These are some thoughts I scribbled down yesterday, and I wondered if anyone could comment or point me towards some reading matter on the subject.
Driving along today I began to reflect on the photographs I added to the Reside residency site http://resideresidency.weebly.com/reside-blog-susa…. I knew that, in the size the blog site dictated, they were not nearly as successful as the larger images on my computer, particularly that of the Methodist Church Hall , where all it’s idiosyncrasies were not visible in the smaller format.
I then began to reflect on the photographs themselves and how they couldn’t quite convey the feeling of being alone in this space and spending an hour in silence just looking at the scenes that were photographed. And so I began to wonder where the art actually was, where it resided, if you like.
When I looked at the ball resting against a chair leg with it’s pitted surface from years of boisterous play, did it become something else when photographed and presented on the website or was the art in the looking,in the selection of that image by myself as I looked around the hall and if so what was the moment when art entered the equation, could the art occur within me myself and what I chose to see or did it have to be documented and presented to others in order for it to take on the context of art. In other words, could art be a transaction that began and finished within myself, could it exist if there was no product as such to record that it had existed. Much writing on social practice and the movement away from the product in many artists practice emphasises the importance of the interaction with others, singling that out as the art happening if you like .
On a recent discussion listed in http://www.marketproject.org.uk/ where a curator was asked whether it was useful for an emerging artist to exhibit in a little-known space with a few viewers he likened that the analogy of the tree falling in the woods and if no one was here to hear it did to happen at all. I thought about this and my time in the Methodist hall and wondered whether art could begin and end in oneself without documentation and presentation to others, whether the capacity to transform a collection of items in space into art lay in the selective, subjective eye of the artist or whether even it existed before and after the transaction occurred with the artist’s gaze. Would the ball and the chair, which existed long before I chose to come along and photograph it, and will no doubt exist long after, have been or continue to be work of art all in it’s own right.
Blog posts for me are a bit like approaching revising for GCSEs ( the memory is etched on my brain), the longer you leave it between sessions the more paralysed you feel at restarting again. Once the post in January was up I thought I would wait awhile until I had some really meaty art related content to share before I put up the next one. As day-to-day life began to fill up with art related content (meaty or otherwise) I seemed somehow to be weighed down by the load and unable to find the time or energy to add another post. But before this blog disappears into oblivion I shall try and breathe some life into it.
The life of an artist can be a strange one, last month or so has found me;
a) rollerblading around the local village hall while wrestling with a giant roll of paper
b) beheading small baby dolls
c) icing dubious e-mails onto pavement
…and so it goes on, I could add some further bizarre acitivities to this list but some are just too hard to explain. Following the last post I was approached by the curator of a new space in Salisbury who was planning to put on a show to run in conjunction with ‘Lot’s Wife’ being hosted by the Salisbury Arts centre. I rashly agreed to produce new work within a limited time period then realised I had a holiday booked halfway through. Somehow though, as it always does, things came together and I had the uneviable position of joining the artists from the other exhibition on the discussion panel at the arts centre.
Chaired by the lovely Roy Voss – Bouke de Vries, Tom Badley, Doug Clark and myself answered a range of questions, all interesting but strangely none actually related to planned theme of the discussion. Everyone seemed happy though and meeting the other artists was a delight.
As the year has got going though things have taken on a much livelier pace as various opportunites have arisen. I now face three exhibitions quite close together with two PV’s on the same night, not to mention the Reside residency which is bubbling along beneath the surface. I did have the pleasure of getting to Phil Illingworth’s ‘Frightening Albert’ show at the launch of WW galleries new space with my husband and twelve year old daughter. Husband quickly found an old marketing mate to chat to (who turned out a relative of the artist) while Esme remained tranfixed by someone appeared to have just stepped out of Studio 54 (excellent handlebar moustache). With the two of them both busy I managed to meet some online connections I have known for some time but have now experienced in the flesh as it were -all good and a great show to see.
So as an artist who relishes showing in alternative spaces I’m feeling a bit like a kid in a candy shop with a disused pet shop at the Bath Fringe, an ancient church building riddled with secret spaces at St Georges Arts and a dank, dark recess at the Crypt Gallery in Kings Cross all awaiting site specific work. Yum, yum.
