Dead and dying flowers

A little experiment with the bird and a bit(e) of Derrida.

Rob and Jon, Thank you for your responses. It’s hard work! I’ve taken a little while to get back. Every time I feel that I am getting somewhere, something else turns up to make me reconsider. I am responding here because I have exceeded the 400 word limit for a comment. I haven’t really got a clue, but if this is nonsense, I have enjoyed making it! Curiously, after my ‘last post’, I returned to ‘The Return of the Real’ to find a reference to op art and its shortcomings! I am reminded of something that I used to say to modern art bashers along the lines that it’s no use looking at Picasso (or whatever it was that had upset them) and objecting to the fact that it was not Constable. But I sometimes feel that what I am doing is similar, in that my modernist (?) eye insists upon looking with the wrong criteria.

The language of postmodernism has the high ground, but there are hordes on the lower slopes enjoying the landscape. Rather like politics, the tide comes and goes left and right, and some of us are always either drowning or stranded. I have had a few days recently when I have felt that I was doing something that has some value. I would like it to be good also, but I am beginning to separate out what I do from the wider context, or alternately see where it fits. I feel my ego creeping in at times. Like Jon, I feel occasionally threatened by the works of others; they might reveal the silliness of my ambitions. My engagement with all this stuff is as much a matter of personality as of objectivity and understanding. When what you do is done in a context of vulnerability, a confusion of feelings arise, envy, insecurity, anger, disappointment (and also surprise and pleasure).

The postmodern critique of contemporary capitalism seems to make the point that people have become commodities. Modernism failed because its cul-de-sac thinking did not anticipate universal commodification. The Citroen ad sums it up; ownership of this object completes your identity as a commodity. Implicitly, loss of self is loss of anxiety. Gestation of postmodern critical theory takes place within the practise of artists. Articulated theory is born through public engagement with the objects. (deconstruction? – In one sense this is the way it has always been?) Given such a project, literal subject-matter and formal structures are necessarily not ‘modernist’ unless ‘ironically’ so.

In my search for some answers, I came across www.jca-online.com which has some excellent interviews. The two that I have read and which have relevance here, are with Haim Steinbach, and Bill Viola.

But just occasionally it is possible to be carried away with the place, the moment, and the paint. Lovely!

This latest painting continues the abstract direction, but with a figurative reference. to a chaffinch that I found by the side of the road. I have used some of its soft pink-greys in the marks. The Triptych of earlier has been gradually submerging in this painting. Some of the old image is discernable through the later glazes. Some paintings just don’t ever work, and have to be defeated.

I went to see the Turner Prize exhibition. I am at a loss.

I frequently look at work and am engulfed by discomfort. I feel disappointment that works seem scaled to dimensions disproportionate to their content – like prototypes unnecessarily large – ideas in search of appropriate form. Looking at art in all its ‘subjectivity’ makes possible the ‘blaming’ of the artist for making meaningless objects.

The so-called subjectivity of art seems often a means of avoiding issues. In a subjective world, is consensus possible? The Turner Prize confers status. I might find it easier if the stakes were not so high.Would Lucy Skaer’s ‘Thames and Hudson’ be more intriguing if it were not ‘Art’? Inappropriate expectations can blind. There is such consensus, at least in contemporary art circles, that my judgments must somehow be based upon error. (I bought The Return of the Real, and the Oxford Dictionary of Critical Terms, recommended by Andrew Bryant – progress is slow.) Enrico David’s words in the artists’ video display appeared much more powerful than the work. Richard Wright’s wall painting seemed inappropriately traditional for the show, only its future destruction somehow lifting its modernism into a postmodern context? In a nearby gallery is a painting by Bridget Riley, the kind of thing with which I feel more at ease. But stepping back, what separates it in my mind from the Turner Prize work? Is it simply a matter of taste? If Riley’s work is no more or less ‘art’ than the sperm whale skull, then there is no connecting (for me) with Wright and friends until familiarity breeds content. But that is not sufficient.

Some, of my search is for recognition. I feel the implicit sadness in such a statement. I recognise the child desperate to be adult. These things impinge upon, perhaps dominate and disfigure, one’s capacity for openness to experience and ability to judge. Sometimes I experience a simple delight in making my work. Such times can occur daily, but are always under threat. The desire to leave all this behind can have the effect of intensifying the tension; picking at the sore becomes habitual when the spotlight remains on it. Perhaps without it, the next painting would not arrive; hope is always invested in what is around the corner. There is too a strangeness in being a middle-class person who spends his waking hours making paintings half-way down his garden!

I must appear to be a miserable old …! Agnes Martin and Cosmo would make good role models?