Retail therapy
In the last edition I introduced my shopping basket meme in the form of some A4 painted drawings. Since then I have made a few clay maquettes (shown below right) and started a larger version made with extruded square section tubes (shown below left). So the subject has been on my mind.
I am wondering what I find so compelling about this theme. The supermarket shopping basket feels like an object that highlights our general obsession with buying things. By focussing on this object as a kind of consumerist fetish I think I am exaggerating its ubiquity to bring attention to bear on how central the shopping mentality is to our culture.
Here is an object we all use because – it’s an integral part of our system of exchanging goods and services for money. I wonder what a visitor from space might make of this? Might they think a shopping basket is part of our religion, part of a fundamental belief system that transforms abstract money into concrete goods and services that we all need. Is this an alchemical device that converts money into physical objects like our lungs turn oxygen into energy perhaps?
Powered by love
I think I detect in myself a temptation to be anti-consumerist, I think that was my assumed position when I started – that I would be on the side of morality and purity unsullied by money. I think that’s why I have started to recall the youth culture I grew up with. The hippies were the predominant youth culture of the time (The ninteen seventies) they/we believed we were creating an alternative society, one that was much better in every way than what existed at the time. It was going to be better in every detail, less corrupt, less compromised, free of war, free of conflict because it was going to be powered by love and peace. It was full of idealism or – I wonder now – if it encouraged simplistic thinking unencumbered by anxiety or experience. The predominant split in western society was between young and old which is quite different to the complex cultural-political fractures happening now.
The reason I mention the alternative culture is that I think we thought we were going to make an alternative to capitalism including an alternative to the role of consumers. That idealism generated a lot of (mainly cultural) changes in terms of alternative approaches to medicine, to food ( whole foods, organic foods, vegan and vegetarian foods). But the core ways of living have not changed, capitalism continues to thrive and as for consumerism – Now I consider it I find I am completely immersed in consumerism myself. I may choose healthy foods and try not to over-consume and do as much re-cycling as is possible (pathetically little i.m.o.) but in the end we are all involved, we all collude in consumerism because that is what exists, that is the air we breath.
50 ways to leave your litter
We are all involved in the consumer cycle of buying, using, moving onto the next version and dumping what’s obsolete. It seems impossible to really set yourself aside from immersion in it and continue to exist in any physically comfortable way, or in a morally comfortable way either, the terrible effects our collective waste is having on the planet are painful to witness and may well seem unforgivable to future generations. So I don’t feel like I am in any way above this looking down on it but I do feel a need to look at it. It’s more like I am making a running commentary rather than writing a critique. I am too close to it and actually living in it – much like a fish lives in water – to have any real perspective on whether I can accept or reject it. If you asked me back in the seventies where I stood I could have said with some certainty that I rejected consumerism wholeheartedly, now I realise that choice is not even possible.
Feature artwork: Conference of the Curves
This artwork came about after I acquired some hollow dies for my extruder gun. That means I can now make hollow clay tubes of various shapes and sizes, square ones, round cylinders, oval cylinders and hexagonal section tubes too. One day I was playing with a multi-colour pencil given to my be a friend who loves to draw. I was testing the pencil to see what it’s like to draw with the side of the lead rather than the point and I made a set of drawings of sculptures which didn’t really work, the three dimensional thinking couldn’t quite be done on the page. Then I did a very stylised simple drawing that was almost diagrammatic or perhaps just graphic, basically it was a circle with a set of curves inside it. I knew that was a strong idea and that I could build on it in three dimensions if I kept a bold outer circle with a set of straight and curved tubes meeting each other at various points in the middle. Basically it’s something like a steering wheel shape but free of that kind of functionalism.
When I have an idea that I think is strong I have to go on to make it in clay to see if it works. In this case as so often I only know part of the structure when I start and I have to work out the rest as I make the thing. It’s very much a case of the mind and body working together to find the solution to whatever task I have set myself. This is why I could never really be a very conceptual artist, I really do need to work with my hands and my brain at the same time.
Incidentally when I put a fifteen second video online after attaching the extruder to the wall I got six thousands hits out of nowhere. Normally I get about a tenth of that number and most of my posts are much longer and more engaging. It’s a very simple post, very little actually happens except for a zoom into the quick-release brackets that hold the extruder gun on the wall. When I looks at the Instagram insights, I notice 95% of the hits were men, my guess is that the object looks like an engine with cylinders in a line so people thought they were going to see something about hot-rods maybe? Social Media really is an arcane art and very hard to fathom.
Other news
I have been thinking about other things too. I am working with John Allsopp (www.artmarketing blog address) and using AI to work out how best to present my work to the world which has been very interesting. I have re-written my artists statement page based on the AI suggestions. It’s shocking to discover how differently AI writes compared to the way I do. In my opinion it’s actually better but then it has a bigger and more specialised brain.
I still have plenty to do on the shed improvements including painting the pealing plywood on the west side and repairing the water damaged floor behind the new doors. Of course I can’t just switch into full time DIY I also have to continue making and Makers Headroom has helped me enourmously in maintaining the thread of creative work while all this building repair work goes on.
NOTES
* A Glimmerist – one who perceives a barely perceptible glimmer of hope in an otherwise hopeless situation.
** Incidentally, the hand-held extruder movie is currently in production and should be out as soon as I have made some progress with weatherproofing the shed.