As opposed as I am to the associations of elitism that surround fine art, particularly those pieces that are designed for the ‘white cube’ of a standard gallery space, producing a piece for my degree show was proving to be quite a headache. Although I didn’t want to create a piece that could only read as an art work, by putting work into any of the gallery-like spaces I was being offered was limiting the associations that my piece could carry to just one: fine art.
The solution lay in creating something that resisted the gallery setting and managed to latch onto associations outside of fine art. The result was a set of photocopied and hand-printed documents which were distributed around the university, and myself sat at a desk in my exhibition space. The documents set up some simple starter arguments that asked people to examine the role of art today, and them come up to have a chat with me at my desk. I used Francis Alÿs and Jeremy Deller on one side (representing art with social function) and Martin Creed on the other (representing art without function outside aesthetics and artistic conceptual understanding). The main bulk of the text was photocopied, but the title, image and an invitation to have a discussion with myself at my desk was hand-printed.
The discussions that arose from the piece were fascinating. My set-up of just me, a desk and some chairs in my white exhibition space was much different from the rest of the show, and this clearly threw some people. But generally people were interested to see what I was up to, I tried my best to be friendly and invite people to sit down and have a chat. It definitely wasn’t just a performance artwork but a survey as well, and the document confirmed this separate association. I talked with people about many different aspects of modern art and from the conversations I had over the week of the show, I pulled out some common themes.
Not everyone will agree with this, but common recurrences in opinion suggested 3 refrains:
- Aesthetics. Art should hold onto the tradition of creating something that has visual interest, whether that is pure aesthetics or anti-aesthetic.
- Meaning. Art should examine or illustrate subject matter that is important and meaningful. This could be subjects that are difficult to tackle in other mediums (film, music, etc) or topics that are involved in current issues.
- Documentation. An interesting point raised was that every artwork ever created is simply an echo/resistance of the time it was created in. The further in the past an artwork was made, the more of a historical document it is. At a certain age, the weight of history associated with an artwork can outweigh the art itself.
As I was going to be exhibiting in another exhibition 3 weeks later, I decided to create a piece that was dictated by these constraints. Art for the people by the people? Or as my document suggested, could I simply be pampering to mass tastes?
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