Quandry

Looking back at the few entries for 2009, I realise what a strange and unproductive year it has been! I have managed to work on a small scale only, creating terracotta figurines like the one illustrated - many with birds, as the great consolation in this dismal year has been the number of birds coming to feeders hung from the ancient apple tree in my garden. The sparrows come in a great flock, about thirty at least sometimes. They are so busy getting on with the task of feeding and chirp away amongst themselves - it uplifts the spirits and sustains the soul! It is a small but significant daily event, and I have been happy to pay homage to such simple pleasures offered by the natural world.


Besides which, small size can still have breadth of scale and expression, perhaps sometimes more successfully achieved because the material itself is so directly manipulated.

I have participated in quite a lot of shows over the year so far, though I don't think exhibiting at the moment really justifies the great deal of precious time and energy involved. It isn't just a matter of poor sales, though I was quite delighted to hear the most straightfoward expression regarding the value of art the other day - if it doesn't sell, it's rubbish! That person definitely had no doubts about the meaning of art!

The problem with the commodification of art is that it is so often not the artefact in itself which is appreciated but what it achieves in terms of signifiers - fame, status, prestige, life-style and so on. Preferably, as commodity, the art object should communicate its signifiers pretty spontaneously to the potential customer without distracting attention towards any individual qualities it may or may not possess of itself. In other words it needs to be recognisable as a brand. The sculptor, Eric Peskitt, considered that an artefact, whatever the input of the artist, only became art once it engaged and sustained the contemplative gaze of the viewer who then valued it as an art object. But has the commodifying market replaced the viewer as collaborator and patron?

Artists who offer the public opportunity to take part in the action, as with Gormley's 4th Plinth project, or Balka's Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern - where you can be filmed experiencing the 'terror of darkness' - are creating mass participatory events which do engage viewers on a scale that ticks all the boxes for a democratic provision of cultural experience, but to my way of thinking, these events are closer to theatre than to the traditional practices of painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture which are defined by the manipulation of tangible material to create form. The problem is that the viewer's engagement with the products of such activity is not productive in terms of the tick box culture of cultural administration.

In the 1960s, the art establishment hype was that 'art is dead', which I dismissed then as a fantastical iconoclastic dogma of modernism - something along the lines of radical Utopianisms such as 'the end of history'. Painting, sculpting, drawing - these are, I thought, natural to the range of expression as music, writing, theatre, dance. All art forms articulate by means of a unique language of their own, and all thereby make their own valid contribution to a vibrant society. And indeed 'Art' has continued to thrive, with ever-increasing state and corporate patronage, museums, galleries, art fairs and even university departments dedicated to its study!
On the other hand, the place in society is not really so great for the traditional visual art practices. The general critical attitude seems to be that these are only valid when they result in products which 'challenge boundaries'. A good artist is always challenging boundaries but not in terms of the neat contextual formulas that the academics like to read into art practice.

And what of the future? Given that paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures are costly to produce in terms of materials and effort, with years of experience required to develop and hone language and content; given that significant art objects demand to be viewed and contemplated over time in a one to one silent exchange that cuts against the veneer of immediacy characteristic of contemporary times; given that traditional art forms are actual in substance, somehow too humanly flawed in that tangible but inwardly received sense, not glossy and distanced like photography and screen - then it is probably true that the 1960's hype was accurate after all, not because of a lack of makers but because society no longer has enough need for the kind of creative engagement traditional arts require of the viewer. All the more reason to make very small sculptures that require minimum storage space!