Introduction

Please be warned that this weblog is an extraordinarily ego-centric and possibly narcissistic endeavour! For those easily offended by such material I would advise you to tread carefully.

To delve more deeply: This is a project. I am a project. This is the project of Duncan Patterson, Artist. A project which by no means has any certainty of success! Perhaps it shall be followed closely up by the project of Duncan Patterson, Lawyer. Or Duncan Patterson, Mountaineer.

I have been thinking a great deal recently about these questions of art and life. I finished my first degree, in architecture, in August, and have since been wondering what to do with myself. I spent the months of September and October in relative seclusion working on a construction project on a peninsula in Georgian Bay. While I was doing this I read a great deal, thought a great deal, and wrote a bit too. One thing I thought about, is that I would like to be an artist. An artist seems to me a wonderful occupation, allowing one to keep informed about the problems and delights of the world, while engaging in a therapeutic form of interpretation of them. That's a great conception of the artist, Therapist Of The World. I think this conception really brings to life the work of some of my favourite artists: Duchamp, Magritte, Escher, Borges, Kafka, Beckett, Dylan, Warhol . . .

I have spent much of my short life producing art of various sorts, but I am never sure if any of it is worthwhile. Most of it just remains scribbles in a notebook. The question arises: When do random jottings become Art? Where does the line between Jot and Art lie? When did TS Elliot, or Kafka, or Van Gogh decide that they were 'artists'? It seems certain to me that its not training that makes an artist . . . but what is it?

In this day and age, these sorts of distinctions seem even less clear. Essentially, it used to be you were a Writer if you were published. Someone else, a clever person in a position of power, would take your work, deem it worthy of the effort, and publish it! I think of the factory that was the Library at Alexandria - scribes carefully copying out the classic texts over and over again and distributing them around the known world: now THESE were important texts! In a time of practically no physical dissemination of ideas whatsoever, talk about validation! With the invention of paper and then the Gutenberg press, the standards for texts must have decreased, as far less effort and resources were required to replicate them. Then as this process became more and more refined, and then with the advent of electronic media - come the 1960s, just about anybody with a mind to it could publish texts. With the internet, we can publish anything we want with unprecedented ease - without having to answer to anyone with regard to quality or content. The internet provides the artist with the capacity to reach a much larger population than 'print media', however this very ease eliminates most any filter for quality.

This in-between zone, 'liminal' zone if you're an architect, attracts me right now. I am interested in pursuing this zone between the true validation (and risk) of publishing, and the absolutely unvalidated and possibly futile zone of jotting in a notebook. But again the question becomes, where do you draw the line? Now that we've eliminated the 'authentication' of print publishing (or gallery showing for visual artists), even this 'semi-authentication' zone of internet publishing still requires some serious decision making regarding quality. When should a random jot remain a random jot? This is going to be something that I hope to pursue with this weblog, which I am going to try and use as a means for disseminating my art, possibly in conjunction with my website at http://www.geocities.com/duncpatt .

If you've read this far, I know what you're thinking - man, this guy needs to lighten up! Well, compare this to Baudrillard, whose Cool Memories I'm reading right now: "Anyway we are condemned to social coma, political coma, historical coma. We are condemned to an anaesthetised disappearance, to a fading away under anaesthesia." So really, my constructive attitude, even if slightly confused, is indicative of a far more positive outlook than HIS!