I'm a little embarrassed by some of the words that are found here, I haven't read them in a while and am unsure now of whether or not I should keep them. There are definitely word choices and registers that I would no longer use, but they also show me how I have changed in the past three to four years, along with shifts in concerns, politics, and context. Leaving art school definitely also means the discarding of a certain safety bubble that encourages a more reckless testing of risk. I realise that I have been spoiled by Facebook's layered set of controls determining opacity of access, and this has very much shaped the way I write and perform online, playing with and to varying degrees of revealing and hiding. Here, the blog form is a fully public space and feels much more exposed, vulnerable, and formal (something largely contingent on my dispositions). It is however also free from the political economy of relational validation on the social network. (How is this information produced in past instances treated by the human and automated info-miners trawling the web, and without providing a point of contrast, how is change perceived by people other than myself?) I may return to it, but it will take some conscientious effort, a finding of strategies.
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A website named after a person. Strange notion, don't you think? Presumably you have come here to look at 'art' this person had made. Perhaps you may think it 'good', or perhaps 'bad'. Godwin, person in question, had graduated from working on getting to having gotten a BA fine arts degree at Lasalle College of the Arts. This somehow qualifies him to be and call himself a professional artist. Yeah, whatever that means. Artists, who do they think they are? Who do we think we are? Why is any of this worth your attention? Why do you want to look at art? What should it look like? Where is it found, even?
Of course there are questions, and therein lies complexity. Any attempt at explaining carries with it an ironic burden of futility; do I want to open that can of worms? But this is here because even as I hesitate to produce an all-encompassing artist statement, I wish not to be misrepresented. Work - this 'art' which was made - could simply be a matter of necessity. We all have our own questions that need asking, and I suppose when we speak of art and the artist, these are the most pertinent lines of inquiry for me. Just how much and how should you promote yourself, if at all, given your opposition to what the globalised market art world stands for? How are you to carry idealism as personal convictions come at odds to social and political realities? Can you remain autonomous, or fight for some semblance of autonomy, in the face of authoritarianism? How can you make work which may operate as art and draw on the legacy of its history, yet still resists subsumption into the contemporary 'creative economy' as commodified culture? What compromises do you want to (or can you) make whilst pursuing radical modes of thought, action, living, and resistance? Is anything radical anymore, and to what ends should the radical be pursued? By and large, this is where passing through the academy has brought me, and for that I am thankful. There are multifarious ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, and doing, but without discernment and criticality, they might as well be empty movements. I see work as about being; about sharing, and it may take on varying forms and purposes; it may be flawed and imcomplete. Work exists as noun and verb. Praxis is an ongoing struggle where work turns into, and is taken from, everything one tries to do. And this is the thing that art can do for the journey - provide the space and means for contemplation and inquiry, in addition to action and connection. “It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working – bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming – all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.”
From A Hanging, by George Orwell (Back-posting from 9 March 2011)
Assessment for this semester has ended. It leaves a strange aftertaste. I have some thoughts. For some time since August I had been struggling with the inability to produce substantial work - work that is conceptualised and executed with confidence and a consistency in quality, and substantial in terms of ambition. I eventually realised that to pursue this takes immense belief in what you're doing and essentially, a hopefulness towards living. I had done it before, but found that I could no longer. This wasn't the result of prolonged intellectualization, but spontaneous in its crippling effect. When part of your world falls apart from personal failure and when hope is lost in the process of loss, how can you continue to believe in your own ability, or in any need to continue making? Surely this art thing is trivial in the grander scheme of things. How can hope survive a fall? How can hope yet be put to work? But it is not trivial. I don't mean art is not trivial (because it very well can be and often is), but making and trying aren't - because they form the basic creative action which disrupts despair. When hope is reduced to a matter of survival; when its absence or necessity is felt so apparently, one begins to question whether hope had all along been generated by the act of doing, or by the need to finish; by the need to show. Whether it was a kind of false hope drawn from expecting response. Is it about the process or the product? Who do you do this for? Can you keep doing it with this or that missing? It was good enough that I was still alive, and I needed to make something for being alive to mean something. Maybe making kept me alive. I came across Martin Creed's "If you're lonely..." again, and reading it now it makes perfect sense. "Maybe working is trying. And work - the result of work - is everything that one tries to do." I had begun the semester thinking that my ideas and actions were anchored by a theme of resistance, or the exploration of such. Although that holds true, it now dawns upon me that it was as much about hope and the building of confidence in oneself. In attempting to resist anything, you really need to believe in something. Your work is, are, but the attempts in getting there - somewhere, not merely or blindly being an obstacle. I suppose school played a part in keeping me going, because the fact was I still had to make things to fulfill certain requirements, yet I did not want to make them in the prescribed schema. Bit by bit I found my way, as ideas came together from myriad sources. I made no "major work"; nothing big on its own. My studio practice was confined to writing and watercolour paintings on loose sheets of paper. They were fragments, a kind of bricolage. I had no proposal to work off of, because it was not the kind of work that relied upon a proposal. Yet these things can and mostly likely will be taken as shortcomings. Of course, the structure (of the school, and by extension the contemporary market-oriented art world) proposes an expectation of condensed prose. Somehow, the work of an artist's practice needs to be squeezed and repackaged into bite-sized bits fit for spectacular consumption. I had offered my life's work of the past three months unaltered, uncooked. What other way was there? If this marks my failure, then surely the broader indictment is on art's fundamental ability to heal, because heal it did. That I continued making was evidence. Maybe that is not enough for some. Should I be deemed to have failed because of the system's failure to recognise and accommodate alternative modes of artistic practice? Was the work a failure because it did not articulate clearly all that I had just written? These thoughts and questions will be carried with me for some time yet, for there is after all another semester's explaining and convincing to do. Let us create new ways of looking at and interacting with art, for there needs to be a shift in the way artists find support within society and community. Patronage ought no longer be about the purchase of art objects. The artist should not be treated as a producer of products, but one of ideas; ideas that somehow find themselves manifested as work through various physical means. In focusing wholly on the objects that result from this manifestation, a marketplace forms where works become primarily goods to be traded (of course, I do not speak of those who are already consciously producing for and exploiting this system). Value of a work/good is arbitrarily indicated by price - because who cares about a personal relationship to a work or action, of course the object signifies everything worthy about the cultural producer, and of course the middleman is right in demanding a share for his own work. This can be observed in the way a gallery-oriented system of art display readily becomes an artist's lifeline (even artists who are so-called self-represented). The artist is inadvertently nudged to operate for the sake of this system. People aspire towards this when thinking of artist as profession; artist as career. This is already formalised as fact in the contemporary art world, so real barriers exist to those wanting to operate "outside". Logically, "conceptual" or "immaterial" work is viable only if market conditions allow it; if there are people who are going to buy/pay for it. But why should this be the case? Should work not be produced simply because it is the best means available for an idea? The fact that non-object-based work or large-scale work immediately find themselves at a disadvantage as artistic gestures to be recognised says something about the inequalities in place. I am not suggesting either, that these kinds of work should suddenly then conceive structures to ensure financial sustainability. The point is that financing should not be a prerequisite to a work's conception. Patronage ought to be about support for an artist's ideas and the provision of spaces (not just the physical) for practice to grow, for ideas to manifest. We as artists and viewers, if we are indeed interested in pursuing radical outlooks towards life, need to step out of the capitalist hegemony and create for ourselves the kinds of communities we want to work and live in. We need to start supporting one another, by not simply approaching all transactions (within and without the art context) via paradigms of property and capital, by sharing resources and learning from each other. We need to show people alternative ways of seeing, thinking, making and living, and this is one way to start - by not adhering to (and actively subverting) systems that perpetuate inequality and injustice.
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June 2014
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