I am not going to rattle on again here about Cornelia Parker, but I am thinking about her pavement casts, and this has forced me to acknowledge what I have learned about my own practice lately. There is a gap between it and my research. It has to do with how I feel when I think of cracks in a pavement. You hardly notice the cracks, but they are the exciting unauthorised unspecified bits – traps to avoid when we are children, places that catch lost fallen treasures, boundaries between solid ground that catch us out, hollows where things can take root. Parker uses them to define things about her pavements – she actually creates stunning structures with them. I’m not sure I do.
The research I have done during this degree has been a revelation. I knew nothing about art history, or modern art when I started – I was mainly interested in finding out new ways to make things. But I have relished learning about particular aspects of art: women’s relationship with the art world, Richard Serra’s adventure with his Tilted Arc, Cornelia Parker and her use of indexical traces, and female artists’ revolutionary use of appropriation.
Until I started at UCS it hadn’t crossed my mind as a C20th girl with choices that women had spent centuries being inspirational objects in male artists’ work, while being ignored and excluded as artists themselves. I had no idea that a huge lump of steel inserted into a city could inadvertently and dramatically reveal secrets about the state’s relationship with the public it served (complaints were made that Tilted Arc obscured the view of “security personnel, who have no way of knowing what is taking place on the other side of the wall…”Crimp, D. (1993) On the Museum’s Ruins. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.pp. 180-1). I didn’t realise you could make art that told a multitude of stories and asked a mass of questions by destroying dull objects. And it had never dawned on me that by stealing something and reframing it as yours you could make a respected revolutionary art work. I have been really drawn-in by all these new ideas.
What I think has united all these bits of research and pulled me onwards is that they are all about art work that has used the invisible parts of life to say something revealing about stories we assume we know. I love stuff that appears to say or do one thing while actually saying or doing something else – I’m a sucker for reading between the lines of things (the cracks in the pavement…) – and I’m in awe of these artists who think so clearly and make it look so effortless. The trouble is, this has been such an exciting voyage of discovery that bit by bit my own work has felt less and less significant and at times in my degree I’ve really struggled to find any validity at all in the work I want to make. Doing my dissertation about female appropriationists was really rewarding intellectually, but I wonder whether that is the sort of work I have ever been likely to make myself?
I think I have to accept that at the moment one important impulse behind my work is a simple instinctive response to my source, not an intellectual one. There is a sentimental earthy part of life that is caught in the lost frames I’ve been using as subjects for my work, and this is what sucks me in when it comes to my practice. When I think of the my old cine films, for example, what I really want to convey is something of the emotional echoes from those lost frames that we don’t usually notice, in order to evoke lost narratives. So although my research, and my dissertation, has really focused on specific conceptual aspects of art, and I do use elements of this when I am making work, what actually makes me do the work the way I do it is an instinctive gut reaction to my source.
For example, my current work does involve appropriation, because I am copying images created by other people, and I am reinterpreting their stories by the way I am replicating them, but the images I am making are done quickly in a way that yields to the medium I am using, and reflects how I feel that moment about the original cine frame’s shapes, textures and colours. Seeing my paintings projected really proved this. They became separate from the tiny scale of the original celluloid images, and far less frames than expressive shapes, lines and rich colours that said new things in their own right. I liked them far better this way.
On top of this, if appropriation as an intellectual concept truly was my motivation, I think it would be natural for me to know what I was ‘détourning‘, but I can’t bring myself to give the work that amount of steer – I don’t want to undermine the main stories, or create or direct particular new ones by having something specific in mind. I’d love to be a ‘proper’ appropriationist or other sort of conceptual artist. For now, however much I agonise about what might be possible, and copping out intellectually, I seem compelled to focus on the excitement and promise of these tiny lost narrative remnants and to play with the suggestive emotional response this can provoke.
