I often ponder: “What is it about my practice that separates it from the conceptual mainstream?”. I keep coming back to this point: my work is not “about” ritual and the sacred. It is ritual and sacred. My work is not talking the talk. It is walking the walk.
It is not Damien Hirst putting a lamb in formaldehyde in a gallery to address the question of death. It is inviting an audience to participate in the killing of the lamb, documenting the event in my blog, making poetry from the participants’ speech, putting bloody hooks in a gallery, recording the sounds of the happening, and making an arty video out of the process.
Is this a retrograde step, a progressive step, a step sideways, no step at all, or missing the point altogether?
For me, it’s about drawing people in, enriching peoples’ lives, engaging people to explore things they wouldn’t otherwise explore, inspiring people to follow their own aspirations, encouraging people to reflect and question. Facilitating people to find their own voice in a world in which there’s always somebody telling you what to think and how to live, including – or especially – the art critics, academics, funders, sponsors and commentators.
For the art critics, academics, funders, sponsors and commentators it’s about some disjoint notion of quality. It’s about the quality of the concept, or the coverage and reproduction of the documentation, or the skill of the execution, etc.
It’s not about how well I draw people in, how much I enrich their lives, to what extent I engage people to explore things they wouldn’t otherwise explore, the degree to which I inspire people to follow their own aspirations, or the depth to which my audience reflect and question. They are especially not interested in facilitating people to find their own voice.
They are much more interested in using publicly funded galleries to “teach people to discern the difference between good art and bad art”. This is the phrase that appears in the founding document of every publicly funded gallery, which ensures the gallery attains charitable status as an educational body.
If the charity commission could grant charitable status to organisations which “empower individuals to assert their own voice against overbearing authority”, then perhaps publicly funded galleries and their associated retinues of critics, academics, funders, sponsors and commentators, could align themselves more clearly with the aims of artists, and less with the aims of government.
I often wonder whether the charity commission would grant charitable status to a body which “educates people to think for themselves, form their own criteria of what constitutes art, good or bad, facilitates people to question received wisdom, and empowers people to assert their own voice against overbearing authority”. I tried it with the Millennium art project I set up, but quickly realised the charity commission is a conservative place, and I was going to need to fund a very expensive barrister to have the vaguest hope of success. The kind of funds that grass-roots, artist-led organisations just don’t have access to.
Enough of this. I just had a great weekend. A whole day to mess about with a friend in the woods behind my home. Three trees came down in gales this year, scattering twigs and branches all around.
What to do? Something sacred? Something meaningful? Something to draw people in and engage people? Oh, to hell with it all, today I made something simply for the pleasure of making it, the joy of dragging stuff out of the undergrowth and putting it together and seeing what happens. A paradise of conceptual emptiness, a purity of experimentation and improvisation.
Then I think to myself: “It would look better painted white”. And then I think “Actually, I don’t want to paint all of it white, just selected bits”. And then I think “I want it not quite touching the dead oak tree, like Michelangelo’s Adam.” Then I think “I’ll bring the kids here and get them to add to it”. Then I think “I’ll get some friends up here too, and expand it further”. Then I think “At the end of the Summer I’ll paint it with flammable stuff and wrap fire rope round it, and make it a fire sculpture, video it and post the video on my blog”. And before I know it I’ve ruined a lovely afternoon of carefree construction, and turned it into Another Bloody Work of Art. Shame on me.
