In the current London Review of Books (27 August 2015 page 16) I bumped into the following: ‘these characters sometimes function as a walk-on grotesque, memorable chiefly for their perverse affectations of unaffectedness.’ This is from a review of David Gates’ fictions. I liked the walk-on aspect of the grotesque, I liked the word grotesque, I liked the perverse affectations and the repeat affect in unaffectedness. Oh dear, I thought, they might have me in mind. A sort of inner/outer dynamic: inside the hunchback of Notre Dame, outside the serene majesty of a superior being. Inside the wounded creature who has never managed to get to grips with his sexuality. Outside the sublimity of the Buddha.
And I want to add, what fun!
Why would I want to say that? Because all I ever wanted to do is play.
A few days later . . . in the Bristol Arnolfini Gallery having been walking round the current Richard Long exhibition. The variety of human projects is inexhaustible. His lines in the landscape, his walks, his gallery pieces all fit into the logic from which he set out from. It it’s a form of play, it’s a very single minded . . . well, both single minded and extraordinarily broad. But he continuously circles back to his home territory of Bristol and the south west. Because it’s close to me I notice his returns to Dartmoor. I hardly dare mention the sheer length of his walks. What has it cost him? Then there is the list of his exhibitions and I looked for the Whitechapel Gallery in the seventies where I first was confronted by his work – 1977. Was it really 1977! That’s a long time ago.
I don’t think of Richard Long as a grotesque. And I think that is about my view of him as somebody who has fully lived out his life. So that might infer that the grotesque is the distortion and disruption of the person who has not found the way to live their life in any sense fully – maybe a few bits and pieces – but leaving behind this twisted, contracted morsel of the human as toxified potential.
Stuff to jump into.
