After Rites

The children have just developed colds. The implications of this go far beyond the sudden abundance of snotty tissues.
Children with colds don't sleep well. And if the children aren't sleeping well, nobody else within a 500 metre radius has much of a chance either.
So, I wouldn't exactly say I woke up this morning. Just that, with the growing daylight, a troubled, tired, wakeful night gradually transformed itself into a troubled, tired, sleepy day.
It's one of the amazing things about children, how suddenly an idyllic life with happy, smiling, playful, sweet creatures on a bright, warm sunny spring day, can be hurled into chaos, mental confusion, spiritual darkness.
However, one odd thing I've noticed about this state of half-sleepness (horrible when first experienced, but to which one quickly grows accustomed), is that it lowers your boundaries.
This has definite disadvantages: it renders one more suggestible, compliant, obedient to the whims of others. Makes one generally more gullable.
But it also has positive effects – makes one more open to ideas, and more in touch with one's own unconscious, inspirational processes.
Thus it was that as I gradually emerged, blinking and dazed, into the harsh sunshine of the morning, inspiration struck. I now know what I'm going to write in my artist's statement. Problem solved, until the next one.
"I am exploring the issue of whether or not some forms of ritual can be considered also as forms of art".
Gone is all the arrogance, the contention, the defensiveness. Gone is the question of artistic survival … it's just another, artistically legitimate, experiment with the fabric of life.

“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 …

On graduating, at 21, 12 years seemed like an unimaginable length of time – more than half my life. Even at 26, on completing my doctorate, 12 years seemed like forever, and the prospect of reaching 38 (and the year 2000) seemed like a far distant possibility.
But my son is 12 on Wednesday, and it seems like just a few, rather stressed and tired, weeks have passed since he was "from his mothers womb untimely ripped" – deep purple and apparently lifeless. Both mother and child survived the experience, but only just.
We weren't in any way ready for parenthood: both on the dole, no money, and optimistically believing that our lives wouldn't be changed that much!
One thing I wasn't ready for was the sudden onset of overwhelming feelings of responsibility. I've seen many men's reactions to this now – everything from outright denial ("I think now is a good time to move to Australia, shame I won't see my child again") to total panic ("I must get a job, and do an OU degree, and another evening job, and another job at the weekends").
Steering a course in between these extremes, so that one's children can get to school in clothes without too many holes, yet one can still have family time, and still grab a few hours of creative time, has been an unbelievably difficult, and constant, balancing act …
Initially I got teaching work, and over the first 2 years found enough time to fundraise 20k for a millennium festival project. But as the project came to completion, I had to give up the teaching work to make way for the project. Then, of course, project over, grant finished, back on the dole, with my previous employer really pissed off that I'd quit suddenly, and not willing to hire me again.
That was when I realised that children, grant funding, and ambitious projects don't mix – not unless you're rich already, or being bankrolled by your partner.
My solution to the problem of finance has been to start a small computer business. Being fundamentally anti-capitalist since my school days, I was reluctant to step into the field of commerce… even though I was doing it with zero capital. However, I managed to quell my conscience by providing a cheap (1/2 market rate) service exclusively to charities working for social change.
The combined price of my principles and creative life is high – I see others in the same business swanning about in Mercs, living in large country houses. But at least, together with my partner's income, we feed the family, clothe the kids and pay the bills … and I still get a couple of days in a good week to work on the art projects, even if most of the time is spent on marketing, admin, applications, etc., etc.!

Every couple of years I think up a good-sounding show, gather together my best slides, cobble together an artist's statement (still a bit of a mystery, that one) and CV, and send the collection off to a variety of galleries.

Some well-wisher once told me to "start at the top, not at the bottom", so each time I go through the tounge-in-cheek ritual of phoning the ICA, Serpentine, Whitechapel, Ikon, Arnolfini and others to garner the names of the current curatorial or selection team. Well, the manual says to speak to them, but it's hard to get through to these busy folks, so they usually just get the package on their desks, 'cold'.

The big galleries are really good at returning slides, as are the small local ones … it's the middle-sized ones that hang on to them for up to 2 years, and then grudgingly return them in the sae (by now, the postage is out-of-date) after lots of follow-up calls.

I've never had any success at all in getting shows. Maybe I could have got something at the Banbury Mill, but they were so scornful of my painting that I never applied again. Everything I've done has been self-organised (with 1 exception, I might come back to that later).

And then, 2 years ago, Wolfson College, Oxford, emailed me to say that my work looked interesting, could I come and meet them. I did, and the 2 year lead time seemed like utter luxury.

Now though, I'm panicking … getting all the publicity out, writing stuff, designing invites, posters, just 4 weeks to ago, and if I'm lucky, 8 hours a week.

But the biggest panic of all is this: what happens next? and that's what I want to explore in this blog.