This wasn't rueally a Simon Starling effort, it was more a comment on the Clyde and a heritage that I've never really known.

I'll study people before I study artists.

Anthropometry, a means to an end.

rep·li·ca·tion

noun.

1. A fold or a folding back.
2. A reply to an answer; a rejoinder.
3. Law The plaintiff's response to the defendant's answer or plea.
4. An echo or reverberation.
5. A copy or reproduction.
6. The act or process of duplicating or reproducing something.
7. Biology The process by which genetic material, a single-celled organism, or a virus reproduces or makes a copy of itself: replication of DNA.
8. In scientific research, the repetition of an experiment to confirm findings or to ensure accuracy.

We build monuments to allow us to forget, we have children to be remembered.

Perhaps I'd like to build a monument to remember those of Glasgow.

People seen and people not.

There isn't really a great much interest for me in knowing every single person in Glasgow. That's the politicians game - the constant fantasy that they would come running up to you on the street to shake your hands. I don't want to shake hands with most of the people on the street, that's not my aim. I don't want to go chasing after people asking them ambiguous questions because quite frankly they would quite probably not stop, bend the truth of their convictions or fabricate themselves almost wholly during the interview. There is something quite deforming about the charity folk who you meet. They all want to sell their own specified bit of truth, and depending on the individual (and the next statement is from an experience i had with an animal charity collector, whose charity I can';t quite remember) they will either harness your interest or not, long enough to detail their proposition. The guy was pretty much a good hearted idiot. Not because of his cause, to which he is a member, but as a detachment, because there is a sever level of unavoidable hypocrisy. We are now closing the door on a vast amount of animal cruelty, but it does still exist. It basically got into a bit of a shouting match though, over the right to preserve culture and the total surrender of animal cruelty. I wasn't particularly arguing for one or the other, but I was waiting for a bus so I had a go. I wasn't going to give money based on a 5 minute chat, so I asked if I could have some literature with more acute information, which he stated that they apparently do not do. At a point he asked me the deeply long routed question of how much I could spare. I could spare quite a lot actually. I could quite smoking, move back home to live with my parents, drop out of art school and work 60 hours a week. There are numerous things I could do, just as there are numerous things we all could do, but I couldn't justify this, because, the hypocrisy of charity is that its benefactors are rooted in monetary shackles belonging to the capitalist nations. Britain is a hyper-bed of this type of cause, as we live with the eternal guilt that maybe we fucked over the world a little too much, and perhaps continue to do so in our own apologetic way. We recycle most of what we buy, we are atoning for past misdeeds. But the stark realisation of it all, and many who donate will disagree, is that the question "Have you got a minute to have a chat?" is really a request for money. To stand strong in your beliefs is one thing, but when he asked if I knew how much a baby gorilla fetches on the black market, I couldn't help but feel the need to reply that it was probably a lot more money than is received for young girls being sold to human trafficking. It is in the interest of mankind to preserve itself, and when before this was as easy as sacrificing everything other than our kind, we now more openly mix the future of our species with a take all give all attitude, where we are both the villains and the heroes, both the means and the end, the question and the answer. We can bare hypothesis, and we tolerate vicious means, but only if it is their victorious end that is resolutely published. Mankind abuses itself as well as animals, yet mankind is an animal, one who is incumbent to rule with both sincerity and strictness, lies and idleness.

For this reason, I don't want to approach a stranger, or force them to think about that which they will not naturally. The greatest and the worst hold candles to their friends and enemies just as they in turn hold them away from or to themselves. Its not in the dissection of this race that ables us to embrace them, but in the depiction of their wholly natural state that I wish to record. Not as a camera on the wall or with tricks and words, for these things only go as far as I am willing to take them, and as long as the bias of my own discrimination will allow concentration. I want the city of Glasgow to become as surreal to themselves as they are to the individual, and as phantom and as blatantly misinterpreted and lost as they are to each other. I want them to exist together purposefully, but in their natural state of unawareness. I don't need to shake their hand for this, but accept the same maxim that they all must, that there are not gods or devils amongst Glasgow, but animals of mankind.

On a very basic level I was interested in taking something which is very publicly effective and well, kind of evident in the cityscape

"In summation, the Duke statue is a fine example of craftsmanship, arguably much more so technically than Citizen Firefighter. Yet, it stands to all those who will forever be beneath it, as a reminder of a Britain no more. It raised one, as thousands fell. Citizen Firefighter exists in a glory that is made all the more powerful by its anonymity. It embodies eternity in an emotionless stance. For we know that the heroes that it depicts will remain faceless, and will not be, in their thousands remembered for every individual act of heroism, for every day, every fire or emergency. Citizen Firefighter is a testament to those men and woman we may never know, who everyday, in the very nature of their job, raise themselves high for others. Far higher than any granite base ever could."

'Walk' cont... (Bridges)

A structure spanning and providing passage over a gap or barrier.

A gap or barrier.

'Walk' continued (faceless)

A Walk On The 26th April '10 (Faces)

mon-u-ment
A structure, such as a building or sculpture, erected as a memorial

Monuments?

Voicless reason makes for harder hearing.

"Our democracy is not a product but a continual process. It is preserved not by monuments but deeds. Sometimes it needs refining; sometimes it needs amending; sometimes it needs defending. Always, it needs improving." Lee H. Hamilton

"Peace has its victories no less than war, but it doesn't have as many monuments to unveil." Kin Hubbard

"The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death." Edmund Spenser

"What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others." Pericles

Question:- Who is the author of the quote Excuses are the tools that incompetent people use to build monuments of nothing?

Answer:-

"Excuses are monuments of nothingness,
They build bridges to nowhere,
Those of us who use these tools of incompetence,
Seldom become anything but nothing at all."

GLAZ-goh

"Glasgow is by far the largest of Scotland’s cities, with a population of 580,690 in 2006."

I think I know 0.021% of them.

An idea of self importance and the perpetual state of involvement

Looking for yourself in other peoples art.

The idea that we are in fact a part of the creative, process, both visually and conceptually. It is not so much a duty, rather a gift, to exist that way. Despite the dusty grey areas of vogue interpretation, art exists very still, and with the weight of those who claim to be artists, it moves forward or backwards, but will not stay still if they are taking their role with the sobriety it deserves.

To some degree it is necessary to look for yourself in others art, especially when the work in question was created as a reaction or homage to a particular or entire community of people. Its not a case of shunning art of the past, but rather, no one should create unless they feel it is because something is missing from the world. Whether is a vitally large or small comment, it should not be a replication, at its worst it could appear as a reinforcement, but never an imitation, less it stagnate.

Conceptual Art - Briefly

Can something be independently owned, but universally shared?
Can a destruction become a birth, if the latter, untempered?
Would a proof be a fact, if presented with a lie, a tale that everyone believed?
Would man be remembered for evil or for good?
Man of woman of man of god?
If a line is drawn with the intention to be unmeeting and straight but the axle upon which the line exists is turned in a timely fashion 360-degrees, would anyone believe it were a line and not a circle?
When before, Man was made in the image of God, yet He now made of a man made cast, do we not expel more from a lie, than we would, of the truth of a past? That Man has wrecked each time he has created, that this misery was birthed, and to a false hope its worth and victory and loss, Stated. Still, of sullen praise, and of Golden return, does the face of a world have such vacant appeal, so too must the gluttons be consumed, as well as their meal. A devastation not only of form, but of content in the commitment of a script, diluted with inefficient Moons and Suns, till a barren authority becomes a benevolent whip. The vessel to guide Man from this storm, is compassed not tord South, West, North, nor tords East, but through unrighteous garments and pitch black infernos, past brothers mistaken as beasts, and passed the dead, who no longer rest, but detest the sight, of this vanity, for contemptuous relentless peace.

Review

This was all quite simply in aid of the idea that work can be made independantly, without socially aggrivated issues, political preference, or anything else which adjusts and contorts the singular ability of a visual creation and the ownership of such a thing.


Untitled 12/12/09
Talk to me with your eyes
From what you actually see.
Not from behind words best left,
to original verse.
Practised prose is a curse to know,
When the memory works more than the mind.
A Bard bastardised for the sake of you’re your rhyme.
Sentiment. Short. To. Keep. Perfect. Time.

I may not speak from genius,
Or write with elegance or with form.
But I do not need quotations,
To see and know,
That what’s right and that what’s wrong.

The Hes and Shes,
Of verse, prose and song,
May indeed have uttered sweet truths,
Under silver light
Of a world long-n-gone.
Yet for the sake of what’s left,
Stop looking for yourself,
In quips and puns and context.
In their verse, their prose or song.

On the occasion of wine taken in volume,
When speech is freer than thought.
A muddle half verse is soothing,
And prose reborn a comfortable shoulder.
Even the song is sung with conviction and love,
Yet without a thought of the father or mother.

As older I grow I sit further in silence.
I sit now, in a stretch of still silence.
Broken vessels belonging to poorly tied knots.
The do’s and don’ts of politics,
Literatures best, forget-me-nots.
In fragments of intelligence,
Stripped bare of light and ownership
Assembled then destroyed with and without doubt,
Unheard and unknown
I leave again that crowd.
But I’ve nothing if not
Unoriginal thought.

Savant - Leslie Lemke

What makes you happy?

"As long as you let him do what he can do best, he's the happiest man on earth."

Is the ability to beat the master a fear?

"When he was playing a Schubert sinata, his paino teacher pointed out an error, but Matt insisted he version sounded better."

Will you ever know everyone?

"His city has over 12 million inhabitants, but Gilles only knows very few of them because his system Urville functions like all other systems - incessantly and without real concern for the individual."

Savants: are they the only artists who make work for themselves?

Savant syndrome, sometimes abbreviated as savantism, is not a recognized medical diagnosis, but researcher Darold Treffert describes it as a rare condition in which persons with developmental disorders have one or more areas of expertise, ability, or brilliance that are in contrast with the individual's overall limitations. Treffert says the condition can be genetic, but can also be acquired.

According to Treffert, about half of all persons with savant syndrome have autistic disorder, while the other half have another developmental disability, mental retardation, brain injury or disease. He says, "... not all autistic persons have savant syndrome and not all persons with savant syndrome have autistic disorder". Other researchers state that autistic traits and savant skills may be linked, or have challenged some earlier conclusions about savant syndrome as "hearsay, uncorroborated by independent scrutiny".

Though it is even more rare than the savant condition itself, some savants have no apparent abnormalities other than their unique abilities. This does not mean that these abilities weren't triggered by a brain dysfunction of some sort but does temper the theory that all savants are disabled and that some sort of trade-off is required.

Alonzo Clemons
Alonzo Clemons is an American animal sculptor and a savant. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Clemons suffered a severe brain injury as a child that left him developmentally disabled (with an IQ in the 40-50 range), but able to create very accurate animal sculptures out of clay. Clemons can create a sculpture of almost any animal, even if he has seen only a glimpse of it. He is also able to create a realistic and anatomically accurate three-dimensional rendering of an animal after only looking at a two-dimensional image for mere moments. He is most well known for his life-size renderings of a horse, but most of his works are smaller, and accomplished in less than an hour.
In 1986 he had a premiere exhibit in Aspen, Colorado. His works have sold for as much as $45,000

Jonathan Lerman (born 1987) is an American autistic savant outsider artist. He was born in Queens, NY, and currently resides in the Upstate New York suburb of Vestal.
Jonathan Lerman began to lapse into long silences at the age of two, and the next year he was diagnosed with autism. His IQ is purported to be 53.
Lerman's artistic bent appeared at the age of 10 in the form of charcoal-drawn faces—both people he knows and those he imagines. In 1999 he had his own solo exhibition at the KS Art gallery in New York City.
Lerman has had personal exhibitions, and has also exhibited his work alongside others.

Gilles Tréhin (born 1972) is a French artist, author, and creator of the imaginary city of "Urville". His book, also titled Urville, is based on his writings of the fictional city's history, geography, culture, and economy, and includes over 300 drawings of different districts of Urville, all done by Trehin.

Richard Wawro (April 14, 1952, Newport-on-Tay, Fife – February 22, 2006) was a Scottish artist notable for his landscapes in wax oil crayon. He was an autistic savant.
He had his first exhibition in Edinburgh when he was 17.
In the early 1970s one of his exhibitions was opened by Margaret Thatcher, then Education Minister, who bought several of his pictures, as did John Paul II.
He got his father's approval for each picture until his father died in 2002. Overall he sold more than 1,000 pictures in around 100 exhibitions.

Treffert says a savants memory is "very deep, but exceedingly narrow". There is a huge deal still unknown about savants, but I find it particularly interesting that the memory can compose such vivid data, and so sad that it cannot be put to a functional use. For instance, its been described that they use raw memory, and the reason it can be so easily replicated is that they cannot infact process it.

Peter Cook & Dudley Moore (At the art gallery)

I sat in the west end the other day at that cafe that's on the corner of Byres Road. The over priced one with a silver moped with no engine in the window. Its only redeeming quality is that it's got a smoking area. I meant to publish this earlier but I forgot.

I ordered a cup of tea:-

I sat down outside as the girl said she would bring it out, in the time it took, I counted 57 people I did not know.

I lit a cigarette:-

Before I stubbed it out I counted 97 people I did not know.

For the next two hours I sat there, taking one break to go to the toilet and order another cup of tea:-

In that time I counted 2216 people I did not know.

I saw fourteen that I did. Of them, I spoke to 3.

I will try get a scanned copy of the notebook, which is just covered in metal asylum tally marks. What I found interesting about this experiment was that, truth be told, I have no idea if I counted some people more than once. The sad thing about this experiment wasn't that I did not know all of the people, or that the fourteen which I did, I only spoke to three. The sad thing is that everything about these people was taken from them as their names, personalities, histories were all represented as a singular identical mark.

Contrast

This work consists of a list of names, displayed in columns, as if it were a war memorial or a roll of honour. They are the names of everyone the artist has ever met, or more precisely, everyone he can remember meeting. Gordon says of this work, 'It was an accurate and honest statement but it was full of mistakes (like forgetting the names of some friends), so there were some embarrassing elements in the work, but that all seemed to be quite close to the truth of how our head functions anyway. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.'

This reminds me of the classic situation when you are walking down the street and you see someone you went to highschool with. Now, chances are, you saw this person 5 times a week for 6 years. So, say you are in school for 9 months of the year, thats 36 weeks a year for 6 years, which is a total of 216 weeks. Then, say 5 days a week for 9 months for 6 years, thats 1080 possible times in which you could have seen them and confirmed their existance. Now, I dont know if it's vanity or fear, but why do you not say 'hello' to them? There are so many possible connections, personal and business, that can be made every day, yet, for the best part, most people will only know a tiny circle. Even those who make an exceptional effort to meet as many people as possible, will only ever know a fraction of the people in their own town, let alone the country, nevermind the world.

Stephen Wiltshire: The Human Camera

The game has no winner

An apocryphal example from World War I of a message being sent down the trench line is Send reinforcements, we're going to advance which became Send three and fourpence, we're going to a dance (three and fourpence is three shillings and four pence in old British money).

This is how I feel about most knowledge. I'm sure there are hundreds of anecdotes and what not yet it is interesting because I cannot count how many times in a day myself or someone else starts a scentence with,"Apparently..." which I guess is designed to remove ownership from a statment which may be untrue, or not in following with your own beliefs, but which, for the sake of conversation or argument, must be stated.

Les enfants seuls savent ce qu'ils cherchent.

"One must command from each what each can perform, the king went on. "Authority is based first of all upon reason. If you command your subjects to jump into the ocean, there will be a revolution. I am entitled to command obedience because my orders are reasonable."" Then my sunset?" insisted the little prince, who never let go of a question once he had asked it."You shall have your sunset. I shall command it. But I shall wait, according to my science of government, until conditions are favorable."

I think we probably ask the most important questions when we are young, without knowing that we will be judged. As you get older, question asking is seen to be anti-conformist, whether or not the answer is known, the question must not be vocalised. In primary school, there was a guy who would never admit not knowing something. It reached a point where other kids in the class would talk about footballers that didn't exist, just to solicit imaginary facts from this guy. It actually go so far I think he almost got the guys name on the back of a football top. As it transpired, I think someone told him that the football player didn't exist, but he point blank said that he did and went into a big tale of transfers. Now, I think something like that goes beyond disillusion. I'm not even sure it was a case of him unwilling to be wrong, or trying to cover his tracks, and not be embarrassed. I think, if something is repeated, over and over, a justification, or an opinion can become a truth. I know, that truth is objective, and there is a vast resource of philosophical theories commenting on sensory misconception, dream worlds, and alternate universes, but there is something so primitively flawed with regards to knowledge.

We have Descartes who goes on the biggest roundabout of critical thought to prove God, but I will never forget my philosophy teacher telling the class that if he had not, under French law, he would have been sent to the guillotine. For this project what interests me about him is that he asked questions, and provided answers. However, depending on who you talk to, or rather, read from, he either did nothing, or everything for thought. He provided what he believed, or at least he published what he believed to be a critical theory for the existence of God. Now, there are too many narrow passageways that this topic could take, but this is not about anything other than the human, asking a question and providing the answer. It is fair to say, had he gone on to publish what some believe he would have, if not under threat of his life, a theory which in fact disproved the existence of God, it is fair to say that he would know more about the world than the executioner. What I mean is, he would have read more books, devised more theories, and articulated more 'accelerated' thought. For the sake of mankind and lets perhaps exclude vanity, Descartes was committing an act of thought, the process of questioning and answering, that would inevitably had some effect on the executioners life. Not however, as much effect as it would have had on Descartes life himself. So my question is, if as stated, he had published the "true" findings up to Meditation 3, proving that there was in fact no God, would the philosopher have, knowing his actions would result in beheading, killed himself. The executioner had his orders, "Behead the Heathen", yet would he have actually killed Descartes. I mean this in the most innocent way, not as a digression of terms. Does the man who commits himself to death with full intention end his life, or is it the man who pulls the guillotine rope?

Library

Someone, I can't remember exactly who, told me the other day, that when they were young they realised the saddest thing about libraries is that you will never read all of the books.

It's not mean to be a twee postcard, but I think there is something genuinely upsetting about the statement as a story itself, but even more so as a metaphor for knowledge. If all answers are opinions, and questions are paramount, how can we ever come up with the right answer for ourselves? Do we just settle? Do people believe in love because its the sweetest way to say, "Hey, I've given up, I don't need to look anymore, and why should I, I've found the person I love!" Because surely that is one of the biggest questions concerning the human existence - love. We barely get by with our own fucked up perceptions and opinions, so we anchor ours to someone elses, then, a child is born as a culmination of these answers - or is the answer simply the child, then the pressure of the parents is lifted, for they are now guardians to another being capable of asking and asking, without getting answers. A cynic would say that birth is the first and greatest act of child cruelty, for they enter a world prepared to give them answers, but do not take kindly to question asking. Most questions have been asked, and most, to some extent are answered for us, but is the capacity to receive information really as important as the ability to ask?

There is an old joke about Scotland in politics. The PM, seeing that his party is dropping votes north of the border, askes his Deputy, "Where do you find the real Scottish people?" to which the Deputy replies, "Scotland, unfortunatly."

Review so far

I've been sick for the last week or so and really don't understand what line I am going with. My head feels fuzzy as hell and with the general election comming up I'm really not into this singular effect that 'I' am trying to ask and answer questions.

I think perhaps that the body is the question, and the legacy the answer.

What are you looking for?

It's strange to see the interpretation of style be diverted back to the author.