Re: What we talked about

I’ve spent the last few weeks collaborating with artists Amelia Critchlow, Jane Harris and Chris Cawkwell, we are in the process of setting up an artist collective, we hope to be able to secure premises and are in the midst of programming our first event. It became clear during this process just how important “colleagues”, for want of a better word, are. As an artist you are a sole trader, you are your own manufacturing, management, PR, and sales team. This is of course, absolutely exhausting.

Between us, by pooling our skills and time we achieve so much more. The best part of it is that by forming an organisation ourselves we get to work with the people we want to.

Here’s a precis of what we are up to.

“ArtLacuna is an artist collective space which aims to open up dialogues across creative disciplines, providing a resource for local professional and student communities and opportunities for the local community to access the arts in various ways. The lacuna, or lexical space, represents a gap in translation, a place where multiple meanings are applied, where meanings shift and new interpretations can be made.

ArtLacuna aims to colonise disused spaces and provide a creative hub which closes the gap between disciplines and explores the creative process as experienced by artists, designers, makers and thinkers. To this end, the project will provide working space for artists, project space for visiting artists, and forums for discussion and conversation. We believe that there is a gap where such cross disciplinary dialogues should be taking place, for the benefit of the creative industries, design community and fine artists alike.

An arts lab environment encourages experimentation and ideation, and reveals the development of concept, creating an open space for exploration without always placing emphasis on a finished piece or end.

We hope in this way to discover more about artistic and creative process, and the in-between stages of thought which lead to innovation in creative professions.

ArtLacuna locates itself in the wider community, offering workshops and exhibitions to local groups to demystify the creative process and involve local people in creative projects.”

If you are interested in following our progress or taking part in one of our events you can follow our progress at these links

www.artlacuna.org

http://lacuna-art.tumblr.com

https://twitter.com/ArtLacuna

I’ve been thinking about the disposable and temporary, transient and ephemeral. Something to do with watching Douglas Coupland’s lecture at the Memory Marathon at the Serpentine Gallery last month. Plus some other stuff I’ve been thinking about. I love Doug’s novels, although I bet a few of them feel pretty dated now.

Watch Doug Coupland here

http://thespace.org/items/e00019bj?t=wcdv

Doug talks about how our brains might be “planned” by the content we put into them, people used to think through linear narratives, like books, now we think like the internet, non-linear, spidering from link to link and outsource our memories to the cloud of information available on devices. i.e., he doesn’t need to remember telephone numbers anymore, because the cloud holds them, so he can use that brain space for thinking about stuff (world peace).

After listening to Doug I started thinking about the feeling that everything is happening at once that occurs when you are exposed to the infinite information of the cloud. Without the perspective of living too much in the pre-internet age I have to surmise that the rapidity, or rather the instantaneousness, of the cloud means that you have the potential to know everything there is to know all at once, if only you had the brainpower (and the bandwidth) to do it. So we are living in an age of a-temporality. As Doug says, “all fashions seem to exist at once at the moment” he might be right, and it’s an interesting thought.

It made me think of post-modernity. Maybe because here at the end of the post-modern era everything has the same value, high and low, old and new, this might chime with the age of the cloud where everything is available at once. The internet behaves as a place without hierarchy when you interact with it (roughly speaking) and no class of culture or information (even incorrect information if those Sandy pictures tells us anything) has a higher or lower status. So if everything is on a level playing field what do you do next? Start creating your own hierarchies and orders? Yours would be different from mine, how democratic is that. Yet perhaps this is why there are no major political movements or artistic movements to speak of. (I’m putting Occupy to one side for the moment because I think it is a different type of beast)

If everyone curates their own hierarchies of interest, information, cause and belief, how would we get sufficient of us together whose priorities match up to start a movement, or a revolution?

Wanna start a revolution with me?

‘Saatchi paints a scathing picture of the contemporary art world and says that being a buyer these days “is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar”.

He says: “It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, hedgefundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.” Saatchi described the Venice Biennale, scene of the world’s biggest contemporary art jamboree, as a place where these people circulate “in a giddy round of glamour-filled socialising, from one swanky party to another”.’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/dec/02…

For those of you thinking “that’s a bit bloody rich coming from him” join the club. However, Saatchi’s is just one in a series of articles and polemics condemning the megabux world of contemporary art (that’s the bit of it that we all look at from a great distance, and wonder what the hell it has to do with us)

What’s going on? It just isn’t cool to spend millions of ill gotten gains on art and manipulate and scheme your way to more millions any more. Like the world of investment banking, and the lifestyles of the super-rich everywhere, it is monstrously out of touch and crucially out-of-step with the rest of the world.

Art just isn’t cool anymore, whatcha gonna do?

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/4683/full

“They’re in the hedge fund business, so they drop their windfall profits into art. It’s just not serious,” he told the Observer. “Art editors and critics – people like me – have become a courtier class. All we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It’s not worth my time.” Dave Hickey

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/oct/28…

The self-fulfilling self-perpetuating fluff of the art world, art consultants, critics, curators, journalists, innumerable administrators and marketeers, manipulators and pundits are a mirror of the accreted ‘services” of every part of the bloated consumer-based world. In banking, in business, in property, in the public sector and in the arts these layers of belief in a market are what give it it’s momentum. Why did no one say anything about all of this before? Collective belief.

I was having a friendly little argument recently with painter Joss Cole, he’s a fiercely intelligent man but a little more idealistic than me, and we were attempting to identify the next movement in art, or certainly ferret out some clues about the shape of it. Post-Internet was mooted although this now seems dated, and Cynical Post-Internet, or what about Post-Consumerist? Post-Object?

It occurred to me that you can only really identify a movement strongly in retrospect, Joss disputed this, but I think it is certainly true nowadays. For this reason; who are you rebelling against? Whose work or attitude are you turning over? The contemporary art machine is voracious and is fashion-led, fashions change remarkably quickly, so you can see yourself on the rebellious fringes looking in one moment, and a month or two later be toast of the town, a month or two after that and you are part of the establishment.

Contemporary Art has to remain cool, it has to have the latest thing, just as the fashion industry sees hemlines and trouser shapes change at least twice a year, if you aren’t ahead of the curve you are behind it, and that ain’t cool.

Still, cheer up contemporary art world, painting died and came back to life, so can you.

More links:

Hari Kunzru dissects Damien Hirst

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/mar/16…

Sarah Thornton’s 10 reasons to quit writing about the art market

http://blogs.artinfo.com/abovetheestimate/2012/10/…

Edited: And from the mouths of oligarchs

http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/its-not-…

Coding my own website has taken a lot of my time this summer, and just as I gather the strength to start testing it I realise just how much left I have to do before it’s ready. ( A lot)

Nevertheless I’m pressing on, wrestling with the technology necessary these days to promote yourself as an artist. Is it just me or is there more and more administration?

I was lying in bed last night, failing to sleep as my mind raced on through a tumble of thoughts, websites, exhibitions, press… And then suddenly new work. An idea.. a precious idea.

No, three! How did that happen? Like London buses, nothing for ages and then a crowd all at once.

So what precipitated this ‘having ideas’? For one, a possible series of photographs, it was a chance remark by a peer about light, and a phrase popped into my head which was suggestive of concept and content.

For another it came as I was reflecting on hanging my Seventies Romance Portraits in a pop-up exhibition (PAPER NAUTILUS) in Ladbroke Grove. The show is being held in a derelict house, and I’ve hung my series of small gouches from the towel rails in an old bathroom with pale pink fittings and crystal taps. Odd but strangely apt, because the paintings are of old romance fiction covers from the 1970s, and feature lurid titles and melodramatic blurbs. I liked the pieces, but they’ve been put away for a few months, or off on their hoidays being exhibited in Romania, and it was the first time I’ve really looked at them in a while.

Romance is one of the things I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I’ve been tossing some ideas about nostalgia around too. It goes with the territory when you are examining the kinds of ephemera I’m interested in. So I think I’ll make some more gouaches which reflect on this. I like the idea of revisiting the art of the jacket or cover designer, all gouache and layout pads, completely at odds with digital photography and editing packages.

If that weren’t enough I’ve been mulling over making some more peeled photographs after reading a good portion of Svetlana Boym’s book The Future of Nostalgia. I liked very much the passage from Charles Baudelaire’s ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ on Modernity “impersonated” by a beautiful veiled woman.

Elsewhere! Too far, too late or never at all!

Of me you know nothing, I nothing of you-you

whom I might have loved and who knew it too!

Boym talks about nostalgia for the present, and the future too, but Baudelaire’s sighing and exclaiming rather makes me wonder if romance and nostalgia might be synonyms I can use together. He talks of Modernity as an unknowable love, he knows he would love her, and she him, but the modern world is too busy and fleeting for them ever to really meet. In fact he enjoys himself so much with melodramatic exclamations that any actual meeting couldn’t compete.

Paper Nautilus is on at Nautilus Press, 77-79 Southern Row, W10 5AL

Private View 6-9pm 25th October. Also open 28th October 2-8pm

Entry is invite only but you can print and invite here eepurl.com/qQu15.

All summer I’ve been editing beautiful super 8 and cine footage using my fledgling digital video editing skills. It sure is a steep learning curve. And don’t get me started on the audio…

But finally our baby is finished, and project Film Fan, a collaboration with artist filmmaker Katie Goodwin (considerably more skilled and experienced with the medium than I am) is ready to roll.

It’s beautiful, and we both agree that the collaborative process is perfect for film editing, although not always smooth sailing. We tele-cined (recorded to digital) approximately three hours of footage in a frustrating set of processes which involved much swearing, temperamental thirty year old equipment (and two temperamental artists) tears, tedium and lots of laughter.

Then we edited. We swapped cuts backward and forward, just locating and linking all that footage in our sequences had us scratching our heads. But in swapping the sequences back and forth we were able to edit further and further, and the distance created by the hand of the collaborator allowed a clarity and freedom of vision, to be ever more ruthless.

The final film is eight minutes long, and features babies, kids, a birthday party, the Muppet Show, a wedding, some amazing period fashion, poignancy and humour.

It really is amazing how these slice of life snippets build to create a picture of British life from the sixties to the eighties.

We installed at Bearspace last week in group show Odds Against Tomorrow, and I’m really looking forward to hearing what other people think of the work.