The Cooler King (part 2)

Do you know what?

I am just a bit fed up with art….bored with it….not particularly interested by it. And I feel slightly guilty about it as well.

Artists Talking have put a link to my blog from the home page and tweeted snippits from here……and I just cant be bothered! So I appologise for not making the effort, and realise it would have been good to capitalise on the profile it provides.

But I have been in the cooler since last Sept and loosing the will to live in there. I have nearly finished the series now and will install them soon.

But….here’s the thing……I will probably have to continue the isolation and dig really deep mentally as it is likely the next commission is another large mosaic.

Art as a comodity, is this OK?

A straight forward you do this and we will buy it! Very very simple.

Should there be more?

Why should there be more?

All very boring.

I have already been paid to start it, but have had to make a lot of design modifications and have been unable to get it nailed….as it were! The emotional investment seems high on these kinds of projects and now and again it seems all a little overwhelming.

and I’ve got nothing to say.

The Public Art Debate

A couple of weeks ago I went to The Public Art Debate at Turner in Margate……..I have just found a video of it on the internet and it was so uninspiring then…… and even more so when I watched the video (actually bits of the video).

Why was it so bad?

It took 20 minutes to describe really painfully what public art was, followed by some average to poor examples, then there were practically no questions from the floor. Defiantly no interesting ones!

I felt the panel thought public art to be a narrow particular kind of art that adapts industrial process to make colourful and shiny things that involved nothing you could recognise. Imagery was often disregarded and praise for art which I thought were gimmicks, which have high impact where interest lasts about 15-20 seconds and then the novelty wears away.

Art that involved working with the people was regarded as a little naff and some of what they championed I felt alienated people from art, as up itself and intellectual. Do artists have to be so clever and Avant- Garde?

I came away feeling I was not avant-garde or critical and was definitely not a public artist in the way the facilitators, course directors, programme managers, architects and curators expected their artists to be.

Craft I don’t think I heard that word at any point.

I heard the word commodity and I think it was regarded badly. I heard lots of democratics, notions, frameworks, values, spaces and facilities. Yet failed to understand what anyone really meant with them in relation to art.

I came out thinking actually I believe the rub of the whole topic was missed out altogether, never mentioned. That is ‘commissioner and stakeholder agendas’. The panel described public art like the artists could do what they wanted on a blank page…….well may be a small number of projects or organisations do allow this. This is not where the majority of public art comes from. They spoke as if it was. But I can tell you the reality is you have dance to the pipers tune. In this respect I feel very much more closely aligned with The Renaissance than contemporary art. Patrons, funders or commissioners what ever you want to call them; want the art they buy to serve some kind purpose, that’s why they are buying it.

Their ‘notion’ of art in the public realm implies artists can do what they want! ………………er hello.

I have decided to write a series of short scenarios:

OK I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll do a sketch with the suggested alterations. I won’t do a large scale fully worked up design yet, and see if the steering group OK the sketch before doing the final design. You should get something by the middle/end of next week is that OK?

and

your representative visited my workshop yesterday to see the works in construction and seemed very pleased with way things have progressed so I am attaching my invoice for payment as agreed in the contract. I have also attached images of the most recently completed work in the series.

but

‘half a dozen designs and none of them seem quite right and oh you want a seventh version with a few alterations.

actually…. I’ve had enough of this….and you can have your payment back. I’m not quite clear on the internal politics going on here, but they make a never ending circle’.

and

as the work will be adopted by us after a year we also need to agree things are going OK and will send a representative out to see the work soon on the suggested date.

and

No thats right, sometimes the only way to get the right colour is to blend the tiles optically, in a pontalist kind of way, to create a colour not manufactured.

but

thank you for the update, but please delete me from your file as I will not submit a proposal as I would be unable to work within the time schedules.

or

Thank you for you application for the residency you will hear from us shorty.

and

I don’t usually have a problem with colour, but I can send you examples of projects with the designs on paper compared to photos of the finished work to show the slight variations that do happen. Oh…. you would like to visit soon after work has started to see if the colours were OK….Yeh your very welcome.

and finally:

The magpie refused to enter the ark with Noah.

I thought I would carry on with a part 2 from my previous post describing mosaic making. I’d stopped at the point where everything is in place and things start getting good and where some kind of gratification starts coming back. To that point it had been very one way- by that I mean kind of prep work.

So everything is in place to do the interesting parts of the picture. The thing is like a painting, its about colours, its how you handle the material to represent whats being depicted. Its about relationships with neighboring areas.

But how to describe the descision making process is outside my ability. I can give clues:

Its about inventing systems for representation.

Its about carrying out the ideas you have formulated on the way to this point.

Its about being quick to spot if modifications are needed to those ideas if they fall short.

Its about patience and working areas to a position where there is little chance of getting things wrong (its a lot of work to pick off and re-do something again).

I can desribe it as being like a sheep dog, hearding things around a focal point in such a way that when the final thing is made it’s easy and works so well because the sounding elements were ushered into place for best effect.

Gratification comes where you can say;

those colour relationships work

that blend of different colours creates just the right tone

the rythymn of those shapes leads the eye nicely

I love that bit there, economical yet effective

The best part for me so far on this epic project is seeing them as a set. Not quite completed yet, but looking at all of them together. Thats when all the ideas, all the research and all the work come together…….for what? Others to interprete!

see the five completed ones to date on my website

http://rob-turner.blogspot.co.uk/p/news.html

My favourite so far is ‘Field Names’ the one with the crows. I think the one I am working on now might take top spot. I will have to wait and see. But I have kept my favourite till last and that is the next one yet to start.

I thought I might try and describe the aesthetic and practical decisions whilst making this mosaic!

It happens on such an intuitive level I thought I would try it in words?

Starts with defining the plain compositional elements – square – circle – and corner triangles really really mechanical yet high attention required for accurate placement of tesserae. The only good thing about this stage is that it moves along so quickly compared to the other stages, which I like.

Next lettering and the broad white ring. The lettering is all about planning, keeping them consistently spaced and the same height requires constant monitoring as the drawn writing below on your cartoon is only a guide and is never right so its all about construction and system. I hate doing S – B – C – G – Q all the circular ones they pose problems when filling in the white behind them. M – W – A – T are always require special attention as they make very large gaps between the next letter and you have to adjust your formula to get the spaces right. H – I – F – L – T , I love these as they are so quick. The width of the white ring needs constant monitoring and pencil predictions as to where it will be as the drawing underneath has again become obsolete as the tiling system overrides the pencil under drawing.

Then doing the picture starts. Which bit do I want to first? Often things have be prioritetised in a way that can only be described as – ‘ I cant do that bit untill I know where the edge of that will be. So the interesting bit you fancied may have to wait till other areas are completed. Starts with outlines of thin black tiles which define the elements of the picture following your drawn cartoon underneath, it may require adjustment as things may be too close together, and this is the opportunity to make slight arrangement and compositional adjustments. I have even omitted a leaf or flower head if the thing is just too congested.

If your unlucky the really complicated part is the part that unlocks the rest of the piece and has to be done first. After a week of pretty low skill level work where your mind is mush and on auto pilot suddenly with no warm up, your in there doing the hardest part of the whole thing. So this is probably a week or more even before anything artistic happens! Every thing to date has been mechanical, practical and formulaic.