Music work continues. To finalise the mixing I placed my speakers, Samson Resolv 65 monitors, really good, flat, sound on my desk at ear height. I reworked the Looking For a Lover vocals, making the second half of the verses and the chorus an octave higher, which sounds much better, more at my natural pitch, but I made the first half spoken in a sort of spiv-like secretish sort of way.
The last track to be looked at again was House of Glass, which had a nice idea but I'm less keen on this track now. I think it was one I liked the most at first. It's strange how tastes evolve. Generally, the newest thing we do is the most liked, perhaps? It's a constant learning process how vocals are layered and used as instruments in songs. I must make what I do the best I can, but know that I'll improve and learn, as all things do, making each cell express itself like a voice, the body as an instrument.
That was yesterday. Today I've prepared to enter the Wirral Society of Artists Open for the first time, something I've thought about for years, but it is in a difficult place for me to get to. The excellent artist Barbara Barlow is helping and we'll take alternative trips to help each other with the delivery and collection duties. I've decided to enter my Self-Portrait with Black Hole, a painting as conceptual as any portrait could be, more like a Frida Kahlo than a Rembrandt I think, although, of course, in finish and style like neither. That, plus two others. These choices are always like gambles.
My main job today is finalising my plans for the 'Cirque du ArtSwarm: Travel' event on Saturday. I expect a reasonably big audience and the pressure is on to provide a good show. I would like to do something interactive somehow, but this isn't easy with a dark audience. I'll open with a short song from the new album, and probably perform another later. I want to be creative and artistic, but I'm often instinctively drawn to being entertaining and humorous. I've been watching the great artist Barry Humphries recently; a brilliant inventive art graduate himself, a true equal of the early surrealists in both acumen and early artistic achievements, yet he became famous for quick witted humour; keenly observed, but not art. Is Dame Edna Everage entertainment, or serious?
It's difficult to be entertaining and serious. Is the flaw of surrealism, particularly British surrealism, its lack of seriousness? Perhaps British snobbishness looks down on art naturally, and this critical, rubbishing, nonsensing, emotion is squeezed into a sort of humour that is laughed at, and the artist feels pressured into self-deprecating, in the way that the character of the Fool is pressured to in the memorable bar scene in The Seventh Seal.
For me, surrealist artist comedians like Vic Reeves (Jim Moir), and the Monty Python team, make serious art, but they don't appear to take it seriously, and self-deprecate. Or perhaps they do take their work seriously, and our laughter is the correct response? Can something be serious and make us laugh, the laughter of truth? Perhaps not. Perhaps what is serious and revelatory must be striking, perhaps amazing and wonderous, but sad, an epiphany of some root of truth, like a glimpse of the true soul of that anxiously laughing Fool.
Is making entertainment different from making art? All comedians have real lives, but entertainers rarely want us to see that, the aim of their act is explicitly avoid real life, and allow us to escape. Perhaps escapism is what entertainment is, and art should never be escapist, but the opposite, shining a light on what we are escaping from. Perhaps that light illuminates our fears to make them go away, and it is this vanishing that is the benefit and pleasure of art.
A strange ramble to end the day with! I've spent far far too many hours today thinking of performer/artist names for my music. It's been driving me really crazy for days, the pressure only growing, searching. It's not a lack of ideas but too many. I hope to finish performance plans tomorrow. I had hoped to finish them today, but progress has been a lot slower than hoped. I'm wasting valuable days of life working on this little thing! Perhaps I need to make it less important in my mind. Sometimes the best results flash up at us in an instant. The first, instant idea is the best and truest, but I've headed down a path of brainstorming, which is rarely helpful. I did this for The Minotaur competition years ago. After a few days (or weeks) the storm creates a flood, drowning and soaking everything with its grey water. I need to drain away ideas, delete, cull, limit, to leave a few grains.
