shedshack, 2014…is another artwork in this art exhibition:Artworks6 – 28 September 2014Blackthorpe BarnRoughamBury St EdmundsSuffolkIP30 9HZOpen daily 10am-5pm
on the edge of painting
some thoughts on the edge of painting, or maybe on the side of painting, a casual sideways glance at some things i have been working on.
edges of some some paintings i have been working on [stacked]on the side of painting suggests support or encouragement, to keep going. on the edge of painting is the doubt or hesitation before starting a painting, or the anxiety about not painting, or whether it really is a 'painting' - but i will try not to get too hung up about it.
more sides or edges of paintingsa page from a recent sketchbook, from around february-march 2014.
these sketches remind me of my older stuff, way back, before the internet, back in the day when we weren't encouraged to check out what every other artist was doing every hour of every day. life seemed so simple back then.i was toying with the idea of creating relief constructions, but in the end i used the square as a building block. there is a sort of push-pull tension between holding it together [containment] and it all falling apart [collapse].curiously, i have also written [alongside the sketches] that "these [inserted 'manly'] discussions on abstraction are getting nowhere because they can't let go of the 'machismo' ego in the act of creation" - not sure what was i thinking - is some abstract painting an act of male bravado, showing off?here is one 'painting' in progress on my studio trestle table. i think i have a title for this one: shedshack.
this piece has texture, or textural incidents and juxtapositions - it's not really a painting. incidentally, i have makeshift shelving constructed from old housebricks and scaffold planks, and around the place are bits of bark or driftwood, crushed or corroded bits of metal, pebbles and the like. i like things that are tactile, that you can pick up and feel, as much as look at.i am interested in the objective 'craft' element of minimalism and how it [usually] rejects narrative, representation or emotional content, at least from the perspective of its making. afterwards, i guess it's anyone's guess - the precision and clarity of minimalism gives joy to many. [by interested in i mean intrigued, curious - what are we/they really thinking?]here is a quote from a young Frank Stella (aged 31), a painter best known for his constructed 'paintings', where perspective, shape and form are real elements, not illusional:"My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object and anyone who gets involved enough in this finally has to face up to the objectness of whatever it is that he's doing. He is making a thing."[A New Cut in Art, LIFE magazine, 19 January 1968]Hey Stella!
[Frank Stella in his studio, circa 1967]
a mug's game
hello reader, this is my all-time favourite mug...
[mug shot]it's a hornsea (lion) mug dating from the 1970s, a design created out of cut-up & collaged newsprint typography. unfortunately, i put this mug in in the microwave one day and after that it became a little bit crazed on the inside, and it was later resigned to a more solitary mug's life in the artist's room.some glimpses of other things i have been pondering on lately...
[shed : stored]
[shack : stacked]
[wood : engraving]i like the idea of living in a rustic cabin in the middle of the woods, but i've been floored by the resolution of this piece. this is another woodwork artwork i started last year. when i realised i would probably never get the opportunity to present it in the right context i (sort of) gave up on it, because its visual aesthetic largely depends upon the neutrality of a white space. i also realised i was making it for no other reason than i wanted (or needed) to, and maybe it doesn't have a particular place to be right now.
[wood, work in progress]some people may deride the clinical whiteness of the typical gallery space, but if art is to have any element of transcendence from the ordinary then perhaps it needs such an environment for its debut into the world of contemporary art, one which is conducive to looking & experiencing firsthand, for the invocation of thoughts in response to the expression of the artist's ideas - or so i once thought. on more than one occasion i have visited a local commercial gallery to see a 'publicised' exhibition only to find the work has already disappeared from the white walls (sold out).interestingly, a few months back i bought (quite by chance) a secondhand copy of robert smithson's collected writings, and shortly thereafter i read this:A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world. A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence. They are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to pronounce them curable or incurable. The function of the warden-curator is to separate art from the rest of society. Next comes integration. Once the work of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomized it is ready to be consumed by society.[robert smithson, the collected writings]well, that nails the contextual argument to the clinical white wall of a gallery, and it brings new meaning to the term 'art in the community'! - and so art often has to exist independently of these institutional limitations.whatever the context (selling or exhibiting), every artist hopes for a good prognosis on their art (support & encouragement), and hopes their work (of art) has a life of its own. carefully administer a catalogue, an essay, a gallery talk, or a full-on interactive panel discussion, together with some general public engagement at regular intervals, will all keep the art (and the artist) alive and kicking. art's consumers are also art's life savers.however, this leaves me even more befuddled about galleries & exhibitions, and the reasons for making or showing work...this particular work evolved out of some ideas about nature's means of regeneration and renewal, and a form of resurrection or symbolic reverence for something (a life) in the past, with an awareness of a separation from (its) nature heightened by the context. so too a relevance in the use of mundane building materials, respectfully returning them to their natural state. i wanted to recreate the presence or feeling of something (living) to recall the absence (or non-presence) of something (other). i had also spent some time at an old-fashioned woodyard sourcing oak for a family memorial commission, appreciating wood/nature from the tree to the table, as it were.
[wood : blocked]such notions of presence and non-presence are sometimes called hauntological:"the paradoxical state of the spectre, which is neither being nor non-being" (from wikipedia).however, finding a precise definition of hauntological has proven rather difficult. i was interested in the artwork as a sculptural object embodying the spirit of something else, rather than a pictorial representation or illustration of a thing, which is (sometimes) the most literal means of conveying an idea about something.a thing summons up another (non-present, or absent) thing. the absent thing becomes present and affects the meaning of the moment (the experience) and thereby the meaning of other things, for everything is inter-related through time and place, but this sounds like a crazy, oddball place in which someone like me will get "stuck" when making art, much like trying to connect all the dots - some confusion ensues.the internet, as the always-on, social network, curiously also lures us into creating a presence to mark time passing, especially in the sharing of pictures, as if being in the moment - or perhaps more self-knowingly, on trend - drives repeated affectations of instant reminiscences about an everyday event (the now ubiquitous, sun-faded or vignetted photograph, for example - i remember 1978 - it looks just like instagram!). although the social networks' daily updates, annotations and user timelines soon become an archive of our social discourse these life-historical waymarkers appear to direct the travel (and any passing interest) in only one direction - onwards!there is little space for personal recollection, history or a sense of time when it is all too soon buried by the now and the next. paradoxically, this relentless need for nowness also needs quite a lot of our time - so when do we find the time to reflect on & reconnect the now with the accumulating thoughts, ideas and experiences of the past to bring fresh meaning to things? well, most artists try to do this (when they can).i wonder if there is any hauntological significance to the process of 'mediating' a 'subject' for the purpose of making art, as all art has a subject, even if its subject is only itself. the painter mediates his/her choice of subject through graphical marks, gestures in paint, qualities of colour, texture, surface - but are artists mediating experiences or the experience of making the art? (it's just a thought…)does endless theorising about this sort of stuff merely embellish and refine the artwork for presentation to a specific audience? probably.most interestingly, someone i follow on twitter recently wrote in an article, bad language, that words about the art often (need to) come before the emergence of the art:The professionalisation of artistic practice, with its emphasis on artists’ statements and the academic blitzkrieg of the crit, has bound the act of making with that of describing, so that many works of contemporary art seem to enter the world backwards, text-first.[ben street, bad language]street goes on to say that the 'text' is also tantamount to a dress code in the art world, a protocol for professional inclusion, and a critical contribution to any discourse on contemporary art. ongoing discussions about art - between the artists (and the making of their work), their peers, critics & curators, gallerists and collectors - are crucial to audience engagement: the conversation has no absolute beginning or conclusion, it is revisited and revised (by the artist and others), as ideas and thoughts shift in emphasis and meaning, moving us closer to the surface of greater understanding.therefore, presentation and context is important - assuming the art has been made to be exhibited somewhere (and not created in situ in response to a given location/space, which is the other story). sometimes too much stuff (interior architecture, crowds, texts) gets in the way of the experience, but not always (obviously). i saw an art exhibition in a disused industrial space (much like the original freeze exhibition), and although i didn't need a text to experience the work, it was interesting to refer to. often critics and writers illuminate the artists' concerns better, as if (at the very least) two minds are required to consolidate the work as art - and where one confidently leads the way others will surely follow - but to disagree or debate is also a good thing in art.
[wood : wood]the small landscape of my personal art world changed and i am packing up this artwork along with everything else related to my art. the question i have long been pondering was answered. i am thankful to the mug for starting a conversation about purpose and value, although i see i have written too many words, once again.sorry about the thingness thing......