One year older

One Year Older - Photomontage. 

Every once in a while I feel compelled to create something approximating "proper" Art. I love performative art whether that's the post performative painting of Jackson Pollock and David Hockney or the endurance work of Marina Abramovic. For most people performance art occupies the very fringes of their endurance of contemporary fine art. I know many people, artists included, who would rather slam their heads repeatedly against a brick wall then endure 40 minutes of a woman standing in a darkened room knitting a dress to the sounds of repetitive electro on heavy rotation, but I genuinely feel like I'm part of an intellectual conversation worth having. Sure it's wanky as hell, but art should attempt to engage with people on a slightly heightened level or something approaching sophistication.
"One year older" is a follow up to a piece I did last year. Although I wouldn't classify this as a performative piece it is suggestive of an act being recorded. I wanted to talk about sexuality without framing it in an overly masculine lens. I also wanted to reverse the traditional gender roles within art. I think these photomontages are an interesting way to talk about these subjects and as an artist it allows me to venture out of my usual role of detached observer and to take a more active role in the conversation. If I'm honest I know that work like this is slightly outside the field of my abilities. My understanding of performative art is incredibly limited and I struggle to pin down my thoughts, but working like this has directly fed into all other areas of my practice, allowing me to be adventurous creatively and more determined to strive for something like artistic integrity within my practice.

This ageing young rebel

This ageing young rebel 

As part of my on going artistic development I am required to consider issues arising from my practice and the impact they have on my work. It became fairly obvious to me that my print work and to some degree my paint work as well, is really about the representation of the gesture rather then the gesture itself. With this in mind I wanted to produce a work that would illustrate these ideas whilst at the same time being a bold contemporary print design suitable for a number of applications.

In the house of flies

In the house of flies Acrylic and debris on canvas

Robert Rauschenberg felt that by introducing materials or objects not commonly found in paint that he could blur the lines between paint and sculpture, but more importantly he could create a sense of conflict within the work. This idea has really appealed to me and I wanted to experiment with introducing conflict into my own paint work. Up until now I had played it fairly safe with the materials introduced.

 Dust, card, plastic bags, wood shavings and earth might blend in to the painting creating interesting texture, but hardly offering any kind  of challenge to the viewer. Rather then providing a fixed point of interest, such as the imagery in "New King" or "little injuries" and trying to avoid the unnecessary violence of "bride and groom" I chose to include prominent objects in the composition. For this piece, along with familiar materials such as the ones previously mentioned, I included a pair of boxer shorts and a broken set of headphones. Rather then adhering to recognisable compositional devices, these objects were offset on the canvas creating, I hope, a greater sense of conflict within the work. 

 For me the success of the piece really relied on creating balance between previously explored themes of sex, violence and decay whilst introducing a more absurdist element in the boxer shorts. My work could hardly be described as whimsical, trivial and highly derivative perhaps, but all pretty much done with a straight face and if I'm honest I was nervous about subverting my own work. 

Of course my nervousness was slightly absurd. The elements I enjoy producing within my work are all present and correct, but unfortunately for me the piece feels theatrical in its presentation. I'm not sure if by including these elements that the work becomes overly knowing, a joke that only I'm in on, or if it simply highlights my own fumbling attempts at overt introspection. Either way it seems oddly self serving, but introspection is something that I am particularly uncomfortable with as I had felt that my practice represented a rejection of this kind of naval gazing. 

 Paint is inherently gestural. The artists presence can never be in doubt and perhaps because of this the artist is laid bare whether he/she likes it or not. The truth is that whatever this painting says or doesn't say is down to me and perhaps I'm not as comfortable with that as I had thought I was.