I'm just beginning to think about print and multiples as a future avenue. It seems to combine what I like about text based art with my interest in images and objects. I can also hope that my personal blog, posted under this same account, might become a little more sophisticated from all this. It is the most direct encounter I have had with autobiography so far. That's a little vague but it's where I am. What I liked most about each of the examples of autobiographical art I mentioned is the weird, unique textures they end up with, after their humble, grounded origins. The starting point may have been fact, but nothing about To the Lighthouse feels plausible, or versimilitudinous. I have never read anything like it.

I have no idea if I'll go back to making more autobiographical stuff or not. I don't even feel any closer to understanding how it's made or why I have been feeling so compelled to make it. This blog was never going to succeed. 

I have been looking for ways to make this all easier, and a bit more fun, and I think it might all be to do with relaxing. Even in trying to analyse these two works, I have been too uptight. If there is one thing I want to take away, it is that dealing with ghosts is a lot easier than dealing with the real thing.

As an aspiring autobiographer – a job, and word, which I made up – I think there is a lot to be taken from My Winnipeg and To the Lighthouse.

‘This would remain.’

All of this is really confusing. The two stories unfold like perfect dreams. Not a single decision is obvious. In terms of critical analysis, I feel like I have completely failed – the writers have accessed a higher plane, from which they can manipulate their personal mythologies, and I have no access to it. They do it all so effectively that I wonder if they could remember, afterwards, what happened and what didn’t. In My Winnipeg, the sleepwalking citizens carry keys to each of their past homes, and to the past homes of each of their sweethearts. I’m not sure where I’m going with that.

‘It’s better between us – now that you’re gone.’

Both works are clearly obsessed with transience and memory. They both confront trauma. They both depict literal journeys – one to the lighthouse, the other a train ride out of the city. And yet neither journey is seen completed, not even the Ramsays’, which was over ten years long.

‘What is a city without its ghosts?’

I read an article about To the Lighthouse by Margaret Atwood, in which she referred to the ‘elusiveness’ of ‘Woolfland’. The events of the book are far from surreal, but something about its characters is distinctly heightened. They are all a little too in tune with each other, and with some higher plane. 'Is it the mystically paired river forks? The bio-magnetic influence of our bison? The powerful Northern Lights?' That was, of course, from My Winnipeg. Exact words are repeated in different characters’ thoughts. As Atwood pointed out to me, Mr Ramsay’s reciting of Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade serves no purpose other than to prophesise the First World War. Everything is too perfectly constructed. Nothing is quite real enough to hold on to – like each story in My Winnipeg it all threatens to give way.

‘The forgetfulness of the snow.’

Child-like, the narrator can’t, or won’t, get past the euphemisms which obscure trauma. I don’t think the viewer can either. Bizarre facts and stories about Winnipeg interrupt the narrative, for instance the frozen horses suspended in the Red river. Everything is slightly too surreal to be understood. The narrator can’t escape any of it, and equally he can’t survive it.

‘Everything that happens in this city is a euphemism.’

The magnetism of Maddin’s mother is equal to Mrs Ramsay’s, yet far more overbearing. One scene that stuck with me was her argument with Maddin’s sister about a dead deer, an argument which slowly morphs into something more sinister.

Afterwards, every conversation has been made stunted and awkward by her absence. Guy Maddin’s father character is treated almost identically. He doesn’t appear in the film except for in the living room scenes, when he is represented by a man-sized earth mound under the carpet. The family have to learn to negotiate the changed landscape of their own home. To me, it’s a perfect metaphor for Mrs Ramsay’s loss, or for any loss.

The depiction of loss in both works is testament to the light touch that I was going on about. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs Ramsay is absolutely dominant. Not a single character’s interior monologue escapes mentioning her beauty, her aloofness, her authority. The word ‘rapture’ comes up a lot. And yet, when she dies, her death is recorded in parentheses. An afterthought. As much as the characters of the novel obsess about her, the narrator is completely indifferent. If I break my rule for a moment and say that she obviously represents Woolf’s own mother, the coldness of this moment is very unsettling.

I have a solution. I won't analyse these works as histories, but rather as constructions. I don't want to make this about fact checking – why should I? I don't even know very much about either of the writers. I will treat everything as fiction, because I'm afraid that I might miss something obvious. Like I said, I get stories and I don't get history. If anything seems naive then please just remember that I'm being ironic.

In critical study, I think that it's generally seen as a bit gross to interpret a text through a biographical or psychoanalytical lens. That makes sense. It's basically a given that a lot of the book or film will come from the writer's own experience, so not only will a prying critic come across as sensationalist, they also come across as an idiot. That puts me in an awkward position, because I don't want to come across as either, but these two works are practically begging to be read as autobiographies. I don't know what to do. The premise of my blog seems to be falling apart a bit.

A little background: My Winnipeg was Guy Maddin's commissioned documentary about his home city. He used the opportunity to take the viewer on a sleepy, surreal tour of his childhood. Meanwhile, To the Lighthouse is widely seen as Virginia Woolf's most autobiographical novel, depicting two days with an alternate version of her family, and the ten years in-between. If I had to be crude, I would say that the latter is about things changing, and the former is about things staying the same. I only have about six hundred words left for this section, so that might be as insightful as I get.

I had just started reading To the Lighthouse when my sister brought up Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg. I watched it straight away because her taste is law. It was impossible not to notice the similarities, but now I want to understand exactly what the strange quality that suffused the two works was, and perhaps understand why I found it so intoxicating.

That is what this blog is all about – having more fun. Ironically, to do that I think that I need to get serious about the work I am making. Guy Maddin and Virginia Woolf are the masters of all this. Talking about themselves. Framing history as fiction and fiction as history. Being playful. They aren’t exactly proper fine artists, but then neither am I. The point is: my attempts at talking about myself through my art have been sort of half-hearted, and, even though I should be the expert, quite ill-informed. There is simultaneously an incredible bravery and a very light touch in their work. In the words of another great autobiographer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “the most important things are invisible to the eyes”. The key is omission. That didn’t make much sense, but it’s sort of appropriate. I see artists who deal in personal history as code talkers. They take the same material that everyone else gets, and through strategic omission and implication they give the viewer the impression that they are a code breaker. I hope that by studying the codes of Maddin and Woolf in this blog, I can become a better code talker myself. 

Being aware of my little obsession might be enough. Now that I know that what I care about is autobiography, I might be more excited by my own work, as if by magic. I know that I get storytelling a lot more than I get fine art. I know that I love the knowing, slightly tacky melodrama that surrounds most autobiographical art. I love that voyeuristic feeling when you catch a glimpse of something you probably shouldn’t. After all, artists know that their work might end up being mined for their backstory, so why not own it? This could all be a lot more fun than it is at the moment.

I don’t know what’s next. I wish I could understand work that talked about more abstract concepts. None of this autobiographical stuff is particularly heady, or even fun to make. It’s essentially therapy, or moping.

From August 2017, I was all about Joseph Beuys. His body of work was so fucking intimidating, but as soon as I found the bits about himself, his plane crash, his shamanic persona – the playfulness of everything – I felt a lot more comfortable around it all. More importantly, he talked about what it meant to be an artist, and that was what I was about to start being full-time.

Carol Rama, Louise Bourgeois, and Grayson Perry were probably the three most accessible artists to me when I was in Sixth Form, and most of their work sits neatly under an umbrella labelled ‘daddy issues’. Or maybe that’s only the bits I remember.

A product of being both unprofessional and uninspired is that my work is generally about myself and my family. Maybe I am just lazy – it is the material closest to hand. Maybe I am only able to engage with autobiographical interpretations of artworks, even though a hundred possible readings might exist, because that is what my subconscious projects. I don’t feel like I’m always questioning myself and my relationships, but the evidence is sort of undeniable. The only artists I get excited about seem to bang on about themselves.