DAY 24

🏴"It's not a feminist act for an 18 year old woman to photograph herself with wooden clothespins clipped onto her naked breasts, groin and torso. It's not an anti-feminist act either. It could be a mortification of the flesh inspired by some of the gory religious paintings the young artist saw during her family's museum outings in Italy… or a retake from a BDSM magazine… or a joke… or a search for sensation...” Chris Kraus on Francesca Woodman's Untitled (Boulder Colorado)” 1976.

It’s no surprise that Chris Kraus wrote about this photograph by Woodman, because it sits outside the artist’s well known vernacular of Victorianna attic-girl swishing around behind furniture & mirrors. I think Kraus is interested in this image because it destabilises the commodified image of Woodman, an identity that is multiple not singular, like all artists. The problem is, when an artist becomes known for one thing over many things they have already become commodified. Galleries commodify. Instagram commodifies. And this has nothing to do with money, but with image, & ultimately identity.

The relationship between Psychoanalysis & Art is intense if you bring yourself emotionally, not just intellectually, to contemporary art forms that touch what I call the “dark register”. Psychoanalytic theory leans into the more intimate & emotional spaces of art & artists who approach the dark register, whereas philosophy represses death & emotion so it can be a theory in itself. “In psychoanalysis you get an insight into a crack, gap, distance, that philosophy has to repress.” (Zizek) That is why psychoanalysis, as a theory, has to be in a relationship with something else to exist, to be alive.

I believe the biggest threat to art is its commodification under the self-conscious mediation of images, & also the conditioning that such mediation incurs; a mediation that is so image conscious that any possibility of risk, permissibility, or going off script under the public’s gaze is sacrificed for consistency, repetition, routine & a stable art identity.

ps. Props to the RHA for letting Austin Hearne rip! This post will be censored in…

Merry Xmas🏴

MENTIONS

🏴It begins… I just posted rather tame images of artworks by Paul McCarthy and Gregory Crewdson as honourable mentions re the advent calendar. But this censorship is appropriate and prescient for the last post of the Advent Calendar tomorrow, which will also be probably removed.

I will putting the whole psychoanalysis & art advent calendar on my website in the next week at smallnight.org.

This is the wrong pond!🏴🏴🏴

Here’s the text from the last post:

I have so many honourable mentions re the advent calendar, which was something I didn’t plan or think through, but needed to do. It’s been quite the commitment. The last post will be tomorrow, but I want to mention artist Paul McCarthy, who I bring up every year in class to the disgust and curiosity of my students. His seminal “Painter” was mentioned in a Hauser & Wirth post just days ago, but it is his LIFE CAST at Hauser & Wirth New York in 2013 that I keep returning to, because of the mix of uncanny and abjection.

And lastly re honourable mentions, there’s Gregory Crewdson’s “Basement” 2014, which I open the course with, but say nothing, just let the students sit with the image and narrativise their memories and feelings and references. When you find out that Crewdson’s dad was a psychoanalyst, whose practice was in the basement of the family home, and young Gregory listened to bits and pieces of traumas discussed between his dad and the analysand, the image is injected with new meanings, new gaps, that psychoanalytic theory can speculate upon but never find the truth or cure🏴

DAY 23

🏴Words by Diane Arbus.

“I worked a lot in Washington Square Park. It must have been about 1966. The park was divided. It has these walks, sort of like a sunburst, and there were these territories staked out. There were young hippie-junkies down one row. There were lesbians down another, really tough, amazingly hard-core lesbians. And in the middle were winos . . . They were like the first echelon, and the girls who came from the Bronx to become hippies would have to sleep with the winos to get to sit on the other part with the junkie-hippies. It was really remarkable. And I found it very scary. I mean, I could become a nudist, I could become a million things. But I could never become that, whatever all those people were. There were days I Just couldn't work there, and then there were days I could. And then, having done it a little, I could do it more. I got to know a few of them. I hung around a lot. They were a lot like sculptures in a funny way. I was very keen to get close to them, so I had to ask to photograph them. You can't get that close to somebody and not say a word, although I have done that.”

*And choosing a subject (for the artist)

"The Chinese have a theory, that you pass through boredom into fascination, and I think it's true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You've just got to choose a subject, and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough.”🏴

📸Photograph of Diane Arbus by Allan Arbus (a film test), c. 1949

DAY 22

🏴The unconscious: “a place of thought that does not think”(Jacques Rancière).

Picture this: American artist Ed Ruscha cruising around L.A. — the billboard-thin backdrop to his text paintings & photographs — listening to the radio tuned into two stations, anticipating the expected & familiar pothole he has stopped avoiding over the years & grown to want, to need, to love as a “spiritual hotspot”. This all plays out in a short film that traces Ruscha's journey from L.A. home to L.A. studio. Never did I think L.A. would be the place where the unconscious would come forth in my consciousness, my definition, L.A. being a place that wears surface as history. But that's just it, the unconscious is not to be found in a dimly lit cellar where Freud's agents of id., ego & superego hide in a windowless three-cornered room with a swinging light bulb lighting up their uncanny personalities one by one. No. The unconscious is not the subconscious. The unconscious is Ed Ruscha on a bright & blue L.A. day enroute to his studio, tweaking the radio dial so that two channels bunk together, dream together; the stock markets on top, country & western music underneath. Freud called the unconscious a double inscription; Ruscha's radio is a double inscription. In the 1960s the French psychoanalyst Serge Leclaire, a disciple of Jacques Lacan, proffered the analogy of a radio tuned into two stations to describe the unconscious, except Leclaire's genre was jazz not country & western. Like the visual drone of David Lynch's Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, America & its levels of thin seems more in tune with the enigmatic surface of the unconscious than anywhere else🏴

📸Ed Ruscha, Vine / Melrose 1999 (for Parkett 55, Lithograph.

DAY 21

🏴Untitled 2003 was initiated in 2002 when Andrea Fraser approached Friedrich Petzel Gallery to arrange a commission with a private collector on her behalf. The requirements for the commission included a sexual encounter between Fraser & a collector, which would be recorded on videotape to be produced as a DVD in an edition of five, with the first exemplar of the edition going to the participating collector. The resulting videotape is a silent, unedited sixty-minute document shot in a hotel room with a stationary camera & existing lighting.

Fraser thought about becoming a psychoanalyst after she was commissioned to stage and perform Untitled in 2002, but she got a teaching job which saved her from buying a couch for other people to lie on. Untitled is a strange work, one that claims but sits outside of Institutional Critique (IC), which was always a meta critique of the art institutions that housed it anyway, an injoke for the gatekeepers. Untitled is not so much an injoke, but something niche & risky, which is very unlike the admin aesthetic of IC. I’m a big admirer of how Fraser articulates the artworld - she made me become aware of institutions, the institutionalised artworld, artist, & the contradictions therein. I discovered Untitled much later, which floored me at first, then filled me with questions. Fraser’s Untitled made the New York Times based on the popular & unpopular reception to the 60-minute artwork, a misogynist article that ramped up the spectacle of sex, lies & video tape. Fraser had to warn her parents before the NYT article came out in print, an article her mother hated so much that I wonder if her anger was misdirected. I think when artists talk about risk, Untitled makes them look like formalist snowflakes. Untitled is not IC a la Fraser, because all meta & irony is lost to something much more real. Unless, as Isabelle Graw writes in response to Untitled, we “rethink the idea of critique as a form of abandon”. It appears on the front cover of a monograph of the artist’s work as recent as 2015, an outlier work that wraps Fraser’s work before & after like a skin, like a pregnancy, naked, alone🏴

DAY 20

🏴Haunted. As I was on my first teenage viewing of Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 animated cyberpunk film Akira, in a small theatre on Haight-Ashbury San Francisco — a film reference that comes easily right now, as I watched it a second time on Netflix a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know what it was about Akira that affected my disaffected youth. What I remember feeling was audio-visual enthrallment & an existential atmosphere that was too much, too soon. Set in the future (2019) against the beat of bamboo percussion, “Akira” is the eponymous name of the boy who, afflicted with extrasensory perception, destroys Tokyo, which becomes the catalyst for world war, government corruption, religious zealotry, teenage biker gangs & everything that composes a dystopian fantasy, including a gravitational singularity that turns the world inside out with abject & mystical results. Amidst this flattening of a world, where power is taken through the high-risk stakes of corruption, science, technology & immorality, a brotherly friendship gets derailed as a boy begins to exhibit Akira-like ESP. I wonder what Otomo was thinking & feeling when he made Akira in 1988; the same way I wonder what is going through Bassam Al-Sabah’s head, but mostly heart, in his solo IT'S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS at DHG. I am tempted to think, even though feeling is what I’m left with. The same feeling on experiencing Bassam’s work the first time 6 years ago for his BA. Then I had no script. Today I’m not going along with the press release of “intersectional glitches” occuring “within the body, gender, & within internal & external worlds and ever-present technology.” Or the perceptions of masculinity & the techno-aesthetic of the glitch in the makeup of the work itself. Other than those robotic subtexts, already in the social ether, the work (to my heart) resides in the sensual & homoerotic body (that arm!) & the issue of being a desiring machine in the midst of an adesiring identity politics & aesthetics. Perhaps in 20-odd years I will revisit it in words when the styrofoam dust has settled & my heart has stopped beating so fast🏴

DAY 19

🏴"The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw."

Don DeLillo’s novella “Point Omega” opens and ends in a gallery in New York. The protagonist creep, who is hidden from view in some dark corner in the gallery, watches a film obsessively. He has returned to the gallery every day without fail. Although he watches the film, he also watches other people watching the film. When two academics from the nearby film school enter the gallery, he goes into a monologue about how, even though they have the correct language to talk about the film, they don’t see and feel the film the way he does. The academics leave after a short while, giving credence to the creep’s thesis that they are detached viewers, whereas he is a viewer that is touched, in more ways than one. The film, although not named, is Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho” (1993). Gordon appropriated Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 “Psycho”, and slowed it down to approximately two frames a second, rather than the usual 24, resulting in the film lasting exactly 24 hours. 🏴

🎥Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, 1993.

DAY 18

🏴MIKE KELLEY Dirty Toys: Interview with Ralph Rugoff (1991)

RALPH RUGOFF: The dolls and stuffed animals in your work often evoke objects left at the scene of a child abduction.

MIKE KELLEY: Because dolls represent such an idealised notion of the child, when you see a dirty one, you think of a fouled child. And so you think of a dysfunctional family. In actuality, that's a misreading, because the doll itself is a dysfunctional picture of a child. It's a picture of a dead child, an impossible ideal produced by a corporate notion of the family. To parents, the doll represents a perfect picture of the child. It's clean, it's cuddly, it's sexless, but as soon as the object is worn at all, it's dysfunctional. It begins to take on characteristics of the child itself — it smells like the child and becomes torn and dirty like real things do. It then becomes a frightening object because it starts to represent the human in a real way and that's when it's taken from the child and thrown away.

In our culture, a stuffed animal is really the most obvious thing that portrays the image of idealisation. All commodities are such images, but the doll pictures the person as a commodity more than most. By virtue of that, it's also the most loaded in regard to the politics of wear and tear.

R: Does this prejudice against dirtiness strike you as something peculiarly American?

MK: I'm sure all cultures have something that takes the place of dirt in ours — of the repressed thing. That's part of the machinery of culture. But in America, there also seems to be an intense fear of death and anything that shows the body as a machine that has waste products or that wears down…🏴

📸Sonic Youth, Dirty, 1992; Mike Kelley, Arena #7 (Bears), 1990, Found stuffed animals and blanket; and other bears

DAY 17

🏴Some twenty years ago I came across the term “objet petit a” invented by Jacques Lacan. I didn't get it. I read a few papers. I didn't get it. I left it for a few years until Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek explained it through some popular cultural references. I didn't get it. I looked up the blunt definition “object cause of desire” & thought I got it. I didn’t. Retrospectively the objet petit a had become my objet petit a, the very obstacle to my desire for meaning, an obstacle I was unconsciously enjoying.

Enter Twin Peak’s Diner owner Norma & gas station owner Ed — the couple who never became official but edge the precipice of its possibility for two lifetimes in TV hours — finally overcome the ultimate pretext & obstacle to their desire, their objet petit a: Nadine. Let me explain. Ed is married to patch-eyed & mentally disturbed Nadine. For a brief interlude in the original series Ed & Norma get together when thirty-something Nadine loses her memory to regress into a teenager in the possession of superhuman strength. Everyone is ‘happy’ until Nadine's memory returns in the concluding episode.

In Twin Peak’s The Return (15 TV years later), Nadine confronts Ed at his gas station with a golden shovel (long story) & releases him from his marital obligations. A gawky Ed rushes to the diner, waves & strides towards Norma to tell her in his country & western timbre that he is free, they are free. Norma snubs him momentarily by continuing with a business appointment in a booth at the far end of the diner with a man that Ed suspects is also a love interest. Ed — a still reed in a storm — orders a coffee, takes a seat at the counter after a few sidelong glances with Norma that reciprocate disappointment, to then slip into a thousand yards stare. Closing his eyes to inhale & hold the seconds, Ed braces against the suspended moment when Norma will either reject or accept him. Same again Sam.

The objet petit a is not the object of desire (Norma or Ed) but the delay & suspension of attaining the object of desire. They are entangled, desire & its obstacle, fusing as surplus enjoyment.🏴

DAY 16

The competition myth between fourth-century painters Zeuxis & Parrhasius is a good place to start thinking about objects & subjects. Zeuxis made a painting of grapes that were so realistic that birds attempted to eat them. Feeling super confident about his hyper-realism, Zeuxis headed over to Parrhasius’ studio where he had presented a painting that hid behind a curtain. Zeuxis sashayed over to lift the curtain, but discovered in shock, awe, defeat, that the curtain was in fact the painting itself. In psychoanalysis there is always something behind the object, whether a repressed something hidden in the partial truth of the symptom, or transmuted in the partial lie of the fetish. Being human is to be enticed by what may be behind the surface. Psychoanalysis is a way to orient oneself towards the subject hiding behind the object, something that the speculative realists have a problem with. At The Complex Dublin, we are asked to PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN. Of course the injunction makes us want to look all the more (as I did), even though in an art context we kinda know that it’s Parrhasius’ curtain all over again. Eleanor McCaughey’s and Lucy Sheridan’s curtains are sheer and open, so everything is partially on display and in translucent sight. No truths or lies or competing claims for territory or identity, which dissolve under the weight of the Oz references, original and The Return. I project Ciara Roche’s emerald green Mulholland Drive couch at the RHA into the space, where the two artists sit together and extrude the essence of the film in an emerald green glimmer that brushes the pearlescent gauze draped from on high; the cul de sac labyrinth; the soundscape, everything melting and sharding to become them and not them. I think shattered mirrors was a thing in The Return🏴

DAY 15

🏴Brian Teeling’s “c-space” installation in the toilets of The Dean Art Studios Dublin is (to my mind) one of the most visceral and sympathetic off-site artworks I have experienced in recent times. It is site-specific, intimating a cruising space for casual sex, with the formal suggestions of glory holes and voyeuristic car mirrors under a heavy red light, safe and not safe. Text ranges the walls and angles of the claustrophobic toilets, reflectively present and absent, like the mirror in the mirrored self-portraits, depending on your standing or squatting position in the toilet. It’s dirty romantic. It invokes the words of the artist Luis Camnitzer, in his text work “This is a Mirror, You are a Written Sentence” (1966-68). Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage is the moment when the child, joyous at discovering they are a whole body in the frame of a mirror, and not just a mother’s limb or extremity, falls into language, and the trouble begins. What excites me about c-space is the precision. It is an installation conceived and made by a photographer, who is not interested in an abject field of representation, but one that extends the photographic medium itself. The mirrored lettering, the curved contour of the wing mirrors, the red light, make this into a photographic image that you inhabit, exorcising more images as you move through the space and time. Poetic🏴

📸Brian Teeling, c-space, 2022—, The Dean Art Studios Dublin

DAY 14

“While staying in Canada, Helen Chadwick and her partner, David Notarius, set off to different locations and made a mound of snow and placed a large flower shaped cutter over it. Chadwick and Notarius then took turns urinating in the snow. The cavities created by the urine were then filled with plaster and were shipped back to the UK where they were grafted onto hyacinth bull-shaped pedestals and cast in bronze, enamelled white, and inverted. Initially, Chadwick had planned to take photographs of pitted snow, making light drawings of the alpine microcosm, but later realised that this would only be visible if it was cast and made into a sculpture.

Chadwick described the work as a ‘metaphysical conceit for the union of two people expressing themselves bodily’. Upon initial inspection the central phallic form of Piss Flowers may appear to be created by a man; but it is actually caused by Chadwick, who was closer to the ground, squatting.”🏴

DAY 13

🏴Cindy Sherman’s work post her 1970s film stills and 1980s abject landscapes feel a little repetitive. It can be argued that that is the point, or that she entered Versailles and couldn’t find the exit. Her earlier work is searching and angry. Artist Robert Longo, who was Sherman’s boyfriend at the time of her earlier work, said she made the abject works as a response to the art market’s preference for her male counterparts, like Longo. In 2016 “Untitled 1987” sold for USD 413,000.

So what we get is vomit and half-eaten muffins with the ever-present Cindy Sherman self portrait, a mere screaming face reflected in a pair of shades.

For Rosalind Krauss, Sherman's photographs — in particular “Untitled 1987” — deal “a low blow to the processes of form", what Julia Kristeva called “abjection” in “Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection” (1980), in which Kristeva “draws on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to examine horror, marginalization, castration, the phallic signifier, the "I/Not I" dichotomy, the Oedipal complex, exile, and other concepts appropriate to feminist criticism and queer theory.”

Those stills though🏴

📸Cindy Sherman, Untitled (#175), 1987, colour coupler print mounted on foamcore, 121.9 × 181.6 cm

2. Untitled Film Still #4,1977, Gelatin silver print, 92.1 × 108.6 × 5.1 cm

DAY 12

🏴On first experiencing your work in 2008 in a New York galley, you expanded my horizons as to what were the limits of art, and how sometimes art is not as free or permissible as it makes itself out to be. I heard you failed your MFA at a big New York art school because you claimed some Texas artists made it all. Who knows. I screened your film “Good Times Will Never be the Same” at Mermaid Arts Centre in 2012 to a small audience of 5. Your kidnapping service drew out fetishists and masochists alike, dressed in your particular aesthetic that owes so much to Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades and Mike Kelley. That said, you were the source I drew most from. 

Description:

“Summer 2002, New York, NY. ‘The client got loose while being transported in a duffle bag and had to be fought to get him under control.’ In the summer of 2002, New York based artist, Brock Enright and a group of his friends from Virginia, started a kidnapping service called Videogames Adventure Services. The clients would hire them to provide a reality based kidnapping experience, while still retaining the ability to stop the ‘game’ at any time. Parameters were set ahead of the service, detailing the activities to be performed, but the actual time of the kidnapping was kept secret to add to the fantasy. An abuse fetish seemed to be shared by the clients as the activites were more physical than sexual in nature. Prices started at $2500 and the imagination of the client and actors were the only limits.”🏴

DAY 11

🏴"I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they are attending to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.” (Sigmund Freud [I918], "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis," in Three Case Histories.)🏴

📸 Painting of the Wolf Dream by the Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff)

DAY 10

🏴Jean Paul Sartre tells a story about a young boy peeping through a keyhole on the top of a stairway in an existential Parisian apartment block. The boy enjoys the view through the keyhole. It is not a shared experience, just the boy & what we imagine is catching his eye beyond the keyhole. Something sexual. Something beautiful. Disrobing. Naked. Or none of the above. Maybe the desire to look without others looking at him look. Voyeurism. Who knows. Then suddenly the boy hears hollow steps on the stairs behind him. His desire is lost in the fear & shame of being caught looking. Shame is kind of a terrible lie. Sartre’s theory of the gaze is about the gaze of the other; Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze is about the gaze of the fetishished object, a linguistic labyrinth that I will not enter right now, if I haven’t already. Sartre’s story is perhaps exorcised from personal experience. As a young boy Sartre discovered, not through his own gaze, but his mother’s horrified gaze - after she cut his beautiful blond locks as a child - that he was terribly ugly. Seems made up. A metaphor. Of course his mother knew his face under the blond veil. If we continue with the metaphor, the lie, we could say Sartre’s long blond hair was the lie, & his one good eye out of a set of two bad ones, was also the lie, the peephole through which the world is experienced & judged.

Alessandro Rabottini characterises Cluj School painter, Victor Man, “partial”. In psychoanalysis partiality & preference are the peep holes through which you view the whole. I think art does the same, what many might define negatively as voyeurism, but what I have come to think of positively as love. Love being something you are quite particular about, unless you are on Instagram. 

📸 Victor Man, Untitled (Shaman Il), 2008, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 45 × 30 cm

DAY 9

🏴From Adam Philips essay ‘Against Inhibition’:

“In his book The ‘Last Avant-Garde’, David Lehman tells an Instructive story about Kenneth Koch's becoming a poet - acquiring the sense that it was poetry he was writing and wanted to write - in Ohio in the 1940s. It depended a great deal, accordling to Koch, on a teacher he was fortunate enough to have had in high school called Katherine Lappa. 'Lappa inspired him to a lifelong love of poetry,' Lehman writes,

when she told him it was OK to allow his anti-social impulses into his poetry. The sensuality and violence that the boy felt he had to repress in his daily life found their way into the stream of consciousness writing he set himself to do. In one piece he wrote of the urge to 'step on a baby's head because it is so big and round and soft like a balloon, and would go squash under my feet'. Katherine Lappa remained unflappable. 'That's very good,' she said, 'that's just what you should be feeling - part of what you're feeling. Keep doing it.' Koch would come to regard this as an 'instance of the benevolent influence that Freud has had on my life. I was able to enjoy the benefit of a teacher who in Cincinnati in 1942 had undergone psychoanalysis.'”🏴

📸Card for Robert Mapplethorpe’s duel exhibitions, Pictures, at Holly Solomon Gallery (flower pictures) and The Kitchen (sex pictures) February, 1977. 6.25 x 10in.

DAY 8

🏴I’ve known Austin Hearne’s work since his MFA in 2013, which I mistakenly ignored. Since then I have almost caught up to his work, with dust still kicking in my eyes. In this review I write towards his exhibition, Requiem For Raymo, at the RHA, by discussing other artists in relation to fetishised process, including Nevan Lahart, Thomas Demand, Paul McCarthy and Austin Hearne at the RHA and Periphery Space. Link here

DAY 7

🏴What can I say… here’s Gillian Wearing, aged 40 at the time (2003), disguised as members of her extended family—her mother, father, uncle, sister, brother, and herself as a teenager🏴

DAY 6

🏴I have described the uncanny here before in the imaginary scenario in which I am teaching, and the classroom door opens and another version of me enters the room to look at me teaching. That is kinda uncanny, but what could make it uncannier is when I look at you, the students, looking at the other me looking at me teaching. This is what Jacques Lacan sums up as: “I see myself seeing myself.”  But there is another uncanny (unhemlich) — Enter Gregor Schneider. 

In the 1980s Gregor started to build rooms within rooms in his family home. He videotaped the results which bled into the artworld such as at the Venice Biennale. But those doubles were just replicas of the very personal and strange warren that to this day, continues to be transformed back in Germany. 

Gregor is more of a Freudian than a Lacanian due to his uncanny being tied to the home. So Gregor has been clicking his heels 👠 for over 30 years to construct a space that may come across as strange and even terrifying — the uncanny being a type of terrifying in Freud’s words — for anyone but Gregor. 

I remember Thomas Demand, who was in the same class as Gregor in art school (what an alumni), who said at IMMA that Gregor was strange, and he didn’t like him. An artist lecturer from my art school days said when I brought him up as an influence: “Thank god he found art.” During COVID Gregor appeared in a Zoom call sitting in his family home, chatting how, even though his artworld globetrotting was on pause, he rather liked being back home. He looked happy. “There’s no place like home”🏴