Summa: diary (July 13-19, 2024)

There’s comfort in melancholy / When there’s no need to explain (Joni Mitchell, ‘Hejira’ (1976)).
There are things I don’t get over.

July 13 (Saturday). Fragment from a waking dream:

July 14 (Sunday). Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt, England lost to Spain in the Euro24 football final, and the death of Bill Viola was announced. A mutual understanding:

July 15 (Monday). 8.00 am: My suffering, as a casualty of preventive medicine, is coming to an end. Studyology. A review of the week, writing, and an overview last week’s work on the archive visual practice. 9.00 am: ‘Get lively, lad!’ I pressed-on with captioning the archive, hoping to appreciate something that’d gone unnoticed, previously. In the morning, I processed work from the period 1985-92. After lunch, I began work on the period from 1982-4.

A recollection by association:

July 16 (Tuesday). 7.00 am: I published My Blog: A 10th-Anniversary Overview (2014-2024). The first blog was on the occasion of the graduation ceremony for the School of Art, on July 16, 2014. Today, this year’s ceremonies at Aberystwyth University commence.

8.15 am: Studyology. 1982-3. My fine art education were marked by vacillations, too many interests, a lack of conviction regarding which would be the most fruitful avenue of inquiry, and a conspicuous capacity to major in minors. In these respects, I was a typical, middling student. Back then, my admiration went out to those monomaniac colleagues who’d hit the ground running, and didn’t look to either the left or the right throughout the course of their studies. However, I came to realize that a breadth of interest and facility was no bad thing, particularly for a future career that involved teaching. And focus did come, later on.

Throughout the day, I’ve been deleting images from the archive where there was either an excess of examples required to illustrate of a particular way of working, or the artworks are below par. I sometimes play this mind game: If I was forced to destroy 50% of my output, what would go? The choices have been very telling. ‘Think of the archive’s portfolios as a series of representative exhibitions, rather than as shop windows, John!’, my inner-tutor urged.

After lunch: ‘Undergraduate 1977-81’. Captioning and binning gets easier from here on in. In order to rest my eyes from the computer screen periodically, I leafed through Geoffrey Batchen’s The forms of Nameless Things: experimental photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot (2024). It’s a remarkable anthology of test strips and trial techniques that anticipate, at the very inception of the medium, much later abstract conceptions of photography (not to mention putatively supernaturalist manifestations of the same).

July 17 (Wednesday). 7.30 am: Feeling groggy, still tired, and bleary-eyed. A day for remaining indoors. My body appears to be fighting the consequences of last week’s jab, still. I remained in ‘Undergraduate 1977-81’. Each reproduction summons the occasion of the work’s production, and with it the memory of my fellow students, teachers, studio space, indecisiveness, and wandering in the fog.

I came across a diagram — pasted into in a notebook kept during the second year of my BA studies — that, for the first time, attempts to objectify, textually and theoretically, my practice. ‘Attempt No. 2’ won the day, and underpinned an approach to making artwork that persisted for the next thirty years.

1.30 pm: Tutored by my web-design technician, I reorganized and continued to delete with a vengeance images from the portfolio for the period 1985-95. Once persuaded of the justice of my cause, I can be ruthless to the point of reckless. During this period (from 1986 to 1990) I under took PhD Art History studies, full-time. It was time, too, when I wanted to both breakaway from the landscape of my home (both Abertillery and Aberystwyth), present and past, and engage with religious, and specifically biblical, sources and ideas head-on.

July 18 (Thursday). 8.30 am: Studiology. Onward, to complete this phase of and, then, move to The Pictorial Bible series of portfolios. These will be far more straightforward to process. There was three-year hiatus in my visual practice between 1996 and 1999. In those years, from 1995 to 2005, I published two books, articles and, chapters, spoke at conferences, and served as Head of the School of Art.

The series marked an abandonment of all figuration in a bid to visualise biblical texts entirely abstractly.

1.30 am: In the background, I played the live video of this afternoon’s Graduation Ceremony, at which the School’s students graduated. Like the King’s Speech, the ceremony never changes. A constant. High seriousness. The occasion saw Professor Catrin Webster’s first outing as Head of School, and the ‘crowning’ of one of my former PhD Fine Art tutees, the Rev Dr Carmen Mills. Well done! 5.30 pm: Carmen invited a number of those who’d supervised her to share a meal at a local watering-hole.

July 19 (Friday). 8.00 am: Arise (later than usual). 8.30 am: Studiology. By 10.00 am: I completed ‘The Pictorial Bible I 1999-2000’ portfolio, and moved into ‘The Pictorial Bible II 2006-7’ After lunch, it was on to ‘The Pictorial Bible III 2012-15’. By the close of the evening, the first run-through of the archive’s reordering and captioning was complete. A good week’s work.

The third project in The Pictorial Bible series introduced the use of biblical texts as texts, in a suite of works collectively titled ‘Bible Studies’. It paved the way for the use of the spoken and written text of the scriptures as the basis of many of the compositions that comprise The Aural Bible series of projects.

See also: Intersections (archive);  Diary (September 15, 2018 – June 30, 2021); Diary (July 16, 2014 – September 4, 2018); John Harvey (main site); John Harvey: Sound; Facebook: The Noises of Art; X; Instagram.