Nottingham Trent University

god it’s coming already!

i was asked yesterday what does john harris want to make work about? i started looking around the room, looking at my note book, then back around the room trying to formulate the answer i thought that summed up this question. in fact going back to the friday it was the private view of an exhibition i was in called ‘old church slavonic’ someone was asking if there was an accompanying material to my piece to help with understanding influences and what it was about. someone called me over introduced me as the artist and they posed this question again but directly to me all i could think of is this rubbish i had been thinking of that didn’t really make sense and i would becoming this mumbling fool like ‘Little Nicky’ i suppose at the end of the day he does save mankind from the evil depths of hell and gets his dream women but in till that happens 45 minutes into the film he is pretty much a complete loser with a delightful taste for fried chicken. i came to blurting out to these two people well it’s about ummm the slippage between fantasy and reality, i like films and yeah computer games. this becoming regurgitated in an equally disgusting manor to when i got asked yesterday. i might as well of wet myself would have given them more to talk about.

the question asked yesterday i was beating around the bush not really knowing quiet how to articulate what i meant. i just said well i like funny things. why. i talked about an accessibility to the work not quiet understanding what i meant by this, i suppose i meant a way in but it could be taken as an access to everyone but the realisation is that why would i want a piece of work to be accessible to everyone not to be elitist but who looks at art? i think that’s the question if i wanted to be a public sculptor i would take other things into account. like that Saatchi show when they got the task of making public sculpture frankly it was terrible but they had a specific audience it was site specific. i’m making work for the gallery why shy away from these nice white walls that create a platform to the work. embrace the Whitecube! humour then becomes this tool which becomes a mechanism to allow the artist to deal with things like how self deprecation is used as a tool by comedians to allow the viewer to relate to them but allows for the application of concept or ethos. humour is there to firstly entertain then have this almost chuck this over my shoulder i don’t care approach to the work i suppose slightly hopeless which i definitely want my work to encompass giving the viewer that ounce of hope but undercutting it.

Why I Am Not a Painter- by Frank O’Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg

is starting a painting. I drop in.

“Sit down and have a drink” he

says. I drink; we drink. I look

up. “You have sardines in it.”

“Yes, it needed something there.”

“Oh.” I go and the days go by

and I drop in again. The painting

is going on, and I go, and the days

go by. I drop in. The painting is

finished. “Where’s sardines?”

All that’s left is just

letters. “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of

a color: orange. I write a line

about orange. Pretty soon it is a

whole page of words, not lines.

Then another page. There should be

so much more, not of orange, of

words, of how terrible orange is

and life. Days go by. It is even in

prose, I am a real poet. My poem

is finished and I haven’t mentioned

orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call

it oranges. And one day in a gallery

I see Mike’s painting, called sardines.

Now mid point review is over, our shall we call it trial run of degree show. so got some new work which i made for that

which i thought i would describe it as a steel framed, wall mounted conveyor belt made of canvas powered by a car windscreen wiper motor that moves a single painted word (fatality) in red gloss paint from left to right of the frame never fully showing the whole word.

Coming back to that little question on critically analysing the contextual content of my practice or what the hell is my work doing? ‘I have a dream’, it’s terrible that such famous quotes can just boil down to some women trying to get a date on take me out. Might start to use famous political quotes to get a date, I’m a bit unsure how “I’m would like to recruit you” would go down I’ll give it ago. Thanks Harvey Milk. However back to this dream, which pretty much sums up how I’m feeling, I’ll set the scene for you. It was dark, I was going for a job interview, I was doing really well in till, I let my guard down, I became comfortable with the employer. Friends? Never I spilled the beans not the jack in the beanstalk beans, although I would like a golden egg, that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. He looked at me in such shock and a little bit of disgust.

I guess I have this way of never completely allowing my practical work and critical theory live life side by side, helping a brother out, feeding each other. Although one always strays off, which leaves me in a bit of a ditch questioning my whole practice, maybe not having all the answers is a good thing. I got told once that if I had all the answers then there would be no point in making work. Knowing it all I wonder if I would rise up and become this master of art? Would everyone bow before me and I wouldn’t need to explain myself because I would be really good. This line between amateur and masters is it actually more exciting to be scurrying down here with all the other amateurs and when a group of amateurs come together and share knowledge does this become a collective mastery? I suppose but at the end of the day having a nice chat or hearing a good story is really what anyone wants.

Got an email from b and q asking me to think about my garden, thanks b and q it’s raining outside and the only garden I have is a little paved patio with a bbq sitting there rusting. Maybe I’ll become one of those famous gardeners that have a mansion and gardens naked with their long entangled naked partner. Or maybe I’ll become Forrest Gump I dunno if you can become someone else maybe as an actor but we can leave that and I can become Forrest Gump maybe without the wonky spin, learning difficulties, mum dying, lover dying, dead best friend although lieutenant Dan has magic new legs oh yeah last thing mother lose son but on the plus side I would be mighty fine at cutting the grass on my sit down mower oh and eat lots of shrimp. I don’t really like shrimp. On the note of lieutenant Dan the actor who also plays not Lenny but the other person in of mice and men George that’s it anyway it got me onto thinking about this sort of equilibrium that my work has I always thought I wanted this Shakespeare esc way of showing no respect for no unities showing comedy and tragedy. However I have realized that my work doesn’t swing either way I’m still kind of held up on what when Brian Griffiths said in a tutorial that my work was a bit flat I did agree with him at the time, GREAT. Coming back to the of mice and men the poem which the title takes it’s name from the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray in which your raised up to a higher level of fantasy but reality just hits you back down.