Back to blithering about art

I've been a bit worried that I'd headed up a blind alley and needed to do some backtracking, but I think the solution is to simply give the painting a rest for a while (well, painting in the sense of applying pigment to a canvas anyway). The paintings weren't working, but the preparatory and off-the-cuff stuff have been. I think I might concentrate more on drawing (ink on paper) than painting. It's really simple and direct, stripped back. I want to resolve the inchoate ideas sloshing round my head, not worry about technical bullshit.

In between experimental films at the City Gallery, Rose and I checked out the show of contemporary art from Te Papa they've got there. I've been getting back into situationism and subtitled my thing for the Mary Newton show a psychogeographical coastal view, so I was pleased to see Mladen Bizumic's work. The curator's blurb next to it was strange. It said his work deals with 'what he calls psychogeographies'. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it seems awfully like the curator isn't aware of the history of the term.

I've also been thinking of resurrecting an old idea of doing an alternate history of New Zealand (Henry Darger's fictional world reminded me of it). When I was younger I thought I'd be a science fiction writer, and so I studied art theory towards that (as part of a mad theory I had that the science fiction story was the only valid art form of the late 20th and early 21st centuries - something, needless to say, I no longer ascribe to), so it would be a nice nod to that. The coastal view could be considered the first part of it. I'm not so sure about this though. I did see, in another nice synchronistic moment, that one of the talks for this show is about the construction of fictional worlds, so I might go along to that.

I want to pull the various strands together, and ideally integrate everything into a single unified grand scheme. I've made a preliminary stab at documenting and developing a personal mythology (the skeleton guy represents the subject alone in a pointless and absurd universe, the illuminati guy represents the cybernetic control society, etc, etc - that kind of thing). We'll see how we go.