ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [30 March 2009]

Every couple of years I think up a good-sounding show, gather together my best slides, cobble together an artist's statement (still a bit of a mystery, that one) and CV, and send the collection off to a variety of galleries.

Some well-wisher once told me to "start at the top, not at the bottom", so each time I go through the tounge-in-cheek ritual of phoning the ICA, Serpentine, Whitechapel, Ikon, Arnolfini and others to garner the names of the current curatorial or selection team. Well, the manual says to speak to them, but it's hard to get through to these busy folks, so they usually just get the package on their desks, 'cold'.

The big galleries are really good at returning slides, as are the small local ones ... it's the middle-sized ones that hang on to them for up to 2 years, and then grudgingly return them in the sae (by now, the postage is out-of-date) after lots of follow-up calls.

I've never had any success at all in getting shows. Maybe I could have got something at the Banbury Mill, but they were so scornful of my painting that I never applied again. Everything I've done has been self-organised (with 1 exception, I might come back to that later).

And then, 2 years ago, Wolfson College, Oxford, emailed me to say that my work looked interesting, could I come and meet them. I did, and the 2 year lead time seemed like utter luxury.

Now though, I'm panicking ... getting all the publicity out, writing stuff, designing invites, posters, just 4 weeks to ago, and if I'm lucky, 8 hours a week.

But the biggest panic of all is this: what happens next? and that's what I want to explore in this blog.

# 2 [3 April 2009]

On graduating, at 21, 12 years seemed like an unimaginable length of time - more than half my life. Even at 26, on completing my doctorate, 12 years seemed like forever, and the prospect of reaching 38 (and the year 2000) seemed like a far distant possibility. 
But my son is 12 on Wednesday, and it seems like just a few, rather stressed and tired, weeks have passed since he was "from his mothers womb untimely ripped" - deep purple and apparently lifeless. Both mother and child survived the experience, but only just.
We weren't in any way ready for parenthood: both on the dole, no money, and optimistically believing that our lives wouldn't be changed that much!
One thing I wasn't ready for was the sudden onset of overwhelming feelings of responsibility. I've seen many men's reactions to this now - everything from outright denial ("I think now is a good time to move to Australia, shame I won't see my child again") to total panic ("I must get a job, and do an OU degree, and another evening job, and another job at the weekends").
Steering a course in between these extremes, so that one's children can get to school in clothes without too many holes, yet one can still have family time, and still grab a few hours of creative time, has been an unbelievably difficult, and constant, balancing act ...
Initially I got teaching work, and over the first 2 years found enough time to fundraise 20k for a millennium festival project. But as the project came to completion, I had to give up the teaching work to make way for the project. Then, of course, project over, grant finished, back on the dole, with my previous employer really pissed off that I'd quit suddenly, and not willing to hire me again.
That was when I realised that children, grant funding, and ambitious projects don't mix - not unless you're rich already, or being bankrolled by your partner.
My solution to the problem of finance has been to start a small computer business. Being fundamentally anti-capitalist since my school days, I was reluctant to step into the field of commerce... even though I was doing it with zero capital. However, I managed to quell my conscience by providing a cheap (1/2 market rate) service exclusively to charities working for social change.
The combined price of my principles and creative life is high - I see others in the same business swanning about in Mercs, living in large country houses. But at least, together with my partner's income, we feed the family, clothe the kids and pay the bills … and I still get a couple of days in a good week to work on the art projects, even if most of the time is spent on marketing, admin, applications, etc., etc.!

# 3 [4 April 2009]

“Two hundred and forty eight, two hundred and forty nine …. Come on, Dad, what comes next …?”. My 6 year old daughter’s complaining voice jolts me back to reality: “Oh, what? Oh yes, two hundred and fifty”

“Two hundred and fifty one, two hundred and fifty two, two hundred and …”

While my daughter patiently counts the 300 seconds until we have to leave for school, I, anxiously, return to my current obsession: thinking about my artist’s statement. Actually, I’ve been thinking about my artist’s statement, on and off, for a good 28 years now, and whatever I write feels wrong. Not just wrong, but badly wrong.

For one exhibition, early on, I gave up, and didn’t provide a statement at all. So on the evening of the private view, I was surrounded by well-wishers, family, friends, and friends of friends, milling about, chanting like a mantra: “Lovely colours, but I don’t really understand your work”.

The problem was, neither did I. I still don’t. After years of reading psychology, anthropology, archaeology, art history, and other artists’ statements, and visiting venerated institutions such as the Tate, and listening intently to all the videos, and diligently reading the commentary, and spending long hours contemplating single works … the creative process, most peoples’ creative process, even my own familiar and simplistic creative process, continues to defy understanding. Whole libraries of books have been written on this subject. How can I (or anyone) even think of providing a meaningful synopsis on a single A4 page? Even in small font?

Even a simple biographical account of how I’ve ended up doing so much Ritual, and why it means so much to me, would fill a small book. Let alone why a hippy drop-out hanging around on the fringes of the Oxford scene might have the temerity, the bare-faced cheek, to challenge great and established thinkers such as Anna Halprin, and claim that not only can art be ritualised, but that Spiritual Ceremony can, done in the right way, be considered art.

I didn’t set out to be contentious. I just ended up doing what I ended up doing. But now I’ve painted myself into a corner. I’m not a priest, I’m certainly not a spiritual teacher, I’m not a healer, I’m not an anthropologist, I’m not a psychologist. I am an artist. This is self-preservation. If I am to survive as an artist, I’ve got to put together a very convincing argument as to why what I do can be considered art … and I’ve got 3 weeks left to condense whatever argument I can come up with into about the length of this post …

# 4 [5 April 2009]

The children have just developed colds. The implications of this go far beyond the sudden abundance of snotty tissues.
Children with colds don't sleep well. And if the children aren't sleeping well, nobody else within a 500 metre radius has much of a chance either.
So, I wouldn't exactly say I woke up this morning. Just that, with the growing daylight, a troubled, tired, wakeful night gradually transformed itself into a troubled, tired, sleepy day.
It's one of the amazing things about children, how suddenly an idyllic life with happy, smiling, playful, sweet creatures on a bright, warm sunny spring day, can be hurled into chaos, mental confusion, spiritual darkness.
However, one odd thing I've noticed about this state of half-sleepness (horrible when first experienced, but to which one quickly grows accustomed), is that it lowers your boundaries.
This has definite disadvantages: it renders one more suggestible, compliant, obedient to the whims of others. Makes one generally more gullable.
But it also has positive effects - makes one more open to ideas, and more in touch with one's own unconscious, inspirational processes.
Thus it was that as I gradually emerged, blinking and dazed, into the harsh sunshine of the morning, inspiration struck. I now know what I'm going to write in my artist's statement. Problem solved, until the next one.
"I am exploring the issue of whether or not some forms of ritual can be considered also as forms of art".
Gone is all the arrogance, the contention, the defensiveness. Gone is the question of artistic survival ... it's just another, artistically legitimate, experiment with the fabric of life.

# 5 [9 April 2009]

The day after the birthday party. Every year I forget, and then on April 6th I remember. 2 days before my son's birthday I start getting flashbacks. My son spent his first 3 days unconscious, with my partner (barely able to walk after the caesarean) and myself spending hours sitting by his hospital cot, willing him to wake up ... before being forced away from his cotside by the practical imperatives of life.
For many families, this would be a time at which everyone would  pitch in. My partner's cousin was a terrific source of support, but apart from her, the phones remained silent.
You see, we both come from military families, where the over-riding attitude is "deal with it yourself". So we did.
Today, as the flashbacks subside, I had planned a day on site with a customer. This was to have provided my week's income, but a mis-communication with my partner means that she needs the van today to return the participants of the party sleepover to their homes. I'm stuck in Oxford, with the customer in Banbury.
It's one advantage of self-employment, that one can cancel a day's work whenever it suits (as long as the customer isn't too pissed off). The disadvantage is that the days off are unpaid, and the work still has to be done ... in this case I'll be squeezing it in next week.
Now I've spent half the entry explaining why I've got time to make an entry. Let's get to some substance:
Jan, my Wolfson contact, needed 15 more private view invites. 2 hours to get to the printer, and then deliver 15 invites - time I didn't want to waste.
"Will a pdf version by email be any use?". 
Yes, all the remaining invitees are on email (it's amazing how many people still aren't), so a pdf attachment was acceptable.
I've finished my artist's statement, and the documentation of process ... still kicking myself that I photographed my last event without film in the camera. Time to go digital, but the cost of a digital SLR (even second hand), with all the required lenses, still seems daunting.
I'm considering spending my spare time over the next 17 days working on a performance for the Private View, something I used to do as a matter of course. I'd like to do a digitial music improvisation, but have just found that my new computer's sound card has no midi interface. I can't believe it took me a whole year to realise this! I used to tinker with midi every week. More outlay, but this is essential, I just can't do serious music without midi.
There should be time to get back into keyboard practice. But I now have a huge gash on the back of my left hand, and a swollen index finger, from a bow-saw blade while cutting wood for the campfire for my son's party. Circumstances are stacking up against me ... but that's OK, I'll deal with it.

# 6 [11 April 2009]

“It’s Easter Day tomorrow, that’s the day that Jesus woke up … I think I’ll pray, I’d better find a prayer mat”. At 6 years old, my daughter has an unusually well developed sense of religious conviction … even if she does get a little confused over the traditional forms.

We decided to send both our children to a multi-cultural school, where 50% of the kids are from an Islamic background, though not all from the same brand of Islam. My son has emerged with a strong sense of his individuality and his potential contribution to a global community. My daughter seems to be entrenching herself into the minority ethos – a born subversive.

It’s all to do with a sense of identity, who you feel you belong with, and who you want to keep away from, what you love, what you hate. And that’s something I’m really wrestling with at the moment, which is the essence of this blog.

My identity as a would-be subversive artist was forged at military school (my father suffered from a form of paranoia in which he fantasised he was a soldier. In reality he was a small-time provincial lawyer). A small group of us organised ourselves into an anarchist collective, which involved the production of volumes of incomprehensible surrealist poetry, and subversive ‘actions’ such as leaving our roaches in the headmaster’s private library, or spraying the school armoury (!) with a CND logo.

The realisation that this brand of art was unlikely to turn a profit, coupled with the lack of a family fortune, led me to study sciences at university, where I endured the company of spotty, pale, anorak-clad scientific reductionists for 3 years, after which I escaped into psychology for my doctorate.

Since then I’ve flirted with the communities of academic psychologists, psychotherapists, art therapists, poets, painters, musicians, visual artists, teachers, environmentalists, IT professionals, and logicians.

Spiritually, I feel closest to the psychotherapists and art therapists and their goal of personal emancipation; in terms of what I enjoy, I feel closest to the visual artists and the musicians; The IT professionals generate the best remuneration; the embattled environmental movement are the most accepting of any support they can get; the teachers expect nothing but total life commitment; the logicians … well, they’re just different.

After 8 years, I’m heartily sick of the IT business, and I now have the time to look at other opportunities … with other identities. I’ve become a specialist in ritual, but I’m wary of entering the murky world of the ritualists and religious studies academics; I’ve got some teaching work in art therapy departments, but to pursue that too deeply is to give up all hope of being taken seriously as an artist; I’ve marketed my services to consumers of ‘alternative wedding ceremonies’, but with zero success; my latest exhibition might open some doors in the visual arts world, but am I really prepared to slaughter my dependable cash-cow to return to such a precarious financial future?

# 7 [15 April 2009]

Bed time punches a huge hole in the day. When I’m not too busy, this forms a delightful 2 hours of family play & chat time. While my daughter’s in the bath, we catch up on the day’s news, and explore the typical questions of a 6 year old – “How does a tape recorder work?”, “What was wrong with Hitler?”, “What is The Economy?”… a whole booksworth of elucidation squeezed into 15 minutes of splashy, milk-slurping, giggling exuberance.

Once she is settled, after bedtime story, when her music is lulling her to sleep, then it’s my son’s turn. “How can I learn to be a helicopter pilot?”, “How dangerous is it being a fighter pilot?”, “Which are better, AK 47s or Kalzhnikovs?”, and then the statutory chapter of Anthony Horowitz’s latest spy novel …

Tonight, though, I’ve been busy: my daughter had to bath alone, and my son was persuaded to watch Top Gear on the telly. The bedtime stories have been rushed interruptions to a long day at the computer.

As part of my exploration of potential new identities, I perused the Opportunities pages of AN Magazine in a quiet moment on Sunday. The St. Helens & Knowsley commission caught my eye – “Yes, I could do that … and I would really enjoy it … and it’s pretty well paid …”. In fact, reading through the terms and conditions it’s pretty clear that the commissioning organisation have been reading the AIR best practice guidelines very closely.

OK, so I’ve never done any permanent public art before, nor any training in how to do it. But I know I’ve got all the skills – not only the creative skills, but also the construction skills, technical drawing and design skills, business and budgeting skills, interpersonal and communication skills. I know I can do it, and can do it better than most, but how on earth can I present 29 years of accrued experience across the disciplines of science, engineering, psychology, counselling, teaching and business (let alone Art!) on the currently fashionable single-page CV? I can no more condense this effectively into a single page than I can write a 500 word Artist’s statement.

In 1999 I was on a selection committee, and this experience gives me a huge advantage when making applications. The key (oh so simple!!) is to put a truly Stunning piece of art work on the first page/slide. One that makes the whole committee go “Yes” in unison. The second thing to get right is to provide examples of work that fit the context of the application. The third thing is to demonstrate versatility, provide a variety of work. The very last thing to worry about, I always have to remind myself, is my CV. Out of 75 applicants, our selection committee only looked at 1 CV.

It’s now nearly midnight, the application is completed, the children asleep. Next stop: morning, and a double-dose of extreme interrogation from the kids.

# 8 [17 April 2009]

Swaddling. At 2 weeks old, my son was making up for his first 3 days unconsciousness, by almost never falling asleep. By this time, it felt like he’d been awake forever – a dark eternity of crying through nights of torture.

My partner started to consult health visitors, friends, even relatives, for advice, and the consensus seemed to be to try swaddling.

We were taught as children that ancient and savage people swaddled their babies – wrapped them tightly in rags and bandages – in an effort to keep their bones straight, especially in regions with low Vitamin D in their diet … but that this was a cruel and counter-productive thing to do. So we were a little resistant.

Anyway, we decided to try it. Late one evening, when we couldn’t bear yet another sleepless night, we wrapped our son up in a blanket. Not just wrapped, but bound tightly, so that he couldn’t possibly move either arms or legs. I was expecting bawls of protest, a bout of screaming that might prompt the neighbours to call the police. But not at all. He took one last look at us, heaved a sigh, closed his eyes, and fell fast asleep.

The theory is that the sudden freedom of movement, after 9 months confined in a womb, is unbearable – arms and legs waving around wildly trying to make sense of an alien universe, no soft womb wall, or soft warm mummy, just these itchy, scratchy, flappy babygro things.

I knew a woman who swaddled her baby ‘till she was 3, whenever she had a tantrum. Whether this was appropriate or not is a matter of debate, but her lodger was so disturbed by the practice that one day he lost it, and threw a tantrum at his landlady. She, being trained in martial arts, quickly disabled him and despatched him from the house, after which moment he was officially homeless. The dangers of challenging somebody else’s parenting technique … just never do it!

When Andrew Bryant sent us bloggers an email urging us to post comments on each others’ posts, I froze in fear. We’re being urged to throw off the swaddles. Simply writing this stuff feels like one is thrashing around wildly in the emptiness of cyberspace. Now we’re presented with the dread possibility of actually making contact with something, someone, unknown, “Out there”.

I took up the challenge, and for better or worse, made a comment on one of Miss B’s Salon’s, which felt very, very unsafe. Reading it this morning I realise, of course, that my choice of topic was all about a desire for safety, and how one way of dealing with that is by inviting tyranny.

So, Andrew, there you are, I’ve done it, I’ve thrown off the swaddles (made contact out there), crapped in my nappy (written about it) … now where’s that tit?? (Oh yes, stop wasting time, and get back to remunerative work!)

# 9 [21 April 2009]

“Auntie Megan’s here, Auntie Megan’s here!”. My son comes running in excitedly, and then dashes out again with my daughter. A couple of minutes later, my old friend, and collaborator strolls in, my children bouncing around her feet like badly trained terriers.

Megan is one of a very few artists I have met who sees the world, and the creative process, from a similar standpoint as my own: Willing to experiment with the conceptually forbidden zones of psychology, spirituality and emotional process.

Megan trained in the 70s, and surfed the wave of feminist art, working with some great names including Judy Chicago. Well respected in her field, but penniless, she developed an art therapy business to keep afloat.

Nearly a decade ago, to the great sadness of myself and my son (then 3), she moved away from Oxford for some landscape, and to focus on her art therapy business.

Recently, she has returned to art production, and to help “catch up”, has enrolled on a Contemporary Visual Arts masters degree.

The first essay did not go well. Quoting her influences and the great names she once shared the limelight with, she received low marks: “This is a course on Contemporary art, not art history.”

Are we really art history … surely not? At the tender age of 47 I just feel like I’m coming into my stride. At 18, the received wisdom was that one’s career would be beginning to mature at 60. Now my generation are closer to 60 than 18, are we to be thrown on the scrap heap of history, to make way for the blossoming Culture of Youth? Will an entire generation of artists be dismissed, as too youthful in their youth, and obsolete in their maturity?

It’s definitely the case that most art is made by young people. Simple economics: young people, without the ties and responsibilities of family, can live happily on virtually nothing (as I used to myself), and can avail themselves of a vast array of opportunities denied to us “Veralteten”: travel scholarships, residencies, competitions for the under 30s, etc.

The true dilettantes soon get bored, and wander off when they’ve found another novelty to play with. Those of independent means carry on, but without having to meet the challenges of living a normal life, their output tends to become irrelevant and self-obsessed.

The more dedicated take arts admin, art therapy and teaching posts, in the hope of one day going part time and returning to creative practice. A very few succeed financially, and define the mainstream.

Only relatively few of us manage to keep creating, and tread that twilight path somewhere between fame and oblivion.

Certainly, my volume of output is restricted, and I pursue an artistic vision that lies on the fringes. But that doesn’t make me history. Not even when my grandchildren are pushing Auntie Megan around in her wheelchair, are regulating my morphine drip and changing my incontinence pads … not even then … will I be history!

# 10 [22 April 2009]

“But Dad, what do you believe?”. I’ve been discussing spirituality with my son, and we’ve just been through some ‘modern traditions’: Theosophy (inspiration of Mondrian), Wicca, Asatru and Crowley.

“I try to stick to my own experience. All I can really say is this: there’s definitely something funny going on ...”

Not a satisfactory answer. We need to believe something. We can’t make decisions otherwise. A defining boundary between childhood and adulthood is that children believe their parents (mostly), while adults believe something else that enables decision-making.

I spent a year of my doctorate exploring belief. I started by reading about predicate calculus (“Logic”). The gist is this: One might have a rule that goes “Whenever X is true and Y is true, one may say that X is true … or that Y is true”. Is this true? Intuitively, yes, but prove it! That’s what predicate calculus does, but only if we make assumptions, like something can’t be true and false at the same time, etc. Very detailed.

There’s this joke: “A Physicist, a mathematician and a logician are travelling to a conference from London to Edinburgh. The train crosses the Scottish border, and they see a black sheep. The physicist says: “Look, all sheep in Scotland are black”. The mathematician replies: “Fool, only some of the sheep in Scotland are black”. The logician retorts: “Idiots – all you can say is that at least one sheep in Scotland is black on at least one side”. As I said, Logicians are different.

But you can’t reason with logic until you make “real” assumptions. You can’t say “all birds can fly”, and “Tweety is a bird”, and deduce “Tweety can fly”, without assuming that there are birds, something called flight, and something called Tweety. And “all birds can fly” is another assumption.

Everything we ‘know’ is just assumptions … beliefs.

Also, our knowledge contains many contradictions. Frege proved that if your knowledge contains one contradiction, then you can prove anything.

I managed to prove that it’s so hard to resolve contradictions, it would take us many lifetimes to clean up our ‘knowledge’ to the point where we could reason with it. But we can still reason … how come?

I wrote a computer program that could be ‘fed’ contradictory knowledge, reason with it, provide apparently sound proofs of completely contradictory things, quite happily … like us.

This is why I am so sceptical of the ‘academic rigour’ that artists are expected to apply to their work. There are a million ways of justifying any piece of art, given a brief and context … and our contradictory knowledge. It’s just pissing with proof, logical masturbation.

I do it - nobody takes you seriously if you don’t … but come on, folks, inject some reality here, stop pretending that this cognitive charade has any creative, or academic, value whatsoever: let’s get on with making stuff, doing stuff, and making the world a better place ... which is what I really believe we should be doing!