I have just taken this photograph of my latest painting. This picture seems to be almost impossible to finish, every time I look at it I find myself hypnotized, its almost as if the picture has some kind of intelligence of its own and all I need do is surrender to the messages it’s sending me. It is, after all, my painting, a painting for dreaming over.
This painting is the product of countless hours of labour and numerous compositional strategies have been employed so that what you see now is a carefully considered distillation of an artificial reality. Hold on. I think I’m talking bollocks which reminds me of an interesting and amusing article I read recently called “Art Bollocks“, written by Brian Ashbee it first appeared in Art Review in 1999. Brian succinctly describes the realities of the contemporary art world and the all-pervading influence of Post-Modernism. Check it out, it’s not over-long and the section on how to talk ‘art bollocks’ is absolutely hilarious – art students take note, this is the kind of guff the tutors like to hear.
Post-Modernist ideas about art emerged out of the avant-garde in the 1960′s but what is Post-Modernism and where is it going? Back in 1917 Marcel Duchamp opened Pandora’s box when he signed a urinal R.Mutt and named it ‘Fountain’. This toilet and other mundane objects such as a bicycle wheel or a shovel became works of art because Duchamp said they were. He called them ‘Readymades’. Duchamp had a wicked sense of humour and one can’t help admiring his attempts to send-up the art world of his day. Since then the idea that an artist deals with reality itself has taken root and given birth to a new species of artist. Previously artists had painted, drawn and modelled objects of various kinds that were inspired by the external world transmuted through the artist’s consciousness in order to create a work of art. But now we have this new idea, an artist deals with and manipulates reality itself, as if he were a god. This means that there is no longer any way to define just what is and what isn’t a work of art. The old adage ‘a picture paints a thousand words’ has lost its relevance. Post-Modernist art needs to be written about and talked about otherwise it can’t be understood.
I wonder how a Post-Modernist artist would have treated the subject I have chosen for my painting?
Now I’ve got nothing against people doing eccentric things, in fact I’m all for it. However I do feel inclined to rail against the clique of artists that emerged in the 1990′s thanks to the patronage of Charles Saatchi. A bemused public has been told that an unmade bed or a cow set in formaldehyde constitute deep insights into the times in which we live. Do they believe it? No, like me the general public prefers figurative art. The truth is most people like looking at pictures and exhibitions of even minor artists from the past are always packed out. As I said I’m all in favour of eccentricity and if some individuals derive pleasure from Post-Modernist art then who cares? Let’s live and let live. But. Yes there’s always one of those; the trouble is a coterie of lightweight artists (whose work is vapid and tedious in the extreme) have managed to collar most of the available funding. The current ‘Poplife’ exhibition is a good example of this. If Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Tracey Emin, Gavin Turk and the others are really among the most talented artists residing in the world today then later on this afternoon I’ll be having tea with a dormouse and a mad hatter.
Why can’t we have a serious exhibition, put on at public expense, of some of the best figurative art of the last twenty years?