lead to a thought in my head as to what this book could be about.
Adrian Ghenie: Detail
Adrian Ghenie: Mobile phone user
Urinary tract infection
These are the first 7 drawings I made in response to how I felt about my urinary infection. They are on small A6 sheets of thick paper, again small so that I could do them from bed, this time sitting on it's edge, using a large A3 sketchbook as a table. As is often my want, I was using a dip in pen and ink to establish the idea.
I then followed that session with another using a brush and various coloured liquids, this time slowing down and concentrating on initially one image.
Coloured image
This was too complicated but pointed to some thoughts about flowing liquids.
Testicle weight
I went back to the earlier images and picked an idea out that suggested more testicle weight. I started to react to the horror I had when seeing blood in my urine. So I took another tack.
Ist step peeing blood
At this point I returned to using the computer and began processing in Photoshop.
The first image that seemed to be on its way to being an image
The image immediately above was the first one to intrigue me, this was the last one to emerge directly out of the drawings done as an attempt to capture the feeling tone I had in my body/mind about the situation I was experiencing. I had been in a lot of pain, I was worried as to what it might all mean and the sight of blood in my urine had frightened me.
I returned to some images working by hand and others I began to edit on the computer. At this point I'm not worried as to the authenticity of working on paper or computer, I'm simply searching for an image.
Pain and heat
For instance I might as in this case, go back directly to a hand made image, scan it and then look to see what happens if certain colours are changed. In this case the coloured image above, is adjusted so that the warm colours are brought out around the groin area. The warmth of pain is one aspect I'm trying to visualise.
As I was now working on my computer, I had easy access to older images, and began to look through some of them, knowing that I had made some before that might work. What I didn't realise was that I had already made separate images of the final elements I would end up using, but by letting these first sets of drawings go where they needed to go, they had established in my mind an idea of what was needed. Their materiality had allowed a thought to jell and they had triggered memories of recent images. I eventually found one which was of work done to prepare for a linocut, (this seemed a better resolution of my stomach/body) and the other of a shape that was at one point a cutout that I inserted into a much larger image, The point being that it was of an extension, something that I was feeling the testicles were. Notice no penis, in the night the blood seemed to flow directly out of me. Drawings of interoceptual experiences are not to do with any sort of accurate anatomy. The resulting images are neither literal representations of the body, nor
simply illustrations, they are materialisations of a
process of encounter.
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