connections
I left work at five and walked up park street towards the wills memorial building to attend a lecture entitled In two minds: neuroscience of perception and creativity, that was to start at six. I decided to go into a stationary shop to kill some time. Stop. Memory: A) The shop was flooded in the heavy rains and a lot of the stock in the stationary shop was ruined. B) Desmond Behari’s posters on coloured paper for the pull the strings gigs.
Start. I had a look around and ended up at the back of the shop looking at coloured paper thinking about the covers for my Film portraits. “Ollie” came a voice and I looked around to see who it was….well I knew who it was but I couldn’t for the life of me place the name. “Dude how are you doing? I said “I’m going to a lecture”, came the reply. NO way I said, the lecture with Richard wentworth? Yes. “wow that’s amazing!!” You see I hadn’t seen this person in a couple of years. So we decided to go and have a coffee. At the café we found out that a cup of tea was £2.09 and that between us we didn’t have enough money for both a coffee and a tea. The woman behind us then offered to give us a £1 so that we could buy the tea, which we graciously declined thanking her for her kind offer. At this point my friend who’s name still escaped me said that it didn’t matter and that he would get a cake in sainsburys before we went into the lecture. I told him all about the film portraits that I had been working on and we decided that we should defiantly make a portrait of him. We decided to exchange mobile numbers, but I still couldn’t remember the name so I said I would phone him. When his phone rang he told me that my name had appeared and that he still had my number. I still couldn’t remember his name to put to his number which was now stored in my phones memory but figured I would eventually. I told him I had his number and put my phone away. So after the coffee we went to sainsburys. All the time we were talking about what we had been up to and I was trying to remember his name. I waited for him outside sainsbury’s and decided to call Emile, because she had studied with the dude at college. In fact she had shown one of his films at the cube cinema which I could remember and was brilliant. Anyway Em didn’t pick up and so I was still none the wiser. However as we where walking to the Wills memorial building.
Stop. Memory: I remembered Emile and Luke and this dude outside the college, on Queens road and I suddenly remembered that Luke had the same name as this dude. It was Luke, they where the two Lukes!!! Start. So once inside the lecture hall, which was amazing, I proudly said “”Luke where shall we sit dude?” After a short wait Richard Wentworth director of the Ruskin School Of drawing and fine art, Mark Lythgoe, Director of the center for advanced Biomedical imaging, university college London, and another dude took to the stage. When Wentworth finished his little introduction, which was very precise and gave everyone a good idea of what was to come, everyone clapped and Luke said “Fuck Yeah” What followed was a hugely entertaining lecture. I recorded it on my little Dictaphone and at the end of the lecture the discussion was opened to the floor. There was a great silence. The chair speaker asked Richard Greggory who was in the audience a question to get things going and then a number of people started asking questions. For some reason I realized that I was holding my pencil in such a way that the point of the pencil was digging into my thumb as I held it. Also my body was very tense and my back was beginning to hurt and when this bloke started a question that was counter to what the panel had been discussing I hung my head and look at my shoes. After the lecture the woman who was sitting in front of me, who looked like this woman Aiylish that I knew, got up and left. To my surprise sitting in fromt of this woman was the real Aiylish!! I said hello and Luke went to talk to the bloke who had asked the counter question. He said “I have got to go talk to that dude” and I kind of hung around. Then I decided to go listen to what Luke was saying to the dude who had asked the counter question and there on the other side of the room was this dude that used to go to the life drawing class I attended about three years ago. I had bumped into him a couple of times since and I waved to say hello to which he threw a crumpled up paper ball at me. However he didn’t through it with enough force and so it nearly hit Richard Wentworth on the head, who was talking to the woman who I had originally thought was Aiylish. The dude who attended the life drawing class and who’s name also escaped me said that he had attended a lot of the lectures and that he was waiting to talk to Mark Lythgoe. At this point Richard Wentworth had become free, so I went up to him and told him that I had really enjoyed the lecture and that I had heard him talk a few years earlier, I reminded him that he had filled his pockets with corks. He said that he remembered and asked me if I was an artist. I kind of stumbled and said that I worked in a public library in Bedminster. After a bit more chat I told him that I had studied an M.A in printmaking and asked him his thoughts on Marcel Duchamp. To which he replied that he probably knew too much, and that Marcel Duchamp was first and foremost a dandy. He told me that a friend of his had taken a picture of Duchamp and informed him that he was a very handsome man. He seemed fairly animated and ready to talk and said Duchamp existed in a very turbulent time. He pointed to the architecture in the building and said that he had come out of this very bourgeois French existence and moved to America. He said the best way to understand Duchamp was to look at history. He talked about the fact that the French where not yet an industrialized nation in the way that America was and that Duchamp was probably aware of this. We walked and talked out of the lecture hall and he said that the readymades where not a throw away gesture, that they were very specific objects. I thanked him again, shook his hand and me and Luke left the building. We decided to go and have a beer and on the way to the bar where Luke was meeting an ex-girlfriend we talked about the lecture, being a chef, cooking, taste, the brain, science, Art, Bright white light and film. For some reason when I got home I felt the need to write all this down. What is a thought? How, why and what makes or doesn’t make these thoughts pop into existence in the movement of time and space? What’s for sure is that if we don’t force them and they suddenly appear out of nowhere they give us a smile and a warm feeling inside.
I have been to a number of lecture’s this year. For example I’ve been to one on agriculture, on plumbing and construction, on linguistics, on glass blowing and window manufacturing, on time and dimensions, on chance and probability, on gender and alter ego’s, and one on engineering and perspective to name but a few and at the end of each lecture I have always asked the same simple question. “What do you think about Marcel Duchamp?
posted by olliebetts at 12:26 AM
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