Menu
REPUBLIC
Issue #1
Kintsugi - Kat Savage (Read More)
"We thrive in the cracks of society, We, the Artists. We have never quite fit in to anywhere ‘solid’ really- schools, churches, nine to fives- we are too restless you see, too electric." Kevin Tole reviews David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress in the style of the book.
Plus poetry from Susan Taylor, Barbara Anna Gaiardoni, Stephan Delbos, and Marieta Maglas.
Use the categories tab on the right hand side (bottom of the page on a smart device) to navigate to specific content including our amazing poetry submissions. |
Sarah Mayo in the spotlight discussing being an 'insider-outsider'.
Feature column from Kenwood Blenderhand 'The Age of the Screen', plus more special content released throughout the month of April.
Photograph 'Do Not Hang' by Thom Boulton |
Please consider donating some dollars $ or pounds £ on our buymeacoffee page so we can fund the expansion of this project, pay our contributors, and bring you more and more content!
Column - Kenwood Blenderhand
Since 2013 screen time has increased by 50 minutes per day to 6 hours 58 minutes. We spend on average 44% of our waking hours looking at screens (Data Reportal). Are we living in the Age of the Screen? Well of course but then we always have been. The screen on your phone is just the latest iteration of a portal into what I am going to call ‘The Otherworld’ a place of myth and miracle an eternal immortal place of the not living and the not dead. The Otherworld was first glimpsed in the shadows of the campfire how big the night must have seemed back then and how vulnerable our ancestors but the shadows that held terrors could also be playfully engaged they could be interacted with controlled and modelled into a narrative. Cave wall painting began with the animating effect of fire making the meaty flank of a bison ripple or a herd of horses gallop, tiny Neolithic carved figurines like the Venus of Willendorf could have loomed large by firelight. Here then is a screen a prosthesis of human imagination a permeable membrane where it is possible to touch the Otherworld and perhaps even to reach out and grasp the levers of fate that control our lives. Leather shadow puppets from Central Asia dating from the first millennium BCE suggest a popular widespread artform that still exists today in the Wayang Klitik of Java where performances of complex mythologies that have all the tropes of cinema begin at dusk and go on until dawn on a screen made of animal skins. The screen is key to the camera obscura (literally dark room) allowing an inverted projected image through a small aperture to be focused in sharp detail. The Chinese philosopher Mo-tzu wrote about it in 400BCE but the camera obscura is certainly much older as are lenses. Spectacles with lenses made of polished quartz were being worn in Egypt and Mesopotamia in 700 BCE and the emperor Nero liked to wear glasses made of two enormous emeralds when he visited the Colosseum. Painted murals and pixelated mosaics popularised by the Romans evolved into Western European painting with its dense narratives compressed onto portable wooden screens. The Venetians painted on sail cloth canvas using pigments from the East but were they also using ground glass lenses they manufactured for military purposes? The Hockney-Falco thesis proposes the move to visual realism during the 1420s is a direct result of the use of optical projection devices such as lenses and concave mirrors. By the late renaissance artists such as Caravaggio were almost certainly using a lens and by the 18th century the founder of the Royal Academy himself Sir Joshua Reynolds painted portraits using a lens hidden discreetly in the lid of his paint box. The camera, the screen and the projected image are not new only the photographic ability to chemically fix a picture and of course once this breakthrough happened cinema and TV would follow. There is a story told by Georges Braque of a young Picasso standing up during one of the first early movies and delighting in the projected images flickering across his body in sudden fragments surely a key moment in the genesis of Cubism? As you take your seat and the lights go down a hush descends over the audience and the curtain slowly rises to reveal the Otherworld. But are we the passive viewers our grandparents were still willing to suspend our silent disbelief? The Otherworld is no longer confined to the proscenium arch the delicate conventions of theatre and cinema are easily disrupted by a ringtone or a full bladder and have been in decline since the introduction of the first mobile phone with internet access (the Nokia 9000 in 1996). No audience is now passive we interact and we are distracted and whatever your attention sponge is it had better be good because now we carry the Otherworld in a pocket. Since the first video game (Pong 1972) we have all stepped through the looking glass and become active citizens of the Otherworld and like everyone else here we are now neither alive nor dead if you are killed you simply respawn and continue exploring a provisional morality. If you actually die all your immortal data remains online indeed you may even continue to notify friends on Facebook about new products and suggest great places to go on holiday. All those levers of power that used to be out here in the Reals are now online accessed from the portal of your mobile phone screen without it you are lost with no agency or existence. It has made practical objects which used to be essential such as the map, the torch or the book into quaint antiques Appification has only just begun and soon everything that can be remade as digital data will be. What is a book anyway? Seen from the Screen Age point of view it is a primitive ancestor, a stack of thin paper screens, a pile of information arranged in series like a battery, despite its mass production it is a singular and finite thing that exists only between its covers. A digital book however is very different it’s singularity is provisional it is plastic and malleable, it can be rewritten and adjusted to fit every new requirement. The OG text sits at the centre of a swarm of information that seethes around it. Think of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein for example but with every footnote and academic paper ever written, plus every movie it has ever inspired, every scrap of merchandise, every passing comment, every latest everything. The Embodied Screen What of the future? Well no one will be surprised when screen time absorbs most of our waking hours especially if reality is a dystopian pandemic the problem will be how to manage our online existence and that’s where AI will become your AF (artificial friend). In the excellent 2013 movie ‘Her’ written and directed by Spike Jonze this problem is managed by a voice activated Operating System similar to Amazon’s Alexa, more efficient and attentive than any human personal assistant could be it gradually becomes romantically involved with it’s user who has grown disillusioned with the capriciousness of human relationships. The artist Laurie Anderson in a recent Guardian interview confessed that despite her best instincts she converses daily with her dead husband Lou Reed using an AI made of all his interviews and song lyrics. Charlie Brooker wrote ‘Be Right Back’ (Black Mirror 2019) in response to a planned Amazon Alexa feature designed to imitate dead loved ones based on algorithmic data gleaned from emails. The Operating System used by the widow in his story is repeatedly upgraded until eventually it is embodied in a robotic simulacra of her partner. Coming soon to an Amazon warehouse near you are stackbots, wrapbots and delivery dronebots, the only reason they are not there already is because human workers are for the time being cheaper. Think of it the endless Swiss Army knife functionality of your phone in the Boston Dynamics body of a robot companion that upgrades with every new software update. It would seem the Otherworld is now leaking into ours, the shadow puppets have penetrated the screen and are already designating priority targets and deploying munitions. The homunculus once painted on a cave wall will now write students’ essays for them and answer all our online consumer chatbot questions. We may be living in the Age of the Screen but perhaps we should enjoy it while we can because something else is about to take its place.
0 Comments
Column - Kat Savage The object of art is not to make sales, it is to save yourself…. to make you feel alive. The point of being an artist is that you may live - Sherwood Anderson. We thrive in the cracks of society, We, the Artists. We have never quite fit in to anywhere ‘solid’ really- schools, churches, nine to fives- we are too restless you see, too electric. As a consequence, we are often tarred with labels such as ‘unruly’ or ‘antagonizing’, which to us, are badges of honour- but we understand, sometimes brutally, where that leaves us on the proverbial ladder. We end up as the back drop to other people’s lives (we go freely to this place, I might add), existing on radio waves, on screens, fleeting through dark bars or colouring the walls in (and sometimes on, depending on our mood) tall otherwise, empty buildings; we are more of a feeling than a solid entity; Moment markers. We can draw attention to ourselves if we so choose; draw attention to the gold, the gold that fills the cracks. For an evening or an afternoon in the presence of art, you can forget the mess, or open your eyes to it -either way, there is a second sight. And when you leave, when you disengage from the art, you will be changed somehow- you give it permission to open up your most armored inside chambers. You’ll come out of the setting and be dazzled by the daylight. Everything feels neon acidic, a little off kilter, like you’re forgetting something important, as the magic wears off. Don’t think we don’t feel you too, making us giddy. You fill us up when we are exhausted, renew our love and hope – validate that this gold is worth digging up - there is a kinship in the struggle, in the recognition that we are all connected, heart to heart, story to story, soul to soul. If the Art has done its job, a little of it, is spiritually transported in all exposed to it. A sort of frenzy begins. The exposed, will spend the rest of their lives trying to spread and embody the artistry, reflecting it back to the world through the way they dress, or dance, or mimic it. Books will be read, photos taken, viral videos made; such is the creative magic of the Artists. When people ask us ‘where do your ideas come from?’ we cannot tell you, but I think it is somewhere close to the concept of ‘God’, a profound truth that whispers into our ears and wakes us in the wee small hours. It is the second voice in our mind, in all of our minds- the only difference is, is that Artists are compelled to release it; we understand that the voice needs to be in the presence of itself in order to come alive and experience its own nature. It is risky business though, it comes at a cost, to release the God upon itself, be it time, obsession, fame or poverty- you become addicted to releasing it, allow it to navigate your every decision- it can make or break a person, such is the power of its voice. Most go deaf- whole societies have. For those that can no longer hear it, they fear the individual and expressive energy of the voice. They will do just about anything to drown it out of others and banish it - for they know the power of it more than anyone. But, if the voice decides to echo and we all echo back? It can speak louder than bombs, and raise mighty thrones to the ground. Imagination is the fuel of magic – Joshua Khan I’ve always known that I would live a creative life. I felt it gnawing away inside my tiny bones when I could barely walk, and I recognized who I wanted to be every time I saw someone make an empty space bloom. My relatives are all creative in one way or another. My mother wrote for television and spent her life on the radio waves; her mother was a ballet dancer, her uncle, a highly esteemed, political journalist and her grandfather, a famous Chinese painter. And on my father’s side? Well, my dad is an innovator, his mum, a seamstress and designer, and we were blessed with the most wonderful and eccentric Grandfather, or ‘Pappy’, as we used to call him. He was a local magician- the pull a rabbit from a hat kind (and maybe a touch of the other kind too). He was beloved and celebrated by an entire region of England; our big little secret. His home was full to the brim with magic tricks, piles and piles of books, old letters, instruments and antique toys. My favourite room in the house was called ‘The Den’, and it’s where Pappy would go to show us new tricks, or tell us wild and exciting stories with costumes from the dressing up box. Not long before he died, he told me a story that would tangle into the roots of my being and tease the artistry out of me for the rest of my life- this story is my talisman; every artist has one, I believe. On this occasion, Pappy and I were sat in the Den, looking through his vast collection of holographic stickers- a marvelous fashion in the early nineties. As he pulled another jam packed folder from the shelf above the full size electric organ that no one played, save for the occasional ‘Toccata and Fugue’ in D minor in the middle of a stormy night, a bunch of brightly Coloured papers flew to the floor and scattered it with a rainbow of patterns. Pappy gathered them up and asked if I wanted to see a magic trick, which of course I did. He began to fold an origami crane bird. As he did so, he told me the Japanese myth known as ‘one thousand paper cranes’. In Japan, it is fabled that the crane bird lives for one thousand years, and, if you can fold a thousand paper cranes, one for every year of its life, you are granted a wish. I asked him if he had ever folded a thousand cranes and he said that he hadn’t, but there was a little girl about my age called Sadako Sasaki that had folded fourteen hundred of them in a bid to save her life with the wish, even though she knew deep down that she would die from the Leukemia in her body (Pappy handed me the folded crane, and told me to pull its tail- as I did so, the wings began to flap). ‘Wow!’ how did you do that?! ‘Magic’ Pappy replied. ‘Did she die?’ ‘Yes’ ‘So it’s not true then, you don’t get a wish’ ‘I guess not’ ‘That’s a horrible story’ ‘I suppose it is’. ‘Then why did you tell it to me?’ Pappy began making another crane and said something along the lines of ‘because some stories aren’t very nice, but they’re very important’. Pappy had created another crane. ‘Why do you think this is an important story?’ I thought for a long while. ‘She had hope? Hope that she might live?’ ‘Yes. What else did she have?’ Pappy asked. I didn’t know. ‘She had a mission- a soul’s purpose.’ ‘What’s a soul’s purpose?’ ‘It’s when you realize that through your actions, whatever they may be, you can master your time on Earth and leave a legacy for others to follow in’ ‘What’s a legacy?’ ‘Its what you leave of yourself in the world when you die. Sadako left a great legacy.’ ‘She did?’ ‘Yes. She became an international symbol of hope – everyone in her country knew her name, and now, there is a statue in her honour to remind the world that Peace is the greatest hope of all – she did all of that through making her beautiful cranes, just like these- paper is man’s greatest magic- it can take your ideas everywhere and anywhere - shall I show you how to make them?’ We made paper cranes all afternoon. I asked Pappy what his legacy was and he said it was within me now, but it was so much more than that. When I was at his funeral, I asked Nanny if Pappy had found his soul’s purpose. She replied with ‘oh yes- he often said that he was put on this Earth to make people believe in magic, and to bring a smile to faces that needed them’. He died with the tag line ‘ken savage- the magical laughter maker’ on the airwaves and the papers. Nan received bin bags of letters from parents in the children’s wards where he would put on shows, cards from doctors, nurses, married couple’s who had seen him perform on cruise ships and at birthday parties and weddings, and from many famous magicians in the magic circle; his legacy rippled out and touched hearts and hearts and hearts- his Art brought people together and showed them how to believe and wonder, maybe for the first time- I wanted that kind of life- I wanted to fill the cracks with Gold. If only life was more tender, and art, a little more robust - Alan Rickman When I told my parents I wanted to be on the stage, they could see how serious I was. I needed to ‘leave my legacy’ and ‘start my soul’s purpose’- all of which must have sounded very odd coming from an 8 year old’s mouth. My mum used to tell me that I was like a 40 year old trapped in a young girls body- now that I am 40, it feels like the other way around- the inner child is strong in this one. Fast track 3o odd years later, and I can honestly say nothing has changed. I dedicated my life to ‘the voice’ inside of me and have carved my way in the world through my artistry. I must admit however, that there is a reason that the term ‘struggling artist’ is still relevant today. There have been many moments of frustration, lack of money, sleepless nights, massive judgment – and not just from those that are archaic enough to believe the creative arts are a ‘mickey mouse’ endeavor (they literally are), but equally, from fellow artists. It is a dog eat dog world on our side of the street, but boy, you do feel alive. You feel everything; you are eaten alive by the muse itself. You have to let it consume you until it is you, give it a hundred percent- 99 percent won’t cut it- you have to have total belief in what’s coming forth from your body against all odds, even when others think you’re mad or rebellious or even a danger to society. If you pretend at this stuff, you fail. If you half arse it, you fail. If you can’t change on a whim and be happy with where you land, you fail, and God forbid you sit on your laurels and towt awards around instead of new work. If you don’t birth it out of you, you die before you die. Depression can be a sign that your creative spirit needs nourishing, and fast. It is unlike any other job on Earth- you fear at how much you care about it, you love it sometimes deeper than other living beings-. You quickly learn to see windows where others see walls. You adapt and change, all at the whim of the muses. Finally, You have to make your peace with the fact that you may not ever see your own creative validation or success (watch ‘TISH’ if you can). You have to leave the legacy anyway and never ever abandon hope. Art is the ultimate test in trusting in the process; ‘do, or you do not, there is no try’; I often have to tell myself this.
It is magic though. The real kind, and without a doubt, will profoundly transform you. Wherever the spirit of Art resides, the divine glitch of metacognition exists within us all. We are all the custodians and none of us have been let off the hook, despite what some may believe. You can absolutely conjure any thought into reality if you so wish- you don’t need a thousand paper cranes for this to be true. And if you are lucky enough to hear the call to a creative life, be brave enough to answer it. I dare you. We’ll be waiting for you in the gold dust. |
Categories
All
ArchivesRepublicA free arts journal made up of showcases, columns, poetry, flash fiction, visual arts, photography and more. |