Oh, the irony. I publish a gushing post about how I intend to write more, and then follows little but silence, for over a month. It’s been a tough year, in many ways, but this past month has given new meaning to the word. I’ve finally moved house & have been slowly working my way through the boxes. My new home-studio is slowly becoming a lovely little space, and I’m really looking forward to working here.
I’ve been thinking recently about the word ‘creativity’ – a train of thought set in motion by a browse through Waterstone’s. There are a great many books that promise to help you “discover your creative self” or “tap into your creative genius”. It made me wonder about this insane focus on the concept of “creativity” – about what, at its heart, this concept represents, and what its true value might be.
I make all sorts of things. I can knit with some skill and sew a little bit, so I like to make clothes, toys, accessories, things to brighten up my home. (In the current weather, my stash of hand-knitted wool socks have made me feel both warm and smug!) I love to cook, and wherever possible I cook from scratch. When I’ve finished this post, I’ll be closeting myself in the kitchen to make a batch of mincemeat to keep my loved ones & I well-supplied with mince pies all Christmas. One Christmas I made huge quantities of chocolate truffles and vanilla shortbread to give as gifts. As much as possible, I like to be able to make the things that I need; I like to be “inside” the things that I do and that I own, to control both the contents and the means of production. To make something by hand that can easily be bought – say, a glove, or a sock, or a loaf of bread – is a rewarding and powerful thing. It allows me, to a small but significant extent, to step outside the modern pattern of consumption and exploitation. It also makes for the perfect union of action and object, of process and product. The life of the object extends far beyond the period of creation – it has a whole lifetime of use ahead of it, too. These small domestic creations in this way are open-ended. The value of what I will term “domestic creativity” is immeasurable, limitless, empowering.
In my life as an artist, I make very little. I think a lot (as I’m sure regular readers will have deduced!), I write a lot, I make little sketches and plans and I gather and collect and position. Must I pollute my precious ideas by marrying them to some tenuously-related physical structure? Will this in some way give them credibility? This focus on the object is damaging. There are artists who make extraordinarily fluent and resonant objects – but I have also seen a great deal of awkward, ill-thought-through pieces: great ideas, poorly expressed. It’s the classic idea of the artist as being somebody who will make a plaster cast of a piggy-bank and then earnestly declaim that “it’s about the futility of war”. But perhaps that plaster pig will get picked up by an art dealer and end up bought and sold for millions! Bought and sold for millions by people who care not in the slightest about the futility of war, nor about any inferred meaning, but only about speculation and accumulation. So, while domestic creativity circumvents consumption, artistic creativity (object-making) begets consumption. The artist as a commodity-manufacturer. A diamond-miner.
Of course, there is more to say; it’s a complex issue – but the Artists Talking word limit is – once again – against me, so I’ll finish by briefly mentioning Antti Laitinen’s work for this year’s Liverpool Biennial. Laitinen used the gallery space as a workshop in which he built a bark boat, which he then used to navigate the rather grey & dirty waters of the River Mersey. The perfect alliance of action and object! The art is in the action, the idea. The object means – is – nothing more than a boat. Nothing less than a boat. Such perfect, unpretentious simplicity!
