#250: Nothing left Toulouse
Should art always begin a discussion, without the need to offer a conclusion?
Yesterday’s workshop by my mate Nina at her local Poetry Society Stanza group in Trowbridge was absolutely superb. I’m hoping to persuade her to do it online at some point in the future, so impressive was it in terms of sparking my own creativity. As part of the process, someone in the group read a poem they’d written about Vincent Van Gogh, and I found myself transported back to the day in New York I saw Starry Night for the first time.
Art’s true power is the opportunity it grants you to challenge yourself: why is it that a painting can reduce this brain to tears whilst laser-cut metal silhouettes of ordinary people create a sense of massive disquiet within me? I can do the mental gymnastics for both of these reactions quite easily: the conclusions are spokes on the same wheel of my own life and circumstances.
The best art must be that which allows you to spin that wheel without restriction.
Art which is actually history’s remains, that which has been placed in museums and often stolen from its point of origin without reparation, is the most disquieting of all. Only very recently did the significance of this register to me, that museums in Western countries are full of things they never have the right to even exhibit. There’s a poem about this in a work currently in submission.
In these situations, the conclusion needs to be talked about more than has ever been the case before: however, in the always on, ultra-opinionated world we find ourselves exposed to via social media, these things rarely are. It should never be acceptable that art can be used in this way, and I find myself increasingly frustrated that these situations are not being more robustly challenged.
The best art has freedom and peace as key constituents of its makeup.
The space in which I am currently staying is a magical example of art and history combined: this mechanism (on my bedsit wall, opposite me as I now type) would have been used to haul beer bottles up and down this building (known locally as The Bottlery). Is this even art, though? Surely it counts either as machinery or an antique… and then it’s about what you consider artefacts of the past to be.
I was told yesterday that in the 1960’s these terraced houses were being demolished to make way for ‘new’ housing before it became apparent to the local council that by doing so they were destroying a vital section of the town’s undoubted history. Human beings are notoriously bad at not thinking through their decisions when it comes to art, history, or indeed many other things.
The best art is a reminder of failings and never only a celebration of creation.
I love that I’ll end this post without offering any real answers, because the more emotive a subject becomes, the more impossible it is to precisely define an outcome. Another one of the many issues with human beings is their need to have answers to questions, normally only one so that it isn’t confusing or ambiguous… except, as an artist, this is what my existence now depends on.
More and more I am expected to provide my own narrative clarity in work, to clearly signpost what things are ‘about’ and what my work ‘means’ when, on any given day, I don’t have the first fucking clue myself. I write to keep myself sane, to be grounded, and to explore the workings of my own mind. Some people find this clever, others irritating.
I think that’s as good a definition as any of art going forward.
I don’t like how other human beings use art to celebrate their own superiority, how it is surreptitiously a promoter of the very worst of our faults under the auspice of ‘discussion’. It should always be the way in which our own joy is celebrated, and our own personal outlook reflected. Yesterday was very much art as that for me, and it has cemented my desire to ensure that keeps happening.
Yesterday was also an important lesson in being objective in the face of difficulty, and accepting my own failings so that we can work on becoming a more realistic lens to the world. Of course, my reality is subjective to begin with: will it ever be possible for me to start the discussions I want and make people challenge their already preconceived conclusions?
The only way to find out is to keep on creating using my definitions.
Now yer talkin’ , that’s superb. X