Why did I react badly to the CSM Postgraduate Show?

The Situation

I arrived at the CSM Postgraduate Show in high spirits today. I went last year and enjoyed it, and I had seen others go, and was excited to go too. I left feeling cheated, sad, and weirdly angry. These were not necessarily rational responses, but this blog post attempts to understand and reflect on this.

Before I begin, two disclaimers 1) I DID like some of the art, I'm not going to say which, but if you are reading this and you exhibited, please consider my reasoning and see if you think it applies to your art, if you think it doesn't, then I either didn't mean your art, or I misunderstood it 2) I had to be up at 0430 this morning so while I didn't feel tired, I was probably quite tired and grumpy (my late wife always use to check how much sleep I had had before listening to any rant about work). 

Please remember the aim of this post is not to critique and pull-apart the CSM show, it's to understand my reaction to it, and what it might mean for me, my understanding of art, and how I approach art in the future.

What did I feel before?

• Excited
• Anticipation to see some cool art
• Excitement to find which pieces spoke to me
• Trepidation that I need to fit into this next year
• Curiosity for what was there
• Excitement to meet some artists

What did I feel after?

• Resentful
• Depressed
• Angry (with a small 'a')
• Cheated
• Rejected
• Isolated
• Keen to think about my own work and how it compared
• Keen to think about how to display my work

Looking at this, there's perhaps 3 clusters of emotions - primary responses to what I saw, secondary responses to what the experience triggered in me, and practical responses.

The two practical responses can be set aside for later. I need to think about what practical changes I will make as a result of this experience.

Having not come from an artistic background, and having had fairly humble beginnings, where I was exposed to a lot of folk art, but not 'culture', I am probably over-sensitive to not 'fitting in' or 'being accepted'. I suspect we can remove 'resentful', 'rejected' and 'isolated' from the list because they are to do with me and my hangups, not what I was experiencing.

This leaves us with 'depressed', 'angry' and 'cheated'. Of these, 'cheated', is probably the most useful. Feeling 'cheated' suggests I didn't get something from the list of things I was expecting. Based on the 'before' list, and my recollection of where things started to 'go wrong', I think I felt cheated because I didn't like most of the art.

What's my problem?

When I consider my own art, I consider balancing three things (I bet there is a 'official' version of this with more!):

• Meaning: Does this piece mean something, does it talk about something interesting, is it thought-provoking? Does it make me think about it in the shower days later?
• Skill/Effort: Does this piece look like care went into it? Does it show skill to make it? Does it show prolonged effort to make? Was it made over a meaningful timescale? Does it look like the artist cared? Do I admire the effort?
• Beauty: Is it beautiful or intricate, does it make me want to look at it, does it give up details in a graceful way? Would I want to have it in my home? Would I want to have a photo?

I think of these as being 'points' on a triangle - the less you have of one, the more you need of the others - you can get away with being a bit shabby if you are charming and interesting, you can get away with being a bit shallow if you are well-made and easy on the eye, you can get away with being kinda ugly if you are interesting and made an effort. What you can't be is shabby, shallow, and ugly (as a piece of art, at least). I consider myself very lead by concept, so I would put meaning above the others - to be, right now, it doesn't matter how skilful or beautiful something is, it has to mean something.

Reflecting, plus looking at notes I took immediately afterwards, I had the following 'issues' with what I saw:

• Meaning: I found a lot of the art hard to understand. Clearly that could be my fault, but equally it suggests to me that either there was no meaning, or the meaning wasn't clear enough
• Skill: A lot of the pieces looked, well, sort of thrown-together. That might reflect the situation it was made under, or it might reflect an aesthetic choice. It felt like there was a focus on experimentation at the expense of finish. As someone with conceptual leanings, I don't think art needs to be a demonstration of skill - that's craft arguably - but it feels like it should look like it took some effort to construct. I think a lot of the public criticism of modern art is that it looks like it was made in half-an-hour by someone with a cup of coffee in one hand and a joint in the other.
• Beauty: A lot of the art was quite loud and garish for my taste. The seemed to be a lot of bright colours and aggressive contrasts.
• Scale: A lot of the pieces where BIG... But it felt like this was done because it's 'good' to go big... The scale didn't seem to add much to many pieces, and just felt wasteful. To me, scale needs to have a purpose.
• Detail: Maybe this is a personal sensibility, but few pieces seemed to reward closer inspection - you got a face full, but looking closer revealed nothing new

I'm definitely not claiming to have any of the above sewn-up, but I equally think that doesn't mean I can't have an opinion. I'm not saying any of those things were RIGHT, just that I FELT them. There were definitely a few pieces that were AMAZING, but I sort of expected a lot more.

I think the environment provided a number of challenges that I need to consider carefully for when my own time comes:

• Crammed in: There felt like a LOT of art in a fairly small space. Some pieces seemed to have been given a corner, while others were allowed to sprawl everywhere. It was sometimes hard to see where once piece finished and another started, creating odd 'composite' artworks that were presumably unintended
• Performance art: I love performance art, but some of the pieces were actually intended to be performances, and it wasn't always clear. Several pieces I couldn't understand turn out to be props for performances. It felt like it should be clearer what stood alone, and what was supposed to be 'performed'. Ironically I learnt that one of my favourite pieces was actually part of a performance, which I missed, but which sounded even more amazing!
• Dead Electronics: A lot of pieces featured electronics, the majority of which were either broken or not turned on
• No explanations: There were labels, but they seemed quite inconsistent - some did explain the work, giving some chance to 'rescue' works that were hard to read. Some were very plane, some were filled with art-speak that used a lot words to not really say much
• Show not an exhibition: Someone pointed out that I was being unfair going to a show and expecting an exhibition. Now I better understand the difference I should have been prepared to treat it more as a bazaar than a cathedral.
• A snapshot of a bigger practice: Of course I was seeing a tiny curated amount of work from 2 years, and it was tempting to think of it as being the culmination of those 2 years, but it was probably closer to a sample - different people probably gave themselves different criteria for deciding what that was - some might have gone for recency, some for quality, some for the most representative.

So would I have felt like this if I had more sleep? Maybe. Either way, I felt what I felt, so what does it mean for me?

What am I going to do about it?

I don't think I should build my art practice around one show, but I do need to consider carefully what I choose to show, and how. I think to succeed in a such an environment, I want to make work that:

• Draws people over to it by being 'interesting' from a distance, I want people to see at a glance there is something 'going on'
• Defends it's boundaries - I have no idea what that means in practice - but I have to assume I am going to be displayed in a dark corner between a six foot inflatable headless duck and a 3 m by 3 m neon pop art print of someone's arse crack
• Offers something immediately graspable in terms of meaning - having come over to see what is 'going on', there needs to be something clearly 'going on'
• Rewards inspection by offering lots of detail and intricacies not apparent at a distance
• Rewards inspection by offering layers of meaning
• Leaves the viewer with a mental after-glow that comes back to haunt them when they are trying to sleep that night

Before anyone think I think I am some sort of artistic genius, I have little idea how to achieve any of this, it's just a list to help me think!

Sensibilities, aesthetics, meaning and presentation... Ugh... Preparing "A Month in my Head" for display

 So, I have a LOT of different artworks on the go, and I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing... It's a good thing because when I am stalled with one, I can pick-up another, but it's a bad thing because some pieces (rivers of silver eh, eh) have been stalled so long they are in danger of being forgotten... I am actually making steady progress on most of them, but I need to finish some soon (for my own sanity, and because I have even more I want to do once I have my face casting back). While there is madness in my method, I do have a system that works:

• For digital stuff, I have an 'in-progress' folder that I have to eye as I search for my current piece
• For physical stuff I have a good/terrible system of leaving it in the way so I have an incentive to finish stuff, if only in the hope of getting my table back, etc

One of the pieces that has been stalled the longest, is "A Month in my Head". This has been an interesting but tough lesson in the importance of display and aesthetics. 

At the end of the month I had 30 perspex boxes lined up on my window sill. While that was quite a nice display, it had a few drawbacks:

• It wasn't practical to transport
• It didn't really show the monthly nature of the work
• It didn't serve to draw the work into one piece (it looked like 30 trinkets)
• It was surprisingly hard to study each head separately if the boxes were too close as the reflections off the perspex started to confuse and disorientate
• It missed the change to show other aspects of the work - by pulling it into one, there is space for more meaning to be added

I really wanted to emphasis the medical/pseudo-science/examination angle of the work. My initial plan was to present it almost like it was 'sold' as kit, complete with instructions and fake labels to complete. To this end I started to create a case inspired by the sort of medical equipment cases. My plan was to build these like thin shelves of oak. Advice from my dear Dead Critics was that this was too heavy and would distract and detract from the heads. I believed this, but I knew I had to see for myself, so I pushed ahead.

Sadly, my plan collided with my limited woodworking skills and I eventually ended up with this:

Which I wanted to love, but already knew wasn't working. I was pleased I managed to make something that didn't look ugly in itself, and was build very solidly... Like REALLY solidly... It's nice to know a piece of my art will probably one of the few things to survive the destruction of the planet. However, the reflections from behind were confusing, and the shelves were chunky and distracting as predicted by the Dead Critics.

I was encouraged by seeing this at The Artists Residence Hotel in Penzance:

But the aesthetics were clearly different (how?). I considered adding doors, but stalled, knowing I wasn't sure. 

Scrolling Insta, I happened upon an artist making fake butterfly specimen trays using faces cut from magazines, and I was inspired to explore this direction instead. The aim being a big wide tray-like frame, with the heads positions inside. I mocked up a few possibilities:

And I really liked the simplicity, the almost medical starkness, so I built a frame:

Which took a LOT of work... And I think it does actually work - the focus is on the pieces, there's room to add labels if I want (do I want?), there's a simplicity but there's still a smell of examination, of display for inspection, of scientific starkness. However, as Bethany pointed out (and I knew in my heavy heavy heart), if you are going to do this, it has to be perfect - it's clear from the photo, and painfully obvious in real life, that the rows are crooked... So FML, I pulled them all off again and removed the mounting:

And now I'm waiting for the mount board to be laser cut, and yet more expense... But I am coming to understand in art, if you are going to do it, you gotta do it as right as you can.

So while I wait for the mount board... DO I want labels?

If art is play, can play be art?

 In my post last night, I proposed that art is play, but actually the reversal is interesting: is play art? I think this is perhaps the more interesting, and the more practical question. 

Public art can be playful - David Shrigley's Really Good being a lovely example, but participatory art can go a lot further, as Pope.L's Pull! demonstrates - here the public gets to observe the play, but they also get the chance to join in. 

On a much more modest scale, my own piece, Wish You Were Hear (I really need to standardise the spelling of that, I write it differently every time, but actually hey, nobody knew what it was called, and admitting or broadcasting that it had a name would probably have harmed it) can definitely be re-framed as a social game with a set of rules viz:

• It's anonymous
• Share what you have written by pinning it up
• Use the prompts on the cards frame the things to share
• Don't steal the pen
• Don't damage, remove, or deface other people's cards

And interestingly, none of these rules were enforced, but they were almost entirely followed - the only one that was ever 'broken' was a few people ignored the prompts on the cards, either playfully (a card reversed to show the white side with "this is the anticard!" written on it) or to share their own messages (names, a few insults, and a single picture of an ejaculating penis). I guess a feature of any game is people 'cheating'!

Could a direction for my work (I'm not pompous enough to say "for art"!) be to create these 'sacred' games? To stop thinking about art as 'things' and more as 'shared experiences'? My current work focuses a lot on my grief/trauma experience, and is (inadvertently) characterised by the use of my own face and themes of pain/damage/emptiness, but also hope/rebirth/natural cycles. Maybe as I work through this, a direction would be towards more participatory experiences? To create 'sacred' (I need a better work) acts of play, capture them in compelling ways, and make that play into art? Such art could have a number of positive outcomes:

• Exploring the fact that most people do follow 'the rules' most of the time - we are social creatures conditioned to be social not selfish or destructive
• Exploring how games can bring people together in shared activities, and then showing more people how people can be brought together in shared activities
• Allowing and benefiting from having everyone contribute, even though those outcomes are mediated through me - in other words, incorporating other people's inputs to make a better overall output

Putting it in a slightly more emotive way: can I make art using (willing) people as the medium?

Things to consider:

• The art is the event not the activity - this is NOT about bringing people together to make artefacts, but bringing people together as an act of art. It is NOT art therapy for the masses, and the outputs can be beautiful and come from me as an artist, not the participants directly
• Although the work would be participatory, and some of the meaning and goals would be social, it would not be social art. It's goals would be artistic, not social - i.e. Pope.L's pull was participatory, and the themes were social (the value of works and labour) but it was NOT a social art project
• Documentation needs to be compelling - while the act is the art, the artefacts will be the only things that remain - these need to be interesting and compelling in their own right - I am effectively making two pieces of art for the 'price' of one - an act that is transient, and an artefact that is not (but which needs the act for it to exist)

Artifex Lumens - is 'artist' a social role, not a job? Reading "Homo Ludens 2.0: Play, Media, and Identity.” from "In Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures"

 Having discovered the idea of "Homo Ludens", I'm doing some reading on the topic including a chapter entitled "Homo Ludens 2.0: Play, Media, and Identity” from a book called "In Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures". I also need to read the original "Homo Ludens" book itself, but I'm clearing some of the backlog of impulse-kid-in-a-candy-store downloads I did from JSTOR.

The central proposal of Homo Ludens (as I understand it so far) is that play is a central feature of culture, in fact it's a driving force of culture. In this context 'play' means non-productive 'work' with self-enforced rules. The more I consider Pope.L's work, the more I see the playful aspect - his piece "Pull!" is a great example of a game - it's pointless, it has arbitrary rules, but it also brings people together in a common activity towards a common goal. More and more, I wonder if the purpose of play is actually to teach us cooperation?

I wonder if the role of the artist in society has become corrupted? "High Art" has become about money, and artworks have become assets, valued for their perceived desirability and rarity, not their actual worth to society. In such a world, the asset is worth what people believe it's worth, and therefore a loss of credibility is a loss of money to someone (someone who probably already has more money than they know what to do with). Humour and play become the enemy, the gleaming pin hovering terrifyingly close to the pompously over-inflated balloon of perceived value. 

Likewise, in such an environment, art that does not make people money must be denigrated. Community art brings the dangerous perception that art can become available to anyone, can be a commodity, can (the horror) be made by non-artists, unsanctioned by the gatekeepers of value.

Did art lost it's way when 'artist' became a job title, not a social role, a source of personal enrichment to many? Perhaps the role of the artist is not to 'make art' but rather to 'make art happen'? Is art an act, not an artifact? Is art actually play? The exclusive play of the artist, or the play of some rich elite, or it can be the play of communities. Maybe to be an artist is to be a community leader in social play? Would society as a whole re-engage with art when it become something they were part of, not something to be locked in a gallery with 'do not touch' signs. 

Are the 'artefacts' of art mere mementos of act of art? In playful art we see the 'artefact' as merely the evidence of sacred mischief managed, such as the franked stamps of Michael Hernandez de Luna.

Maybe the true calling of an artist is to be a 'playful spirit'? Using the Jester's Privilege question the unquestionable? To flout the norm? To lead community in play? Maybe high art is art that leads communities in 'games' of serious play, that help them to critically exam the world around them? Of course, in this scenario, the definition of 'artist' become very broad, very open, too dangerously open for some people's comfort?

Read the chapter “From Insubordinate Playfulness to Subversive Irony.” from the book "In Humour and Irony in Dutch Post-War Fiction Film" by Peter VERSTRATEN

 I am wondering if when I say "humour", I actually mean "playfulness". Pope.L's work is definitely playful as well as humorous. I decided to do some background reading. A JSOR search turned up this chapter which looked relevant, and which I hoped me might have something to say on the differences. Unfortunately, it was very specific to the topic of Dutch Film. While interesting for being so different from my study so far, I struggled to find anything directly useful to my current paper or practice, and skimmed most of the chapter.

Finished reading "Humour in art and its use to challenge authority" interesting references

 Interesting read, mainly useful for the references including "BLACK SPHINX: ON THE COMEDIC IN MODERN ART" which I have ordered.

Frottage using 3d printed designs? The sort with wax crayons, not genitals

The word 'frottage' makes me think of the sexual practice, but maybe that's just me? However, putting non-penetrative sex to one side for a moment, a comment that my digitally processed photo of a wax head (steady now) looked like a brass rubbing got me thinking:

I'm messing about with 3d printing (or at least, thinking of buying a 3d printer since the fabrication lab is so hard to use if you are remote) so could I actually 3d printer to print a 'plate' to sensuously draw my wax crayon over? Could I actually make a 'brass rubbing' of my picture?

Reading a thesis/essay called "Humour in art and its use to challenge authority"

 I randomly found a thesis on the web called "Humour in art and its use to challenge authority" by Lorenzo Frattini. It appears to have been written as part of a dissertation. It's fairly high-level, but is well-written and too close to my own research paper not to read. 

Finished: Art and Laughter

 Finished Art and Laughter, as expected it gave me a good grounding in artists that use humour, and how, gave me some good further reading, and helped me with the intro material. It wasn't the most fun read, if I'm honest, but it was worth reading. Aiming to do one chapter a night (or stop at 2045) seemed to really make a difference.

A Month Outside my Head: Participatory Artwork using wax heads

 Chatting about the wax heads from A Month in my Head, Roz made a comment that I should explore the colour and texture, perhaps in photos. My head was in a very different space (pun intended) so I parked the comment for the time-be-in. I've been having a lot of internal struggle around how I should present the wax heads, to the extent that the piece has stalled a bit, plus the practical consideration that I haven't been able to get much time recently to work on it. Reflecting on this while driving, I was suddenly struck by the idea of the wax heads as a sort of 'contact sheet print' in a grid. I remembered Roz's comment and I was inspired to photograph a few and try different effects:

I need to explore these further - both basically use a semi-transparent layer derived from the detail over a plain red outline. The first uses edge-enhance and the second is just playing with contrast to effectively posterise the image. The first has a lot of texture and a certain primitive charm, the second is closer to my normal aesthetic, but is maybe a bit 1960s paperback cover? I think I need to try with more heads and more effects. It should be fun.

However, I was further thinking about the question of labels - people have rightly pointed out that they could be distracting, but I also think they could add a lot to the meaning/richness. I was thinking about adding ironic/humorous labels e.g. "rabbit face" or whatever, effectively mocking the gravity of the topic, when I thought :- why buy a dog and bark yourself? Far funnier/more interesting/more meaningful to allow other people to come up with labels, and see what they do - some might be rude, some funny, some earnest, some well-meaning... Plus it would be a great commentary on how we interpret/filter/misinterpret both art and mental health...

So that's what I really want to do - get a public space, a bunch of probably postcards (to give people the chance to consider the heads as individual pieces as well as a set), and let them come up with their own 'captions'.

Blockers:

• Cost - printing 30 designs in usable numbers will cost a shit tonne of money :(
• Venue - I need a ready source of people!

I need to think about how I might get a space, and then maybe consider how to mitigate the cost :(