There’s no getting past it, but what happens - or as now seems more likely - doesn’t yet happen on March 29 has been dominating pretty much all the news here in the British media, and despite something occurring to me and quite often thinking ‘hmm, I wouldn’t mind writing about this or that - ‘this or that’ having absolutely bugger all to do with Brexit - every time I sat down I found myself circling back, like a young teen lad and a girlie magazine, to Brexit. But I didn’t want to write about Brexit.
I shan’t say the subject bores me, because it most certainly doesn’t, but there really is nothing much new to say until we find out how the cookie will crumble come March 29. Yet Brexit is almost impossible to get away from, and I resented it (and don’t think that the irony hasn’t escaped me that this blog entry, or at least its intro, is also about Brexit).
So here is one topic I have over the past few weeks been pondering, and as I think best either in conversation or when writing (usually this blog), considered as a possible blog entry.
. . .
I have lived here (about a mile outside the moorland village of St Breward in North Cornwall, down the hill towards Wenford Bridge (or it could be Wenfordbridge - I’ve read both) where the potter Michael Cardew had his workshop) since December 1995. At some point over those past 23 years I noticed, at Penpont a mile down the back road to Bodmin, a workshop but with a sign outside which proclaimed it to be the workshop/studio of a ceramics artist.
The artist is Jenny Beavan (not the costume designer, but the ceramicist) and from the pictures of some on her website, I find some of her work rather attractive and interesting, other pieces not so much. I have no idea how much she charges, but if I had the money and the space here (and a wife who enjoys ‘art’ as much as I do) I would certainly consider acquiring some of her work. Here are a few examples:
The reason I mention Ms Beavan in this blog is because of what she writes on her website, particularly in her ‘artist’s statement’. I must add that from here on I shall not be commenting specifically about that statement, although I shall quote from it as an example, but a tendency in many to intellectualise beyond redemption pretty much anything to do with ‘the arts’. People can, of course, say - and intellectualise - just as much as they like, but what I question what is ‘said’ is necessarily all it is cracked up to be.
At this point I must take an apparent left-turn, but only to try to help illuminate what I am trying to say. When I was younger, I had rather less faith in my own judgment and intellect than I do now. If I read something I didn’t understand, I immediately and always assumed I was my fault and that I was just a bit too thick to understand it. I now realise I was being a little unfair on myself because often the subject matter was complex, and I had too few reference point and too little intellectual experience to attempt anything even close to comprehension.
For example while at college I came across (or didn’t as it turns out and as I shall explain in a minute) Walter Pater’s admonition that ‘art should shine with a hard, gem-like flame’. Being then, and possibly still, rather too literal-minded, I asked myself ‘now what the bloody hell does that mean? Because I don’t have a clue.’ And being clueless as to what Pater was getting at, I again blamed myself as being just a little too thick. I now think I do know what Pater was getting at and that he was simply being what might well in simple terms be described as ‘poetic’. Furthermore, what he was expressing was not particularly important.
(When I searched the net to double-check the wording of the Pater quote, I couldn’t find it because it’s not what Pater said at all: in fact he said ‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life’, and what he said there is not one mention of art. I suspect what I had heard (or read) all those years ago was an unholy product of a series of Chinese whispers and inky undergraduates, such as me, simply getting it wrong.)
As I got older and had worked as a newspaper sub-editor for some time, I came to realise that often a written piece was opaque going on pretty bloody incomprehensible simply because it was badly written. It is not too outlandish to suggest that if you are trying to communicate, the clearer you are in your expression and communication, the better. But it took a while for the penny to drop and I wonder whether others, as I did, believe it is they who are at fault if they they are a tad baffled by, say, 500 words on art, writing or music. However good an artist is in her or his chosen field, they might not necessarily be good at simple communication.
. . .
I am about to quote from Jenny Beavan’s ‘artist statement’, but I should like to make clear - to Ms Beavan in case she ever happens across this blog entry as well as everyone else - that I am not criticising her but have chosen these excerpts as examples of their kind.
Ms Beavan begins the statement:
‘My work is an exploration into material and place observing in particular processes of interdependence between water and geological change. The intention is to capture a moment in a process of change and to reflect upon the physical and metaphorical aspects of a place as a vessel with containment. . . The experience of walking and being in a place often creates the necessary impulse from which to respond. I will often, almost daily follow a water course through a familiar landscape, where the activity of revisiting and being familiar with and more sensually aware, helps to shape and re-shape minute and seasonal changes.’
So far so good, and I don’t doubt many are thinking ‘well, that’s straightforward enough, what’s he banging on about?’ But now look at the pictures above of three pieces of her work: Ms Beavan’s statement is all fine and dandy, but would you have deduced any of what it says from the pieces shown (though I admit it is always preferable to see the original piece of plastic art if at all possible - reproductions are worse than useless)? You say ‘it’s just an artist statement, dummy, don’t try to read too much into it’. Well, let me put it this way: does Ms Beavan’s artist’s statement in any way illuminate the pieces? Does it give you a better appreciation of them?
I might seem to be concentrating too much - and thus misleadingly - on Ms Beavan’s work and her artistic statement, but what essentially concerns me is a tendency to intellectualise (which I think it does), especially, although not exclusively, in ‘the arts’. It almost seems to have become an end in itself.
Take what has been referred to Brit art and conceptual art, and take an well-known example of it: Tracey Emin’s My Bed and the prominence it has achieved. Emin conceived of her unmade bed as ‘a piece of art’ after spending
several days and nights in it, drinking and smoking and trying to come to terms with a broken relationship. The ‘work’ was first exhibited in Japan and at the Tate Gallery in 1999 and has since been shown around the world. It was bought by Charles Saatchi for £150,000 in 2000 and four years ago made £2.2 million at auction. When challenged by critics that anyone could exhibit an unmade bed and claim it was art, Emin is said to have responded, perfectly reasonably: “Well, they didn't, did they? No one had ever done that before.”
. . .
Don’t worry, I am not about to launch into a gammon-faced rant against ‘modern art’ and wail about ‘what on earth is the world coming to!’, although I do have unorthodox views on ‘what art is’, namely bloody anything you want it to be (which would include Ms Emin’s bed, by the way). Where I brutally part company from many is in my sincere belief that anyone and everyone can produce ‘art’ and that, to put it mildly ‘art’ is not half as important as it is cracked up to be.
Yet we seem continually to be required to show it a reverence, almost to treat it as something sacred. I suppose the my view could best be summed up in the observation, rough and ready perhaps, but I hope you get the drift, that ‘art’ is not ‘a thing’ but ‘an activity’. Furthermore it is ’an activity’ which everyone and anyone can indulge in, though whether what is eventually
Art can certainly tell us a lot about our and other past and present societies, our self-image, our values and much else, but then so does much else: shopping patterns, TV schedules, economic data to name but three. Art in its many forms gives us a lot of pleasure. Producing art has been shown to have a definite therapeutic value in health care. But as for the reverence we are expected to show and genuflections we are required to make to ‘art’, consider the £2.2 million Ms Emin’s My Bed commanded at auction (with several involved in the transaction each acquiring a tidy sum): would those £2.2 million really have found a new home if the ‘significance’ of Ms Emin’s bed had not remorselessly been talked up?
That is where a great deal of the intellectualising comes in and proves to be very useful to those with an interest in bumping up prices. I cannot guess at the motive of whoever bought Ms Emin’s bed (and had £2.2 million to spare) but I suspect her or his reasons were swayed by the kind of write-up exemplified by this short write-up in Britain’s Guardian from October 2017:
‘With My Bed, Tracey Emin turned one of her life’s great low points, a bedbound drinking spree, into a theatrical arrangement worthy of Jacobean tragedy: a violent mess of sex and death. Amid the yellowing sheets there are condoms, a tampon, a pregnancy test, discarded knickers and a lot of vodka bottles. It’s also very kitchen sink. That blue slab of carpet speaks of lonely rented rooms.’
From my point of view - that is my contention that intellectualising has long ago outgrown its britches - here’s a ‘better’ description of Ms Emin’s bed which appeared in the Daily Telegraph in December 2014. The piece is pivoted on the doubt expressed by a Martin Kemp, an emeritus professor of art at Oxford University who ‘questioned whether [My Bed] is “real”. He thinks that the sweat, stains and vomit pressed into the sheets and pillows cannot have survived for nearly two decades as the bed was transported around the globe. These secretions must, therefore, not be real traces of life, but material added later. And what about those creases? Would Emin’s body really have produced patterns of that shape and size? How did they survive all that handling and packing?’
He makes some fair points, to which the writer of the Daily Telegraph’s piece responds that because van Gogh used synthetic paints, some of whom have proved to be unstable over time so that what he intended to be purple now shows as blue and his bright red now shows as pale pink, are the van Gogh paintings we now exhibit displaying the ‘real’ painting?
It is a rhetorical question to which we are surely supposed to reply ‘well, yes, of course’ with the implicit understanding that each iteration of Ms Emin’s bed - its sheets, pillows, used tissues and the rest - might no longer have anything in common with the My Bed originally exhibited but ‘Would any of those changes make My Bed less real? No, because it’s not a piece of furniture, or even a story – it’s a work of art.
As circular arguments go, that one is hard to beat: it’s a work of art because it’s a work of art. How do we know? Because the woman who produced it said so. Actually, I don’t care, I’m liberal me, except that I do object that because My Bed is a work of art, ergo I am obliged to take it seriously. I also think that by now we have not just entered the emperor’s new clothes territory we are deep inside and, worse, completely lost.
I seem, perhaps, to be concentrating on Tracey Emin, but that wasn’t my intention. Ms Emin can do what she likes (and has done: another of her pieces of art was entitled - it was destroyed in a fire - Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995). It is the intellectualisation of what is otherwise banal crap to justify its existence I found hard to swallow.
. . .
I have been taking photographs for the best part of 35 years, and I started in the days before digital photography when we were still using 35mm film. Because of my interest in photography, I like to visit photographic exhibitions whenever I come across one, and they, too, can prove interesting when it comes to intellectualising to the nth degree in order to justify what is otherwise pretty ordinary.
A good picture speaks for itself, so when at exhibitions I come across beside each photograph an A4 sheet of typewritten explanation about ‘what the picture is doing’, why it is significant or variations on that theme, almost always the picture itself is not great. Even if the photographs are not intended in any way to be arty-farty and are meant to be more of a documentary record, they will still manage to speak for themselves. That is not a hard and fast rule, of course (I like to think there are no hard and fast rules except that ‘if it works, it works’) but in general that observation seems to hold true.
To create a worthwhile picture you need - apart from the subject matter - control of the light, that is getting the aperture and shutter speed right and being able to manipulate your light source whatever it is, so I have a great
But enough of that. Next time: Brexit and what to wear on March 29.
Pip, pip.
