The Project as a Sprawl. And as a beginning of a beginning. Inside of the Pocket.

When starting a project it is in a sense a germination. The beginning of something. There are many beginnings. Beginnings are often stunted by the appeal of another beginning. A tab is replaced by another tab, by another beginning. Half-formed. A collaboration is eclipsed by another tactile opportunity. To jump from one project to another, to another. Leapfrogging through constant fluctuations and potentials. Continually turning machines on only to turn them off a few moments later. Pockets are beginnings, they often have the same contents. Keys, wallets, purses, coins, tissues, phones, earphones, paper, receipts, lint, facemasks. The items are then routinely removed. Ordered and replaced if necessary. The start of the day marks a new pocket. A new organisation a permutation of the pocket. Back pocket, front pocket, small pocket, jacket pocket. The backpack is a huge pocket. a compiling of the pocket. A serialisation of pockets attached to handles or straps. Made easy for transport for handling. Can a beginning be a pocket? We have several empty boxes. Fresh boxes. Fresh starts. New days. And perhaps we choose to pull the same boxes from the wall as it is convenient. Each day the boxes can be arranged in front of us with new permutations. Then why do they continually remain in the same order. The same language employed at the same moment. The glass container is a beginning it is refilled. It is fresh. The water is replaced anew. Each time a new beginning. How does it exist without the water? Is it therefore lacking a beginning. What is a beginning with three n's in the middle? It is a beginnning. But what if there are three before the g at the end then it would be a beginnninnng. 

Of Quotes.

 It's a painting of a medusa and its scary

Generational changeover, perhaps

Anti-Subterranean

Standard grids with locked out areas; completely unapproachable

Cups of Xanthine

I'm a Xanthrope

All this dirty furniture

Spilling into the future

On the beams. On the walls.

It was at that Point that it Drifted

A Constant Rhythm Made by Differing Machines

Oscillating Pockets of Hot Wire

Transient Routines

States of Never

On Art School

- You see a tutor every now and then. Who you might have little to no connection with, but they are sometimes incredibly helpful and are sometimes an important part of being at art school? Tutors don’t get given the opportunity to do their job because they are often on a precarious contract and don’t get paid enough to spend the amount of time that is necessary to "mentor" a student. The whole tutor student thing is a bit weird anyway. There should be a scheme where artists do long term residencies in schools so they can get paid and don’t have to also rent a studio.

-The process of leaving the school is so harsh, degree shows albeit good fun don’t function well. Its not even possible to see all the art properly! Effectively destroying a school each year for a third of the students doesn’t work.

-Students should leave school when they want to, some people are done after six months, some need 5 years or more!

-Art schools are inherently racist. They are hostile to people whose first language isn’t English. During critiques speakers whose first language isn’t English often fear to speak and when they do there is a patronizing atmosphere from those listening. Art schools are failing to actively dismantle racism. This is the most important problem at art schools.

-There should be some accommodation on site available to students. Living in my studio works well. It’s helpful if you can just wake up and get started. I understand for some art school Isn’t their whole life, but some might want to make it theirs.

-You are sold "fantastic" workshop facilities. But often the experience can be frustrating. Students are often scared to use the facilities they came there to use! Sometimes the technician is intimidating or over worked/under paid and therefore grumpy. Workshops are often dominated by people who devote all their time there and are accepted into a sort of ‘inner’ circle. Often there is lack of protocol for how to use them or its limited to the constrains of what the technician wants to do. Often the facilities aren’t any good to start with!

-Art schools produce good work. Why is the 'artworld' or art industry so far from it? Musicians start their ‘careers’ young. Why does it take till someone’s in their 30’s or after finishing their masters that they start getting paid for anything? Galleries, museums, project spaces should be more connected to art schools. Art systems move frustratingly slow.

-There should be like an Art Apprenticeship loads of people want to make stuff but aren't allowed to because the "table saw is too dangerous." Loads of people end up going into fabrication after anyway and are sort of half qualified tradespeople. There should be some sort of middle ground for this.

-By the time things get going, the term ends! Studios aren’t open late enough and aren’t cohesive social areas. Why are arts courses squeezed into the same time boundaries as academic studies.

-There should be kitchens. Students should be able to make their own food and not settle for shitty meal deals. I found eating and drinking with other students an essential part of being at art school, you should be able to do it how you want to and cheaply.

- You get given a desk and a wall. The architecture of the studios tends to be alienating, some people are happy to be on their own and just paint but I knew a lot of people who wanted a more co-operative environment, one that feels creative and not like a fucking office! I thought that students could build their studios/move change studios as it doesn’t make sense if someone wants to do some big installations when someone else’s desk is empty because they're off using blender (no offense to people who work using computers it’s just people have different needs.). It could get quite neoliberal/hotdesky which would be shit if done wrong. But maybe just letting students do what they want with the architecture and increasing student communication would work.

-Schools should be more interconnected! It doesn't make sense that you can't go use a forge (for example) that’s in a different school 5 miles away, when no one is using that forge anyway. Art schools are all run completely differently and could learn a lot from each other.

-The option of letting you discover what you want to do, works and doesn't. I know a lot of people freak out when they get to art school because of the freedom, other art schools are too prescriptive and therefore boring for the students due to a lack of creativity. I think the hope that art students ‘find’ their way themselves is a bit lazy on the institutions part. There should be a general structure e.g. an essential reading list. Even if the students choose to disregard this is okay too! The institution should stand for something, instead of being this creepy place where you don’t really know what it wants.

-There is so much waste! Big skips at the end of the year where everyone chucks away all the stuff, they spent hours making, or throwing away all their equipment because their going to a different country only for other students to buy the exact same stuff the next year.

-Why does no one talk about careers and money? Seems quite unrealistic to me to never talk about that. Maybe you can go to a career’s advisor in your uni but that’s not really of any help to an artist. Maybe it’s not good to prescribe a route for artists and inevitably there will be moments where people say that’s bullshit why would you want to sell your art. But if you’re going to have to go get a job after art school anyway why not talk about it instead of leaving it as an elephant in the room?

-I'd like to be on a fine arts course where practices are more mixed. Why doesn’t a fine art course accommodate software engineers, theater people, why not even bankers? (I don’t know).

-Foundation courses seem to work quite well I recall a lot of my friends saying they enjoyed foundation much more than their BA's. Filled with optimism and fun, but also strange spending a lot of time making a portfolio that you end up disregarding when you get to art school.

*I’ll keep working on this list. Please let me know if you share some of the same ideas or have other ideas of how an art school could be. Please let me know if you disagree with any of these points. Noah x*

4 words

I just ran twelve marathons without any water.
My body became the exact substance humanity tried to banish years ago,
I set myself rules and them washed them with water.
I heard you can create real waves without any mechanical alterations.

There is nothing going on inside that persons hat.
I thought there might have been .
But there was not.
They will be ecstatic when the removal of all public monument occurs; I will be too.

They hadn't written down my number they just pretended.
Hard water, cold water.
Black water, brown water.
Crown Water, damp water
Old water, frown water

Check yourself before you check into yourself

Put that back in the bin
Get it out of the bin and then put it back in the bin anew
Crazed fever and globular membranes a-new
Bodies filled the streets

Empowered and heated
Sweating limbs removed their ability to process
They re-engaged and moved forward
And asked to speak directly to the body

Station (unfinished)

There's the question of the train station. It will be decked with trash. The corners will glisten; the off cuts of the night. How should it be filled? How should the rubbish move? Is there a moment where the trash just becomes liquid it starts to move freely once it gets to the land fill its back to its ocean.  Back into the wild. As if to litter is some sort of inhumanity to the rubbish.

Or, falling at the wayside, failing to get to the bin. It wants to return.
The tiles on the floor of the station. They are part of the stations grid. I guess the station is a grid and the tiles are the cells of it. Brick. There should be a lot of brick. But the sort that is hostile, new shiny. A brick in the teeth. A brick in the

The "spare" room

It has been freshly painted a crisp lime colour. Ready for sale or ready for a guest. It’s not for use as much as it is used for show. There is an old Dyson hoover in the corner; a DC04 apparently. Its bruised decal secondary to its replacement that resides in another room. Totems of Tory aid.  There is pine furniture, the worst of the house. Other spare parts mis-align in here. A barrenness circulates around the room underneath the bed and into the idle gloss work. At one point this empty room marked a symbol of achievement. Now maybe just middle-class sterility.

The dross nature of "nice" interiors. I'd rather it be bad than "nice". Stacks of memories filed neatly into albums sit patiently for rituals of recollection to moments of seized happiness.

How many other extra rooms are empty? Layers of hotels are empty. Nocturnal rooms. How many rooms are full? How many cease to be occupied? How many never cease to be occupied? How can such a silent room be so stentorian? And how do some attempt silence and still say nothing at all?

The rectangular window. Serves a slice of home county countryside, within the boundaries of the villages most prolific landowner. A nascent hum of the A24 hangs there. London’s veinal tendrils sprawl out to the meekest of quarters.