#200words

Alt. title: What’s Holding You Back?
A public pep-talk to myself and anyone that wants to listen.

Mostly? Fear of failure. During my school years I was the best artist in my year, from beginning to end that was everything that I was about. My report cards from all classes went something like, ‘If Trevor could apply himself as much to the academic side of (Insert non-art class here), as he does to drawing diagrams, posters, and book covers, then I am sure he could achieve a grade higher than a C.’ As it happens I achieved straight Bs, with the exception of Art and Graphic Design, obviously.

Cut to sixth form and there’s a kid in the year above me whose drawing and painting was the stuff I could only dream of producing. At the UCAS application process, I froze. ‘Actually, parents, I’m just gonna stick with Morrisons, the pub, and the snooker hall for a bit.’ Truth was, the fact that this kid had been (in my eyes, at least) so much better than me struck me with fear. At university, would everyone be this good?

Cut to one month later, ‘Actually, parents, I’ve left my job and dyed my hair green. I’m just going to stick with punk for a bit.’

Cut to me, aged 25, as the penny drops that I’m an artist and can no longer deny it. ‘Actually, wife, I’m just going to stick with this call centre for a bit…’

Cut to me, aged 32, finally doing something about it and enrolling in Art School.

Cut to me, aged 35, walking around my degree show with my new born son strapped to my chest. ‘Actually, art world, I’m just going to be raising this little feller and his little sister (arrived two years later) for a bit.’

Well, this year I turn forty. That little feller has started school and his little sister starts preschool in September, and with that goes my last remotely viable excuse for not getting on with it. Of course, I have been getting on with it – loads of exhibitions, writing, etc – but it can be hard to believe when almost all of your time is spend changing nappies, bathing small humans, cleaning up sick etc.

Thing is, a lot of artists have this thing called impostor syndrome – the fear that sooner or later we will be found out, unearthed as the frauds we feel ourselves to be, while simultaneously secretly believing we have one of the world’s greatest art minds – if only there weren’t so many things in the way of unlocking it.

Scrape all of that away and what you’re left with is fear of failure. There is nothing that can stop you from having a go at the life and career you want for yourself, be it artist in a garden studio painting watercolour sunsets of St. Ives, or community engagement officer of your local council, or anything in between, from lecturing to actually selling work through a gallery.

You see, more often than not, fear of failure isn’t fear of failure at all. It is fear of failing in front of people whose opinions we value, and whose trust we have, and who believe in us. The invisible bungee that pulls us back from achieving is the fear of letting down those people, but unless we cut that bungee, the only people we’ll be letting down is ourselves.

It has been just over a year since the news broke that Anish Kapoor had bought the (non-scientific, non-military) rights to Vantablack – the ‘blackest black’ of pigments – and, in the kind of petulant spirit usually reserved for the children’s playground, took it home with him and refused to let anyone else play with it.

Vantablack is a fascinating material. On a microscopic level the pigment’s filaments are 300 times taller than they are wide, so 99.96% of light that hits its surface is trapped within its tendrils. It’s no surprise that Anish Kapoor, to whose work the concept of the void is pivotal, has snaffled it up. What I find astonishing is that he’s keeping it all to himself. Mr Kapoor has defended his exclusivity by comparing it to his use of stainless steel, but I just stirred my morning brew with a stainless-steel teaspoon – am I and millions of other stirrers holding constituent parts of some massive public artwork?

Kapoor doubts his actions would elicit such a strong response were he dealing with the whitest white but I’m not so sure. Klein Blue, maybe, but technically speaking (I’m hardly qualified, but this is opinion after all) that wasn’t a stand alone pigment, it was ultramarine mixed with polymers that allowed the pigment to retain its colour when mixed with liquid and turned into ‘paint’.

I can’t imagine a younger artist, one that graduated this century, for example, would even contemplate not sharing this incredible new material. We swim in a sea of open source products, technology, and information, and most artists whose work features an online element have consigned copyright to the historical scrapbook, it’s just a shame that Kapoor’s attitude can’t go the same way.

In 2010 I saw two fighter jets in an art gallery. One lay on its back, coming into contact with the floor at its nose, tail, and left wingtip. It had either been hyper-polished, or the panels had been replaced with chrome – so reflective was its surface that, if need be, I could have used it as a shaving mirror. The second had been buffed and repainted with feathers so barely visible as to have been unnoticeable at first, and it had been suspended from the ceiling by its tail so that its nosecone hung a foot above the gallery floor.

I was awestruck. Killing machines re-contextualised as decorative objects. Tools of war made, in the case of the prostrate Jaguar, hyperreal, and in the case of the feathered and hung Harrier, juxtaposed with nature.

More than once I heard visitors saying ‘I don’t get it’.

But get this, you don’t have to get it.

Sometimes art is a big philosophical hypothesis, other times it deals with politics, emotions, or death. It can be idiotic or profound, or both, and it can mean something entirely different to its creator than to every single one of its viewers.

Sometimes art is a spectacle, and that’s okay, too. Sometimes, the thing to get is no deeper than that it looks fucking awesome.

The gallery was Tate Britain. The artist was Fiona Banner

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This post was originally published on my Patreon feed.

Kayt Hughes’s recent solo exhibition at Gallery North ‘My Five-Year-Old Could Have Done That’ suggests that out of play, great and even profound ideas may emerge.

Outside of the arts, the concept of play is associated almost exclusively with children and even they must confine it to a designated ‘playground’. Later, play is one of the first big ideas you learn in art school; dredged from their small ponds and delivered into a sea of equal and mostly greater talents than theirs, first year students are advised to ignore their debilitating levels of self-awareness, stretch up a canvas, hire a camera, loosen up, and PLAY.

Hughes is eighteen months out of university and appears, hearteningly, to be still playing. Indeed, her exploration of play is so considered that she has structured her nascent art practise around it. Her objects, formed from wood, rope, and plasticene, have a buff aesthetic – they are screaming out to be played with. Alas, in this exhibition at least, the works are completed via instructions carried out by gallery staff. Play it may be, but this is studied and sensitive work.

Your five-year-old (and I know, because I have one) is capable of beauty and of eliciting emotions that could move mountains, but a contemporary artist they are not.