Restart

So here I am sitting in a gallery full of art invigilating so the public can have access to it whenever they want to.
I am finding that the context of this big white space (No Format gallery in Woolwich, London SE18) is a great way to look at the work and allows discussions to start. The gallery environment is a reflective one, with plenty of space and a timeless quality that makes it a refuge from other concerns, it’s almost like a retreat, it has elements of a place of worship in a secular mode. The staging of the show is not precious though, it’s pleasantly informal and physically accessible.

I am finding that I tend to develop a fantasy of how the show will go, how a steady stream of enthusiastic visitors will flock to the show, how people will be curious and enquiring and tell all their friends. Needless to say these ideas keep bumping up against the reality of an exhibition in a quiet London suburb in part of a regenerating industrial area that is transitioning from old uses and industries to new populations and start-ups. It’s a dynamic area with all kinds of interesting businesses, organisations and individuals all ferreting away to establish their niche in the economy of the capital.

One issue the show has thrown up is that of selling things. It is obviously desirable that we would make some sales of the artworks in the show and it remains to be seen if this will occur at the time of writing. There are other possibilities though and this is part of my thinking about revenue streams for artists, that the more diverse and sustainable revenue streams we artists can establish the more chance we stand of making our work sustain us so we can spend more time involved in it. To this end I have organised postcard sales at the show. This is hardly revolutionary, nor will it pay the rent in itself but as an idea it points the way to allowing income to flow in our direction not only from those rich enough to have sufficient disposable income to buy original artworks but from a much wider market that wants a reminder of the show, some token they can take away, something more than a memory, something tangible to hold on to that reflective secular space that our work represents and inhabits. In this case I think these sales may be more important symbolically than they are financially but it is an issue I will be addressing early on in the next show I am involved in.

Some other thoughts about exhibitions:
1 Wear a badge at the PV
Put your name on it and your twitter handle, this makes it easier for people to start conversations with you and to connect in a real way with people who you have only encountered online up until now. These things are not cool I am sure but they could really help those of us less gifted in the social department.

2 Weather
The English weather is such a major factor in determining how many people are out and about and likely to turn up at an event or not. I think you have to learn to suspend your expectations until after the event. This is an emotional impossibility of course, expectations build up as matter of course and adjustment of some kind inevitably follows, it’s another of those recursive patterns that keep turning up everywhere I look now.

Recursive

This will be the first time I have used this blog in the way it’s meant to be used, as a log of a project, or in this case an exhibition. I am showing in the ‘Recursive’ show, curated by Jane Boyer at the No Format gallery in South East London this October.

This blog is part of the way I became involved in the show. I targeted my promotional tweets to a few artists and curators I was following including Jane. She later got in touch with me with an outline of the show which was actually initiated by another of the participating artists Hitomi Kammai.

Working with a curator is a new experience for me, it’s a nice contrast with working on my own and it brings me into contact with new and different ideas and approaches. Sometimes it’s a negotiation or a trading of ideas and intentions other times I just have to remember to communicate what I am thinking.

Having a show to look forward to is changing my thinking and behaviour, to some extent it’s a focus, it’s a fixed point in time so I’ve got to get things prepared and I have to get myself ready. I guess it helps you take yourself more seriously as an artist when you get to show your work to an audience. My shows have now been so far between that this one’s giving me a greater sense of delivering the work to the point where it’s ready to be seen. It feels more like a launch than taking something to market which it also is. I am trying not to get carried away with the expectation of selling things, but my fingers are crossed just in case.

The show is called ‘Recursive’ which is a interesting twist on the concept of repetition and is defined thus: “Relating to or involving the repeated application of a rule or procedure to successive results in time” I see recursion as a cycle much like the creative cycle where you go through a series of stages which do not all feel like progress but which bring you back not to your starting place but to a place where you have assimilated some learning, thus you progress if you are lucky, but not in a straight line.

Recursion is also a term used in artificial intelligence where a robot goes through a cycle of experience and learns from it so that the next time it goes through the cycle it is better informed and can do it better.

So what does recursive mean in terms of my work? In ‘Autobiography”, which is a series of nine, wheeled ceramic vehicles there is some repetition in that each one has four wheels (producing the wheels was certainly a production line). Beyond that point the piece takes mass production as a theme with variations, each vehicle is as different in character as possible, the very opposite of actual car production where the variations are extremely constrained by commercial considerations. In the recursive model I would be learning from making each vehicle, incorporating what I learned into the next cycle of making – which is exactly what happens all the time with tacit or craft skills like clay modelling.

Repetitive obsession is really common among artists. I think if I had more time to spend in the studio I would make a lot more iterations of the same idea than I do currently, just to help work out the technical and aesthetic issues each idea brings up. I seem to have started working faster and more roughly to aid in this. It’s partly because I think I am becoming less precious about the work, I no longer think it’s very important that each piece proves that I can do my job, it’s more important that I get the idea across and often the fastest way of getting it down has most authenticity about it, the most freshness.

This is an eternal conundrum, so often the sketch is the best stage of a work.

Recursive at No Format Gallery,
London SE18 Oct 9th – Nov 2nd

Recursive blog post 02

This will be the first time I have used this blog in the way it’s meant to be used, as a log of a project, or in this case an exhibition. I am showing in the ‘Recursive’ show, curated by Jane Boyer at the No Format gallery in South East London this October.

This blog is part of the way I became involved in the show. I targeted my promotional tweets to a few artists and curators I was following including Jane. She later got in touch with me with an outline of the show which was actually initiated by another of the participating artists Hitomi Kammai.

Working with a curator is a new experience for me, it’s a nice contrast with working on my own and it brings me into contact with new and different ideas and approaches. Sometimes it’s a negotiation or a trading of ideas and intentions other times I just have to remember to communicate what I am thinking.

Having a show to look forward to is changing my thinking and behaviour, to some extent it’s a focus, it’s a fixed point in time so I’ve got to get things prepared and I  have to get myself ready.  I guess it helps you take yourself more seriously as an artist when you get to show your work to an audience. My shows have now been so far between that this one’s giving me a greater sense of delivering the work to the point where it’s ready to be seen. It feels more like a launch than taking something to market which it also is. I am trying not to get carried away with the expectation of selling things, but my fingers are crossed just in case.

The show is called ‘Recursive’ which is a interesting twist on the concept of repetition and is defined thus: “Relating to or involving the repeated application of a rule or procedure to successive results in time” I see recursion as a cycle much like the creative cycle where you go through a series of stages which do not all feel like progress but which bring you back not to your starting place but to a place where you have assimilated some learning, thus you progress if you are lucky, but not in a straight line.

Recursion is also a term used in artificial intelligence where a robot goes through a cycle of experience and learns from it so that the next time it goes through the cycle it is better informed and can do it better.

So what does recursive mean in terms of my work? In ‘Autobiography”, which is a series of nine, wheeled ceramic vehicles there is some repetition in that each one has four wheels (Producing the wheels was certainly a production line). Beyond that point the piece takes mass production as a theme with variations, each vehicle is as different in character as possible, the very opposite of actual car production where the variations are extremely constrained by commercial considerations. In the recursive model I would be learning from making each vehicle, incorporating what I learned into the next cycle of making – which is exactly what happens all the time with tacit or craft skills like clay modelling.

Repetitive obsession is really common among artists. I think if I had more time to spend in the studio I would make a lot more iterations of the same idea than I do currently, just to help work out the technical and aesthetic issues each idea brings up. I seem to have started working faster and more roughly to aid in this. It’s partly because I think I am becoming less precious about the work, I no longer think it’s very important that each piece proves that I can do my job, it’s more important that I get the idea across and often the fastest way of getting it down has most authenticity about it, the most freshness.

This is an eternal conundrum, so often the sketch is the best stage of a work.

Value, meaning and the crowd

I am thinking about how our artwork acquires value, how does it move from having an entirely personal value to having value to society in general and measurable value in the market?

My work has value to me because it has significant meaning. I make things that are full of meaning (to me) on many levels, they are rich with layers of ideas some of which are clear and direct, others of which are less clear and more ambiguous, or just not yet consciously identified. I judge my own work by the degree to which it seems to hold a set of meanings that are intended, if the work accrues other meanings by chance or whim during the making process then this may be to my advantage or of course it could spoil the work by distracting from my original intention.

As I work I make a whole series of incremental decisions that are individually difficult to identify but which add up to specific meanings embodied in the work. These meanings give the work its purpose and its character.

Inner meaning and investment

The processes described above are all about meanings that come from or through the artist, these only carry across into the outside world if the meanings are successfully embodied and discernible by others in the work. If this is the case you might expect the work to immediately start accruing real value as something desirable and profitable to trade: “if you want this meaningful work, please invest £xxxx which is the monetary equivalent to this meaning.”

From meaning to commodity

Grayson Perry described in his recent Reith lectures the process whereby a consensus of opinions confers value onto an artists works. To paraphrase his words, broadly this means that an artists works become assimilated into the art canon by an informal art crowd showing an interest and approval gathering around an artists work. For this to even begin happening the artists works have to appear on the art crowds’ radar through the kind of attention that shows, awards, articles and reviews can give. Firstly you have to make a body of work, then you have to bring it to the attention of a number of key people such that it starts to build you a reputation as a serious artist. If you can keep this marketing process going it should gradually imbue your work with increasing real financial value to the extent that your artwork becomes a commodity that can be relied on to grow in value so it can safely be invested in. This process represents the successful transfer of (some of) the meaning in an artists work from the individual to the collective and from an idea embodied in an object to a tradable commodity.

Art as a mountain

It has taken me a lifetime to understand that this is how the process is supposed to work and now I find myself still right at the beginning of it, perhaps the foothills are in sight for me but if the actual mountain range (a career as an artist where I earn the majority of my income through making art) remains a distant vision at least I now know where the path is which I did not when I left art school. A few years ago I was advised* that 80% of artists never progress their careers in art beyond the stage they reach at graduation from art school so I guess there must be a lot of artists, ex-art-students and latent artists in the same boat.

Are meaning and value equivalents?

So what conclusion could I draw from these thoughts, and what if I am wrong, that meaning is not related to value? What if value in art is entirely randomly attributed as it so often appears to the world outside the art business? I suspect there is a lot of guesswork and speculation involved in valuing art just as there is in valuing shares. Although in theory I would prefer it if value was fundamentally linked to meaning, I know this is too simplistic. Value in art is created and maintained by a consensus of ideas which evolve over time and can only be tested by history

my own work is driven by my need to make things and that is directed by my ideas and the meanings I want to convey. I also think some meanings emerge from the unconscious whether we artists like it or not, both these processes, getting ideas from our conscious and unconscious minds out into the world is what artist do for society -it’s why our work has value at all.

*Matt Roberts Arts

Art, profit, truth

Can we profit from our art? How do artists on the periphery of the art world make sense of their struggle to maintain a practice based on a drive to create artworks? As artists we need to survive in a culture where it is really hard to get a share of the profits from art. There are also different ways to profit from art.

Restartistics…

Through this blog I have established (to my own satisfaction) that a tiny fraction of artists are working full time. I think the figures (if they existed) would show that 99%* of artists have to have other jobs to make their art careers possible.

Whatever statistics tell us artists have to invest heavily in their art careers in the hope of making sufficient profit to continue as artists. Do we also have to recognise that our profit may not take a strictly financial form? Well perhaps I hope to have it both ways, the key for me to be able to spend more time making artwork is to earn more from it more regularly.

Motivations, driving forces, vision

In the context of making art, profit may be a hope or an aspiration but it is unlikely to be the core motivation. If financial profit was the driving force for artists then I assume there would be about 99%* less of us. What are other possible motivations? I think I have several things driving me to make my work.

– Aptitude. I am a visual and tactile person, I like working with my hands and making things, I have not identified any other job where this is both the means and the end except that of artist.

– Tacit understanding. I think in a visual and physical way. We do not all think in the same way or use the same route to discover solutions to problems. I like this quality I think it’s one of the things that makes me the artist I am, it also makes me difficult to fit into the world of work and employment which is increasingly based on rationality, linear thinking and teamwork, which do not suit everybody all the time.

– Vision. As an artist I am trying to use my skills to create things that have a veracity about them. My ‘vision’ is a subjective one, I think that if I can stick with it, it will lead somewhere that is interesting and beneficial. This benefit could simply be an aspiration or by believing in it I could be on the path of a truth that is also meaningful to others. I am using my own sense of what is valuable and important as my guide.

– Resonance. When I do something or make something that works, it has a resonance. This is the only word I can find to explain the feeling I experience when something hits the spot. I get it when I am exposed to work that has integrity, or when I am involved with a group of people that are really concentrating in a constructive way, drawing, making music, collaborating, listening intently, being present.

It would be interesting to know what other artists think motivates them. Is our drive to make things a primitive one, beyond our understanding or control? I am determinedly looking for my version of truth through my work. I conciously bought into that idea from the first week I spent at art school but I suspect it started much earlier..

Our Way

The odds often appear to be against us seriously profiting from art but somehow we keep throwing ourselves into it, thousands of artists every year emerge from art school and the arts and creative business as a whole are an increasingly significant part of our economy. This would not be happening if there was not a profit in it somewhere. The question is how best to make sure some of that profit comes our way to the extent that we not only survive but thrive.

[footnote: I am illustrating this article with a collection of work from other artists who have kindly agreed to let me show their works in this context]

*All statistics in this post are strictly subjective, I believe they are true – I just cannot prove it. See the big artists survey for verifiable stats.