It’s been way too long since I’ve written a post here on Blending Primaries, but it has been with good reason and lots of hard work as culprit.
I was in London recently curating an exhibition called ‘What’s time got to do with it?’, which resulted in a very interesting conversation with artist, lecturer and writer Paul O’Kane, he wrote the article ‘Do You Believe in Things’ in the May 2012 issue No. 356 of Art Monthly. Our conversation circled around time and the life of the artist and how art production is really a kind of ‘enacted biography’ to borrow Paul’s quoting of Kris and Kurz. Paul wrote this to me in an email, ‘I think the greatest difficulty/interest I have found as an artist has had a lot to do with a kind of meta-consciousness of what I am doing. This can be accommodated by spilling over into meta-critique through teaching and writing but still requires attention in practice itself. The passage of time and the perception of the ‘life’ of the artist have often overwhelmed any simpler, ‘expressive’ or career-strategic attitudes to making.’
His statement is the quintessence of ‘blending primaries’, which is our path as artists.
I felt this ‘life of the artist’ keenly when I saw the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at Tate Modern. I wasn’t going to go but once I flipped through her exhibition catalogue in the bookshop, I got back into the considerably longer queue after purchasing Damien Hirst tickets, and I’m glad I did. What a powerful and sometimes overpowering experience. Beyond the intensity of her individual works, most of which I had never seen before and now feel so privileged to have seen; I exited the exhibition with the sense I had walked through the inside of this woman’s head and viewed the world through her perceptions of it. It was a rare feeling from an art exhibition. Interestingly, I had just read about the paintings Edvard Munch made during a period when he had an intraocular haemorrhage and how these paintings offer insight into the disease. I sensed the same sort of insight into mental illness through Kusama’s work.
The theme of ‘time’ kept cropping up on this visit. I visited Anthony Boswell, which he mentions in his blog, and we talked about looping time in our interview. It is a curious feeling to move at a pace where you can feel the passage of time and consider it. It is a valuable thing.
Also while I was in London I was able to make progress on the venue search for This ‘Me’ of Mine and hope to have some news in the next couple of weeks. If you haven’t visited the site in a while, you may not have seen the information on the proposed symposium. I also have three new interviews in the works, one of which is Anthony’s, with a fourth to start soon. Recently, I was chosen as a featured artist on Rise Art, I’ve been invited to exhibit in two separate shows with two fellow artists and I have lots of work to do with Rebecca Projects. I’ve been helping my friend and colleague Gillian Powell with media presence for Core@Nolias Gallery too. I’ll be handing the reins over to her soon. I also think I have found a new ‘line of enquiry’ (to quote David Riley) in the studio.
So while I had not wanted to give a run down , news account of my activity over the past few of months, and is the reason why I haven’t posted lately, there’s no altering the fact I’ve been incredibly busy and sometimes I’ve felt blinded by the light of my blended primaries!
