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October 17, 2006
On to new things now
Where is reality? What is real?
Here in the Art World, where we make things up unashamedly, it’s not always clear.
I remember wrestling this problem when I was at college, along with many other universal concepts – that’s what art college was for [sadly no more, but that’s another story for another time]. This reality thing seemed tenuous at the best of times and it struck me as a puzzle so I wrote it large on the wall of my basement flat on Falkner Street, Liverpool 8:
It was in this chair I used to sit, every night, listening to the late John Peel, wrestling reality.
Well I soon discovered a certain kind of reality as a mug flew across the room in a moment of heightened excitement. The mug smashed into the wall with a satisfying crash. Later, in bigger studios, I would sometimes fling a chair.
I’m not proud of it, and I’ve lost a few good chairs along the way, but it is a kind of reality. A chair flying through the air is like a book or a film, the ending is all wrapped up in there.
The chair in the air, in mid-flight, is real. That’s where reality lies, for me anyway, I don’t know about you.
Posted by john at October 17, 2006 09:34 PM