On the outside looking in

I’m reading ‘Hold it against me’ by Jennifer Doyle about difficulty and emotion in art.  It’s waking something up in me, have only just begun it so maybe I will write more on this later.  It’s making me feel there’s a purpose I can latch onto here.  I know that seems ridiculous – as if there isn’t a purpose when of course there are a million kinds of purpose to the art I might want to make but right now my brain is a bit clouded, overcast.  Too many open tabs.

The interim show was a wonderful experience.  I still feel strangely unattached to what I made although I feel I did resolve it successfully and the piece got a lot of positive responses.  I want to understand why I feel so flat about it.  But also, as art critic Jerry Saltz says – your art is a flatworm (earthworm in UK) – cut it in half and from it grows another piece.  I love this idea.  From the piece I made I am drawn to the the feeling of the figures – and perhaps I should commit to exploring the figure more – people / character is something I’ve studied hard as an actor / theatre maker.  Story.  The relationship with the audience.  I also enjoyed the spatial dynamics, the setting of the multiple chairs.  The box.  I like the glaze.  But why this material?  Why clay?

I am feeling today at odds with the ceramics world. I’m mentoring for Arts Emergency – and it feels so good to be doing this – I am sick of and angry about how privilege in the arts stores up opportunity for itself and it’s friends and how that depletes the art world for everyone. The theatre world witters on about this while doing nothing in general but the ceramics scene seems entirely unaware about the need to address inequality at all – in this most resource-hungry of practices.  I am trying to find a way to help raise maybe $30k for my mentee who has got into the prestigious acting school Julliard in NYC.  It’s a gargantuan task.  Ironically at the same time I’m not sure if I can pay my rent.  

I needed a break after the intensity of the first assessments and the interim show.  Brain depleted. RSD. The residency week was glorious.  The cohort continue to inspire and delight me – we are such a cast of characters.  Each one of us so different from the next, and the sense of a community of support and practice is real – I feel so blessed.  It kind of feels like a bit of a dream, to spend a week with these brilliant people.  The printmaking workshop was a highlight and I’m galvanised to make more 2D work and maybe look more at printmaking on clay.  I also saw some really brilliant art shows and discovered some new galleries.  On the subject again of money I had a fascinating conversation with Betty on the bus to Peckham about art that fetishises poverty – or ‘poverty porn’ as we call it when it shows up in playwrighting.  

An artist who could never make poverty porn, although she will no doubt have been accused of it, is Tracey Emin.  Her Tate show tore me apart.  She speaks about her reality, she is an open wound.  Surprising number of men seem to think she should shut up and stop going on about rape and trauma.  

She is an artist and she works with the material she has – her life.  Do I, could I, do that? (I remember actually after Nick Cave, yes he’s a man yes, after Nick Cave wrote a beautiful song about the recent death of his son and some girl I know from my hometown said on social media that it was distasteful and I…I have no words to say about that person.  The guy is a f-ing artist)

I like that Doyle differentiates between two kinds of difficult.  The intellectually challenging ‘difficult’ art turns away from the spectator who feels inadequate, not ‘fully initiated’ into the ‘sociology of contemporary art.’  The only feeling for the spectator I guess is – they are on the outside looking in.  I can relate to that.  And then – and this may relate to my research – she talks of difficult art where the spectator is inextricably complicit in a kind of witnessing that is very personal.

‘This is where ideology does it’s most devastating work…This is where we come to know the contours of our selves, our bodies, our sense of soul’

I’m feeling kind of worked up right now as you can probably hear.  I feel like something is coming and not coming.  I’m blocked.  I wrote to Jonathan to say I was confused about the feedback on Unit One, it was clearly full of praise but nothing solid I could build on, I wanted more specificity.

I’m really looking forward to the class starting up again after this three week break, to seeing everyone, to find out what’s next.  

My writing mentor Chris Thorpe once gave me the most useful feedback about a first draft I was making –

‘What’s the most difficult thing that this is not saying?’