Further along the line

I put the image of Alice on the cliff tops before the storm on the blog because I'm proud of it but also because it's a constructed image - first I saw the view from the triangulation point then I noticed her red coat. Then I got her to stand where she is stood for the composition - I made her get wet as the picture took about 10 minutes to stitch and I took 4 plus she is stood on the highest point of the cliff so I risked her being struck by lightening.  It strikes me that the aesthetics of this image - although it's only a holiday snap taken on my phone have inscribed themselves on the moment.  It does not really capture the moment of the storm it signifies the moment of the photograph- like drawing it's a tautology

I am enjoying this conversation - whenever you slip into talking about the farm I'm seduced into a Ruskin like romanticism and remember a beautiful woman I once saw driving a tractor towing a load of hay on a balmy late summer evening where the low sun gives everything a shimmering golden edge.  I know this isn't a true image of the work of a farm but in a strange way it is mine.  Not working the land I spent a big part of my childhood playing on farms - I remember standing under the tube where the corn comes out of the combine and showering in the barley - walking across fields pulling out wild oats and trying to avoid the mythical geese who had killed our next door neighbor through a gangrene infected bite - As he laid dying,I remember my mum describing the smell in his house - "Like something gone off."  

The reason I like  the farm story is it seems to develope a way of talking which "Dances on the edge of metaphor." The act of farming is the act of inscription on the landscape. The enactment of a practice is an inscription on the surface of lived experience.  To try and be clever and refer again to mr Ingolds drawing and inscription are two very different things and if I can hold onto this thread and line of thought for long enough perhaps what we are talking about is both propositional drawing which is authored "Written on something" - Art.  This expands into "Inscription enactments "which are not authored and are of the world not art.  The propersition when realised stops been art.

When we try to describe what it is that we do my problem currently is fundamentally  the Duchampian appropriation of the social space as art.  I have decided that this is now my line in the sand - it's something I'm not prepared to do or even play with doing.  This becomes hard because I think many people could accuse us of appropriating the social as our art. I'm not sure that I can successfully argue why we are not doing this especially as in the post modern world of multiplicity if someone so much as thinks we are doing this then we actually are.

Farming is a way of inscribing on the landscape it strikes me that this is very different to drawing on the landscape it is clearly a practice - it might be useful to talk about how it differs from our practice as well as how it is similar - working the land has clear parameters and controls  the reasons for decisions are driven by many external factors which are beyond your control perhaps the glory and worth of the art of proposition is the internalised worlds and spaces which control decisions.  Alice in her red coat been positioned on the cliff top - a solitary red point referencing Shindlers list, don't look now, landscape photography, rainy holidays - dads running back for the car - the fact that in the end we are all disconnected points in a very big landscape which wraps around us. 

I'm not going to edit this post as I like it and makes me feel romantic but I did have a great conversation about proposition drawing with a new friend - here he is as usual Marcus dressed him as his spirit guide - a wolf or Johan Isaac Siebers who is a philosopher and fisher of men.  In the conversation I think we got to the point where I was thinking that when we are working or drawing propositions we can be "Artists" when these propositions are enacted they become "Of the world" this is a bit like the earlier post about the

The purpose of art is to become more of life
The Purpose of life is to become more artful

Which is a recently old conversation but is perhaps good to revisit as we further expand the idea of propositional drawing.