It’s only words and words are all I have, to take your heart away… or my heart as it turned out.
I never saw myself as an artist with an agenda; I guess I liked the idea of sitting on a rather tall fence looking down on the confused faces of artists who were confronting a cause within their work. I think the only thing that was close to an agenda was adding humour into my work as a way of expressing how ridiculous certain aspects of life are. From the second year of my degree I found myself creating work from daily newspapers, both tabloid and broad sheet, I was taking the serious stories of war, conflict, government behaviour and other serious headline stories and crossing them with the rather nonsense stories that red top tabloid papers choose print. My aim was to address the issue of real stories but add a ‘pun like’ twist to them. The red tops have the ability of taking important stories and dumbing them down, adding humour to the article in order to appeal to their chosen mass market. I was in no way making fun of the stories themselves; it was more a case of addressing how red tops approach stories.
I chose to continue with this idea at the start of my third year. I think I have accepted at this point that I tend to see the finished piece long before its made, I can visualise the presentation of work and the stages I need to get to that point and in my second year I was hanging these finished newspaper prints a certain way and knew that It would create a very visually appealing installation space, however, it doesn’t always work out how you see it (I realise at this stage that a lot of these posts will appear very romanticised and I’m sure the way I address this blog will change dramatically when I have caught up). I was creating work in very much the same way, cutting text stencils, preparing the newsprint and spraying through the stencils to give me my finished image… BUT (added anticipation), something seemed to not be working like it had been last semester, but why, what had changed? A few I’d made before had kinda worked, I felt the idea was still strong, so what was it? Then during a tutorial with my tutor he had made it clear to me, I’d made it too personal, I’d added my own feelings to the headlines, I’d forced my opinion on to the viewer, basically I’d taken the idea of appealing to the masses and become the Daily Mail!!! Suddenly I had become an artist with an agenda, I had become political within my work, I was protesting against tabloid red tops and forcing my views on to people and that is something I never thought I would address. This is the start of a rough patch of unknown terrain, how do I address this within my practice? It was clear I needed to do a lot of reading on political art and as I was about to start my dissertation it seemed that would be how I would begin to understand it, so I chose political art as a subject for my dissertation, specifically concentrating on protest and activist artists leading me in to the deep unknown.
Tune in same bat time, same bat channel… for more.
