Alex Murdoch, Artist

Tag: feedback

  • Perverse conditions

    Had a long chat with Jonathan about the feedback on the Assessment and what is most helpful for me right now.  Unpacking what I mean by something more critical, and tangible to build on.  Especially in regards to research.  Quite rightly he asked what would I tell myself in regards to feedback and this opened up a bigger thought about why I’m doing the MA.  I see my imposter syndrome – in fact I bore myself with the amount of space that takes up in my blog.   And I do feel I’m in the right place in terms of my approach to the journey – and take the encouragement to ‘do more of the same’.  But I guess although the aim is independence in one’s practice I’m here for the critical engagement, and ultimately of course if I’m making art it’s not just for me.  Like a hobby or an indulgence or something that exists just for myself.  It is a public thing.

    I want to find out how my work operates in relationship to the world.  To outside myself.  In dialogue with others.  I want to affect people.  

    So unpacking that really helps clarify things for me.  I am engaging with my own conversation with myself.  But I’m here for the rigorousness of criticality and the outside world.  And that doesn’t have to be in the art school tradition of aggressive critiques (we have enough artists who have been trained to talk impressively about their work in written explanation and I’m not convinced there’s much beyond defensiveness sometimes).  I’m glad that this MA puts kindness at the forefront of the journey.  But I’m here to go on a journey of discovery, and that means not just circling around myself, but to make use of the expertise and knowledge of Central Saint Martins. 

    So we unpacked my aims on the Study Statement – which starts with ‘break open my practice’.  Which sounds dramatic to Jonathan, what do I mean?  Actually that is exactly what I mean, I kind of feel that something is too contained, to subject to the demands of the medium and what I expect I have to do with it, the constraints of the firing schedule (always one step forward two steps back – now the firings are apparently fixed dates – but…every 6 weeks as opposed to the monthly on the contract), I feel like I want to put a bomb under my practice in order to see what remains.  

    I want to own it.  Jonathan – own what exactly?

    Well the transition from ideas to making is really clunky.  Sketches to making feels really literal. 

    I talk about the journey from making this thing from ideas to what I presented.  Now as I write this I’m looking in my sketchbook at drawings of Bruegel’s Mad Meg and the Fall of the Rebel Angels.  None of which made it beyond the cutting room floor.  Although actually…the idea of falling did.  So maybe exploring any visual hunch is good.  Blind alleys are maybe more interesting than just sticking to the path.  

    We talked about the qualities of other people’s work that inspires me most – I keep returning to Yuki Nakamura’s ‘Fragile like life’ porcelain footballs.  More than anything I loved with that the concept of play and joy and of breath and life (deflated football) in this sad hospital garden.  And the something so generous about the ‘here and gone’ nature of the installation that speaks to me of the weirdness of time spent in the bubble of caring and hospital visits.  

    I also speak about my friend Tim Crouch’s play An Oak Tree.  I’m going to talk about that in the next blog post (which I was halfway through writing when this Jonathan conversation came in) 

    Tim is an interesting example for me.  An actor turned playwright doesn’t quite sum it up.  Aside from Caryl Churchill he’s probable the most ground-breaking playwright in the UK.   He’s kind of moved playwrighting towards conceptual art.  But what I want to say at this point is – there is this care and attention, simply to Nakamura’s piece, of how the work really works for an audience. Beyond basic curatorial choices, drilling deeper into how and why the audience meets the work in the way that it does.  

    It’s that specificity I am after.  

    That maybe what ‘owning it’ would look like.  I understand audience (Gaulier taught me that, improv taught me that, making site specific theatre on beaches and in village halls and working mens clubs, my indie theatre company was all about how to mess with the live experience).  Staging the chairs and the figures and the plinth and being very deliberate about how they were presented in the space was a positive thing.  

    So the space between my experience and what I want to do with my work is at the pull between intention and spontaneity.  

    When it’s out the in the world I can’t control the experience in the way I can with live performance.  Although our long form improv shows were in the the chaos of the unknown we did work in great detail on how we controlled that one sentence set-up at the start for the audience – the only scripted line – in order to allow the audience to put aside their expectations, nervousness and cynicism about whether it’s even improvised at all – so that they could get on with experiencing the thing we wanted them to experience. 

    I think I’m often most creative when I’m creating perverse conditions for my work.  

    And perhaps that’s what I want to break open.  

    Feeling.  Relationship. What relates.  What is affective?

    This is not about controlling meaning.  This is not about starting with the end in mind.  This is definitely not about a textual explanation on a card on the wall.  This is about interrogating the conditions in which the audience meets the work whilst – and this is the paradoxical bit perhaps – whilst giving them space to do whatever they want with it.  

    So to go back to improv – we are letting go of all control over the structure and meaning and in fact also the quality perhaps of the story we tell – in favour of allowing the wild ride of spontaneity.  And we’re allowing them to believe in something that we’re told is impossible – because conventional practice would have us believe it takes one genius man in a room to write a play.   Jonathan reminded me of this quote from Keith Johnstone’s seminal ‘Impro’


    “People try to use what they know. They want to be ‘right.’ But I prefer to see people who don’t know what they’re doing and take strange paths.”

    I worked though some big things in this generous conversation with Jonathan in how my audience meet the work.  Or maybe the question is what is it about the work that allows my practice to meet the audience.

    That’s maybe why I asked the question ‘what’s the most exciting thing that is growing’.  Because that’s what I need to know, and that’s not ‘what’s most exciting’ to me.  That’s an outward seeking question, in relation with my work and the world. 

  • 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?’