Gnomes

This is Norman, he is a little white ceramic gnome who watches over the strawberries in my garden. He isn’t real but the squirrels think he is, thats how it works. I’m not too sure how he fits with the subject of this post, other than the fact that he depicts a magical being. He looked so nice out in the sunshine that I had to take his picture and show it to you.

Back to Bataille in the caves of Lascaux. He says that those paintings were not necessarily magic, they didn’t all serve a function, i.e. to help the hunter etc.. he offers the suggestion that the people who painted those images were playing. It is play that distinguishes our kind of human from the Neanderthal, who just made tools and worked. Art making was the first playful act. In this light it makes sense that the advert, I’m going back to the ‘Rowntrees’ Randoms’, is a kind of magical act/image. It most certainly serves a purpose and it does this through enchantment.

Two pieces in this years Northern Art Prize highlight my preoccupations. Crowe and Rawlinson’s video ‘Twinkle’, shows two figures wearing leprachaun outfits. The video image has been filtered to create an hallucinatory colouring and twinkle effect and the figures have been mirrored so as they move the fixed symmetry of their faces makes them appear beast-like. I felt as though i should have liked this work but it didn’t really move me, it was a bit horrific but what happens after that?. It was all effect and the way it had been made sort of stripped it of interest. On the other hand Pavel Buchlers ‘il castillo’, two tiny pencil ends sharpened down to spell the title out of their remaining text was all about work and play. The real magic is in the relationship between the two. He doesnt need to dress up and behave like a shaman to induce the feeling of joy or understanding one gets when encountering art. He just showed a little bit of himself, enough to reach out…