A few of us were asked to write for the catalogue…and I was continually getting writer’s block with this…so my friend emailed me what he had written… In all honesty…I didnt quite get it…but from that…all of a sudden I could write…so I wrote this:
We all take on a role. Each day we dress for our audience. Like actors preparing to approach that spot-lit stage to recite a speech…a sonnet. Like the prostitutes that dress themselves up, just in order to get dressed down. Like the politicians that speak what we want to hear, yet know they will never be able to deliver. Like the artists that say it is all for love yet they are desperately in need of the money.
We all wake up and take on some kind of identity that is not quite our own. An identity already prepared, packaged for the company we know we are planning to keep… or for the viewers of our life that we are looking to meet, yet have not appeared before us
..not quite yet, anyway.
Through our art, we show you what we want. We are asked…"and what audience are you looking at?…who is it for?" And through that we design ourselves…pushing in, pulling out, mashing up and rearranging, in order to become right for whom we want to effect
…and right now it is you.
You see what we want you to see. You see us, as whom we want you to see. We manipulate you, to relate with our work and our ideas, our thoughts and experiences that we yearn to pass over and with which, form a connection. Even the most honest of artwork is never completely truthful… each second of our life is a moment that we are trying to understand …trying to understand ourselves …and the world around us… and the lives that we partake in each day…and throughout this we are continuously changing…being revised and reformed …and we will never find any of this out…because there is no complete and definite answer… Yet we still look…we search.
So therefore…no moment is honest…no artwork truthful. We make it up as we go along. Only through that do we find ourselves on this painful, exhausting yet intoxicating journey… repeating the past, bringing up past ideas and then eventually through finding these, do we see a new take on them, a new possible aspect and yearn to create something virgin…something already known but not looked at in this way.
We all seek this…this attempt to not let this life pass by us. Not let it escape our grasp without us forming some sort of stamp. Something to leave behind. And if not leave behind…something we have created that definitely was there, yet now remains in some other’s memory. We have to assert our existence…find a witness… make sure we are not passed by like strangers on the street. We all do it in different ways…yet as artists…which we are becoming… we need more than that. Not just to be remembered…we need to be remembered for something we once thought…something we were trying to achieve…and the identity we chose for you to see. We are searching for those perfect people that we can affect…Those people who will remember our work and therefore…us. Those people who will understand and only then, keep a record of the fact we were once here.
but then after…I sent mine to him…and he said that they were very similar…
I didnt see how, seeing as I didnt actually understand his! but it seems now…that subconsciously I rewrote his in a way that I could understand and in my own way and from my perspective.
So…unfortunatley…this means more work… I have another one to write now!
