Alex Murdoch, Artist

Tag: influences

  • Talking to my Dad about making art

    Session with Rebecca Fortnum, artist and researcher, about ‘correspondence’.  Rethinking how we do research as artists.  Collecting data and other traditional methods may not work – and she raised the question who is the best judge of the work.  Is the audience?  Not always.  The critics?  The artist themself – and at what point?  Retrospectively or immediately after making a thing?  

    Fortnum has made work in ‘correspondence’ with other artists, often marginalised female practitioners, giving voices to say the Practiciennes supported by Rodin.  She explores their voices through letters, through investigating images from a different angle, her viewfinder closing in on large figurative sculpture and honing in on say, a detail in an expression. She gives us another way of looking at a 3D piece by flattening it into a painting.  I write down the word ‘prosopopoeia’ – making the inanimate have a voice.  Are we doing that in what we chose to hone in on?  Giving a moment or a feeling or an idea a form.  I feel that I’ve done that in the past with writing and today is a writing exercise day.  

    When we work in homage to another artist, or in response to or have correspondence with, we are still making our own voices heard.  As Tim brilliantly says ‘you are writing to the significance they have for you’.  

    We are asked who would you like to have a conversation with in relation to your work.  I work on an imagined dialogue with my late father. In his last months he told me about an opportunity he had by chance (coincidence comes up several times today) which saw him and a bunch of other South London kids who’d had a tough life, as part of a progressive education project, transported to the countryside and a classical education.  Something I have tried to research but never got very far with.  Partly maybe I resist that research because he kept this story from me for most of his life for his own reasons.  To me it is a moment of glorious post-war optimism which he chanced upon (how chance could have taken him another way) and that changed who he was and who I am in turn.  

    So I wrote about this and mostly I think I am actually writing about the hopelessness of ever getting a full answer from him now that he’s left us.  He was an unreliable narrator at the best of times.  

    *******

    Talking to my Dad about making art.

    But what did you make Dad?

    It was a golden time.  One of the tutors there was a contemporary of Henry Moore you know, very respected.  

    You said

    And then it was all over and Nan came to fetch me and we went back to Camberwell.  She was with Stan then.  Grandad Stan.  I didn’t like him.  

    But what did you make Dad?

    Well, that was it, it was all over.  It was the same when I got into Grammar School.  When I passed the eleven plus.  She got the hump about that.

    I know

    She had to fork out for a uniform and she was livid.  

    And that was Wilson’s Grammar School.

    What is Camberwell Art School yes.  Terrible place, Wilson’s.

    And Johnny said you had an exhibition in the little library on Camberwell Green?

    Yes

    What was it of Dad?

    Paintings.

    What kind?

    Near Kennedy’s Butchers.  Best sausages.

    In the whole of London.  But what were the paintings of Dad?

    It was a golden time at that school, the one I went to.  We listened to opera and read Shakespeare.

    And you learnt sculpture.

    Yes, she was a contemporary of the great Henry Moore.

    What sort of work did you make Dad?  

    I was pissed off when Elsie turned up with Stan. Nasty piece of work Stan.  

    And you went to Cambridge?

    I enrolled in the poly and I was a milkman.

    Did you still make art Dad?

    Lovely city Cambridge.  Full of people and ideas.

    Maybe you could have made some art later on.

    No Al, no.

    Why not Dad?

    Never time.

    Would you make some art now Dad, if you were still here?

    Maybe.

    What would we do today Dad?

    We would take a trip into town and see Rose Wylie if it’s still on.  A feast of colour. 

  • Where am I now?

    Really interesting lecture from the Art in Context series run by Dean Kenning.  About diagrams as a methodology.  Diagrams being ‘synoptic’ – you see everything at once.  How we think in terms of a diagram creating order but there is not necessarily an order. 

    A timeline is the most basic diagram.  It spatialises time.

    Diagrams like timelines use metaphors to do with directions of travel – we say ‘go forward’ ‘go back’ – arrows towards some kind of end point.

    This joined up with Jonathan’s lecture for me about the reflective process as a cyclical plan – reflect, plan, achieve, observe > new question now, reflect, plan, achieve, observe etc.  Rinse and repeat.  And how that is problematic with art because ‘continual progress’ and a ‘final end point’ is deceiving.  It looks more like messy, tangential, zig-zagging.  Rito’s ‘radical incompleteness’.

    Dean Kenning showed us some examples of timelines that demonstrate that they are always …that word ‘partial’ again…always selecting, never neutral.

    Joseph Priestley’s New Chart of History – (1769?) – a view of the history of the world from the point of view of the Empire.  Alfred Barr’s graphic of the relationships that make up – in his view – the story of Modern Art.  As the founder of MOMA NY he should know – but like all custodians of artwork he is partial, selective.  

    (Note to self here – to check out ‘System’s Theory’. And the Zeno Paradox – where you are only ever halfway to a point, always halfway to another point etc to infinity.)

    So anyway.  No arrow.  Just the rewriting of a story in particular and personal terms.

    What to take from this?

    The above messy timeline of my own.  I notice I didn’t place my now in art history terms, just in terms of my journey and what got me here now.   All the influences that make up me.  Looking at it again I see that I have blown some things up and minimised other events and I guess this would look completely different say 5 or 10 years ago. I feel excited about what things will become important and prominent in the next 5 or 10 years time. I have no idea.