Dead and dying flowers

That's Christmas done. My blog began as a means of exploring the approach to my exhibition in February. Recently I have been clearing a space in my garden to place a shed in which I shall house my work when it returns from the exhibition. Occasionally, thoughts of ‘Shed, Boat, Shed' drift to mind. In terms of physical work and its satisfactions and tribulations, it is at times difficult to distinguish between making ‘art' and making anything else. The shed, its construction, its function(s), its foundations, its physical context, all have literal and metaphoric possibilities. (THE SHED is becoming a cliché.) But how do my shed and my art differ? I don't have to worry about the shed in the same way that my artwork concerns me. I feel vulnerable in relation to my artwork and what I say about it. In one sense it must stand without words. I am reading ‘Real Presences' by George Steiner with a dictionary at my side. And at the same time I have in mind something else that was once said to me, that ‘when you're doing the philosophy, never forget the Art. When you're doing the Art, forget the Philosophy.' I was also reading Tom Duggan's blog in which he mentions the work of Mark McGowan. These various ideas and experiences drift around attached to feelings and bumping into each other. Steiner makes the point that the most appropriate comment on art is other art. Which is getting me closer to what I am thinking about. Simon Starling says that his Shed Boat Shed is ‘the physical manifestation of a thought process'. Tom Duggan wonders whether Mark McGowan's work is ‘art' I wonder whether ‘traditional' artwork such as mine has a place any more. In a sense, painting today is arguably irrelevant repetition of its history through the elevation of style and content over form; it has become a parochial pursuit out of touch with real contemporary issues. But Simon Starling raises the issue of meaning. Is there a sense in which much art is misplaced literature? And what of the curatorial? My uneducated feeling is sometimes that in our commodified world, the artist and his/her work has become the curator's (the gallery owner's) raw material; the artist has been appropriated by the curator. If I were to have stumbled from a culture devoid of the aesthetic as we know (???) it and bumped into a painting leaning against the wall of a shed, how would I begin to know the difference between them? I think??