art - social dysfunction celebrated as ritual

The RA's new Professor of Drawing

2011-12-14T14:04:00.002+01:00

I used to have a chip on my shoulder about being repeatedly turned down in my applications to study art at degree level through the eighties and nineties.
Now that the Royal Academy have announced Tracey Emin to be their new Professor of Drawing I understand that I was clearly applying for the wrong courses (fine art) at the wrong institutions (art colleges).
I'm happy to accept that Tracey Emin is an artist, I do not challenge that. But Professor of Drawing? By what criteria?

isms

2011-08-13T17:54:00.002+02:00

I’m frequently being asked if I my work is stuckist, or neo-modernist, or expressionist or just urban art...
Post-modern irony or post-oddern morony. It’s all cheese as they say...

What is Stuckism? Well it’s certainly not a definitive style of painting. If you consider the origin of the term then it’s basically the opinion of one artist (Tracey Emin), concerning the work of another artist (Billy Childish), that any work not following the methodologies of a few lecturers at a few London colleges, informed by western art developments throughout the latter half of the twentieth century (conceptualism) were irrelevant at a certain time (late 1990s). This proposed insult was first taken as a badge of opposition and then of identity in challenging the mainstream art practice of the late twentieth century.
The group of artists I informally presented together online, under the banner of Neomodernism, was founded in much the same spirit. We, along with the Stuckists and Remodernists, felt that the visual arts were being led by critics, curators and theory. The visual had been replaced by the word, represented by the visual. The value of craft had been replaced by the value of ideas. I was certainly never opposed to all conceptualist installations as I was never an apologist for all and any painting.
Some say that we get the art we deserve; that the excesses of the last flush of the contemporary art market (2007) where increasingly abstract sums of money were being paid for (apparently) increasing un-art-like art objects was symptomatic of the crisis in the western capitalist neo-liberal world.
Perhaps...
Certainly art was not being treated as an object without utility. It was now being used, at this level, primarily as an investment vehicle.
Another label of the current art world (driven primarily by an enthusiastic collector base) that has now been safely absorbed into the mainstream art market is ‘urban’ art. It’s just another ‘ism’ (even though, to my knowledge, it hasn’t turned up yet as ‘Urbanism’) that I’ve been marketed under, despite the fact that a collector described my work as ‘urban’ about fifteen years ago...
It’s a strange name that seems to be waiting for a clear definition as it apparently covers any artist that a growing bundle of galleries want to push. So it stands in for graffiti (indoors and out), street art and performance, paintings that contain references to urban culture, paintings that don’t but are made by artists who have worked on walls, paintings on walls by artists that usually don’t, art interventions against advertising, graffiti being re-imagined on canvas, paste-ups of woodcut prints, mass produced subversive stickers, stencils, tags, tag wars... It’s all very amorphous and perhaps with a long life specifically because of that lack of a clear definition. The one thing that all the work under this umbrella does seem to benefit from is the democratic nature of its audience. It isn’t an exclusive art. It’s not an art that needs the knowledgeable, art-bollox spouting critic to validate it. It has a relevance to an audience that otherwise would have ignored art as being not for them. It’s an art for the modern world.
Things have changed. The distrust in the intrinsic value of postmodern conceptualism is becoming more widespread. Even the critics are starting to challenge their churches a little more freely.
There appears to be a growing return to the appreciation of the value of the small gesture and the quiet moment. There is a growing distrust of league tables of artistic quality being more or less identical to league tables of financial value.
Agents of Stuckism, Neomodernism, Remodernism and a million other artists not slave to the tyranny of the idea of word over art are now able to move forward without the automatic accusations of ‘reactionary’. And it is time to move on. We’ve had our say – so let’s just get on with the work. So I’ll declare my position now. I am no longer a Stuckist or a Neomodernist (I’m not sure I ever identified myself as that anyway). I’m not an Expressionist painter or an Urban Artist. I’m a painter, a visual artist, an artist. I paint for a hundred and one reasons. I paint to the demands of a commissioner, I paint for myself, I paint to make a political point, I paint as personal therapy, I paint to learn about painting, I paint to give away the work and I paint to sell the work, I paint because it’s an obsession and I paint because I’m selfish, I paint to make beautiful things, I paint to make ugly things and I paint for reasons I can’t even explain.

London riots

2011-08-11T00:20:00.002+02:00

To the politicians

you blame the anarchists
and you blame the youth
you blame the immigrants
but ignore the hard truth
it isn't the Muslims
it isn't the blacks
it's a world of lost dreams
that fuel the attacks
kids promised everything
they'll never achieve
at school and on TV
and on estates they can't leave
you'll call for more money
to support your rich friends
and it'll come from the people
who call for your end

London is burning

So August 6, 2011 will go down in English history as the night when, once again, society seemed to disintegrate beneath the flames of street violence, anti-police sentiment, vandalism and looting.
The trouble continued into the following nights and I posted the piece of writing above. Now I'm not one for usually feeling the need to defend what I say or do to any great degree, but some of the emails I have received concerning my poem have been so vitriolic I feel I should write something in return...
I do not defend what has happened; anyone that knows me will know I am a pacifist and believe in the virtues of non-violent protest. But I have been thinking long and hard about why we have seen such an upsurge in violent protest coupled with organised looting.
I don’t think that what we’ve seen on our TV screens these last few nights is the important issue. We’re all familiar with violence and thieving in its many guises. I personally think that the issue of primary concern is that so many people were involved in what was clearly NOT a political protest. That so many people were so disconnected from a commonly accepted civic morality, to consider it acceptable to attempt to get away with whatever they thought they could get away with when an opportunity presented itself, is the important issue.
There was no single clear demographic identity to relate a cause to the symptom except age; the majority of the trouble felt was at the hands of the young. Whatever the reason is for the change in attitude to the idea of civil society, I think its core lies in generational differences.
What is it about the current cultural environment that has produced such a different personal outlook from, say, my generation?
Certainly something substantial drives individuals in such numbers to behave like pack looters. They clearly feel there is a selfish sense of acquisitiveness that needs fulfilling and they also clearly feel that this is perfectly reasonable; I’m sure it is justifiable and supported within their own peer group too. It is a sense of entitlement that the rest of us, particularly those who are older, do not consider right or excusable. What is so different about their circumstances?
I don’t know if they are contributory factors, but I do know that I did not grow up through the seventies and eighties a so thoroughly targeted recipient of consumer advertising. The era of disposable consumerism fed by incessant novelty product was far less intrusive than it has been for the last twenty years. Though there was always a childhood desire to be ‘grown up’ there was still a distinct separation in the mind of children between theirs and the adult world. That has disappeared and now children are just a different subset of consumer.
The celebrity culture that existed in my childhood was distant and tended more to an adult world than a child audience. It wasn’t all pervasive, it was considered trivial and it was never the focus of the news to the level it is now.
When I was a child was there a huge number of hidden children that suffered clinical depression? Or the varieties of eating disorders, suicide attempts or other psychiatric disorders that we generally consider to be (at their earliest) the concern of young adults but are increasingly creeping into the lives of primary-school aged children?
Was my childhood so unusual that until the 1980s the majority of my friend’s parents had stable work and affordable housing?
Was my childhood so unusual that the kids at my primary school only really aspired to occasional passing fashion fads? And is twenty-four hour, multi-channel TV creating a mental environment where everything (both on and off the screen) now has a life of a few weeks at best, creating a perpetual hunger for the next fashionable ‘must-have’?
Is there a more readily accepted culture of entitlement, fed by media pundits, than there was when I was a child?
Is there more common, general public acceptance that politicians are more corrupt, and corruptible, than there was when I was a child?
Are the disparities of wealth between the extremely rich and the rest of the public more apparent than when I was a child?
Is money more central to our ideas of cultural and social value now than when I was child?
I know it isn’t a simplistic case of cause and effect; I know of twins, born within minutes of each other and raised in identical environments from home through to secondary schools who, as adults, are absolutely different in their characters and moral outlook.
I don’t know the answers. I’m not a social scientist. I’m an artist and I just look at things.
I do know that the capacity for theft is a common human trait – driven by opportunity and a perceived personal need. Some of it is illegal and some of it is formalised into our society as being acceptable practise. The capacity for violence is equally reprehensible and justifiable for most people, dependant on circumstance. The responsibility for change is too important to be left to the politicians – we all have a duty to involve ourselves with our communities in a positive way.
But that’s another blog post.

New York and the Purgatorio paintings

2011-06-06T15:32:00.001+02:00

My focus on Dante’s poem as an inspiration was though its exploration of morality in politics. I grew up through the Reagan/Thatcher years and I feel that they have had a far greater influence than most today would care to think. Policies that were adopted through dogma rather than through necessity have had far reaching ramifications that are only now being questioned. The ideology of the supremacy of free-market capital at any cost have in some regards, with the assistance of other unforeseen contributory factors, created a far more politically uncertain world than that of the Cold War era.
Until 2001 the defining and conveniently heroic political moment of the post-war years had been the fall of Communism. In the western popular imagination, led by an increasingly accommodating media, the breaking of the Berlin wall became a convenient metaphor for a supposed end of ideologies. The events of September 11 2001 certainly put an end to that optimistic, simplistic and hubristic narrative. The attacks on America did not come out of a void; they were the latest chapter in a story that can be traced back through the machinations of generations of the world’s powerful elites. The sorry story of political and religious conflict rolls on and its crushing inevitability now falls heaviest on the lives of the ordinary citizen. Those with the least ability to affect political change are those that are subject to the most uncertainty and misery because of political change.
In terms of the outcome of that day in September the reasons underlying the attack remain academic. Ordinary people suffered extraordinarily – that should be the focus that develops a positive political difference. This suffering of the civilian is the constant in modern conflict that is dragging humanity back to the morality of the mediaeval. Conflict has developed from the ancient terrorizing of cities, to the formalised 'civility' of wars in distant fields to the World Wars fought firstly in fields and open seas, and then in and over cities. Now we have returned full circle to the notion of the urban civilian as legitimate target. This change has been a gradual evolution for most of the world, but for America it was a harsh and sudden return.
Those that instigated the attacks will defend it as being ‘deserved’ or ‘necessary’, and so again we return to a catalogue of blame, counter-blame, justified responses, outrages, conflicts, wars, civil-wars, terrorist outrages, political coups and violence. Always violence. Surely the perpetually preferred, political expedient of violence in response to violence is the negation of any enlightened sense of moral progress. With the instigators always secure and the powerless always the victim. Regardless of flag, faith or ideology the result is always the same and the attacks on New York exemplified this; as did the political response in the Middle East.
The Purgatorio is driven by the relationship between virtue and vice. Sin is not independent of love but directly dependant on it – through it being a product of a chaotic, perverted or misrepresented love. Whereas the Inferno seems to present an unremitting fall to a predictable and inevitable end, the Purgatorio presents the opportunity to the reader to believe in the ability to change an unfavourable fate. There is optimism within the poem, even at that simplest level of the journey being represented as an ascent rather than the Inferno’s descent.
I am not relating the Purgatorio to New York and September 11 through the deaths on that day. I am looking at the world’s perception of America as an imagined political and cultural entity and how the individual suffering was lost to the slogan of ‘America under attack’. A New Yorker reinforced my own thoughts when he stated that on that day, and for a short time after, he felt that America had the sympathy of the world; but all this was lost when the inevitable, predictable war machine started to roll.
The work, though specific to Dante’s writing will also feature elements of images found from the internet, particularly of people in New York that terrible day. Another aspect of my work in the past has featured significant press images as reference for my oil paintings. This is done intentionally (rather than creating fictitious characters) because I feel that it makes the viewer reassess their generally ambivalent attitude to such photographic images. People look at a painting with far more intensity than they do a photograph.
I am also constructing an assumed and complete narrative of the major elements of the day in New York on the basis of found video footage. One large landscape painting, in the fashion of the traditional ‘history’ genre, made from connected canvas panels. This, shown in Manhatten, relates the exhibition location as being in the considered centre of architectural and corporate ideological progress, but being brought low by one of the oldest human traits - it is the story of Modernism versus Mediaevalism. Optimism versus Nihilism.
This is a collection of work recognising the suffering of the American people on that day and I hope it will be seen as respectful to the memories of all those that died and suffered as a result – both in New York and beyond. William Blake wrote: “Can I see another's woe, and not be in sorrow, too? Can I see another's grief, and not seek for kind relief?” Despite the many cultural differences of the peoples of the world we are all essentially united by our humanity; our common desires, hopes and despairs.
Some people have tried to warn me away from taking 9/11 as subject matter. I do not feel I have to justify my position and I hope that the work demonstrates my belief that peace will only awaken when vengeance finally sleeps.

new work and methods

2011-03-01T21:37:00.000+01:00

Today I have finished the first part of my work for the show that follows on from the Inferno show in Bologna. The new work is inspired by Dante's Purgatory, the second part of his Divine Comedy; the first piece for it is a series of numbered, stencilled paintings that highlight my proposed focus for the Purgatory exhibition. The show is scheduled to open in New York around the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Whereas Inferno sites its residents depending on Dante’s consideration of their actions in life, Purgatory deals more with motivation and intent. As much of the work in my Inferno paintings relates to issues of current conflicts and it ends with a painting of the attack on the World Trade Center towers it seemed appropriate to relate Purgatory to the political decision-making made following the attack. Historically 9/11 is probably the most significant event since the end of the Second World War, not just because of the terrible loss of life that day, but out of consideration of the political events that both led to it and from it.
To echo the aftermath of the attacks I will be using a reduced colour palette with a predominance of greys and white and there will be a heavier use of collaged paper fragments and pencil work.
As in my Inferno work I will again be referring to other artists and writers that have also been informed by Dante in their own work. With this 'edition' of paintings I have tried to tie up a basic summation of where the Purgatory work will be going before I start it properly. Each complete set consists of two different portraits. There are 33 of each portrait (one for each canto of the Purgatory). One is of a New York resident and the other of a Fallujah resident. The two pieces take their titles from the first two lines of a poem by William Blake: Can I see another's woe, And not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, And not seek for kind relief?
At first the plan was to release a limited print, however the only medium available to me in my own studio would have been a wood or lino cut and I did not feel that it suited the subject matter.
I wanted to incorporate text so stencilling seemed appropriate, particularly since I've been using stencilled text in my paintings for years now. My method of building an image by stencil also allows a high degree of variation between repeated versions of the same idea. This then became an exercise in personally further developing my competence in another paint media. I have now built for myself a method that allows me to produce a limited edition, that though bearing general similarities, hold an almost infinite capacity for individual experimentation.
Though each piece can take up to two hours painting time, it is still to some degree more dependant on a fixed, repeated method. I have arrived at something approaching serial paintings or repeat mono-prints and it's a method I will develop further in the future.

venial sin

2011-01-09T23:11:00.001+01:00

I’m nearing the end of the Inferno exhibition work and I’ve started the preparatory work for the Purgatorio exhibition. I’ve never enjoyed painting as much as I am at the moment - I’m a lucky bastard. They reckon that purgatory is a temporary torment don’t they?

Perhaps I’m making indulgences for my salvation.

A question for students

2010-11-27T16:06:00.000+01:00

What took you so long?

Alright, so it’s not the fault of the existing generation; the blame should be laid at the feet of those that truly were the ‘children of Thatcher’. There have been a few raised voices over various issues since the maintenance grant, made compulsory in 1962, was formally undermined by the creation of the Student Loans Company in 1990. The problem with the protests of the last twenty years is that they have generally only been vocal enough to feature in the media when it is over issues of student finance. Even though these current protests relate directly again to the personal financial interests of the students there does seem to be a general change in the zeitgeist. The issue of education funding seems to be a convenient hanger for a deeper ideological malaise.
There has been a gradual increase in protesting student numbers as the anti-war movement grew, but they were always on the fringe. Now it seems they’re back. The noisy, angry, idealistic, unreasonable student. Thank god – if we can’t rely on the spirit of youth to have the energy to demand political change who else is there?
I listened to a BBC programme this morning attempting to pass itself off as a ‘debate’. The starting point being whether the students should even be allowed to protest or not. Apparently rather than popping into town of an evening and feeling some sort of solace through the expression of comradeship with a like-minded community they should be too busy studying towards making themselves correctly functioning production and/or consumption units in our broken neo-liberal economy.
The same people that celebrate the protests of the aggrieved elsewhere in the world see no contradiction in demanding their children and friends get off the streets. The same generation that to a greater degree have benefitted from post-war social policy giving them near full employment with employment rights, more secure housing entitlement, some degree of pension provision with a period at the end of their lives to use it and, ironically, free education.

So hats off to the students. Be reasonable – demand the impossible.

student questions

2010-10-21T00:53:00.002+02:00

Some answers to some questions I was asked recently...

Q. Would you call yourself a contemporary painter, a traditional painter, or something else?

A. Because of my general preference for oil paint, a medium that by some would be considered ‘traditional’, many people consider me a card-carrying art-reactionary. That tends to be the usual pejorative association of the term ‘traditional painter’. By definition of still bearing a pulse and consuming air I must also be a ‘contemporary painter’ – a description I don’t mind. If I’m dealing with the art world, and it’s already assumed I’m a visual artist of some sort, I don’t mind calling myself a painter. But I wouldn’t say this to a stranger who just asks what I do for a living. In that situation, if you answer ‘painter’, people then sometimes ask me to quote for decorating their bathroom or kitchen. Generally, for the sake of not having to turn down unwanted decorating jobs, if someone asks I tell them I am an artist. In France it’s easier – even the state considers me an ‘artiste-peintre’.
There is, among some artists when faced with the same question, a preference of calling themselves ‘painter’ rather than ‘artist’. This is done to give the impression that they consider themselves a worker and not a pretentious aesthete; they will then qualify the statement with something along the lines of ‘it’s up to others (or history) to decide if I am an artist’. I used to do it before I knew better and generally consider this more pretentious than calling yourself an artist. It plays on pandering to the snobbery and pretentions of the intellectualism and connoisseurial credentials of the questioner; it’s almost fishing for compliments.

Q. Where do you think the traditional easel painter stands in the art world today?

A. Once again, who would we consider a ‘traditional’ easel painter? It all generally comes down to the critical acceptance and celebration of individual artists. Currently, the likes of Lucien Freud and Paula Rego can generally do no wrong as far as critical acclaim is concerned so ‘traditional’ figurative painting is as valid as ever. Admittedly they are probably considered by some as the last of a certain generation of painters but then painters like Antony Micallef and Jenny Saville has shown how the medium moves on without losing its relevance to a younger audience.

Q. Is beauty and aesthetics important in your painting?

A. The aesthetic of the medium certainly is important. I was always influenced by a potential visual punch delivered by interesting paint effects, generally best exemplified through abstraction. This is why I am so impressed by the work of Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Francis Bacon, Joseph Turner and Gerhard Richter – I love the way they manipulated their media.
As to an idea of a general aesthetic, or beauty, in my painting I’m not sure. I don’t set out to make something that is either ‘ugly’ or ‘beautiful’. Each piece of work is generally established though its subject and not its depiction. During its painting it will present different problems that have to be addressed with different painting solutions that are learnt as you progress as a painter.
Personally I think that painting can never be totally autonomous or separated from its social function; certainly not if the work is planned for public exhibition. I used to think it was very important and disappeared into painterly abstraction for about five years before I realised that I was disappearing up a formalist dead-end. There was nothing I was doing that hadn’t been done by abstract painters before me.

Q. What is your opinion on the art market and the value of a painting?

A. The art market is a necessary evil that allows me to paint fulltime and exhibit to the public. I am not independently wealthy; I have no state or independent private patronage so I have to accept that I am at the mercy of the market. If the success I have recently benefited from stopped tomorrow I would be grateful for the last three years of very good sales and go back to supplementing my painting income with another job as I did for the twenty odd years before I moved to France.
As to the value of a painting I am permanently puzzled. I have bought other people’s work and clearly the value is no more and no less, that which the market will accept. I do not put the prices on my work as I cannot begin to relate a financial value to my work that a selling gallery will agree with.

Q. Where do you think painting is at today in relation to contemporary art and the advent of new media such as film, photography, digital art, installation etc.?

A. This is an enormous question and vast tracts have been expounded on it. Western visual art history is centred on painting, particularly since Vasari wrote his ‘Lives of the Artists’. I think too much has been invested, financially and philosophically, for painting to ever be sidelined at the expense of newer media. I do think though that over the last forty years painting has suffered through deluded intellectualised debates over its ‘death’ through irrelevance. Certainly the choice of potential media has broadened for artists and that is a good thing however there is something urgent, primal and immediate about mark-making that will always allow painting and drawing to be relevant media. I have used photography and I have dabbled with film and digital art but personally painting has an authenticity of personal expression that has not been matched by other media.

Q. We live in an age where anything goes in art. What is your opinion with this regarding painting?

A. My only objection to the ‘anything goes’ approach to painting is when technically deficient work is being critically defended as ‘intentionally’ bad. This is lazy both in terms of the work’s creation and in its critical interpretation. If a critic cannot assess the capacity of an artist to competently make the right mark in the right place they need only ask another artist who can. There is a vast difference between a skilled artist attempting to make work that displays an attitude of creative naivety and an art school graduate of limited technical ability, disguising this inability with hackneyed, half-considered and half understood intellectual defences of irony and self-regard.

stolen goods

2010-10-03T17:27:00.002+02:00

We’ve just had a visit from Sarah and Dave of Red Propeller and they’ve basically given us a thorough de-brief of the London ‘Behemoth’ exhibition. All in all it looks like it was a success, both in terms of feedback and sales. Considering the tough financial times we’re in, a near sell out show of 34 paintings with no variety in theme has to be something to be pleased about. I have never so thoroughly worked through an idea before and I’d like to think that this degree of application has had some part in the success of the show.
When I saw the show at the opening I was also relieved that there wasn’t a painting screaming at me to be taken down and thrown to the Trafalgar Square traffic. Because I’m taking so much more time to put a set of paintings together, and they’re sat on the studio walls for that much longer, their problems are clearly apparent and hopefully resolvable in good time.
There was only one problem (in the mind of Red Propeller) concerning the exhibition. Apparently, on the second day of the show, someone came in and stole one of the smaller paintings. Unfortunately it had sold on the opening night so the buyer had to be re-funded. Red Propeller were extremely upset about it and they’ve taken the financial hit on it – which is very good of them. They said that it’s not my fault so I shouldn’t be out of pocket. I said that it wasn’t their fault either – it was the fault of the thief!
Anyway, thinking about the theft of one of my paintings, in all honesty, I consider it a sort of strange compliment – to think that someone wanted a painting so badly that they had to steal it. I must admit that I have in the past occasionally seen other people’s art on a museum wall and thought to myself ‘looking at that - I can see why a person would want to steal art’.
If they took it because they had to have it then I’m not as hacked off as I would be if someone stole it to shift on the secondary market. So if anyone out there is offered a small canvas of mine, wonderfully framed by Tunnadine Fine Art Framing (marked on the back), by the title of ‘des paillotes’, (the title is collaged on the canvas) about 20 cm square...

How painting works 2

2010-09-26T10:50:00.001+02:00

I think that painting is a focusing; a process of exaggeration and editing of a suggestion of reality. I can start with a skeleton, like a foundation illustration, perhaps taken from a life study or a photograph and then I start to manipulate that framework. All the time I am hoping for accidents with the paint as the accidents are usually the source of greatest productivity. Perhaps the accidents of paint give me a similar perspective as the viewer to the finished painting: the surprise at something fresh or something that is not immediately understood in its construction. This aspect of painting is like, perhaps, finding the uncontrolled intention.
I know when it’s right or, at least, tending towards right but I don’t know how to do it. If I knew how to do it, that there was a predetermined and guaranteed method, then it wouldn’t be the challenge that forces me to paint continually.
How can I explain to someone, and still sound rational, that I love the colour orange but cannot use it because I have never found the right orange for the right painting.
I’m not trying to be intentionally obscure but it is difficult trying to describe something in words that needs to be expressed in a visual language.

Starting the comedy

2010-09-06T14:53:00.000+02:00

The response to the Behemoth work was constructive and useful. It was well hung by Red Propeller and all in all I'm fairly happy how it all turned out. Now I'm back home it's time to get on with the next project that already has about ten paintings started. Much like the last show's work, based on Dreyer's film about Joan of Arc, the next project is something I've been loosely tumbling over in my head for a fair old time - Dante's Divine Comedy.
I started the work earlier this year as I was coming to the end of the Behemoth paintings but the original inspiration to actually approach the subject came from Tom Phillip's interpretation (the book was a birthday gift over twenty five years ago), this then led to me getting the Dore illustrations of the text, and then the poem itself. I have attempted to start the project a couple of times since then but I didn't have the available time to disappear into it fully, consequently the efforts were only useful in identifying how I didn't want to progress the work.
After various email conversations with far more informed people than me (in particular an English arts journalist and an Italian arts academic) I've been directed to some really useful research on the subject.
I certainly will not be illustrating the poem as I feel that has not only been done far more effectively than I could do (or would even want to do), but there will be little room to work in a manner where I can interpret and evolve the work to reflect the current political and moral issues that I feel deeply about.
The work is more likely to be a blend of Dante's and Denning's journey. Clearly I will be led by the inspiration I've always found in the original text but I want to explore my own personal prejudices along the way. This is going to be a very busy year in terms of actual painting work - I will be exhibiting The Inferno in Bologna next January, Purgatory will be shown in New York in September and then there's Paradise. We don't have a venue for that yet but we'll have at least a year to find one. Assuming I can actually deal with painting Paradise...

behemoth show

2010-08-22T23:30:00.001+02:00

For the last two years I have been working through a long held obsession; the visual and emotional attachment to Dreyer’s 1928 film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. I can’t be precise about when I first saw the film, all I know for sure is that whenever it was that it drilled its way into my head it has never left. I have made over two hundred sketches, finished drawings, collages and paintings since deciding to actually approach the project with some degree of rigour and I think there is potentially still more to be done. The obsessional aspect for me has been the intensity of the performance, as Jeanne, by Renée Jeanne Falconetti and I have studied it intensely. At no point, even when watching scenes almost frame by frame, does she appear to be acting. Is there such a thing to an actor as a perfect performance? I’m not an actor or a student of the theory of acting; I’m just an audience member, the target of her work, but I’m convinced it has to be one of the greatest cinematic performances of all time.
Well the paintings are shortly to be shown in St. Martin in the Fields in London and I’ll be travelling back for the opening night. I hope the audience is forgiving of the obsession and can feel some degree of support for the reason why I have chosen the subject – as a metaphor for an apparent loss of faith in a rational, caring world.

New York apology

2010-07-14T01:10:00.004+02:00

The show at Brooklynite Gallery in New York has now closed and I have an apology to make. Not to anybody specific, but to an imaginary idea of ‘American’ that has rattled around my head for years. As an attempt to mitigate my crime I’ll offer an excuse of sorts...
Because of my political beliefs and because of the ubiquity of popular American culture in my quarters of Europe I visited New York with very set prejudices against that country’s people. I was wrong and I apologise for my bigotry.
I enjoyed the hospitality and friendliness that I met from all quarters. The cordiality offered to shoppers, that seems so false when repeated as a set script in the UK branches of American chains, was as honestly meant as the “Bonne Journée” I get in every shop in France. The willingness to help a lost tourist in New York is in stark contrast to the willingness to run away from the same in London. And the willingness to talk to a complete stranger over ridiculous reasons of artistic interest are another trait that connects the New Yorker far more to the mainland European than the Brit...
Obviously there was the all pervasive consumer culture, the excesses of terrorism paranoia, and the tacky tourist kitsch that wound me up... but you can't tar every thing with the same brush can you? Something that had been easily done by myself in the past. I should extend my excuses for the things I hate on this side of the Atlantic to the other. In general people are people and they just want to get on - despite the attempted media programming.
So that apology made, I can only say that when the opportunity arises again to travel to America in general and New York in particular, I will go with less cynicism.
The gallery, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, was surpassed only by the enthusiasm and support of its directors – Rae and Hope McGrath. I could rattle on about all that they did to make exhibiting as pleasurable and easy as possible but the list would go on for ever. But in my mind, the most important thing that they did, was to take a great deal of time out to take Colleen and I around all the parts of their city that every tourist should see – but most probably doesn’t. They showed us why they loved where they live and it was contagious; so thankyou to Rae and Hope. And thanks to the rest of the New York we briefly saw that made it such a memorable visit.
We will return at the soonest opportunity.

Brooklynite Gallery show

2010-05-13T22:50:00.006+02:00

The work for the New York show with David Walker has been finished; the last job was the framing by Le Tunnadine prior to shipping (I wouldn't trust anyone else!). It's been an interesting set of paintings as I've been able to work on a lot of disparate ideas that have been rattling around my head for years.
Two pieces on the subject of the loss of political faith, which in a general sense thematically connect to a painting inspired by one of my favourite books - William Golding's 'The Spire'. This has been a particularly difficult painting that started as a six-foot wide diptych and finished as a three foot square single canvas.
The subject of Lilith has returned, inspired by comments from a local woman on the last Lilith painting. There's still one piece to do to tie the original Lilith painting (currently in a collection on the other side of America) with the two paintings showing in Brooklyn but I'm not sure when that will come to fruition; and there are a couple of smaller painted self-portraits (that originated from a mis-guided idea to post a drawn self-portrait a day on this blog) which in turn led to a larger painting that returns to the series of 'imaginary self-portraits' I completed in the mid nineties. The larger self-portrait is also the second panel of the original 'The Spire' diptych. It all seems to go round in circles...
Now I've got to finish the Behemoth show work for the St Martin-in-the-Fields show this September and hammer into the preparatory drawings for the Bologna exhibition inspired by Dante's Inferno. If anybody's interested and they want a good translation of the Inferno , I can recommend the Robin Kirkpatrick (Penguin Classics). Not that I know bugger-all mind.

The philosopher-kings

2010-05-05T00:25:00.004+02:00

It's Turner Prize time, and once again, those that challenge the clear shibboleth that all conceptualist installationism is at the apex of contemporary cultural achievement are assaulted with the cries of 'Philistine'.
Does it not occur to these narrow-minded doctrinaires that there may be other opinions beyond their own?
The public that criticise this work do not always do it out of an instinctive prejudice against anything 'new' or 'difficult' (and by God that's a boring and far-stretched defence now).
Does it not occur to these self-appointed guardians of 'high' culture that there is increasing dissent of this pseudo-intellectual orthodoxy from within its own church?
Perhaps not for them, but for most people, art must contain both craft and a conceit. Why is that such an abhorrent principle? Permanently dazzled by their own superior analysis of the world, they tower over us, tossing morsels of sagacity to the great unwashed, uncomprehending hordes of simpletons below.
If we don't agree with them we're simply WRONG. Perish the thought that there might be another opinion.
No doubt they take time off from standing on the shirt-tails of us intellectual minnows to sit on the Left Bank of the Seine appearing to read a well-thumbed copy of Finnegans Wake.

motivation

2010-01-19T01:03:00.001+01:00

Now I’m getting pissed off. I’ve not done any sensible amount of work for bloody weeks. The drawing’s not working at the moment. I’m trying to pare it back, slow it down, refine it. All were rubbish and all have been destroyed. Since the last pile of ballsed up drawings a few days ago I’ve just avoided the studio and now I’m sat up, wanting to get down there and work. But I’m too tired. Too tired to work and my head’s too busy to sleep. It’s not like I haven’t got anything to do. I’ve got exhibition commitments coming out my ears and there’s sod all work going on. There’s a joint show with David Walker in New York in June and the main solo show of September 2010 at Saint Martins in the Field, London. I know I’ve got most of that covered but then there’s a solo show in Bologna February 2011 and another solo show in New York the following September. I need to kick myself up the arse and just get on with it. Get up early, coffee on and bang it.

slow

2009-12-21T23:48:00.003+01:00

Just trashed a pile of rough preparatory drawings, a dozen or so more finished drawings, half a dozen irretrievable canvases and removed half of a dyptych that’s been pissing me off for weeks. Work's going slow but it's still going. It's just more of a fight.
The studio’s like a bloody fridge.
Now working through dark mornings and darker evenings.
Life’s good though.

Diet of worms

2009-11-07T23:24:00.002+01:00

The incredibly fortuitous timing of Damien Hirst's "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever", the Sotheby's sale/exhibition where he sold over £100 million of work on the week that the global financial markets imploded, seemed to present the art world with an obvious full-stop to not only the YBA phenomenon, but also the glut of contemporary conceptualism. The negative response has been gathering, slowed perhaps a little by the critics not wanting to seem as if they're jumping on a 'reactionary' bandwagon. It is a long history to undermine too quickly; many careers have been built on preaching and promoting the faith of the institutional conceptualist market.
And following this the "Pop Life" show at Tate Modern has also received mixed reviews, with many critics focusing on the lack of irony in a show that celebrates the initial mocking nature of the Pop sensibility. Art that triumphed commercialism in a knowing fashion has become, particularly in this show it would seem, a sad parody of its ideological underpinning. It is no longer celebrated for the commercial, supposedly democratic, process of its mass-production. The focus of this art is now nothing more than its financial value. The only true hint of irony came when one of the contributing artists objected to the original show title of "Sold Out", as if this celebratory acceptance of the value in art being decided by the investors and not the creators was beyond the pale. It seems that some of the artists want to have their cake and eat it, and now it is clear that they may not be the masters of their own careers to the extent they had recently thought. And out of this crisis of faith comes Damien Hirst... again...
I mentioned in my previous post that Hirst was rejecting conceptualist object making. Since that newspaper interview he has opened an exhibition of paintings at the Wallace Collection which, as far as I can see, has been universally critically derided. Not having seen the actual work in the flesh I'm not in a position to comment, however I am pretty sure that on the basis of what I have seen online they are not the worst paintings to have been let loose on the world in recent years - which is the impression we are being fed.
Perhaps they consider him a modern-day cultural Luther and this exhibition his personal Ninety-Five Theses.
Perhaps they're worried that the supply of indulgences might dry up.

I might be wrong.

2009-10-02T01:34:00.003+02:00

There's been a tiny tea-cup sized storm in the UK art world... When I first read it I must admit that I sat up and started digging around the internet for clarification and any additional information.
The news was that Damien Hirst, doyen of the YBA scene, has publicly stated that personally, he considers conceptual art and abstraction "total dead ends" and that now he will return to "painting my own paintings from start to finish"
Admittedly my initial response was fairly predictable. Something along the lines of... now that Damien's said it perhaps the critical fraternity might accept it. 'It' being, that the excesses of the increasingly insular contemporary installation and conceptualist crowd have become boring. Not just to the general public, who have in the greater number felt intellectually intimidated by work that is intentionally abstruse, but also by an increasing number of artists themselves. Particularly those who were sidelined and ridiculed at college for maintaining that figurative painting, drawing and sculpture were relevant to a modern audience.
Then, after my cynicism had waned a little and I had given some thought to Hirst's statement, I had to admit to having some admiration for the bloke. I've always held that it is more mature, in all respects, be it in politics, religion or any other pursuit where opinions are hard fought for and held, to have it within yourself to admit you were wrong in the past. I've said it before on other subjects, but it applies to my beliefs on art too.
I have chosen, after experimenting in various media and ideas, to work figuratively and in the medium of oil paint on canvas. That is because I personally think this medium has a core relationship with my idea of what constitutes 'art'. A relationship that has been a continual learning experience from the day I first found I had an aptitude for accurately recording what I saw before me with a pencil on paper. And I have never stopped learning and I base my opinion on that learning. But I know it's important to realise that I don't know everything. So I think I'm right. But I might be wrong. Well done Damien.

not angry

2009-09-09T02:17:00.003+02:00

I've been angry for years. Ever since a friend woke me up politically back in the early 80s with handed down copies of New Internationalist, Marxism Today and New Society.
I moved on through direct action protests, working with campaign groups and other (less publicly celebrated) organisations; disappeared into the ideological anarchist camp and have since, more or less stayed there.
I've tried occasionally to direct that anger through my painting as, deep down and probably as a consequence of being bullied at primary school and being kicked unconscious by Fascists as a teenager, I've always considered myself allergic to physical violence. It was easier to shout from a gallery wall (some would probably say 'softer') than to sit in the back of a van, with a bunch of fellow anti-fascists, waiting for trouble to turn up outside an Asian family newsagent. To be honest I was crap at it too - as anybody that knew me then will testify. I won't be auditioning for any future Luke Skywalker roles; the force has long gone.
And sadly (I think) I now find it increasingly difficult to maintain that political anger. It used to be easy to whip up enthusiasm amongst friends and new compatriots when an offensive political issue raised its head. The world IS going to hell in its proverbial handcart. I don't think I'm being unduly pessimistic or dismissive of previous similar claims throughout history; I think resignation is the pragmatic approach.
Religion seems to be the new political creed. Now that (apparently) all the old ideologies have died there's no point attempting to effect change - just pray for a divine intervention to sort it all out for us. The UK is in the middle of its fourth Afghan war and it is plain what strategic direction that is going. Global free-market capitalism has upended and shown its fundamental flaws but the machine is not only allowed to carry on - the taxpayer has to support it. There is clearly a scientific consensus on human induced climate change but little political effort is making real difference because of excessively noisy multinational corporate lobbying. I don't know why we worry about a mass extinction instigated by an 'odds-on' meteor strike - it looks like humanity's doing a good job on its own.
There clearly needs to be a major global social or climactic crisis that interrupts TV transmissions for a week or so. That might generate a bit of mass-enthusiasm for progressive political change. So I'll be waiting. And I won't be angry anymore - my head can't afford it. I'll just be resigned to the fact that I'll be waiting a bit longer.
Don't expect any more angry paintings - I don't think they're in me anymore. Perhaps my lights will go out before the world's. I hope so - for the sake of my children and my grandchildren.

if the work is too easy...

2009-08-15T22:43:00.001+02:00

Two years ago there was a fire in my studio in which I lost twenty years of accumulated artwork. Even though I had no desire to sell it, or realistic intention of fixing the problems that had become increasingly apparent through living with it, for some reason it was left to the fire to create the full-stop that this document of my artistic life clearly needed. Friends and family thought it was terrible; I thought it was a bloody relief.

It wasn't about anything as gloriously romantic as catharsis, after all I hadn't instigated it. It was an accident - it was just a line drawn in the sand behind me. It was the line that symbolically separated the old life of struggling to financially support a painting career from the new life, where I was in the position to be able to earn enough from painting sales to maintain a painting career without other jobs.

I have had two years now of near continuous painting with nearly no distractions. Consequently I also have two years of failed canvases and drawings that I dare not show, let alone attempt to sell. I need another full-stop - another fire. But this time I will be burning them myself, and it will be a pleasure.

I have decided that I need to slow down with my output and if collectors are supporting me by buying the work then I need to be sure that I have applied myself to the fullest in that work.

So there are going to be fewer shows (future solo shows that are mounted are certainly less likely to be consistently themed shows) and less finished work – much less finished work... but I hope that it will be appreciated that the work I send off as ‘finished’ is, in my mind, stronger.

I have been working solidly now as a full-time painter for two years. Near day in, day out; sometimes twelve hours a day. Particularly in the last six months of this time I have seen a strengthening of my technique and the development of an increasingly self-critical eye. This has reflected in the positive comments the work has received and it doesn’t deserve to be ignored; it has to be treated like a gift.

I will use that eye and I will be more judicious in self-editing. If every piece doesn’t stand stronger on the lessons learnt of the piece before then it doesn’t get out of the studio.

If the work is too easy then there’s no point in doing it is there?

Four, one, five, two, three.

2009-06-10T20:45:00.004+02:00

The order in which the Cremaster Cycle films were made.

I have always been impressed with the clearly evident, aesthetic craft of Mathew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle; as each film was finished and still shots started to seep into the art news magazines I was becoming increasingly impatient for a viewing. When I did see the films I wasn’t disappointed. I would not make a direct comparison between the Cremaster films and some of the films of David Lynch – a comparison that is frequently heard – because clearly the targeted audience and ideal viewing environment is so different, however there is one key element that Barney’s shares with Lynch. That is the creator’s clear love of the visual aesthetic for its own ends. Narrative is clearly secondary and much of the meaning contained is personal to the director, even to the extent of being absolutely unfathomable to the viewer. To appreciate this work the audience just has to share the same love of looking; I feel it is as simple as that. In my opinion it is clear from its careful construction (evident whether you like the work or not) that the artist views the medium of film in a similar way that many painters view their medium.

Any narrative is at best buried beneath the layers of fragmented visual metaphor and allegory; apparently even Barney has difficulty fully explaining some of the reasons for the film’s content. I don’t think this is necessarily a weakness or an admission of intentional obscurantism. It is the same process that I identify in my own work once it is completed. So much informs the artist through the working method and practice that minor and frequently apparently insignificant influencing feeds from daily life, incorporated during the process of formulating the work, are frequently forgotten.

Finding not only the visual impact of the films thoroughly stimulating, but the working methodologies clearly similar to my own, I decided to pay a respectful nod to the art of Barney with my own practice. Following on the long tradition of artists referring to other artist’s work I am working from available videos and stills of the Cremaster Cycle and adapting the work of this contemporary art medium into an art medium with more directly personal significance and relevance.

I have worked through the available footage of the films that I have been able to source and followed the sections that repeatedly visually struck me the most. I have then slowly watched and studied them, more or less frame by frame, sketched from the screen captures, and gradually assembled and edited this preparatory material into proposals for a few new paintings.

As I have done this, I have investigated other avenues that the film’s clear references have led to. This has led to ideas and influences in my work that to a viewer may have no direct reference to the Cremaster Cycle but to me are, or were at the time of finding them, directly relevant to my interpretation of Barney’s films.

The first inspiration from Cremaster that led me to the idea of working from them came from a personal consideration that these films seemed almost to be in the tradition of the painted still life: particularly the sixteenth and seventeenth century Northern European still lifes of careful compositional construction, often loaded with symbolic reference and frequently a vehicle for the display of the craft of the artist.

In the past I have been accused of talking both prolix and bollix, so I’ll summarise briefly:

In taking the inspiration for my current work from the analysis of another artist’s work I am doing nothing more radical than artists have done for centuries. I’m happy to acknowledge that this section of Barney’s work is something that has impressed me immensely and I am just acknowledging this formally by working from it in a similar way that I’d work from the inspiration of other art, music, literature, film or performance.

affectation, affectation

2009-05-05T01:57:00.005+02:00

A friend has had her work rejected by a gallery on the grounds that it is too stylised and tending towards ‘affectation’. All said in the politest way possible of course.
Apparently (allegedly this is news) there are degrees of affectation in art; and also, so it seems, there are limits on its acceptability in the eyes and minds of the particularly critically astute viewers.
Those artists who insist on continuing to plough the obviously decrepit and irrelevant furrow of expressive figurative painting are accused (with a patronising and authoritative nod) of ‘affectation’; as if there were a higher form of culturally accepted art that did not rely on affectation.
It reminded me of the story of the philosopher Diogenes, whilst he was at the Athenian theatre one day (I’m assuming it was Diogenes of Sinope but I can’t seem to track down the story online).
A group of youths from the wealthy city of Sybaris entered; all decked out in the finest clothes, jewellery and make up, striding through with the confidence that they were as natural as water or air. Diogenes, a confirmed critic of all excess (and Cynic of course), stands up and shouts at them “Affectation, affectation.”
A little later another group walk in; this time it’s the residents of Croton, known for their more ascetic style of dress and life, who also walk with the confidence of supposed authenticity. Once again Diogenes stands up and shouts “Affectation, more affectation.”
To the gallerist: It’s art... the cultural apex of conspicuous artificiality. Show me please, what in your mind, passes for an 'authentic', artifice-free, piece of art.
Do you purists not think there may be an etymological link between the words ‘art’ and ‘artifice’?

Beautiful people

2009-04-26T14:28:00.005+02:00

I do not know for certain if the apparent contemporary public obsession with the idea of ‘celebrity’ is any more intrusive on our lives now than it ever was in the past – but I suspect it is. There clearly was a time when the notion of a celebrity was a more localised and small-scale phenomenon, but because of the nature of our modern globalised media it has mutated into an exaggerated cult of a rotating register of a few hyper-celebrities.
Undoubtedly I will be accused of being at best a curmudgeonly Jeremiah, or at worst a cultural elitist but personally I think this obsession is damaging not only to cultural growth but also to general social well-being and development. Also I would not place all the blame at the foot of all the individuals in question, who are inevitably (primarily because of the incessant media and corporate driven demand for novelty) also at risk of being victims to the machine. I would also like to clear up that I have no objection to individuals seeking recognition when working in any clearly very public arena; that is the nature of that beast.
My personal objections are reserved for the extremes of what I consider an industry that operates in an increasingly moral vacuum. The uber-celebrities that crave simultaneously absolute media attention and personal privacy; that see the idea of celebrity simultaneously as both the ends and means; that crave public sympathy for their plight as a celebrity; that have achieved and maintain recognition for no other reason than their capacity to spend unearned wealth; that expound to a general public on the morality of charitable donation whilst simultaneously doing their best to avoid paying taxes; that expect to be lauded and deified; that declare authority in arenas they are clearly unqualified for and most insidiously, the uber-celebrities that present their lives as a realistic aspirational goal that all should aim to emulate.
Digging for ideas and inspiration for the upcoming Hollywood show around the theme of these socially dysfunctional 'beautiful people' and the sometimes self-destructive nature of celebrity culture I half-remembered a line of a phrase in the last Shakespeare play I saw at Stratford. Looking it up properly I came across:
"O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't! "
They are the last words spoken by the character Miranda in Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' - and seemed to have an ironic relevance to the modern notion of the eternally solipsistic uber-celebrity.
Then of course this (or my notoriously goldfish-esque attention span) led me to Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' which I read nearly thirty years ago and have sadly more or less forgotten about.
I used to worry that the world (particularly Britain before we left) was slowly sinking into an Orwellian morass of state-surveillance and excessively prescriptive legislation. I can remember writing in the wet paint of one of my pieces ('You'll be wanting a happy ending then') something along the lines of how, at school at the start of the nineteen-eighties, I used to laugh at the implausibility of 1984's super-surveillance world - just as it seemed to be fulfilling itself as an increasingly accurate prophesy of twenty-first century Britain. All this time worrying about the potential of George Orwell's novel to predict our future social and political course and I had forgotten Huxley...
In 1931 Huxley imagined a future world where the population are pacified through mental conditioning, state supplied drugs and, more relevantly now, through the encouragement and celebration of consumerism to the ends of eradicating personal dissatisfaction.
Huxley suggests that if a population is significantly distracted by a culture that obsesses over physical appearance and recreational, responsibility-free sex; is contented and free of unrealisable aspiration, then the state will not need to prepare to crush dissent in the manner Orwell predicted. There will be no need for the Thought Police if the population’s thoughts are permanently directed at nothing more than pursuing accomplishable, hedonistic, self-serving, ends.
And to my mind, the excesses of our celebrity obsessed media exemplify that corporate (replacing state) attempt to control through a culture of inanity and disposable distraction.
In terms of where we are now I think it is clear that Huxley was nearer the mark than Orwell – even if I do frequently consider the incessant celebrity onslaught to be the potential cast list in my own personal room 101.
And on the subject of room 101, there was one final little irony turned up whilst I was wandering around this thought from nowhere of little real significance (a novel is a novel - real life is real life).
Interestingly (for me at least) dates in Huxley’s future world are defined in their time from the first major instance of mass production for consumerist ends, using assembly line methods: the introduction, by Henry Ford in 1908, of the Model T Ford.
The novel is set in 2540 which in this consumerist driven dystopia translates as "The Year Of Our Ford 632".
Well, I so liked the idea of incorporating that idea of the Year Of Our Ford into a painting that I had to calculate the current Anno Ford.
It’s 101.

Viewing and meaning

2009-04-14T23:53:00.010+02:00

When a painting is seen in the flesh (as opposed to in reproduction) it is invariably seen in whole and experienced as a complete and self-contained object. Personally my future appreciation of that work is tied to that initial viewing. I rarely come to love a previously unregarded painting after repeated study. I may come to appreciate technical aspects of a painting I have never previously held any great affection for, but I cannot engender that same enthusiasm that a newly seen, exciting painting can create. This is an assumption based on the experience of talking to other collectors and gallerists so for convenience sake I am taking this as generally true for most, if not all, viewers of paintings.
On this basis I choose paintings that I would consider buying. I do not consider the title, the wall-note, the investment potential, the catalogue or any enthusiastic gallery sales pitch. I either want the piece or I do not. The next, and usually deciding, matter is affordability versus desire to own. I recently walked past a small gallery/shop in the Breton city of Quimper and was stopped by a small painting in the window. I went inside and found a small room piled floor to ceiling with paintings quite clearly of only two subjects: seaside views populated by picturesque rowing boats and floral still-life paintings. Clearly the painter was pandering to two markets – all bar this one, small painting of a young girl on a bed with a flute. And it stood out, in my mind, because of its honesty. I asked about it and all the artist could say was that it was a portrait of her daughter.
In my mind, the reason for this one painting taking my attention was because of its honesty; because of its refusal to pander to a perceived market. It is relatively crude in its technique, it will probably never be worth any more than the fifty euros I paid for it, but it is simply and honestly beautiful. I know that if another painter saw it then I would lose that opportunity to own it. That was my interpretation of the painting and my need to have it.
Where is this going?
Once again I have been asked by a collector to explain the meaning of a painting; the relationship between the exhibition theme, the painting itself and its title. I have always found this particularly difficult because so much informs my work at all times through its production and I do not keep a diary of all these influences. My first worry is that if I offer an interpretation, no matter how involved, well considered and clearly expressed, that challenges the collector’s initially held ideas about the work then I am not only doing them a disservice by questioning their own interpretation, but I am potentially ignoring aspects of the work that they have found more readily than me.
I do not have all the answers to my work. If I did then I probably wouldn’t have the obsessive need to progress it. Herbert Read stated that “A work of art is not present in thought, but in feeling; it is a symbol rather than a direct statement of truth.” It is that old cliché that painting is all about the external expression of the inner processes of art and the artist, which though currently unfashionable does seem to chime inside me as bearing some nugget of truth. More importantly he follows this with “That is why the deliberate analysis of a work of art... cannot in itself lead to the pleasure to be derived from that work of art. Such pleasure is a direct communication from the work of art as a whole.”
So in refusing to any more offer in-depth interpretations of my own work I am not playing the role of misunderstood, stroppy, prima-donna – I’m just quite honestly saying that I really cannot relate all of the informing influences. From the initial idea, through the related research of others’ intellectual ideas, to the preliminary sketches, the changing technical aspects of my own painting learnt over thirty years, the influence of lessons learnt from other painters (living and dead), the music I listen to while I paint, the news I hear and the books I read.
A friend (who is blessed with the abilities to both paint and write) recently helped me with this conundrum quite succinctly. I related this problem of defining my work to collectors seeking an explanation and he just replied that if I could thoroughly express the purpose or meaning of my work in words then I would do so. But I choose to do it visually because that is the language that I naturally default to. It sounds obvious when someone else says it doesn’t it? And if you don’t trust my friend down the road there’s always Barthes in his ‘Death of the Author’ where he states that a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. I’m not a philosopher. I might be a thinker and a reader, but primarily I’m a painter.

masters of my world

2009-01-26T12:51:00.005+01:00

Because art has now become viewed as a progressive and loosely 'intellectual' practice, where new methods and media of expression are a pre-requisite to it being considered as serious, young student artists have tended to work in any medium except those that have a traditional craft base. This is not a new development and this ideology has become so ingrained into the art education/production/market system that it has further reinforced itself over the last forty or so years.
It has now been possible to produce art of critical acclaim that involves ideas as diverse as tinned shit (Piero Manzini), wrapping an existing canonical art object in string (Cornelia Parker), a gallery light repeatedly switching on and off (Martin Creed), accumulations and presentations of 'found objects' (Marcel Duchamp), textual descriptions about art (Art and Language); to the point now where it is fully accepted within the public mind that art can be, and now indeed is, absolutely anything. However, the key ingredient in successfully establishing these works as accredited 'art' is not the art work itself or its reception in the public sphere. Invariably the success is manufactured through either the intellectual theorising that underlies the work, or more commonly, the intellectual theorising that arises critically after the display of the work.
This critical response is the key manufacturer of the current stasis in the methodologies of contemporary art production and the important thing to understand is that this critical response is neither independent or disinterested. Despite their protestations to the contrary the critical elite are feted and indulged to deliver a positive and exclusive account of contemporary art that matches an equally exclusive market controlling and feeding an art collecting oligarchy. This is maintained by an exclusive and limited core of galleries who are in the main just like any other wealthy businesses. It is this reality that is frequently displaced for an assumption that their owners must have a peculiarly prescient critical eye. As with any other business that is essentially a shop front for extremely exclusive and expensive luxury items they feed a market that is driven by an incessant necessity for the fashionably new as a substitute for absolute exclusivity.
A gallery with this peculiarly wealthy collecting base will trawl a few, safely established 'radical', colleges for any apparently new idea, regardless of its merit aesthetically or intellectually. To support this new find a critical treatise will be formulated that uses an intentionally obscure combination of ambiguous art clichés and references to previously established safe canonical artist's work.
Then the art machine is initiated. First the artist is flattered with inclusion in commercial exhibitions with the established gallery artists to add critical weight by association. Then, after a while, the eventual 'long-anticipated' solo show, first displayed through a private exclusive show of the wealthiest and most predictably acquisitive collectors. If the work has not actually sold then it is not unknown for the mystical red dots to appear anyway, to create the impression of a potential lost opportunity to other buyers. At some point following this auction houses will also be manipulated (neither are the auction houses themselves innocently unaware) and will take bids, sometimes openly, from the gallery owners themselves – needless to say this is solely a purchase on behalf of a third party that was unable to attend (or mysteriously never bought directly from the gallery earlier) and it is only a side benefit that it raises the market value of the artist. One other key ingredient, at the most prestigious end of the market, is to arrange for the kindly donation of a significantly expensive piece of work to be donated to an equally significant national, public collection. This of course instantly raises the value of the remaining stock of that artist's work still in gallery storage, including those pieces previously assigned red dots without an actual purchaser.
The artists are happy because they can afford to live and work without having to resort to that uncivilised dead-end of taking a 'real' job. The collectors are happy because they have not only acquired a degree of one-upmanship amongst their peers (who may still be collecting last year's name), but they have work that will have a cultural stamp of quality and may even (should they be fortunate enough to repeat the exercise over a sustained period of time) have their name forever associated in history as a connoisseur of their time. The galleries are happy too, for not only are they making the money, they are instantly assigned a historical, cultural kudos that follows no other shop keeper.
Throughout the process, this select band of galleries will invite critics to the most exclusive opening nights, to meet the wealthiest patrons and arrange the introductions to those creating the most 'relevant' work. And unlike a thousand other exhibitions of unknown artists, in even adjacent galleries, those critics will attend; for fear they are struck from the list of those driving the cultural Zeitgeist. They can then take this air of being on the inside of an exclusive world to their commissioning editors, justifying their positions as the arbiters and reporters of national cultural taste.
This situation is not necessarily wrong, it's just the way it is. Also it is not a new affliction or even particularly hidden. It is very likely the last legal unregulated market place left in the world, probably because, at this level, it deals with that strangely intoxicating and unreal notion of national cultural identity.
However, despite their own consideration of importance within this system, in general the art critics do not deem what is artistically worthwhile; why should they bite the hand that feeds the machine?
Neither do the artists; they just work at, and after, college in the hope that they will be 'discovered'. Perhaps there will be the occasional student who will attempt to engineer their work to meet where they hope the future art market will be, and the lucky few who will naturally meet it by accident. But most will just be ignored. Very occasionally there will be an artist who can use the mechanics of the market, perhaps through a fortuitous meeting of a relevant contact, to launch themselves into this rarefied environment; they are the exception.
The general art buying audience has little input into who achieves artistic recognition in the high-art stakes. The small audience that constitutes the greater mass of significant spending are led to their trough. Clearly this is the safest route otherwise they would be risking not only their potential returns but perhaps even their capital (and at this level art is a most significant investment), not to mention their credentials of impeccable cultural taste.
The true taste-makers are the small circle of gallery owners that choose the new art at source, and they choose to primarily feed a market that, like all modern markets in non-essential goods, needs novelty.
I suspect that we cannot put this genie of novelty and shock-tactic art back into its bottle unless we change not only the art market, but the economic system that has brought such a wider buying public into the potential of affording non-essential, luxury items. When the luxury item exists and it is used by its purchaser as a supposed mark of exclusive superiority in taste amongst peers then there will always be a need by another collector to have the next, the better, the more expensive, the more exclusive, the stranger. The current elite-gallery system is the natural provider for that commodity in such a system.

the pharmaceutical bestiary

2008-12-08T01:07:00.003+01:00

Looking for perfection - in a world of carnage and absolute terror
There's chemical warfare being waged in your bloodstream and you've realised
YOU'VE REALISED<
Your doctor is just... another... dealer
And that's when you know that you're not losing the thread.
That you're one of the few that realise, that the eye for the twine weighs heavier than the prick.
And you're not fucking mad,
It's the rest that are sick.

And there we all are again.
There I am again... looking for perfection
The land of the waiting room,
the waiting room.
Waiting empty excepting the mathematically spaced chairs
Cold coloured plaster engages savage radiators and the shopkeeper shrinks as the first cross her threshold
And I am the first. I am the first always.
Because my piece demands that single seat that sits at the feet of that thin black wall
That's the seat that keeps their wall behind and our door well ahead.
And I am the FIST
I am always the FIST
And the other heads know this when I look down their line
We all stare ahead
I am the first
And the other heads FIST
Since they've lost the desire to even try
And instead look ahead
Contemplate that minutiae (the one of coloured cold plaster - at a breakneck sub-atomic level)
And the time-drying,
airwarping,
centralfuckingheating

So
Your lover wakes you up when woken by a nightmare
And wants holding. That's all.
Holding, and falling
back... to... sleep.
Again.
Is there any moment more common and sweet? Like clean, clear water.
Just holding...
And he turned on the radio quietly
And the news-reader was telling of a body pulled from the grey (the only colour) glue of an oil-slick... and it made him smile (an honest smile) because this nugget of hope reached him
He remembered.
He wasn't a fan of animals mind, he didn't hate them, he didn't fight on their behalf but
once he remembered seeing a swan die
And he said it in his head.
''Once
I saw a swan die''
And I cried (beauty/pathos/simplicity/death)
I'd seen swans fly
So I cried
You would, you know
That lithe white ess had ceased the struggle and its exhausted head lay on its back
contemplating the asbestos beauty of its nylon and lead veil...
It was beautiful in death
Despite the blank throttled eyes
Despite the scraped red neck
Despite the last frenzy of struggle. Meat and feather.
It would always be more beautiful because of that,
and because of that I cried.
(beauty/pathos/simplicity/death)

There's this old boy see. With tales of the boys, their blood and his glory, poppies and ingratitude.
This old boy with no family - no family that cares to know in any case.
No family and no friends bar those with the same faded imaginary scar
whose only celebratory day is no longer a birthday or Christmas, but Remembrance day.
A particularly European day of the dead - sans forgiveness.
The fresh dewy green stage - reliving black mud drenched horror
and the old boy who dropped dead at the sound of imagined gunfire - mid re-enactment of the battle of Verdun - dun for.
Dropped dead like a dud bomb on the verdant front lawn.
With nurses hovering like beneficent blue dragonflies - the old boy died famously in his years old boy's fantasy.

so lie... lie sweet self. Lie and lie to yourself in your head and convince yours truly that the bollocks you'll spiele will convince the
unfaithful and suckers alike.
Stare @ that ceiling of sad soft artex circles - warm in the orange gloom of the sodium burn. Study like you've never studied
before with an intensity enhanced by your
ABSOLUTE drug shoved torpor. paracetamol powdered, two hundred to one and powered by the vodka early morning express -
feel it steaming full on through your compliant, yielding, train tracked system.

no head ache now.
no fucking chance of a head ache.
no head ache in the head,
no head ache in the liver,
no head ache in the kidney.
No danger of any ache really - not now.
I
don't th
ink
you / i can
even feel
that
old familiar
ache of the bed
i don't
th
ink i
can even feel
the bed.
see... it’s not about whether you do it or not. if you've transcended that you'll be on to the choice of weapon: big knife or little knife, big knife or... little knife
there it is
the numbness in my head
pinning body to bed
it’s January
It’s three in the morning
and I feel fucking famous

How painting works

2008-08-25T12:09:00.004+02:00

Take a map from a foreign, and perhaps strange, country. Leave your house and navigate a local journey with that map. Either you can use the map and attempt to match your journey to it or you can follow your known routes of roads and paths and try to match the map to them.
That is the middle.
Opening the front door and leaving with that map...
That is the start.
It's not as easy as the middle, but it's easier than the end.
You won't know how the journey ends but you will certainly, eventually arrive somewhere. And perhaps even after several false destinations on the way. You won't even know when the journey is going to end, but after it has ended you will know for sure that it has.
That is the end.
That is how painting works for me.

Cans Festival

2008-05-08T19:59:00.004+02:00

BANKSY's 'Cans Festival' is the latest urban art show attracting the ire of the establishment art critics. Despite not being the first, but because he's been the one with the most identifiable name, BANKSY has always been subject to lazy journalistic sniping.
I don't have a problem when the criticism comes from quarters that just object to graffiti per se. When they view all graffiti, whether carefully planned and executed or just quick tagging, as an offence of aesthetic destruction upon our carefully built and lovingly maintained urban environments. That's a choice that the individual is entitled to take, much in the same way that I object to all the oversized corporate street advertising that my senses are assailed with on a daily basis.
The criticism of today's street artists that winds me up most is generally that coming from the establishment broadsheet art critics. It's usually unresearched (probably because there hasn't been a personal invite to a private view to schmooze and drink free wine), generally lazy (with no irony this is one of the main accusations they lay at the door of the artists) and, more often than not, demonstrably written from a position of ignorance of the urban art scene. Even if a criticism makes no direct reference to established contemporary 'fine' art, the critical definitions are couched in the same language so as to reinforce the authority of the ONE TRUE WAY of reading art; the contemporary broadsheet critic's way.
It is easy to attack 'urban' work as 'simplistic' if you don't agree with the message, but that's because you can read the message so directly. The flip side of this tends to leave the critical quarter assigning depths of profundity to contemporary fine art that even the responsible artists fail to comprehend after the event, and this is because much contemporary conceptualism or installation work is not directly or easily accessible (and neither is much of it meant to be). This isn't necessarily wrong; there isn't one way to make art. But neither should there be one method of criticism – I don't complain that Mahler's music doesn't make me want to dance.
For a lazy critic urban work is easier to read than much of the pseudo-philosophy wheeled out to assail the senses of the public-gallery audience usually held to be the apex of contemporary art. Because urban art is readily accessible to a public not readily versed in post-modernist or post-structuralist theory, because it undermines the critic's position as interpreter (or original author) of meaning and (until recently) because it has been outside of the financial circus of contemporary art the critics have shied away.
It is this last point that is already changing the previous establishment disregard for graffiti and other urban art. Now that this once renegade art form has found an audience ready to pay establishment art prices, many private galleries can no longer afford to ignore it. They are catering to a growing audience who buy aerosol stencilled work on a brick wall as readily as oil paint on canvas. An audience that has a desire for art that doesn't stand above them, like a naked emperor, with its air of supposed intellectual superiority. An audience that know (like the artists) that art will never change the world, but that can take comfort in the fact that someone feels the same way as them about current issues.
Today the people that look to graffiti and other politicised art are aspirational of change in the same way as the agitprop of the Paris art students of 1968; only in the eyes of a critic, scrabbling for an 'angle' for an article, could it ever be a competition.
Mark Wallinger appropriated BANKSY's work for his Turner Prize victory in 2007 where he was praised for his 'bold political statement' – never an accolade given to BANKSY by the critical establishment.
Now that Damien Hirst is collecting British urban artists (where previously the audience was considered art-ignorant) I'm sure we'll soon see a critical about turn.

the hours are worse...

2008-03-05T00:12:00.003+01:00

For the first time in my twenty years of borrowing, begging and blagging exhibition space I'm in the position of turning away galleries that are coming to me to show my work.
I've got group and solo shows booked pretty solidly for the next two years and other commitments stretching five years into the future; and they all came to me... How things have changed. Best not take the piss then. Best get on and 'knuckle down' as my mother would say.
I am also now able to sell all the preparatory drawings for paintings, which strangely adds a little more pressure. If people are paying for them I feel the obligation to work them a little more thoroughly and at least commit them to a decent paper. The disposal rate hasn't dropped though; if I'm not satisfied with a drawing I'm not going to ask someone to part with money for it. Now that I'm logging all these drawings, and selling them, people might actually see how much work goes into a finished painting. Not to mention those drawings that never make it to canvas and the preparatory oil paintings too.
In some ways I'm glad that I lost all those years of old sketch books and experiments in the studio fire. They wouldn't stand up to the work I'm doing now, and though I don't think I would've ever sold them... well - you never know what's around the corner do you.
I'm doing quite a lot of new paintings using just black and white (with very light oil glazes) and I seem to be getting some interesting results. How long this aesthetic and technical avenue will last is anyone's guess. Something else will come along eventually...
It's midnight here now. I'll finish this entry and get on with some more drawing.
I wouldn't change a thing in my life that has led me to where I am currently. I've now got one job; I'm a full-time painter. And after twenty years of supporting it with other jobs I'm prepared to treat it like a job, to work as hard as I can at it and produce the best work that I can. There is one difference between this job and others though. The hours. But at least I can smoke and drink at work...

Keep looking

2008-01-26T10:40:00.003+01:00

Following the exhibition of my 9/11 World Trade Centre paintings, several viewers of the work questioned the dimensions of the plane in relation to the towers in the paintings. Though the paintings were taken directly from photographs and videos of the events it seems a common thing for viewers of the paintings not to realise how small the planes were (comparatively), and consequently how small the human scale is down from that. It's as if we are so used to seeing television images of all horrors imaginable that we no longer really take in what the images are recording. The ubiquity of instant media imaging, and its rapid turnover, has almost made every image itself disposable as the next disaster takes its visual frame in our daily news.
Working on from replicating the images themselves I have now extended the modification of the finished paintings to the point where they no longer seem derived from the original source. I am now looking at creating contrived constructions of views that were never in the public eye because they were never actually recorded on film.
As well as these most memorable of recent news images I have been taking other press photographs and personally 'processing' them. Civilian and military war casualties, victims of social and political policy failures, drug addicts (legal and otherwise), the ever common celebrity excesses and all the other less than positive markers of twenty-first century human civilisation... I want to take the images that we no longer really look at and put them into a medium and location where slow and considered 'looking' is not ephemeral or secondary.

What a year

2007-12-02T14:25:00.003+01:00

The Red Propeller 5/11 show seemed to pass off rather well. Actually, in comparison with my previous shows over the last twenty years, that has to rate as the understatement of my career. The private view was very well attended, despite the galleries relatively tucked away location. Work was being eyed up from the start of the night and by the end of the event more than half had been bought or reserved. Within a fortnight virtually all the work had sold - a new experience for me; hopefully one which I can repeat in the future. I also met up with a like minded soul in the person of Mister Aitch, another artist who considers politics in art as being more or less a pre-requisite. I've been conversing over the electronic ether with him for a few months now and we've also been exchanging work. Hopefully sometime in 2008 we might get to put a joint show together celebrating the joys of the concept of state governance - I've just got to fit in with all of the other demands put on me following the new found interest in my work.
I'm not complaining. It would be disingenuous of me to whinge about the turn my life has taken since July this year. Admittedly as I'm typing this I'm looking out of a window at Brittany's best horizontal rain, but I'm not preparing for a Monday trip to a hospital job. Following the damage to the studio I'm dressed to paint like an Eskimo, but I'm not worrying about union cases to represent for the following week. And though we're separated from all our friends in the UK we're making new creative contacts here. Only yesterday I was contacted by a local newspaper who were given my details by a local gallery owner who we've been getting on famously with - I'm not sure of the reasons yet!
There's the 'twelve days of xmas' show that Motorboy has been putting together in Bristol coming up shortly. I would have liked to pop along but I'm too busy here at the moment. As well as sending some work his way I've been working on paintings for a January joint show at Signal Gallery in London. I really wanted to submit to this exhibition as Harry Simmonds is showing too and though it doesn't really count as a 'neomodern' event it will be nice to have my work on a wall with his. A couple of people have expressed an interest in curating a specific neomodern group show and I'll do my best to encourage their enthusiasm - we'll see what happens.
I've also got to submit work for consideration by the auction house Bonhams for their impending urban art auction and though most of the die-hard supporters of 'urban' art probably wouldn't consider my painting urban enough I have to be grateful to those that have broadened their buying from pure graffiti influenced work. It is this group of art buyers that have put me where I am now.
Even though I'm not a street artist I would like to be considered as working from a similar perspective as the more traditional (if there can be such a thing!) urban artists, even if my media and methods are different. We all seem to find a need to express ourselves politically through art and I think it is this that has generated so much interest in the genre of late. There is a generation that grew up through and after punk and see creativity as being intrinsically linked with social commentary. I think for most of these people the antics of the meticulously engineered and controlled contemporary art market, not to mention the deliberately obscurantist and pseudo-philosophical output of some of its most famous creators, is considered irrelevant to domestic scale art consumption. I've frequently associated BANKSY with an artistic identity not totally unrelated to the 18th century English painter and engraver Hogarth, and I think you can extend the comparison to many other contemporary 'urban' artists.
I'm still working full-time on the painting. One of the particularly good things about the move to rural France is the loss of distraction and the ease with which I can focus on painting literally full-time. The latest pieces are, I think, even more layered, worked and laboured over than those from the last half of 2007. I don't know if the work is getting more intense in the viewing, but it's certainly getting it in the production. I'm also still working on the few pieces that were not ready for the 5/11 show including more concerning the 9/11 attacks.
I've also received positive emails and comments regarding the paintings that deal overtly with the World Trade Center attacks, these were the paintings that I was most worried for about the feedback. One woman, an American, told me that she looked at my site after being told about them and was moved to tears by 'Vanity Fair'. This was definitely the career highlight in terms of a viewer's response to any of my painting.

Lucky

2007-10-24T21:31:00.003+02:00

We've had a sobering experience. A very sobering experience. Through some freakish accident that nobody can really work out we had a pretty serious fire in the studio last night. We were lucky that a passing kid saw the flames from the road and banged the brains out of the front door to alert us before it came to the point of no return; as well as as having the foresight to telephone the fire brigade before he alerted us. As it was I had time, with the assistance of the mystery French youth Nicolas and my brother-in-law (who's here on holiday) we managed to suppress the flames until the properly equipped blokes turned up. The heat, smoke and fumes were unbelievable but I'm so glad that we persevered. The heat left us with 300 melted favourite CDs, no working materials, a totally destroyed collection of over 20 years life drawings and other work, no studio doors, windows or electrics and the relief that the structure of the house was saved and none of us were hurt.
Most of the paintings for the impending 9-11 show at Red Propeller on the 5th November (no irony eh?!) were saved but I have lost virtually all the work on paper, 2 finished canvases and a couple of unfinished canvases.
I'll be spending the next few weeks working on replacing the pieces on paper as I hoped these would be more affordable for people than some of the canvases. It's also broadened the French vocabulary today. Déclaration de sinistre - insurance claim. Mètre fondu de l'électricité - melted electricity meter. Merci, merci, merci Nicolas - vous n'avez aucune idée comment reconnaissant nous tous sommes. I've probably buggered the grammar, but I hope you understand the sentiment.

en France

2007-10-10T18:33:00.002+02:00

We've finally made it to France... This has been a dream of mine and Colleen's for over a decade and it really is better than we thought it could be. We've been here a month now in a sixty year old house, in a small hamlet in the middle of the Monts d'Aree national park. The locals are friendlier and more open to a bald English artist and his wife than the English ever were - despite the tales to the contrary that we've been continually hearing over the years. We're down the bar every Friday which is doing wonders for my French (and occasional Breton) language skills and the only problems we've encountered have been overcome by smiling, apologising and just continuing to butcher their lovely language in conversation. I'm learning more French like this than I ever could from a text book or audio tapes.
The painting is going extremely well; I'm now working all day, everyday - doing exactly what I've dreamed of. The demands of the two solo shows that are coming up at the art-file and Red Propeller galleries have been enormous but they’re now more or less dealt with. The art-file work was sent off last week and was on sale today I think. I haven't finished all of the work for Red Propeller yet but most of it is well underway.
The ability to work this intensely on my painting has also strengthened it I think (mind you, I suppose others must be the judge of that really) and I've also been able to realise a project that's been on the back burner for a few years now - the Petite Morte paintings. Of those that were started and came over with me I've been able to work through the problems they posed and I've only had top discard a couple. More importantly to me were two paintings of the world trade centre started five years ago. These have always been a real challenge but I think I can finally say that they are now in a position to be left alone.
Offers of other exhibitions are coming in for 2008 which is a really alien concept for me! It means I can concentrate on producing work and I don’t have the old worry of simultaneously trying to get the enthusiasm and money together carting work around on the hope of getting a gallery to say they’ll give it a go. I hope it continues; we’ll see… As it stands I’m pretty well committed through next year; one of the shows promises to put my work on the same walls as Harry Simmonds. He’s one of the neomodern group artists and he emailed me to let me know that he was showing work in the same exhibition as me. A coincidence and surprise to both of us, but it will be nice to catch up with him again. Mind you, the last time I met him it cost me a packet in couple of pieces that I bought! Never mind – money well spent! And to top it all Radiohead have just released a new album. Life’s good.

Everything at once

2007-07-16T16:47:00.002+02:00

Things are moving, in all departments. I've finally left the hospital job; Colleen will be finishing this week, we've bought the place in France in a lovely hamlet close to a small town called Huelgoat and the Bristol joint is on the market. Once it's gone then we shall follow...
However, things have taken an unexpected turn art-wise. Every dealer and gallery that has a stock of my work have been watching it fly out their doors over the last couple of weeks. Because I've been dreaming of this kind of interest in my work over the last twenty years it now seems very strange and I've been trying to figure out where the sudden change occurred.
I was getting more mailing list requests from about the middle of June, then at the start of July Red Propeller gallery took away about two dozen pieces in preparation for an exhibition later this year.
The paintings were led against a wall and then the buying started. Apparently it has also been made clear that Antony Micallef recommended my work to Red Propeller... I have thanked him! I'll stop analysing it, after all it could all be just a flash in the pan and be done and dusted in a month. I wasn't expecting it (I'm not ungrateful) so perhaps it's just best to run with it while the going's good.
Mind you, I've had galleries, dealers and collectors from all over the world currently asking for a total of about 120 paintings by the end of 2008. I reckon they need to look at the web site and see just how many I generally get done in a year. They will either have to be a bit more patient or just go disappointed.

Watching you, watching us

2007-05-22T13:19:00.002+02:00

If ever I was unsure that the impending move to France was the right thing to do, the thought was dispatched to the mental dustbin last night. It is now (finally) a fairly well known fact that 20% of the world’s CCTV surveillance cameras are installed in the UK, that Croydon has more CCTV watching its residents than New York City and that following Middlesborough’s testing of ‘talking’ CCTV cameras the UK citizen will likely soon be watched and ordered in every city and town in the country.
But on the last night’s TV news it was announced that Merseyside police will soon be using radio-controlled drone surveillance vehicles. Actually this got out last October but the police spokesman said "The idea of the drone is a long way off, but it is about exploring all technological possibilities to support our war on crime and anti-social behaviour.”
Well he was right; it was a long way off - a whole seven months.
To be honest I don’t know why the government just doesn’t roll out their desired solution. Install subcutaneous RFID tags at birth and be done with it. The general population won’t care, as long as it doesn’t interfere with their bloody television reception.
I once wrote on a painting ‘When I was at school I used to laugh at the implausibility of Orwell’s 1984’. Now the degree to which we’re watched, whether guilty or innocent, has grown to ludicrous levels where even domestic monitoring seems only a small step away. It hasn’t reduced crime and to be honest I don’t think it was ever about reducing crime. It’s about political control of the population and I refuse to live under it.
Another scheme that has raised its very ugly head lately is the profiling of expectant mothers to identify those likely to give birth to children that may grow up to be socially ‘problematic’. So single mothers-to-be, or expectant parents living in areas of deprivation will receive prescribed social support measures to ensure that the children are raised in the manner that government agencies approve of. I don’t have a problem with state support for families that need it – what I object to is the identification of the wrong core problem as the issue that needs addressing. Rather than address poverty, social isolation or a lack of expectation of any personal aspiration, they are trying to target and identify ‘potential criminals’ before they act.
We’ve been here before, only recently, with the race riots that swept through urban Britain in the eighties. If you treat innocent people as potential criminals it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Thank god I’m off…

Gilbert and George online

2007-05-09T00:46:00.002+02:00

According to Alan Yentob in the Guardian today, those great current saviours of British art (now that the YBAs have lost their once urgent appeal) Gilbert and George are ploughing the latest technological furrow in democratising art. Apparently they have produced an art piece that is freely available for download online from the BBC web site. "This sort of thing has never been done before," said Yentob,”
Ermm – sorry to disappoint you old bean but it does have precedents. In fact, even I’ve done it before, and I wouldn’t like to lay claim to being ‘first’ (which as we know is all important in the art world). I wouldn’t expect Mr Yentob to have checked out my site print from three years ago but I would have thought it was an obviously dangerous, dodgy journalistic line to anybody with half an ounce of common sense and an awareness of the nature of both artists and the internet.
The Guardian are a little more circumspect, “It will be the first time that artists of this stature have made work available in this way.”
Get out a bit Alan… or at least kick your researcher up the arse.

the joy of paint

2007-05-06T15:07:00.002+02:00

It's been a while since I've been on here and it's been quite an interesting and busy 'while'. I've finally got married to the wonderful and beautiful Colleen who I've been living with for the last dozen or so years (basically in preparation for our plans to run away forever to France), I've spent two weeks in Brittany trying to figure out what sort of house we want to live in and trying to establish where we want that house to be and I've been painting my arse off getting work ready for the new year's art fair season.
I think we've settled on the Finistere region of Brittany as being the 'place to be' for all kinds of reasons. These include the fantastic church architecture, the beautiful wooded landscape, the lovely open towns and villages and nothing at all to do with wine at less than two euros a bottle. Honest. The final excuse came today where, in a small town (and I mean small), I went into an ordinary newsagent to try and pick up an English newspaper and was confronted with a magazine selection that offered me twelve arts magazine choices. There and then, without having to order specially or in advance; without having to go to an 'arts' venue that happened to sell arts magazines. I managed to leave with only two, which Colleen probably thought was quite a good result. Admittedly, if they'd been in English I would probably have taken the lot. One magazine in particular (AZART) had some incredibly strong work throughout - painting is still valued seriously outside of London. Thank god.
On the art front, things have also been quite chirpy this year, so far at least. Art-file of Bicester sold a fair bit of work at the London Affordable Art Fair and both they and Morgan Boyce Gallery of Marlborough are threatening to take my work to the Islington Art Fair next January. The Rostra Gallery in Bath have taken some of the new work for a joint show starting this May and I've also got to finish some more pieces for the Bristol Affordable Art Fair later this year.
Last week we were in Brighton and finally arranged successfully to meet up with Antony Micallef. We've been promising to meet up ever since the neomodern site has been running, but circumstance and distance have always prevented it to date. We had an entertaining evening in a Brighton hostelry talking art bollocks all night. Which is nice - if you like talking art bollocks... His career has really rocketed lately and we talked about the benefits and the lunacy associated with such a sharp step upwards in the art job stakes. People start digging up every old bit of work that you'd done your best to forget and plonk it up on ebay. The secondary market goes ballistic and though the artist doesn't benefit financially you have to put up with endless criticism of 'selling out'.
Banksy is the victim of the same problem. The work develops a market away from the established fine art gallery circuit, the secondary market puts prices beyond anybody but the investment collector and the sniping starts - with Banksy the most regular and vociferous attacks seem to come from the Guardian art blog pages. Now that the 'secret' is out he's no longer the darling of the media trendies.
Linking Micallef and Banksy is the Lazarides gallery in London. I saw the Faile Collective show there recently and was astounded at the quality of the work. It was another one of those clichéd art moments... Don't rely on a photograph to show the work at its best. I've seen a fair bit of the Faile Collective 'torn fly-poster' assemblage pieces online and in photographs from friends but they really don't do the real work justice. If you get the opportunity to see their painting make sure you take it. There was a real love for the medium they used as well as for the medium of the subject they were depicting. The compositional value of the paintings were in the tradition of the Modernist abstract aesthetic and not through any reference to a 'real' wall of torn fly-posters and old advertising hoardings. There was a very careful and measured use of colour, method and subject within each piece too. It restores your faith in painting as a vital medium that can still stand tall in the current heady heights of a conceptual and video art obsessed art planet.

Learning from Euan Uglow

2007-01-27T00:07:00.002+01:00

I learnt something today. In fact I learnt a lot... about painting. A friend works in the local Holburne Museum in Bath and she reminded me of an exhibition that I'd noted down to see but almost forgot. Well the show finished on Sunday so I popped down to have a look this afternoon. I can remember seeing Euan Uglow's work pop up regularly in the glossy art press ads of the nineties. I can't remember which gallery was pushing the work, but I can always remember thinking that his work was interesting. The paintings collected there, with only a couple of exceptions, were in my opinion excellent. I've never seen a collection of his work together so it was an interesting and new experience, and I damn happy that I managed to get my arse in gear to se them.
I can't paint like Uglow; I don't have the self discipline. I may start with all intention of staying calm, cold and analytical but it all goes out of the window. At some point I'll get a loaded brush and fling the paint at the canvas. Or I'll get the palette knife out and scratch and stab furiously at a painting that's annoying me through frustration. I couldn't see any of that in Uglow's work. Just a delightful, deliberate, measured care in every mark made. I got the feeling that these were paintings where every mark was considered, calculated and placed with absolute certain accuracy. It was beautiful; I was grinning like an idiot almost feeing the enjoyment and satisfaction that I'm sure he must have felt at the marks he made.
Though he's not often defined as such the man was a brilliant colourist. Not in the manner of Matisse with singular primaries or clashing complementaries, but in the careful use of pastels and hued greys. I knew, from the paintings I'd seen reproduced in those old adverts in Modern Painters, that there was no doubt of Uglow's credentials as a draughtsman. That was why I wanted to see this exhibition - like many others I consider drawing to be one of the fundamentals to great visual art and I knew his work would deliver on that front. But the show surprised me, and made me realise how much of a beginner I am in the field of painting. This man was a master painter; perhaps even the greatest painter this country has had in the last thirty years.
If the opportunity arises make sure you seek out any display of his work. Forget the subject of the painting - just ignore it. get up close and look how he used paint. Study the very careful layering, and the deliberate variety of qualities and textures of paint used. Look at the inscribing and the spaces left unpainted, the under-painting and drawing. Look at his use of colour - and I mean REALLY look at it - I've never seen anything like this before.
Like I said, I can't paint like Uglow. And if I could, it would be because I wanted to paint like Uglow - and that is not the right reason to attempt a 'serious' career in painting.

The death of ideology

2007-01-10T00:15:00.002+01:00

I’m coming to the end of a raft of paintings that will hopefully mark the end (for the immediate time at least) of the Icarus series. The reason behind the Icarus theme was tied to the UK and US illegal intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq; it seemed an appropriate allegorical reference for the hubristic aspirations of George Bush and Tony Blair in their deranged hopes to rewrite Middle East politics in the fashion of western sensibilities. These last paintings have been a long time finishing and a lot have been discarded or painted over on the journey but now they seem to be approaching their natural end.
As I’m writing this the news stations are declaring that tomorrow Bush will probably announce an increase of perhaps twenty thousand extra troops to perform, on his behalf, some bizarre final curtain call prior to an eventual withdrawal. The American Democrats are calling for the withdrawal, as are the American electorate – but this warmonger’s arrogance will probably not allow him to accept the ‘will of the people’. Like Tony Blair he is obsessed with his historical legacy. Well it doesn’t take a huge capacity for depth of political and historical analysis to know that their legacy will eventually (because God knows there are enough media apologists for this fiasco and blood-bath) be that they took two nations into an illegal war with the expectation of installing a government that would support western economic oil greed.
As well as this I’ve read today in the New Statesman that the UK and US military are putting money into constructing ‘ecologically sound’ weaponry. Bullets without lead - because it’s potentially bad for the water table when the rounds settle in the dirt after they’ve blown off the limb of the soldier they’ve killed, and rockets that launch with less smoke - to reduce any contribution to air pollution after they’ve blown the crap out of an innocent family's home (acceptable collateral losses).
It’s not even April 1st, the world’s fucked up and we’re all probably going to hell in the proverbial hand cart. And people have the nerve to accuse artists of talking irrelevant nonsense.
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. Tony Blair stated that God would be his judge – well if that’s what you honestly believe and you honestly have faith, then be careful what you wish for you mad bastard.

ten years later

2006-12-30T02:09:00.002+01:00

It's that time of year again - the time when we feel the need to suddenly find empathy with our fellow planet travellers when usually we do our best to ignore them. My credit card has been cancelled by my bank because some local fraudster has got hold of the details and has been busy booking foreign air trips and North African hotel stays without actually feeling the need to invite me, the bastard. So we've stocked up on red wine and the time away from the nine to five mental grind at the hospital has been spent (between the obligatory family visits) painting. And I think I can say that at last I feel I'm finally getting somewhere. This may prove to be the famous last words before the creative juices go the way of the desiccated turkey left-overs, and this entry might be the excessive results of too many paintings sent on their way with one or two, or three... bottles of Merlot.
I gave up painting abstracts in 1996 because the joy had gone out of the painting of them; I was almost painting to order. I had always wanted to paint people, it seemed the natural extension from drawing them - which had never been a problem - but I wanted to paint them in a certain way. I think now I am getting towards that initial idea of how I wanted my work to start looking, after ten years. Bloody hell - that's some wait. I'll see what happens...

turner prize 2006

2006-12-05T23:59:00.002+01:00

And this year's winner... Tomma Abts.
Well, I've seen work like Abts' paintings before. I'm not talking about the vast history of twentieth century geometric abstraction that it has obviously been influenced by, but the other work that has also taken the same reference point.
Her work is reminiscent of a great deal of 'abstract' work produced by what used to be patronisingly known as 'Sunday painters'. The carefully constructed, passionless, geometric gouaches, stuffed into a cheap DIY superstore frame and usually shown at small community fetes with the hope of garnering the owner a small rosette or certificate. Next in line to the prize vegetables and home made pickles.
However, this Turner prize winning work came from a youngster, schooled in the art of art's language, so it's 'knowing' and therefore the real deal - not like the work of a pensioner looking to community art lessons to fill their free time. Art lessons where they're exposed to the transitory shallowness of the current art world teachings that gets them to offload their accumulated experience and instead turn to abstraction for authentic expression. Why? Because it allows them to visually compete on a level playing field where translating degrees of verisimilitude is feared.
Feared because of its very undemocratic capacity to set a league table in a class of what that generation generally (though not always) calls artistic ability.
And I know it happens - I've seen it happen. I've worked with art departments that work that way as a fundamental way of maintaining a parity of perceived ability.
But Abts' work is different, because it has the authority of the critical gallery c.v. behind it. And now it has the name of the Turner behind it. And still critics stand up to fawn over work that they would deride in any other venue bar the accepted clique.

statement 2

2006-12-03T02:34:00.002+01:00

Though I am fascinated with many aspects of art history and practice, I try to restrict as best I can my enquiries into the portrait as a subject, other art forms as a referential subject in these portraits, the journey to understand and explore the physical media I use and the social relevance of art to a contemporary audience. When I start new work, though I initially plan to follow a course that I hope will progress a straight path, I may be diverted down avenues that were unplanned; this is the nature of painting, whether the audience and galleries like it or not.
Because I rarely paint sequentially, one work at a time (I have even occasionally returned to a painting after a five year hiatus), they feed off of each other stylistically and technically. If I found a manner of painting that I was happy to progress until the end of my career after only twenty years of experimenting, I would consider my work short of effort and application. To me painting is not a means to bread and wine. It is an exploration of my means to express myself in a manner I consider honest and meaningful. My work’s first audience is myself; any audience after that is secondary. To some it might seem selfish, pompous, undemocratic and self righteous, but I consider it a strength. My work finds new methods that occasionally even surprise me. The huge varieties of finish and appearance that oil paint can take on, dependent on the vaguaries of the oils and pigments within the paint, the coarseness of the canvas, the softness of the brush or the atmosphere and temperature of the studio cannot be learnt by book. You have to get up close and study the surfaces of the work of other painters and attempt to interpret their alchemical processes. You have to attempt to establish what was fortunate accident and what was a moment of inspired intention. And most importantly, you have to know and understand the difference.
I did not go to art college, and so missed the opportunity to study painting for three years with the aspiration to a gallery career afterwards. Instead I left school, went to work, started a family and painted at home with far more commitment than most of my college friends. This is not an accusation of them or a defence of myself. They were obviously not as obsessively driven in progressing a personal understanding of painting. I am in my forties now and I am still studying. I am still looking for that mysterious formula that will allow me to leave the study of the medium so that I can apply it reliably and safely to any subject I choose to tackle.
I have mad aspirations to be the master of my medium. I delude myself that perhaps one day I will be able to conceive a painting in my imagination that I can transfer into the real world with sure and reliable accuracy through a process of mark making and medium manipulation that does not rely on any aspect of chance.
So I must learn what the materials do in as many circumstances and combinations as possible.
To this end I sketch, draw from life and work from photographic reference because it hones the ability to be sure that I am putting the mark in the right place on the finished work. If I am satisfied with my ability to coordinate hand and eye then I have one thing less to concern myself with. I have the satisfaction that if I distort the apparent ‘reality’ of my subject then I am doing it with purpose and not by accident.
But the medium is wholly different and unpredictable animal. I have woken in the morning to work that has changed overnight as the turpentine, linseed oils and pigments have continued their own avenues of experimentation in my absence.
Certainly I could avoid these occurrences by slavishly maintaining a fixed palette of very stable pigments, always using the same grades of oil and thinners, maintaining a consistent humidity and temperature in the studio and following safely worn tracks of drawing, priming, painting and varnishing process. But where would the opportunity of the fortunate accident be? It would be in another painter’s studio, and I want that magic for myself. I will not be left painting the same painting over and over until it is ‘right’.
So this is why my work sometimes revisits previous ideas and techniques, and why its technique sometimes radically changes from one finished piece to the next.
The one constant that I continually struggle with is to define the subject being painted without losing the wonderful physicality of its medium. To show the viewer that it is, after all, only paint on canvas - and that sometimes it can even be huge swathes of plain, gaudy, unmixed paint – paint that is knifed on so forcibly that the canvas rips and has to be stitched together. The audience need to see that it is just carefully arranged, artificially manufactured synthetic dirt on a portable cave wall.
Sometimes the mark I want can only be made by throwing the paint onto the canvas or squeezing it directly from the tube; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
When these applications of technique work, the sense of satisfaction is almost tangible. I assume it must be a similar feeling that an athlete gets from a good result in a race. Once I actually felt like a winner of the race when I finished one piece of work, but that has only ever happened with one painting that I can think of, ten years ago…
When I’m not satisfied with the results, particularly after working for weeks or months on a painting, the sense of failure is just as significant and equally affecting. If this seems melodramatic or extreme, then just return again to the sporting allusion. How is failure in sport taken by not only the practitioners, but the supporters too?
Imagine painting over a failed attempt or scraping the wet paint from the canvas that has been worked over so carefully and solitarily.
Now imagine having the obsessive drive to return the next day and face another canvas that you might ruin. Or worse still, a blank canvas. After a recently failed painting, a new blank canvas is like a school-yard bully - goading you to recognise the inevitability of your next quixotic failure and forcing you to acknowledge inadequacy in the arena you’ve chosen to compete.

bad painting

2006-11-20T01:08:00.002+01:00

The last few days have been quite interesting. Colleen has not been well - so I've had problems sleeping through worry. Three and four hour sessions of sleep a day, over a period of weeks, does interesting things to your head. I've found myself lately just mentally shutting down mid conversation with people, which I presume is why we're not built for that kind of lifestyle. Or perhaps we are and that's why the great one in the heavens also created coffee and nicotine. Fantastic - what a bloke/woman/tree/flying spaghetti monster... whatever.
Anyway, I've been incredibly productive the last month or so - probably because of the bizarre sleep patterns. A large raft of canvases that have been lying around unfinished for ages, as well as those that were coming to their natural end through process, and some new pieces have all been completed. I honestly don't know where these drives come from; if I did I'd ask them to pace theirselves thankyou very much.
Well today I've been forced into a break. I'm out of canvas that has paint dry enough to continue on top of so I thought I'd take up the invitation from Motorboy to check out a show in Centrespace, Bristol that he's got some work in. I couldn't really say no could I?
It was a chance to catch up with Motorboy before he moves to Berlin. It was a chance to see the first show of his work put together in an environment that it could be appreciated properly. It was a chance to get out and away from the frustration of smelling turpentine but not being able to do anything constructive with it.
It was a good afternoon, so good that I think Colleen and I put our names down for a piece by Cyclops, one by Ghostboy and two by Motorboy. So everyone that wants presents from us this Christmas will just have to do without...
We had a brief bite to eat and said goodbye, and considering that we were only a few minutes away popped into the Arnolfini to see what was nailed to the walls in
Bristol's alleged high temple of contemporary cultural edification. You can already tell where this is going can't you...
I'll be fair - the Albert Oehlen show 'I Will Always Champion Bad Painting' wasn't the blood pressure raiser that I thought it would be. There was one painting in there that stood out over the rest, but it was away in the smaller room of the gallery, so I suspect that perhaps I was reading more formalist strength into the piece than the creator or curator, but then perhaps its positioning was a deliberate irony. Or not.
Perhaps it was all deliberate, perhaps it was all accidental. Perhaps it was good art because it seemed in general to be championing bad painting - and that was its stated aim. Perhaps it was just bad art because it was bad painting. Perhaps it wasn't bad painting, but just painting that didn't match my taste (or the taste of many other punters in there by the sound of things).
You know - most of them don't understand what they're looking at, despite desperately wanting to. It's like an uncommitted agnostic checking church every week, desperately seeking out a security blanket of faith.
This was a Sunday afternoon...

Stuck

2006-10-11T03:53:00.002+02:00

Stuckism was, and still is, far more than just an anti-conceptualist standpoint taken by a few artists, apparently ‘stuck’ using an ‘antiquated‘ medium in a pseudo-naïve style. The timing of the rise of Stuckism coincided with the popular rise of the ultimately democratic medium of self-publicity, the internet, and consequently many people painting in this style from all over the world assign the name of ‘Stuckism’ to their work and broadcast it to the world without really understanding the reasons behind its foundation. Because of the apparent initial similarities of the very individual paint techniques practiced by those initially working under the banner of Stuckism, and no doubt also due to the fact that the group assigned themselves an ‘ism’ to work together under, the popular media and the general public interpreted the name in a similar manner to the countless other well known ‘ism’ art movements. The idea of Stuckism as a technique stuck.
What is key to the whole understanding of Stuckism is not the aesthetic sensibility of the work of the movement’s practitioners or even the manner in which it came to prominence, but the point in time that it came to prominence. Though I’d be loathe to put the responsibility for anything as culturally wide scale as an art ‘movement’ or even ‘anti-movement’ on the shoulders of one individual I’ll maintain the Billy versus Tracey story as a convenience that people can relate too. Billy Childish and the originating Stuckists did not respond to the YBAs in an oppositional sense, and then start to paint in the way they did. The reasons that the Stuckist artists paint the way they do are the same reasons that many others, myself included, continued to paint through the nineties when the art education establishment was pushing the art party line that conceptualism was king. To use a now clichéd word, this return to figuration and paint was nothing more than an end of the century “zeitgeist”.
It was the obvious route to take if someone who wished to be perceived of as an artist, wanted to achieve that goal in the old-fashioned and empirical manner of comparative achievement of applied and accumulated efforts. What does that mean? Work basically. That is, the continual practice of technique, the continual exercise of self editorial control and the continual development of patience in the face of producing work you may not be happy with. And of course, the decidedly undemocratic, un-postmodern belief that there may be such unfashionable, un-pc things as recognition of the western male dominated art history, the belief in the existence of innate talent and ability or, at the very least, the Romantic idealistic sensibility of the artist.
Before I get lynched please note that I only stated that the western male dominated art history should be recognized. I have never suggested that it should be the only history. Modernism and the movements that led to it are not without fault, but also, and importantly, that does not mean that they are not without some merit.
There are other ‘isms’ associated with Stuckism and on a personal basis at least, the reasons that I am happy to be associated with the Stuckist term is through one that I have attempted, in a small way, to champion – Neomodernism. I have been previously subject to attempted baiting by some critical halfwit asking which came first, Remodernism, Defastenism, Stuckism or Neomodernism…needless to say I told them where to stick the question. I’m not in the ring to claim this or that ‘ism’ was first or second.
If these idiots posing as experts extended their analysis beyond the insightful puddle-like depths of tabloid journalism they would realize that this variety of cultural responses is the obvious outcome of any number of geographically diverse artists, bloody minded enough to shoot career aspirations through the foot; driven through frustration to the point where they will willingly bite the hand that most might prefer fed them. Once again – it is nothing more than the spirit of the times of those that hold a belief in the value of independent thought. It is artists refusing to accept that the commonly accepted notions of what constitutes art (figurative painting and sculpture) are dead.
Like Stuckism, Neomodernism is not a return to something that came before stylistically. It is an attempt to progress art from its current moribund obsession with pseudo-intellectual analyses – but with reference to all art history. It is a celebration of creative spirit over academic, politically correct desiccation. It is a renaissance of that old art battle ground where the Romantics take on the Classicists.
Anybody involved with the art world will be aware of the term Modernism when taken in the Greenbergian sense. Like any other history it was extremely selective and exclusive and because of this, not despite it, as it was usually taken in the last thirty years, it opened up the cultural debate to other important avenues that were equally dogmatic in the hands of their academic champions. Feminist art, black art, queer art; the list goes on…
In my opinion (a phrase you rarely hear from the defenders and maintainers of the current hegemony) the work I consider most likely to stand the test of the time is that which is grounded in applied effort, application of craft and workmanship and celebration of the values of art established generally, though not exclusively, over the last six centuries. An art that a public audience can engage with, without being told pre-emptively what to think about it or how to correctly interpret it.
I am sure that the current artistic vanguard will be seen in the future art histories as a ‘blip’ – perhaps (if today’s cultural history makers are lucky) even an interesting blip. With the applied perspective of the distance of time and when viewed by a general public not subject to the current critical bullying; when the current raft of people who call themselves artists are viewed in the context of artists before and after, I am sure that those currently outside of the chosen establishment circle will be vindicated in their rejection of current supposed valid contemporary practice.
I also maintain another difference of critical definition that some refuse to accept. And even though it may only be a matter of semantics I think it is a characterization that adds lucidity to understanding not only the current art world politics, but those that preceded it. That is the difference between the vanguard and the avant-garde. The vanguard is the established order; the avant-garde is the challenging unorthodoxy. The current British conceptual and installation art driven establishment cannot by definition be the avant-garde. It is in fact the old Classical orthodoxy itself, pompously declaring intellectual superiority and authority over any art that cannot be assimilated.
The return to an aesthetic and medium that the public recognize will be championed by the new Romantics, the Stuckist avant-garde. Whether the current art establishment likes it or not.
Art history is littered with episodes of challenge to the established cultural order and of course, that is the way it should be. The only way an artist can justify their practice as being relevant to its audience is to push forward down different roads to those currently in the mainstream, engaging the viewing public with fresh interpretations of the one constant subject of art. Not art itself (one of the current curatorial clichés) but humanity, even if that means re-investigating previously utilized media, subject matter or critical sensibilities.
There is little difference between the last great culturally fascistic order (the nineteenth century European art academies) and that which now holds sway. Allegedly they differ because the work that challenged the old academy is the foundation of what stands now – as if all that preceded is absolutely irrelevant. A very selective and convenient history.
The reason that Modernism took hold critically as well as in the mind of the public was twofold. Firstly the new work bore direct relevance for a western world audience that was in the grip of rapid industrialization, urbanisation and mechanized warfare. But, secondly, I would suggest that what was more significant to the old European academic fall from grace was its relative cultural parochialism outside of the western nation’s capitals. Today’s cultural empire, despite protestations of being inclusive, is just as exclusive. There might be the occasional loudly celebrated trumpeting of ‘new’ aesthetic sensibilities (Australian aboriginal art and the current commercial obsession with contemporary Chinese work are prime examples), but these are rarely inclusive beyond their being the latest fashionable item for the wealthy art cognoscenti to accommodate in their collections. They are, shamefully, the cultural equivalent to the whinging middle class liberal of old loudly proclaiming ‘Look at me, some of my best friends are black’.
When it comes to the larger, global art arena we are still in thrall to a few private and public collections, despite the huge wealth of variety around the world. The A list supports a few favoured biennales, world shows and of course a few select ‘competitions’, of which the Turner is perhaps the best known here, demonstrating that nothing has changed relatively in terms of real inclusivity.
Perhaps the most significant difference between the time of the Impressionists and the time of the Stuckists is the current insidiously pervasive nature of global media. Today this is a lazy media that no longer even bothers to seek out its source material. Why should it waste its time, money and effort if its agents, the arts journalists, need only to stay in the office to be spoon-fed by galleries and promoters of whoever or whatever will be the next big thing. Why should they challenge a critical discourse that even they, masters of language and the written word, cannot fully fathom. Are the general public going to challenge the accepted wisdom if even the art media doesn’t?
Is Modernism dead? Yes – of course it is. High Modernism, Greenbergian Modernism, Formalism whatever you want to call it, is dead. It moved from the radical American painterly investigations of medium (and occasionally spirituality) in the 1950s into the bargain print section of B&Q and IKEA. But similarly the intellectual and nihilistic posturing of Duchamp is equally dead and irrelevant. It was an interesting philosophical exercise, tied to the uncertainties and horrors of its time, a time that is nearly a century past. Like the musically opposed excesses of prog-rock and punk, we have had our artistic extremes of excessive introspection and even more excessive anti-art nihilism. Now it is time to move on, looking to the past art histories with respect, and working their lessons into future work without falling victim to the current incessant obsession with novelty.
I am not opposed to conceptual art. I have seen installations that have moved me to real joy – but this is a distinct rarity. What I am opposed to is the current glut of deliberately obscure work disguising a paucity of talent - which is usually the case with what is today considered 'conceptual art'. I would argue that all art should be 'conceptual'. The arguments usually used against figurative painting work both ways. If a painter, disassociated from the work, produces nothing more than illustration or decoration then an installation or assemblage, if produced with equal lack of integrity, is probably no more than land-fill with a wall label.
My ego and id is inextricably bound up in every piece of finished work I produce; my work is both conceptual and primal. This is not a stance I have formulated. This is the position of most painters that I know. On a personal level painting is the medium of self-discovery. I don’t want my practice to interminably ‘investigate art itself’. I want an art that is honest, personal and capable of communicating to the viewer. Art that investigates art is no longer art that can engage interest, except to students of art critical theory or art history. Who in their right mind would want to produce work for such a small audience? Unless of course they are only doing it to achieve immediate critical success amongst those who they know hold the key to their being recognised as serious contenders for entry into the pantheon of art history.
I am fed up reading reviews of exhibitions that simultaneously say the same and yet say nothing. Reviews that celebrate the conceptual significance of a twenty-something year old’s installation. Recently graduated art students are not philosophers. They do not have the intellectual discipline. Believe me - I have spent time talking with published practitioners of philosophy whose capacity for thorough and organised analysis astounds, impresses and occasionally frightens me. I’ve talked to recent Fine Art graduates too – graduates that inevitably know the market more thoroughly than the history; this has had the occasion to frighten me, but certainly not astound or impress.
Painting pictures is important. People outside of the art world understand it without great tracts of explanation. That is its problem for the art critical industry – figurative painting and sculpture undermines their supposed intellectual authority and allows the public audience to engage without their mediation. It is this that Stuckism is about - the celebration of a truly democratic and inclusive art. Consequently this also means acting occasionally as a more confrontational campaigning body. Along with the Stuckists I too maintain that the critical and curatorial fraternities can shove the Turner Prize and its like up their arses. It's no different than the other national gongs like knighthoods and MBEs. We don't need the spurious stamp of acceptance gained by the judgements of a few individuals with vested interests acting in the egomaniacal notion that they can arbitrate the taste of nation. When a student contacts me out of interest in my working methods, or an individual on low wages is willing to pay for a painting in monthly instalments over a period of years, or praise for my work comes from another painter – that is when I feel justified in my choice of working direction.
The most important aspect of the Stuckist manifesto is the one that's usually ignored – that Stuckism is an international non-movement. This is why it can be associated with Defastenism, Remodernism and Neomodernism. The Stuckist manifestos were good in bringing to the fore a challenge that was noticed and comprehensible to the public. They can be read, understood and be found refreshing and honest.
Unfortunately the manifesto is a point of reference for journalists, critics and historians to be able to accredit the 'movement' without having to apply any level of effort in personal analysis, but the manifesto in relation to the wider movement is unimportant. The important aspect is that there is a genuine avant-garde (who just happen to champion craft, application of effort and art that communicates outside of the arena of established fine art criticism) who are willing to challenge a vanguard that hang onto the coat tails of an art theory that is nearly a century old.
On a personal note, when first becoming aware of the Stuckists, certain aspects of their manifesto made me realise that I wasn’t the only person feeling the same way. I'm not a Stuckist painter. I’m not a Neomodernist painter. I'm just a painter. Their manifesto was penned in October 1998 - the Stuckists were painters before they were called Stuckists.
So you see - Stuckism is so much more than a style, medium or technique. Stuckism is a vital challenge to an arrogant art elite, based like the old academies, on financial interests. Stuckism, like Neomodernism or Defastenism or a hundred other ‘isms’ is only a convenience for people’s comprehension of aspects of the cultural world that they really don’t have the time to examine themselves – oh and lazy journalists.

Stars

2006-09-20T23:21:00.002+02:00

You know when bad things seem to conspire to bring misery upon your life like a western government spreading peace and democracy upon the Middle East? Well lately a lot of shite seems to have come my way, but with the help of a loving family and gloriously fine artist friends, the cloud actually DOES seem to have a silver lining. There have been various trade union related crises at the hospital, and more than a Texan restaurant’s serving of hassle has been served up on my plate. This has been a major factor in me not producing any work lately and on top of this I’ve received a ludicrous demand from the Inland Revenue that should be considered a worthy Booker Prize nominee (best work of fiction, retrospective 2004). So it’s safe to say that generally I’ve felt pretty shitty lately.
I took some time out to visit the Rebels and Martyrs show at the National with my sixteen year old son Luke (who also has a healthy interest in art and a natural talent to music). It was probably the most enjoyable day I’ve ever spent with him and I suppose it would be an equivalent to a footballing father and son going to see a big game. The show was wonderful and it has forced me to look more carefully at the work of Gustave Courbet who has definitely become my latest ‘cause celebre’. There was a self-portrait that if executed today could be considered self-indulgently staged. All wide-eyed and tormented hands grasping the head as he stares at the viewer. Pure artifice (which after all is exactly what art should be) but beautifully painted; unfortunately it resides in a private collection and I can’t find it online so if you didn’t catch it this time I don’t hold out much hope in the future. Expect future blog posts celebrating this painter…
After this we ambled around Cork Street galleries for an hour or so and then Luke took me to Camden market. With a bit of food and a couple of drinks to finish the day it turned out to be something we both agreed should be repeated. Back to home and Colleen and I have decided that we really should pull our fingers out and finally get married (she’s had me on approval now for twelve years). And now that my parents have declared they want to move to France as well, it seems that this dream too is about to become a reality inside perhaps a year. All being well we’ll set up some kind of artist/writer retreat (sounds great doesn’t it? I think it’s basically a posh B&B!) where perhaps I might do some private tuition too.
I received an unexpected call from Juno Doran who was passing Bristol on her way to a weekend away in Devon and she wanted to pop in to say hello, which she did. Her husband Paul came too, they treated us to a fantastic meal which they made here, we stayed up until stupid o’clock drinking good wine, talking art, religion and philosophy bollocks and introducing each other to our personal musical tastes. What a way to live eh?
Others have said it frequently, but for some reason (perhaps it was the way it was justified philosophically) Juno made it hit home. I realised that I should be painting full-time. I shouldn’t be staring at a bloody computer screen all day building NHS websites and then spending evenings and weekends fitting in my painting. I should be staring at canvas and breathing in the smell of turpentine 24/7. I’m forty one this year, how long have we got on this bloody planet? I need to sort my life out and start doing what I was put here for. Cheers Juno, cheers Colleen, cheers Luke, Mum and Dad - you’re all stars.

Six degrees of separation

2006-09-06T15:21:00.002+02:00

I've just received a couple of interesting emails. One that you'll have to take on trust as being genuine, bearing out the old adage that you're only six people away from anybody else in the world. A friend of a friend knows an extremely famous artist in this country who is quite happy to admit (when drunk and to friends at least) that there is no real great degree of effort involved in being successful in the current contemporary British art scene. Apparently opportunities come their way like 'flies to a turd' (not my words). This person can amble around at a leisurely pace, pursuing whatever interests they wish to progress, and ‘exploring’ new media without fear of lack of financial support as their name alone assures a positive response to funding applications made on their behalf. It wasn't this that really wound me up. Nope. What did it for me was the admission that if they needed money, all they had to do was 'scribble some crap' on a piece of paper as there were currently no shortage of potential buyers willing to invest in the brand.
On the following day I get an email from a 22 year old from Minneapolis who's greatly enamoured with my work (it was nice in an email but the praise would have embarrassed me if I met them in public). As well as letting me know that it's as ridiculously expensive to study in America as it is in this country, and that the same financial supported and driven student art cliques exist there as well as here he included this little throw away...
"There are so many people here obsessed with the idea of being an artist that they never learn to be a painter first. So they have art parties and play in art bands and live in art spaces. But they don't actually do anything."
This little observation reminded me of an incident years ago when I was ambling round London on a week day (for a job interview). Purely by accident I strolled down a side street off of a main road and went past a building entrance stuffed with beautifully, languidly draped, smoke enrobed fashion victims. I can't remember the precise uniform details of the requisite sartorial fascism at that time - but rest assured they were all sporting it. They were too busy sprawling beautifully over the pavement to trouble themselves with getting out of the way of the irksome pedestrians so I informed them that they were all, to an individual, a consummate band of masturbators (or some such observation).
As they had now gained my undeserving attention I also took note of which establishment's maw had vomited them onto the thoroughfare. It was one of the Central St Martins' college buildings. No doubt (as this was at least six years ago) there are some present day gallery superstars who share the memory.

Bargain...

2006-08-30T21:14:00.002+02:00

Once again I've received an unsolicited email offer of an exhibition in Canada. The gallery have viewed my work online and considered it worthy of me being allowed to pay the $2500 administration fee. Needless to say I have to fund the shipping as well. A positive bargain that's all I can say. If I could be arsed I would write back to them to ask if they would charge Damien Hirst a $2500 administration fee, but I can't - I must be getting soft.
I've had plenty of these unsolicited offers before as have, no doubt, plenty of other relatively unknown artists. You would have thought that these were the kind of opportunities that British arts funding bodies might support, but apparently they don't fund unknown artists to take work to commercial overseas galleries. They're too busy throwing money at those that really need their support. A few selected London private galleries and the usual creative suspects: Hirst, Emin, Gormley et al...

catching up on the news

2006-08-07T22:16:00.002+02:00

Found this in yesterday's Observer. The ICA's Director of Exhibitions "Jens Hoffmann notes: ... a lot of people spend more time reading labels than actually looking at the works of art"
I'm not saying anything d'you hear me? Absolutely nothing.
Rachel Cooke, reviewer of the current ICA treat 'Surprise Surprise' seems underwhelmed. I'll be taking her advice then and ignoring the ICA show and instead check out the National's 'Rebels and Martyrs' exhibition. I don't need to travel 120 miles for prescribed public education in contemporary junk assemblage. If I'm going to learn something I'll look at some nineteenth century painting techniques thankyou very much; that's actually useful to me. I suspect the punters there that aren't painters might be enjoying the paintings too. Deluded fools - obviously they have absolutely no idea at all what's good for them.

France - we're coming...

2006-08-06T10:57:00.002+02:00

Well I’ve just returned from France via Marseille and one of the most obvious art-related sights there has to be Mont Sainte-Victoire. I can understand why Cezanne was so impressed by the subject that he painted it more than sixty times – however, despite his obsession with the subject (and Cezanne was a good one for obsessions) I don’t think I’ve seen many of his paintings that have caught the scale of the mountain. One notable exception is Montagne Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves, completed between 1902–1904, currently in the Philadelphia Museum of Art; most of these paintings though seem to be more about paint technique referring to spatial volume on the canvas than spatial volume in reality. I’m not saying I could do any better mind.
Also, another cliché of art talk came to mind when driving around Aix en Provence and Arles. The famous ‘light is different’ phrase, though usually applied to Saint Ives in Cornwall, seemed appropriate when bearing in mind Van Gogh’s canvases. Admittedly the sun was blazing the entire time of our visit but you can’t help ‘seeing’ his paintings wherever you go. His colours weren’t artificial at all – the place actually is that bright. There were strange clouds too, no doubt due to a combination of the geography and climate of the place, that though not as twisted and tortuous as he painted them could obviously have provided the inspiration.
So – back in the west country and inspired to paint (I obviously needed some kind of mental creative invigoration). I know I haven’t painted the butcher thing yet, or a hundred other proposed new subjects come to that, but I’m winding up for another larger Icarus, perhaps something Minotaur inspired (I came back with a lovely little casting of a bull that I bought from a roadside wine and fruit seller) and probably a return to the Young Spartans theme.
I know it’s only going to be a matter of time – but we will move to France. The cultural climate there IS different; despite my persistent attempts to tell myself I’m living in some kind of mad idealised world of how I want France to be it actually is how I perceive it. The people are friendly (and gloriously ideal subjects for painting), the food is varied, good value and healthy. Smokers aren’t yet subject to potential summary execution and there’s always the wine and coffee. Ahh – the wine and coffee…
Apparently Aix en Provence is twinned with Bath. I know where I’d rather be.

Questions I get asked...

2006-07-03T22:51:00.002+02:00

...range from the 'simple that almost answer themselves' to the ' don't ask me that because you'll die of starvation before I get half way through.'Another painter has noticed that I'm doing smaller work and they've wondered why - considering that "small paintings [are] actually more difficult/problematic technically". Simplistically, that is the reason I'm doing smaller work! Working on a large scale has its own peculiar problems, not least of which is the ludicrously obvious problem of working out how you’re going to fill the space. The key to this, in my opinion at any rate, is to specifically avoid ‘filler’.

Everything that is in any painting ‘needs’ to be there but with the luxury of a large canvas you get the opportunity to reduce – most viewers of a large painting stand back so that they can fit it into their field of vision in one comfortable viewing (if you’re in a gallery trying to appreciate a twelve foot wide painting and your view is interrupted by some goon virtually rubbing their nose on the surface of the canvas then that’s probably another painter studying technique). With a large painting you have the luxury of flinging the paint about, perhaps benefiting from the occasional ‘happy accident’. What I’m attempting, by working on a smaller scale, is to avoid this ‘happy accident’ situation. I’m trying to maintain absolute control over my work; that’s why I’m working on a smaller scale.

As to the other question of late “What exactly is the purpose of art?” I suppose it’s my fault for my last blog entry – but in my opinion art is about communication. And communication, to be successful, either requires a singular clarity of the language used (which is always going to be problematic with visual art), or a singular clarity of the end message. It doesn’t matter whether the message is social, spiritual, philosophical or aesthetic – but for the message to be given any weight it has to be well or, at the least, honestly informed. I have read on philosophy and theology but I would never consider myself informed sufficiently to proselytise through my painting. I do however, know my medium, and I also read widely on current affairs and political history; consequently most of my painting tend simultaneously to these directions. That is the purpose of art for me.
What annoys me with the British art world today, is the current glut of twenty-something cod-philosopher art graduates producing work that they think is in the grand Romantic tradition (even though, sadly, most of them wouldn’t know what that tradition was).

Oh - I haven't been doing much painting of late as my time has been taken up fully with trade union duties. The hospital I work at has announced a potential redundancy total of 330.

Hell - Now I'm writing to MPs

2006-06-16T21:50:00.002+02:00

FOR THE ATTENTION OF:

Dan Norris MP
Wansdyke

Friday 16 June 2006

Dear Dan Norris,
You may be aware of the case of the artist Michael Dickinson who is facing prosecution in Turkey for allegedly 'insulting the dignity of the Prime Minister' Tayyip Erdogan through the medium of his art. He is threatened with a maximum prison term of three years for what is nothing more than political criticism in a pictorial collage. Turkey, as you are well aware, is applying for membership of the European Union and behaviour of this sort is totally in violation of the democratic nature of this organisation. Can you assure me that you will address this issue seriously and condemn this gross violation of human rights and freedom of artistic expression.

Yours sincerely,
Guy Denning
painter

Is art “fit for purpose?”…

2006-06-16T10:52:00.002+02:00

Art is in the display of the object and not the creation of the object. Whether we like it or not the gallery or museum are intrinsic to the value (financial or critical) of the art object. The artist seeks the exhibition and the attention. They may not seek the associated celebrity status, they may not seek the extremes of financial reward that can be generated through engineered publicity but they do seek the exhibition of their work.
If these arenas are important, then they are important for a reason, and the only common reason I can think of is that it puts the notion of the creator of the work, as an artist, in the public domain. Put plain and simply - recognition and/or communication with a public audience is what is sought when an artist works. Would an individual want to be recognized as an artist without consideration taken of the value of the work? Or again, put plainly, do they just want celebrity status for having work on display? Probably not, or at least that's what most would claim. Most artists want their work to be evaluated by an audience and found to be worthy of entering the common memory (for whatever period of time) so art plainly has to engage with the audience at some point in the exhibitive process.
I call this art/viewer engagement 'communication'. It does not necessarily have to be the didactism of BANKSY. The work of the American Abstract Expressionists equally communicated with the viewer but in a visual manner through the aesthetic level of non-figuration, Damien Hirst's 'The impossibility of death in the mind of someone living' communicates in the sense of spectacle when the viewer is first confronted with the monumentality of the installation; the 'Pieta' of Michelangelo communicates in a multitude of ways to differing viewers (religious inspiration, the artist's love of his work and his capability to transform his medium).
What seems to be lacking today is an awareness of the art object to be able to stand on its own merits without mediation through a critical interpreter. A viewer can appreciate a Caravaggio without having to read the accompanying wall note, in fact without even knowing that it's a Caravaggio. With almost all the work created today in this country, that passes for 'significant' and worthy of entering public collection the same cannot be said. Most honest viewers wonder what they are looking at, they wonder what their appropriate response should be, they take note of the approved reading of the art object and they accept it as the wisdom of the elders.
Don't accept what you're told as a viewer (educated in the history of Fine Art or otherwise), take the work at face value and see if YOU the viewer can engage on a personal level with the work. If you do like the work for any reason then take one of two courses of action. Either walk away, happy in the knowledge that the artwork has added in some way to your life experience or go and read the wall note and see if your interpretation was the appropriate response.
If not - don't assume that you, the viewer, were wrong. There's a problem with the visual language being used and the artist is at fault. If the art work is meant to be communicating you would have thought the onus would be on the artist to use a language that the audience might understand.
Art works made for the benefit of an art critic audience is not honest work if it's shown in a public arena. It's grandstanding for career accolades and probably little more.

envy's a horrible thing

2006-05-06T07:25:00.002+02:00

I think I've made it clear previously that I have to work full-time in the NHS to support my being able to paint what I WANT to paint. That's not good is it? I'm only two dozen or so words into an entry and I'm already SHOUTING. Bloody 'netiquette'. Anyway, I've also been elected 'Chair of staff-side' which is basically the trade union side of the local hospital's staff representative body. I'm not new to union work at this level but it has been an eye-opener to find how modern public service management operate. And it’s rapidly turning into another full-time job. On a personally positive note it has meant going to Gateshead for the recent health delegate conference which gave me the opportunity to visit the new Baltic gallery.
It's a fantastic venue in a beautifully appointed building, but it suffers (thankfully to a lesser degree) from the same problem as Tate Modern. The marketing boys and girls end up making the gallery the focus rather than the work within it. We're in the middle of the age of 'personality galleries' - most odd.
There was some very interesting work on show but sadly I was too early to catch Sam Taylor-Wood's latest show. I can't say I'm a fan of her work however the 'Still Lives' did look potentially interesting from the pre-match publicity and I was hoping to be converted. Ah well - there will be other times.
There was a hefty amount of painting there which was cheering; however it didn't do much for me in the way I hoped. In fact my expectations were reversed and I found the work of James Hugonin and Ian Stephenson to be too clinical and reserved for my personal taste. There were obvious painterly ideological associations with artists like Seurat whom I've never jumped up and down about and despite claims of Stephenson to be working in a tradition related to Constable and Turner I failed to see it beyond the association of being English.
The main space in the gallery was taken up by the ongoing 'self-portrait as a building' installation work of Dutch artist Mark Manders.
'Isolated Bathroom' was one piece that I did find darkly interesting, however any atmosphere of threat generated by the work was lost when presented in a cavernous venue like the Baltic. I'd like to see it again in smaller rooms where I think the work would become the focus of the experience and not the celebrity gallery. The work was quite disparate and seemed generally inchoate. It was indeed like ambling round inside the waking thoughts of the artist, and to be honest, with it taken in entirety, it's not somewhere I'd choose to go for a walk again. Not because it disturbed me, but just because it didn't seem worth the effort. In the accompanying blurb it states 'which is more important, the word 'cup' or the cup itself? The cup, of course, because it has colour, because light falls on it, because it casts a shadow.' But the fact that this is even an issue within the supporting literature amply demonstrates that it's the words that are more important. I'm not getting into the words and galleries rant again...
The artist's career is assured. The ‘Short Sad Thoughts’ show at the Baltic will become another worthy c.v. stuffer. He's done Documenta, MOMA and now the big Biennales no doubt beckon. Good luck to him – I’ve got three jobs to get on with… short, sad thoughts.

Brian Haw

2006-03-19T23:13:00.002+01:00

I had an interesting day Thursday gone. I had some work on show at the London Affordable Art Fair and the gallery holding it sent me a pile of tickets. Being Billy No-Mates I went up on my own but that allowed me to do something else I'd been promising to do for years... I thought I'd pay a visit to Brian Haw, who's still camped across the road from that paragon of democracy, the houses of parliament. I don't know what I expected of Brian when I got there, not that I had any right to expect anything. Here's a man that's forsaken any life he had previously (that includes his family) to protest about the despicable behaviour and murderous actions of our government. If you don't know about him and that he's been there since June 2001 then that shows what a sterling job the majority of the media in this country are doing in keeping you on-side. It's also little known that this government has passed legislation to stop protest outside of the great house - however, no doubt much to Blair and his fellow pseudo-dictator chum's chagrin, it can't include Brian as he was in situ before the laws were passed.
Initially aimed at the illegal and immoral race for oil control in Iraq, Brian has now extended the protest to encompass all aspects of how children and civilians are being murdered around the world in our name. The great British public voted these great British murdering bastards in after all.
I planned some time ago to paint a portrait of Brian as the third piece in the ongoing series titled 'Badge makers' and I wanted to say a 'thankyou' to him for what he was doing on behalf of the rest of us. He's had five years of idiots like me coming up, shaking his hand and saying the same old stupid things to him. There's nothing you can say to him that is adequate enough to express your gratitude – I hope he’ll understand one day when he’s got less reason to be so angry (and he is bloody angry. I don’t even come close). I left him with my packet of tobacco and a promise to see him again – hopefully not there…
I ambled up Bankside to check out the Tate. The proper Tate that is, Tate Britain - which I did mention to somebody on the way in, actually now looks like a small provincial gallery from the outside. Once upon a time it seemed huge, and then they started converting power stations, flour mills, Zeppelin hangers etc. into galleries... Anyway, next time you're up for some capital cultural edification I'd recommend the old Tate. You've now got room to amble around and enjoy the paintings without the usual huge crowds stamping on your head as in the new Tate. I found a Constable that I knew of but had never seen in the flesh before, and I'm not really a fan of Constable. The analysis doesn't go any deeper I'm afraid - I just don't get any 'oomph' from his paintings. This study however, of a girl in a bonnet, is beautiful. Small and beautiful…
Oh – the art fair? Just me doing the usual art-whore thing really. Mind you there were a couple of galleries that had heard of me – I don’t know whether that’s good or not as they hadn’t contacted me. Probably had me on a list of ‘nutters to lock the door on once you’ve got him out of the building’.

Know any good butchers?

2006-02-22T11:02:00.002+01:00

You know, I’m starting to not mind 2006. Purely in selfish painter terms of course.
Despite the fact that our glorious leaders are priming their respective populations for the next military caravan of doom (Iran). Did you know that Iran has been planning for a long time to move their trading in oil away from the US dollar to another currency? If other countries that are equally as sympathetic to the American cause follow suit it could undermine the whole US economy. The anti-proliferation argument is basically the equivalent to the WMD excuse previously wheeled out – it’s the same old oil, power and money routine.
Despite the fact that there are moves afoot with some American employers to install radio chips in certain employees – and we are the fifty-first state of course, so it’s only a matter of time before they start shoving digital surveillance up UK resident’s arses.
Despite the fact that we’re getting the ludicrously justified identity cards (they’ll fight the insidious war on terror on our behalf apparently).
Despite the fact that the environment is totally up the bloody spout; glaciers are disappearing, along with our previously obviously apparent different seasons… don’t worry, be happy… turn on the telly and watch the winter Olympics (before the climatic differences between them and the summer games totally evaporate).
Despite the fact that when I now walk from my local shop with a packet of fags in one hand and a bag of sugar in the other I feel like I’m smuggling illicit drugs into the house.
Anyway, like I said, in selfish mode… I’ve managed to get more paintings completed so far this year than I did in the entirety of 2005. I’ve also had an extremely positive response to the latest piece ‘The Madness of King George’ and now I feel fired up to start something new. I don’t expect to be giving up the day job any moment shortly, but it’s good to at least feel positive about my painting. The ‘screaming head’ video work I did for North Sea Navigator at the Cube in Bristol went down an absolute treat; the band are still talking to me - which is a bonus. Also Naïve John of the Stuckists is encouraging about getting some kind of contribution from me for their Symposium later in the year in Liverpool – I’m looking forward to that…
I've got plans to do some paintings of meat. Butchery, carcasses, that sort of thing... best annoy some local butchers I suppose (in a nice way of course).
Yeah, 2006’s looking alright at the moment. Someone’s bound to balls it all up. The smart money’s on Bush/Blair…

Is there anybody out there...

2006-02-12T00:35:00.002+01:00

Obviously there is... judging by the fact that I actually get posted responses to my blog and other email too. This year has started off on an extremely productive note, which is quite a relief as I was rattling around in a pit of wine and self-inflicted misery due to the urge to destroy most of what I actually got around to painting last year. I don't really feel any different - but a combination of two things has probably fired up the painting rocket at the start of 2006.

1. The request from the band North Sea Navigator to provide some work to support their forthcoming album launch (that's where all the screaming head works are going).
2. Knowing that having a web site with your work on it, though some galleries don't approve (never mind eh?), is being looked at by generally interested punters, students, the occasional art journo and other painters.

There is one problem though. I don't want to get out and catch up with the various friends, galleries and all the other nonsense I've supposedly got to do; this is in actual fact a bit of a pain in the arse - as I am generally quite a social individual. But after a day's work at the hospital, followed by whatever time I can apply to meaningful painting, I basically can't be bothered. Up at six in the morning and getting to bed at two the next morning is not really a habit I want to maintain. And all my mates are probably starting to think that I'm a right miserable bugger...

self pitying whinge

2006-01-27T23:42:00.002+01:00

If you get enough rejections from galleries, curators and juries your focus moves away from the previously assumed inadequacies of your work; I've had enough rejections now where it's come to the point of being the accepted process of my work. Being blunt (it's something I tend to pride myself on) I work my bollocks off producing work that I feel has some level of integrity. On top of that I have to also hold down a full-time job - as eating paint isn't an option. This has been the case for the last twenty years, and no doubt it will continue (I'm well past personal delusions of being 'discovered' and cruelly subjected to the torments of being a nine to five painter). So the process then moves, following the production of a new batch of work that has at least a vague semblance of a theme (galleries tend not to like a disparate selection of subjects all at once), on to hawking around the new pieces in the mad belief that someone would care to stick them on a wall. Being brutally honest with myself I can see why the gallery managers may have some reservations, perhaps I've just been extremely fortunate in attracting the odd individual buyer who doesn't want to pack their walls with token abstracts, landscapes, spitfires, spaniels and chinese mass-produced still-lifes, perhaps the big bald bloke with one inch holes in his ears and a cod Dutch moustache is a little intimidating, perhaps my work is just shite.
Anyway, I've just had another rejection, just in case you're wondering where this little rant came from. And the excuse was the usual, particularly unoriginal "Your work doesn't fit in with our usual client expectations." Which in actual fact is complete and utter nonsense. It's based on the assumption that I am sat at home randomly posting paperwork, photographs, discs etcetera to inappropriate potential galleries. I can afford neither the time nor the financial cost of not thoroughly researching potential galleries; to top it all this gallery not only seemed appropriate (I checked their existing artists on their own website), but they actually sought new submissions through an arts publication.
Anyway, like I said at the start of this, it's no longer about the fact of being rejected. It's now become a matter of pride in accumulating better reasons as to why a gallery (public and private) should not exhibit my work. So for your edification here are some of the more interesting reasons why I'm still a slave to evening, night and weekend painting:

* "We've been told your work could potentially offend a rural audience." (That was from a public gallery)
* "Our viewers don't like to be reminded of their mortality." (From a hospital requesting work to fill main corridors and public spaces)
* "We don't think work that is predominantly black and white is uplifting enough." (Same hospital)
* "No red please." (Yup - same hospital again) Don't worry, I've got the message now - three strikes and you're out.
* "We need some yellow paintings." (Private gallery this time - after seeing my work somewhere else they asked me to bring my work the 150 miles to show them)
* "We don't take artists who have websites." (I won't bother showing it ANYWHERE then!)
* "Perhaps you could come back when you've been painting a little longer." (Said, with all due gravity, by a twenty-something year old, public gallery manager, fresh out of an art history degree)
* "Have you thought about doing some video work?" (From a private gallery that had never shown video work up to that point and hasn't since - I can take a hint)
* "It's a bit depressing isn't it." (Private gallery with a healthy list of visual-dirge obsessed artists)
* "We don't do work from outside of London!" (No doubt they're equally fussy about their buyers)
* "We don't accept unsolicited submissions." (I bet they would if it was Damien bloody Hirst)
* and the best of the lot, not totally unrelated to the last... "In our position, an unknown artist is too much of a risk."

Actually, the last bunch were right and went out of business inside a year. Serves 'em bloody well right I say...

Bargain basement philosophy

2006-01-06T11:08:00.002+01:00

1. the cynicism of art and literature was once able to open the eyes of an unaware audience to truths of the abuse of power, now the audience's cynicism of the truth of art and literature keeps the same eyes shut.
2. I believe in the right of an individual to state that they are an artist - even if another individual replies 'you are not'. I believe in the right of an individual to state that somebody else is no artist.
3. I believe that art can serve many purposes - not one.
4. I believe in moon-monkeys. They are blue, they are monkey-shaped, they live on the moon. If you do not believe in moon-monkeys I do not expect you to prove their non-existence. It is up to me, as a believer, to provide you with incontrovertible proof of moon-monkey existence before I expect you to believe in them. Bring me proof of the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, beneficent deity and I will believe in that deity's existence.
5. I believe that humanity is not at the end, or near the end, or even near the beginning of some great mystical Homeric epic of progress. We do not progress - we maintain a course of destruction, cruelty, inequity and indifference.
6. I don't want to die. I really don't want to die. I'm not frightened of it - I just don't have the time to waste on it and I've got too much other work to fit in before it. Dying would be a major inconvenience to my future plans.
7. art - social dysfunction celebrated as ritual
8. The validating mark of any given society, both to itself and the outside world, is its culture; the lens of that culture is its art.
9. I defy any artist out there to say that they have created what they set out to achieve. They're either lying, or not trying hard enough.
10. art isn't about communication, its about the search for significance and control in a world of anonymity and chaos.

accumulated over the years

The democratisation of art

2006-01-06T11:03:00.002+01:00

There is a world of difference between the ideas of 'anything an artist spits is art' and 'anyone calling themselves an artist is an artist.'
Since the dadaist practise has been appropriated into the modernist art canon and the ethos behind it celebrated and mutated to justify any kind of pseudo-artistic excess we have been more often subjected to this bogus democratisation of art.
Without wanting to disappear into the pedantry of semiotics most of us, in and out of the rarefied celebrity-fest that is the 'art world', have a fairly constant idea of what an artist is and what an artist does. In general we do not call somebody an athlete unless they display a certain level of prowess at an athletic skill. We all know people who take part in athletic events at a level we would consider less than Olympian - but we do not identify them primarily as athletes. Similarly not everybody who takes part in 'artistic' activities would be primarily identified as artists.
All the effort, desire and luck in the world will never make me an athlete - and should I choose to exercise my athletic skills in a public arena representing my country in place of somebody with far more ability, I would expect to be drummed out by the spectators (probably at gunpoint). Even in a postmodern world there is little room for 'irony' in sporting arenas, or many other arenas for that manner. Second rate is second rate, and unfortunately in the current art world the over used concept of 'irony' has become a major apologist for 'second rate' artistic practise. No matter what critical and semiological gloss is applied bad art is bad art - 'you can't polish a turd' - is the phrase I think I'm after.
Anybody cannot become proficient at any thing. It might be unfair, undemocratic and un-pc, but its a hard fact of life. If this was not the case we would not have a cultural history (that is still continued and added to) celebrating the abilities of those who stood above their peers in whatever fields. There is at current, a glut of deranged celebrities, who feel that they can not only shine in any environment they choose to visit, but honestly believe we live in awe at their apparent accession to the throne of new renaissance man.
In catering to the inflated ego of some rapidly diminishing celebrity their sycophantic curatorial buddies do nothing except devalue the work that others who have no drive but to create 'artwork' do.
Neither do four years at the right art college make an artist (and believe me its got more to do with the right college than ability, drive or obsession). How the hell do you teach a wholly subjective subject? They'll tell you that they can't - consequently anything goes and everything is Art. Anything goes does it? Travel around a hundred small, privately organised and generally self-funded exhibitions and you'll find out that most of the truly inspired and individualistic artists out there were subjected to extreme humiliation to make their own work fall within the confines of the shadow of some sad, under-exhibited tutor rattling around in the cultural morass of postmodern theory.
Anything goes - except a few things, unless they're ironic, or you're shagging the lecturer.

BITTER AND TWISTED?...You'd better bloody believe it.

1997

Reasons to be cheerful...

2006-01-06T10:57:00.002+01:00

...so it is common knowledge and accepted practise that the alleged 'avant garde' (an over used phrase if ever there was one) has the patronage of not only the art establishment, but by guilt of financial association, the patronage of the state...

mmm...the 'avant-garde' in the patronage of the state...

so...the 'avant-garde' has become the established order in the art world...

the avant-garde has become the vanguard

...right, just so that I know where we all stand...

[an asides

person X {a.k.a. ARTKILL VICTIM} learns 'Art' and prescribed 'Art History' {generally modified simplifications of the rantings of Clement (pass the drip-stick Jackson) Greenberg (minus Cubist semiotic stuff)}, shows an interest {beyond the construction of a virtual football tournament final featuring the Abstract Expressionist F.C (Greenberg on the bench, Pollock up front and Rothko permanently contemplating defeat) v. the Cornwall Allstars (Nicholson too busy designing neatly inscribed pitches to play, all the big names were transferred in and any real Cornish players too old to get off the bench)}, and progresses through to ART COLLEGE to learn the chosen craft of hand rolling scabby cigarettes and making one pint of cider last a fortnight.

here they will:

i. realise that any true individuality or original thought (dangerous concepts) is stamped on vigorously and repeatedly UNLESS they can shag the lecturer in which case they will have their working practises modified to FALL within the tenets of critical theorising favoured by lecturer X (progression from person X to lecturer X usually indicates an earlier life decision geared around the realisation that creativity in the current social climate {sub-arctic without even the fridge light at the end of the tunnel vision to lift the gloom} is greatly pooh-poohed - and the concept of earning enough money to live on from an activity which directly improves the lot of all on this planet {AS OPPOSED TO BEING PAID EIGHT GRAND A WEEK TO KICK A LEATHER BAG AROUND A FOOTBALL PITCH WITH TWENTY ONE SIMILARLY INCLINED GOONS} can only be generally realised by acquiring lofty lecturer X status - IMPORTANT NOTE... it is not necessary to carry on your interest in learning about ART beyond that required to achieve lecturer status.

YOU MUST NEVER CEDE ANY ACCEPTANCE THAT WHAT IS CURRENTLY BEING CREATED MAY BE MORE RELEVANT NOW THAN THAT WHICH WAS BEING CREATED WHEN YOU WERE PUPIL X).

ii. realise that anything is acceptable ON THE VERY SPECIFIC PROVISO that it is absolutely fucking unintelligible {preferably even with frequent explanations}. ENSURE that any of the apologists defending the apparent inability of the creator to explain the thought(s) behind any piece of work EXPLAIN this apparent inability away as genuine artistic pique {because of the viewer's incapacity for comprehension} OR EVEN BETTER [but rapidly becoming over used] claim it as the artist self mocking the actual deep sincerity and heady philosophical content of the work.

iii. learn KEY words and phrases and use them in one of two ways (ONE.toss liberally into every conversation or, preferably TWO. randomly pick six or seven king sized semiotic monsters

andstringthemtogetherintoincrediblylucid
statementssothateventhemosthardyopponent
wouldnotargue)

USE THE FOLLOWING: brit art, brit pack, post-modern, deconstructionalism, representational irrationalism, irony (good one that...and easy to spell), iconoclastic, architectonic, enigmatic (do not use this word in the same sentence as 'talent')

DO NOT USE THE FOLLOWING {lest they be used against you}: originality of thought, technically competent, enthusiasm, variety of work, experimentation, friendly and approachable (as opposed to egotistical, posturing, narcissistic, mad bastard)

the avant-garde (a term originally used in art critical theory to define work in opposition to the official art establishment)

HA

1997

Posting all the old writing...

2006-01-06T10:49:00.002+01:00

Just as a warning, or an explanation, I'm going to put all my older pre-blog bits of writing on these pages too. Admittedly they'll be out of date order but it will clear up my site and make it easier to navigate. The artwork stays on the main site and the ramblings of the lunatic stay on the blog.

Letter to Art Review

2005-12-20T13:06:00.002+01:00

Art Review
1 Sekforde Street
Clerkenwell, London
EC1R 0BE

Dear Editor
I have only been buying Art Review more in the last few months following the recent transformation of Modern Painters, from arguably the most accessible, critically informative contemporary arts magazine available in the country to outsized, overpriced, cheap papered, coffee table accessory (an accessory, incidentally that rarely ‘does what it says on the tin’). The last time I regularly bought your magazine was when David Lee held the helm.
In relative terms Art Review unquestionably seems more pertinent to my aspirations when it comes to parting with the hard-earned - despite its apparent favouring of installation work. But then I’ve only bought the last three issues, and there was that wonderful piece showing the work of Matthias Weischer in the latest issue; and I am a painter so I’m allowed to be prejudiced.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt (considering that just about a fifth of the 100 new young ‘stars-to-be’ were occupied in the outdated practice known as painting) and hope that your magazine is not favouring an artistic field (installationism) that is increasingly distancing itself from a realistically salaried art buying public. There will always be a space for painting in the collector’s mind; for the majority it is the most accessible means into the world of acquiring genuine art. There is too, something magically totemic about a painting on a wall – however passé that idea is. The audience that appreciate the endless onslaught of unqualifiable novelty is generally the same target audience of the (public subsidy free) commercial gallery sector.
And onto a slightly associated whinge. The other matter of content in recent issues that I’d like to take to task are the top 100 lists. Let’s be honest – they are nothing more than page filling fluff. I could argue that they are meaningless in that the judgements cast in favour of artist X, Y or Z as they are totally subjective. This would be wrong however, but only in the sense that your magazine being in the position it is in, it has the power of publishing a self-fulfilling prophesy. Do you not feel the space that these lists have taken up would be better spent on in-depth pieces on specific artists?

Regards

Guy Denning

Miserable, self-obsessed sod...

2005-12-11T23:05:00.003+01:00

Much pondering recently on the purpose of art today and whether the work I do has any validity to either that purpose or intrinsic validity outside of it. I know what has brought this introspective self-pity on. It’s a combination of three recent rejections from galleries, the absolute nonsense of the art-celebrity fest that is the Turner prize and seeing a great deal of incredible painting and sculpture in Rome. I frequently complain that much work produced today, that seems to meet the pre-requisites of acceptance into the state sanctioned canon of ‘Art’ seems to be produced without much underlying application of thought, effort or craft. But when I look at these new (to me) paintings, that pre-dated the early twentieth century, I wonder if even I could apply myself with that degree of single-mindedness.
There is also the ever present demand from one gallery that is selling my work, to keep producing smaller work, as it is something that they seem able to sell comparatively easily; I’m not in a position to be able to turn them down. Similarly another gallery wants to submit my work for the Affordable Art Fair in New York, but I suspect they’ll want more manageable pieces. I can’t complain if it actually gets seen over there. Finger’s crossed…
I want to produce some larger pieces but I suspect they’ll stay out of buyer’s hands for quite a while – that seems to be the general pattern of late! I’ve also had some inspiration (fired up by musician Paul Nash) for a series of pictures that challenge the idealised image we have of children. I can’t see those flying off the gallery walls – to be honest I can’t see them flying onto the walls in the first place. I’ve also still got that skull sat next to the easel awaiting its portrait…

Roman Holiday

2005-12-02T12:37:00.002+01:00

Well it’s been a while since I’ve been on here so I suppose I’d better make the effort. A fair bit has happened of late including a very nice week long trip in Rome which was a revelation (artistically not spiritually) in many ways. We had plans of the things we wanted to see over the break which included the obvious - Sistine Chapel, Borghese Gallery and in terms of specific artists, Caravaggio. It soon got out of hand though with a couple of unexpected stops. One at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna and another at Scuderie del Quirinale. Describing paintings in words is about as useful as attempting to paint a novel so I’ll just dish out the names. At the Quirinale, after recently only going on about the lack of Franz Kline’s work (my favourite painter) available to view in this country we were presented with three by the boy – including one of the signature large black and white oils. I couldn’t believe my luck. The show was concerned primarily with the Italian painter Alberto Burri and included a beautiful black and red piece of his from the fifties – and you could walk round comfortably without the usual crush and rush of somewhere like Tate Modern… bonus indeed. At the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (the nearest equivalent I can think of is Tate Britain) we were again presented with unknown (to us) names – which will present endless opportunities for digging around bookshops and the like:
Adolfo Wildt, Giulio Turcato, Ettore Colla, Mario Schifano, Achille Perilli, Arturo Martini, Afro Basaldella, Renato Guttuso, Mario Sironi, Felice Casorati, Giulio Bargellini…
The list isn’t quite endless but I think you get the idea. It just goes to show how limited international interest is in a specific set of canonical artists; and it was exciting to have so many, new to me, names to look out for. There’s also the whinging internal worry that the political sympathies of some of these artists may have been questionable if you’re not a fan of ‘Il Duce’. To be honest I was just looking at the work, and there was work that was far more polemically right-wing than those I’ve listed. It’s a strange area – the politics of the artist – mind you the anti-Semitism and misogyny of Degas doesn’t seem to have diminished critical interest in his work alone. Perhaps I worry too much. Perhaps I’m justifying it to myself.
Another eye-opener was seeing so much of the sculpture of Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the flesh. I’ve always considered his work to be perhaps too decorative in comparison to that of Michelangelo Buonarroti. But seeing the work just overawed me with the man’s ability. When you visit the churches, basilicas and museums of Rome you are subjected to such a wealth of sculpture, old and new, that after a while you’re able to filter out work that previously you would have thought great solid work and those that pushed the boat out just that little bit further. It sounds like an insult but it’s not meant to be one (I certainly couldn’t even begin to imagine myself attempting sculpture on that scale) but the likes of Bernini and Buonarroti make the others look like ‘jobbing sculptors’.
Various people warned me that I’d get hooked on Rome – they weren’t wrong.
Unfortunately we didn’t get time to do the Museo d’Arte Contemporaneo Roma so we’ll just have to go back to probably the most beautiful city in Europe. No hardship.
Oh – and I’ve also just picked up a beautiful book on Jenny Saville – here’s someone whose painting deserves every ounce of praise it gets. And she now works in Italy – what a star.

Hats off to the Arnolfini

2005-11-08T11:53:00.002+01:00

I take it all back - all that whinging about the opening show at the Arnolfini a month or so ago. Rather than be castigated for launching the newly revamped space on a poor show they should be congratulated. I’ve just seen the latest show ’Starting At Zero: Black Mountain College 1933-1957’ and it is an absolute stunner. This was obviously the show that they were meant to open with, but due to incredibly efficient contractors etc. they must have finished a month ahead of schedule and this show obviously wasn’t ready in time. So credit where credit’s due – it’s not often these days that a project finishes early (it’s just a shame it buggers up their exhibition plan).
Anyway back to the current show.
When I saw the title I was quite excitable – the Black Mountain College was an incredible experiment in an alternative art schooling that was significant in its helping defining the course of High Modernism; when I read the publicity that mentioned Franz Kline too I was over the moon. To my knowledge there’s only one painting in a UK public collection (‘Meryon’ at Tate Modern) and a small paper piece in the British Museum – that’s it. I expected the Arnolfini show to have probably the British Museum piece and perhaps ‘Meryon’ if we were lucky, I didn’t expect to see a beautiful diptych on paper (Untitled 1952). Throughout the evening, interspersed with a lovely soft Rauschenberg (Untitled – matt black with fabric 1952), sublime photographic portraits by Hazel Larsen Archer and a beautifully textured painting by a new name to me, Lyonel Feininger, I kept returning to the top piece of the Kline diptych.
The last time I was able to wallow in Kline’s work was at the Whitechapel retrospective in 1995 where the audience was spoilt – the paintings easily outshone the works on paper, but when isolated from the great signature black and white canvases these little paper pieces have a new life. There’s no point going into an in-depth description of what the piece does, or how it looks. You just need to get down there and see this fantastic show; I’ll be making frequent repeat visits before it closes in January. You can’t have too much of a good thing.
I also met up with Paul Nash of North Sea Navigator, who seems keen on doing some collaborative miserable-as-sin audio-visual thing – which would cheer me up no end. It’s nice to abuse a masochistic audience every now and then.
So all in all – a good evening.
The Arnolfini’s got a new director as well. Tom Trevor – an artist – promising…

Getting moving again

2005-10-28T21:29:00.002+02:00

I recently got annoyed with myself because my work was so seemingly up a dead-end, that I was considering, following the influence of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, the production of a still-life. Well, no surprises. That’s apparently going nowhere; the collection of objects is there on the side, next to the easel, awaiting my attentions. It isn’t going to happen! Not for the moment at any rate; I can’t whip up the enthusiasm.
A dealer has offered to submit my work for consideration in a New York art fair so it’s probably a better idea to get on with some work that I can get a little more ‘oomph’ up together for. This would suggest more of the little portraits are on the way. Also I recently collected two little paintings from a gallery in Padstow which I’d forgotten were down there. When I did them they were a nice little avenue that I fancied re-investigating but without them in front of me it was difficult to remember exactly how they were painted. So they’re here now and I feel a little more optimistic about getting some work done that I won’t want to paint over.
Also I’ve offered to get a painting finished for the hospital’s Cancer Support Centre (I think it’s going to go in their new ‘chill-out’ area for patients) which I’d best do too. They’ve waited long enough.
And I’ve waited enough to turn out some passable painting.
The still-life arrangement is still by the side of the easel though.

Turner Prize 2005

2005-10-17T21:53:00.002+02:00

Painting could be the new rock and roll. Or not. It's Turner Prize time again and this time there's a painter. Ooh yes - a painter; a real one too. Not an ounce of irony squirted about a post-modern canvas to be seen. I'm not expecting this critical largesse to expand and soak up all us saddos that have been rattling around in curatorial oblivion like an emergency rescue sponge. It is quite funny watching the broadsheet critical back peddling though; whether it will extend to a wholesale reassessment of the many excesses of second rate conceptualists or installationists or whatever they call themselves we'll just have to wait and see. I can't say that it would be wise to hold your breath - there's far too much moolah tied up in too many 'important' collections (private and public).
There was an odd personal aside that occurred when reading Adrian Searle in the Guardian today. 'Gillian Carnegie is a surprising choice... Finding your own voice as a painter can take a long time.'
Critics seem to be able to find their voice soon enough, and change it with the wind. I haven't got a clue what my painter's voice is... perhaps that's the problem. There's too much competing shouting going on in my head whenever I pick up the brush.
Anyway, following Searle's comment, are we to assume that finding your voice as a conceptualist/installationist (whatever) is therefore easier? BURN THE HERETIC. Carry on like that and he'll be drummed out of the cosy club.
I was at a show the other day that was almost stuffed to the top of the skirting board with conceptual depth and a fellow punter (a stranger to me) was contemplating a strange assemblage of corrugated cardboard, wire, plaster and other mystery accretions. He smiled knowingly, I think he may even have nodded slightly, looked at me and said 'Fantastic isn't it'.
It wasn't a question; it was a statement. I took the opportunity handed to me and asked what he meant. Was it literally 'fantastic' or did it just impress him some way?
It impressed him.
I asked him why; was he impressed as an aesthetic response to the work or at some mystically revealed message imparted across the stripped oak that made him 'reassess his relationship with the incongruities of a public gallery environment celebrating the creative personal detritus of the artist' - as the work was apparently meant to do.
He started to load that old expression of 'hedgehog discovering motorway' so I calmed his concerns that he was being harangued by a nutter and explained that I considered myself a practicing artist and was just interested in his response to 'challenging' work.
'Well - I just like it'. I thanked him and moved on before he reported me to THE AUTHORITIES...
That's okay then - he just liked it. Fantastic. Can't argue with that can you?
There are a hundred and one critics only too eager to jump into the fray to take down the country’s (apparently) most popular painter Jack Vettriano on the grounds that his paint technique isn’t that hot. The same people aren’t generally quite as vitriolic when it comes to assassinating second rate conceptual work. I presume this is either because they don’t know enough cod philosophy to challenge the artistic or curatorial ‘insights’, or they ‘can’t tell shit from pudding’ as an old boy I once knew used to say.
Perhaps the game’s up at last, the tide does seem to be turning a little. Good job too. It’s not only a good thing that you can you have too much of.

‘Against the disease of writing…’

2005-09-30T16:56:00.002+02:00

‘…one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.’
Pierre Abélard writing to Heliose

Artist Juno Doran did warn me… be careful or you’ll get sucked into the perpetual non-working state of bloggophillia. I can see what she meant – unfortunately she presumes that I have the attention span of at least two goldfish, when it is well known that my attention span would be challenged in duration by a single, impatient and late for an appointment goldfish. But I did find myself thinking this morning, as I ambled down the hospital corridors where I work, taking in the displayed art hung for our cultural edification. I was wondering what the accumulated variety of work had behind it – and I don’t mean the walls.
You know what they say – ‘No names, no pack drill’ so I won’t identify anyone in particular, and I’ve probably been guilty of the same thing at some time. Wall notes accompanying art, initially produced with all good intent, for the benefit of throwing additional light on work whose meaning or raison d’etre may seem a little difficult to pluck from the fathomless depths of the artistic intellect. It occurred to me again when struggling to remain silent amongst last Saturday afternoon’s Arnolfini chin-strokers. I probably don’t have enough in my life but this thought has obviously been driving a mental bumper car around my head since the weekend.
If I assume that the art is not only produced for the artist’s cathartic benefit but also for the audience’s interested consumption what is the correct way to interpret contemporary conceptualism? I presume its very nature of tending to avoid figurative representation and ‘traditional’ media would suggest that any response would have to either fall into one of two categories, the aesthetic, formalist criticism or a social enquiry response.
If the meaning or purpose of the work is tied to our aesthetic interpretation then the only purpose of the wall note should be to tell us the barest minimum about it (for reference purposes perhaps) such as who was responsible, when it was created, perhaps even who owns it…
If the meaning is tied to the artist making a social or philosophical observation – which would suggest an intrinsic role of communication – then the work is by definition poor, if it cannot be interpreted without an intermediary wall or catalogue note.
If the concept can be so succinctly put across surely it makes the artwork redundant.
So I’ll be happy to enter an art gallery and see referential supporting evidence for both older painting and sculpture and contemporary work when it applies to a history that we may not know.
I’ll read the wall notes if I want to know who made the work, but I don’t want an explanation that the work itself should be offering.
I’ll also happily accept an empty gallery pasted with row upon row of notes that expound great philosophical or social insights, unencumbered by the baggage of inadequate artifice – but I think these may already be in existence and go under the name of ‘libraries’.
It wouldn’t be so bad if the ubiquitous wall notes ever said anything different. Unfortunately they generally contain the same art phrases and clichés about the work ‘challenging the viewer’s preconceptions’ or ‘addressing the issue of…’
For once I’d like to challenge the artist’s arrogant preconceptions that the viewers are so unenlightened and ignorant that they require their preconceptions to be challenged by a twenty something recent fine arts graduate. Similarly, though art has a role in highlighting social issues and political agendas it rarely goes beyond the function of preaching to the converted.
I’ll start by practising what I preach. From now on - no more verbiage. Not even titles. If words are needed in the work I’ll include them in the work and not on the wall by the side of the work.

A waste of (white) space

2005-09-28T22:11:00.002+02:00

I've put off the writing of this for the best part of a week. Just to make sure that the ire I felt was rashly conceived, but it wasn't. Last Saturday I visited the Arnolfini in Bristol for the first time since its reopening following a two year closure and revamp; I think the words that adequately sum up the opening exhibition are 'lacklustre' and 'sad'.
The new space isn't too bad though the apparent reduction of the bar/cafe seating is a little disappointing considering that the space previously, particularly at weekends, was a packed and buzzing meeting venue for all those that didn't mind being seen in a gallery. It becomes particularly irksome when you bear in mind that the entrance foyer area is a comparative waste of space that seems also to have eaten into the bookshop. I might be wrong; perhaps it's a cunning architectural sleight of hand and in actual fact the shop and bar have expanded but in a trans-dimensional 'Tardis-like' fashion they only seem smaller. I knew I hadn't given sufficient benefit of time to this - I'm getting sarcastic already.
Generally the exhibition space, which admittedly is the venue's prime function, has improved. There's more of it, it's better laid out (and accessible - which was one of the main reasons for the change so I've been told) and better lit and presented.
There - I'm not totally negative - back to the opening show.
From friends who have some previous involvement at the Arnolfini I am on the understanding that prior to the closure the exhibition schedule was set around about eighteen months in advance. The closure itself was about two years in length. There was every right to expect a show that would knock the socks off an expectant Arnolfini starved audience after this lengthy wait - but I'm afraid to say that we were left wanting. Judging from the comments I heard inside the galleries, the bar and outside, I wasn't the only one that felt cheated.
Perhaps we've been spoiled by a previous wealth of riches. The obvious choice of a pre-closure exhibition that I reckon the Arnolfini will always find hard to top was the show 'Presentness is Grace', with the conceptual genius being led from the front by the incredible talents of ÝNikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen and Hideyuki Sawayanagi. This was the show that deserved the attention of a supposed grand re-opening, not this 'This storm is what we call progress' effort. Apparently - according to the material supporting it 'The exhibition asks how, why and what we remember... these works explore our complex relationship to the past as well as our responsibility to the present.' No it didn't and no they don't. The work was perhaps worthy of supporting stronger work but not of maintaining its own head above the waterline.
And as if to support accusations of the exhibition's 'conceptual' insecurity it is titled from a Walter Benjamin quote concerning a Paul Klee painting and it also makes great play of including a Turner oil - as if to include by guilt of association the contemporary work into the canonical status of Britain's most famous painter.
The Arnolfini is known for showing primarily conceptual performance, screen or installation based work over 'traditional' art media (unless of course you're Paul McCartney and you need a venue to hang your cod, retro, pseudo New York School paintings - but that's another bitter, twisted subject). If I want to see good painting I'll pop up the road to the Bristol City Gallery and catch Karle Weshke's Leda and the Swan.
However, if I want to catch top notch contemporary weird shit I'll go to the Arnolfini. Unfortunately this wasn't it. An apparently slung together table top construction that defied any aesthetic interpretation; I therefore assumed it must have been challenging in the sense of the new way it wanted me to see some part of my world. Nope - not unless I resorted to reading the associated wall notes, in which case I would suggest getting rid of the work and leaving the wall notes. A video, tedious in its monotony, painful in its shaky-helicopter-cam pinkness and unoriginal in its guilty liberal, politically correct subject matter (documentary style apparently). I would suggest that its supposed intent would best be rendered by an authoritatively written, competently shot documentary - probably. These were probably the day's worst, though not only, offenders of reinforcing the public's incomprehension of contemporary art. The whole event was another exercise in pseudo-intellectual, politically correct, cod-philosophising of the highest degree.
'This storm is what we call progress?' No it's not - if it is a storm it's more Typhoo than typhoon, and as for progress... It's just another piss-poor, deliberately obscure show that hangs on the now ragged coat-tails of a seventy year old allegedly anti-art, anti-establishment ideal. And for the opening show of the major local venue, with a supposed two to three years preparation time it was a bloody farce.

Television is fantastic.

2005-09-21T12:54:00.002+02:00

You know - I'm getting quite comfortable in my slow metamorphosis into a miserable old bastard.
Television is, in general, one of the greatest modern inventions devised to increase personal motivation. Marx reckoned that religion was the opiate of the masses – he didn’t count on the work of John Logie Baird then. I suppose I am fortunate then in that I am one of those lucky individuals that can dip in and out of the drug bag without being sucked into perpetual dependence. The absolute inanity of 90% of the programming does nothing but motivate me to do something less boring – which generally means painting.
People, inside and outside of the insular world of art, wonder at the productivity of artists such as Michelangelo, Picasso and Van Gogh. Where did they get their time and motivation? They found it internally, quite easily, because they weren’t being neutered by an all pervasive popular culture that invaded both the actual living space and non-domestic community space.
I'm glad that I don't understand any of it. In all honesty I don’t even want to understand any of it. I'm glad that I don't know why the new TV comedy is funny, I’m glad that the current state of journalism is neither impartial or truly investigative, I'm glad that in general the new popular music seems either derivative of music I listened to in my teens or is totally incomprehensible. In another socially cultural avenue I'm glad that the new fads in fashion are passing me by and I'm glad that I am no longer sexually attractive to those in the flush of an increasingly sexually demonstrative youth. I'm glad that television, mainstream cinema and in general most of the news media are doing such a piss-poor job. Because it means I have less justifiable distractions from getting on with painting - and at the age of forty, if I am lucky, I might have half my life left to apply myself with some level of determination to produce some worthwhile work.

You'll hear this whinge again

2005-09-19T13:44:00.002+02:00

I'll get this posting over as soon as possible, because if it isn't dealt with now it will only raise its head again in the future. A lot of people consider me to be, in their words not mine, 'prolific'. I have always considered that I was not 'prolific' enough by far. I have a thousand ideas for unrealised paintings, web-art projects, sculptures, prints... and by the time I've realised one of them its single mental parking space has been taken by a dozen more fresh ideas. It doesn't help that I have to also work full-time (outside of art) to avoid starvation and summary eviction. I have evenings, nights, holidays and weekends away from my paying job to work in my preferred job; this has been the case for nearly twenty years and I suppose I am more or less resigned to the fact that this is how it has to be.
Anyway - back to the subject of today's post.
I have painted over my last two paintings due to my dissatisfaction with the results. Unfortunately, what you’ve immediately finished and discarded does not necessarily translate into the solution to immediately progress to a ‘successful’ painting – whatever that may be. So I’m stuck in that painter’s equivalent of ‘writer’s block’ I suppose - again. It does seem to be a recurrent problem.
One way of addressing this is to run away from going forward and start looking back. I don’t mean to my own work – that would be pointless – but to the work of other painters. So, in remembrance of previous admiration of the work of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin I am considering a still-life, perhaps a ‘Vanitas’ which has a noble historic tradition behind it. Eminently suitable subject matter for the not-so-latent narcissistic, egomaniac tendencies of myself and a million other unknown painters.

I suppose it saves buying a diary.

2005-09-16T14:34:00.003+02:00

I've decided to take the plunge and join the ranks of the bloggers. I don't know why really. Perhaps it's because I'm closing in fast on forty and the realisation that no-one listens is starting to bite. Perhaps they'll read instead. I must be having a crisis...

Honest work

2005-01-11T11:38:00.000+01:00

Artists have a responsibility to engage initially with the general public before producing work aimed at the attentions of the art critical establishment. Artwork produced for the insular world of art academe will rarely stand the test of time despite perhaps achieving initial high praise. When the artist has gone and the fashions have changed all that will be left is the work. The only constant will be an audience that has a minimum of actual lived reference to the times the work was created in. Work made for a public audience is honest work and honest work is the best the artist can hope to be remembered for.

November 2005

old and found

2004-10-15T13:47:00.000+02:00

Work had been a disappointment. Again. I don't know why I tell you this with any expectation of surprise or sympathy on your part. Again. You can see how the routine of routine disappointment and routine failure becomes the expected aspiration. A safe feeling of low expectation - simultaneously warm and cool. You are brought up with the aphoristic truism 'expect nothing and you won't be disappointed', but do you wonder if the children of the rich learn this supposedly satiating wisdom? Of course you don't - and no, they do not.
So how do I fill this vacuum. What is my life so patently missing and why is it missing it. I think I have narrowed this down over many years pondering, and feel fairly safe in the veracity of the personal judgement made. That my life is deficient in volume, value and quality of stuff. I think it is plainly seen by all-comers to the adult sphere that their worth is judged by peers, betters and subordinates in terms of the stuff an individual at least aspires to. At least - aspire. It does not take a great raft of effort. Aspire and join the swell of the ranks. Aspire to afford, and when you are in the position to afford - aspire to acquire.
The plan to relieve my perceived inadequacy is as follows:
To spend one evening celebrating the cult of consumption; to faithfully record one evening's television advertising; to purchase on the basis of that advertising. And what if I run short of money? What can they do to me? Hang me? Imprison me? Take me away from a daily struggle to keep a financial neckline above the waterline and substitute it for a cell? I've not offended before - by my reckoning, it's my turn.
I am determined to follow this through to the bloody end. This is not going to be a wishing list of 'what if I had the means'. This will be an Evel Kneivelesque rocket-bike leap across the grand canyon of cash-deficiency and self-confidence void. Like I say, what can they do? To be blunt - fuck 'em. Fuck 'em all. The parents who have always expected and received a responsible son. The children that expect a father who will always provide their means to school yard training-shoe peer approval. The employer that expects non-reciprocal loyalty and subservience. The wife that expects. nothing. At least nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing away from of the security of the mundane, safe, safely boring, predictable husband.
I would consider this personal situation a likely and probable reason why 'the man next door', or 'the bloke who didn't say much', or 'he that seemed so normal' were the most likely candidates to go, as they say in America, 'postal'.
So I'm taking in Star Trek, waiting for the trauma of intergalactic soap-life to temporarily halt, pen in hand and pad on lap, ready for the three minutes of divine intervention to lead me on to my proposed holy grail.
Tomorrow (I have already taken the day off from work - in a responsible fashion. Perhaps I should have rung in sick.) I will be embarking on a journey. The quest of the Last Great Consumer with my map of engagement that I will diligently draft tonight.
By the end of the first advertising assault I have been promised the lifestyle, personal confidence and peer respect I am confident I deserve after all these years of grey conformity. The secret ingredients of this metamorphosis: Troy will fall, Rome will rise. Nothing is permanent - and who will care? The evening crawls to the early morning and now the offerings have gotten dire and repetitious.
Tomorrow I will be buying a BMW, Daiwoo, Mazda, two Fords and associated insurance policies, more shampoo, conditioner and assorted hair gel and colouring products than a balding man could possible use in a lifetime, three mobile phones spread over two networks, a personal computer, a satellite television system, razors (the best a man can get apparently - so the obvious choice at the moment), hi-gloss smudge-resist, non-staining lipstick, ready meals, non-ready meals, whisky, rum, mountain spring water in hydrocarbon plastic bottles, panty-liners, a stair lift, double glazing, a conservatory, security windows, hearing aids, two top selling debut albums, three top selling compilation albums, telephone sex lines (I've already cleared that one off the list seeing I was sat at home, between adverts with a free hand and time on it), morning newspapers, weekend newspapers, weekly magazines, two new kitchens (but in a mad, uncontrolled furious moment of anti-profligacy I've decided on taking only one), three dvd and video blockbuster releases, toilet cleaner, floor cleaner, perfume, deodorant, air freshener, stain remover, soft drinks, soft jeans and tough jeans, bleaches, beaches, hyper water tighter nappies, hayfever remedies, headache pills, hi-tech tooth-brushes, jet powered bog-brushes, the universe's most comfortable NASA designed mattress, a trip to a local safari park and three trips abroad. Oh - two charitable donation direct debits and my mate, Marmite.
At a cost of one hundred and forty three thousand pounds. Give or take the odd poundage of loose change. Not bad for a quiet night in.
In a normal, quiet, lacklustre, dreary, dull, safe, boring, predictable, standard, harmless, honest, gentle, uninspiring, average life it would take me fourteen years to earn that amount.
Now all this is achievable through the ongoing help and support offered by my guide for the evening. The national lottery everyone's a guaranteed winner, bonus-ball, roll-over, steamroller special, four credit cards, five opportunities to re-mortgage, three unsecured loans, and a potential claim against a local authority for a back injury sustained due to the negligent spreading of salt on a pedestrian walkway. Not forgetting the anti-wrinkle cream with formulated nano-hydro-ceramide worry line removal system. Worried? Me? No bloody fear, I'm going shopping.

September 2004

April 23 2004

2004-04-04T12:09:00.000+02:00

At the moment I am working through a series of oil paintings based on a (nearly complete) collection of forty two photocopy prints. The inspiration came from the clubbing fly-posters around Bristol , and feature the people and architecture of Bristol . As a result they are titled ' bristol life 1 - 42'.

The hotshot consensus is that painting should now be considered 'old fashioned' in terms of contemporary art practise. That's a bit like saying musical instruments are old hat now that musicians have access to computer technology. It just exemplifies the current cultural obsession with style over content, instant effect over application of effort.

And content is all, particularly in the current political atmosphere - Bertolt Brecht summed it up nicely, "...when the great wars were being prepared for...they won't say: the times were dark. Rather: why were the poets silent?"

On a personal level I see art as having a specifically social purpose. The times of the Modernists claiming artistic autonomy, not to mention the current Satchinistas claiming the artistic pitch of intellectual autonomy is now generally irrelevant to not only the general public, but also to much of the art world. There was a point to it, once. When it challenged the authority of academic ism ..

That's another reason for taking the medium of the photocopied fly-poster. It engages with the people outside of the art world goldfish bowl far more than any publicly funded, politically correct, agenda driven art work can.
It's time that artists stopped preaching to the converted - it's not big, it's not clever and anyway it's too bloody easy.

April 2004

A funny thing happened...

2004-01-01T12:06:00.000+01:00

on the way to the Tate

A planned day of work unexpectedly turned into a day of time with old friends, but rapidly descended into the rabid pit of art world inspired lunacy.

A recent trip to a London gallery to deliver some work for exhibition was preceded, quite unexpectedly, by a phone call from Mexican artist Luis Ituarte and his film maker partner Dr. Gerda Govine-Ituarte, who I'd struck up a friendship with a month earlier at the Florence Biennale. They were on their way home via London and were planning on visiting the Tate Modern. Would we like to meet up? In all the time this alleged powerhouse of high culture has been open my partner and I had never actually had time to check it out - so indeed this seemed quite fortuitous. Another chance to catch one of my favourite paintings in the country - Franz Kline's 'Meryon' in it's new gallery setting.
The following day we set off early - everything was moving along fine. We enjoyed an untroubled drive up the motorway (which has never happened before), dropped off the work at the gallery, took a lazy amble up the road to the nearest tube, and waited for our train into town..
Before we can get on the train we're interrupted by another phone call - this time it's Joe Mangrum, another artist we met at the Biennale; he's on his way to home to San Francisco via London where he'll be this afternoon. Did we fancy meeting up? at the Tate Modern perhaps? What started out as a good day just kept getting better!
So after a pleasant tube ride (again never a common experience), some great tube station modern architecture and a short walk we get to Tate Modern. Expectantly we descend the entrance ramp and behold the current media hyped spectacle, Olafur Eliasson's 'Weather Project'.
Which is fine. In a big yellow sun in a hotel basement garage kind of fashion. I think we're convinced of it's implicit greatness through it's explicit BIGNESS (there's a job here for a mathematician to establish the exact quantitative relationship between artistic seriousness and BIGNESS - a zippy little equation shouldn't take too long to whip up). Needless to say there's no shortage of punters oohing and aahing (the atmospheric wonder of breathing difficulties in cold ice for asthmatics), rattling on about the sense of 'the spiritual' in this work, the 'monumental scale' of the work. These very same punters would likely walk right past the Gothic leviathan that is Cologne Cathedral because it was a 'church'. Despite the fact it took six centuries to complete and has the kind of presence that can only be related to, in an aesthetically atheistic fashion, as some great, Armageddon inspired, smoke blackened, extraterrestrial landing - unless of course it was on a modern art tourist map - perhaps the Germans should rebrand it...
Anyway, at the Tate we met our friends. Amongst the happy-clappy art-world, new-age hippies running up to this Glastonbury festival installation, raising their arms and chanting art bollocks mantras to an artifice of sun in a very dull day coloured brick warehouse.
We couldn't cope with the dark any more and didn't want to waste what short amount of time we had left turning blue from a combination of UV deprivation and carbon dioxide inhalation. We thought the best way to attack a one afternoon visit to the Tate was in relating it to Dante's Divine Comedy (even the title seems appropriate in retrospect) so we started at the top, with the noble plan of descending the seven levels of hell, sorry - artsville.
Like lemmings in a cultural IKEA garage we were shepherded by the Saturday afternoon art-shopping crowd around the current curatorial favourite of randomly associated collections of cultural artefact. Bill Viola attempted to confuse and confound with pseudo religious video doom (in a lightless room of course). But his attempts at messing my head up counted as naught in comparison to the frottage and beating dished out by other viewers - I think I actually stood on two student fans of Mr. Viola (serves 'em bloody well right for attempting a transcendental experience on the floor of a dark room) and I also unwittingly hoofed a discarded drinks carton into somebody in a fashion that would've inspired Pele.
I'd recommend art critics view this work in the same kind of lunatic conditions that we, the general public punters, have to. They might hold back some of their literary hyperbole when they have to fight for the right to view in an atmosphere of body odour, loud whispering and bodies on the floor whingeing at being stood on or fallen over.
Elsewhere in the asylum the usual chin strokers were fondling their goatees at the usual suspects. Stressy attendants were hassling a snappy happy photographer whose flash light was obviously threatening to permanently erode a Rodin bronze. The 'beautiful people' were sucking in their cheeks for the benefit of the other 'beautiful people' who were pretending not to notice by wearing black sunglasses - this in an art gallery did obviously not strike them as odd behaviour. Perhaps they were being 'ironic' and not 'moronic' as I initially interpreted it. And of course there were the culture tourist victim kids in tow, ever going on in an ever honest kid fashion about 'that's not art Dad - that's crap'. And Dad's tried to explain the intricacies of twentieth century art theory versus 'crap' to kids who'd rather be bored at home in front of one television showing Big Brother than bored here in front of a bank of boxes endlessly, relentlessly showing repeats of Bruce Naumann TV.
THANK GOD for Franz Kline's 'Meryon'. It was the cheesecake and double cream desert to the soylent green dog's dinner of much that we saw that day. It enlivened me like a double espresso, morning nicotine fix and sent me on my way - to a moment I shall hold as an epiphany in my obviously ever sad, art-world life.
I did take the name of the work and the artist - but my ensuing euphoria at having been kicked in the mental bollocks by new art has since hoovered the names away. And it doesn't really matter - it could quite literally have been by anybody.
We entered a room; a relatively quiet room considering the mayhem of the preceding exhibits, and came to a Tate note on the wall. Usual sort of nonsense - metaphysical horse-shite puddle-deep title, artist's name, year of creation, collector, corporate sponsor etcetera. And the work itself.
A door. Perhaps twelve feet tall or more, with huge great steel hinges AND NO HANDLE. God - the significance of this work seemed otherworldly to me after the experiences upstairs. I may even have stroked my chin in some representational orgy of mental onanism. Hellfire, I was mildly impressed. Thank god something contemporary in this museum hell-hole had moved me (if only two inches to the left). I was even enthusing with Gerda over the quality of this piece.
Now I've never professed to be the world's foremost font of art theory and history knowledge, but from the age of eleven my parents bought me art biographies because I wanted them. I've read on art, art history, and art theory since because I was obsessed with the subject. I've always practised the visual arts, from the age of eleven I've been painting with oils. And I've kept a fairly solid record of the work I've created over the last dozen or so years. I've had discussions and arguments with curators and gallery managers who've been only too willing to display their limited knowledge rather than admit to it. I'm not unaware of the contemporary developments in fine art - officially sanctioned, state supported or otherwise. But this got me.
I turned to the left to leave the room and enter the next gallery and saw in the next room the exact same door.
Same hinges, same height, same aesthetic (i.e. none) and importantly same lack of door handle. I returned, in a puzzled kind of fashion, to the original 'art' door with its 'art' plaque of authenticity. Slow dawning realisation - in a rosy cheeked fashion if you get my picture (Gerda comes to the same conclusion simultaneously and laughs hysterically at my dumbfounded state). The plaque in fact had referred to the work to its right, not to its left. The door was plainly and simply a bloody door.
I, with the accidental assistance of the Tate's curators, had mistaken it for a piece of art. The title was so vague that it wouldn't deny the relevance of it. The supporting exhibits so 'sublime' that they didn't deny the truth of it. And my tacit acceptance of the museum's authority through mere presence wouldn't deny the validity of it.
I'd been had. But not by some sly, shooting from the hip, tabloid TV anti-art hack or a wit ridden YBA, but by myself. Brilliant!
So what chance do the general public stand when they come here with some vague notion of attaining cultural enlightenment?
Next I had visions of security guards lurking in a darkened room somewhere, taking the piss as they sit watching that corner of that room, taking odds on which Tate Modern punter is next going to stand in front of that door, read that plaque and stroke their bloody chins in art world wonder.
I'm not sure which divine levels led to which divine moments of enlightenment - but the toilets definitely led to another of their own. I can't have been the first person to think it - but well, that environment kind of focuses the attention into art world solipsism. I'm in the loo of British Modern Art plc pissing on a replica Duchamp. I mentioned this heresy to my fellow denizens of the pissoir but it was just so much grain tossed onto the barren sod of the day's ongoing high art sitcom.
The Tate Modern BIG art experience could only be topped with a visit to the Restaurant (non-smoking - consequently containing a great number of fretful nicotine starved artists). It looked fantastically black and shiny and modern. Stuffed with scores of the great unseated, attempting to hunter-gather an insufficient quantity of seating. Insufficient perhaps, but beautifully arranged. A kind of Corbusieresque 'machine for waiting'.
What else awaited us following our Tate Modern branded coffee cups with Tate Modern branded sugar and Tate Modern branded milk substitute?
What could top refreshments in MacTate?
The gift shoppe. And here was the point I feel of the whole experience. Escalators whisk the expectant punters up and down the Divine Comedy like some great badly lit department store until at last, by purpose or accident, they find themselves at Tate bookshop central.
I can cope with the monographs, I can cope with the theory, I can even cope with the world's most expensive living painter (Richter), being promoted in what was probably the world's most expensive living art book. But the final straw was the Tate Modern branded associated tourist nick-knackery. Give away, disposable, mass-produced supposed 'multiples'. 'Multiples'? - must be art then - best keep 'em safe. They might be valuable one day, even if they do look like ping pong balls with 'Tate Modern' printed on them - best stick them behind that limited edition Elvis commemorative dinner plate.
I know I'm always being accused of being a miserable, cynical old bastard. But do they have to make it so easy? Perhaps it's never been about art alone and perhaps I've got rose tinted spectacles (though welding goggles would probably be more appropriate) when it comes to my memories of the old Tate. But since the worst of the various sins of post-modernist over-intellectualism have allied consumerism as a both the subject of art and art theory - the marketing department, not the art, seems to have taken over the museum.

I'll go back to the old Tate next time (sorry - Tate Britain) - hopefully it'll be stuffed with old farts like me and there'll be room to see some Art between the punters.

January 2004

Copy shop art

2003-02-02T11:34:00.000+01:00

For too long the photocopy has been sidelined by the art establishment as either a business tool - unrelated to the craft conscious gallery environment, or if taken on board as a pseudo avant-garde tool for the conceptual arena. It is time that the photocopy as a reproductive art tool was brought alongside other established 'fine' art tools.
The celebration of the woodcut and the etching was their opening of the art marketplace's affordability; but the market stall holders have closed ranks again. A limited edition, in any one of the many accepted fine art formats, particularly if produced by a resident of the accepted art canon, can far outstrip in price a single piece painting or drawing by a 'lesser' artist.
The engraving was originally a reproductive tool of commercial use so it has no reason to rate hierarchically above the photocopy.
Accusations of the crudity of black and white photocopying are elsewhere held up as the singularly aesthetic beauty and reason of the woodcut print.
And when Polaroid photography has entered the commercial gallery streets how can we accuse photocopying of the impersonality of its mechanistic detachment from its creator.
The reason why the photocopy has not been accepted as these and other forms of reproduction is because of its absolute opposition to the elitism of the fine art gallery world.

If I can sell a limited edition print, using a photocopier, for less than the price of a pint of beer then that's progress.

February 2003

Scapegoat for an atrocity

2003-01-11T11:51:00.000+01:00

Following the initial idea for this painting, the process for the continuation of the work develops from a natural mechanics of the convolution of thought. Producing a piece specifically to be shown in such an art historically rich location as Florence with all the accumulated associations of history painting led to this work being loosely associated with the mythology of antiquity. However, I have always felt that artists bear a responsibility to social concerns and it would have been an abdication of this responsibility not to refer to the current conflicts outside of the rarefied environment of 'Art' which still too often claims an autonomous relationship with society at large.
Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax of his wings melted, and he perished for his pride. In this respect my depiction of Icarus represents many things. The black and the gold are a symbol of the global political greed for oil - and my response is summed up with the cut-up newspaper text.
There are further combinations of references to contemporary life and art-historical tradition. The old colonial notion of 'the noble savage', still pushed to the consumers of news and represented in the painting by the black warrior, is a commentary on the current political and media community's obsession with identifying a common 'popular' enemy. A symptom of controlling dissent well demonstrated by Orwell's INGSOC of '1984'. In the linguistic currency of modern news-casting the 'civilised' Western world is fractured by political difference whereas the 'uncivilised' Middle East is split by religious or 'tribal' difference with all the semantic associations of a backwards looking society yet to reach our levels of 'sophistication'.
The Middle East was the birthplace of modern mathematics, astronomy and medicine - and this is ignored as foreign armies roll in under the guise of civilising an un-modernised culture.
Icarus represents the collapse of western political morality, the impotence of the idealism of the United Nations in the face of global capitalism and the callous indifference of the majority of western peoples whose only interpretation of the events is as television spectacle.
Icarus represents the tragedy of the events of September 11th 2001 - particularly its political manipulation into being the scapegoat for an act of military aggression that had been planned years before this horrendous terrorist act.
In the painting none of the figures take notice or is even aware of the unfolding tragedy as it is carefully and erroneously mediated by the politically and economically controlled news media, here represented by the illegible jumble of stencilled texts.
The quotation is from the Roman poet Marcus Annæus Lucan:
'Trahit ipse furoris
Impetus, et visum est lenti quæsisse nocentem.'

'They are borne along by the violence of their rage, and think it is a waste of time to ask who are guilty.'

November 2003

Make a difference - make a mess

2003-01-01T11:44:00.000+01:00

Our glorious leaders have found the world not to be of their liking and are on a mission to 'tidy' the 'mess'.
Meanwhile the art world - the world that claims to want to make people think, contemplates its navel - as ever.
Forget your art 'career'. do something to make art relevant again. It needn't interfere with your 'mode of production' for any more than one piece. If you claim to stand for art, then you stand for culture, you stand for reason and rationality against the natural order of violence and barbarity.
Make an A4 piece of work with the words 'no war' somewhere in it - PLAINLY. Photocopy as many as you can afford and make your town your gallery.
Fight the order and make a mess.
This isn't about art theory.
If you want irony, consider the fact that world leaders consider it morally inexcusable to assassinate a world leader but wholly acceptable to bomb civilians for their greater freedom. Stop 'deconstructing' their world before they absolutely deconstruct ours.
It's not about changing the world because they're not going to let us.
The mass media want a war because they want the ratings; the politicians want a war because it's about markets.
If they put a tenth of the military budget into peaceful solutions they could eliminate the inequities that foster the extremists - but they wouldn't control the prizes of conflict, the oil markets.
A war has an economic dividend for the victor. It's not about democracy, it's not about revenge, it's not about justice and it's not about freedom.
It's about cleaning up, ideologically and financially.
Don't let them clean up without at least making a noise - or they think they've got a mandate for murder.

Because you were too busy to make a mess.

January 2003

It's work

2002-01-10T11:42:00.000+01:00

I have been obsessed with creating visually since primary school age. It has been the one constant throughout my life. My parents encouraged it, even if they didn't understand the excesses of it, and by the time I started Secondary School I was already sure that the road I would choose as an adult would be that of the 'artist'.

The first stumbling block came when I applied for Higher Education. Over a nine year period I made four applications to study Fine Art, and was turned down on each occasion. On only one of these applications was I given a reason - my work already had 'too much specific focus'. After each failure I was determined to be successful the next time to the point where I drove myself mentally into the brick wall of a breakdown.
After almost ten years of working and never being considered 'commercially exhibitable' or qualified enough to be considered a 'serious fine art practitioner' I started to get small exhibitions, generally organized by other artists. My paintings, then abstract, were selling well but I felt that they were becoming increasingly irrelevant so in 1995 I stopped painting and looked at other mediums - primarily photocopying. Consequently the sales dried up but the excitement of a return to figurative work combined with the new modes of expression gave me the drive to continue and forget the bitterness I had always felt at being excluded from Higher Education.
Over the last few years I have been fortunate in that galleries are starting to take an interest in my work again, perhaps fuelled by the increasing fashion for figurative work, and it has enabled me to work with fewer of the financial constraints of previous years. Acceptance into public collections and an invitation to show at the next Florence Biennale have also boosted my confidence and justified my belief in my work.
I do not consider painting irrelevant as a contemporary art practise, the world has a fixed notion of what constitutes 'Art', and that includes painting alongside other more supposedly 'avant-garde' methods of production. I have worked with found objects, installation, sound and new media but have always found them to be wanting. I always return to painting. There seems to be a singular truth to this medium - the practitioner takes what is in essence dirt and modifies it to a form of significance through the manufacture of 'art totems' - paintings. The truth of this is borne out by experience. Artists that would consider themselves of the 'conceptual' turn to painting, established musicians and actors turn to painting, even writers turn to painting. This is because they have realised that their initial forays into a, perhaps shallow, search for notions of posterity will probably be consigned to the cultural bin of ephemera rather than the canon of human cultural progress. I'm not saying that this is where my work is destined - but I'd be lying if I didn't say I'd like the look of the road map.
I consider my work to be 'Modernist' in that I love the mediums I use. I want my audience to love them too; I want then to get up close and wallow in the visceral glory of what paint or collage or newspaper can look like when it is subjected to attention of detail. This is why I have not returned to abstraction, for when you look at one of my paintings of an individual you know that the representation is made up of solid paint. The representation has to be there to make the medium all the more obvious.
The subject matter of my work tends mostly towards a quiet critique of our society's gradual erosion of its own compassion and humanity. There is little point in being the didactic zealot - nobody listens anymore. But I just feel the need to stand up and say the best way I know, through painting, that some things are unjust. Today the greatest global injustice is a singular poverty of aspiration tied to a very visible wealth of expectation.
My work is simultaneously a celebration of what I do and a call to the audience that we should notice what we are doing to ourselves.

October 2002

Waiting for a gap in the traffic...

2002-01-05T11:23:00.000+01:00

Modernism never went away. I'll rephrase that. The Modernism of Fry, Bell, Greenberg et al may certainly have fluctuated in its importance as a canonical term in recent art theory, but the notions of modernism or modernity have not. The view of high Modernism as a stripping away of the 'non-art' aspects of artistic practice, 'the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself.' (1) From the late 1960s the representation of 'other' or excluded art histories became prevalent and Modernism, despite protestations from its opponents, subsumed movements with a less overtly political element (Pop, Minimalism). Because of the nature of these movements (defined more as intellectual than political) and the current movements in criticism outside of Art, Modernism almost morphed into Post-modernism.
As before in art history, the avant-garde slip into the comfort of becoming the vanguard and the new avant-garde can only define itself in oppositional terms to the established hegemony. With Marxist and Feminist art practice coming to the fore during the 1960s and the Modernist 'top league' being almost exclusively white, male and American this critically driven art movement led to its own, self-predicted end.
Greenberg understood that the seeds of Modernist criticism and practice's downfall would have been sown by Modernist criticism itself. 'I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant. Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism.' (1)
Since the very finely tuned definitions of what actually constituted Modernist practice were contemporary with the paintings of the Abstract Expressionists (and they both fed off each other) the two terms have become almost synonymous. Defenders and critical supporters of Pop, Feminist, Marxist and Minimalist work frequently defined themselves oppositionally to Modernism, primarily because its chief promoter and protagonist, Greenberg, allied it to the Abstract Expressionists.
Modernism is not an artistic doctrine as such; though the following was written in 1972 and could be considered revisionist I feel it is an honest account and defence of Modernism - then and now. Rosalind Krauss wrote '...it was precisely its methodology that was important to a lot of us who began to write about art in the early 1960s. That method demanded lucidity. It demanded that one not talk about anything in a work of art that one could not point to.' (2)

The attacks levelled at Modernism should really have been directed at Greenberg and his very narrow perception of how Modernism should be applied if used as a prescription for art production. I think most would agree that didactic work produced in this manner does not stand the test of time, and it applies to even supposed Modernist work, especially that not produced in its own, relevant, time. That's probably a very long winded way of defining 'old hat'.
You cannot stop progress in Art - even if the progression seems initially retrograde. The most astounding work is always the reactionary. You might not like it - but that is not why it has been done. The best new work is done because it hasn't been done before. Its the journey of a succession of artists trying their hand at a brand of shamanism. The popular tabloid interpretation of this places the artist somewhere between being 'difficult' and 'downright mad'. This consideration, of the artist as 'madman' is also played up to by practitioners and supporters of the arts. Some of the more esoteric art movements: minimalism, conceptualism, arte povera etc through the actions of both supporters and opponents (not to mention egotistical creators) have made the artist/mad association easy to support - but look at this from another angle. Admittedly this requires a definition of Art that is not particularly popular, critically, at the moment - art as the search for spiritual significance.
I do not define this spirituality in any formal religious sense, rather as a base spirituality of humanity. The same base that leads various individuals to form religious sects for others to follow. Personally I would define myself as an 'unholier than thou atheist' and in its own way this humanism is my spiritual faith. It's a little like understanding an Anarchist society as having more organisation than any supposed 'beneficient' government system. I look on artists as being those who, on behalf of society, attempt to manufacture objects of totemic significance, with no function beyond that significance. The theorising of Modernism came very close to establishing this but realised that definitions of aesthetic 'quality' were essentially impossible to quantify. The attempt to deconstruct the eternally undeconstructable was at an end - and criticism turned in on itself as if to establish whether the questions were being asked correctly. I think we can be pretty sure that if artists are still able to outrage and offend (even if it is sometimes obvious and formulaic) that perhaps the theorist's game is up!
Threre is a critical assumption that art cannot exist without corporate or public support; even more specifically without critical reference. On looking at certain African Art, curator Jan Hoet stated in 1992 'I did not find any houses of the well-to-do containing contemporary art. Nor any press providing artistic and cultural information... And in spite of everything there is art." (3) Art has always existed outside of the critical idiom - particularly in the last 200 years where its very nature, in being progressive, was to be transgressive. This idea of critical reinforcement of any art production was brought about by the methodologies of Modernist criticism and widely available, but prescriptive art education. Perhaps being given the benefit of the doubt by a fellow art historian, Edward Lucie-Smith describes Hoet's words as 'slightly naïve' (4) . I would describe it, being a painter, as strikingly arrogant. It is Greenberg's notion of the relevance of Kant taken to the extreme, abetted by, certainly in this country, the idea of the curator/critic knowing more about art than the artist.
We have arrived at a point where public art funding is determined increasingly by ideals of 'social inclusivity'. This agenda driven exhibition programme, that controls the majority of good public exhibition space, in its obsessive zeal to promote political correctness still alienates certain artistic agendas. Admittedly this is only based on personal and anecdotal experience, but most of the curators, gallery managers and directors that I have dealt with have been white, middle class and degree educated. The degree education being, for most, their only experience of adulthood outside of the rarefied atmosphere of professional arts administration. They have followed and swallowed the party line and can spit out the political correctness handbook verbatim - but sadly they have little real idea of both its increasing relevance and occasional irrelevance. Many are from the odious school of '...some of my best friends are ... black/ gay/ disabled'
Because of the insular nature of their upbringing, education and work life they look on pc as a convenient label system and ideological blame generator. Anything that they cannot fit rigidly into this liberal censorship system will not be accommodated, because in their 'finding it difficult to read' they assume the rules must be being broken. A male artist painting the female nude is assumed heterosexual therefore the work must be exploitative and consequently not 'good art'. The gay artist painting the male nude is often sidelined as producing 'homoerotic wall decoration' (initial presentations of the work of Caillebotte for example). The female artist dealing with the male nude is either producing pornography or wall decoration - in either case she is undermining the Feminist Struggle. This situation has continued for too long. Since when did administrative officials decide, to any great critical acclaim, what should or shouldn't be the subject matters of artist's working practice.
With the increase in widely available art and art history education came an increased number of potential critics, historians and curators. Now we find that formal study in curating is almost essential to secure a post in this field. Though the increased general knowledge that this has permitted in the public perception of the arts is to be lauded, the control and restrictions that the establishment put on artists is not. Since the early 1980s the general perception of many Fine Art students is that they are being forced to work within a critical frame set by knowledgeable but tunnel visioned tutors, who seem more obsessed with being 'there' at the start of some ground breaking new art movement. Tutor as guru, and students as acolytes of the latest critical sensibility. Those students that refuse to comply will be sidelined and regardless of commitment or quality of work find their grades suffering at the end of this three year farce. Those that don't fight, and who can blame then when they're essentially funding their own grades, and submit (essentially opposing all progressive art movements in history) will arrive from their 'educations' with the grades that will be recognised by their tutor's contemporaries in the art world outside of education.
This glut of intellectualism in art criticism began to feed directly into art production, partly with minimalism, but most surely with conceptualism. Summed up beautifully by Alison Green 'The canonisation of Conceptual Art hinged on essentialising arguments about its difference from the expressionism and/or phenomenology of the art that preceded it.' (5) In other words Conceptual Art is the idea of the creator and the intellectual response of the consumer - the replacement of the perceived art object by ideas and thought. The concept of Conceptual Art verges on the sublime. If it could work as cleanly as its proponents hoped, it would assign to Art the kind of power that exists in music. The disembodied aesthetic. Unfortunately by its own definitions Conceptual Art is tied to language; signifier and signified. Any associations made cannot be controlled in the manner that some conceptual artists claimed, and how could the consumer of the idea disassociate themselves from the media, process and environment of delivery. Not only will the 'uninformed' art public make these qualitative judgements but the critics and historians do, and have done.
Because of our common held assumptions of what Art 'is' (despite its difficulty to define) I don't feel conceptualism is the end point that so many others feel it is. That is a positive step - if we ever establish what Art is in a quantitative measure we will no longer have what it really is in its deeper sense.
Art criticism is useful, but it is neither science nor art. Art criticism, history and theory are only selective opinionation - hopefully considered, informed and respectful of differing opinions. Modernism gives us a way to interpret certain aspects of certain sorts of art. As does Feminism, Marxism, Queer theory etc. If you want to know why artists do what they do then listen to what they've been saying.

'the modern artist tends to become the last active spiritual being in the great world.' Robert Motherwell, 1944.

'Pictures must be miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.' Mark Rothko, 1947.

'Indefinite stirrings of the urge to create.' Wassily Kandinsky, 1914.

'art may possibly be one endeavour that fulfils what another age might have called "man's spiritual needs". Or, another way of putting it might be that art, deals analogously with the state of things 'beyond physics' where philosophy had to make assertions.' Joseph Kosuth, 1969.

Obviously these are selective quotes to support my suggestion - but I strongly identify with the sentiment. I paint because I have to. From my earliest memories it has been a fundamental need - and my pursuit of it has been singular and selfish. If I am honest I must say that it is the most important thing in my life and will always come first. If this sounds extreme it is only because too few artists are willing to admit it. Their friends and families do not like what it implies. Those that can give it up? Make your own mind up regarding that.
All artists view themselves as producing work in and for a modern world with all its imperfections, injustices and inequities. Whether they have worked in a Marxist, Queer, Feminist or Modernist critical sensibility all artists are trying to achieve similar ends. To raise awareness of the fact that we are not at the end of the human journey, we are only on the road and perhaps the journey can be made a little more palatable through understanding it. When bison were painted on cave walls they were painted in modern times. When Paolo Uccello struggled with perspective in 'The Battle of San Romano' he was painting in modern times. When Chris Ofili painted with elephant dung he was painting in modern times.
I cannot speak for sculptors or conceptual artists because what they do does not move me as painting does, but I am sure that regardless of message or feeling they wish to get across to their audiences their reasons for doing it are similar if not identical. A fundamental drive to form significance from the insignificant. It is the prime totem of the human struggle, the cultural ordering of natural disorder - the celebration of our difference - our Culture. If we understand what Art is to a point where it could be produced by recipe and be of equal significance across cultures we will have arrived - there will be no 'modern', there will be no 'future'. Only now, and before now.
I am pretty sure that we will never arrive. Humanity's cultural production and achievement is an affront to nature. By cultural achievement I refer to everything 'not natural'. Me, writing this. You, reading it. The earliest searching out of shelter; the journey from Earth to Moon. Language is culture, building is culture, cars, money, chopsticks, fence-posts. Alexander Blok wrote in 1908 'Every promoter of culture is a demon, cursing the earth and devising wings in order to fly away from it.' (6)
For me the visual arts are the most significant of these 'devised wings' - always being re-configured to fly higher and further as the notions of modernity bring the other 'wings' of science, technology etc. nearer. Science chases art in the escape from nature - that is why all good art is modern art. The mind must guide the hand. That is the value of conceptualism in Art.
So the artist working 'now' is essentially doing the same as the artist working 'then', whenever. Modernism is a manner of identifying certain aspects of this. Modernity is always with us, always changing as science moves into the void left by the arts as they move on.

Paraphrasing a current jazz musician - 'Modernism doesn't go away. It just waits for a gap in the traffic.'

May 2002

(1) Clement Greenberg, 'Modernist Painting' 1965
(2) Rosalind Krauss, 'A View of Modernism' 1972
(3) Jan Hoet, 'Africa Now. The Jean Pigozzi Collection' 1991
(4) Edward Lucie-Smith, 'movements in art since 1945, Issue based art and globalisation' 2001
(5) Alison Green, 'Duration Duration Duration' 2002
(6) Alexander Blok, 'Nature and Culture' 1908

Statement 1

2002-01-04T11:40:00.000+01:00

The visual arts are the focus of culture; they are the most important road leading humanity away from its old home of 'nature'. From the earliest finger scratched image in the dirt, to the cave paintings of Lascaux to the iron 'angel of the north' they represent our fundamental desire and drive to replace the natural chaos with a cultural order. The visual arts so often have served spiritual ends because of this representation. At its basest level artists take dirt, model it and make significance. It is no coincidence that the state funded galleries of the world have taken on the presence that only religious buildings once had.

Art isn't about communication. It's about the search for significance and control in a world of anonymity and chaos.

April 2002

April 25 2000

2000-01-04T11:35:00.000+01:00

I feel I have finally arrived at a point in my painting career where my work seems to have direction and motivation of its own.
I can remember the first painting I did at Primary School that showed me that I was capable of something special. For the first time I wasn't the outsider child - I had done something that my peers approved of; I wasn't used to their positive response and immediately destroyed the painting.
I have always painted and loved the visual arts since. It has provided my only source of continual mental security despite the intense difficulties I have had with it - particularly since adolescence. Thirty years from that first painting I am achieving what I have only recently realised I was looking for. At last my work is reflecting directly what I am personally, without the sense of political or methodological artifice that previous work contained. When I leave any painting I have no care for it any more; I just need to move on to the next piece of work. If people appreciate it, I am grateful - if not, to be honest, I couldn't care. I will not modify my work for the benefit of those that think I do it on a whim for public or critical approval. It is difficult to say with any certainty what the current work is about beyond its obvious themes of isolation, loneliness and the dysfunctionality of our modern technologically, media driven society.
People are forgetting that Art drives Science. The artist conceptualises the new, the dangerous and the unacceptable. The scientists follow, and attempt to rationalise these ideas.

April 2000

Giving up Art

1999-01-12T11:28:00.000+01:00

Somebody once said that painting was a compromise. That has to rate as the understatement of all time; painting is not a compromise - it has become, at least on a personal level, an absolutely bankrupt ideal.

Whatever ideals or concepts are considered for the subject of a painting, or for that matter any art practise, it has become clear to this point in time that they will not be achieved. As soon as the first mark is made, no matter what care is taken, the idea is unrealisable. That first mark is a compromise, but from that point on the entire exercise becomes another failure.

I love that old romantic notion that you so often get shoved in your face when at some exhibition of one of the old great and goods - you know where they're on their deathbed and the last words are along the line of 'now I am beginning to understand' - I think the technical term for that is 'bullshit'.

The need that I have to make a painting that is not a failure is obsessional - there is no way that I can see myself not continuing in it. But with an escalating record of failure behind me it certainly does not make it any easier.

The aims of Art, at least in the terms that I personally define them, are worthwhile - but I feel, ultimately unobtainable.

I defy any artist out there to say that they have created what they set out to achieve. They're either lying, or not trying hard enough.

Or they're making wall decorations.

December 1999

Turner on - tune in and drop out

1999-01-10T11:17:00.000+01:00

It's that time of year again - the critical celebration of the establishment's annexing of the avant-garde on the planet Art. Watch in wonder as the vetted panel make their selections in terms of politically correct under representations and live in fear of accusations of knee-jerk philistinism should you dare to oppose this state sponsored cultural fascism.
It is no secret that the cultural Emperor of old, the Academy, realised that it couldn't compete let alone beat the new young turks of the early twentieth century art world. So it transformed itself from Napoleon to Nosferatu and set about draining the life blood from new art by letting it join the club. The new establishment is about state approved, quasi avant-gardism.
The work presented at the Turner Prize is not intrinsically bad because it is on the short list of the Turner Prize, I'm not even suggesting that it is bad. However it is not new, just because it is short listed for the Turner Prize. Neither is it good, just because it is short listed for the Turner Prize - that is the line that we the punters are being asked to swallow.
Because primarily of the nature of the work, as opposed to its merits, the current star of the crop is Emin. Her work is being discussed in terms of how honestly she bares her identity, persona and life history to the viewer. As if a pissed-off, self-obsessed, miserable artist were something new.

Well here's news for the culture pundits:
All the artists I know, and I count myself among them, are madly selfish, egotistical, depressive, self centred and narcissistic - and if they weren't, they wouldn't be artists. I don't hold these to be faults; they are positive character traits required to enable artists to stick mind jarring ideas forcefully into the viewer's subconscious.
For an artist, work in this vein should be naturally simple, and relatively straightforward to get across to the audience. There are formulae in the visual arts as there are in music. Ask Leonard Cohen - there are certain rules to creating a successfully miserable piece of music.
The subject matter of much art today is not original and neither is the methodology of its presentation.
Since Duchamp made his greatest cultural mark (not getting exhibited) at the 1917 SIA Exhibition, the idea of the found object as art, combined in an unholy alliance with 'conceptualism' have taken over a critically neutered contemporary art scene as the only way forward. When the new art vanguard adopts the credentials of an eighty year old avant-garde and claims that other art methodologies are old hat, it rings a little hollow.

Firstly, conceptualism is as flawed as painting in league tables of artistic purity since it still relies upon the transportation of the cerebral into the material.
Secondly, the contention of progress in Art from point A (less good Art), to point B (intrinsically better Art) is based in most around modern (post nineteen-sixties) art history education which in turn was based on the loaded theorising of American critic (and puppet master of Jackson Pollock) Clement Greenberg. The apex of Modernist art practice just happened to peak two paces to the left of Greenberg and he was there to document his entire history.

The new avant-garde attempts to define itself simultaneously in terms of its post-modernity (creators and critics) and in modernist theorising (critics and curators).
We have recently been witness to the Tate wheeling out their duly appointed 'Curator of Interpretation' who is as guilty as the obsequious critics in continually 'interpreting' the artworks in an obscurantist jargon cocktail of modernist, post-modernist and metaphysical epithets. No doubt he is convinced of the validity and substance of the artworks but not even he can convincingly explain them in terms that those outside of art academe would understand. Some would even suggest he was unable to explain them to viewers with a solid grasp of art historical language. Yet surely the nature of his job is to do just that - relate 'high art' and its theory to a wider audience.
From his recent television appearances it is plain he was trained to deal with the reactionary tabloid hack, but when confronted with an intelligently questioning journalist he gave the appearance of a startled bunny contemplating its own road-kill.
This is the kind of post that only a hardened masochist would knowingly take on - as long as the 'Curator of Interpretation' is available to field the flak dished out by an increasingly art-disillusioned public and media, the higher echelons of the public art bureaucracy can maintain their distance and continue justifying Greenbergian careers of fame by association.
The Turner Prize is not worthy of its namesake as long as it has to be defended by these razor suited administrators. It is no longer a celebration of the best, or most significant of British Art. It has become, especially since its regular sponsorship by television, another money generating side show for the British public art establishment to pompously celebrate their assumed cultural superiority over a supposedly art ignorant public - maintaining a closed circle clique of approved creators, colleges, critics and curators in their own chummy camp of post Dadaist, pseudo-intellectual arrogance.

October 1999

The neo-modern

1998-01-10T11:31:00.001+01:00

We are at a point in time, culturally and socially, arguably similar to that of the late nineteenth century. New communication technologies open the world to the us in a manner similar to the way industrialisation of the late 1800's brought aspects of world culture to its then new audience. The modern 'surfer' can aimlessly travel the world via the internet taking in the new modernity as easily as could the 'flaneur' of Baudelaire's day - the 'passionate spectator' of Haussmann's Paris. Artistically too we are at a point of change. Since its common coinage as a descriptor of Art that followed high Modernism attempts have been made to adequately sum up the identity of the Post-Modern in relation to the visual arts. In the critical environment of post-modernism even the work of the Modern has been redefined and consequently the theorising behind it too - Jean-Francois Lyotard destroys the clear cut definitions of modern and post-modern by demonstrating that by their precipitation of each other, they actually become each other. Similarly he showed, through a raft of definitions of post-modernity, that you cannot define a thing if you have not experienced it in its totality. Will the post-modern end on its own? If it is left to follow its logical path it can only end with the end of Art - as the only obvious target would seem to be the quest for incessant originality; an originality that only actually exists in the critical assessment of work rather than its creation.
There is no original work. What is actually being addressed are works that fall within the tenets of what is considered classically acceptable as a 'modern', and it is this notion of classicism that should be addressed; not the false notion of post-modernism. Classicism is not an aesthetic judgement - it is a political judgement of the artistic vanguard and establishment who work together to maintain it, and through it their own validation. Modernism in the visual arts is useful only as a definition, not a creed as Clement Greenberg saw it. What this man did for the arts was useful in that it gave us a critical reference for Western work that stood outside of, what were then, traditional Western terms of interpretation. His approach and methodologies, though biased and extremely selective, have widened the approach to art production and criticism since. In fact it could be argued that the extreme selectiveness he employed were instrumental in opening up the art historical debates from other perspectives. Already it is obvious that we are in need of a new modernism, a return to an aesthetic sensibility. Though work that is being produced now has moved on from the idea of the democratic 'anyone calling themselves an artist is an artist' argument, the criticism has not. The artist now is not satisfied with the work standing as a statement of almost nihilistic 'anti-art' sentiment. This argument has been taken to absolute extremes and can no longer be validated as original. Instead we are seeing a return to arguments of content and quality. It still isn't fashionable, hence the general difficulty in obtaining a fixed definition of a work's meaning from the artist. Those creating now are still living in the shadow of Post-structuralist philosophy and many still look on it as some great shibboleth - never to be challenged. In the quest for originality the artists, guided by the critics and philosophers, turned their eye inwards onto the subject of art itself as subject. In essence, it was the only choice that could follow on from the mutated Modernism that followed what was undoubtedly the United States' greatest contribution to western art. Work that was produced in direct opposition to Greenberg's vague notions of 'quality' had to be pulled into the pantheon somehow and in the early sixties that still involved rigidly structuralist, Modernist criticism. In reality one intellectual elite had only been replaced by another that was then spuriously claiming a democratisation of art was on its way. What replaced the aesthetic value imbued by any artist was the exhibitive value assigned by the art establishment to the point where culture is now not viewed as an abstract concept validated retrospectively by society but as a badge of intellectual merit planned in advance by committees of state.
It is possible to work with an underlying eclectic approach to both subject matter and methodologies without having to resort to hackneyed arguments about the post-modern. Many artists whose work would seem to follow on from Dadaist ant-art sympathies see their work as having personal and social significance beyond these arguments; they do not see their work as a vehicle for a message alone - in fact I would argue that many of the new British artists, whose work in particular seems to be described in this fashion, would consider the aestheticism of their work is far more important.
The Post-modern is useful only in terms of further defining Modernism from its origins and is essentially only a continuity of modernism - sometimes termed hyper-modernism. These are all useful, to a greater or lesser degree, in terms of avoiding the ideas of the 'end of (Art) history' but with regards to the actual creation of artworks they are invalid. People do not set out to create a work of 'Post-modern Art'. If we must have a new label, let it be a New Modernism - a return to the critical aesthetic giving the artist the opportunity to create work that has some relevance to the new modern audience - an audience already familiar with 'modern art', where validation of quality is not founded on post-modern hyper-obsession with language and semiology and the artist is not ground into politically correct subservience. I do not see this as a retrograde step - it can be the only way forward - to let the artist communicate without the bonds of corporate and state art politics.

To those claims of 'Art is Dead - long live Art' -

Post-modernism is dead - long live Neo-modernism.

October 1998

Surrealism and the feminine

1995-01-10T11:11:00.001+01:00

Though much of the Surrealist's theory behind their work involves the work of Freud, it would seem that sexuality was of more importance to their work (even if unintentionally). In particular in referring to an identity for the artist as they wished to be portrayed, and not working in relation to the notion of 'femininity' as the surrealist central organising metaphor of difference. Andre Breton wrote that 'the time should come to assert the ideas of woman at the expense of those of man' but the reasons for this he follows with 'the bankruptcy of which is today tumultuously complete'. So the 'feminine' was not seen as a progression but a reaction which still adds weight to the import of the former masculine. Many of the reasons for this looking to the feminine too were gendered in the masculine.
That which Surrealists found so attractive, the ideas of automatism and the unconscious mind were for them indicative of the female state of mind as opposed to the male state of mind which represented culture and control. Consequently this liberation of the feminine was rooted in traditional patriarchal ideology that though fought against was not broken free from. If the production of the art object is taken from the masculine and put into the feminine, for example in the work of Kahlo or Oppenheim, very different things are happening. Again the artist can be said to be dealing with the 'feminine' as an ideological start point but surely these articles are not doing this in the same way as their male counterparts. They are not standing outside of their own experience and looking into another; this is why Kahlo's and Oppenheim's work is particularly strong, I would say stronger than other (male) Surrealists. In comparing the genders of artists this way, there is an acceptance that this was an ideology adopted by male artists. However because it was experience translated 'second hand' I think it explains many of the problems that male Surrealists had in establishing a fixed start point outside of Freud or Marx.
An example of the problem in action can be seen with Meret Oppenheim's 'Object: Fur Breakfast'. To whom does it become a fetishistic object as stated by many critics. Is it a fetishized object now and if so was it when it was produced? The manner in which it was first exhibited would seem to suggest that it was just considered another juxtapository construction of ideas, however it has become increasingly important as an art object today because it has become more relevant to an increasingly sexually divergent and tolerant society. The idea of fur having fetishistic connotations was confirmed by Freud as would perhaps the association with cup/vagina and spoon/penis. However when contemporaries of Oppenheim, Man Ray and Dora Marr, photographed the piece the emphasis seems to be on creating as staged a representation of the actual expectation of a cup, saucer and spoon as possible. They seem to be more concerned with the dichotomy of utility and in-utility. Only later, when photographed for MOMA New York in 1993 does the spoon becomes 'involved' with the cup and saucer, mirroring current concerns in representing sexuality in art - but even though now this association can be freely made with this piece of work the gallery is still not prepared to put the spoon in the cup! Oppenheim's work should not be taken as being representative of the Surrealists approach to gender politics, indeed she compounds matters by posing naked for Man Ray at a printing press as if to break down the association of man with machinery.
Unfortunately this is not liberation, not that it was meant to be, but it reinforces the patriarchal ideals that Breton so wished to fight against. Beauty v brutality, nature v culture etc. He wrote in 1924 in the First Manifesto of Surrealism that concerns with 'our mental world' discovered by Freud were of the optimum importance to him. That the unconscious and dream states should not be neglected; indeed they should be encouraged. The only mention of woman is in reference to his sexual orientation - he finds women objects of desire.
This I feel is echoed throughout male Surrealist practise from painting, writing, found object to happenings - a dominant heterosexuality - and it is in this that the feminine is defined. Dali would seem to follow in this where his concerns with representation are related to various mental states, including those of paranoia that was thought would release normally repressed subject matters and imagery. Dali's particular interests are as different to Breton's as they are to Oppenheim's. Primarily I feel this is because each artist in addressing their subconscious or unconscious are in fact addressing their own identity and consequently that most repressed facet of identity, sexuality. An argument is made that these projections of desire apparent in for example Magritte's or Man Ray's work, that incorporate the feminine, do so because the desire is not projected onto the image of a woman. But the idea of women being more able to 'tap into' these areas of the unconscious is being used. However when we look at Surrealist images of automata they are nearly always male and in the sense of being 'automatic' or 'automated' they seem to be in actual opposition to this idea of reacting against a male dominated world. Similarly the relationship between women and automata is transferred to mannequins or dolls which too have their own associations with passivity etc. that only reinforce patriarchal means, and consequently show the artist's true intentions were related to their personal sexual identity.
Bellmer's use of parts of dolls to create seemingly independent representations of the human form are defined by their dress as particularly female. It has been argued that the artist was transferring a subconscious castration anxiety but I feel it displays more about a personal attitude to women; of being able to possess the female as a child would possess the original doll. And at the same time having such a degree of control of the idea of woman in his own mind that he could even mutilate it and transform it to suit his own fetishistic interests. Even the apparently banal title 'Poupee' (Doll) admits an unwillingness to name this extreme vision. True that the male doll may not have been available to produce work around similar ideas but the artist is in the business of creating and Bellmer used not what he had to but what he wanted to, even to the extent of dressing the dolls in a manner that it is clearly open to be interpreted as sexual in motivation.
Oppenheim, dealing with issues of abuse towards herself when she was a child, projects onto the abuser, her nurse, the image of the woman as a tied and trussed bird ready for cooking as if in some bizarre childhood revenge fantasy. Though this object 'Ma Gouvernante', would appear to have fetishistic undertones it is related to abuse and revenge for that abuse. Kahlo, even more particularly, addressed the personal issues of her womanhood rather than the general idea of 'woman'. It is interesting that despite his supposed ideology of art, Breton viewed Kahlo first as a woman 'endowed with all the gift of seduction' and then as an artist 'situated at that point of intersection between the political line and the artistic line.'
He viewed her work as related to Surrealism not probably because of the subject matter of her work but because of the way that the subject matter was portrayed. The supposed liberation of repressed images was attractive to Breton, however Kahlo's choice of images was personally and culturally specifically symbolic - not random or automatic. Also her work was related to the feminine in a personal sense, how could any man look at 'Henry Ford Hospital' of 1932 and realistically expect to identify with the particular pain and anguish present in the artist when she painted it?
Her work is related to the European Surrealists in that it deals with personal experience to an extreme of candour. Kahlo's is of the feminine whereas Bellmer's or Man Ray's is of the male heterosexual view and experience of the feminine. The work of Kahlo seems obsessed with certain recurring images: the foetus, the self-portrait, the family and personal injury. Much of this can be related to Kahlo directly; as a young girl she was involved in a road accident that resulted in an operation that left her unable to have children and permanently scarred. Kahlo's work differs specifically from the European Surrealists in that it does not deal with Freud - instead it deals with that which is personal to the artist. Her identity, without Freud as an intermediary. The European Surrealists looked to the writings of Freud first and assimilated imagery accordingly.
Breton applied the idea of using the concept of the feminine retrospectively to Surrealism mainly because of the problems faced by the group when they tried to identify with or ally themselves to Marxism. Certainly their work is best explained in terms of psychoanalysis as it directly deals with many of the same concerns both from the perspective of the artist and the spectator who, depending on gender, age, and whatever else constitutes an individual identity, interprets the work in a peculiarly individual manner. The mannequin of Masson, imprisoned in a cage, mouth covered and displaying a flower could mean as many different things to as many different people that viewed it. What does seem clear from studying the philosophies behind Surrealism is that they felt free to express in any way, on any subject they chose, including the subject of Surrealism itself. Certainly aspects of Surrealism portrayed an interest in the feminine that was unlike any other modern art movement, but through this Freudian based interest ran another seemingly common thread, certainly in Europe. Breton always sought the approval of Marxist groups but found organisations such as the French Communist Party unwilling to recognise the Surrealists as an autonomous allied revolutionary group. In his Second Manifesto of Surrealism he tried to simultaneously use the doctrines of Freud and Marx as influencing factors for his group's work. However he was explicit in defending the use of Freudian ideas but in the form that he felt they should be used and not as Bataille was using them. Basically without reference to the social (or Marxian ideology) and concentrating on the dark side of the psyche and studying methods by which decay or dissolution take place.
Though Marxian doctrine was important to Surrealists like Breton it cannot be said to support the movement as a foundation as did Freud's work. The most consistently followed subtext subject matter of Surrealism was not particularly the feminine, but the ideas of identity, sexual orientation and sexual identity. This would seem capable of supporting all of the varied artistic practises within Surrealism. Certainly imagery and subject matter that organises around the feminine appears both in the work of male and female Surrealist artists, but the origination of this subject matter comes from different perspectives so it does not seem fair, particularly to the women artists, to unify them as being part of a consistent subtext or theme of the movement when the origins of these artworks already have a unity in being based around the identity of the artist.

October 1995

The artist formally known as

1995-01-10T10:59:00.001+01:00

LUCID

1. The work comes first - the justifications come after to legitimise it.

2. Justify the justification - because it justifies the work.

3. Justify to the critics and historians - and justify it with justifiably historical critical language (USE TERMS SUCH AS REALITY, because you know what it means, and they know what it means, and you know that they don't know what you mean, and they know that you don't know what they mean, so everybody knows that nobody knows, but nobody is saying since nobody wants to be seen not to know, except the general public and they really don't know, and guess what you all knowing navel gazers -THEY DON'T FUCKING CARE).

4. Paint, sculpt, perform, find, video. Do whatever you have to do. BUT, whatever you do, don't believe your own publicity. If you wrote the bullshit and you can convince yourself you can definitely convince a critic or two...

5. If I become a critical success then this is AN EXAMPLE OF POSTMODERN IRONY.

6. If I and my work is destined to remain within the boundaries of cultural oblivion (non-fame), then this is the rant of a BITTER, TWISTED, UNRECOGNISED AND TORTURED GENIUS.

7. If the critics and historians ever manage to get their act together, then they will need something to over-analyse. In that case this is an example of MODERNISTPOSTMODERNIRONICYNICISM.

8. We're only artists, god help us all...

I didn't do it m'lud.

Take me down.

October 1995

Art and pornography

1995-01-05T11:21:00.001+01:00

There is a strong relationship between the artist and the pornographer in their respective interactions with 'society'. Though they initially appear to be at opposite ends of the cultural spectrum they do in fact occupy a similar utility. Both the artist and the pornographer are in the business of identifying aspects of the human condition, that perhaps we prefer to keep hidden from view, and putting them into a public arena. Neither is capable of producing an image or idea that cannot be identified with even if only negatively, for all that is available for use sits within the minds of everyone of us even if it is only rarely considered and then only considered as unpalatable.
Though art resides in the comfortable confines of 'high' culture it is to be seen at its strongest when it challenges these boundaries and makes the viewer question the very nature of art itself. Equally as there is good and bad art there is good and bad pornography. At its worst pornography only reinforces traditional male/female boundaries and relationships but at its best it can make us reassess not only our relationships with other people but how we interpret our own sense of identity. Lowest common denominator art like bad or indifferent pornography is nothing but a temporary distraction - the 'nice' picture acts as a transporter of instant gratification, a mental masturbation that can be used over and over again but provides no great act of stimulation or sense of satisfaction at having worked with the artist towards the construction of ideas. Bad art, like bad pornography is exploitative. Both attempt to do little beyond seeking the most return, usually financial, for the least outlay and neither have any respect for any damage they are doing to their respective media.
Some work inhabits the middle ground of respectability - abstraction in art, once at the cutting edge of the visual arts can now be seen as established culturally within a financial arena of aesthetic snobbery. It occupies the same place as erotica. One time pornographic and subversive but now occupying the safe ground of risque respectability. Some erotica, like some abstract art is a wonderful thing but generally like abstract art the more traditional masters provide more satisfaction and reward than the new pretenders who, in general, seem derivative and lacking verve.
What is probably more interesting occurs when the boundaries between art and pornography become blurred. What makes a Mapplethorpe photograph pornographic, as many have been accused. Is it the medium he used or the ideas he expressed? I feel that Mapplethorpe's work resists the traditionally defined label of 'pornographic' because though his work concerns primarily concepts of sexuality it is also about the aesthetic of the object or subject viewed. Pornography in general is more about a reportage of situation whereas Mapplethorpe seemed to have an almost modernist approach to his medium and the end result. So if the construction of the work is so versed in this how can the medium be accused of being the reason for his work achieving labels of pornography? The reason that his work is sometimes labelled this way is purely because of the subject matter - but who is in the position of deciding what should or shouldn't be the subject of art?
Pornography is defined as material designed to stimulate sexual excitement. Certainly art cannot do this without becoming pornographic by definition alone (similarly a photograph of a melon could prove sexually stimulating to a melon fetishist!), but when does this stop becoming art? Was this quandary of definition the purpose that Mapplethorpe set out for his work?
The definition of art is far harder to tie down than the definition of pornography... 'the exercise of human skill as opposed to nature, the creation of works of beauty or other special significance.' What is of significance is difficult if at all possible to specify and surely some pornography approaches these criteria; unfortunately when it does and a market of respectability awaits it, it too then becomes 'erotica'. Surely Reage's 'Story of O' or Nin's 'Delta of Venus' fit the definition of pornography but both have been culturally absorbed into the worlds of sanitised respectability and literature.
It appears that it is culturally unacceptable for an artwork to be also pornographic. Similarly pornography cannot simultaneously be art. We are so obsessed with separating these two so called disparate elements of our visual and literary culture that it results in artful pornography and pornographic art becoming sidelined as if somehow second rate to works of each of their respective primary genres regardless of any merits they may have.

May 1995

The celebration of difference

1994-01-01T11:14:00.001+01:00

The validating mark of any given society, both to itself and the outside world, is its culture; the lens of that culture is its art. As such, art represents the struggle of society as it attempts to move humanity away from the natural order. The natural order is, as is plainly obvious, an entity of massive disorder and chaos ruled overwhelmingly by three driving forces; birth, death and sex.
Our culture and indeed most cultures of our race's societies have attempted to disguise the brutishness of these most significant acts in our life by the concoction of rituals. The most elaborate and convoluted of these rituals revolve around that part of our lives that is with us the most frequent - sex. This is diluted and made palatable with romance, courtship, consent, marriage and particularly ritualistic, fetishism. Without these controls we are left with the blatant sexual act, that is crude, direct and if necessary, non-consensual. The rapist is at the apex of this natural pyramid. Those that profess a longing to 'get back to nature' are either deluding themselves to the actuality of nature, or they are dangerous!
They represent a return to the hierarchy of the survival of the fittest and as such are presenting themselves as the opposition of society. The more that society is rejected, the more that nature is espoused. Consequently, those that claim to live without the controlling factor of a society's culture - from its language to its high art - should be treated with care or at the very least suspicion. It is plain then that art has a role to play in identifying for us significant factors of our culture, and in identifying them it can make aware to us areas that need further development for the benefit of society as a whole.
This is my justification of the role of artist and no matter what the field of production this role should be taken seriously. The artist has the ability simultaneously to turn peoples actions in favour of or against society. Society as most would agree is far from perfect but in terms of an origin in the natural order we have come a long way and with the aid of a developing culture we could go a lot further. It is plain from our development that we are a social creature, however this social behaviour naturally arises out of seeking 'sameness' to identify with. Because of the origin of this social ability we 'naturally' developed an intolerance of difference as a crude defence mechanism. But we are not natural animals - we are cultural animals and so a progression from this intolerance of race, religion, sex, sexuality, disability etc. is not only desirable but essential. Neither is just 'tolerance' acceptable as this infers a basic desire to ignore, if not hate. What is really needed is acceptance and celebration of difference.
Perhaps this is the last vestige of the truly natural within us - it is certainly the one aspect of the natural order that has caused most problems for the human race. All conflict is based upon a refusal to recognise difference as being desirable.

January 1994