Live shows for spring 2020 cancelled or postponed.
Tag: artists
When you’re an artist, every night is drag night
My article in the spring/summer 2019 edition of Sluice magazine.
Look clean, so you can be really filthy
My column in the spring 2019 issue of Sluice magazine.
A HUMANISING FORCE
Manchester, November 2018.
Sluice magazine: Don’t Look Down
My column from the previous issue of Sluice magazine is now online, on the pervasive metaphorical debt of the art world, the perpetual actual debt of artists, and lazy little millennial fucks. The new issue is out very shortly, with more of my columnage.
Artists and Mental Health
Summary of my research on the mental health of artists for a-n: the artists information company.
All real artists get turned into a doll
I was inspired– negatively, so... unspired?– by the fuss about a recent Frida Kahlo Barbie doll, of which the doll itself was probably the least offensive thing. Yes, it somewhat cleaned and prettied up a woman rightly famous for being a feminist and a communist who was ahead of her time in foregrounding … Continue reading All real artists get turned into a doll
Artists and mental health
New article for a-n News.
Artists are human too: the realist residency
Towards a fair artist residency.
Post election breakfast at Assembly Bristol, June 9th
9am-12, Friday 9th June at The Brunswick Club, Bristol.
My latest column for Sluice magazine
New edition of Sluice magazine out now, May 2017.
What They Didn’t Teach You in Art School
I contributed my wisdom (?) to this book by Rosalind Davis and Annabel Tilley. As a famous idiot once said (and as referred to on page 9 of the book itself!), there are known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns, and I think many artists reading this book will realise how many unknown unknowns they've … Continue reading What They Didn’t Teach You in Art School
What is Art? A User’s Guide
Southampton City Art Gallery, Thursday December 1 2016.
Sluice__ talks and Space Time Agency performances
Saturday 21 May, 12-6pm
A day of quickfire talks and performances at The Averard Hotel, 10 Lancaster Gate, London W2 3LH
NEO-THOREAU
Discussions of economics and making a living from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854):
SELLING AND AVOIDING THE NECESSITY OF SELLING
“Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off—that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed—he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it…
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b-side Symposium 2015: The Excursionist
Portland, Dorset, October 8-9 2015.
ARE YOU VALID?
Some new research on artists working outside the gallery system has just been published by Axis [1]: Validation Beyond the Gallery. As an artist who has little interest in making objects that can be sold, collected or otherwise institutionalised, as a relative outsider (and Outsider) even among the outlying group of artists who feel the same [2], and as somebody doing ongoing work related to artists’ livelihoods and pay, there’s some interesting stuff in there. The only caveat I’d add is that the study is by their own description qualitative [3], i.e. an interpretation of narrative from only 25 participants, so personally I’d be very cautious about forming policy or drawing universal conclusions from such an incredibly small sample of participants.
Having said that, the TLDR version will perhaps be unsurprising to anyone with any experience in the matters under discussion, although evidently it still needs to be said:
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BUY NINE, GET SIX DESTROYED FOR FREE
A PARABLE FOR ARTISTS
The early Christian writer Lactantius– who advised the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine I– told the story of how the Roman king Tarquinius Priscus acquired the Sibylline books which were kept in Rome’s Capitoline temple for consultation, guidance and divination in times of trouble. Although Priscus bought them, they were eventually considered priceless and remained in the temple for many centuries until they and the temple were destroyed by fire in 83 BC.
The Sibylline books took their name from their keeper, the Cumaean Sibyl, high priestess of the Apollonian Oracle at Cumae near modern day Naples. At some point between 616 and 579 BC, she made Priscus an offer he initially thought he could refuse:
They say that Amalthea, the Sibyl from Cumae, brought nine books to the king Tarquinius Priscus, and asked 300 gold pieces for them. The king refused, saying it was far…
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SAINTS AND MARTYRS
Two posts from other sites about audience entitlement, the apparently growing resentment towards any creative person who dares to try making a living from giving audiences the things they seem to feel they’re entitled to, and the impossible double standards to which artists are being held. They’re referring mainly to US musicians, but virtually all of it applies to writers, visual artists, film makers, etc. anywhere. We’re all in the same boat and we’re all subjected to the same kind of determined attacks at the moment. I strongly encourage you to read both posts in full, but I’ve pulled out a few of the most cogent quotes.
ARTISTS CAN’T SURVIVE AS SAINTS AND MARTYRS
http://www.artistempathy.com/blog/the-pomplamoose-problem-artists-cant-survive-as-saints-and-martyrs
“The American artist is expected to be both a saint and a martyr. Operate outside the capitalist system and we’ll praise you for your creations, call your poverty a quaint kind of martyrdom that has nothing…
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JEFF GOLDBLUM SAID: A PARABLE FOR ARTISTS
Via @AylwinGL on Twitter, with reference to the aforementioned horrorshow that is Amazon Art, a useful observation from the lovely Jeff Goldblum as the least realistic mathematician ever in Jurassic Park.
Dr. Ian Malcolm: If I may… Um, I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here, it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now… you’re selling it, you wanna sell it. Well…
John Hammond: I don’t think you’re giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things…
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