GUIDE TO LIFE ARCHIVE GUIDE TO LIFE ⇒

RECORDING DAILY EXPERIENCE:

Create a set of (blank) forms to facilitate the accurate and exhaustive recording of daily experience.

MEANINGFUL OBJECTS:

Make some meaningful objects.

ART WITHOUT BELIEF:

Develop works of art that effectively communicate an idea or philosophy that I don’t believe in.

RANDOMNESS:

Make a piece of work where the outcome is truly random.

NOVEL:

Write a novel, finish it, publish it.

ISOLATION:

Make work that communicates the reality of isolation and the impossibility of communication.

INTIMACY:

Make a work that enables true intimacy between artist and viewer.

FUTILITY:

Make a work that demonstrates once and for all the futility of making art.

FURNITURE:

Furniture that is deliberately impractical or badly made: drawers that stick, beds that are just too big for alcoves, tables that fall over when you put anything on them. As a metaphor for an unquestioning acceptance of our surroundings.

PRODUCTIVE LIVING: FURNITURE:

Furniture that communicates. A chair that says: sit up straight, pay attention, watch where you’re going so you don’t trip over the legs. A chair that collapses when not sat on correctly.

EVALUATION OF WORKS:

Produce obsessive evaluations of works. Evaluations describing my feelings and experiences as a result of making a piece of art, what I found successful, what I didn’t. Produce just concepts and evaluations and no actual works:

1. The concept to be expressed;
2. Possible ways to express it;
3. Diagrams, construction drawings;
4. Material list, costings;
5. Evaluation.

DECISION MAKING:

Make drawings of decisions – both important and unimportant – as lists balancing pros and cons with individual weightings and a conclusion at the bottom. The conclusion is binding.

CATHARTIC ART:

An expressive, gestural painting coupled with an exact documentation of state of mind, environment, clothing, methods of production etc.

BLUEPRINTS:

Create blueprints for machines to perform unnecessary or impossible tasks, or to solve problems that don’t exist.

EMOTIONAL BLOCKAGES:

A diagnostic tool for mapping and cataloguing the exact configurations of emotional blockages effecting your life.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY:

Autobiography as an exact recording of the physical realities of my life (distortion of vision, physical feelings, sounds, tastes, position of my body etc).

A document of periods of time from a single second to my entire life.

TIMELINES:

The story of a day.
The story of my life.

A timeline as a graphic expanding in both directions away from the present.

ALONENESS:

Premise: we are totally alone and any attempts at communication are futile.

Make a piece of work that accepts this principle.