Opening: 12 November, 6pm

Looking for The Ocean Estate is a solo show of new film and sculptural works by Patrick Goddard with a text by Naomi Pearce.
 
 
Notes on Looking for The Ocean Estate.
 
1 But what did the baby pigeon nest smell like? (yeast, off milk)
Did their little chirps go quiet with the layer of (slow suffocation) plastic?

1a Small penis humiliation is just another way for guys to get girls to pay attention to their dicks.

1b Shit nostalgic camcorders with distracting lens scratches are just another way for western obsessions with ‘vision as truth’ to proliferate.

1c Caroline A. Jones is good on the fetishising of sight:

Sensory attributes are not only economically but racially coded within modernity, Europeans still stigmatize Others as ‘smellier than us’, African Americans are decried as ‘louder’ (both visually and acoustically) than their Euro American compatriots.

1d Seeing is not believing when the visible has been discredited.

2 You said the script is all truths. All your truths at least: truths you overheard, truths you felt and truths you read about. Anecdotes too. Re-vised in order to survive. Anecdotes are part of historical records (yours, ours, theirs, who’s?) ones that report events and act upon them.

2a This film is probably good enough to be on TV.

3 Home is questioned in times of crisis.

4 The authenticity of one culture is often someone else’s exclusion commodified.

4a I’ve just started to read Édouard Glissant. It feels wrong to be quoting him now, so soon, but still:

The poetics of relation presuppose that each of us encounters the density (the opacity) of the Other. The more the Other resists in his thickness or his fluidity (without restricting himself to this), the more expressive his reality becomes, and the more fruitful the relation becomes.

5 Smiling woman at the radical prison abolitionist conference:
Things are not good. What do our Facebook friends mean anyway?
The first time I meet someone now I’m thinking about what they can do for me. I’m assessing them, like data.

6 Need a better lexicon for gentrification. It’s like porn: I’ll know it when I see it.
Verbs: displacement, fragmentation, appropriation.

6a All other characters bored.
You are obsessed with gentrification and see it everywhere.

6b Apparently we see fewer ghosts now. It’s the toxic mould spoors in old buildings that produce hallucinations or hauntings. New houses are less damp. Displacement is happening across physical and ethereal realms. Only render ghosts in no ghost zones now.

6c The enemy is homogeneity. Sarah Schulman:

Spiritually, gentrification is the removal of the dynamic mix that defines urbanity

Culture calcifies with conservative sameness. No more difference together. (See echo chamber as gentrification of online space?)

6d But what do the other gentrification artworks look like?

7 The names of the new builds: Potters House, Sculpture House. A half arsed millennial update of what Sharon Zukin called ‘The Artistic Mode of Production’. She described how the loft living of 1970s New York artists became a cultural model for the middle class.
(Harry Handelsman in Shoreditch etc.)

8a Julian Stallabrass in High Art Lite (uncool but relevant) on the fantasy of the ‘urban pastoral’:

simple rural folk enjoying rustic pleasures have become replaced by the characters of the inner city, similarly devoted in middle-class fantasy to the joys of politically incorrect humour, the circulation of obscenities, the joys of violence, crime and vandalism...

8b Lisa: ashing fags on the pock marked hob.
The way she tells the story about the kids kicking in her door, taking joy in violence. Your fantasy.

9a You squatted The Ocean Estate from 2007 – 2008

9b I search for squatting on the Internet and all I get are hits for bum exercises.

9c Artist in ‘Squatters: The Real Story’, 1980:

London is a creative city; creative people always live in a bohemian way. Squatting is a bohemian way of life. Anybody interested in community life would extinguish squatting at their peril. I’m a citizen of the oceans, not of any of the suicidal technocracies. (London, 1975)

9d You are a citizen of the oceans looking for The Ocean Estate.

10 You misuse ethnography – to debunk it, to punk it? A performance of participant observation, data collection, cultural description to expose the fictional objectivity of these practices.

10a Simon O’Sullivan’s term ‘fictionning’: the re-imagining of the past or present as a critical act, an intervention. Your fictions don’t offer alternatives but construct a satirical composite of all the worst things: what not to do, what not to say. Use the cliché enough it has to wear out or just break.

11 Social media as a depoliticizing force: dissipates anger, reduces isolation. An outlet. Perhaps art does this too? Turn the phone/camera/laptop off and realise just how little space you have left.

12 Who is this film for?

12a Simon Critchley: Tragedy is insufficiently tragic because it is too heroic. Only comedy is truly tragic. And it is tragic by not being a tragedy. Laughter as a form of resistance to impotent hand wringing. Not laughing at the old lady, or the rude boy or the Lord of the Rings enthusiast. Laughing at you.

12b Use of POV: a way of letting us know the joke’s on us too.

 
Naomi Pearce