Feb 2009

Dear all,

Very little to say this month - as everything is obviously going so well. Thanks due to Aaron for great work posting blogger material to the Discharge myspace.

Below is an interview I conducted with CJ - as part of us being included in the book, Avant-Garde For the New Millennium, edited by Forrest Armstrong.

Enjoy.

Anthony

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Murmurists interviews Cocaine Jesus

Hello CJ. I greatly admire the work you’ve done as a catalyst – in bringing together lots of great artists for the Discharge series you started. I think the effort you made – in terms of inviting the right contributors, keeping things moving, and such like – has had a profound effect on those people; and the community you helped create has made some fine work. But you are also an active contributor yourself. As such, I wonder, what are your personal motivations – principally as a writer, and also as a sometime image-maker?

Hello M, may I call you M? Makes you sound a bit like a bond character doesn’t it? Thank you for the praise. Catalyst indeed! I am very proud of Discharge and all the work being done there. It does have some fantastic and highly creative people on it. My personal motivations? I guess, the truth be told, I admire and am a little enamoured with you and all the like minded people there; in fact all creative people amaze me. I genuinely believe that there are two principles that differentiate us primates from the rest of the animal kingdom. 1. Our innate sense of spirituality and 2. Our natural creativity. I do not hold myself in a very high esteem when it comes to much of what is seen on Discharge, I am certainly not in the same league as Ruela or John or even your good self. I suppose I admire you all to such a degree that I want to work with you just to be a part of that process of which I find fascinating. Less a Malcolm MacClaren and more an awed observer. Don’t get me wrong here, I think my writing is as good as anyone’s but it is very different to what is currently the modus operandi that is seen on D5. If we are to distinguish what I do on Discharge as a separate output to my Fekenham Swarberry Tales then my motivations for that are purely selfish: I love it. I love the characters, the parallel universe it exists in and I love writing it. It is great fun for me and I am determined that it will be published and hopefully, one day, might even be seen as a Studio Ghibli type animation. I also would like to be able to write as a career.

Good luck with that, of course; and I’ll address the issue of getting work published in a moment. First, though, can you tell me is art-making a compulsive activity for you or do you see it as a form of recreation?

Simply something that I have always done and have to do. It sounds glib perhaps but creating, in what ever format, is a part of me. I do it as I am driving or doing the house hold chores. I am sure it is the same for all of us. The danger with that is knowing when to switch off. I am not certain that I do. I did try some while back to discipline myself. I took a week off work to write on a series of story’s that I have in my head. I would rise at 7AM each day. Have breakfast and do the sort of things one does before going to work. Then I ‘clocked’ on. I sat at my PC and wrote from 9AM until noon, took a break for some lunch, returned to work at about 12.30 and worked through until 5PM. I very much enjoyed the discipline of that and also the work ethic. I am, much like Mark. E. Smith, a firm believer in the work ethic.

I agree with your sentiments about hard work, yes. What do you hope to get across to the audience with your work?

Oh, several things and all at once too! Fun, outrage, energy, exasperation, joy, fear of aging, fear of authority, anger. (Anger is an energy after all), the absurdity of life and a total lack of understanding for any kind of po-faced seriousness. I don’t take myself very seriously and I do not take much in life very seriously either. Irreverence I guess.

What do you think your work is for?

Me. (Is that vain?)

Well, in some sense that need not be vanity, in my view. But if you are not seeking to bring meaning to the actual activity of art-making by, let’s call it, audience validation, then how do you yourself ascertain its value?

Oh lord, I have no idea! Highly important to me in what I need to do but value? No idea.

What for you would be the ideal response to your type of work?

Again, this will run the risk of making me seem self centred or self absorbed but so long as people are relatively polite I am not overly concerned by their response. I have no wish to offend, although I think society too easily gets offended by all the wrong things, but responses are often just based on taste and taste is a very personal thing.

Given that, do you think in terms of a definite audience? Do you have a mental image of your audience? Or are you unconcerned with such things; preferring, instead, to put the work out there on a like it or lump it basis?

When writing the Fekenham Tales I have a very focused view of who I am writing for and I think can judge that audience and its reactions well; when writing or creating images for Discharge it is very much a case of lump it or like it.

We already touched upon general aspects of how art-making and writing feature in your life. But I’m interested in how you precisely compose your pieces. Do you, for instance, write into a notebook and transfer ideas, passages etc. onto the screen, or do you create by typing directly into the computer?

Ideas float in at the most inappropriate of times and so I tend to use what ever is to hand at the time. Often a notebook which I transfer to my PC later. As is I said earlier, ideally, I would sit from morning to night writing and all on the ‘hoof’ but still there would be notes and references to call on. With my images, I normally take a photo (or steal one) and then ‘mutate it’ by various methods. I want it be as spontaneous and intuitive as possible. I try to have as little intellectual input as possible so that whatever comes out as the finished article is free of thought as can be.

So process is important to you. Over and above that, though, what are your abiding conceptual concerns?

Individuality. (Does it exist as we believe in the way we believe?) Isolationism. Absurdity. Nationalism. Tribalism.

What is the subject most occupying you currently?

Ha Ha, I could be brutally honest and say my finances but let us not go there!

You use a fair amount of self-portraiture in your images. Can you say more about this, about its function, and why you use your own image in your work.

I find that there is something odd about me, a bit of renegade narcissism. Not that I am really that vain but as one gets older odd things happen. Lines appear, hair begins to retreat. The perceived beauty that was goes and good bloody job too. I like growing old. I like the art of growing old be it gracefully or disgracefully but without the need for cosmetic surgery. My own face, and yours and anyone else fascinates me. The way various photos can project an image but often that image is false. Doriandra does it best and I have merely tried to emulate her. I have plans to do some really bizarre and brutally honest (but absurd) shots of my self naked. This may seem odd but hey ho! Self portraits are the sort of fun thing one does when as a teenager you shove your head into the old passport photo booth and gurn. That is pretty much it. Daft as a bag of frogs me!

Well, whatever one does could be seen as a form of portraiture, in my view. But let’s leave that issue hanging in the air! I look forward to your naked pictures, of course! You’ve previously stated that you see blogging as essentially ephemeral – which I took to mean something fleeting but not valueless. Could you say more about what you mean by this remark.

Art for me is the everday; that is not a dismissive remark as art is very, very important to me but art should not be placed on some bloody pedestal for all and sundry to worship at. Creativity is a human condition. We are all creative but by degrees. The great artists had more of a commercial appeal perhaps but they are no more creative than you or I. Again this is not to dismiss Gauguin or Dali or any other perceived great artist. The people who really make ‘great art’ are business people who decide what will sell. One of my daughters has learning difficulties. Her creativity would not sell but who is to say it is not art? Blogging, by its very nature, has a rapid turnaround time. Posts are put up at machine rapidity. This is good. This reflects modern life. Pow, pow, pow. It doesn’t degenerate the art created there and in fact sets itself up as a new form of art and not just bogger but also myspace and facebook too, although I have some serious issues with the later two in regards of censorship. Blogging is not valueless but can only ever be a fleeting vessel, the post that is, as the audience does not have time to spend great amounts of time reading or engaging with the images before another one pops up. I find that fascinating. But it is art and it has value.

Whilst I agree there is an inherent temporal and linear element to posting on, say, blogger, given that the material - though gone, in time, from the front page, as it were, is still there, available to be seen, for years, curiously I think it is also very permanent. What I personally like about blogger, and this links to the point I just made, is that, unlike display in a formal gallery, reciprocity is intrinsically invited – via the comments system. In terms of blogging, what do you personally think the function of comments is? Do you believe commenting is merely a way of indicating that one has read or viewed a posting? Or do you think commenting should have a constructive, critical edge?

I think the comments section has many qualities. Yes, you can use it purely for leaving your mark, which I am convinced that many bloggers do as an attempt to engage with you and to encourage you to reciprocate. That for me is just EGO. An attempt to collect names on your blog in the way an entomologist collects butterflies. That is not for me. Yes, one can leave some form of critique, and I often do but I also see the comment section as being a part of the ‘art of blogging’. Rather an intuitive response and not cerebral but somehow the post and the comment feature as a single piece; or at least they can – certainly with much of what you do and occasionally myself.


I tend to agree: I, too, see comments are part of the piece. Back to our earlier discussion of publishing … I know that recently you have turned your attention to producing a chapbook and to attempts to get your writing published in the traditional sense. Do you see cyber as a lesser activity than realising your work in print, as an object and so forth?

Producing Fekenham as a book is my primary target. The original blog was merely a way to ‘test the water’ so for that genre I see cyberspace as being a supportive tool and nothing more. However, the very essence of modern art MUST encompass the internet. It is where some of the most creative people are. There is some incredible stuff being created out there which is largely being seen only by like minded or interested parties and not by the dreaded established body. I would love to see, as we have discussed before, some authority to recognise that art is the ordinary and ordinary people are creating art and their choice of exposure is the internet and not the gallery. Not that I am anti art galleries, I am not but there is more to art than the established eye sees.

Who and what are your influences?

Blimey, how much time do you have? Kate Bush, Anthony Buckeridge, Robert Rauschenberg, Yoko Ono, Don Vliet, Frank Zappa, Bjork, Robert Wyatt, P.G.Wodehouse, Dave Sim, Los Bros Hernadez, Withnail and I, Comic books, Anime, Alan Moore, Ivor Cutler, Peggy Mount, Syd James, John Lydon, Viv Stanshall, Peggy Ashcroft,

and ZILLIONS of others.

What are your future plans as an artist/writer?

To get The Village Tales of Fekenham Swarberry published. To get a series of animated films of said books made. To promote that wonderful internet art site Discharge until all the folks on it are established art figures. And then, after tea…

Good for you, CJ. Sounds like a plan. Thanks for chatting.

Best wishes,

Anthony Donovan

(January 2009)