Dead Cat Transaction

I applied for the Chorlton Arts Festival back in September with two proposals, one of a normal exhibition and the other to interfere with and distort an area of public space.  Like most applications for arts related things I listed my accolades and wrote the proposal in a way that I thought would come across as arrogant and off putting.  So I was quite surprised to be allowed to complete both of my proposals as two separate intertwined events.  So there is a lesson in that.  Coy, evasive, polite Englishness isn’t the best approach to writing artistic proposals and confidence is not necessarily arrogance.

I went to set up my “installation” or “mural” on Sunday morning at 5:30am.  At 6:30am a man came up to me asking if I had permission.  I pulled the brochure out of my pocket and opened it to the right page.  “See.  Outside Proof.  This year.  That’s me.  I’m here.”  I told him.  I asked him if he worked there and then he said he owned the building.  After which he got inside a black cab taxi’s driver’s seat and drove off.  So maybe he is the owner or maybe he just enjoys saying he is the owner of buildings.

 

Speaking of tall tales after this I was approached by Jesus Christ.  Or someone claiming to be him.  Though in reality one of Chorlton’s best histrionic old men.  He didn’t remember me speaking to him 2 years ago.  But why would he?  He has so much effort invested within his performance that the real world barely drizzles into him.   Would Al Pacino recognize you even though you saw him on the telly once?

 

I forgot my phone and was meant to be meeting the festival instagrammer some time around 9am so I had to walk home.  At this point it was all just about almost finished and I was in a sleep deprived self involved feeling of artistic fanciful freedom from the realities of flesh.  This was then destroyed when I turned the corner and saw what at first I thought was a sleeping cat.  But as I got closer noticed it was a cat with it’s organs ripped out, that had been tossed about violently and broken and spattered. 

In visions like the above you become confronted with the truth.  That underneath the clean walls and flat surfaces everything is reducible to gloop, the plastic lives we live doesn’t go anywhere beyond this surface so when the true nature of gloop and death is shown to us we just recoil because it shouldn’t exist in our tiny, self limited worlds.  The end of our lives is usually hooked up to some tubes and needles and all our conflict and war comes to whatever it rationalizations or lack of rationalizations we have.  Death is not beautiful in our culture.  Dead cats with their intestines on the pavement are not beautiful to me.  It was the biggest attack ever on my aesthetic sensibilities.  But it was the most real thing I've seen all year.

Much as this disturbed me I repressed the experience after I dealt with it.  And considering it now then I realize that the work I’ve created is in a sense attempting to operate on the level of a dead cat.  It is essentially street art designed to be inaccessible.  Unaesthetically pleasing.  Following no plastic populist Golden Ratio.  Making no references to anything but itself.  It is untidy, in terms of production, execution and in presentation.  It’s a part of me that is laughing at clock towers, mobile phone shops and hospital beds.  The dreary compartments and hospitality of the different places we phase into.  Every life a series of transactions.  Bound in a Social Contract none of us ever see or sign.   We are doing their very best to be unchallenging, appealing and boot licking too each other as possible.  That’s how you do self promotion.  “Share me, like me, want me then I will share you, like you, want you.”  Most people don’t like a dead cat.  Most people wouldn’t share a dead cat.  Most people don’t want a dead cat.

 

So come and be annoyed by my aesthetically jarring “mural” or “installation” outside of Proof in Chorlton.  Or be surprised that it doesn’t really live up to my write up of it.  And that you actually like it.  Like it.  Share it.  BUY IT.  BUY ME.  BUY ME. CONSUME (insert more counterculture anti-capitalist clichés here, perhaps a cartoon of David Cameron being spanked by Rupert Murdoch.  That would be clever.  That would affirm everything.)

 

Also I will be exhibiting at Tea Hive in Chorlton for the next few weeks.  I set up that exhibition on Monday.  So there is plenty of stuff there for you to initiate one of your many life transactions with.

Deconstruction of Falling Bricks

Some of you may have been following this story on Facebook, I did become quite obsessive about it and took as many photos of this slowly demolished building as possible.  I my eye on it all day due to it occurring outside my office window for the last four months I was working for Manchester City Council.

I'd been working for the City Council for quite a few years and took voluntary redundancy meaning my contract finished March 2014.  That's the uninteresting part of this story.  This is the story of my unlikely non-friendship with a collapsing structure.  Here comes all the personalized, irrational but knowingly just metaphorical stuff.  The collapsing structure could be seen as a physical manifestation of the end of my time working at the City Council.  The gray facade was torn from the face of the building, revealing all the hidden colours.  Almost like how my job had given me a bureaucratic facade and as time went by the mask had to slip away for the real me to reemerge... now that's turning the metaphorical into the pretentious... but I don't mind so much about that.  Pretentious is as Pretentious does.  And Pretensious writes a blog.

It wasn't like any ordinary demolition.  When I was young I remember Edlington's pit being blown up in an amazing explosion.  The whole structure tumbling down in one fast organised collapse leaving behind a blackened undeveloped wasteland.  The explosion was exciting to my 4 year old brain and I wasn't of an age to appreciate the political ramifications.  I had a vague concept of Thatcher as a pantomime villain who stole milk from children.  To be fair on my four year old self he likely had a lot more political knowledge and awareness of current events than I do now as a thirty two year old.

In contrast to the last demolition I watched this building was taken apart in slow motion.  I'm assuming it was taken down in this fashion for health and safety reasons, though a friend told me that they might be selling the bricks so they'll need them all intact.  Either way the deconstruction method could probably be googled and that would give you a more satisfactory answer as to why some buildings suffer this slow unravelling. This entry is more about how interesting I found it on an aesthetic level.  Like a form of archeology. Looking into other people's past lives, their taste in colour and how well sign posted their fire exits were.  How a dull, boring tower block can have under it's surfaces such vibrancy, and that even in council flats there is a taste for bright colours.  Not all council residents look live like Mike Leigh believes them to.

So I would check everyday, see it from different angles dependent on my position.  Discovering that there was not just one of these buildings but two of them.  If you have ever been to this area of West Gorton you would know that there isn't a great deal to do apart from smoke.  So the arrival of this rough, colorful character into my life became something of a fascination and I thought about it on a multitude of levels, some of which I can't actually recall or even put into tangible words.  Or in other words ''I'm not sure I can be bothered trying to put them into words.''  Perhaps this is due to a lack of words in the english language to define my feelings or perhaps it's due to me feeling that to reveal them would be telling too much about myself.  The main reason though is that some of the levels were very silly.  Needless to say though I did have an appreciation and at times an actual affection for this building in it's dying days.

The broken building became something important for me to chronicle.  The more it was taken apart the more the imiment change in my own life approached.  The idea of leaving my job before the building was destroyed seemed like cheating, it needed to be destroyed on the last week of my work.  Progress on the poor thing was very slow for quite a few months, so it got to a point where I feared my visual journal wouldn't be complete and that I wouldn't be there for the broken building when it was finally torn down.

Around this time I started to get into pattern design.  I started to see the world differently and the real world started to feel like art and patterns.  I started looking at everything in different ways, seeing pattern potential in everything.  The fact the building was being destroyed meant that it's pattern would be lost forever, but also it meant that it would leave a new pattern behind.  That being the issue of existing within time and space everything moves and changes.  Patterns and art are a way of fixing life into some form of permanence. There was nothing permanent about the broken building or my job at the City Council and most importantly for me to remember that there was nothing permanent about me.  That I really am adaptable and I am capable of changing.  At the time this was very frightening.  I wasn't sure what I would become and still feel like I'm in a bit of a chrysalis.

A few years ago, possibly around the point I started this blog or not long after, I actually felt I had reached my full psychological apex, that I wouldn't ever rise higher or change into a different sort of person ever again, that I had reached the middle of my life and from this point onwards I was a fixed point.  This doesn't mean that I was incapable of achieving but that my core characteristics were always going to stay the same, whether I was living alone, with people, with a cat or with whoever I would always be the Garth Simmons that I had become.  As the building was taken apart so was I, and within the ghost walls I began to think more about the real me rather than the trappings and definitions I'd inadvertently put on myself.  This is good as those definitions had become very old, tired and predictable for me to live in, sometimes they were actually frustrating.  But it was strange and scary because I had no idea, actually still have no idea, what it is that I will become.

And so it ended.  The last week of March.  The whole thing broken down and turned into piles of dead brick.  I got the bus away from West Gorton for the last time.  Leaving behind the dead shell of a departed friend not to mention some lovely co workers.  In this blog post I've attempted to make the mundane epic or perhaps make the epic personal.  Experiences somehow change their substance when put into words, ''mundane'', ''epic'', ''personal''.  It all was what it was and all these things happened and now the future feels vast and indomitable.

Wrecks

I was going to use my Sunday afternoon in the same way I used my Sunday morning.  Sat with the curtains closed in my bedroom under electric light sticking little bits of paper onto other little bits of paper - I would have continued doing this until all the paper that needed to be stuck to paper had been stuck to paper.  It was quite sunny outside though so by about 3 o'clock I decided to don my straw hat and sunglasses and have a brief walk in Chorlton Waterpark - find some shade, phone my mum for a bit, do a little bit of design work for my exhibition.  I realised in the early stretches of the Water Park that it would be difficult to avoid large groups of people, so I scampered up a little steep hill and sat up there and proceeded with my tasks.  It was an unpopulated and ignored area of the park with no discernible pathways and no people, just lots of plants.

So it got to a point I'd done all I needed to do - which didn't take long - I considered going on a familiar walk down the usual paths but when heading in that direction I was instantly bored and nearly stepped on a few wandering dogs - too much hustle and bustle for a clumsy type like me, I think boredom can enhance my clumsiness so I headed back homeward but got slightly bored on my way back down such a dull familiar path - so I scrambled back up the steep hill and ventured into the dense vegetation.  It took me back to my early teens, when I went into Edlington Woods on my lunch break as it was the perfect place to talk to oneself and think, also the best place to avoid the melting pot of children, all learning social survival instincts and pack mentality.  It was also a good place to develop a split personality, so the thoughts in your head would actually become like a different individual perched on a throne in your cerebral cortex screaming to get out and making petty sarcastic remarks - like discovering a secret imprisoned soul that's been smothered for the past decade but it's reawakening ready to become real and as a consequence making you as a person more real..... well.... depending on your perspective this new presence may make you seem less real - but then at the time I wasn't so much aware of everyone else's subjective viewpoints, my own viewpoint was like a rollercoaster swooshing past all the sights and sounds of real life so therefore not being able to take part.  Boo hoo.

Anyway I completely digress.... as I made my way through the thistles and thorns I was thinking about how much I like exploring ignored areas of woodland, and how it would be unlikely to find any burnt out cars hidden in Chorlton Waterpark like the ones I used to see all the time in Edlington Woods - because Edlington is well dodgy and Chorlton is well nice.

I carried on with my rambling ramble stepped over dead trees and branches grabbing a useful stick on my way and within a minute, perhaps two (who's counting?) I came across a burnt out car.  It wasn't just burnt out either - it was also crashed into a tree.  Result.

I was pretty surprised because this place is such a fun family orientated area - but then I suppose at night time it's not about that anymore - it's about dogging and burning stolen cars for insurance claims.  I used to know a man in Scarborough who used to take up missions of pretending to steal a car, burning it and then sharing a cut of the insurance money with the owner - he didn't spend the money on anything useful though, within 24 hours all the money would be spent on his fruit machine addiction because he couldn't "resist the bright lights".  Anyway I took a few photos of this car here:

And whilst I was playing detective I also found the empty container of gasoline used to burn the car - presumably after crashing it into a tree.  Because cars don't always explode when you crash them. 

I saw another burnt out car just a few feet away on on my way towards having a look I randomly found:

An old, rusty and mangled kitchen sink!  I really didn't see that coming.

I continued my detective game at the next car and found out the gangs name:

I deduced through my complex sleuth skills - reading - that the gang, group or organisation that destroyed these machines and threw in everything including the kitchen sink (just for good measure) is known as M21 - which is the post code of Chorlton - so it's good to know that even in the slightly more idyllic left wing and slightly posher areas of suburbia there are people who burn cars and mangle sinks.  It makes me feel much more at home knowing for a fact that this sort of thing is going on.  I like that they named themselves after a postcode, it reminds me of E17.  

You may have noticed that I gave the cars a good lookaround.  This isn't because I have any massive interest in cars, I actually don't like them at all, it's more because I was looking to see if there were bodies inside.  Not because I'm some sort of ghoul just because it's probably the sort of things you should check for.  I didn't actually get into the cars but maybe I would if I were wearing protective gloves and clothes which weren't so lovely.  Here are the rest of the photos of the second car:

I took my leave of the wreckages knowing that there would be unlikely anything more interesting to find and rambled through the woods until I found the exit to the park - very near to which I found something else unusual for the area:

Two very large and very nearly geometrically placed perfectly square sponges.  This one, I think, is surely the work of the government or some secret cabal or society.  Or maybe a homeless person put it together as a rudimentary bed.

Well I'm back home now about to start sticking bits of paper onto other bits of paper again in preparation for sticking the stuck on bits of paper to even bigger bits of paper.  I'm good at sticking bits of paper to bits of paper but perhaps I'd make a better living as an adventurer - knight errant or errant fool?  There is an interesting world out there though, and things that I can make the effort to find that no one else would normally come across, or even find interesting.  I should probably take to the road one day with some sort of quest.