Mx.D.P

I love thinking, and it turns out that art takes a lot of thought…

Thinking is one of my last great pleasures, along with food; Mateus rose and masturbating to the vision of a young Brad Pit dressed as a femboy or in that leather skirt in Troy and George Clooney in ER… I know I’m a pervert; I mean, who actually likes Mateus Rose… turns out it takes all sorts!

Thinking can be dangerous, though! I remember reading Greer’s The Female Eunuch when I was a teenager and then absolutely hated my boyfriend of the time. What was really happening was I had a crush on Boy George’s ‘boyfriend’ Marilyn and did not understand what any of that meant!

I have been contemplating a PhD proposal and attended a UAL session on PhD application. You have to start early; they take a lot of research and fund finding. I recently thought I might contextualise my art education in terms of learning to fly.

I saw my undergraduate work as a flying school: flying small single-engine a/c in the first year, ‘blindly’ moving on to flying in ‘blind’ weather in instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) in the second year and moving on to twin-engine IMC flying in the graduation year.

Here in my MA, I am in airline pilot ground school, making sure I understand the systems, the hydraulics electrics, fuel, engine, airconditioning and pressurisation, navigation and flight instrumentation and flight control systems… then flying the aircraft in the full flight simulator, starting to unpick the complexity of the checklists that deal with emergencies… making sure I don’t miss anything…

What awaits me in my PhD may be a way to run a checklist that, in the real world, must deal with the worst emergency imaginable… climate annihilation.

Will it be the Kobayashi Maru Scenario that I finally discover… ‘The purpose is to experience fear, fear in the face of certain death, to accept that fear and maintain control of oneself and one’s crew. This is a quality expected in every Starfleet Captain’ (Spock in Star Trek)

While meditating with printmaking and painting, I am attacking my reading list using critical thinking… unfortunately, I am getting distracted by two books one is on Jacobean history (Nicholas Galitzine’s Duke of Buckingham is rapidly displacing George Clooney in my fantasy), the other is on Queer Theory Now which as it was published in 2019 is probably f*cking light years away from current thinking but in historical terms absolutely fascinating as an aircraft technical development manual, as is the notion of Jacobean sodimites!

I adore that reference in Gavin and Stacy, where Smity introduces Jason as a proud member of the LGBTIQ+ community. Yet I’ve sat in lectures where prominent Gay men have said there is no such community, and I’ve heard young gay men say, ‘Everyone is fucking Queer now… I just want gay ‘actual’ men…’

If everyone is Queer, there is no Queer Theory, as you need the normative to exist so it can be queered!

Is the concept of LGBTIQ+ or even homosexuality a hetronormative concept anyway?

Before 1870, to indulge in sodomy was something you did not something you were; it wasn’t always seen as an identity as such. This idea was conceived in some hideous love trist between mid-19th century German physiologists and eugenic colonising capitalist machinations to provide a de-humanised rapidly growing population that would concentrate on breeding to fuel the world factory that has caused Climate Chaos.

Queer theory tries to intellectually umbrella this mythical community of LGBTIQ+ and make it a cohesive and embracing reality… but in doing so, does it threaten to colonialise and coerce past, present and future identities…

So is queer theory already dead, or like feminism evolving into another iteration that may or may not be a ‘niccce’ Pokemon evolve! See Trans exclusionary feminists TERF’s for details..

There is, however, a whole new generation of people that see and embrace their ‘queerness’ or ‘gender’ or ‘identity’ or ‘being’ and some older ones like myself that understand our long-lived truth in more newly identifiable terms… this is a possible future of our species, to understand the fluidity of need without oppressing others… could this be the new knowledge of artistic language I will eventually discover?

It’s extraordinary going to university at such an advanced age as you have decades of lived experience; you are often older than your lecturers yet collude with a young generation. A generation that intuitively understands more than anyone should… debased and disavowed certain of their own demise, crippled by anxiety and quite understandable mental health issues; they deal with anti-social social media and an online plugged-in life that is more real and more exciting than anything that can be provided IRL… yet they are the ones that must be now empowered, they do not believe they will survive. Still, they must, on a possible unique planet among 400 billion nearest stars, the fate of millions of species depends on their ability to flow think, adapt and survive.

When I read, I make notes in the margins or the electronic reader. Still, I also make notes as a conversation about the intersectionality of my practice and how I perceive what I read in relation to the questions I am asking myself.

These are some of my notes for the first few chapters of McCann and Monaghan’s Queer Theory Now (2019) this is not about what’s in the book as much as what it makes me think about as I read the book…

The planet is a closed-loop system. What we have is all we have got; what we do with it is only a matter of change of state (chemistry reference)

Deconstruct signifier and signified…

Modernism, Post-modernism and Post-structuralism phallogocentric focus

Climate change isn’t the problem; that’s the signified… the signifier is the thought process of the accepted… This is why there is a need for a gender chaos theory.

Gender chaos theory might be an evolution of Queer theory and evolution of multi-species in the Anthropocene

Capitalism requires constant growth and consumption and eventually total depletion of resources and the planet itself… change of entropic state…