‘...at the age of twenty-seven, he began work on the spacious gallery in his house in Harley Street, which not only advertised his achievements but provided a more sympathetic setting … than the crowded walls of the Great Exhibition Room at the Royal Academy.‘
From Tate Britain’s biography of Turner.
I think that my difficulty with the white-cube gallery as a context lies in its finality. Try as it might to be otherwise, the gallery is a place of resolution, the exhibition the ultimate event, the displayed object a full-stop. I have a problem with finality, and the problem is that, wherever I look, everything is shifting and fluid and ever in motion, and nothing at all is fixed. How at all, if at all, can the static art-object reflect this dynamism? This is something that has troubled artists for decades; Julio le Parc, for instance, began to work with light, mirrors and mobiles to create chance-based, open-ended works that shifted and altered continuously. Video projections, immersive installations and interactive sculpture are some of the other ways in which artists have grappled with this issue: the creation of works that transcend, transform or open up the space. But, for me personally, the difficulty of the gallery remains: it seems to me to be an authoritative space, waiting to be filled with commodities; and very separate; not a place where art can live. I have always been fascinated by the interfacing of the inner and outer worlds; in a space that announces itself as a Place For Art, how much of the subtlety of this intersection of the private and the public can remain? In other words, a gallery seems weighted towards the outer, the public. In opposition to this, I’m thinking about art in the domestic space. I’m thinking about art as an intervention into the outside world. Not self-announcing in the way that public sculpture or a painting on the wall of a coffee-shop can be; but a quietly active Thing that breathes and lives and immerses…
These thoughts are feeding into a proposal I’m working on today; though so much of my working seems to consist of looking at the beech-tree outside the window. Yesterday, the leaves on one side of the tree began to turn yellow.
My friend, fellow artist and a-n blogger Emily Speed, sent me this link over the weekend – some words by Agnes Martin on disappointment & the process of working as an artist. Martin has long been one of my favourite artists; I remember seeing her piece Morning at Tate Liverpool’s 20th century retrospective – almost three years ago now, on an early date with S., my boyfriend. I stood -silent, transfixed, and quite anti-social – for what felt like an eternity; experiencing her work physically was one of those art/life experiences; the rare ones, the transcendent ones. I came home and wrote reams of scribbled and excited notes in my notebook (which led me to the succinct conclusion: “Re-read Plato.” — his Theory of Forms, in relation to art, is something in which I’m desperately interested.). To me, Martin is one of the most truthful artists of the last century – if not ever. There’s a purity, a subtlety and a quiet directness to her work that is both breathtakingly beautiful and incredibly honest. As the artist herself said, talking about Morning, “It is about how we feel.”
Martin has also said this (which is quoted on the blog to which I’ve linked above):
“A sense of disappointment and defeat is the essential state of mind for creative work
“That is why art work is so very hard. It is a working through disappointments to greater disappointment and a growing recognition of failure to the point of defeat.
“‘Defeated’ is the position from which to have something to say, to rise up.“
This last line; yes, and yes, and yes. It was precisely the affirmation I needed this morning – barely half-past seven, with the sun not long risen & the wind racing through the trees & against the buildings. After several very dreadful, very, unspeakably dark days, I woke and I rose with a renewed sense of purpose and faith in what I wish to do – my usual sense of September re-awakening, but intensified and brought to a point. And then to read these words! It is true: I have felt defeated; but I shall rise up; in a quiet way I shall speak, I shall work. Because I have to. Because I want to. Because I must.
… Oh, the way that these things find us when we need them. Serendipity. Truly, I don’t know where I would be without it.
For I am coming to understand that I (and, therefore, my work) thrive on solitude, quietness and intense, first-hand experience; the private self and the inner life rather than public demonstration. Of course, there are other artists who work in this way too, but in Liverpool, where I currently live and work, I appear to be in a minority of one, in amidst the noise and clutter and slick self-promotion. My mistake has been to attempt (to over and again attempt!) to place myself with in the prescribed boundaries of what A Working Artist ought to be, and invariably fail.
I wrote this in a post dated August 16th, and after a conversation with a friend, I’ve realised that I hadn’t read or thought it through with anything like the appropriate thoroughness. It was pointed out to me that, by saying that ‘I appear to be in a minority of one’ I was effectively condemning all the other artists working in Liverpool. This was not my intention; there are a number of Liverpool-based artists whom I like and respect, and whose work I admire. A better way of phrasing it would have been to say that I am in a minority group of artists, and the minority/majority contrast often feels much starker in Liverpool. When I say that ‘I appear to be in a minority of one,’ in a way I suppose I am hoping for the opposite; hoping that appearances are deceptive and that there is, perhaps, a place for me.
Writing as an outsider, there is, in this city, much of what I described as ‘noise and clutter and slick self-promotion’; there are many people whose work is less than the myth they’ve built around it. There are many, many sacred cows that it’s considered bad form to criticise. I’m not in the business of walking on eggshells to preserve the status quo.
However, while it is true that I often feel as though I am in a minority of one (with no useful connections, no potential collaborators and no opportunities), it isn’t fair of me to denigrate all other artists. Generalisations make for really great polemic, but they help nobody at all.
