What does it mean to be an artist?

*** This blog is currently dormant, but remains as a sort of archive. It may yet be resurrected! ***

I’m very very busy at the moment; a busy-ness that seems to primarily consist of impotent, stress-driven flailing & stasis. On Saturday afternoon I took some time off & went to see some art. I feel like I’ve really neglected this since moving to Bristol – bar the Jamaica Street Open Studios, I’ve scarcely seen a thing. On the one hand, I don’t necessarily mind this: I’m a notoriously Bad Artist; a stay-at-home who finds the structures, choreographies & rhythms of the world as it is far more exciting, generally, than anything found in a gallery. Equally, I’m aware of how dulled & lazy this can make me, and I love that particular feeling of inspired serenity I get when I emerge from a space, having just seen something beautiful, something moving, something challenging, something great.

I went to the Arnolfini to catch The Sea Wall on its final weekend. This was an exhibition with an ambitious remit, aiming to present a conversation between the practices of Felix Gonzales-Torres and Haegue Yang. I’m not entirely sure this was successful: since only one Gonzales-Torres work – the stunning Untitled (Water) – was included in the whole exhibition (which utilised all 5 gallery spaces across 3 floors), the “conversation” was rather one-sided, and it seems facile to claim that a single piece, however breathtaking, can speak for an artist’s entire body of work in this way. Untitled (Water) was used across locations, mostly as a divider, creating liminal and transitional areas between Yang’s work. While I think that this was intended to reflect Yang’s interest in communities and the invisible, porous, yet containing boundaries that run through society, it was a real shame, to me, to see such a powerful work treated almost as a prop.

Yang’s work is sprawling, and not always successful – but when she gets it right, it’s wonderful: subtle, playful, challenging. Her Mirror Series transforms the mirror from passive receiver to active transmitter in often surprising ways; and Certificates, a series of sales contracts committing the artist to provide personal details such as her Gmail password, raise interesting and sly questions about ownership and documentation. Elsewhere, the collage series Trustworthies turns envelope security patterns into rich, textural 2D works reminiscent of seascapes. Down on the ground floor, 186.16m3/372.32m3 provides the most striking link with Gonzales-Torres’ work – just as Untitled (Water) invites us into the space with a promise of water, of a broken surface, of the freedom of the swimmer (or the drowner), a few paces behind it, barely visible, razor-thin lengths of red thread span the space at equal distances. The effect is shocking and experiential – expectations confounded, we find ourselves in a regimented and enclosed space with no way out but to turn back. Visually, too, 186.16m3/372.32m3 succeeds: its two-colour, minimal, near-invisible frailty creating a sense of precarious order and calm. However, VIP’s Union, a collection of furniture donated by various Bristol luminaries, is lumpen and flat, and Yang’s experiments with domestic objects, enclosed spaces and porous borders (Site Cube #1; Rue Saint-Benoit) are repeated too often to have any real impact.

Too often, this exhibition felt incoherent and unedited; too often it seemed insular and inward-looking. Its use of a single piece by Felix Gonzales-Torres, set against curatorial claims of a dialogue, a conversation, appear to assume prior knowledge of Gonzales-Torres’ work, an art-historian’s awareness of the common themes and threads shared by he and Yang. There were only two or three instances where this reciprocation was clear; elsewhere, the show was muddled and bizarre. In this way, the exhibition carried its own theme forward – something resistant and exclusive masked as something inviting and inclusive.

Another Lazarus-style resurrection for my little blog. So much has happened since I last wrote here. Here are some bullet points:

– I went through a huge and stressful break-up resulting in my relocation from Liverpool to Bristol (from where I am now writing).

– I had a brilliant BA interview at Dundee and was accepted on the spot. I was supposed to be starting in a few weeks, but the break-up/relocation ate into my university fund so massively that I’ve had to defer until next year. Even so, I am proud and excited to say that, as of September 2012, I’ll be studying towards a BA in Art, Philosophy, Contemporary Practices at one of the nicest and most exciting art schools I’ve seen. The course, the school and the tutors are a perfect fit for me, and I’m so pleased.

– I took my bookworks to the Bristol Artists Book Event 2011, where I broke even for the very first time and sold two works to the Tate. I also drank pink fizz and ate pizza on the harbourside in the spring heat & was perfectly happy.

– I’ve been working on my project in Runcorn intermittently since May, and things are starting to come together now. This is the first community project I’ve done alone, as lead artist, and it’s an interesting, challenging and engaging experience. My project is called Hello, Runcorn!, and it’s all about celebrating the small, everyday, easily-overlooked things about our environments; it’s about falling in love, again or for the first time, with the place where you live. I’m blogging about the project here, with the hope of encouraging local people to get involved. To that end, I was also featured, with obligatory unflattering photograph, on page 28 of the Runcorn & Widnes Weekly News (eat your heart out, Emily Speed!)!

– At the moment I’m thinking very deeply about what it means to be an artist in momentous times, particularly in light of the recent riots. This polemic by Sofia Himmelblau has sparked off a whole train of thought, particularly the line, “Art and brooms isn’t going to fix this particular problem“. Raised by politically-active parents (I was one of those early-80s babies with a CND badge pinned to my rompers), I’ve always had a strong sense of what, for want of a better term, I’ll have to call “social justice”; and I’ve always wanted to make a positive impact, somehow. I want to know that what I do matters; that it makes the world a better place (or at least doesn’t actively make it a worse one). I posted this on Facebook as part of a fascinating discussion with some friends which encompassed community art work and Empty Shops schemes, and I think it does a good job of illuminating some of the thoughts I’ve been having lately:

“…I have noted a definite disconnect: communities are often only involved in one-off, project-based ways, helping artists/institutions to achieve their aims or hit targets… and you can sometimes think, “when this project is over, what will become of these people whose input we’ve harvested?” A lot of projects running on Beuysian principles: social sculpture without due attention to the social part. The questions I continually have to ask myself about my work, to the point of paralysis, are: “What am i doing? Why does this matter? Who does this help?” And I can see that in some communities, the arts are window dressing to make certain streets a little less scary, to insulate some of us from the empty-spaced broken-windowed reality of poverty…”

Plenty to think about…

– Next weekend I’ll be attending Supernormal – an artist-led arts, performance and music festival. I’m attending as a guest rather than an artist, but I am planning an unauthorised, off-programme intervention on the festival site as part of a collaborative partnership about which I’m really excited. I’m hoping it will be feasible…

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So, with the catching-up out of the way and my life rather more settled than it has been, hopefully I can start giving this blog the love it deserves. Wish me luck!

At the start of the month I went to visit a very old, very dear friend in another city. He’s a little younger than I, just about to graduate from art school and step out into the world for the first time. We sat in his studio space for a while; there was a real sense of excitement as everybody made the final push towards their degree show – but this was mixed with a palpable feeling of trepidation; the knowledge that soon you’ll have to jump out of the nest and fly as well as you can.

We talked a bit about what might happen next, about what he’d do after graduating. He’s putting a few proposals together for some summer shows aimed at showcasing new graduate talent – and after that, he said, he hopes eventually to get gallery representation. At that point I said something like, “It’s one way of doing it, but it’s not the only way, and it’s not for everyone…”, only for my friend to reply, “It’s the only way if you want to make a living out of your work and reach as many people as possible… especially in the current climate.”

I found that interesting, as to me, commercial galleries are not synonymous with reaching as wide an audience as you can; in fact, I tend to view them as quite a negative thing, contributing to the level of speculation and commodification within the arts, and, to a certain extent, encouraging stagnation. I’m yet to hear of a commercial gallery that supports artists whose practices do not produce solid, saleable outcomes – for good reason, of course, as commercial galleries are, more than any other type of institution, businesses first and foremost, existing to generate sales and profit. (From my perspective, it’s hard not to read all of the above as being damaging and negative, though I can also understand how a less politically-minded artist with, say, a pure painting practice who has found a supportive, understanding dealer might choose representation. And, of course, more experimental commercial spaces may well exist – any examples are welcomed!)

I talked to my friend about other methods, citing examples of artists I know who manage to make something close to a living from a mix of residencies, exhibition fees and educational work, with studio practice, unpaid-but-fun exhibitions and occasional sales thrown into the mix too. I think it’s a model that’s becoming increasingly viable, with artists utilising social media as a tool for building supportive networks, displaying work and reaching audiences. I tried to explain a little bit about how I feel that gallerists, dealers and art fairs are mostly bad for art and artists, and that it might be more interesting (and fun!) for artists to find another way of promoting, exhibiting and selling.

I’m not sure any of it worked; my friend seemed convinced that gallery representation was and is the only way for an artist – any artist! – to progress and succeed. As such, he’s coming out of art school with vast confidence in his own work (and rightly so; his work is fascinating) but with what looks to me a lot like fear and confusion about the next step. It’s a shame, and I wonder if universities could do more to prepare graduating students for life after art school.

Oh dear! Again, such a long time between posts. I’ve been busy since the New Year with a number of things, two of them significant:

– Developing, proposing and planning my first-ever community-engagement project as “lead artist”. It’s an idea that combines my love of print culture with ideas around social sculpture & intangible outcomes (the focus on the process, with the product recast as ephemera or evidence), hopefully in an accessible and non-rarefied and fun sort of way. I’m so excited to get started – and it’s paid, too, which is lovely. I’m sure I’ll post more about it once it gets started, so watch this space.

– Deciding to apply to various art schools to actually get my BA. I realised that my confidence was lacking, that I felt unable to compete in a professionalised “arts market” (yuck!), and that the only plausible antidote to this was, as my brother would put it, to man up and go back to artschool. The process of applying, compiling work and being interviewed has been a learning experience in itself – criticism being something that most peer-to-peer discourse seems to lack (understandably, for fear of offending). I can reveal that I am now in the peculiar position of being a “working artist” with works held in collections etc. etc. who has also been rejected by Central St Martin’s for BA(Hons) Fine Art! (Though I’ve had no feedback, at interview they seemed to think I didn’t need the course, which is a little frustrating as I think that everybody has something to learn. Perhaps even them, as when I mentioned Allan Kaprow the interviewer said, “oh, pfff, happenings and all that,” and when I mentioned artists’ books he said, “desktop publishing” – perhaps not the school for me!) This rejection has knocked my confidence still further, so much so that I am beginning to re-evaluate my choice to try and pursue a career in the arts. Is it really for me? I’m less and less sure that what I do is strictly art in the way that the World At Large would interpret the word (though it certainly feels like art to me!), or particularly saleable, or indeed something that’s especially easy for others to understand or “get”. I have a couple more interviews to attend, but I’ve started to formulate a Plan B which would take me down a wildly different, far more academic route – though of course I plan to continue in my art and thought practice whatever happens. This would be quite an interesting acid test for all my theorising around the intersection/blurring of art with daily life. As well, I am wondering if the broadening of influence and knowledge resulting from intensive study in another field might not be beneficial to my practice. I don’t want to become one of those artists whose work only addresses other artists. (I treasure those moments at book fairs when a “civilian” picks up & falls in love with one of my bookworks – such a sparking sort of joy!) It’s telling, to me, that the two BA arts courses about which I’m most excited are the most interdisciplinary; though I’m by no means certain that I will be offered a place on either. I know that my art has more to do with philosophy than it does with painting, and I am happy with that. I just wonder if it fits into the artschool definition of what art should be – of what it means to be an artist.

Interesting times.