I have had a response to my rather sad plea last night for someone to tell me if they were actually reading this. Not that I think that people ought to be reading it but just because it helps me to know that there is someone out there. Not only did you say hello but you even let me know who you are. So, thanks for that.
I have been thinking a great deal lately about art practice and about how artists are employed 'as artists'. I suppose it's inevitable that I should think about this a lot, given that I have jobs teaching, advising other artists, facilitating other people's creativity, mentoring, leading gallery education workshops etc. I get paid for being an artist doing activities where I am not actually making art. Because my practice has often had a strong strand of working with others in it, this has sort of merged with those other paid activities in my perception of what I am as an artist. These days, I often think quite simply that in order to call myself an artist I ought to be making art and my idea of what that is seems to have become rather conventional in many respects. I am rather suspicious of this move, thinking that there are unconscious strings coming at me from the direction of the Art Market, pulling gently on my motivations and desires and skewing them. I suppose this is inevitable.
This evening I got out my peace banner (that you can see in the only picture on my blog) from its plastic storage wrapping. I've not looked at it since 2003. I'm making a piece of work for a show in London at Hold and Freight which references this earlier work. I was surprised when I unfolded it at how colourful it is. At the time I made it I was trying to depict something positive and all I could think of was flowers and idyllic rural landscape so that's what I've shown. It looks so naive and hopeless. It embarrasses me. But I don't mind that. In many ways it seems like the polar opposite of Hirschhorn's banner. It's more modest too in its dimensions . . . which isn't surprising. I took it on the march in Feb 2003 and it caught people's attention. One person told me it ought to win the Turner Prize and I remember just thinking "that's not the point, it's supposed to stop the war". Lovely idea that, that one could make a piece of work that would stop a war. Hideously grandiose, naturally, but says something still about the potency of objects, or at least about the potency we attribute to them.
