Something finally worked out with the Specials project. I have at last found a competent joiner type person, who is able to build the video tower, and who also actually had something to contribute in terms of good ideas as to how it might all fit together. Tomorrow we go on a site visit (I've shown him photos of the site and a plan) and hopefully within a week this thorny aspect of the project will be realised. I spend so much time thinking about the content and reasoning behind what I do, that I am increasingly aware, it is all too easy to let the actuality of putting the show together become somewhat secondary. I think my mentality is still right in there with the painter I imagine myself to be, considering the canvas, balancing everything, making it work on some imaginary plane, and then just hanging it in some pure white box. Nice and easy. So why do I continually make life difficult for myself by expanding the work so it no longer becomes a nail in the wall, ‘stick it up there' proposition, but instead requires irritating journeys out of my comfort zone. T'was ever thus.
Yesterday AN mag arrived. Now it may be a bit self referential (this blog being on the same website), but I really feel a need to comment/ empathise with a number of artists statements here.
It's something I have pondered of recent times – the work ethic versus the credibility of the work produced. I read a quote from Cathryn Jiggens (who has a blog on here) along the lines of "I was a high achiever during my academic studies and so have continued this work ethic into my practice beyond – as most artists do.." I misquote but that is the gist. It struck a chord. It sounded like me at some other point in my life. It was an assumption I made of myself. Hard work equals good work. Very Methodist.
But a lot of water has flowed under various bridges since. I spent many years after leaving my own college, devoting myself to my work, and, in the process, (and in hindsight) trying to sustain a momentum that originated from the very privileged position of having all that grant aided space in which to think. Not a bad thing – a great thing. But somehow (and I say this for me only) when I think of those ten or so ‘artistically intense' years after college I realise that the work was becoming increasingly ‘academic', ‘professional', ‘self-referential'. I might as well have had a ‘proper' career. I was churning it out.
Then I looked further up the page in AN. There was another quote from Stuart Mayes "Although I think of myself as an artist I realise that I spend the majority of my week away from my practice – being at work…isn't the same as being there doing it". Well I can certainly relate to that.
