Royal Academy 2006
I was rather surprised to discover on attending the preview of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy that my sculpture which I had been informed had been accepted was nowhere to be seen. Eventually I found it, or rather didn’t: what I did find was the empty base, a plain slab of slate, displayed as exhibit 1201. What apparently had happened was that they had become separated and the selectors had judged the empty base a good enough sculpture in its own right to include in the show.
How this happened is not yet clear, the rest of the sculpture is lurking somewhere in the basement, but rather than finding this as reason to blame the organisers, I am very amused, partly because it says something about the state of the visual arts today, (the exhibition has come in for a lot of criticism so far), but mainly because in its new form the sculpture holds beautifully to the idea I wanted to express.
My entry is a large laughing head, which I called “One Day Closer to Paradise”, and I could say that making it was a process of exploring and trying to describe sensations and attitudes that might be experienced in the pursuit of the possibly empty promise of paradise, ranging from delight to ridicule to horror, changing as you walk round it. So to have it suddenly absent, invisible, is entirely appropriate, as if the soul has achieved Ascension leaving behind the base, which was suitably cut from an old slate mortuary slab and has a small bone-shaped mounting device tied to it. In a way I quite like this new version, though I recognise that it is a chance collaboration with the selectors.
There is an interest in the efforts of the Royal Academy to move with the times, as if it’s a piece of visual art itself, and the attention being paid to this error in recognising a sculpture is like the concentration necessary when you make a mistake in a drawing: it’s important to learn from it without prejudice. That an empty plinth makes it to the exhibition is the stuff of cartoons and is also a comment about the apparent vacuous nature of some contemporary art, and it could reflect badly on the organisers, but there are several reasons why it shouldn’t do so. I believe the apparent degradedness is partly intentional. There are obviously many kinds of art: studies, celebrations, questions, and I’m of the opinion that the art world itself is engaged in a cultural performance about the nature of social control, about the propaganda that keeps us in thrall to commercialism. This is not to say all involved are conscious of it.
To be effective, propaganda must be invisible, and consequently the satirical nature of this piece of performance art is sometimes hard to see. Particularly effective in the real world is the reverse-psychology advertising tactic of making us all feel inadequate whereupon we go out to do more shopping and hopefully vote for greater protection. Throughout history the wealthy ruling elite have commissioned powerful art to support their status, to enforce influence with beauty, in effect employing artists to maintain their propaganda, and it was the job of the artist to find new ways to animate it, to permeate it with an always new sense of aliveness, but always aimed towards population management. This is preserved as art long after the effective social influence has passed. The institutions and corporations who exert similar controls today use marketing, public relations and media bias to maintain the invisible influence, employing artists in the same way but also buying art of a useful style done independently.
It’s natural though that artists who remain to a degree independent of this, who after all are trained in observation, respond anarchically with satire, mockery, mudslinging and then obscenity, trying to illuminate and expose the cultural bias through sense channels that we hope are still available to honesty and reason, trying to devise up to date language that can carry today’s thoughts and their own awareness with aliveness. The most effective artists, those whose poetic insults hit the mark and penetrate the carefully managed blind-spots, are given a lot of money to shut them up, their rotten tomatoes are put in museums like hunting lodge trophies, and their work feeds the blank cheque currency of the avant garde. Sometimes art loses its bite, so that work which originates as an ironic victim statement ends up as part of the marketing tactic, and it’s difficult to tell which side the artist is now on, employed or still independent. If you take fashionable degraded-looking art at face value, it’s depressing, but this is to ignore an ironic intention and its over-all potential as satire. And sometimes people imitate style without realising its origin, and it all goes into the mixture. Obviously it’s not so simplistic, but there is social programming to keep us obedient to a system which permits itself wars and environmental destruction, and the arts are a way of trying to make sense of it, therefore are a threat and subject to control. The usual form of attack is by wilful misinterpretation, artificial categorisation, synthetic internationalism, finding longer words than you knew existed, by promoting as great art stuff which to everyone awake is apparently incompetent drivel done with no skill and no relevance to the human condition, and by ignoring or denying that such work can be taken as satirical or seen as advertising, thus creating blind-spots of confusion and a dependency on government intellectuals.
When such attempted cultural realignment passes into education the interrogative focus rests entirely within these blind-spots and previous solutions are disregarded, which is of dubious intelligence, but it’s on this effort to value or to misrepresent clear sighted observations that the struggle rests. For example, Duchamp’s urinal was presented in an art show at the time of WW1, wanting, in his own words, to symbolically “take the piss of the pumped-up industrialists”, but the experts ignore the criticism and several students I know now insist it was only a linguistically original bizarre art object, meanwhile the same industrialists are running the same evil of making profit from death, but at least Duchamp is a hero of today’s younger artists. Another example of invisible influence: last year’s Beck’s Futures prize, which went to an arguably ghastly work originally called “My Depression”, is a fine piece of advertising: such a judgement is enough to drive you to drink - Beck’s of course. Or that Martin Creed was awarded the Turner prize for his empty gallery because otherwise his elegant nihilistic description of the art world pretentiouness would have had to be taken personally. It’s a dance of self importance, in itself a revelation.
These events could be seen as a performance, intended to shock, to distress and awaken, but it can be more than that. The arts can be seen as the digestive organ of the culture, with a full range of functions and products, and an equivalent need for digestive aids: it could be said of some work, thinking of artificial categories, that it could be called Bulimic Expressionism, the aim being to choreograph the response needed to cope with the world, not just the art object….
One of the primary skills the artist learns is to stand back and see, which can be practiced on traditional subjects but the same skill of examining context is needed to understand how the art world is itself creating a performance about our balancing act amongst the pressures of civilisation.
One can sense that we have a natural collective intelligence which works to maintain the balance of the world, and one way this works is through culture, defining culture as the created quality of the place where we live, (not just party time for the arty - such mis-definition is one of the ways bias is maintained). Within the culture one can reveal the world through the stage, creating an equivalent which is acted out in parallel to the real world, though the boundaries blur. We live in a privileged age where we can focus on questions like this, and while many of us would prefer a more enjoyable and intelligent performance and a better education in the traditional device of satire, one can see that what goes on in the art world is a theatrical battle ground, where actors play the part of establishment intelligentsia infiltrating experts into society, recruiting the unwary to work for the rulers, and here artists play-act greater and greater incompetence or try to script their own solutions, pretending to be victims or celebrities, selling tripe through hype, matching real world pretentiousness and hypocrisy with fakes, attempting as with any art form to reveal truth by telling lies. The quality of the aesthetic is there to hold our hand while we face the unpalatable, to make it safe to experience what we, both audience and the actors, have allowed ourselves to become. And as with any public art form there are fashions of style, overacting, rendering the cultural dynamics in black and white or through metaphor. Art moves on not just because artists find new possibilities but because of the developing abilities of the audience to read and appreciate the artists creation. It’s often said that an artist is ahead of his time, naturally, because art is about caretaking the culture, and often work done for one reason at some later time becomes meaningful in a different way, maybe being critical of the limited or dangerous mentality of the audience who originally loved it. Art does more than reflect society. It’s continually developing drama, responding intelligently to evolving means of control, and the challenge is to devise solutions, suggestions of civilised behaviour which are worthy of preserving in the museums of art, as collections of beautiful propaganda and brilliant cultural activism, just as we value church art, the expensive propaganda of the middle ages, and present it as an inheritance of wonder for our children. It is the emperor’s new clothes, but it is intended as entertainment, a stage act, hoping to get under our skin for that vital millisecond and make us think.
The display in the Summer Exhibition of a number of our smaller sculptures is strange, all lined up on shelves, which ignores the all round quality and sense of presence that enables a sculpture to choreograph and inform our motion, an aspect of western sculpture which took centuries years to understand. Now we live in a world where the TV world moves round our sofas, so by denying the 3D aspect of sculpture the organisers have described a lost importance in our lives, but done it by being famous artists themselves and demonstrating this as unawareness. This is cultural stagecraft.
So I’m delighted to have made an empty plinth that isn’t empty, where the exhibit itself is merely invisible.