sitting here thinking and writing and staring at the laptop and looking out of the kitchen window pissed that it’s raining and colder than it should be for this time of the year listening to talking heads drinking lukewarm tea noting that i bite my nails too much farting and giggling and knowing i need to shit but not enough to get off my chair and go to the toilet and looking at the laptop some more desperate for something anything a hook a sign a line a word that’ll jolt me out of my skin and begin

Cease

Producing

Stimuli

A title. That’s what I need. Something simple. Something real. Clever, telling, ironic. It must be a little sardonic, but not arrogant so that it obfuscates or dilutes my announcement to write an essay on artists and performers that start up and ride a visual, aural, conceptual and intellectual merry-go-round. A cycle of act, art, thought, word, sound, mark, movement, act, art et cetera that attempts to better understand the world in which we’re all trying to live. Happily. Even if not for ever. Definitely not for after. A world that requires experience to be sequestered and sequenced in to palatable (sound)bites of being and memory. The same dance. Over and over again. A world that remains consistent in so many ways yet as infuriatingly ineluctable as ever and so all we can do is hop on that plastic horse, grip tight, look at the lights and spin round and round and round like a record, baby, until, finally, we stop and open our eyes.

Then what?

This is the then what.

Cease

Stimuli

Producing

The Sine of the Sign of our Times: A search for entrances and exits, beginnings and ends in the shapes and sounds of eleven artists

Not sure about the title. Fuck it. Let’s roll with this and see how I get on. I really need to shit first though.

RIDING THE SINE OF OUR SIGNS

Stop making sense
Quit talking
Stop making sense
Start falling
Stop making sense
Hold onto me
You're always at your best
When you're not making sense

Mating Ritual, Stop Making Sense (2018), (songwriters: Ryan Lawhon, Sean Van Vleet)

“Stop making sense”. I immediately think of David Byrne in that enormous suit of his in Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film of Talking Heads’ live performance, shot over four nights, at the Pantages Theatre in Los Angeles in December 1983. Byrne wriggling on stage like a tanked, tan termite, performing “Psycho Killer” and “Burning Down the House” and “Take Me to the River” like a man possessed; a man giving confession for sins we do not understand; a man in the throes of primal therapy. It’s that call, that plea for you, me, the rest of the world to stop. Look. Listen. Understand that the world around us doesn’t make any sense. Byrne wants the world to press pause and reconsider; rejig; recalibrate itself. Not to stop making, but to start forging and articulating content, essence and value. Differently. Because the world just got different, and not in a good way.

But to start, firstly, you have to stop.

Stop the noise, make the sound.

Stimuli

Cease

Producing

Byrne still does think this. Many do. I do. We live in curious, challenging, fucked-up times. An age ravaged by rupture, violence, bifurcation. Times of walls and boundaries, wars and Brexits. Some enter, some leave, some come, some go. Talking of Michelangelo, as T.S. Eliot once wrote. Violent shifts to the right are mirrored by equally dynamic moves to the left. Each position or strategy seeking hope, meaning, comfort. Seeking some sense of it all. Of all of this that none of us can really fathom. Where did this start. How does this end? When did this start? Why? By whom? Who has all the answers? Are there any answers?

Yet we are left with no sense. Sometimes even nonsense. And in there we can find a tiny kernel of hope. In that space between sense and nonsense; between fiction and reality; between nature and artifice sits art. And it is inside art that we can – we hope – find some architecture of meaning, some clever little app that allows us to understand what the fuck is actually happening in our world.

Stop / start. Begin / end. Here / there. Now / never. Antagonisms like this fuel the eleven artists selected by curators Daniel Allison and Sam Hailey-Watts as part of their exhibition, Cease Producing Stimuli, presented during the Deptford X Arts Festival. Objects, positions, performances, sounds all coalesce together in this week-long presentation, offering the viewer a myriad of different takes and shakes on this ever-shifting, constantly morphing, seismically snookered political, social and (subsequently) artistic realm we all currently experience. This show thus reverberates with objects knee-deep in that quixotic quagmire of synecdoche, metonym and oxymoron, purposefully interrogating the hegemonies of object, subject and status. Protagonists and practices slip from sign to signifier in the blink of an eye. Things don’t end but begin anew. Being is replaced by becoming only for origin to become its own conclusion.

Round and round we go, always looking; always seeking for a truth that may not even exist. But we try. They try. They, we must try.

Stop.

Start.

Stop.

Start again.

I’ve put all the names of all the artists into a hat and I’m going to write about them based on the order they come out of the hat. Fuck the alphabet. Fuck order. Fuck rules. Fuck language. Fuck signs. Need to shit again. I wonder what I ate? Fuck.

NUMBER 1: ROSIE KENNEDY

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.”

Dr. Seuss quoted in Miles Corwin, “Author Isn’t Just a Cat in the Hat”, The Los Angeles Times, 27 November 1983

Rosie Kennedy makes objects and installations that turn their initial, material truths on their heads, radically rebirthing them as entirely different objects, images and indices. She slaps function on the face. She kicks form in the head. Kennedy usurps and hijacks. She wrests away from the old new and exciting possibilities, both perceptible and hidden, both physical and intellectual, for the ‘object’ and its tributaries of signification. Such is the case here in Kennedy’s Pending Plaque (2019). Four smartphones are nailed together, forming a single unit, suspended (and charged) by their own leads. Technology has been tortured to within an inch of its life. Made pathetic and redundant. The sexy gloss and shiny veneer of these futuristic smartphones now ragged and rueful, dangling in the air like victims of a lynch mob, hoisted by petards of others’ doing. Kennedy’s doing.

Communication, entertainment, information all subjugated now by the artist’s persecution of function and her distress of form. No more speaking to Mum; no more Candy Crush; no more Tinder. Photographs of the phones remain lit on the phones themselves. Their past glory part of their present demise. Their dissolution the end of the beginning of their accomplishment as a functioning form, but also signifying the birth of their new status. Kennedy whips the function out of form leaving us with but a flagellated cypher of hope for what was; a plaque or headstone for what could have been. She takes the smart out of smartphone, like she puts the no in technology, reminding us to remind ourselves that we need not become hostages of our phones or our Instagram and Twitter identities. Kennedy keeps it - and us - real. We are nothing less. The rest is nothingness.

#techno

#notech

NUMBER 2: AL FRESCO

“Italians use the expression 'al fresco' to mean 'in the chill' or 'in the cool'. ... When tourists are in a restaurant and want to eat outside, they usually say they want to eat 'al fresco'. This is a funny mistake. In Italian, the expression has a completely different meaning. 'Al fresco' literally means 'in prison'! Al Fresco, the outfit we are discussing here, describe the phrase as (outdoors) -- literally, ‘to fuck outdoors’”.

From Mark Harwood,“Al Fresco” in AG 14, 23 August 2019.

Al Fresco are a London-based trio working with sound. Lia Mazzari, Tom White and Sholto Dobie collaborate to make an electro fusion of concrete sound that chimes with musical notes achieved with traditional and non-conventional instruments. Their performances have no beginning nor end; their composition sitting entirely at the centre of their improvisation. Out of that musical ad-libbing strange and beautiful sounds, textures, melodies, reveries emerge. Sound, by its very nature, is never static, never regulated. Like a stream it runs, pools, eddies, collects, disperses. Al Fresco lets us dive into that fluidity – of performance, sound and gesture.

The parts of the sum don’t always add up to the sum of the parts.

NUMBER 3: ADAM DIX

“It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterise the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or, lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet’s own spirit.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, (1817), Chapter XV

I know Adam Dix. He’s a friend of mine. So, I’ll refer to him as Adam, as opposed to Dix. And, anyway, every time I see ‘Dix’, I hear ‘dicks’. Which puts me off when I’m trying to write about Adam and his work.

#dix

#dicks

Adam teases us. He offers a little piece of chocolate, drawing you ever closer into his sweetly coloured narrative, his foggy drama, his cunning grasp. Once you’ve bitten into his chocolate and swallowed, it’s only then that you realise you’ve been dosed. Adam opens the door of perception and invites us into hallucinogenic vignettes of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Weirdly. Adam ever so subtly transmogrifies those very British, folkish rituals one associates with cute yet curious traditions, such as morris dancing. Age-old, rural innocence becomes blighted by its encounter with futuristic, ethereal forms of communication. Farmer Joe meets General Zog and we’re all asked to join them on their journey to meet Joe’s leader. Rings of dancing girls encircle satellite dishes, sending messages only God knows where. Perhaps to God, herself.

But it gets darker than that. Much darker. As one can clearly see in a new painting of Adam’s called Chant (2019). With their hands aloft in heady celebration, a standing figure and three kneeling ones surround and confront an inexplicable, mysterious object. Behind them a wall glows like a 1970’s disco dance floor paying homage to Anni Albers. It is pretty yet something feels not quite right. Are they communicating with the object? Are they praying to it? It almost looks like a microphone, perhaps broadcasting these protagonists’ collective chant. Or perhaps the object is not inanimate. Perhaps it is some Whovian-like villain who has captured these four people so that their hands aloft signify their surrender. Adam’s scene oscillates between candied optimism and sinister pessimism. Between a light-infused Hallelujah and the encroaching darkness of claustrophobia.

Adam takes the languages of ceremony and festival and wipes the darkness of the uncanny and the supernatural all over it. His is the land of the Wicker Man; the films of M. Night Shyamalan with his figures exhaling their unease at their indexical incarceration, trapped in a Willy Wonka-esque world where all that is sweet and wonderful tastes of shit and fills you with horror. Just the horror. Only the horror. The influx of the other triggers the self into flux.

i’m all of a sudden quite hungry writing for a while with no music on because i’m afraid it will put me off my thought processes and i need to try and keep a clear head i am going to listen to bowie for a bit think i’ll play bewley brothers and eat a crumpet

I fucking love crumpets.

NUMBER 4: SAMUEL DEVEREUX

If you go on to Samuel Devereux’s website (www.samueldevereux.com) there are two links to click on. If you click on WORK then up comes an exciting array of the artist’s work. If you click on ABOUT then up comes nothing. Just his email and an evanescent field of hazy colour, slightly moving, which is a detail of the surface of one of his sculptures. There is little written on Devereux and his praxis. There is nothing offered by the artist himself. He is, therefore, something of an enigma; as inviolable and sacrosanct as that wobbly little Rothko-esque cloud on his website.

So, here’s ten things I figured out about Samuel Devereux.

Samuel Devereux is an artist.

Samuel Devereux does not write nor speak in public about his art.

Devereux is an anagram of “U’re vexed”.

‘Vexed’ is a very good word to begin thinking about Devereux’s sculpture.

I’m stopping at 4 because I don’t like the big font. Too shouty.

TOO SHOUTY

‘Vexed’ is, indeed, a good place and disposition from which to begin exploring Devereux’s art. Polymer modified plaster works look like the love child of Giacometti’s Femme de Venice and Dubuffet’s early, brutal figures fashioned out of dirt and hair and earth. The artist literally agitates the architectonic, phallic power of geometric, hierarchical form, perplexing it with diseased surfaces of iron powder or shellac or, in turn, causing the original form to bend or curl or splay, a victim of Devereux’s constant vexing of his original material.

In contrast to these very physical, albeit malleable monuments, Devereux has also made much more fragile and frangible works. Strands of painted silicone cascade from the ceiling to floor, with each individual strand latticed or twined around another, forming a kind of rope-like structure. From whence it came or where it goes, no one knows.

The marriage of these two trajectories can be found in his work, Should I be Worried (2019). St. Bartholomew’s flayed skin dangles over an etiolated trellis. Flaccid, limp yet febrile and lusty. Devereux pairs hyperbole with litotes with the result a wonderful, powerful vexation of form and space. Which is exactly what great sculpture does and should do.

These large iterations slice and splice the space(s) they are exhibited in so that one’s experience of them is inextricably linked to one’s conscious engagement with the space that houses them. And vice versa. Devereux’s smaller sculptural works, executed in epoxy resin coated in powdered ball clay, offer tiny vignettes – as if pulled from the ashes of Pompeii – of organic abstraction. Whispers of Germaine Richier, Kenneth Armitage and even Jake and Dinos Chapman hang in the air when contemplating them. Devoid of colour, lumpy in construction, heavy in presence and presentation they still breathe and excite because of their visceral vitality as objects and as relics of this artist’s exciting sculptural practice. Nature infecting artifice. Decay made beautiful.

NUMBER 5: JODY DE SCHUTTER

Jody, like Adam, is a friend. Coincidentally ‘De Schutter’ sounds a little like a Dutchman referring to his toilet. I’m, therefore, as with Adam, also glad to continue referring to Jody by her first name in this essay.

I’ve been writing for almost 6 hours now and I’m tired.

I think I am going to stop.

Have a glass of wine.

Call it a day.

Pick this up tomorrow.

I’m worried I haven’t said enough whilst writing too much.

We’ll see …

And I’m back in the room.

Suddenly I think I'm on the phone
Suddenly I think I'm telling a story
But I'm not
I'm just dancing
I'm just dancing
I'm just dancing
I'm just sleeping
I'm just raving
I'm just repeating

And on
And on
And on
And on

Fatboy Slim and Riva Starr, featuring Beardyman, Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat (2013), (songwriters: Norman Cook, Calvin Harris, Darren Alexander Foreman, Stefano Miele)

There are two Jodys. Known and unknown. Word and sound. Shape and process. Id and ego. Both these Jodys weave in and out of each other, shaping, caressing, finessing a formal and epistemological pluralism that delights and penetrates both in juxtaposition and contradistinction. Jody speaks, sculpts, installs, performs and paints. And the commonality that runs through all these diverse pursuits is her intention to capture, isolate and amplify that very diversity, and all the paradoxes that come with being a spoken word artist who paints or a sculptor who performs. Connections abound across the widest possible plains and planes of creativity in the inventive art of Jody de Schutter.

I like the feel of her sculpture; the rhythm and metre of her intonation; the gravity of her performance; the fleshiness of her painting.

SCULPTURE

INTONATION

PERFORMANCE

FLESHINESS

FEEL

GRAVITY

PAINTING

RHYTHM

Each adjective works with each discipline. Each practice ignites the same mood and feelings in her viewer or audience. A brushstroke becomes a spoken word; a wooden veneer becomes a stoic performance. Everything sort of dovetails together so neatly, so effortlessly in Jody’s practice. Round balls fit square holes. And all she needs to do is push gently. With her brush.

You can see all of this consanguinity in a simple little painting. Performing ways of becoming (2019) sees a Jacob’s Ladder of hands extend up Jody’s canvas, set against a chiselled background of scratched blacks and hatched greys. Hands, like eyes, never lie. They have personalities of their own. Jody’s hands meditate, bless, snap and implore all at once, dancing in and out of passion, compassion, impression and expression. It is a delightful, beautifully executed painting of a notoriously difficult subject to paint, but it sings not because it has been deftly done. It sings because it is a solo performance in a much grander score of imagination and achievement.

Painting as performance as sculpture as poem as painting as … You spin me right round, baby, right round … round the mulberry bush.

NUMBER 6: NAPE

Nape is a musician, DJ and sound artist. It’s hard to label his sound but ‘industrial’ is a word that helps. I will attempt to describe his sound in just ten sentences.

Panic station on a submarine.

Tachycardia.

Those who do not obey will be punished.

White noise.

Row faster.

Don’t shoot. Shoot.

Infomercials for Scientology.

Do androids dream of sheep?

Looking for love in all the wrong places.

I’m throwing my typewriter in the bin because none of my words make any sense.

[

]

End.

NUMBER 7: NIELS BUGGE

“… Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart … I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star … to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius … and a very stable genius at that!”

Donald Trump, quote taken from two tweets made from his @realdonaldtrump Twitter account, 6 January 2018

Niels Bugge tells lies. Gloriously long-winded and palaverous lies.

currently struggling to write here because the husband is making a racket getting ready for the day it is morning and still raining outside donnie is also trying to make dinner reservations at a restaurant in japan and annoyed because he has to use my long surname for the reservation i told him to use his and he told me to shut up or else he’d shit in my mouth all of this is true

Start again.

Niels Bugge tells lies. Gloriously long-winded and palaverous lies. He fabricates extended, complex narratives that wend their way through fact and fiction, through sound and object; through concept and performance. Basically, Bugge buggers history. One of the artist’s most comprehensive webs of deceit is his M.A.R.B. project. Those letters stand for The Museum of Anthropology, Religion and Bioengineering. Bugge has even built a website and created an Instagram account (@marb_research) for this imaginary museum.

Bugge tells a story where Planet Earth will be ravaged in around 600 years from now as Artificial Intelligence abandons humans, in the process depleting Earth of all its technology which, in turns, results in a loss of knowledge. Because, you know, the entire contents of the British Library can now be stored in a chip the size of … well … a chip. M.A.R.B. exists to research, display and protect artefacts from that period; objects that speak of cultures and customs that lead up to the period where knowledge is lost.

Procreation Dinos is from the High Neomechanical era (2500-2900 A.I.D.E. [Artificial Intelligence Departure from Earth]). It is a ceramic pot, adorned with female, Pre-Colombian like figures, sat up with their legs splayed, revealing holes, as if about to give birth. Or about to have sex. A phallic spout protrudes from the pot.

The pot is employed to ensure procreation without the need for intercourse. Culture and society survive and does not need to be predicated upon, or infected by, the vagaries and viruses of sex. The pot would have been employed by an elite female member of society and filled with sperm from three suitable donors. Once filled, the pot would have been inserted into the Queen, freshly fertilized and thus able to continue her line of authority.

All of this is true and not true. And therein lies the rub of Bugge’s extraordinary vision. Artificial intelligence meets artificial insemination. Both of those concepts exist in real time. Yet their truth becomes Bugge’s invention. An invention that harks back to the past, even if it speaks of the future. History and memory thus become fantasy and science fiction, begging us to determine what is real and what isn’t. The problem and the solution are one and the same. None of it is real. All of it is true. Mind blown.

NUMBER 8: CHARLES HAYWARD

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1919)

The experimental drummer and musician Charles Hayward’s performance Rattlesnake and Slow Train is a work that transports its viewer directly into the mouth of that ominous Yeatsian gyre. It is a performance that sees Hayward make surprising sounds out of the most innocuous materials. Meaning garnered from vanity. Glass bottles rubbed together create a discomfort that, strangely, after a while, pleases. Beads inside large cans rolled across the floor. A speaker, making phantasmagoric reverb, wheeled across a stage in a baby’s pushchair.

Hayward multitasks in the performance playing an array of instruments at the same time – as if he tests not just his own invention but also the capacity of each instrument. All the while, swimming through this multifaceted performance, are Hayward’s words, like the shedding rattlesnakes he speaks of. Sliding in and out of piano notes or plastic, cheap mouth organ toots, leaving traces of his spoken word to cling on to his abbreviated but no less punchy musicality.

Hayward will perform a piece called FRIGS MAINTENANCE. Noise from South East London overlapped with spoken word.

Sound as poetry as performance as music. Word as noise as sounds of the city.

NUMBER 9: MELANIE BOOTH

On 3 July 2013, Boris Johnson – then the Mayor of London - held a press conference at City Hall with the then Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak. They were both answering questions at the launch of the Islamic Economic Forum. Mr. Razak took a question about female education in the Muslim world, which he claimed he had boosted in Malaysia, with the 2013 university intake in his country showing that 68% of new students would be women. Johnson then interjected, saying “They’ve got to find men to marry.” No-one laughed at his risqué joke. The audience merely groaned.

(source: The Independent, 8 July, 2013)

Feminism is like an onion (2018) is a typically witty yet confrontational work by the multidisciplinary artist, Melanie Booth. Booth works with a plethora of different media – from textiles to video – yet her conversation remains steadfast. She explores several issues surrounding gender inequality, inveighing against the social and political architecture in place that props up such stereotyping.

This work was initially shown in Sydney at Booth’s graduation show at the Sydney College of the Arts last year in a presentation she titled I hung out his washing and it made me feel guilty. A lusciously red linen banner is hand embroidered in thread with tiny flowers, cut peaches and leaves, with those floral emblems occasionally evincing a distinctly fallopian morphology. And those peaches, of course, signifying vaginas. But we don’t talk about that, do we? That’s not a very nice thing to bring up at one’s coffee morning now, is it?

It is clearly a banner for womanhood: bright, organic, deliberately pretty. But a certain type of womanhood. The sort of banner that ladies from the Godalming Women’s Institute would proudly display. Or perhaps it could be used as a blanket for one of those tables that the Conservative Party use when having country fetes to raise money for the local candidate in Uxbridge.

But this isn’t that type of embroidery. Emblazoned across the banner are the words SHAKE MY FUCKING HAND. It’s a demand for acknowledgement, for recognition, for achievement; as an artist and, of course, as a woman. But it’s also an infuriated, clenched fist, uncontrollably rattling in the air. Denied salute or acceptance, it is this female artist’s noisy, angry scream in to (and at) the phallocentricity that, still, dictates the attention of the world and, indeed, the art world and its market.

And who can fucking blame her?

NUMBER 10: BAG

“Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.”

L. Ron Hubbard quoted in The Los Angeles Times, 27 August 1978

BAG is an experimental spoken word / sound art collaboration between Daniel Allison and Jody De Schutter. Daniel Allison is not only the co-curator of Cease Producing Stimuli but also a very good friend. Just like his wife, Jody, with whom he performs as BAG. I’m going to refer to him as Dan, for fear that by calling him Allison one might get the impression Dan has an alter ego called Allison which he adopts only at night, dressing in Laura Ashley and wearing black patent leather kitten heels.

Dan.

Dan and Jody paint with words and sound. Dan makes haunting, repetitive beats that loop in and out of each other and which become impregnated with Jody’s spoken word. Jody makes a gentle, beautiful, unruffled sound when speaking, even if Dan’s sound rushes headfirst into speedier beats or slows down to a single, hovering drone. His inconsistency pushes her consistency – lexically and oratorically – to the front of our minds. We see with our ears. His variety provides the backdrop to her measured, imperturbable performance. We hear with our eyes.

And yet for all the distinction between two – as people, artistic elements, sounds, meanings – they blend as one when performing. A word is a sound. A sound means like a word.

NUMBER 11: JONNY GREEN

“Two fixed ideas can no more exist together in the moral world than two bodies can occupy one and the same place in the physical world.”

Alexander Pushkin, The Queen of Spades (1833)

Like Adam, Jody and Dan, Jonny Green is also a friend of mine. I’d like very much to refer to him by his first name. Little problem there though. His name – Jonny – is a slang term for a condom. Well, that’s me fucked then. Green it is.

Jonny Green puts subject and materials on an assault course before, finally, deciding to paint. Using pedestrian, found materials, visible to the eye but invisible to the heart, Green fashions objects, sculpted (if that is the right word, I’m not sure it is; I prefer harvested) with elements pressed and pulled and pushed out of plasticine. These kinky, kooky, plastic abstractions then live with the artist. And then the artist looks and thinks and waits. Once Green is happy with the form he has created (inevitably he adds and detracts from his object) he then photographs it. He plays around with lighting so as to engender, ironically, a number of painterly effects in his photographs. One can use language usually associated with the painterly pursuits of artists like Rembrandt - chiaroscuro; scumbling; tenebrism – to describe Green’s images. Finally, once he is happy with the image he has photographed, he paints it.

And then he destroys everything and starts on the next painting.

Big Prinz (2019) is the poster boy for this exhibition. As it should be. A large pebble, no doubt found on a beach, is marked with a red brushstroke and crossed with black tape. It sits atop a wheel of sorts, the top of which suggests it is some kind of navigational tool. You can see it clearly though, so it kind of hovers in that space between reality and fiction; between it being a discarded old compass or a mystical amulet ready to whisk you away to another dimension. That element then sits on top of a collection of small plasticine logs, already beginning to crumble under the weight of the assemblage. They look like tiny tubes of heroin, encased in cling film, recently deposited by a mule.

The painting is resolutely a Still Life. Yet it is anything but still. Shadow darts across Green’s canvas, pooling and massaging and arousing form. He paints plasticine like it feels: stodgy, gungy, viscous stuff. Likewise, he is able to describe the sensation of cool, smooth stone in the same way. As ever with Green’s painting, we are reminded that his surface is one made up of licks of paint. And that’s all we get from him. Tiny flecks of colour; beautiful little accidents of the brush; smudges and smears all congregate together to varnish Green’s lies with a veneer of truth. Or is it the other way around? I guess that’s the point. The veracity of this artist lies in his process. The making is the object and the object. The object doesn’t really matter. Even if the painting does, and incredibly so.

Green scrutinizes, surveys and selects. Out of that interrogation – one aimed at materials, processes and himself – emerge these extraordinary paintings that seem to herald from another time; another world. They’re Dada meets Surrealism meets Tom Baker’s Dr. Who’s nemesis meets Arcimboldo meets Weenix. They are the babies of that Structuralist throuple: sign, signifier, signified. Index as image; image as index.

What’s left to say? We do all swim in troubled waters at the moment. In Britain we are plagued by extremist positions that defend ridiculous political decisions that make no sense at all. Artists, like all of us, have responded to this collective brainfart we call Brexit. Objects are more slippery; messages more powerful, more political; materials poorer, more radical, more everyday; sound noisier, angrier.

Whether it’s Jonny Green’s bitterly banal yet beguiling trophies of and for an anaesthetized society or Adam Dix’s triumphant celebration of an other that we are yet to experience (but which hangs like a sinister omen just over the horizon), Image and its meanings becomes more chilling, more rebarbative, just as our society moves in to those dark alleys of the unknown. But which we do actually know as history, forever, repeats itself and we, forever, try to forget. Whether it is the scratchy, metallic, alienating sound of Nape or the sculptural surface – whipped and dragged and beaten into submission – of Samuel Devereux’s work, material is pushed to its limits. Probed and prodded in an effort to wring it dry of all possibilities – be they object, subject or, inevitably in today’s chaos, abject driven. Whether it be the re-reading of modern history in the protest of Melanie Booth or the complete retreat in to fantasy we see in the invented universe of Niels Bugge, today’s narrative is recounted in wildly different ways. Yet the search for truth, the search for sense, remains just as potent now as then. A path well travelled, but a path we need, we must, continue taking nonetheless.

Maybe, like the politicians, artists, writers, thinkers, all of us should just stop making sense. Stop producing stimuli. Maybe we should all embark on personal crusades of nonsense; of absurdity; speak jibberish; promote poppycock. Because what else do we have? What else have we been left with? What placards can we raise in the air that say, fuck this, we’re tapping out. We’ve had enough.

Well, we have these artists, creating and concocting and deconstructing and reconstructing tapestries of signs and signifiers, offering some answers, more questions and causing huge waves of scrutiny for and about the world we live in and those who run it. Or fuck it up. All we have to do, as viewers, is ride those waves. Up and down. In and out. And we’ll get there. Eventually. And that’s a start.

SO LET’S START.

#SENSE #PERCEPTION #ACKNOWLEDGEMENT #FACULTY #SIGHT #SMELL #HEARING #TASTE #TOUCH #AWARENESS #CONSCIOUSNESS #APPRECIATION #SAGACITY #PRACTICALITY #PURPOSE #REASON #OBJECT #MOTIVE #SIGNFICATION #DENOTATION #DIRECTION #DISCERNMENT #OBSERVATION #SENSUS #CONSENSUS #SENSATION #SENSUALITY #SENSITIVITY #SENSIBILITY #SUSCEPTIBILITY #SYMPATHY #SENSORY #SENSE

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Matt Carey-Williams works in London. He sells contemporary art at a gallery for a living. He writes about art in his spare time. He wishes it were the other way around. He lives between London and Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, with his husband, Donnie. His Instagram account is @matt_careywilliams. He tries his hardest to be a good person. He thinks he shits too much. He’s sure he talks about shit too much. He knows he talks shit too much.