START: 17/04/2020

After moving from my studio as detailed in my last post I’ve been unable to write anything. Perhaps incapable is a better word. Obviously the latest Grant application was abandoned and I’m left in a kind of limbo. Fortunately I don’t need the money to live, only to work effectively and make the appropriate investments – time, contacts, equipment, etc., – so I’m one of many who is just happy to be ok and creatively feeling a bit numb.

garden drawing 13/04/20

So I did a drawing, A1 size or thereabouts, in charcoal, pencil and watercolour (a couple of dabs of white). This one took about four hours on one of the fine days we’ve been having.

I’ve also been working on new models for the geranium project, rebuilding them so that they can be played on desktops or through browsers.

geranium project page with an embedded WebGL game

I’ve uploaded a fairly straight version to a site called ‘simmer.io’ there is a link on the page for the project. It takes up to two minutes to load and it doesn’t work on Safari, it also doesn’t allow you to look up or down for some reason and has an annoying walk speed and sound.

I’ve been resolving those issue though and hosting new attempts to sort this on my website. Here www.ian-latham.com/geranium/game

This one is just one garden at the moment and has no sound, but it loads quicker and allows you to look up etc., these are both controlled using the mouse to look and arrow keys, or wasd, to move around.

I’ll be updating this location as I try out new things and bring in more gardens.

A final thought. I’ve been reading a lot of ‘art’ stuff,

[…] I want to speak loudly for what art has always been — something done against the rules of advanced capitalism. Art isn’t about professionalism, efficiency, insurance, and safety; it’s about eccentricity, risk, resistance, and adaptation. Mike Egan, owner of the visionary Ramiken Gallery, writes to me, “Art will not survive as some dull thing, some social good that we must support out of consensual responsibility to the social good. Art will explode with the desires of the people to see action play out, with tears, screams, harmonies, and some death.” He goes on, “Watch what happens next. Galleries will go under — unless they survive. How to survive? Passion. Obsession. Desire.” Indeed, in this time of sheltering-in-place, he just moved his gallery to a decrepit building across from a garbage dump and told me he opened “a secret show.” I thought I felt the rumble of art’s old thunder when he wrote this to me. In this and other similar gestures, I imagine a new “First Days of an Art World.”

https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/how-the-coronavirus-will-transform-the-art-world.html

Jerry Saltz waxing lyrical about the effect of Covid 19 on the “Art World”, April 2^nd 2020, notes that a large number of galleries have reserves that will last a month or two at most. In the UK commentators are noting that the closure of the gallery closes the gallery shop which for many is a major income stream. ACE has launched an emergency funding scheme that seeks to mitigate the disaster that has hit a majority of those self describing as artists. Friends of mine are working to maintain connections and bolster the support networks that run alongside practice for a good number of creatives. The thing for me is that a lot of this points up the commodification of ‘art’ and speaks to a constituency that judges artworks according to their social value. The ACE parameters are that you earned more than 50% of your income from funding streams (not necessarily theirs) and can demonstrate this loss of income. It’s either this or hopeless idealism it seems. I’m interested to see what remains after COVID-19, but also extremely nervous.