Digital artwork
Where is the art world located
Created 22.03.2007
Available as ltd. ed. digital print (forthcoming)
…a further response to the Mark Staff Brandl article on sharkforum.org
This article really hits home from the perspective of an ‘ex’ artist, future artist struggling to deal with the multiplicity of styles and cliques now infecting the British ‘Body Artistic’. I was a party to the initial infection of ‘oblique strategy’ art through a couple of interviews for Goldsmith’s College of Art here in the late 1980’s ( ironically just before the Brit-Art boom).
I was discarded as being too ‘traditional’ at these interviews and responded by disappearing literally to the countryside where I grew up to complete the supposed ‘reactionary’ art I was accused of. I ceased exhibiting soon after and have led a merry dance around the genres ever since and in fact came across r.d.roth of sharkforum in that dance.
It seemed then and it seems now that a a badly misunderstood ‘mission statement’ based on an outpouring of cobbled together cod philosophy (especially French) actually mattered more than an ability to develop or complete a substantial body of work. This trend has thrived like a virus especially in regard to art-training which has shed all pretence to accomodate ’skills’ in favour of ‘networking’ and ‘business acumen’.
As an example of how far this trend predominates I recently had a show where I instinctively felt that my actual ‘work’ ( traditional landscape drawings influenced by Paul Nash ) were irrelevant to my audience and in a fit of pique I started drawing on the day of the show a series of sarcastic and irreverant cartoons about the art-world in Nottingham on basis if you can’t beat them join them! I immediately gained attention, some small renumeration and a possible future show……
I feel that I have stumbled into that world the article describes of small pecks at the rhino’s hide in search of my own artistic salvation. I increasingly over last decade and a half admired ‘polymath’ souls such as Butch Hancock (musician/photographer) and anybody operating well away from the main stream especially so-called ‘outsider art’ as they seemed immune to this ‘tainted generation’s’ stylistic morass.
It seems to me that artists have two choices…travel to Rome and adopt the clothes of the conquerer’s and become ‘curators’ or walk to the furthest edges and break down fences that border the still wild and unexplored possibly with multiple personas….Pessoa comes to mind and in his spirit I have invented any number of ‘Fake’ musicians and artists recently….indeed to the point where I declared myself a ‘Fake Gallery‘and declared my various ’styles’ separate personas…
Only in fakery did I become real…
Thames Valley Texas
Thames Valley Texas is a new project highlighting the multi-faceted work of former country star/fine artist/poet and outsider artist Shaun Belcher a.k.a. Trailer Star. Never has an artistic practice broken down fences on the U.K. range with such gay abandon…and curiouser than Alice.It all connects ..no really..
This poem’s got the lot….eco critical content, poet-historical referencing…
the notes to a John Lucas book on Goldsmith and hell it is even place-centred too……
The Drifting Village
Deep in the sleet
Forward slanted, rimed with ice
the cottage, wrecked and the tree
catching a fire on a winter’s eve
Stars and a dance of the dead
across hills and exotic trees
brought in from ships at Tilbury
and carted to the master’s door
The crackle of horsehair chairs
and splintered bed timbers collapsing
All that remained of Bab
and what Bab held dear.
Like a frail cross the tree smouldered
then burnt to the ground
reminding the assembled multitude
of their right and true position
Then, heads bowed on her behalf,
with a tear here and there
At her body still warm in the ground
they felt the village tug one last time
slipping from their fingers
Like the mooring ropes a river away
being loosed from the India Docks
as particles of spice drifted loose
from briny planks fell into eyes
She had held that village like a hulk
in its original berth.
Stopped it sliding up from the floodplain
to the master’s new dock on the hill.
Now a three century gap gone
the same village a berth for commuters
watches as the water floods once more
as if it had found its true course
All the spilt contents bobbing on a sea of silt
the mobiles, the dvds, the trash of the eastern shore
All cascading just like that submerging barque
A hundred years before slid back to the river plain
And settles into its original image
marking out her last resting place like a chalky line
a scuzz of empire flashing like flags on the mud
her tree’s new roots a catchment of time.
Barbara Wyatt resident of Nuneham Courtney village refused to leave her tree when the Harcourt family moved the village
for landscape improvements. It is probable that Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ was based on this village. She was tolerated as a ‘talking point’.In 2007 the new village (now a commuter village near Oxford) was flooded as a result of a local farmer’s mistaken attempt to alter a drainage pattern.
