Accelerated Anodynism

Without a doubt, it is one of the most beautiful parts of the English countryside. I have travelled to the South Downs many times in my life, among many visits to other parts of the nation. Yet for me, there is dread beneath the idyllic glimmer of sunshine through the new leaves on the trees, the blossom caught on the breeze, celandine greedily covering swathes of grass verges and occasional forget-me-nots adding their precious blue accent. I park by a teashop I know well to break my journey and collect my nerves.

The teashop is of necessity a cliché. A striped awning, red gingham tablecloths and the exaggerated vintage of lost and found teapots and crockery. It is a hyperreal simulation of a classic tether of English identity. It smothers me with its nostalgia and cloying attempts at comfort. The service is lazy and the tea unremarkable.

I am reminded of a passage I have underlined in my copy of Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf, “A man of the Classical age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilisation. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, between two modes of life and thus loses the feeling for itself, for the self-evident, for all morals, for being safe and innocent.” For a while after I last returned from England, I was confined to an institution for my own safety. Something happened to crack my worldview, to force me to question all my values and morals, and called into doubt everything on which I had constructed my sense of self. For a while, my hands would not stop shaking, nor my own mind stop talking to itself. I felt I was falling between the two ages that Hesse spoke of, falling forward from the comfort and complacency of my own age into the extreme uncertainty of its successor. I recall a quote from Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

My hands still shake a little as I lift the teacup to my lips. I am more observed these days, more aware of my own intrusion into a reality I’m not quite as certain of as I once was. I sit here and imagine people are commenting on my existence, as if a man from the middle ages had arrived at the teashop and sat down and waited to be served. The poor waitress stares as if I am a man outside of his own time, a ghost from the past or some alien form from the future. I glance around me as if my entire surroundings are part of a mechanised display, or a film set peopled by extras, a museum dedicated to reenacting quotidian normality. I have to ask several times for my table to be cleared.

My treatment consisted of attempts to accept the existence of reality. My carers conceded that I had not lost my mind, but my mind had temporarily begun to reject its sensory inputs as being untrustworthy. They suspected that I had suffered quite a tremendous shock, something that had shaken my faith in the external reality we share and must navigate together. I was encouraged to pay attention to small details, to indulge in the myriad ways that each passing minute is unique, that each touch or smell or new sight or sound can bring small joys of connection with our surroundings. I had spent too long in a serious appraisal of artifice. Throughout my career, I had indulged in deep thought about the meaning and intention of this artifice, the movements through society and time of which the work had been a product. I was someone with a deep faith in idealism. Unfortunately, this idealism belongs in an age long past. We are all realists now; there is no place for ideas. I am reminded that the sheer mass of material created by humanity now outweighs the biomass on earth. We live on an artificial planet. While my mind recovered, I was encouraged to focus on contemplation of the simplest things.

I visited Oswald Boddington and Gemma Slaver a few years ago, with the intention of profiling their latest work and the ethos behind it. Instead, I was able only to create a snapshot of my own breakdown. Their work presented such a confrontation with my own prejudices that I was unable to withstand the shock. I wept. I was reduced to idiotic thoughts and for a long time I thought only of escape or of destruction. I was hospitalised and had to work through a kind of grief for the loss of my old certainty of thought. My intention now is to visit them again, and to undertake two endeavours - to confront the very scene of my catastrophic breakdown, and also to profile their latest work.

Since my treatment, I have developed a catechism that is intended to prepare my critical faculties for any shock. I remind myself of previous shocks in the art world at which I was present, and which I withstood. I recall the time I visited the Stux Gallery in New York in 1987 to review Piss Christ by Andres Serrano. I was startled by its crude but bold blasphemy, yet found positive things to write about it. Similarly, I was at first outraged by Ai Weiwei’s 1995 piece Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, but in time my critical evaluation has become more measured, especially with the relentless commercialisation of every aspect of artistic expression. Even when confronted with Marcus Harvey’s Myra at the Sensation exhibition at the London Royal Academy in 1997 I managed to keep my cool, despite the uproar all around caused by the offensive piece. I even kept my cool, and the contents of my stomach in place, when confronted by the images in Rutger Schrijnemakers’ 2003 Stront eters exhibition at Galerie Gerhard Hofland. Of all of the shocks in my career as a critic, it was somehow the utter banality of Boddington and Slaver’s work that unsettled me the most. This is why I have taken time out from my journey, to run through my catechism before I visit them and run the danger of losing my perspective again.

The waitress seems forgetful and almost negligent. She cannot recall anything I have ordered and claims to know nothing of the bill. She seems as confused as the English are in general about their identity and purpose, their role in the world and any idea of responsibility. I leave what I consider to be enough to cover the refreshment and walk back to my car. I sit for a while, the catechism still in my mind, to control my breathing and settle my nerves. Then I begin the journey down those idyllic lanes and beautiful downs until I arrive at the converted barn where the provincial “artists” Boddington and Slaver run their operation.

I have had plenty of time since my convalescence to ponder what they may be working on now. Last time, we spoke quite candidly about their aims and ambitions, about the subversive and deliberately disruptive nature of their work ethos, and the devious element they employ to ensure their work finds its targets. Having chronicled their trajectory, I feel I am in a good place to predict where they may possibly be heading next. I’m hoping they have pushed on with their subversive work and are intent on holding the grotesque commercialism of the art world to account. I see parallels with their work and those who deface advertisements in public places and make the public question the ever onward commodification of every aspect of our culture and society. I’d like to think they are perhaps producing art that cannot be commodified, or somehow destroys itself the moment it enters into the commodified relationship with its buyer. I am encouraged by artists such as Magomedkhan Viltė, whose art is manifested through gentle touching between the artist himself and anyone who wishes to experience his art; or Kaylie Victor, who draws and writes directly to those who express an interest in their work; or Ruh Jacinto, whose work is a series of complex vibrations in a room, that can be perceived only by being in the room, and which makes sonic forms through its interaction with the ears and the body; or even Schrijnemakers’ latest series of works, which use deeply personal voyeurism to explore the construction of identity in a society where everything is for sale. This is work to try to throw off the commodification and mediation that are the predominant forces in our society and in the art world. These artists wish to nurture direct human experience and the meaning of interpersonal contact and exploration, to draw the artistic impulse back to its origins in the direct experience of meaning.

Despite my personal crisis, I am convinced that the avant-garde has completely lost its power to shock. It has now been so thoroughly co-opted by the commodification excesses of consumer capitalism that shock and spectacle are expected from it, and it cannot live up to expectations. To even call it avant-garde is to hark back to a time when perhaps there was something challenging or provocative about the work, but all the practitioners have since been employed in advertising or continue to service the banal requirements of the art world. Recently I visited Tswb Ajax, whose graphic work is very well regarded at the moment, despite some of the violence and cruelty depicted. But I felt I was looking at something with an ulterior motive, I could see past it to its own neediness for sensation, and the requirements of the Deja Dream Corporation, which sponsors much of her work. I looked in on Vivienne Chastain when I arrived in the UK. They have transformed themselves into an incorporeal and genderless cyber artist whose latest work, I Can’t Stop Looking, is a series of explicit images that they suggest are provided by moderators on social networks, projected directly onto the retina from a networked “Media Influencing Machine”, a structure that is not dissimilar to one of Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulator devices. I quickly became bored and frustrated once initial interest in the gimmick had subsided.

Perhaps these reactions are because my doctors thought that “art therapy” would be helpful during my recovery. Never was there a more ironic treatment! I was tortured by having to turn my attention to some really very poor artwork, made with the best of intentions no doubt, but so amateurish and intent on leaving little uncertainty in its message. Their pieces meant to stimulate were all of the same blandly utilitarian aesthetic, one-dimensional without any danger of uncertainty of interpretation, as one would expect from psychologists. Those lured by the banality of psychology seem to seek some form of solace in the naivety and simplicity of the pseudoscience.

“Oi, why the fuck is this parked here?” The screaming voice of a morbidly obese man with a shocking red face beside my car window.

”Verzeihung,” I blurt in a panic. The face is quite hideous, sweaty and puffing and swollen.

“Move this fucking crate or I’ll put the fucking windows in.”

“My apologies,” I scream through the half-opened window. “Is not Oswald or Gemma still resident here?”

The grotesque form moves back from the car and I have a view of the poor creature’s monstrous scale. A T-shirt hangs from the form like a tie-dyed smock, wet around the ample male breasts. Thick veined ankles protrude from the smock.

“Who the fuck is asking?”

I wind the driver’s window down a little more. I notice that the oversize vest is an enormous Washington Redskins football jersey.

“Oswald!” A gentle female voice behind my vehicle.

“What?”

“It must be Burkhart. He’s visiting this morning.”

“What?” The face moves closer to my window.

“Burkhart is due to visit us today. Stop being so rude.”

“It is you,” says the wet face. “Guten tag! Das queen of Westphalia ist hierhin.”

“Is it him?”

“He’s here. He’s come back for more.” Oswald cackles in the same way I have overheard English tradesmen do outside public houses.

“Guten tag, Oswald,” I venture. My hands have already started shaking and my voice is not clear.

I try to open the car door. Again the cackle.

“Out you get. You’ve been sitting in there for fucking ages.”

We walk across the badly tarmacked area in front of the converted barn I had been impressed by last time I visited. Somehow it seems to have been utterly spoiled. There are countless large SUV cars piled up on the tarmac, and someone has taken the trouble to install synthetic turf to where the meadow had once bordered the building. The barn itself has been attacked by someone with a paintbrush and a swatch of mismatched colours. Dereliction may have been a less ignominious state for the building.

“We’ve got some fun things for you to see this time, Burkhart. I’ve got a feeling you ain’t gonna be disappointed.” Oswald seems to limp and is already out of breath, even though we are barely halfway from the car to the door of the barn. I try not to look too much at him, but he has undertaken such a physical transformation that I cannot help myself in wanting to see if there is any part of his new form that I indeed recognise.

“I am eager to learn more about your current projects, Oswald.” I consider broaching the subject of my last visit and my subsequent breakdown, but pause and then stay silent. Gemma appears near my side.

“Herr Färber, we’re so glad you’ve returned. We are so grateful to you for the way you have supported us. Please forgive Oswald’s rather uncouth manner.” She takes my arm and gives me a wry smile, as if we have a shared secret. She manoeuvres me delicately to the door of the barn.

I notice there is a terrible smell that seems to permeate the air throughout the area. There are diesel generators stacked against one wall of the barn, making quite an oppressive noise. The exhaust and warm air and stench combine to leave me rather sickened.

“Please come through, Herr Färber. You are most welcome in our home.” Gemma guides me through the door. I am shocked to see the state of the place, and also to learn that it is from inside the building that the unsavoury smell is emanating. I cover my nose and mouth.

Suddenly Oswald appears again, coming towards me from the interior of the building, even though I thought he was following behind. He has a moronic expression of enthusiasm on his face, and woos and yeahs like an overexcited American sports fan.

“Welcome to the future, oldtimer!” he shouts. “Only joking. The future has been cancelled. The Western civilisation show has been discontinued.”

I am appalled by the state of his teeth when he leers. He flaps about in his oversized vest like a hyperactive preschooler.

“Oswald, please stop doing that.” I notice that Gemma is gently pushing me through the doorway. She seems equally distressed by Oswald’s behaviour. “Will you stop that and offer Oswald a drink.”

Perhaps it is my age. Perhaps the upset to my mental composure has given me higher expectations of what artists might be doing. I reflect on the suspicion that religion might be a more worthwhile arena for my own anxieties. After all, I have been trying to deduce meaning from the art I have spent my career appraising, and it seems it has given me nothing in return other than an appreciation of aesthetics, no more profound than the concerns of an interior decorator. My suspicion is that I have been looking for too much, and this is why I was tipped over the edge when last I visited Boddington and Slaver. I was expecting too much - I was expecting something - and when I realised the utter void I think the sudden decompression overwhelmed me. I have promised myself to treat art more lightly, as something more likely to delight the senses than provide a moral guide to the contingencies of existence.

“Oswald, stop that!” Gemma’s voice is sharp. Oswald is lifting something in the half darkness of the main room of the barn. It appears to be a large, rough leather bag, perhaps. “Oswald, enough!”

He cackles again. Then I realise that there is something dripping from the torn skin along the side of the object. Then I see a dull eye and immediately recognise a limp tongue hanging from a horse’s severed head. I step back in alarm. Oswald cackles loudly. Gemma grabs my arm as she shouts again at Oswald.

For some reason my mind takes refuge in Botticelli. Behind my closed eyes it revels in the immediacy and beauty of Madonna and Child with St. John the Baptist. My hand curls towards my chest in a mirroring of Saint Augustine in His Study. My heart yearns for a time when these images would have been so fresh and had such impact, when we were not utterly overwhelmed by the image as a form of pollution. For a time when images had a meaning, where they were so rare that one could not help but be in awe of them. Now our reality is reduced to image, a performative spectacle, broken images.

“Burkhart, you alright?”

“Oswald! What are you even doing?”

“Is he alright?”

”Geht es gut,” I murmur.

“Why have you done this? Why have you even got that?”

“Knacker’s van was coming up the lane. Thought I’d see what he had, so we could tell Burkhart we’re working on a Damien Hirst.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Just fun, init.”

“You’re an idiot. Come on, Herr Färber, let’s have a drink. You look like you need one. We’ll wait till he grows up to talk to him.”

Gemma takes my arm and leads me away from Oswald, who remains standing in the doorway, blood stains down the giant basketball shirt, the horse’s head in his arms. We sit at a pleasant outdoor veranda and sip chilled drinks. Gemma asks me about the intervening time, and how life is, and what I have on my agenda. She smiles and laughs and occasionally gives me a look that suggests our intimacy might go further. I find myself charmed. For some reason I find myself confiding my feelings when I was most recently leaving Kassel, still upset that my cat had recently died. Little, pathetic things, but for a reason I cannot understand, I begin to cry. Gemma puts her hand on my arm again.

“We worried about you, of course. It was terrifying for us. We didn’t know what else to do. An ambulance seemed the best idea. You were so distressed. These people know what to say, don’t they, to diffuse a situation, to bring you back out of your head. I do so hope you’re better now.”

”Ich fühle mich viel besser,” I comment. Gemma moves her hand along my leg.

“We worried about you so much. We didn’t know whether we should message you, or whether that would not help your recovery.”

For some reason, the ruined restoration of Ecce Homo by Elias Garcia Martinez comes to mind. The idiotic daubing of a talentless amateur destroying something of modest historical value.

“It has been a difficult process. But I am glad I am able to visit you again.”

“You are courageous, taking on our radical works again!”

I stare at her for a few moments, believing she is joking. She appears to be serious. She pats my leg. For a few moments I close my eyes, and cannot be rid of a memory of confronting Adoration of the Magi by Tai Shan Schierenberg.

“No, Miss Slaver. I’m fine, thank you. And of course I would like to see what you are currently working on.”

She rises, and walks around in the afternoon air, a much freer individual than when I had last visited, when she had rather seemed as if she were visiting from another era, a haunting, an apparition trapped in repeated motions. For a moment I envy Oswald, and then despise him.

“Yes, of course. We must show you our current work. I’d quite forgotten it was a business visit.”

My mind is filled with images from the oeuvres of Norman Rockwell or Jack Vettriano, utterly formulaic exercises in nostalgia and whimsy. My stomach tightens.

---

Oswald is over-excited again, swinging his arms about as if limbering up for a sports event he believes he has a good chance of winning. He jogs around, his weight and absurd clothes and burning face forming a ridiculous caricature of athleticism.

“We’ve been busy since your last visit, Burkhart!”

“Very good.”

“And your last visit really did help us. It made us think. Even if it caused you some trauma.”

“It is good that something positive has come of it.” I taste vomit as the fetishistic imagery of The Singing Butler won’t leave my thoughts.

Oswald holds up a piece of apparatus similar to binoculars, but without lenses on the front. He sneers and proffers them in my direction. Gemma appears in a doorway and sighs. I grapple with the equipment, remove my spectacles and reluctantly pull the headset over my head.

“It’s a work in progress,” comments Oswald. Suddenly I am confronted by blurred images of flesh and a soundtrack of pornographic groaning. Reticently, I adjust the controls on the plastic housing, and a grotesque image forms before my eyes. Oswald’s heavy sweating jowls vibrate and wobble in the foreground while a large man dressed only in a leather mask performs an unspeakable act towards the rear of the naked body of the artist. The video footage appears to depict Oswald being subjected to terrible pain, and his face stretches through agonised shapes as he bellows and screams. My nerves can take only a few seconds of the imagery before I pull the headset away from my senses and toss it to the floor. At least the obscene recording displaces the persistent Vettriano in my awareness.

”Das ist widerlich!” Spittle flies from my mouth and forms globs that seem to hover midair.

“A work in progress, but the process itself has become the work,” comments Oswald. Gemma is behind him, shaking her head as if despairing at the behaviour of a child with learning problems. “The process itself is the work of art in this instance. The process is that we use a computer algorithm to go through each frame of the recording you have just watched. The algorithm itself decides whether the frame is a work of art, a bit like a digital Duchamp. It then creates an NFT from the frame and sells it via an online auction. The buyer owns the NFT but never even sees the original frame that it has been created from. In fact, the auction itself is just computer algorithms bidding on each others’ commodities via an entirely automated marketplace. No one sees any art. There are simply drops, trades, gains of value, occasional losses.”

“I see.”

“This is the final destination of the art world. It is no longer about visual representation or concepts. It is solely about algorithmically traded virtual commodities. As it should be.” Oswald laughs like a taxi driver that has just amused himself with an unpleasant joke.

“The Waltons have settled their invoice.” Gemma seems to have appeared beside me, sipping from a tall glass. She puts her hand on my knee and winks.

“Good,” states Oswald.

“It was only sixty-eight thousand. Did you give them a discount?”

“I don’t know. Check the paperwork.”

“Would you like a drink, Herr Färber? Humour him for a moment.” She disappears again, and I am left with Oswald staring down at me. He leans to pick up the VR headset. I place my hands over my eyes gently. Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas occupies my mind.

“Burkhart.”

“What?” I lower my hands.

“Are you ok?”

“Travel is more tiring these days.”

“On your last visit we talked about manifestos.”

“Yes.” I try to bolster my resilience to any further shocks the provincial showman may have in store.

“The importance of a theoretical underpinning that the artist may be articulating through their art.”

“I recall.”

“You labelled our attempt to destroy the complacency of the art world Anodynism.”

“But this is just a scam.”

“‘To break open the stifling presumptions of the settled art world’, as you put it.”

“Yes.”

“‘A grenade in the midst of all this empty talk about the relevance of modern art.”

“Yes.”

“That was really good. You were a step ahead of us. But I think we’ve refined our approach.”

“Ok. And this is what you wish to share with me, after these pranks of yours?” I point to the headset.

“No, this really is the work, Herr Färber.” Gemma shocks me by reappearing by my side on the couch.

“Oh, interesting.” I try to remain positive, but I fear more horseplay.

“We have become accelerationists!” Oswald’s eyes beam with enthusiasm and he spreads his arms wide.

“Jake and Dinos are accelerationists.” Gemma nudges me with her elbow and rests her hand on my thigh again.

“We need to take the direction the art world is going and drive it to its extreme. Art must exist as a commentary on the human condition, mustn’t it? That’s something you’ve written about before, Burkhart. And what is it saying now, what has it been saying for a while? That the condition is absurd, meaningless. Modern art means nothing to anyone apart from investors. It is only a traded commodity. It has been fully deterritorialised. There is no connection between a human being and a modern piece of art anymore. You can stare at it, or listen to it, or experience it in whatever method the artist has conceived, but there is nothing there. It was created not for your experience, but only in the hope of finding a buyer or an investor. It is the creation of a commodity, the same as all other processes in the industrialised system of capital. Let’s go back to Lascaux and the daubed representations of animals. Producing those images was a profound act that represents a milestone in the development of the consciousness of humankind. Representative art developed with this trait, and has survived to inform us of our growing self-understanding and quests for meaning. But’s that all gone now, hasn’t it? Because we have settled on something far more important to us, far more meaningful to us than understanding our surroundings, or our origins or our place in the universe, and that is exchange. Art used to be central to humans and communities as they became self aware. It was how they explored the rise of consciousness. It was utterly integral to our identity as human beings, to the evolution of our potential. Now capitalism is more central, so art can only be a comment on capitalism. This is what is most interesting about art, about how it has stopped meaning anything to most people, and the exchange of commodities means more. Sharing and sociability are more important to us than meaning.”

“Yes, I wrote something similar in Texte Zur Kunst.”

“So do you not see how our process is the work itself, how it exists the undermine the complacent attitude of the art world? NFTs exist only as the embodiment of copyright and the fear of inauthenticity. They are the ultimate commodity in the art market, entirely divorced from any meaning humans might be trying to make through art. Art is another form of money. Nothing more.”

“This is true.”

“How can artists rebel against that, when their entire medium of expression, the infrastructure of rebellion has been co-opted into the capitalist status quo? What are we left with? Indeed, what is anyone left with, when rebellion itself has been co-opted into the framework of oppression? Rebellion and resistance become commodified themselves, they’re deterritorialised and repackaged as playthings you can buy from the giftshop. This system is bulletproof. There is only one option left - to drive it to the limits of its own contradictions. To use its success against itself in order to destroy it. There is no other option than to promote the non-fungible tokens, to assist in the further estrangement of the art market from anything meaningful, in order for something new to replace the entire corrupt and bankrupt system.”

When I close my eyes all I imagine is Jeff Koons’ Banality series - the Pink Panther, Michael Jackson, Saint John the Baptist.

“Herr Färber?”

“Give him a moment, Oswald. He’ll have whiplash keeping up with our ideas.”

“Poor old guy only just venturing out of the twentieth century.”

“Please, you two. Really, you are very preposterous,” I comment as I open my eyes again. “I thought you might have something interesting to say, perhaps invoking the spirit of Marinetti and the Futurist Manifesto and interpreting it through the framework and context of contemporary technosentience. Imagine, the way forward is to “destroy the museums, the libraries, every type of academy”, especially the infrastructures that propound the power of the technoelite. But no, not you two! Completely in thrall to your own infantile preoccupations, churning out the same brand of inconsequential babble as ever. The same drivel that you used to hawk around to corporations to hang in the anonymity of their boardrooms. Now you’ve jumped on the same bus as everyone else, blinded by the hype about blockchain, the desperate solution in search of a problem to solve. The same as everyone, selling NFTs and not knowing what you’re doing. But you’ve post-rationalised it all with this creepy talk of accelerating the demise of the capitalist system, or financial markets, or Western civilisation or whatever it is you believe you are rebelling against in your teenage minds. Wouldn’t it be great to smash the system so that you two utterly bourgeois privileged white ‘artists’” - I make air quotes - “can prevail and now present to the world your real art, the art that the system has been oppressing. As if there is any real art here.”

”…”

“And without irony you say you are attacking complacency with your agitprop NFTs. As if your entire existence has not been bankrolled by Gemma’s parents, and here you are just playing like spoiled children. And you are going to smash the system that is so generous to you! Why? Just carry on being a privileged player in this system you so abhor. Your sense of entitlement - it’s exhausting.”

”…”

“When I visited you last, I was guilty of over-interpreting your work. I found way more in it than I should have done. In fact, I should have found nothing in it. There is nothing to find. You’ve had some commercial success, and this has led you to believe that you have something to say. You don’t. My breakdown was caused by my own mind not being able to believe that young people could be so empty of ideas. You produce such banal works informed by nothing more than your own narcissism and self-confidence. I travel a lot, and I speak to a lot of young artists. I love hearing their ideas and reviewing their work as it develops. But I have never met anyone quite so empty as you two. And when last I visited, I think I was expecting something, but met with a dangerously empty nothing, and my critical facilities quite simply imploded.”

There are tears in my eyes, and when I wipe them away I notice Gemma standing above me. She seems to have changed into something like a stylish ball gown, and has had the time to do something with her hair, which is now swept up into a lavish bouffant. She seems as unreal as a Warhol silkscreen.

“Herr Färber, we’re really grateful for your support.”

“I’ve made you a drink.” Gemma hands me an ornate cocktail.

“Your support means a lot.”

“I wish you well with your endeavours, but please see it as it is. Utterly inconsequential.”

“We appreciate your response to our work as we do with everyone.”

I stand, and take the drink from Gemma. I place it on the table and bow in thanks. “I have a long journey ahead of me, for which I will need a clear head. But thank you.”

When I step outside, I see the landscape as if through the shapes and colour in the works of Richard Diebenkorn. Oswald and Gemma stand nervously in the doorway as I tread carefully across the chaos of their land. They do not speak, and I do not look back.

---

Later, I stop the car at a small chapel situated deep in a forest. It is a modest flint structure, and its unassuming stature elicits a kind of pity as I see it through the windscreen. For a while, I sit and look at the simple beauty of its presence surrounded by the stately tall trees as it is framed by my view through the car window. Then I sit for a while in the very tiny porch of the chapel, the hard wooden bench offering no comfort at all. The refutation of modernity is like a balm. The cold hard discomfort, the austere silence of the chapel, the aloof majesty of the trees as the wind antagonises their composure.

I wonder how many hours I have spent in contemplation of works like The Abbey in the Oakwood by Caspar David Friedrich. Throughout my career, I would have visited this painting many times in the Alte Nationalgalerie, or rested a heavy book on my lap while I studied the image. I would have wondered about how the figures depicted in the painting would have reflected on their own existence, or how Friedrich himself was able to create such an image, and even how his contemporaries would have reacted to his imagined scene. There is not enough time any more to become even superficially familiar with any of the trillions of images that flash past our attention spans each day. There is no time to appreciate, or form an opinion, or care.

The simplicity of the chapel setting convinces me that I needed to step away from the torments of art. I realise that since my illness, I am searching for something far more profound than the sensations and concerns of the modern image factory. I know I am trying to step aside from artifice and explore the context of my own existence. In modern parlance, I am going to be mindful, to connect with the moment, to dispense with concerns over interpretation. It is a sense of freedom that is quite beautiful.