This morning I finally opened a parcel sent to me in October 2022. Have I really left it that long to address the contents I thought? When the parcel arrived my dad had been dead less than a year. Since the parcel was delivered I have managed to travel to LA, Athens and Tbilisi to collaborate on art projects. What has prevented me from opening the package? Despite its light weight it has sat heavily on my shelf in a suspended Schrödinger state of potential, being moved from time to time as I packed away books in preparation for an, as yet, unrealised redecoration project. The first thought that occurred to me was unacknowledged depression and my fear of having to confront what cynics might call my honest madness. The contents of the box was supposed to be about my belief in the power of applying conviction to purposive aesthetic acts without an end but left unopened had perhaps come to embody my doubts in a deluded belief in feeling as the fundamental component of the cosmos and an acceptance that the logicians were right all along. Having to accept this depresses me and yet there is something in this sense of ennui that offers a chink of light. I’m thinking here about the monologue at the beginning of Stalker about how certain the world had become,
My dear, the world is so unutterably boring. There’s no telepathy, no ghosts, no flying saucers. They can’t exist. The world is ruled by cast-iron laws. These laws are not broken. They just can’t be broken. Don’t hope for flying saucers. That would be too interesting.
And the occasions I have met artists like Alice McCabe who describe their practice as a resistance to boredom. This attitude once puzzled me because I considered myself blessed (cursed?) with a sense that making stuff and making stuff up was a default setting for being a living human. I have recently been reading about how positive results in telepathic research steadily decline as the subjects grow bored with the repetition of the laboratory process. I began to think about how this default setting of critical analysis was what my artist friends were resisting. The hubris of this stifling rigidity is something I feel more acutely now that technological delivery systems are able to broadcast probabilities so effectively and my feeling that the cardboard box on my shelf might contain something interesting seemed not only naïve but worst of all, unhelpful.
I had attached too much weight of expectation to something that was essentially a simple whimsical exercise in joining in. The unopened box had absorbed the feeling of regret generated by my inner pseudo sceptic and I had become a dogmatist in disguise – someone who dispels ideas of the non-mechanical universe with the zeal of a religious fundamentalist. Some people say use it or lose it but the memo I seemed to be getting was prove it before you use it. This could serve as a good description of depression from where I am sitting on a train to Kew.
In moments of expression my reading of Gregory Bateson’s observations emerging from collaborative experience of indigenous cultures alongside his wife Margaret Meade, steer me to a process of losing purpose to find purpose. In these expressive moments this truth of being on the brink of finding something out, permeates my being. It’s not what I find out that matters but the opening to feeling as a fundamental component of the cosmos. In moments of depression this feels like the house made of straw built by the boy who cried wolf. The feeling of being on the brink of a discovery is what led me to source a cassette recorder (several failed ebay purchases) onto which I could record myself singing a song called descendants of the Decadents and then send the device in the post to another person who would record something onto it. This was in Lockdown April 2020, when like others (I imagined) I began to feel the acceleration of the insidious transmogrification of life into a digital equivalence. To counter balance any idea that the reader may now be developing that I am a technophobe I should like to say that around this time, inspired by Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual, I stitched together a tapestry-like website in honour of William Blake, weaving together dozens of digital artworks submitted by invited acquaintances. With William Libet’s research into the interval perception in my peripheral vision I had a strong sense that this “lag” could be a way to experience the virtual realm with the same material vitality as an analogue experience. This positionhad been nurtured by my ongoing and somewhat accidental proximity to the tapestries of meaning that William Blake created through weaving imagination and technological innovation together. Interested readers can still access this website created for Blakefest 2020 at www.virtualvisions.weebly.com
And so today I gathered myself and found the nerve to open the box. A little further explanation is needed here because this was not to be the first time I had opened the box. The first time was on my Birthday (December 9th) 2021 when the parcel’s arrival on this most celebratory of days felt like a sign that my belief in purposive aesthetic acts without end was indeed a sound one. That the parcel had come back relatively quickly was a good sign I thought. Upon opening the package I found that there were only three songs recorded on the device and that after a few months of holding onto it the third recipient, had decided that the apparatus was not working and that this explained why their recording was not as good as the others. They kindly gave me their phone number and after a friendly chat it transpired that they had recently become a mother so the delay was understandable, though the questioning of the mechanical integrity of the device was more puzzling. I thought their recording sounded fantastic but it was immediately obvious that we were looking from opposite ends of the telescope – my end was onto the wonder of how a simple mechanical device could capture events of purposive aesthetic and the other end was how the device couldn’t match up to the recording techniques of *insert cutting edge alternative record producer here. Reading between the lines I realised that the last recipient of the devise had just signed to a major/alternative record label and I felt that my desire to spontaneously escape the region of judgement that the music industry seemed to open into was ridiculous and that people were always going to judge the technical quality before the feeling of the event itself. The parcel was shelved for the first time and eventually as time passed I felt I able to send it out into the world again only this time I would perhaps suggest who to send the machine to next. This level of control felt wrong but it was the only way to recapture the spirit of spontaneity behind my original impulse to send a cassette recorder in the post.
Opening the box for the second time I discovered the the receivers of the cassette player had filled in their details and followed the friendly advise of the first recipient to set the counter to zero after the recording. My office is in the attic and so I had to go downstairs to the kitchen to find AA batteries because the last performer had thoughtfully removed them from the devise. I was grateful for this practical foresight because they would have had no idea that I would leave the package unopened for over two years during which time the batteries may well have corroded their connections. With the new batteries in place I tried cautiously to rewind the tape a little except that nothing happened and after opening the battery compartment again I saw that one of the connectors was missing. I noticed that there was still an exposed wire and tried just pushing the batteries hard against this. To my relief the machine gently woke up and I allowed myself a sparing sample of Bronze Age flash back recorded by Rob Jones.
I sit now on the train at Clapham Junction on my way to the home of Vic Godard. I had first proposed this visit soon after I received the packed in 2022 and I am grateful to Vic and Mandy (who initially liaised with Vic) for remaining patient with me and not ignoring my renewed request to visit with the cassette recorder. This acceptance of slowing of the passage of time might be integral to the resistance of boredom. Another reason for my delayed visit may have been my inner policeman thinking that taking the machine in person to someone for them to record onto was a total dereliction of my duty to allow the process to shape itself. It was like a paranormal researcher providing the answers to the telepathic test in advance without admitting it to themselves, the dogmatist in disguise whispered. The process was conceived as a kind of revival of my brief entanglememt with mail-art in the early 1990s, which seemed to bring me into the orbit of more grown up and naturally transgressive artists without me fully understanding what I was getting myself into. What, for instance did the arrival of a large gummy green pig’s head portend? By resorting to hand delivering the cassette machine and press the buttons myself I was letting everyone down, I thought. In my mind I saw the faces of more rigorous artist researchers who would sneer at my amateur travesty of situationist endeavours. This resistance to boredom is a strangely complex thing though and sometimes the proof must walk patiently at the master’s side as they stride towards the void. It was only whilst walking in the spring sunshine towards the train station that the lyrical truth of how delivering the recording devise in a tote bag to the home of a mythical postman/pop-star was the most fitting way to finish the project and put my demons to bed.
Here is the film I recorded of me unboxing the machine on the first occasion of its return.
Since being initially sent out in April 2021 the cassette now contains 9 songs by some surprising artists. To hear them please attend The Catalyst Club on ?? when the cassette will be played on the devise upon which the recordings were made.