last blog of the semester

I was going to stress myself out by during the traditional super stressed all nighter, where I try and fill up more of my sketch book, do a page on each artist I have looked and other things like that but when I looked at the list i relisied this was an over ambitious goal for the the time I had left. It also seems like a pointless thing. It only really satisfies the grading matrix, its not the most motivating motive.

I do constatly look at art, I don't think I need to prove this. If I need to prove anything it is my analitical skills. Not that I know a lot of different artists by looking at their wikipedia page but actually take the time with the work this dosen't happen by quickly compiling a few sentenses cut from other peoples views and reasssesmbling them in your sketchbook.

I think my sketch book this semister has almost been the residue left from work rather than me working things out myself. I spend most of my time reading and watching and trying to write but I get most of my ideas, although thats not the write word, walking to and from uni or when I am having a shower but this is true of most people I think. Whe n you have ideas or thoughts like this though they aren't all together. I think you can fool yourself into thinking you know what you know but when you try and write it or say it you relise that what you think dosn't make sence, or you were thinking of two ooposing things at the same time or that your great epithany when you write it down wasn't as smart as you thought it was.It is important to try and write down what you are thinking so that you can look at it objectivly, this is mayby something I haven't been doing enough and it is far more important than proving that you know of artists. 

My thinking has been muddled this semester. I have been trying to figure out what I am really intersested in, but that is a stupid thing to do in the end because you don't pursue that you just end up doing it. Its like those people who pursue happiness, you don't do that you stop worring about it and let it come to you. You really know what you are interested in. So what are my interests? I don't know why are you asking me that?

Thats a stupid thing to ask because people are interested in a great deal of things or at least interesting people do. Yay! I'm soooo interesting.

The question is focus not interest and thats just a matter of choice. The truth is I have lacked focus rather than interest. I almost feel like picking a random theme uot of a hat to work on in forth year that seems like just as good a way of choosing as any. I am uncomfortably speaking like this because I get the feeling that I will look back and cringe at comments like these when I am older and know better. What matures in an artist is not the thing looked at but how its looked at and then of course how that vision is realised.

I don't know how far my work has matured since last semester, but the difference between 3rd and 2nd year I feel has been considerable. I still need to make a real jump for 4th year. This semesters work has been stuck in the clump that I got to at the end of last semister, i am using many of the same techniques and I fear this might be a bit of creative lazyness seeping in. There is a thought process where its like I have an idea how can I can display this with my body doing a futile repaeted action and then how will I display that usinga mix of TVs and projections. It is starting to feel for me a little formulaic. Its becoming a default setting rather than pushing myself and boadaries. I need to do something that surpasses this or at least does not conform to this because the last thing i want to do Is repeat my self and get bored of my own work.

Going back to the subject of researching artists there is a tendancy to look at artists who are doing art that similar to the work your doing. Of course this is a nessesary thing and it would be stupid not to do this you need to know the history and the different ways the subject has been realised but i amm allways scared that you can dig your self into a hole. Its a fear of ending up knowing everything about nothing Hmmm a minite ago I was talking about how important focus is. There is also the fear of being a jack of all trades but a master of none. Both end sof the scale sound good and bad in different ways. No wonder I am lost. 

This has been a theme of this sememester. I can't help but get roped into absurdism when even the really insignificant issue of what an art student should do in his 2nd semister of third year is surrounded by grey paradox. being lost in thisway also makes It harder to make a sketchbook because when you are lost you don't know what is significant.

I would love if I were more people, graham doppleganger pictures look like a wish come true because then I could do everything but sadly I don't have the cloaning abilty on hand. I will just have to prioritise and make choices like everyone else. 

while Looking back at the semester I might aswell write alittle about the final videos I concoctded:

I don't know whether i should talk about the main piece that we discussed in the crit because that has been quite roundly evaluated so I will skip on to the other videos. 

I made a few videos of the light in the hall. The most significant one is lightbulb Pendulum. This was half inspired by the scene in psycho in which the mothers corpse is reavealed and lila knocks the lightbulb when she steps back in horror. The moving light give the illusion of moviement to the mother dead corpse so that she became both living and dead at the same like she is in the rest of the movie. This living death is something which has always been part of photography and film. It fits with the feeling of being trapped from my staircase piece. I have amplified this idea by making the lightbulb in my film swing back and forth forever like a pendulum and dispaying it on a Tv. It simulatanously references the passage of time while also staying the same and going no where. The light bulb goes from pole to pole only to reapeat itself. constantly changing but remaining the same. Its back an d forth movement is also ment to remind the viewer of hypnosis, pointing out the fact that when the TVs on your eyes always end up watching it even if the programs of no interest what so ever. I remeber during last semisters exhibition there  was this we kid who spent almost the hole time staring at my work, just because it was displayed on TVs. It's strange almost like to use a chilched example moths to a flame. These were the sort of thoughts that were going through my mind when makin up that piece.

I also  made a video called two masks. which is basically two tvs playing the same video, though one is slightly a head of the other timewise. Visually it looks like one face laughing at at another face that is crying. Both over acted (both faces are the same face,mine) as the videos play the laughing one changes to crying and vice versa so the sympathies change. I really hate the one thats laughing its so heartless taking happiness in the others pain but then the crying one starts laughing and the laughing one starts crying, and the power shifts. The titial obviously refers to the two masks tradgedy and comedy and tries to show the artificiality of these boadaries. Things in life eliude the boundaries and structure of fiction. It is obviously also talking about the ability to tell or understand how someone one really feels. There is where the tital kicks in again. The tital does its job. I don't know if the tital is two obvious or even if the whole idea is a little run of the mill. I still like it though. I think it is effective in trying to judge the characters what are the laughing or crying for. They are laughing/crying at each other. Its like they are struggling for supreamacy and when one finally gets it the victory seems hollow or they realise how cruel them are and they fall. neither ever really wins they slip between failure and success.   It reminds me of my attitude to my work, at the moment I think I am totally brilliant but when I started to writting this I was feeling pretty depressed about the quality of my work. Maybe it because i'm now listening to upbeat music with flutes in it and ooo la las. I'll listen to something miserable when I write about the next video to see if it has any effect. With all this elesivness and pointing out that there are no boudaries the piece is contradictory in that it is very much in a set structure a very simply structure. Its strange. 

The next video I made was called Jump for Joy which consisted of a video of me reasoably small in an expance of grass jumping with a voice (stuart) offf screen, behind the camera, barking commands such as jump higher and smile more and admonisments like "thats not good enough" in the style of a overbearing father at a childrens football game.  Its a single unedited shot. Its quite amusing however perhaps a little slow, Its also a bit of a one liner. It was developed from the script I wrote called "Brinng" where the main character was stuck in a pointless job in which he could never succeed. In this I have slighlty changed the idea and also reduced the staging. I'm talking more about the idea of how even our liesure and emotional lives are governed and controled like everything else. There are social pressure to feel the right thing. A jump of joy is ment to be a spontansious act not a rehearsed and reapeted one. Play is oringanally an exploratory thing, where you learn about the world but as you get older play gets more and more consricted and rule ridden. A game like football you have to obey the rules or you are playing wrong. How does this fit with the last video where on of the points is the elusivness of reality. Well it shows in a way how we deal with this by building rules and systems that allow us to play together nicely even if this is restrictive and leaves you sometime doing seemingly pointless activitys in order to survive or having to repress your feeling in order to fit into expectations.

The next video is plinth. Its a bit of a half baked thing, which hasn't been distilled down to a level that i am happy with as you can see with the three versions of it there is still alot to work out. This is less important to me than the other videos. I enter with a pair of jeans in a white space with a plinth in it. I lay down the jeans carefully and stuff my outer garmets into the legs then arrange the boots at the bottom of the jeans so it looks like a pair of legs, then I push the plinth onto the jeans, with the ends of the stuffed jeans sticking out so that it appears comically like there is a person squished under the plinth cartoonlike. I then leave. 

I haven't got any real reasons for doing this. I was thinking about narassism and art and how much any piece of work talks about the artist. What do you leave in an art gallery. I don't know really what I was doing. It was a spur of the moment thing i saw a plinth and I wanted to make a film. I suppose when you try and make an honest work of art you try to bare more than just the surface but the art work is also a surigate in a sense. It represents you as much as it represents what the artist had in mind. People if you are well famous refereto a piece of work as "a (artists name)". I suppose I was trying to workout these sorts of issues

The last video on the dvd isn't really worth talking about.

To finish I'll just throw in some art works that I enjoyed 

This is "Paradox of Praxis I (sometimes doing something leads to nothing) by Francis Alÿs. It is a nice simple piece. In which the artist pushes a block of ice (the type street vender use to keep the drinks they sell cool)  around mexico city until it melts. He is exploring many of the same themes that I have tried to but has also managed to bring in a political side to the work as well, something which he often does, by referencing the street venders who despite all thee efforts are trapped by there difficult curcumstances.          

The next is a wee monologe by ivor cutler. His works I find really funny and has that strange dark human children have as well as a child like wonder at the world yet he's still has this stern dour scottish voice that  pushes it into brilliance. It also brushes the profound in an odd whimsical way

Right thats me.

I wish my sketchbook was a little more ledgible

but it isn't.



staircases

I decided to write a blog about staircases because one of my videos has some stairs in it and I thought I might as well tell whyish because I haven't written it in my sketchbook and I need to prove that I have been reading and looking at stuff rather than just sitting around drinking tea.

These two videos show the dual purpose of staircases you can go both up and down them, making them twice as usful as escalators and slides. they are trasitory spaces.

in both reaching the top means death.

The first clip is from psycho which is a good film the second clip is from a matter of life and death which is also a good film. I have never watched psycho. Its one of those film that I hardly think I need to watch because of the weight of what has been written about it. I can play it pretty much in my head becase of all the clip shows its featured in, documentaries, books on film theory, references in pop culture even art works. Its become a sort of cultural myth, its in the collective subconsious, its a foundation for modern horror, really good film...yadda yadda yadda

actally stuff this! I'm going to watch it now. It'll probably be on the internet somewhere.

Well that was a really good film. I really liked the ordinariness of it from the start where it had the establishing shot and the seemingly pointless date and time. Seemingly because it showed it as just anyother day. the date meant nothing to us except that it grounded the audianice in everyday meanial fact. Everything was ordiary the male hero and romantic interest wasn't a firefighter or anything he owned a small shop that sold insecticide to old ladies who wouldn't want to hurt a fly. Even after the ladies murdered in the shower the whole cleaning scene is presented almost like regular house work. the Bates motel would seem normal if it weren't for the haunted house that lurks like a big tumur of crazy.

The second clip is from a film called "A Matter of Life and Death"  which is such a charming film it melts the icy shard lodged in my heart by the straight up warmness of its tone and the chemistry of the characters. and it looks so lovely aswell. All nice bold colour, except in the black and white afterlife. oooo its cimnema as it should be. I don't know whats better this or Psycho if only their was someway to combine them. If there ever was such a film made I would not dare to watch for after seeing something so fantabulous what in life could top it? But in saying this I would miss one of the most important lessons within "A Matter of Life and Death". The bold colours of life and love overpower anything that can be found in death. Life and love are the most precisious things in the world more important than any rules of the cosmos and so need to be fought for with all our given strengh. This is what happens in the film. A british airman cheats death and falls in love with an american radio operator and then has to argue why he should live in a court in heaven. It was made and set in WW2 to be used to ease animosity between the british and americans. I don't know if it worked in that respect although their are the odd scene where this is brought up but it dosn't upset anything. Anyway the clip shows the airman disscussing who should be his lawyer in the upcoming court case with the angel who failed to collect his soul in the first place, who is trying to trick him into accending to the afterlife.

The staircase they are going up is perhaps the most famous staircase, jacobs ladder. I couldn't think of anyother really famous staircases. I though about looking at stepped pyramids of the icas, aztecs and Egyptions but after reading for too long about them I decided Jacobs ladder is the only religious stairway I can be bothered writting about in this blog because there is a nice painting by William Blake of it and William Blake is just great.      

    

The description of Jacob's ladder appears in the Book of Genesis (28:10–19):

Jacob left Beersheba, and went toward Haran. He came to the place and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it [or "beside him"] and said, "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendants; and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done that of which I have spoken to you." Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it." And he was afraid, and said, "This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."

The ladder is a powerful symbol of the link between man and the divine. 

Martin Creed and Bruce Naumen did a few simple (in form, if not content)  art works comprising of staircases. I couldn't find a video of Creeds stairs works on youtube. I was looking for the one where a note sounds when you step on a step from low at bottom to high at top. I eventually found one in this video advert for the show it featured in last year which is ok I suppose.

i hate his fake mondesty it feels like he's trying to figure out how much modesty can i get away with. however he can be endearing when talking about his ego: "I probably have a big-ish ego, like a lot of people. It just looks small when you're standing far away." Anyway I don't know why I am talking about whether I like martin creed as a person. It is kind of irrelevent, and I have had no contact with the man so really anything I can say about him is of no real value. However he does choose to present himself in a very delibretly low key manner and this relates to his work. If you fink this persona irrating then you will probably also find his work irratating. 

"I think that the best things get under people's skin, make them remember them. People aren't stupid. They know what's fake and what's not. They respond to things. Art is just things in the world, usually an arrangement of colour and shapes. It's people who have the feelings and the reactions."marin creed

His work posseses a purity that stretches almost to the point of boredom but to say this is to miss the point. Whereas other minamilists such as Judd get rid of everything except the matierial to let the universe in and so walk toward the light of the sublime. Creed pull focus into banitly and simple boring truth. There is no end to judds work whearase thre is a first step and a last step in Creeds work in my view.

 His work are all about restrictions: impersonal rules which require a quick, definitive responce made formal by the parameters Part random, part ordered.

it makes minamalism managable and also injects much needed humour into it. Humour can never work in tandem with the sublime in my books because humour acts as a screen. Man can seperate himself from the the butt of the joke by his ability to change the thing he looks at in the way its perseived while the thing persieved can do nothing to him. If it did do something to him the joke would be over. its all fun and games before someone loses an eye.    

Anyway I was talking about staircases.

Creed has rigged things so that every step triggers a musical note from speakers on the stairs. It's like that big keyboard in that Tom Hanks film "Big". Is it one of those artworks that serve to make us aware of our body and movement in space, yeah probably. It also looks like fun. Its the sort of artwork that when you go to an art gallery with non art friends and you ask them what artwork they liked best. They will say eh that staircase one because its the only one they can remeber becauseit relates to them and so they relate to it. It is fun to play with and isn't play the way we learn how to function in the world. It does its job I think.

"there is no regular rythm whe your going down so you have to take each step and watch it"Nauman

I can't find any signithicant writing on Bruce Naumen's stair cases apart the odd droll remark. The usal its art because I say so tedium. I wish people would all stop saying that if only to see if their work is still art. It probably will be.

"Stairway" above and "The Stadium Piece" do diferent tthings on is a staircase where all the steps are different sizes supposedly causing an increased awarness of body but you could if you wanted to spin it into a statment on life you know because although its sometimes hard to see each step is different so you have to watch out. I don't think this view is a worth while view of the art work because its really quite cheesy it sounds like a moral you might find at the end of the wonder years. To be honest I never watched the programe, I've only ever scene scraps of it while channel hopping on weekend afternoons so who am I to judge it? from the short while i spent making sure the show was called "The Wonder Years" and not Days of Our Lives or Golden Years I read many heartfelt reviews of the program from old fans who thanks partly to the strong messages and inspiration hey gained from the seris managed to get through some pretty hard times, other who had lived through that period themselves and made their insides warmed by bittersweet nostalgia. I think we are two soon to write off these forms low art. I am sure wonder years have touched more people brought more tears to the eye and smile to the face than all of naumans ouvre. and isn't that the purpose of art to touch people, to share in our humanity? I don't know i haven't learned the answer to that yet but what I have learned is its not big or clever to write anything off before taking the time to appriciate. The rules that state what is good and what is bad, what is important and unimportant are not written by one man alone and even less by one mans ignorance. yes I have learned something to day. perhaps i'll look back on this day. Narrating over my own TV seris about how naive i was then but how I was learning to open up my heart to new things and open up myself to life.

"The Stadium Piece" on the other hand is a staircase that in the end dosen't reach anywhere, it goes up and down and up and down and ends up on the same floor. I can can make up a crummby metephore for this work aswell. Life has its ups and downs but in the end we all end up the same place the ground. These works are so much fun because they are nice and contained but open to any rubbish theory you care to think up. This sort of art is usefull for keeping the ego at bay because you come up with your half assed interpretation of with the understanding that it can never be correct but it kinda is. its a nice balance. I need to make sure that my works are nice and contained because its not good when unsureness leaks out, it just makes a mess.            

"I like the idea that you could make something that appears to be functional but when you use it dosen't you can't quite figure out what that function might be and that in the end is what its function is." Nauman

rachel whitread makes scultures out of negative space. I like this persons work. She makes familier space become unfamiler by filling it with plaster.
 and the human inability to find any. The absurd dosen't mean logically impossible but humanly impossible to understand. The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd, but rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously.

One of her works “Untitled (Upstairs),” 2001, is a cast of a staircase from the artists house located in London’s Bethnal Green.  Whiteread’s staircases play with our perceptions on two levels. Firstly, the empty space beneath the staircase is negated by transforming it into an impenetrable closed form and secondly, it is flipped on its side skewing the expected laws of gravity and the viewer’s own sense of orientation. The work is foreign and at the same time familiar. Whiteread’s staircases thus call into question the credibility of our perception and embody both absurdity and impossibility.

The Absud refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek the meaning of life

In whitereads work this exists in a marginal way in that the object is regonisable as a staircase well a shadow of a staircese, well something like that however it is unrelatable in a human sence because where we would have fitted into it has become solid.

Absurdism is something that has infected my thinking for a while now. The confrontation between man's desire for significance, meaning and clarity and the vast inconsivable universe is an easy thing to get stuck in.

Whenever I start to wax philosophical I always remember this part of a video game i had as a child. I have been reading that essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" by camus which has been nice. The myth of the titial is basically that there was this ancient greek guy who was all sorts of badass, he dified the Gods, he captured death so that no one died and he managed to slime his way out of the underworld. When he was eventually apprehended by the Gods he forced by them to everyday roll a boulder to the top of a mountain only to have roll back down again. An endless pointless task like washing "You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing." camus



You never see femme fatales doing housework except maybe as penance. sisyphus was the crafiest of men and he paid for his artfulness dearly.



I have also been looking at the sublime through the essay "On the Sublime" by Friedrich Schiller and Romantic artists such as Blake. Here is that picture people always show when anyone mentions romanticism: 

 The sublime as we understand it was invented by englishmen seeing the alps and thinking jeez thats awesome, in the true sence of the word.

"The sublime object is of a double description. We refer it either to our power of comprehension, and succumb in the attempt to form for ourselves an image or a concept of it; or we refer it to our vital power, and consider it as a power before which those of ours vanish into nothing. But although in the one as in the other case we preserve the painful feeling of our limits through its instigation, so we do not, however, flee it, but rather are attracted by it with irresistible force. " schiller

In this quote we can see similarities between the notion of the absurd and the sublime in fact the sublime could be seen as the begining of the absurd in that the sublime is the moment we realise the human impossibiltiy of belittling the universe down to a human size. You can see your life as insignificant against the sublime, see your life as meaningless but that would be narsassitic. Just enjoy the view.

Anyway good bye i have writting this blog for too long i was going to write a bit more but that will have to do. the gist of the essay was I was going to talk a wee bit about the spiral jetty and what that says about the sublime and also speak a wee bit about entropy.

a spiral goes on forever because it never leads anywhere

I was then going to talk again about jacobs ladder whilst comparing and contrasting it with Sisyphuses task and talk about the matieral and the immatieral. sisyphus was damned because of his love for life and his wish to remain in the realm of bodily sensations-earth. I was also going to mention "a matter of life and death" again. because this fit with the sisyphin philosophym, with the desplay of love for life. While jacobs ladder is celebrating the fact that we can escape and leave this body behind. The body is the boulder but instead of having to roll it up a hill we have to feed and water it everyday, more than once supplying its demades is what keeps us chained to the earth. Climbing up jacobs ladder is to leave it behind.

I am an absurdist in the respect that I don't belive in a god and I know I can't understand the universe but it is foolish to then see life as a drugery. that the gist of what I was going to say but I need to write about other stuff before the deadline smacks me in the face. its taken my days to write this far I am just too easily distracted why did them have to combine the typewritter with the biggest cornicopia of distraction that mankind has ever consieved. Everytime I start to type the temptation just to read or watch something new and interesting pops up. yes I am going know goodbye.

    

"We gladly submit to the physical necessity of our well-being and our existence, for that reminds us precisely, that it has no command over our principles. Man is in its hand, but the will of man is in his own." schiller

climbing to the sublime.

"I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy" camus

"despite everything i believe people are really good at heart" anne frank

its like housework
crafty people don't do these sort of tasks
you never see femme fatales doing housework except maybe as penance. sisyphus was the crafiest of men

 Fullest Feeling of Sublime – Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature).
The word, of Latin origin, means something that is 'set or raised aloft, high up'. The sublime is further defined as having the quality of such greatness, magnitude or intensity, whether physical, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic or spiritual, that our ability to perceive or comprehend it is temporarily overwhelmed.

can the sublime defeat absurdism, it dosen't matter whether life has meaning or not It just matter whether or not it seems to.

sublime is most sublime when it can kill you thundrous ocean or explosize vollcano. Why not tripping over your shoe laces while going downstairs? when the sublime and the mundane meet. The romantics worship death as much as nature and life. death is the ultimate in sublime. the great darkness.

The zohar also connects Jacob's Ladder to the mystery of the human body. "Soncino Zohar, Bereshith, Section 1, Page 150b - Jacob then said: THIS IS NONE OTHER THAN THE HOUSE OF GOD , implying: This is not to remain idle; its covenant is not meant to exist in isolation. It is in sooth a godly abode, to be used for the promotion of fecundity and for receiving blessing from all the bodily organs. For indeed this is THE GATE OF HEAVEN , or, in other words, the gate of the Body, the gate assuredly through which pass the blessings downwards, so that it is attached both on high and below: on high, as being the gate of heaven, and below, as being none other than the house of God."

  

"In the sublime, on the contrary, reason and sensuousness do not harmonize, and precisely in this contradiction between both lies the charm wherewith it seizes our soul. The physical and the moral man are separated here from one another most sharply; for exactly in such objects, where the first only feels its limits, does the other have the experience of its force and is elevated infinitely precisely through that which presses the other to the ground."schiller

skulls

I was just reading an article on trepanation and came across this funny illustration. It looks like some sort of macarb game of knots and crosses.

The man who brought this trepaned peruvian skull( now dated between 1400-1530)  to world wide attension was Ephraim George Squier (1821-1888) a self taught archaeologist and at the time the US commisionar to Peru at the behest of Lincoln. He said of it:

...the most important relic in Senora Zentino's collection is the frontal bone of a skull, from the Inca cemetery in the valley of Yucay, which exhibits a clear case of trepanning before death. The senora was kind enough to give it to me for investigation, and it has been submitted to the criticism of the best surgeons of the United States and Europe, and regarded by all as the most remarkable evidence of a knowledge of surgery among the aborigines yet discovered on this continent; for trepanning is one of the most difficult surgical processes. The cutting through the bone was not performed with a saw, but evidently with a burin, or tool like that used by engravers on wood and metal. The opening is fifty-eight hundredths of an inch wide and seventy hundredths long.

all 'n' all pretty amazing. It for obvious reasons reminds me of Gabriel orozcos work "Black Kites"

The game that springs to mind here is chess and everyone knows death is the captian of the metaphysical chess team. Black Kites is one of those annoying pieces of work that you can't really sum up quickly in a blog post it's one of those neatly tied art puzzles where you take two simple elements: a skull and a checkered board pattern and combine them. It has been said to be a readymade, which it kind of is. Duchamp was a chess player, and someone who at least pretended or was accused of trying to bring about painting or it could be some sort of day of the dead celebration type thing because after all the guys mexican, probaly not. I missed out a significant element its name, black kites whats the significance there? Once the winds stop in the silence at the opening of the seventh seal the kites stop flying and fall to the ground. I am just going to take the easy way out of this work and keep with the bored game theme of this blog post and think of it as a chess board. Orozco has used chess symbolism before in Horses riding endlessly so its not an absolutly bad theory.  

The knight in The Seventh Seal shouldn't have played chess he should have played knots and crosses you can keep on drawing for ever in that game. You could graffeti all the skellintons in the world.
 I don't know whether or not death would play knots and crosses with me or whether God plays dice but if he dose it won't be in a simple game like snakes and ladders it probaly be some strange mysterious game no man could ever fathom perhaps dungons and dragons. The two above skulls both show the creativity of mankind don't they kids? but I'm not going to patronise you by continuing to spell it out I just can't believe the ancient Incas perfored brain surgery. people are amazing, in what we achieve to escape death and the things we create to try and reconcile it. 

To end on a cherry note Death is eventible. No matter how rich you are you can't buy immortality . sorry damian.