about
There was a time when art represented an attempt to think the unthinkable while staring into something abyssal and succumbing to the pain and dubious pleasure of inevitable failure — or maybe I dreamed that up…
Always the romantic…
“To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail.”
―Samuel Beckett
But what was romanticism if not the compulsive search for a fact that wouldn’t be found, a truth that never arrived..?
Post-truth
Truth has been in decline since God got hacked but world-wide connectivity appears to have accelerated that process. So have we entered a new state of wakefulness or a different kind of somnambulism..?
Or perhaps that stark division is indicative of prevailing naiveties regarding the role of human consciousness in the formation of our reality…
Whatever we decide to call ‘the real’ now — and as we sink deeper into our Anthropocene, our ‘post-truth age of anxiety’ — an ability to navigate abysses, I maintain, will become increasingly important…
Boundaries are shifting, disciplines are morphing and merging. The role of creativity and how it might apply to our lives is evolving. The question of what art should actually be has never been more pertinent and open.
A call to art
This blog, which is not a blog, which thrusts a pencil into the wound of cultural history in search of its themes, its failures, and its ghosts, is part-sketchbook, part-ideas repository and some kind of a call to art.
I’m Tony Eddicott. I live in London where I write, make art and use my design and technology skills to help creative professionals work the web. To misquote Borges, my taste runs to posthumanism, ‘pataphysics, a darker surrealism, the taste of coffee, the prescience of J.G. Ballard, the sensuality of Angela Carter, the fragmented heart of Maurice Blanchot, and something Kafkaesque… I also contemplate the function of art in the wake of AI, and post-industrialisation’s relentless roll-out.
“Because I dived into the abyss I started to love the abyss of which I am made.”
—Clarice Lispector
For completists here’s something of an extended artist statement.
