This is the woodcock with an injury that I found in the back yard. I had to kill is to put it out of it's misery. My grandad used to say "I had to kill it to save it's life." it was one of those things which made no sense but somehow makes complete sense when the only just action is to kill something. I don't normally mind killing small animals that much. The times I've had to do it really stick in my mind. Kim once stood on a bat in a church and we heard it crunch I took it outside and bashed it with a book of common prayer it was an act laced with symbolic meaning but in the end a very necessary thing to do for a fellow mammal.
I am thinking a lot this week about the art world again and wondering if we need to kill it to save it's life. I don't mean kill the art world, I mean kill the bit of the art world in us which holds us back. Perhaps we could bash it to death with Herbert Reads from "Giotto to Cezanne". It feels a bit like the beautiful woodcock with it's startled eyes and long beak, to strange and unworldly to dispatch with a stick.
So when I think about what I do I wonder if it is only art in name. When I went to test out the projector on Wakefield Cathedral David Gilbert introduced me to an artist he is working with and said "Steve's also an artist." I had my hi vis jacket on and was filling a generator with petrol. She asked me what I did and I was my usual unreconstructed "Well a bit of this a bit of that - some stuff about Blockian notions of concrete Utopia's and wisdom with Rotherham youth services and a bunch of fishing coaches- and then I'm doing a big project about John Ruskin in a council estate in sheffield" She looked a bit confused. This is my practice now and I'm an artist and the art world or even what I would think of as considered aesthetics are like the dieing woodcock.
Then I secretly projected a number of pictures of birds onto the cathedral and was slightly disappointed as there were loads of sodium lights on -the bluebird looks best but it probably isn't good enough to go in our birdland is everywhere set unless we kill it to save it's life.
At the moment, Steve, I'd like to 'kill' the jargonistic and bureaucratic bit of the art (and humanities) world that holds us back - demanding a 'Case for Support' and a 'Justification of Resources' for the sake of getting a couple of thousand pounds that would enable me to examine the post-war council estate as a place with a culture and heritage of its own. Or am I feeling like this just because we've put the clocks back ready for a slow descent into winter?
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