We met with David Gilbert, Amanda Ravetz and Mark Smith to discuss how artists outside the galleries work is validated, it builds on some research that Axis web have commissioned around this subject with MIRIAD . It was a broad discussion and much of it has been lost in my mind over the weekend. Early on in the debate I talked about art as either a reductive process or an additive process - I was referring to sculpture and how you can stick stuff on like modelling in clay or chip stuff away to reveal something inside like in carving wood or stone or you can do a bit of both. We talked for two hours so I think a reductive process is needed here. We can call it distilling or refining or cutting out the shit. To do this properly though will take more time and space and discussion as it was a lively discussion that jumped around a lot. The discussion finished on a metaphor about chance and the potentials of expanding the idea of the good and bad in art and artists. I struggled with it to be honest but that is a good thing. The metaphor goes like this it reminds me of a story from Ernst Blocks Traces A book that explains the world through a series of tales that like life are not as straightforward as they first appear.
"There is a dripping tap in the house and you need to call a plumber. The first potential plumber will come and fix the tap and the repair will last for years, the plumber is friendly and efficient. The second plumber is equally pleasant and effective he can fix the tap at the same cost but the tap will start to leak again after 2 weeks. The second plumber could be perceived as being poor at his job yet the unconsidered potential of a leaking tap is full of rich possibilities."
I got a bit frustrated here as a man that plumbs and was also brought up to be logical by an engineer dad. I firstly thought the tap was leaking anyway so fixing it for two weeks only removed the potential benefit of a leaking tap for two weeks and it cost money and lets be fair the plumber was just crap and any potential benefit from his crapness was just an accident- I asked for an example.
although creative I'm not sure how convinced I was by the worst case scenario constructed in defence of the shoddy plumber. "There could be an earthquake that destroys the house pins you to the floor with your hands behind your back and by chance your mouth falls open just next to the dripping tap - there was also something about a cat that was both alive and dead but I can't quite remember what that was about.
So the story I suppose suggests that we don't really know what good or bad art is because we can't know the future, we can't know the historical context of a work or an artist in advance - we don't know who the best artist is or who the best plumber is until the world of consequences unfolds in front of our feet.
The analogy or trace came from a discussion of the idea of quality, we were all trying to reflect on the day through art- we wanted to make art as important as the word, spoken or written. It was an experiment or as people who want to be cleverer than they are say part of a heuristic drawing on specific experiences and skills - good or bad. I said I was taking photographs and you wouldn't want a bad photographer to take photographs- it's just like getting a bad plumber there is no point in doing things badly. Then I said - I am on manual - I have dug out my 50mm lens as it stops down to 1.4 so I will have a very narrow depth of field, I am taking all the photographs from where I am sitting. I had come up with a list of things that I thought would make me more knowing in trying to do something different - the accidents or chance were set up by approaching something differently - it was important to feel like I was been considered even if it made little difference to what was produced. So I learned that I am stuck in my own system of self validation, my own little dogma's that I'm happy to break.
When I was at art college a friend asked me to help her make a tap form a single drip every 40 seconds or so and for this to maintain itself for a week - the water was hard and the dripping tap would stop after about 3 hours - in the end I had to bypass the tap and use a concealed micro feed with a medical drugs dispenser to simulate the dripping tap - a plumber that can fix a tap for only two weeks may be in charge of a very specific skills set.
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