This view from my studio window at EMPAC reminds me of a comment by a pensioner in Liverpool, during a Superflex project I was part of some years ago (working with residents of tower blocks in the city to produce their own web tv channel). The pensioner was a lifelong Marxist who was deeply saddened at the tower blocks imminent demolition as now “the churches will be the tallest buildings on the horizon again.”
This in turn makes me think of William Smith, the father of modern geological mapping, articulating the science of geology from the top of the tower of York Minster, as it was the only strategically placed manmade structure that was tall enough for him to confirm his theories about the processes of rock formation.
The desktop picture on my laptop has been a constant through my time at EMPAC. It’s Nicolas Poussin’s “Landscape with Diogenes”. It shows the moment Diogenes discarded his last possession – a piece of technology (supposedly he saw a youth drinking water with cupped hands and threw away his drinking cup, seeing he had no need for it).
And the tapes to the left of the laptop are part of the hundred hours or more of footage that were shot for The giSt n.
The EMPAC show is running till April 30th, but my personal time upstate finishes tomorrow. Just finishing up the principal photography work for a documentary on my work, provisionally entitled “Deface the Currency”…
…that and looking out of the window, with increasingly fragmented thoughts and free associations. The adrenalin I mentioned in an earlier post is pretty much gone now. Time to get back to Brooklyn.
Graham Parker 