M106

Studio Work

Life is an aesthetic experience:-

       Art is life is aesthetics is work is play is doing is thinking is

       writing is talking is reading is creating is living.

‘But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?  Why

should a lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?’

(‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’ (1983), in Rabinow Paul (ed). Michael Foucault- Ethics. (London: The Penguin Press, 1997)  261. 

What is art?  Why do we do it?  Why do I do it?

People have questioned the purpose of art for so long, with so many replies.  These range from Plato’s "ideals" as the origins of concepts and his derogatory comments on representations, to Barthes and Derrida who have multiplied possible meanings by ousting the author and elevating reading practice.  I have found various philosophical, linguistic, and art theories helpful in developing my ideas, yet nothing entirely speaks to what I myself as an artist am doing.

The practice of art in the 21^st Century entails a level of uncertainty and a feeling that it lacks justification.  The word has so many meanings, from the superficial to the esoteric, from the commercial to the spiritual.   When one is engaged in an activity so variously understood there is a need at least to understand where one’s own work lies; but there are so many theories that seem appropriate.  All of them make sense, and contradictions between them do not narrow the choice.

Some subsume everything in human experience under a theory about objects.  From our relationships to each other, to material objects in the world, attitudes towards ourselves, and the creative space between inside and out, which is where all objects, according to Winnicott, are finally created and understood.  One could ‘object' that whether our world consists of objects depends partly on how one defines the word - but Derrida and others would agree that words do not have definitive meanings, and can be understood in many ways. Christopher Bollas would say that the best way to discuss objects is in terms of relationships, and Brentano, Husserl and Sartre would put up barriers of ‘intentionality’ between internal and ‘external’ objects.

Previously my own work practise was overloaded with symbols, over-determined, and refined to the point where nothing was unmotivated. Materials, technique, form and content were entirely necessary, with anything superfluous excised.  The layering of a phenomenological present across memories subliminally dredged from the past has created a multilayered work of conflicting and opposing meanings and feelings within the form.  But the progressive refining of each work to more completely contain my entire worldview made it increasingly obvious that my practice would be limited by an apex.  Attempting to analyse these contorted, overloaded and overworked pieces merely dragged me into the turbulence, a maelstrom of meanings, which clarified nothing.

So I reversed my methods.  In place of loading the entire universe into one work I returned to the beginning, to our first object as described by Object Relations Theory and D.W. Winnicott; to the experience of infancy, before we knew about symbols, language and meaning, relationships or the world.  To the first experience of world as separate to self, the first relationship with ‘other’, and the progression from this to the pre-verbal mind’s creation of the ‘transitional object’ of Winnicott.  Surely, by looking at our first object relationship, the first creative event before the clutter of multiplicity, one can gain some understanding of our relationship with the world.  To the way in which we create a world in our minds and to our relationship with the cultural objects that we actually create with our minds and hands.  Perhaps eventually it might be possible to approach the overwhelming flood of symbolism and meanings that attach themselves in infinite numbers to our every perceptual shift.

Immersion.