Dear Alex,
Have you ‘found your practice’? What factors make this problematic? Are they external or internal? What is a ‘true practice’ any way..?
Sarah Rowles from Q-Art London, a new forum for open discussion, is going to be the Choice blogs guest editor for August. In her selection copy she talks about, “…insecurity and the lack of time to ‘find oneself’ as an artist because of the constant pressure to define ones practice in order to gain grants, exhibitions, funding…”.
This is a central issue for artists working today and in anticipation of Sarah’s choice hitting the homepage I am inviting you to contribute to this discussion by adding a specific post on your blog, which I can then link to from the homepage.
Any contributions to this will be gratefully received. Please let me know by email when you have made your post.
With kind regards,
Andrew
Like my imaginary Vampire cowboy (previous post) I often feel slightly uncomfortable when defining my practice. Explaining what I do doesn’t come easily to me and I don’t like the words that we are asked to use. ‘Practice’ seems poncey, ‘work’ a bit desperate. If pushed, like many artists I do like to hide in the third person and try to come up with a Blairian soundbite, something vaguely descriptive but which doesn’t commit me to too much. Some years ago now I produced the tag-line “Alex Pearl makes things and then films them before they fall apart”, (not exactly catchy I know) I had to leave it behind when I started to do more things and some of them didn’t fall apart. Then I went with something along the lines of “his work deals with chance and the things he doesn’t do very well” I like not doing things very well, it seems to be the artist’s prerogative and has allowed me to paint, dance, make sculpture, films, even write. I see that a bastardization of these phrases still head my writer description for this blog, though I have changed to a suggestion that things are beyond my control. Lack of control has become central to my practice (feel the quality of that phrase). Like an extremely unsexy Vicomte de Valmont I constantly excuse my actions by my inability or unwillingness to govern them. When I received Andrew’s email asking me (and I assume many others) to respond to the questions: “Have you ‘found your practice’? What factors make this problematic? Are they external or internal? What is a ‘true practice’ any way..?” I began to think that my avoidance tactics were somehow born of the constant demands on artists to provide reasons for what they do.
view complete post at www.thepearlfisher.blogspot.com
I heard an interesting tale last night from an Australian doctor. She told me a story of a friend who came from Transylvania. One evening he explained that his grandmother had asked that her head be cut of after she had died (not before). He also told of how the vampire myth came about during the plague. Apparently many victims (in the interests of hygiene and the common good) were buried before they had quite died, and some dug themselves out to walk the earth again. The good doctor told of his convincing Transylvanian accent and theories that Vampires had colonised every film genre. I realised I was being obtuse so I didn’t bring up my theory that a Vampire would make a very poor cowboy, turning up at high noon only to disappear in a puff of smoke.
Dear Alex,
Yes I can remember quite a few things but I hope they’re not too personal…I liked the Hammer writing (the titles) -it reminded me of the First Reich typography-I wonder if that was intentional considering the era the film was made-I wonder if the First world war still represented the horror of the second…twice it happened it must have felt like it was going to happen forever.
I thought Christopher Lee was Peter Cushing and I was having little fantasies about him swimming in the sea and imagining his fangs taking in the North Sea…and then Doctor Van Helsing arrived and I realised I had got it wrong. I couldn’t imagine what Dracula’s body was like anyway, so it solved a problem for me-I thought maybe…My mother had an Edwardian Schoolmaster doll. She had patched his face up with plaster and watercolour and he looked like those WWI Pachendale victims that had their faces patched up-to be left with half of their face with an unnatural sheen. I always wanted to see what the Schoolmaster’s body was like under his black gown and trousers-but his legs looked like matchsticks and didn’t join up with his Edwardian spats. Maybe I am thinking of Mumra but that’s what I thought Dracula’s body might be like. I don’t think he had need of a body did he? The women seemed delighted with his mouth. When did the acceptance of the clitoris as useful and important come about? I remember my aunt saying that for a woman to have sex on top of a man was seen as outrageously emasculating.
What else do I remember…that the unpleasant action occurred downstairs in the cellar. The glacial waters that flowed outside Dracula’s castle reminded me of Switzerland…..The deep flowing water of Geneva was very exciting for me…I remember looking over a bridge at the cormorants underwater and wondering if I would ever come back and see it and if I would be married by then. I fell asleep in the park after that, setting my alarm clock, and was woken up often by annoying men trying to ‘help’ me. The students had gone to the United Nations and I had fainted so I was allowed to wander around on my own.
read the rest of this post at www.thepearlfisher.blogspot.com
Wednesday, 15 July, 2009, 5:37 PM
My dearest Annabel
I have made very little progress writing my blog and have not even gotten close to writing about watching Dracula with you last night. I was wondering if you would help me by emailing me your response to the film, the evening, and indeed anything else that strikes you as pertinent.
Yours forever
Alex Pearl
The return to my Ipswich lodgings was largely uneventful. My companion felt unwell probably due to too much excitement. As she slept for most of the journey back I was left with my own thoughts as I mulled over our trip. At least that is what I would have liked to have done. I have to admit that very little mulling was done; instead I played Risk on my phone. I’m addicted to it, constantly weighing up the distribution of my armies and the merits of capturing South America or Australia. I did also order Mr Cushing’s “Dracula” a Hammer Horror spectacular from 1958. We stopped for a meal not far from Ipswich station in a little restaurant with unpleasant waitresses. We sat outside but under the shelter of one of the large umbrellas as my companion can barely tolerate the sun.
