The Moving Still Life
oldm8ari
Not many posts lately. My blog loyalty has lapsed.
Instagram has taken the attention the blog otherwise took.
I have an account on Instagram with my name and the same variety of viewpoints that are covered on this blog.
There is not the same pleasure with building word structures that I enjoy here on the
Blog.
I am the prodigal blogger.
I have found among the dross of Instagram accounts several which hold my attention*
oldm8ari is one grammer who has taken and holds my attention, from the grammers sampled.
He posts mostly videos. I tried briefly today to make contact with him, so that I might,
well, I don't why I did now. There is nothing I need to know from him, perhaps only the desire
to share and so build enthusiasm. From the amount of posts from today, there seems for the
time being anyway, no lack of enthusiasm on his part. Perhaps he knows he is onto something.
I asked him, one of the 'comments' I made, to which he did not respond, "Where do you hide the 'likers' of your posts?" It seemed I was the only one, or one of three at most, most of the time, who were 'following' him. How could his audience be so dispassionate?
The works,** are fairly evenly consuming. They mostly make me laugh, or smile . They remind me of my own dis-ease about the world. They provide a critique of contemporary life without being didactic. They make the realm of installation out of which his practice seems to have emerged, looked suddenly moribund.***
Apart from a sometimes vacuous quirkiness, (no more sliced white bread!), the works are entirely value un-ridden. There is no sentiment. There are a lot of props employed, miscellaneous, mundane, mostly household objects interspersed suddenly with food of various instant varieties uncontained, spilled, not belonging to the vessels from which they may have originally emerged.
From a pictorial perspective, the dramas are contained mostly within an armature of an ordinary domestic interior which I understand he refers to as his 'studio'. The floor is mostly the canvas onto which the chaos is applied. The actors, or objects applied are mostly fairly evenly randomly dispersed and provide the contexts for disorder. ****
The videos combine in equal measure the elements of sound, movement, picture and narrative. There is a fairly uniform shrill staccato as if something might explode or give way. There is a sense that life in all its guises exists within a term of incarceration. Get me out of here! But where should I go should I be released?
Everything is so nice. Look at my nice new checked slacks!
For me what is fascinating or funny, if you will, is the cultural origin of the humour/drama. I believe that it may be authentically 'Australian' in that I can't identify the source of it. It does not seem to be derived from another cultural source.
What is not something else is what we are. Perhaps it is this which is both shocking and refreshing.
How appropriate that in attempting to unravel aspects of an Instagram account, that I should have instantly framed a history for it, that it may already potentially pass and be consigned to having an Instahistory.
Next please!
* It is the square format of each posted image on Instagram that is the killer, that guarantees ordinariness, failure.
** That I should call them works, is of course preposterous. The word suggests some work was involved in their construction.
*** "Installation", by virtue of what emerges here, looks suddenly to be part of a past practice. Into the history of past modes with marble bronze comes installation, pink faced, ashamed.
**** He uses a small brush. The marks squirm in the same way Fred Williams trees do on their expanse of carpet desert. Rather than squirm, as a Williams tree might do, these marks squirm with mirth and meaning.