When I originally suscribed to a-n I had no real idea what it was about, except that there was some insurance in the package. I was hoping to show my work and felt that insurance would be useful. The consequent experience of blogging and commenting has opened up my thinking. I am a little afraid that my views are actually dated expressions of a comfortable middle class view of art –the opposite to what I hope is the case. ( Looking around the blogs, there do not seem to be many older geezers!) As a person who draws and paints figurative pictures, and who has arguably been out of the loop, it comes as a surprise to see what is out there. Maybe I should just get out more. Certainly it is possible for one’s lack of understanding to reveal itself through an attempt to ward off the threat of the new. And I find also that the more I try to articulate my thoughts, the less certainty I have about them.
Reading the blogs, there is an awful lot of funding going on. Is it possibly that the Blairite project of managerialism has appropriated the work of artists? Art and the municipal have settled down very nicely together. As a teacher I observed the rise and rise of officialspeak. Ofsted reports, comment banks and so on. Control the language and you control behaviour. It seems that there are echoes of it in many ‘artist statements’. Is it taught in Art Schools? It bothers me somewhat that I cannot become excited by much of what I see. The ideas contained in the work sometimes are interesting, but often there is a concern with social/ existential issues which seem to be more appropriate to theatre, sociology, writing; the work makes sense only through some mediating text. Otherwise it is often visually mundane. In my wilder dreams, my sunsets can be quite radical.
