Your Interest in Tom Cruise

I was recently somewhat relieved to discover that the great AI threat to humanity has been overstated. It can be fooled quite easily I realised, simply by adopting irregular and unpredictable online behaviour. Switching on my phone one morning this week I am faced with a notification for a news item tagged “your interest in Tom Cruise.” I would like to take this opportunity to categorically state that I have absolutely no interest in Tom Cruise (unless it is related in someway to the downfall of that rich white fallacy, The Church of Scientology), and it took me some time to work out how Google’s algorithms had come to the conclusion that I had any desire to know what the diminutive Hollywood prat had been up to. 

Eventually I remembered that one evening a few weeks ago, lost surfing a YouTube tangent, I had watched a video clip of Johnny Vegas being interviewed at some red carpet awards event. Now, I am willing to declare openly, here and now, that I do like Johnny Vegas. He has a brutal honesty and vulnerable openness to his comedy, and often says things that are so tragically truthful that I laugh out loud despite myself. But, standing in a line of celebrities being interviewed, who should Vegas be standing next to in the line, but pixie impossible Tom Cruise, and Vegas was saying to the woman interviewing him how she was only talking to him because she was waiting for Tom Cruise to be free. And also, I remember now, Tom Cruise was mentioned in the title of the clip.

We all know how everything we do online or on any connected device is recorded in someway and fed into an ever-growing store of knowledge with which the big internet companies make their money selling this knowledge of us to advertisers. But it is reassuring to know that they haven’t quite got it right yet. Why else would I get adverts for over 50s holidays, or endless adverts for the thing I just bought and have no need to buy another one of? It helps I guess that I am not on Facebook and have no desire to join (I’m still in the majority. Five billion of us are still not on Facebook). But I suppose it does worry me slightly that in the future our lives, when they end, may be judged by our online history. And if I continue to avoid letting Google and Facebook know who I really am, by refusing to continually feed them real knowledge of what I am really interested in, my Amazon sponsored funeral may well have a large poster of Tom Cruise hanging over the coffin. This is the nightmare future I envisage. You have been warned.

A Minor Revelation

It is the evening after a day out in Manchester and I am sitting at home spending some time with the new objects I returned from my trip having purchased. I slowly turn the pages on the Callum Innes catalogue for his 2013 exhibition History held at the Whitworth Art Gallery, which the gallery were selling off cheap in a sale, whilst listening to my new Biosphere album Shenzhou, when I am struck by a minor revelation. Callum Innes is known primarily for large minimal oil paintings in a high modernist style, but this exhibition was of a series of watercolours, a medium for which Innes is not normally associated. The twenty watercolours follow the familiar style of Innes, being comprised solely of large blocks of colour, in this instance squares where two colours have been applied one on top of the other and scraped back to create a semi transparent plane. The two colours used are visible around the edges of each piece where they have not been scraped back. The series as a whole acts as an extended colour study, exploring the results of combining different pairs of colours. The title of each piece tells the colours used, for example Cobalt Blue Tone / Quinacridone Gold or Red Magenta / May Green. The Biosphere record is a 2017 vinyl reissue of a 2002 album, named after a Chinese spacecraft. Every one of the twelve tracks on Shinzhou takes as it’s starting point a small section of music by Debussey, which Geir Jenssen has removed from it’s context, looped, and put through various electronic filters and reverbs to create a series of minimal ambient sound pieces, which serve as a musician’s study of Debussey. The minor revelation was my realisation that these two art works, although made in completely different media, are the same.

Both the watercolours and the music are, to first appearances, very plain. They both follow, and do not divert from, the application of one or two simple rules. Some may describe them as quite empty. They are flat. Pick any point and compare it to any other and it may well look or sound the same. Their tone does not change across each piece’s entirety. But, upon closer inspection, both the watercolours and the music share a deep and rich texture. The more time spent with the work, and the longer one looks, or the deeper one listens, the richer and more subtly diverse the texture becomes. This revelation of the similarities between these two art works led to another revelation about my own taste when it comes to art, music, books, film, culture generally, and even perhaps people. I don’t like work that shouts, or demands attention, which unfortunately is the majority. I like work that quietly goes about it’s business, seriously, attentively, with an open curiosity and pleasure in enquiry; work that does not immediately reveal it’s depths and richness, allowing the viewer/reader/listener the opportunity to peel back the layers slowly, over an extended period of time; art and music that gives more with every listen or view; art and music one can live with, that grows and develops with the viewer/listener’s ongoing interaction with it. I am not one for instant gratification. I find the greatest pleasures are to be found in quiet and continued contemplation. 

John Stezaker, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

Words I associate with the work of John Stezaker as I walk round his current exhibition in the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, include: cool (by which I mean contrary to hot, as opposed to fashionable, although some would say cool is fashionable), subtle, precise, calm, quiet (possibly silent), still, deeply-moving, considered, serious, wry, funny (especially the Marriage series). For those who don’t know his work, Stezaker creates collage in several growing series, and has been doing modestly for decades, usually by combining two images, sourced from promotional photographs of actors or scenes from old black and white films, postcards of landscapes and waterfalls, or simply cutting shapes or figures out of an image. Having the appearance of extreme simplicity, the work shows the artist’s hand and mind to be wholly present, although his physical intervention is minimal. The placement of one image over another is so precise it is clear that the vast majority of the work involved is in the looking for the right combination of images and the absolute correct placement, before very quickly sticking them down. There is an almost nostalgic visceral pleasure in the physicality of the work, the photographic prints, the postcards, the clear evidence of scissors and glue. Although you can understand Stezaker’s work from a digital reproduction, you get more from seeing the original physical work. 

In the Mask series, where postcards obscure the faces of film stars, the forms in the depicted landscapes and waterfalls subtly mirroring the forms in the obscured face, Stezaker reveals to us the hidden depths behind the masks we present to the world, the existential anguish lying just beneath the facade we project, the turmoil under the thin and fragile surface. In the Waterfall series, where a postcard of a waterfall separates a leading man from his leading lady, we witness the impenetrable distance which separates us all from each other, even lovers. Stezaker tells us we are all inherently unknowable, yet intimately connected, islands. In the Tabula Rasa series, where one character in a scene is obscured by a white rectangle cut out in perspective to show the direction of the obscured individual’s scrutiny, the attention of everyone else in the scene being on the white rectangle, Stezaker demenstrates we are each a blank screen onto which it is others who project their ideas of who it is we are, or who we appear to be in relation to them. Or, conversely, is it only I that can’t see the real me? Am I in fact revealed only through the gaze of others? I only exist because I am seen by others. Through John Stezaker’s work I feel I know him, I feel a connection to him, I feel I understand how he thinks and how he feels, but, of course, I don’t. I know only his work, which is his mask, his projection, his tabula rasa.