In the name of progress, or worse

All updates will now be made on the notebooks section of nickhersey.com. Information regarding development of projects, anecdotes from the creative process, wild musings, bland inarticulations and immature political misgivings will all continue to be posted with reckless abandon. This may annoy some readers, but hopefully please the other two users of my blog. Thank you for the continued support. When I am famous I will personally thank each of you.

New exhibition

 

1st May - 20th May, in this glorious year 2012. Nick Hersey's exhibition which examines the lot of the average modern western consumerist citizen. A bit.

notes from the diary

skimming through an old notebook (well current, just underused) and smiled upon reading an entry I had made following a visit to London to scour galleries:
"Your success will depend on how well you cope with these setbacks"
I take it I had not had a very encouraging response from the people I had seen among the Hip-Arterati.
As another new show is celebrated with a party in Sheffield tomorrow, and some finishing touches to new works for another show opening in two weeks, things are arguably slightly rosier.

Can we go, now?

Mind was drifting in slow moving traffic through Woodseats. Various pedestrians and assorted social detritus caught my attention for as long as was necessary to consciously recognise the need to look at something less boring. Then my mind double took at what the eyes had so lazily passed on, namely a grandmother out with two children, the group arrested at a picture framers window. Grandma, in charge of the children for the easter duties while mum worked on, I surmised, had decided on a stroll along the high street as suitable distraction for her young charges. Both of whom looked as if they had been sold tickets for Alton Towers only to arrive at the gates of Ripleys Just Amazing. But through the glass of the picture framer's window, Grandma is identifying a variety of exciting destinations upon a world map that sits proudly in its freshly gilded frame, a testament to the shop proprietors handiwork. Her excited gesticulations begin to transport the younger of the two children, magic carpet like, through moroccan bazaars and polar ice caps, yellowcab filled honking new york streets and atacama deserts... I am filled with a sense of wunderlust as I empathise momentarily with the junior wanderer. Having realised one or two of the momentous journeys that the Grandma is illustrating, I feel a mixture of pride and jealousy that another young traveler is formulating the beginnings of the desires that may ultimately drive him from his homeland. His reverie is shattered moments later by his elder sibling who has lost interest and seeks more immediate amusement elsewhere on the immediate high street. From behind the silence of my car closed window I can only just make out the words that she laboriously mouths... "can we go, I'm bored". Ironically, it will probably be those exact same words that her younger brother will use when deciding to make all those amazing journeys.

creative streets of Sheffield

sunny Sheffield

written, lost, re-written

Water writing in Anhui district, rural China. The definitive action to express pursuit of creative excellence

speck

modern clichés

voyager abstracted

Afrika Bambaata remixed

As the night draws in, remembering the morning song

I can't help it

He was not unusual in himself of course. True he did not fit the regular demographic for this particular incarnation of the project, as he was younger than the average participant- he was perhaps a few years younger than me- but he certainly was not the first person of general intellect to drift into the unit. His jaunty goatee and only recently unkempt hair lent the impression of a creative, or liberal, or somesuch type, and his fairly well disguised midlands accent seemed the natural auditory accompaniment to this demeanor.
He flapped a B5 envelope in his other hand, between thumb and index finger, as he mused on what might be the best way to pin down the amorphous idea that was clearly crystalising quite nicely in his mind. It had always been a refreshing interaction when a passer by would encounter, digest, understand and then participate in the installation without needing prodding or goading by me. Most would, at some point, need confirmation that what they were doin was right- was permitted, or expected of them. It is part of the creature that we have become, to need assurance or security in the fact that we are doing it as expected, by the rules, to form. There is indeed a term for the 'fear of freedom' - but it escapes me now. Our envelope flapper needed no introduction or encouragement, no shepherding or cues. He got it right away... he knew exacty what he had to do- he just needed to get it, well, just right. It was almost as if, in fact, this whole exercise had happened upon him at just the right moment- that if circumstance had been different, and he had not wandered into this operation, he might have spent the next forty minutes looking for some equivalent vehicle that could alleviate him of this burning idea. After some rather embarrassed smiled exchanges, some chin rubbing and, I think, a little finger wagging to his unseen conscience or mental spirit, he finally filled with the confidence that he had got it right.
He humped his rucksack higher onto the one shoulder that carried it, so that it should not slump awkwardly as he leaned forward to write, and he placed the paper on the desk and quickly scribbled the words onto it. After a brief pause, looking at them on the page, to check that they were, in fact, a fairly accurate representation in written form of the conceptual miasma that had taken so long to condense, he nodded to himself (or his unseen conscience once again) and slid the paper across the desk to me, a look of satisfaction on his face that just about resisted becoming an expression of smugness.
I looked at the phrase that he had written, and turned it over once or twice in my head, making sure that the concept that had been so lovingly wrapped in words and then written on paper, would be as diligently recreated by my own cognitive processes. I smiled politely as I had trained myself to after so many diverse contributions. It had become a polite ritual to acknowledge vulgarity, racism, stupidity or perceived wit with equal measure as a way of thanks for at least bothering to participate in the project. Genius and Hideous were treated with zen-like equal measure in this house.
In themselves, the words were a commendable effort, but especially so in the context of the project. The phrase would have stood in its own right had it simmered to the surface of his consciousness of its own accord, without being teased out under the duress of participating in the project, but it seemed even more vigorous when considered as a manufactured response stimulated by the unit. I had come to expect a yield of perhaps one or two real crackers for every two days spent within the installation, and the statistics had not deviated from form on this day. The better responses were not the very best I had ever seen, but they had that immediacy, resonance and sparkle that I knew would translate fairly effortlessly into something visual. This one, however, was a stand-out winner. They had a weight or gravity because of the person from which they had come, rather than in spite of him. The words read 'I know I shouldn't do it, but I have to'.
Their power was augmented substantially a moment later, when the young man paused on his way out of the unit and turned to me, envelope once again flickering between thumb and finger... 'is there a post office very near to here?'.

The Studio of Broken Dreams

Billy's

Wandering

Truth, Credit and other Opiates

...because our experience of the modern world has been thinned by truth, credit and other opiates that have numbed our experiences and ensured that opinion, emotion and intellect are now available to us by proxy, through palatable, bite-sized, sweetened, condensed snapshots of reality that maintain the illusion of freedom, democracy and independence but beneath which the status quo of rampant proletariat consumerism (bread proles) and minority capitalist dictatorship

I am graf

with all the focus on and fashion for street art/graf/bank(sy) me off while I pay you 3mil.. its easy to forget that actually we're all part of that shit- well, by we I mean the old crew from the roller disco, the kids we saw up MASH every sat'diy in carnaby, the wankers from the bus stop at school who beat us up cos we scratched out their tags... we have grown up and forgotten, a bit, that its all part of the same thing. Most became graphic designers or environmental scientists, some became bankers... but we all share that heritage. Whether it was taking a break from playing roller hockey to tag up post office vans, or craCKING OUT THE spray cans at someones parent's party, it was as natural to us as tweeting is to this lot.

Brighton's sad loss of the kissing copper's is a hilarious example of the way in which people are re-writing history to suit the common current zeitgeist. STUMP or SER or GOLDIE or REVS coulsd ll have been in that place, had we been middle class enough to be blessed with vision of the world ibto which we could have injected ourselves. As it is, we stand proud of our heritage, reminisce of glorious days of old in the car parks of lewisham or Brockwell park, and giggle at the media frenzy over what many of us spent our childhoods running from security guards and community police officers for.

As Karl Marx famously said...

"X-Factor is the opiate of the masses"

Moderation

More notes from soltude, fresh air and dog-walking. Following the latest expedition, I have concluded for the moment that 'moderation' could be the only possible solution to the conundrum of how to cope with reality. Following on from the unbearable weight of the argument that every discussion has a bell curve of opinion, with extremes of cynicism at either end, the idea that moderate views are the only possible sensible conclusion perhaps seems obvious. But from this I considered moderation as a workable solution to the economic proposal to 'make less money without compensation', which clearly has no chance of succeeding, no matter what the overriding socio-political environment- communist or capitalist.
If the ruthless efficiency displayed by progress could be slowed by 'moderation'... if we could settle for not having faster processors, or greater productivity, or more efficient usage... if we could just make do for another year or two with the current iteration, I feel that many of the problems facing humanity etc could be dealt with. I type this on a Macbook that is entering its 5th year of usage... the temptation has been on so many occasions to replace it, yet what it lacks in sharp clean lines (dented, paint splattered and dull) it retains in perfect functionality that Mr Jobs, 5 years ago, thought the essence of perfection. This is not ludditism, it is moderation.
Given the 2012 we all have ahead of us, I would say upgrades won't even be an option