Whether I'm using clay, chalks or ink, there is a constant plastic morphing of shapes that as I work with them can emerge sometimes as frog-like forms, sometimes as images of rocks or landscape and sometimes as humans or plants. Why should something as fluid and unpredictable as this matter?
Anthropomorphic map of Chapeltown
The most important issue for myself is the relationship between art and the world. I believe that art does not set out to critique social issues or to answer problems, it is not about knowledge gathering or illustrating an idea. It is therefore a very poor academic discipline, as it cannot be measured easily and if asked what questions it answers or what issues it solves, many artists may well say that it does not ask questions or give answers. But as the issues and problems that face us today are so huge and pressing, does this mean that art is useless? Art is for me something much more about being embedded into life, rather than standing outside of it. It is about experiencing the world and the things that make up the world, both its processes and its physicality. It is also about using the stuff of the world to reflect on the world. It therefore deals with material possibilities. My personal approach is that as stuff comes into contact with my hands and my sight and the rest of my body's experiential bundle, it can be engaged with and as change happens its implications can be followed until something emerges. The world not being the subject of some sort of objective study but something I am immersed in. As I try to swim in it, my movements create eddies in the water, these eddies can be just splashes if I'm not in tune with the water or they can be beautiful swirls if my actions flow with the fluid I'm in. In making drawings or ceramics I try to attune myself to both the materials I am working with and the various processes and activities that I am entangled with, these other things being what we call politics, gardening, reading, having relationships with other people, feeling ill or smelling cut grass. It could be argued that everything matters, but sometimes I need to make images of things to let their 'mattering' make sense to me, I also need to filter what matters, if not I would be overwhelmed with so much information that I wouldn't be able to function. I do believe making art is about making some sort of sense, but not because it explains things, its a sort of sense that relates to how the experience of living has something about it that can be seen through the imagination. It is as if the intuitive coming into being of an image as it arrives out of a material, helps crystallise certain types of observations, not those of scientific measuring or reasoning, but those that are more about love and kindness, of empathy, of paying attention to something and how it interconnects with other things. Old ideas such as 'harmony' and 'interrelatedness' still seem important, if only because in order to achieve these things you have to look and listen and acknowledge other forms besides your own.
Several of the drawing projects I have been involved with over the last few years have begun with conversations, I have either been drawing in the street and someone has come up to me and decided to tell me about their lives and what it is like to be them, or conversations have just happened randomly. As I get older conversations change, the things that I talked about with others in my teens were very different to the things I talk to people about now, not more interesting or deeper, just different, because as I interact with the flow of conversation today my bones ache and my feeling tone is that of someone in their 70th year and not their 17th. But above all I try to listen. Back in the studio I go on to continue my part of a conversation through imaginative drawing or making. This is not about being the analytical artist standing back from the world and being objective about it, it is about flowing with the implications of the conversation, and as images arrive using these as extensions of that conversation. Not just with people but with the materials that I have also joined in with in opening out possibilities. By making the conversations more visible, I also get to become part of a wider ongoing conversation, one that occurs on social media as much as a result of people seeing the work in exhibitions. Images thus become part of a flow of both verbal and visual conversations, but the images work slightly differently to the words, they allow others time to digest them and they take on new meanings as they are translated into digital forms. However the meaning is more to do with what is articulated at the various points of contact, rather than something directed or shaped, its a meaning that flows into forms in a similar way that molten metal flows into a mould.
A glowing sun/virus illuminates a dark sea
There is something about care that is important here, valuing others lives is part of an attempt to value the earth itself and this means that I also have to take other viewpoints seriously, whether this be of people or non humans, which is part of a duty of care that is a hard thing to follow sometimes.
Taking others seriously is something I found that the art world was very poor at doing when I first arrived in art college in the late 1960s. Art it seemed to me then was much more about learning to operate within a series of positions that were acceptable to certain gatekeepers within the profession. It was certainly not about developing conversations I had previously had with the people I knew before I entered the art world, especially the world I came from in the English Black Country. My teachers from that time would despair of me if they saw the work I did now, their position would be that artists deal with the type of questions that other artists find interesting, the proper subject of the discipline of art being an interrogation of the discipline. There is a long tradition of art writing going back to Lessing and including Greenberg and Dickie that discusses what can and what cant be the subject of art. It was Tom Wolfe's 'The Painted Word' that helped me to eventually articulate my own stance in relation to what I found was an arrogant and stultifying approach to art, one that was a celebration of a certain type of elitism and in England in particular, it was something to do with class. Working class people worked with their hands, therefore the crafting of things could never be as important as the planning and intellectual positioning of ideas, which were the sorts of things middle and upper class people did. It took me a long time to accept that my hands thought in their own way, and that they could have a deep conversation with a material, a conversation that was an enfolding of possibilities, rather than an intellectually understood position. The one was about an ongoing, constantly readjusted dance of relationships, the other was more an observed 'frozen' thing, an isolated object. This was why, I began to realise, that all those wonderful objects that you could look at in glass cases in the British Museum, were somehow 'dead'. They had been plucked out of their event, cut off from the doing that they were involved with. I was often told that the making of art was a thing done in isolation, it would be received within a process of a 'disinterested interest'. But the art I looked at that appealed to me always seemed to be about an approach to the world that suggested an engagement with it. Not to solve anything or to unpick the details of social ills, but to help open out an awareness of what is there. Goya does not solve anyone's problems but he makes me aware of the continuing vanity of people, the stupidity that we can all descend into and the violence human beings can inflict on each other. He is aware that reason sleeps when anger and self interest take over, is tuned into the dark side as well as the funny side of awareness. He is also attuned to ink and paper, as well as paint and its ability to be transformed into the forms he sees and the forms he imagines, the one flowing into the other.
One thing that we need to remember about art is that it is made by people, people immersed into the world and when I look at art I cant do that without feeling or thinking about how it was first of all engaged with that world and then of how it continues to be entangled into it. This is why older art is still useful now, it changes in how it engages us because nothing stands still, but it continues to engage, because the basic things that have been central to the content of artwork remain the same.
I have gradually come to realise that art making is something 'stitched into the fabric of the world' as Tim Ingold put it when thinking about anthropology. Our perception of the world is in fact the world's perception of itself, an idea that Ingold took from Merleau-Ponty and which when I read it, I understood as being central to how I could think about how I was working as an artist and as how as an individual being I am in the world. As I do things I interact with the world around me, it is shaping me and I am in my small way shaping tiny bits of it. We mould ourselves together, I am cast from the environment I find myself born into, but as I move through it, I begin to dance with it and hold certain parts of it closer to me than others and as I do so we grow together. Out of this experience and forming an integral part of it comes art. It is a dynamic process, one that is always seeking harmony with the environment it finds itself emerging from.
The world of degree level art education, within which I work, has seen the rise of the need for lecturers to undertake PhDs. I have never been against the reading of theoretical texts, and in fact have often celebrated their existence and encouraged others to read them, because what they represent are other voices, other conversations as to what the world could be about. But I have always believed that these voices should not to be elevated above those of poets, farmers, street cleaners, wood workers, nurses and overhead crane fitters. All of the people you meet, either in person or via something they have written or visually imagined, are like currents that swirl around us as we swim, sometimes a current will be so strong that it almost pulls you underwater, at other times the existence of a barely perceptible undertow might almost go unnoticed, but will still be a forceful shaper of the direction you will end up going in. My personal observation has been that a PhD prioritises academic learning and the research question above instinct and a haptic understanding and in doing so analytic and objective decision making are elevated as leading to new knowledge, which is in turn valued above any wisdom gained from material thinking, intuition or hand learning. Wisdom it seemed to me could only be arrived at if it had a common purpose, and a common purpose could only be arrived at by working alongside and in collaboration with people and things. For instance if I really want to know what the landscape is like between my house where I live and the place where I work, what I ought to do is try walking from one place to the other with no shoes on. This is a very different approach to knowledge. A collection of facts is something that is too easily commodified and linked to outputs and some sort of measured impact. I have perhaps tended to rely overly on ostensive definitions of what things are, i.e. I prefer pointing to things to show how or what is happening. Wisdom is something that operates in and between people and the world, knowledge is something you can save up, like capital. It can define power relationships and elucidate difference. Knowledge leads to either or situations, which identify difference and if I know you are different from me, I may well treat you differently. This simple fact lies behind so many of the world's problems. We are not things that can be separated one from another, we are entanglements of events, parts of which are always being entangled with other events. If I could see myself and others as an ongoing event whereby we all have parts to play, I would be more inclined to help facilitate the action that is going on between things and people, rather than to create blockages, by working to disadvantage certain players. The event of a fruit ripening on a tree, encompasses many things in its becoming, from sunlight streaming down onto the Earth over many months, to a developing soil complexity and microclimate, that includes minerals, fungi and insects. There is an ever shifting and shaping combination that enables the tree's roots to embrace nourishment, and these events are intertwined with human events such as picking and eating and digesting. For the tree event I also become a distribution system, facilitating seeds to move as far from the tree as possible, so that they can survive outside of its own shade, and for myself I gain nourishment and the energy resources to amongst many other things, type this text. On the other hand, I can use words to differentiate one thing from another; I am a human being and that thing over there is a tree. If I use the two separate nouns in this way, a proposition is developed; it states that humans and trees are very different things, rather than interconnected parts of a process. This writing is art too, which is why hopefully as the words are read, an idea emerges about noticing things. It would be argued by an OOO philosopher however that the nouns are important and what is more useful to think about is the points of contact between things and how change is made at those points of interaction. Whichever way round I think of it, it is interaction and change that results.
No matter how hard I try I always see everything through very human eyes. Everyday I take a few moments to spend time looking into the pond in the garden. It is that time of the year that the tadpoles are about to get legs and set off out into the world. There is a frog in the pond that always hides behind a particular stone and I always look to see if it is still there and worry when I don't see it. I cant but help think about the frog through my own human form and when I do I picture the frog in my drawing mind as human. As a child I read many a story where frogs were really people, or where they acted as if they were human. I also realise that still thinking like a child is a stupid thing to do, however I am of a very stupid cast of mind, so as our paths cross, I record my thoughts about this in a way that only makes sense to me, by making a drawing, a drawing that suggests that the frog is human, like myself. If this is an argument for my own discipline, then it seems to fall apart at its very inception, but in the conundrum of being illogical and subject to sometimes childlike innocence, perhaps we will find the very thing we are looking for, as it is not about profit or reasoned argument or hubris, it is simply about re-inserting ourselves back into the world, and if this means a process of stupid re-connection then so be it, if it means I think kindly about the life of a frog for five more minutes than I would have done before, if my day to day activity includes a frog in its event cycle, perhaps that's a good start.
A flower morphs into a frog
So what is it that makes my discipline one that is useful and still of importance to the world? Perhaps it's the fact that it can take seriously a child-like point of view, that it can stand outside of academic structures, that it allows for an enmeshing between people and materials, that it facilitates a flow of change and that it is more about process than final objects. Perhaps it is also because it has a huge mythic weight on its back, one that includes all those very expensive works of art in museums and bank vaults, perhaps its to do with the fact that it is supposed to represent some sort of truth, or just that it is forever morphing and shifting its form, so that it becomes something that can be used by each society as it finds it needs something to help it understand itself.
Bird form emerges from watery environment
My present cast of mind could also due to the fact that I have been asked to consider undertaking a PhD. Something I have been avoiding for several years has suddenly come to sit right in my centre of vision and I have to make a decision as to whether or not to undertake something that all of my colleagues have done or are in the process of doing. Therefore my earlier statement, that 'the PhD prioritises academic learning and the research question above instinct and a haptic understanding and in doing so analytic and objective decision making are elevated as leading to new knowledge, which is in turn valued above any wisdom gained from material thinking, intuition or hand learning', needs a bit more interrogation, does it always have to be so? If not how can a body of doings be constructed that allows for the serendipity of unexpected interconnections that I like to make as I write this blog, in fact, is this blog a form that could lead into a PhD?
A long time ago I drew a diagram that attempted to show how art was always changing and that it was never a fixed entity. Perhaps it's time to revisit it and to think about what it could be again.
Diagram of the evolution of the word 'art' I made for a GIDE conference
Art as an idea is in constant change, if it wasn't it would have little baring on reality because reality is an ever changing experience. The only people that want art to be some sort of set of eternal values I would suggest are those that have an investment in an idea of such values.
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