To produce all of our sheep milk cheese, we rely on East Friesian sheep. Native to northern Germany, they are the most productive dairy sheep in the world. The East Friesian produces roughly around 300-600 litres of milk per season and are a valuable asset to our farm.

To help us produce a hardier milking sheep we have also introduced the Lleyn breed. Native to the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales,they are more robust and have great maternal instincts.

I have often wondered what Smithson might have made of McCracken’s monolithic oddities circa 1966, or the uncannily leaning planks that soon followed, had these inspired him to write as he did on Judd’s work in the essay “The Crystal Land.”¹⁰ Noting the discrepancy between Judd’s insistently rational accounts and his eccentrically fabricated specific objects, Smithson allows that “the first time I saw Don Judd’s ‘pink plexiglas box,’ it suggested a giant crystal from another planet.” McCracken shares much of Smithson’s otherworldly sight, his metaphysical yearning. Yet he diverges from Smithson’s recourse to transcendence, from the notion that worldly physical and historical experience might be surpassed by a crystalline entropy. McCracken’s metaphysics does not end in eschatology but in empathy.

My misrecognition was symptomatic of a tendency among artists who, through the use of a relatively humble toolkit and their own brains and muscles, identify with the wanderer, the vagrant, the scrap collector. There is a false homology between the wandering, working artist and the wandering, working worker. It’s an identification that can only ever (affectively) flow one way, and smoothes over sharp economic differences. 

 

I am an artist in my free time, and I work so that I may have free time. The money I make from working does not support an extravagant practice, so I look for ways to work with low-cost, at-hand materials, at scales which can be stored in my apartment. These are political economic decisions I make which are determined by the jobs I hold, and the amount of space and money I have. Walking, looking, and even gambling are activities charged with pathos, but our imaginaries of these activities are one-sided when we abstract away all the particular economic determinants which compel them, however enjoyable they may be.

matt browning gandt show