Negative Space

I’m in a tizzy, trying to pull together things for a submission. The thing it’s made me realize is that I’ve not really been working on my art. My art’s kind of been relegated to the back of the bookshelf, mouldering away (it’s pretty much got a fungi colony now, metaphorically speaking)

My current artistic pre-occupation is the politics of the image – how images circulate and so on. But while I’ve hammered out observations and theories in my mind, I haven’t actually been working with images. (That’s the problem with me – I tend to live in a universe of theoretical possibility). When I do work with them I feel as though it’s not enough – someone, somewhere has certainly done something like that before. Then there’s the anxiety of other things, like trying to balance a contemporary aesthetic without looking like utter bullshit, and the more uncontrollable one – worrying if the message carries. The late conceptual photographer Sarah Charlesworth conveys the basic idea incisively in her essay ‘A Declaration of Dependence’, stating, ‘the value and function of our work may be defined by the social and economic context in which we operate’. What if one has misread the signs? What if no-one else sees the signs I am seeing?

If anything I realize I can be rather conservative, prizing aesthetic over content, something harmonious over something a little bit out there. (I don’t know when or how I got this way – it’s disturbing). It’s the risky, that sends an immediate signal that THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM and SOMETHING HAS BEEN STIRRED and therefore requires a new way of looking. That’s how one creates an individual viewpoint versus simply replaying the signs. But sometimes I think, maybe the work – in its conservative form – could be saying more than I realize. That train of thought however strikes me as kind of sloppy; it depends on others to do the heavy lifting, when it is my job as artist to corral the signs for them, meet them that bit halfway.

Instant gratification occurs in playing the game, giving what is in demand within the current state of play; it’s often the work of those who don’t play by the rules who end up with a more enduring impact, despite having an initially harsh or skeptical initial reception.

In a bid to do THAT, I’m trying to re-work some old photographs into a form that carries my desired message. It’s hard, when thinking conceptually, not to get mentally carried away. By that I mean I come up with some high concept explanation which ends up limiting the work, somehow. God, sometimes I wish I could just turn off my brain. Does any of this happen to you, hypothetical-creative-person-reader? Leave a word or something so I don’t feel so alone in the world (pathetic!).