Baring All and Drawing the Line
How much revelation is a good thing?
I’d been thinking of doing a series of articles on creative shame and it was only after sitting down to write this about something quite different that I realised my thoughts here are also touching on related areas.
Last year I decided to write a short piece that is a lot more personal and revelatory than the type of thing I would normally do. I think that it sprang from realising that the only way I could explain a particular topic to myself was through focusing on authenticity and delving into what really was behind the work I was making. As the work is in the public domain in the form of illustration, I realised that in explaining it to myself these thoughts might also be something for an audience to consider.
Baring it All
One thing I always appreciated about Tracey Emin, other than her drawings, was the gift of shame-free vulnerability she brought to fine art. I know I will never be the person that emotionally bares all, whether in the name of art or for any other reason, but in many ways seeing Emin’s unmade bed meant that people like me would never have to. After that, as an artist it was okay for us to be whoever we wanted to be, and the raw abjection of human existence belonged to us all without needing to demonstrate it over again. In that way I felt that her work was a selfless act that as a young female artist right at the start of her career, I was able to appreciate.
Twenty five years later, a similar unfiltered revelation no longer really has the power to shock and it is both common and fashionable for people to pour out personal information on a public platform, not necessarily the gallery space. Self-expression and explanation are often sited as the key to audience engagement, personal liberation and building community.
For someone who naturally steers away from revelation, there is good and bad in this phenomena. Freer, safer and uninhibited emotional spaces help people to form human connections and feel that they aren’t dealing with aspects of life alone. Maybe this is the type of creative freedom I was experiencing seeing Emin’s bed, and now it is also for people who are less invested in the fine art world and who report real benefits when otherwise difficult subjects are discussed with candour and in the open. Yet there is sensationalism in this too, involving a scatter-gun approach to medical terms, celebrity coach style gurus and influencers pumping out content. Simultaneously inspiring yet narcissistic social media vignettes can focus on raw, unfiltered trauma or an envy inducing sugar coated life, or something in between.
The social media technology this performance is presented with drives ever more extreme and polarised discussion for increasing advertising revenue. It is a precarious path society walks seems very different to an unmade bed in the fine art space. To start with, presenting it in a gallery space contextualised it as work and belonging to a particular arena and conversation. At time of the YBAs there was shock and awe but it was mostly for the consumers of fine art.
As someone who consumed and wrote fiction from a young age, I was always fascinated by the capacity of language as much as art to channel a range of emotions and human experience in a way that removes a story from just being a regurgitation of raw personal experience. This is an interesting process for a storyteller as much as an audience. I liked the way that this could sometimes elevate emotions, allowing us to access them in different ways and understand things outside of our own ken. I’m never sure whether my own work has ever achieved that even for a moment, but I do appreciate this in other people’s work, and obviously it is something to strive for.
Weaving a fictitious tale, using language or creating a piece of art works on many levels of human understanding, not least the subconscious and unconscious. Therefore, you process the story differently and can gain something of your own from it as well. Hence Emin’s bed had left me with a deep sense of gratitude I had for her to be able to show herself in such a revelatory way that made me feel I could be myself but never have to really defecate in my trousers in public because she had said all there was to say on this type of visceral emotional exposure, and said it well. No doubt others gained something quite different from this piece of work.
After this, when I realised fairly recently that I needed to write something more personal than usual, I thought twice and nearly didn’t do it. I don’t think I will need to be doing it again in the near future, but just for the moment it seemed necessary to explain a personal experience that I think more people should be aware of. Interestingly it has given me the creative and personal liberation that was evading me during the long three years of not being able to finish the artwork I was writing about due partly to pandemic problems with print studios, and also realising the drawing wasn’t good enough. I feel more connected to the work and it’s likely very tiny audience, so although I don’t think that this is right for everything I do, I would encourage people to dip their toe in the water once in a while.
For the Love of 20th C Sci Fi
Sometime before the pandemic I started drawing around the idea of 20th century science fiction, and it was both an emotionally comforting and aesthetically pleasing decision.
In 2016 I had been to the Cosmonauts exhibition at the Science Museum with someone who expressed surprise at my belief that it was documentary in nature. They thought it had been an entertaining two hours of fantasy stage set and I don’t think they believed me when I claimed that the USSR had indeed had a space program. I was 16 in 1991, so I remembered Helen Sharman going to visit the Mir space station. This exhibition experience made me think about the disparity between popular 21st Century and 20th Century attitudes to space exploration. Maybe this is what planted the seed I brought to my visual art practice for a while after that.
Many of my art influences seem to come from what are often considered low-culture places, which is perfectly respectable if you work with illustration, so I started using retro imagery to make screen-prints, collages and drawings that filled me with comfort and a sense of nostalgia. Creatively I didn’t get any of this right for a long time but by when the pandemic hit, I was working on a set of 6 screen prints investigating my love of TV sci-fi from my childhood against feelings about the future now.
Three years on and after my print studio closed, I realised screen printing this project had been the gateway to a kind of hateful laziness and impatience to push work out that I am sometimes guilty of. I have one screen print of the only good image and went back to the drawing board to make the rest better, instead of letting the novelty and materiality of analogue work be the lazy excuse for poor draughtsmanship. Before this, I had possibly even indulged in an occasional textured background, which is something I have questioned my own students about before now.
Currently the images are emerging one by one and will no longer be screen printed because there was no need other than elevating the drawings from poor to mediocre. Mediocrity is not something that I strive for but sadly so often end up there. I always hope that if I can see it going that way before my eyes at least I have dodged a bullet that particular time, so losing access to affordable large screen printing facilities leading to reflection really was a boon as it turned out.
In the meantime, I spent months working on paper and fabric with very simple space age stencils and producing a quantity of visual research that aided my subconscious thought process very much. Yet there was something else I needed to work out of my system, so I started writing about the place the feelings in the work, and ultimately aesthetic drive, were coming from.
The resulting writing centred around popular and TV sci-fi from when I was a child along with thoughts about my own cultural heritage. I wouldn’t have placed these things together until I started writing, which is why I feel I should always write more and speak less. From this exercise alone, I learned where all the nostalgia, longing and cosiness was coming from. It made me think about what each of the finished images meant, and also helped me to remember that when writing stories I have always preferred hope over both dystopia and romanticism.
Libraries Over Meta or Don’t Call Me Mixed Race
Cultural heritage is an endlessly social-media friendly topic at the moment, but in the end I decided to publish the essay into a decorated print booklet. After I had written the piece, and talking to some friends, there ended up being two AI versions of what I was writing about that were reassuringly nothing like what happens to a topic when you put real human experience into it. Another reason to be emotionally close to your work, not that it has to always contain anecdotes or biographical detail. I have put the AI pages in a separate pull-out poster in the booklet.
As stated, I think this level of exposure might be a first and last for me because, personal feelings aside, I usually prefer my own fiction writing. However, in this case and instead of a printed booklet going off to the British Library, social media might have been just the breeding ground for likes, anger, arguments and some mud slinging on the topic of someone with vague anecdotes about the space age and a mixed cultural heritage who does not like to use the term mixed race. Likes mean sales and the commercially helpful notoriety that everyone is looking for, surely? However, encountering the piece in a format that can be read without pressing a button or immediately writing a string of abuse / heartfelt agreement is maybe the best way to digest an essay.
The last few weeks have seen endlessly depressing feeds on the very small amount of social media I engage with, which is usually Instagram. I had a comforting phase of rescued equines and artists I know, however recently it has been all inflammation about a range of inhuman topics. I am not quite ready to quit yet but I want to move my work back into a realm where it can be considered, debated or even ignored with some of the humanity, intelligence and resilience these online conversations are stripping away from everyone. If you would like to read it, Humans and Aliens is available from my shop, occasional other bookshops who might stock it or indeed the library.