“Two hundred and forty eight, two hundred and forty nine …. Come on, Dad, what comes next …?”. My 6 year old daughter’s complaining voice jolts me back to reality: “Oh, what? Oh yes, two hundred and fifty”
“Two hundred and fifty one, two hundred and fifty two, two hundred and …”
While my daughter patiently counts the 300 seconds until we have to leave for school, I, anxiously, return to my current obsession: thinking about my artist’s statement. Actually, I’ve been thinking about my artist’s statement, on and off, for a good 28 years now, and whatever I write feels wrong. Not just wrong, but badly wrong.
For one exhibition, early on, I gave up, and didn’t provide a statement at all. So on the evening of the private view, I was surrounded by well-wishers, family, friends, and friends of friends, milling about, chanting like a mantra: “Lovely colours, but I don’t really understand your work”.
The problem was, neither did I. I still don’t. After years of reading psychology, anthropology, archaeology, art history, and other artists’ statements, and visiting venerated institutions such as the Tate, and listening intently to all the videos, and diligently reading the commentary, and spending long hours contemplating single works … the creative process, most peoples’ creative process, even my own familiar and simplistic creative process, continues to defy understanding. Whole libraries of books have been written on this subject. How can I (or anyone) even think of providing a meaningful synopsis on a single A4 page? Even in small font?
Even a simple biographical account of how I’ve ended up doing so much Ritual, and why it means so much to me, would fill a small book. Let alone why a hippy drop-out hanging around on the fringes of the Oxford scene might have the temerity, the bare-faced cheek, to challenge great and established thinkers such as Anna Halprin, and claim that not only can art be ritualised, but that Spiritual Ceremony can, done in the right way, be considered art.
I didn’t set out to be contentious. I just ended up doing what I ended up doing. But now I’ve painted myself into a corner. I’m not a priest, I’m certainly not a spiritual teacher, I’m not a healer, I’m not an anthropologist, I’m not a psychologist. I am an artist. This is self-preservation. If I am to survive as an artist, I’ve got to put together a very convincing argument as to why what I do can be considered art … and I’ve got 3 weeks left to condense whatever argument I can come up with into about the length of this post …
