| The
Lectures, SFAI & Seattle (Photographic Centre) |
In
October 1999, Simon Larbalestier and Mike Eldridge conducted an exhibition
and lecture tour on the West Coast. This is part of the written text
of lectures at The San Francisco Art Institute and the Seattle Photography
Centre.
The Physik Garden site is essentially about wanting to be surprised, wanting all the time to challenge and ask questions about what art and creativity can possibly be on the Internet. Now this is an important and exciting thing to do. It puts the system in reverse because we get behind the usual restrictive barriers of agents, galleries and publishers, and deal directly with people. The Physik Garden is literally a net we are casting out to see what's out there. We are not limited by physical space or in any particular way by costs and overheads. We can publicise without cost, run any type of magazine on the net we choose, associate ourselves with whomever we please and strike out rapidly into any country on earth without formalities. We launched the Physik Garden on January first (1999) really just as an act of faith. Neither of us are designers and although we knew conceptually what we were about we had no idea as to how to put it all in a form which gave expression to what were at the time just ideas. Fortunately at the time our intentions had been picked by Neil Chenery who runs Hoteye from Melbourne in OZ and he asked to interview us. We said OK and he posed us some sharp and pertinent questions, which, as is often the way with these things, defined our intentions in the answering. But we launched the site with nothing on it on Jan 1st as we had promised ourselves and virtually on the very day, Neil contacted us and threw a cover design for the site our way. Simon and I looked at each other through cyber space and both said wow this guy's good, let's dare and ask him if he'd like to take it on. Well, he said yes instantly and we were on our way. Here are a few statistics. We are currently into 40 countries from as far apart as Mexico, Chile, Iceland, Malaysia and last week our first in the old Eastern Block State Estonia and this of course in the English speaking world; next year Italy too because it's home base and despite the language barrier 10% of visitors each week are from Italy. Again no idea why. So you can get the picture. At every turn this site has come up with surprises, even the seven of us involved have just popped up as if from nowhere and the suggestions as to it's direction and content have all come from outside. So what did we design? What did Simon and I first decide that its form should take? Well, let's go back to the beginning. (Here we show some more paintings and pics of my current house and garden (the original Physik Garden) Simon's of B/W CLEARED GARDEN. And I talk through the pics of the Garden. I'd moved in to a Podere in Tuscany. Top of a hill, nothing between me and Siena but woods in one direction and a clear view of San Gimignano, Tony Blair's holiday favorite, the other. (Incidentally) thanks to our dear leader, the towns a write off in the summer months. Friend of mine who lives not to far away at a place called Volterra told me last week that his town was now blocked with German coaches in July to Sept, coaches which were being turned away from SG. Some of us are leaving Tuscany I might add, but that's another story. Simon came down the first Spring. What I thought I had was a big house in a wood but this guy went right in with an axe and this was the result. We spent some 4 weeks at it and talked all the time, pausing only for the occasional cuppa and a biscuit here and there. Got it ploughed, The intention was to have the real PG here, You see we had agreed that the site must be a 50/50 affair, nothing should exist in cyber space that didn't exist in reality. But the search for the perfect, whenever to be found, place for this Physic garden goes on in a different part of Italy called le Marche. More of this later, enough to say for now that we put together the Blair factor which I have already mentioned and then added the neighbours chickens and what is worse a ravenous turkey named Pipo, not to mention wild boar which come down, and porcupines, and its been exhausting, so we move across the Apennines. (This doesn't sound too funny outside of context of pics). Here I'm talking about organic, serendipitous growth as opposed to over reasoned planning. The idea, to put it simply, is that it all becomes like a paper chase you know, little clues along the way but that the real garden remains hidden to all except those who make the effort, crack the code whatever. S came back at the same time early this year and we walked and talked walked and talked in that old fashioned way. And it's then we realise that we are beginning to get one hell of a response back before we've even properly opened the site and we have to ask ourselves 'What is happening and what IS this site going to be about?' So we walk and we talk. Discover the Sibilline mountains and I buy a house there and in talking and walking it just comes at us page by page of notes which we distill in the evenings living in this house without windows, snow blowing through the windows and Simon burning every bit of wood he can find in the cattle sheds below to keep us warm. So we come up with these 7 elements (talking here about the seven component parts of the site). Because they represent everything we want to know about and want to know from others about, so Neil puts them up in June ready for the show at the Edge Gallery in London (we had a show there for month of June) and then our visitors double in number and we realise what we are doing a bit more clearly. People ask us why 7 parts? And we research the number and find that, and here a few examples, in Egyptian mythology, the no 3 represents heaven, the No 4 Earth and that No 7 represents the interaction between heaven and Earth, or in our case between Cyber Space and down to earth reality. Then again we discover that in world mythology there are 7 acknowledged fundamental archetypes, (and we've been in touch with Jean Houston about this so we know), The Great Mother, The Young Redeemer, The Great Snake, The Trickster, The Wise Old King, Dionysius and The Holy Child. Then these translate in Jungian terms to The Lover and its opposite aspect the Beloved, The noble and its opposite The Ignoble, The Conqueror and its opposite The Conquered, The Oppressor and Victim, The Betrayer and the Betrayed, The Warrior and the Priest. The Man of Sorrows and the Self-Reborn. Interesting uh? Thus these 7 and their opposites making 14 in all, and would you believe taking us back to Egyptian mythology, the 14 component parts which Osiris was cut up into and put back together again by Isis. Now I'm not a mythologist but I give you this as a fascinating factor, which had its origin in our creative imagination not in any clever design concept, Interestingly too, in the Native American Indian Sweat lodge they use seven white hot stones to represent the seven elements, North, South, East, West, Sky, Earth, Heart (self). What I'm trying to emphasise here once again is that the Physik Garden site has come at us simply through the back door from out unconscious imaginings rather than planned construction. So our component parts are these…(as per site!) So what does the site do to us and the way we think about images/ art. If we do an exponential graph of the sites development we see we are being visited by an increasing number people without advertising or publicity. Now what a does that do to our minds? If so many people see Simon's work, mine other artists like Jack or Neil with contact directly back to these artists well then this can't be a bad thing, especially when you consider that our site is an interactive one encouraging involvement and comment and of course real time meeting when we get our terrestrial act together (our next point of emphasis). Saw one of my paintings in a London magazine last week and one of Simon's. An article on the PG which later came up in an Italian (magazine). No idea how it got there. So all this stuff is happening out there and in the meantime galleries are quietly showing their stuff in some sort of parallel world. Truth is we dont know where it's going. It's also true though that we want to be part of it. Throughout history artists have embraced new philosophy, new concepts, new ideologies. If we dont, who will? I'll end by remembering a lecture that I gave some 18 years ago at the SPE convention In Carmel. It was a time of increasing doom and gloom in the artist's world. Thatcher had begun to put the strangle hold on art and education and Reagan had just been elected here. Not just financial strangleholds you must understand but invisible ideological ones you could literally feel. And all that is gone now and bye the bye. Just to say this, that if in some way we are discovering the first steps in a New World, a new art arena, then there isn't anyone yet out there who can touch us in the way that those politicians tried to do in the late seventies. There's a democracy of ideas in the air and both Simon and I feel this sincerely, and which we would be fools not to embrace. Here I just talked... TALKED ABOUT THOSE GUYS, THOSE HEROES, GINSBERG, KEROUAC, WESTON, MINOR WHITE, ADAMS. Ended with this comment (I would, wouldn't I?) Find and follow your hearts' desire.
|
