I’m grateful to all the other artists who recently attended ArtLacuna’s Bodies That Matter experimental peer/performance event at Space Station Sixty-Five. They were very generous with their thoughts and comments on my work, and the work of the other parcticipating artists. We ran this as a large peer critique, with a selection of artists many of whom did not know one another or one another’s work. There was then a series of short talks on the subject of performance. The notion linking these events was that any and every artist is a performance artist, even those who don’t consider their work related to performance in any way. The most obvious place for performance being the act of talking about ones work, ergo; the peer critique.
http://artlacuna.org/bodies_that_matter.html
It got me thinking about the peer critique as a tool for artists, it is a routine event in art college, and many continue the practice after they leave with small groups of friends. Speaking to a more established artist recently he intimated that the practice of peer critique (or salon review as it has become known in these parts) is something established and secure artists should not need. Presumably the habit of rigorously examining ones own work and ‘critiquing’ it has become ingrained and internalised enough to preclude the need for any external discussion.
I’m not entirely sure I agree, and I’m sure you can think of many established artists work which would have benefitted from a rigorous yet well-meaning interrogation before they made it out of the studio door.
The drawings I showed at Bodeis That Matter are new works based on the seventies romance novels I collect. I think these work better than the gouache versions I previously made for various reasons. The gouache was intended to refer to the lost art of the book artist, but became too slavishly wedded to the garish seventies colour palette and stylistic quirks. In revisiting the subject matter in ballpoint pen, specifically that shade I associate as ‘corner shop blue’ the connotations and references of the drawings take on a different angle, evocative of biro doodles in text books and teen angst. I like the obsessive and repetitive quality of cross-hatching here. Hand drawing book text also has a particular hand made ‘zine, or school girl quality. I’m also experimenting with alternative papers, everyday lined paper or school-book paper, but I’m not sure if this is the wrong route.
I’ve pinned some references http://www.pinterest.com/alexandramarch/romance/ to romance novels here including True Love Stories by the Connor Brothers. And some drawing references here http://www.pinterest.com/alexandramarch/drawing/
