A twinkle in my eye or more exactly some scrawls about the business of getting old that are still to be translated from handwriting to print.
If we have been lucky enough to make it through to a post-work phase of life, when we retire we are faced with the challenge of re-making our day to day life. Meanwhile bits of our body are starting to fall off and we can’t remember where we posted the cat. We are in decline now, on the down slope. It might get boring. It might get depressing. But it can also be an interesting challenge. It requires a creative approach and I’m trying to keep notes of mine.
I call the jottings - The Art Of Decline.
EXTRACTS
I’ve started to notice that some artists are making work that has a genuinely useful social aspect. They aren’t deliberately making stuff for therapeutic reasons, it’s just that the action of citizens feeding into, and helping to shape the art, is part of the warp and weft of the work.
Now it strikes me that as the technology of screens commands and trades more and more of our attention time, excuses to collaborate live are increasingly precious. Not art which can be used to wash your car, but art that generates communal glue as a bi-product.
I like to think that Vernacular Theatre would make it into this category, but I want to include two other artists who I have interviewed. Eric MacLennan and Esther Campbell.
TWO PDFs.
