Rebeginning

What I think declarative statements in the shape of text pieces are to younger artists are, first and foremost, a way of formalising a viewpoint or an idea. The success of the subsequent work depends on a variety of factors, but these factors are inherently rooted in both the visual and the literal. For contemporary artists that include text in their practices it is often used as a means of questioning what can actually be known, the nature of society and social and political structures, as well as having further critical clout in that it is seen as conforming to the Duchampian ready-made ideology. This is often as far as most artists who occasionally employ the use of text stretch to. In the worst case scenario text pieces are self-referential, naval gazing and can often give a viewer the impression that the artist didn't have the time to write a decent poem or song lyric.

Above: 'Art is Gold'

214cm x 168cm

MDF, Gold Leaf

(2011)*

Below: 'Yes, Yes, Yes - But'

Dimensions Variable

Black Vinyl Lettering

(2011)*

*as shown at the Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, Free Range exhibition in London, July 2011.

The challenge for artists using text, since Kosuth and Weiner, has been in challenging the formalism of text art. This second wave of text artists arrived as certain neo-Conceptualists sought to update those artists' work, adding a sense of self-awareness of the art's own existence. With my text work I tried to use this idea of art's awareness of itself, to posit the view that any meaning that is imbued or implied in a work of this sort inherently seeks to destroy itself. The meaning, by being implied, immediately contradicts itself by being so explicitly communicated, within the parameters of postmodernist art, and so ceases to function as a viable mode of communication. This work attempted to highlight the difficulties of making art, not just in a practical sense, but at its deepest level of communication. 

Above: Degree Show, Bath Spa University, June 2011.

This work was for me an attempt to extend or explore the limits of language and art, by challenging both as universally accepted modes of communicating. It was important also for me to try to show that art that uses text is not limited in subject matter to issues pertaining solely to linguistics, but can actually open up debate on issues such as the way in which we construct meaning - from language and from experience, how we live, how we feel. 

Aside

What's needed now is to find a re-entry point. I've just moved from London to Bristol in a genuine effort to start practicing art for the first time since I graduated last June. There are, for many artists I've spoken to, quite a few things less straining and mentally painful than doing what they love, and for me that's certainly been the case. Time spent away, however much needed, has shown me the difficulty, and therefore value, of being able to make decisions. I see that how an artist's work evolves relates first and foremost to the type of person they are. If your intention in life is to be a practicing artist, and this is something which you know, then surely one of these things must suffer if you do not regularly draw or paint or write or in some way perform a task which has no function other than to exist as art. I've said before how pointlessly boring diaristic blogs about art are to read and I stick to that. What this is supposed to be might not be what it is, but to force yourself to make a decision, and then to follow through with it no matter what, is evidence of a discipline that I wish I had more of.