Space between the viewer and the artist (from a-n)

 

It’s similar to the PhD desire, where I keep going back and forth between wanting to pursue it and then becoming repulsed by it. I’ve stopped having social media (again, hopefully permanently this time). This is because it hasn’t worked for me – it kept making me become someone I don’t want to be. I’m trying really hard to become the artist I want to be. I’m going to refrain from putting new artworks on my website too so I have that personal boundary as an artist.

I look up to figures such as Emily Dickinson and Agnes Martin. I think they saw right through the pretence. I don’t know how to think of Banksy. I like his work, but the fame and entourage ruined the work – sometimes having too much mimetic desire creates an ick for me. I’m not writing from the place of snobbery, but from feeling a visceral ick. I can’t help how I feel.

 

We celebrate the wrong thing

Anyway, I’m deliberately creating space between myself, the work and the world, so I can make artwork with that peace. I think deep down, I want to be in the mindset of being in my own little world – writing in my diary at 14, before I became enthralled by social media. There is another thing I want to address. We naturally emulate people we like (it’s just human nature to), and with the internet becoming really busy, all the styles are becoming homogenised into a particular style. A century later, all the artists today are going to blur into one, which would say something about the lack of authorship, but it might be uninteresting to have one visual narrative. One walks into a museum about the 21st century, and it’s about a narrative, and artists in the world at the time was thinking about it the same way. Nothing stood out visually. (I don’t know why I’m writing to argue this, because it’s a swinging pendulum. How did we go from ‘authorship is a lie’ to ‘no authorship is awful’?)

Giving my ideas away for free was not helping me get opportunities as well. But perhaps that’s a cop out explanation, because when I get opportunities, I feel an ick, and my body just doesn’t want to go with that opportunity, and then I will self-sabotage so I don’t get it.

A few years ago, one of my paintings got shortlisted for RA, and I handed them my painting without brackets to hang it, so it subsequently got rejected. It’s as if there is a software within my brain, where I won’t allow myself to go further than a certain point in my art career. It’s the same with the PhD – I can’t get past a certain point of my research proposal. I think deep down, I know that external success is not the way. It used to have the meaning of something internal, but it’s been hollowed out through the years.

 

I feel like I’m doing the right thing for me (in being a recluse to limit spending unnecessary money – cost of pints are going up), but I look like I’ve lost the plot to everyone else.