Summa: diary (February 22-27, 2025)

Act!

February 22 (Saturday). 8.15 am: An ambulation across the Promenade.

9.00 am: Prescription retrieval and a little light shopping for some of life’s fundamentals at the supermarket. ‘Where can I find eggs, please?’, I asked an assistant. ‘On the bacon aisle’, she replied. I apprehended the logic, immediately. No doubt sausages will be found on the baked-bean aisle; fish, on the chips [fries] aisle (as proved to be the case); and macaroni, on the cheese aisle. I see no problem with this arrangement.

10.15 pm. Home, armchair, tea. 10.30 am: Domestic chores and studylogy. 2.00 pm: A long-overdue endeavour to simplify, map, and rectify the cabling network joining the TV to the digital recorder, various channel boxes, the analogue aerial, and Internet. Armed with several pliers, wire cutters, screwdrivers, notebook, cable ties, and sticky labels, I engaged the task with the composure and determination of a bomb-disposal engineer. First, I simplified the cabling system: snip; snip; snip. My objective was to diagnose and remedy the TV’s Ethernet failure. Which I both did and didn’t do, simultaneously. (Schrödinger’s fix.) By a process of elimination, I established that either one or the other of two devices had failed and needed replacing. I re-established the TV’s Internet connection via the domestic Wi-Fi instead.

February 23 (Sunday). 7.30 am: The outer commotion: strong winds pressed down, and light rain prevailed. (I abandoned my ambulation, for the umbrella’s sake.)

8.30 am: The inner commotion: My spirit stirs. (‘Like a rushing mighty wind.’)

2.00 pm: As the wind and rain pressed against my window panes, I took a journey with the author of a book, and listened, sung, and moved to the music of my youth. 7.00 pm: In the evening, I watched Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987). When viewed on my own, I weep.

‘My foolish heart’.

February 24 (Monday).

Student: ‘You once told me that: “To move forward in my work, I must risk failure”‘.
Me: ‘No! I said: “To move forward in your work, you must first fail”‘.

8.00 am: A communion. 8.30 am: Domestic chores: flitting between washing and casting-off old clothes with the same dispassion that my family will exercise when they dispatch my belongings after I pass. I’ve almost completed planning my funeral (while still in a sound mind), finalised my ‘digital legacy’ (so that my offspring can access and maintain or otherwise delete my websites), and begun drawing-up plans for the disposal of artworks, equipment, writings, and books. Not that I’m presently aware of any bodily or mental malfunction that will hasten my departure. However, death is inevitable; its closer today than it ever has been. The only thing I’m not prepared for — is to be a burden to my surviving loved ones, by leaving them a raft of unnecessary choices and second guesses.

12.15 pm: An ambulation and shoppery, on such a day that made me forget yesterday’s dismal presentation of the weather.

I’ve been asked, often: ‘Do you do anything just for the fun of it, or the pleasure it gives?’ To my embarrassment, I answer either ‘No!’ or ‘Rarely’. As a child (like most children, I hazard), pursuits were undertaken for the sheer joy of doing them. No rationale, justification, ‘anticipated outcome’, or critical appraisal attached themselves. Somewhere along the way, I’ve lost that capacity … to my deficit (possibly). Below: when the pretence of being able to play a plastic Beatles guitar was fun.

On the rear of this photograph are two inscriptions: one, in my mother’s handwriting, stating that it was taken on the occasion of my 5th birthday; another, in my own handwriting, stating: ‘Found the piano tiresome, began thinking in terms of forming a rock band’. The latter has me flummoxed.

February 25 (Tuesday). 8.15 am: Writing. While preparing to retire, I was contacted by someone who was in the photograph taken immediately prior to the one above. We’ve not communicated in over five decades. She was, quite literally, ‘the girl next-door’ back then. This really has been a month for very long-overdue reunions. My timeline has been telescoped suddenly and profoundly.

Back then (1960-2), at home, in detail:

I enlarged a photograph, taken of me when one year old. ‘What are you searching for, John: a gun emerging from a bush; a synthetic snake skin; an entrance; a way back; someone you recognise; someone who recognises you, returning your gaze?’

Whit Monday, Somerset Street, Abertillery, Wales (May 22, 1961) [detail].

10.45 am: Studiology. I reviewed the Aberfan [working title] structure, conscious that it was getting tied down too soon, conceptually, and developing a predictable response to the historical sequence of events. The project needs a bigger idea within which the narrative can sit.

1.00 pm: A soiree with my friend and former student Wayne Summers and his wife Melanie Summers over pizza at my home. He is an artist, foremost, who’s also undertaking a PhD Fine Art degree. Wayne has a prodigious energy and output, and could give an artist half his age a run for their money. I’ve always been impressed by his focus and determination. We’re the same age, more or less. Consequently, our terms of reference have a great deal in common. At times, we think in parallel.

4.00 pm: The day’s second conversation, held at a recently re-situated cafe/restaurant on the boundary of the town centre. This was my second bout of discursive and responsive exchange of memories, experiences, and sagacity with the writer Julie Brominicks, whose virtues I extolled previously on the this blog. (See: Summa: diary (February 8-24, 2025).) On this occasion, I found myself sitting at her feet, receiving the fruit of her own instincts, intuitions, lessons in life, and labours.

February 26 (Wednesday). 8.00 am: Writing. 9.15 am: An ambulation prior to a haircut.

10.45 am: Studylogy. ‘I get by with a little help with my friends’, sang the Beatles. As this is as true in the realms of creative practice as it is in life in general. Julie Brominicks (above) courageously challenged me to think about how I might approach the live performance of my sound work.

Response Letter 1: I was staying in a hotel in Helsinki in 2008, next to a park hosting a festival of electronic dance music. The artist on stage wore an anorak and beanie and stood motionless, save for the gestures of his hands on the laptop before him. Sonically, his delivery was competent. Visually, I found him disengaging. The performance exemplified what I would not be aiming at, should I undertake a live and public presentation of my sound work — which I did, for the first time, a year later, as part of a lecture about my research on Protestant aniconicism and art, at the University of Calgary, Canada. The sound adjunct was an illustration to the academic discourse: a presentation rather than a performance; an elucidation rather than an entertainment. (That has been the condition of my sound presentations in an academic context ever since.) The Calgary piece was delivered using an electric guitar, effects pedals, and a backing track. A second version was presented live at Princeton Theological Seminary, USA, in 2011.

The few other occasions on which I’ve ‘presented’ in public have arisen out of the needs of the collaborators, who were often my PhD Fine Art tutees. In 2010 and 2011, I explored visual-to-sound analogues with the visual artist Marie Hayes (In Concert: To Do Something in Cooperation with Another (2010); Energy Gift Exchange Day (2011)); and, again, with the visual artist Adam Blackburn (Live Art: Dialogues2: Improvisation Through Drawing and Sounding (2012)); and, yet again, with the artist Marcel Duchamp, posthumously (Erratum Musical (2014)).

Alongside these activities, I’ve held periodic 24-hour ‘open-studio’ events at the National Library of Wales. The public wandered in and out of my transmigrated home studio, observed/auditioned my process of composition and the equipment, and either engaged in conversation or choose to ignore me.

I recognise that my prior public sound outings have been:

presentations rather than performances;
undertaken within an academic context;
often collaborative, within the ‘laboratory’ environment of a gallery;
directed towards either the collaborator or/and the task at hand, rather than an audience.

My better instinct would suggest that (contrary to any desire I may have presently) I should continue on the straight and narrow path I’ve travelled thus far. I can’t see myself reinventing “John Harvey” as “DJ Prof”, somehow.

11.00 am: I enjoyed a rare exchange of ideas and questions with my friend, former student, and artist Helen Cass. She has embarked upon a courageous extension to her practice, which takes her, to my mind, into architectural form — in particular developments that I associate with 1940s and 1950s Modernism. I recalled the building complex designed for the Dunlop Semtex rubber factory (built 1946-52), Brynmawr, Wales, where my father worked for many years as a colourman. The complex had a significant impact on my appreciation of modern architectural form, grids, and repetition. One part to the factory avoided an appointment with the wrecking ball: the boiler house, which I’d pass on the walk from my school in Nantyglo to Brynmawr, where I bought chips [fries].

Architects’ Co-Partnership and Ove Arup, Boiler house, Dunlop Semtext rubber factory, Brynmawr, Wales (1946-52).

Helen (not unsurprisingly) took this old bull by the horns, and asked when I might return two making two-dimensional art.

Response Letter 2: If two-dimensional work presents itself as the most appropriate mode of realising an idea, then I’ll make it in the future. That is my precondition. The sound work is, in my experience, composed using the same ideational processes and critical frameworks that I used to fashion visual art in the period from 1999 to 2015. (I stopped making images thereafter, because I’d solved the problem I’d set for myself.) For this reason, I don’t miss two-dimensional manufacture. It’s all one to me. The Aberfan [working title] sound project that’s floating in the studio presently, began not only with that tragic event but also its mediation on TV. The black and white after-images of the broadcast made an impress on my visual imagination that endures. If two-dimensional art is to arise in the short term, then, it’s likely to emerge out of these memories. But presently my conception of their images (as well as of the sonic response to this project) is still too “figurative”, accessible, and literal for comfort.

*Test Card C,* television network version (first transmitted in July 1948) BBC, UK.

Too rigid a modus operandi? I’m not persuaded otherwise. My late-modernist art education, coupled with a protestant nonconformist upbringing, taught me to be suspicious of my motives, and test every intent against the touchstone of pragmatism, reasonableness, rightness, and necessity.

February 27 (Thursday). 8.00 am: A short ambulation (to deposit my excess on the steps of a charity shop in town), and a communion — to think aloud, and prayer inwardly.

8.45 am: Studiology. I’m not prevaricating. Rather, I’m strategically forestalling a re-engagement with my sound equipment in order to rethink the Aberfan [project] at arm’s length. Meanwhile, the studio equipment must be woken up, dusted down, and put through its paces.

10.00 am: A jaunt to the School of Art to attend two exhibitions: Paentio Dwyflynyddol BEEP 2024 | BEEP Painting Biennial 2024 and Alex Gilbey’s Y Rhyfel na Ddigwyddodd | The War That Never Came. These two contrasting statements are nevertheless joined at the hip. Both, in very different ways, address these uncertain times.

The artists selected for inclusion in Beep were

given the title of a song from a rescued 7” vinyl record and [asked to] create a new painted cover for it. The painted record covers each measuring 18cm x 18cm, and the music forms the main content of the exhibition.

A simple idea that sustained an engaging, varied, and very human compendium of responses to the task.

11.15 am: Studiology. ‘Remember, John!’: