So it’s been a while since my last post. Running an arts space and managing other parts of life have meant that arts practice has been put on the back burner, as is unfortunately and inevitably the lot of many artists these days. There don’t seem to be enough hours in the day to clear the headspace necessary for conceptual rumination and the desk-space for the picking up of paintbrushes.
Still and so, a recent bit of gallery going did throw up some interesting juxtapositions.
A recent trip to the Foundling Museum was inspirational for someone as interested in the personal object as I am (see previous posts). The object or personal ephemera as signifier of self, and somehow parallel to portrait is something I’ve been playing with in various forms for the past two years. Previously for me it was found photography, an obvious place to start, and a place to play with the image as object. Subsequently, books and old magazines have formed a part of this exploration. At the Foundling Museum it is the Token, small unique objects given over with a child, as an equivalent to a physical signature and signifier of identity. I immediately contrasted these with the large oil portraits of founders, patrons and governors throughout the museum. Such high status objects as signifiers of identity, representations almost as indistinguishable from their contemporaries all in a row, as the number upon number of tiny forlorn tokens collected together under glass.
And on the same day I visited; the Hayward Gallery’s Alternative Guide to the Universe, a weird, wonderful and at turns deeply disturbing survey of the way in which so-called outsider artists theorise and conceptualise the world; and Michael Landy’s Saints Alive at the National Gallery, a likewise wonderful and deeply funny fairground junkyard of an exhibition, complete with saints hitting themselves and pulling out their own teeth.
The parallels of slightly bonkers world views expounded in both are unavoidable, with Landy’s lightheartedness a welcome relief after the turbulent traipsing through labyrinthine thought processes of some of the outsider artists in the Hayward show.
A similar contradiction of world views came about at a recent Lacanian reading group I attended. I find myself left a little cold by the remaining prevalence and reliance of artworld theory on psychoanalysis. I am certainly interested in the use of language, and the theories of it’s development and usefulness, but I do find myself increasingly drawn to the science of cognition as a field of research. I’m currently reading The Ravenous Brain by Daniel Bor, and hope to learn more about consciousness and cognitive neuroscience. It seems that this area of science is undergoing some revolutionary developments. It does make Lacan and certainly Freud seem a little old hat. Not that I’m an expert in either, and perhaps there is a place for both in my own world view.
Art is like an escapologist, wriggling out of the majority of definitions world views would seek to place on it each time it is corralled. Perhaps that is why the urge to make and experience art is so timeless.
