I'm deliberately not formatting this as a 'versioned' update as I think the format isn't really helping my current 'stuckness', and actually this isn't really about the content so much as the process for deriving it...
I'm making slow, but very painful process on both the five-minute video and Open Casket. As correctly predicted by JK, by making them feel like my final word on the subject, I've made them un-birthable... I've created a situation where every idea is not quite as good as the idea I haven't had yet... But no idea I HAVE had is quite good enough.
Squeezing My Nuts
I think this is all very good for me and character building and all that, but it's also not a lot of fun, and in grave danger of inadvertently proving my own theory that art is a 'free activity' like play, and the more I force myself to do the art magic, the more artistically constipated I'll become... That said, some of my better/weirder ideas have come from the process of forcing myself against seemingly unmovable constrains - I think of it as a bit like a Zen koan - by squeezing the nut sufficiently hard, I will eventually succeed in breaking my fingers in some artistically interesting way...
Five-Minute Video
I think for the 5-minute video, I am still in a good place. I just need to walk the line between making a weird art-video and making a boring conventional video about my practice. It needs to work as both or I need to abandon my fun challenge and make something that definitely works as a conventional video about my practice... My original plan had been to lean toward the weird-art-video side fairly heavily. However, I'm coming (through the process of careful planning) to realise that five minutes could be a very painful long time to watch something that (at first blush at least) doesn't make a lot of sense... It also requires a rich seam of visual material that I'm worried I may not have. I think I therefore need to keep pushing in this direction, but be ready to start diluting things down with some more conventional narrative if needed - i.e. let the narrative take more of the strain if the video material isn't quite up to the load. One fun potential 'twist' I did think of (because it wouldn't be Tom without some stupid twist) would be to get someone else to narrate it like it's a posthumous documentary.
Open Casket
Open Casket is a trickier beast... I think I'm still on the right lines, but I keep adding new constraints then removing all constraints, then adding in more constraints, etc in a bid to get to some sort of breakthrough...
As detailed previously, I think I need to work out if it's participatory or not. Bereft of a great idea for a participatory work, and wasting many cycles grinding my gears on one, I decided to make the decision that I will NOT make a participatory piece - by taking that off the table (knowing I can always put it back on!) I'm hoping to narrow my focus.
Some things do feel fixed now - it's definitely a sculptural piece, almost certainly featuring some sort of life-size 'corpse', almost certainly featuring life casts, almost certainly featuring three props (wedding ring, time-management book, acorn), probably featuring some sort of natural materials too.
What IS shifting is the realisation that my original grandiose gesture of 'burying myself' at the final show is... well... a bit wanky. I guess the problem is raises is that that is the 'motivation' for me, but what meaning does it have outside of a grand self-serving self-therapeutic dump? Sure it feels good to get that load out, but what benefit does it serve the poor people I'm inflicting it on?
So the meaning and motivation need to shift... Ugh... Because now I am in danger of backing meaning and motivation into something that I'm already designing... Which is sort of arse-about-face as my dear old dad used to say. Except I have learnt that in art, arse and face are fairly flexible things. I'm ok backing up, adding meaning, then 'forward fixing' the resulting mess... At least, in principle.
So I think the broader meaning I extract from my 'death' is that you don't really understand what you have until you are about to loose everything. I sort of sum this up as "as evening draws in, how will you wish you spent the day", although now I think about it, that is something somewhat related, but different. Nevertheless, I think the purpose would be to encourage people to confront their own mortality, and realise that the 'answers' are already within them. You won't really appreciate how good the morning sun feels on your face until you realise you've had your last morning on earth. The trick then is to grasp what mortality gives us (and many eastern religions also preach) and try to enjoy 'now' fully and for it's own sake. Notice and enjoy the feeling of the morning sun on your face precisely because you believe and embrace the knowledge that you might NOT get to see tomorrow's sun. It's the world as it is. It's the null point... Huh.
So how to create a piece of sculpture that conveys that? I think I need to use the impulsion of my experience (Tathos) but processed through (somewhat objective) reflection (Tomgos). I think I keep the elements above, but I seek to anonymise them (if my face appears, it has to be clearly 'a face' not 'the face') and harmonise them (it needs to be one statement, not a mish mash of elements). I need to create something that clearly conveys the emotional charge of my experience and it's meaning to me (Tathos) but presented in a way that the viewer can see themselves in it (Tomgos).
Easy yeah?