Before Hindsight

In response to Abbi Torrance (thanks for your comment):

Is it true that Visual Art specifically, and cultural activity in general, signify group membership or exclusion? Could one argue that art is only valid if it refers to a group membership delineation?

For instance, as I mentioned in “After Rites” I was educated at a school with a strong military ethos. The cultural activity of the school mainly referred to various group memberships: the military elite, the wealthy elite and the UK aristocracy.

A small bunch of us got together in the XIth form and got busy inventing a little counter-culture: we borrowed heavily from any movement that promoted individuality (the military ethos was biased towards group uniformity and authoritarianism), which included psychoanalysis theory, expressionism, anarchy and pyschedelia. It was rather like “Dead Poets Society” but 12 years earlier.

The whole project was great fun, and kept us (almost) sane for the last 2 years of our education. But once I left the school, the whole thing became irrelevant. Wider society, it turned out, was not oppressively authoritarian to that extent (even under Thatcher), and individual aspiration was already a prominent feature of UK culture. Although I desperately wanted to carry on with the experience of exciting subversion and strong group cohesion, it was difficult to find such a forum in wider society.

Eventually I became involved in the counter-culture surrounding environmental concerns, hence my occasional appearances at Stonehenge. But this is where I became very aware of the limitations of art. I’ve met so many artists who expound at length on the “Power of Art”, how it can communicate between peoples, break down barriers, etc.

However, I don’t see it that way. The art from the fringes of the environmental movement in the late 70s and 80s never communicated ideas or an ethos to the mainstream of society. The whole thing remained fringe. Some of the ideas of the time have become common currency (such as “sustainability”), but this has not happened through some cultural interchange. This has happened through a combination of necessity and debate of ideas.

What the art of the period did achieve was to provide a symbolic gathering-point. A banner around which like-minded people could come together, and through which they could identify each other. A symbol of group membership.

Likewise, the mainstream exclusion of that creative activity formed a powerful aspect to the defining of the mainstream. “You’re not a whacky hippy are you? – good, you’re one of us then, we can show your work in the gallery!”.

From my perspective, something that defined the artistic activity of that period was the ritual. The druids at stonehenge, the full-moon covens of earth-worshipping feminists, the group outings to various “ancient monuments”, and consequent rites. It’s a whole visual and multi-artform aesthetic rolled together, and still regarded as too fringe for comfort. Yes, artists can do whatever whacky pagan ritual they see fit in their spare time, but please don’t bring it into the gallery!

So that’s exactly what I’m trying to do. And in the Rites exhibition, that’s exactly what I achieved, if only in a small way.

The difficulty with this kind of thing, of course, is it doesn’t really belong in a gallery. Sacred ritual isn’t a commodity that can be bought and sold, and I would quickly lose my audience altogether if I tried to push it in that direction. That’s why none of the work in the Rites exhibition was for sale. The work is sacred, it can’t be bought.

Where I take it next, I’m not quite sure. I don’t want to just carry on doing the same thing over and over again. That’s not in my nature, and (this is my opinion) doesn’t befit an artist. More ritualistic work, Yes. More sacred artefacts, Yes. More collaboration, Yes. More work about, and in, nature, Yes. More fun, definitely.

But also, more exploration, more change, more difference, more risk. Maybe more video, more on the internet, maybe some collaboration with more traditional gallery artists.

Oh, and that reminds me, I must join the UK pyrotechnic society. Any galleries out there willing to host an indoor fireworks display, and then open the fire and smoke damaged building as an artefact of the happening??

Another self-portrait, a little more colour this time. Wanted a different angle, so spent a good 30 minutes balancing mirrors on boxes and an old easel, until I could see myself comfortably while drawing.

I’ve used a little illusion here, running some patches of colour straight across the facial boundary. Our brains fill in the missing lines, so it’s actually quite difficult not to see a complete face. I’ve also deliberately placed the specularity along the top of the head at the wrong level, but again our brains plonk it back where we think it should be, and we still interpolate a surface correctly.

This is all stuff I learned while researching for my psychology doctorate – as well as the lovely dot of white on the pupil of the eye which we instantly read as a shiny curved surface. A good third of my thesis was directly concerned with visual perception, and what our brains have to do in order to interpret the “visual field”.

So, 20 years ago, my brain full of psychology theory (and practice), how to make art from it?

There were some obvious directions to go in:

Make art out of optical illusions – be a contemporary MC Escher. Well, not only had Escher already done it, he’d pretty much covered every base, and with far greater skill than I could ever hope to achieve.

Then there’s the whole cognitive thing. Logic, axioms, deduction, contradiction, the beauty of mathematical structures. But I still had bad feelings from that side of my research – I had addressed an international conference on “Truth Maintenance, Second Order Logic and Default Logic”, exposing my humble piece of research to the scrutiny of the two dozen or so logicians from around the world who were actually interested in this little niche. I realised at this point that, whatever I was, I was not a logician. It was rather like being a fish addressing a conference of cycling enthusiasts. So, I didn’t really want to follow this direction creatively either.

I’d also spent quite a lot time researching dreams and dream interpretation. I’ve always had very vivid dreams, and have been fascinated by those who spend their lives deriving meaning from them. Well, there’s the straightforward path of “Dream Art”, an approach with a good provenance, especially from the surrealist movement. But a brief survey of Dali’s work convinced me that my dreams weren’t anything like as interesting as his, and again, I wasn’t going to come close to his technical skill … not for a long time, at least.

Another tiny strand which led from my doctoral research, which barely made it into my thesis at all, was the question of emotion, spirituality and relationship. The abstract expressionists had already had a good go at this kind of thing, but I felt there was still something missing – there didn’t seem to be much in modernism that was exploring spontaneous action within groups, and where this was explored, it was mostly in the fields of poetry and music.

After a couple of years, I made contact with a small number of artists, poets, musicians and dancers who were working with these ideas; mostly Live artists with a strong affiliation to psychotherapy or art therapy. The next 18 years have been a colourful path through painting, music and live performance which have culminated in my focus on (mainly sacred) ritual.

This seems to set me apart from the mainstream, whose practitioners, though often deeply spiritual, seem to produce strictly secular work. The inclusion of direct emotion or passion into a post-modern piece or event seems to be taboo.

But whether my work turns out to be a retrograde step back into modernism, or (as I hope) a progressive synthesis between modernist and post-modernist ideas, only time will tell.

Just finished another artistic ritual creating a dreamy self-portrait. My last creative act of the decade.

Like most people, I like to take the opportunity to look back over the last year on New Year’s Eve; but I also find it fascinating to look back over the last decade. So far, I’ve always found myself in a place that I could not have imagined ten years previously, and I always find that comforting.

However, I have a suspicion that this relatively rapid change is going to come to an end in a year or two, because life has been plodding along pretty much in the same old way since my daughter was born, just over 7 years ago.

10 years ago, I was just coming up to the final stages of the Green Gallery project, trying to persuade reluctant artists to sign contracts, and on the cusp of resigning from my part time teaching post.

Running my own IT business, having another child with my partner, leaving the place we were living at the time. These were not things that were anywhere close to the horizon.

I don’t really want things to continue as they are. The IT business is a pain – though I’ve learned a lot from it, and it’s a reliable cash-cow, it really does get me down from time to time.

I’m also fed up with our living situation, and my study/studio, which are both far from ideal. I had been hoping that the property “crash” would bring a mortgage within reach, but far from it – exploitative borrowing rates coupled with (astoundingly) continued property price rises in this area mean we’re priced out as never before.

Finally, I’d like to get back into collaborative work again. The last 8 years has seen me working pretty much on my own, snatching half a day here, half a day there, and the demands of children have made any regular meetings impossible, even (especially, in fact) in the evenings.

I can see a way out of the IT business – I explored this in my last blog – but I think it’s going to take more than a couple of years to get that truly sorted. But I’m upbeat on that one.

I’ve now got the time to make regular commitments, and will be joining the Oxford Improvisers, within which there is great potential for collaboration, and exciting new projects.

I’m also finding the a-n blogs and forums a great source of inspiration, and who knows, maybe I’ll make some valuable contacts through this route too?

Accommodation and living situation is going to be harder to fix; but a double-dip recession, or at least a major dip for house prices, in 2010 would be a magnificent outcome!

Happy New Year everybody!