i was asked yesterday what does john harris want to make work about? i started looking around the room, looking at my note book, then back around the room trying to formulate the answer i thought that summed up this question. in fact going back to the friday it was the private view of an exhibition i was in called ‘old church slavonic’ someone was asking if there was an accompanying material to my piece to help with understanding influences and what it was about. someone called me over introduced me as the artist and they posed this question again but directly to me all i could think of is this rubbish i had been thinking of that didn’t really make sense and i would becoming this mumbling fool like ‘Little Nicky’ i suppose at the end of the day he does save mankind from the evil depths of hell and gets his dream women but in till that happens 45 minutes into the film he is pretty much a complete loser with a delightful taste for fried chicken. i came to blurting out to these two people well it’s about ummm the slippage between fantasy and reality, i like films and yeah computer games. this becoming regurgitated in an equally disgusting manor to when i got asked yesterday. i might as well of wet myself would have given them more to talk about.
the question asked yesterday i was beating around the bush not really knowing quiet how to articulate what i meant. i just said well i like funny things. why. i talked about an accessibility to the work not quiet understanding what i meant by this, i suppose i meant a way in but it could be taken as an access to everyone but the realisation is that why would i want a piece of work to be accessible to everyone not to be elitist but who looks at art? i think that’s the question if i wanted to be a public sculptor i would take other things into account. like that Saatchi show when they got the task of making public sculpture frankly it was terrible but they had a specific audience it was site specific. i’m making work for the gallery why shy away from these nice white walls that create a platform to the work. embrace the Whitecube! humour then becomes this tool which becomes a mechanism to allow the artist to deal with things like how self deprecation is used as a tool by comedians to allow the viewer to relate to them but allows for the application of concept or ethos. humour is there to firstly entertain then have this almost chuck this over my shoulder i don’t care approach to the work i suppose slightly hopeless which i definitely want my work to encompass giving the viewer that ounce of hope but undercutting it.
