I arrive with few artistic intentions, I am travelling to Belfast partly to be out of Cardiff where I live. Time away from the mixer of normality. I’m invited by a friend to see the city, meet other artists, see spaces... I’m struggling with ideas at the time, I’ve just finished working with a collaborative group and now I am trying to get my head around my concerns for a (or within a) solo practice. My concerns (amongst the mess) are increasingly with solitude and the sad but uniquely critical perspective that being alone can provide. I am also still trying to analyse the pieces of my long term puzzle on religion and ethics.
Belfast – People seem to have awareness of the built up architecture and a secret/hidden architecture. Walls and doors that are built out of culture. Architecture and history are fused together so that history can make walls that cannot be (to the untrained eye) seen and Architecture can generate and maintain historical narratives that far out stretch the simple lifetime of the building. This is not a phenomenon that is specific to Belfast but what is noticeable is how much people are aware of this.
Cardiff – My practice of loosely focused research, half followed trails, diversions, continues alongside continued dialogue with several artists in Belfast. Questions concerning the positive and negatives of naivety in such circumstances (the circumstances of a travelling artist). I realise the importance of owning up to one’s own naivety (at home or in new places) else being arrogant and overlooking critical details and conversations.
I create work as an artist in residence at a Talk by a significant curator. I’m asked to respond to the talk which is in part about site responsive works. My personal experiences of a trendy bar which hosts the event and the tone of the event which tastes of London (in a kind of entrepreneurial/careerist way) leads me to write with coy venom. I write mostly about the bar area which we use for the talk, my interest in the cultural architecture, the sense of a little piece of London being teleported into Wales/Cardiff/my home.
Swansea – I spent some time walking down from a gallery space where I was preparing an exhibit to the beach, the sea front. There I stood staring out into the water. I had recently read an interview where Will Self claimed he thought large expanses of water were good for the imagination and creative process.
Hale bopp (a twin tailed comet that was visible for most of 1997, and is the most visible comet that has been appeared for a long time) was for some reason right at the centre of my thoughts. The comet was an important object of scientific research, generating a huge amount of scientific information in public media, concerning it’s path, history, geological make up... Also the Comet was believed by a cult group to be a spiritual spaceship arriving at the earth to take their spiritual selves on to a better place and was the focus of their eventual mass suicide. This seemed to resonate with the recently enflamed science vs religion debate which was of interest to me. But also I enjoyed a kind of romanticism in my mental image of a (million) stargazer(s) hyper- aware of his solitude (a pin point in the depths of space) as they stare in to the open sky.
Venice – I travel to to see contemporary art from all over the world in the dusty Disneyland of Venice. Shrines, Churches and religious iconography are spliced between the oddities of contemporary art. I’m more aware of my aloneness than ever, this aloneness is thrust into it’s most pathetic manifestation –watching girls. Disruptively beautiful people everywhere, all talking currency, already fluent in the local tongue – Euros. Nothing could speak of all this better than the book I’d just read ‘Death in Venice’ by Thomas Mann.
Cardiff – On returning I think more about the city of Venice, it’s multiple faces, the way the city is exactly what you’d expect but somehow layered (And heavily scratched) with multitudes of other possible cities. You might have guessed that I’d started reading ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino (a book more or less centred on the city of Venice in many forms). More than ever my most hated buzz word ‘Psycho-geography’ haunts my research. The relationship between reading/writing and more typical ‘visual arts’ is really important, the books I’ve been reading, providing influential insights into my ideas.
I’ve, by chance been invited to make work in three completely separate spaces that are all ex-police stations: Bristol, London, Belfast. I start to think about how the (archetypal) ‘Police station’ exits within my frame of thought. I decide to build a police station in my back garden as a physical drawing, which becomes a site for performance sketches.
Bristol – The Police station is wiped clean to white walled gallery. I think a lot about the site but other ideas are currently demanding my attention. Texts I’m writing concern my solitude directly addressing a sexual aspect of this, and the inherent moral ambiguities. This overrides the site history to some extent, however the architecture of the space is hugely influential on the aesthetics and the process’ that take place in the build up to the work.
London – Straight on to London with another Police station. Each day as I cycle to the gallery I start at ‘Kebab Zero’ which is the bottom floor of the building I’m staying in, cycle past the Tower of London and over Tower bridge... The ex-police station is a massive redbrick building that hosts studios and small gallery spaces. Art in the ex-archive room somewhere in the galaxy of London... where ever you are in the city, you have a strong feeling that you could move in any direction for as far as you like, travel for days and still never leave London. Metropolitan to the point of Isolation, the sense of nothingness that exists between any two entities in the city pervades. This is the London that invades the pubs of Cardiff, individuality (an apparent cultural currency) taken to new extremes. Trade routes clogged with empty vessels.
Cardiff – The tables are turned, for a while I host visiting artists, sleeping in every soft area of my home. Exchanging tales of our normal lives made exotic, drinking long and late... I start to think more about the role of visiting artist. I start to prepare work for an exhibition in Glasgow.
Glasgow – My previous trip to Glasgow was for the National Review of Live Art, in its underground style railway arch (hide). I had performed to an audience that might not have included a single Scottish person. I wondered if I had actually made performance in Glasgow. If maybe the space somehow became part of a different international performance art city (One that exists just under the surface of other cities: Glasgow, Bristol, London, Cardiff, Swansea, Venice...) On this occasion I’m not in Glasgow long enough to eat a battered black pudding and chips, I am making performance to a audience of mostly Scottish people but I decide to discuss the International performance art city just under the surface.
Cardiff – I read an interview with the artist Artur Zmijewski. He talks of a ‘fantasy’ that separates art from the rest of the world (real world) keeping each safe from the other. This fantasy seems to be constructed in the romantic notions of the artist as an enigma, tortured and inspired with access to an otherworldliness of existence. I think a lot about this whilst watching the ‘School of Saatchi’ on the televion. (The problem with school of Saatchi was that it exposed the fake structures that hold up the fantasy within a commercial art world. Exposing the amount that artists are craftsmen making objects of peculiarity (to order) for high brow entertainment. Whimsical joke objects. This is a sad situation.)
Preparing now to return to Belfast I wonder about the last nine months since I was last there. Thinking about why I am returning. I realize that I need to get out of the mixer of everyday Cardiff, I need to attain a kind of solitude. I wonder to what extent I entertain Zmijewski’s ‘fantasy’ to coax new works out of myself.
I‘ll go to Belfast to a draughty loft, drinking hard to keep out the cold I’ll gouge my pen into papers writing obtuse metaphors that I re-read (sober) and loathe. Sick and cold I’ll start again. Then something happens. During the heaviest rain fall since the second world war according to a newspaper page that I’ll pick up on the bus. It’s the last few minutes before dawn, I’m out on an excursion out to buy drink after time from a little local place, and I’ll come across a man dressed as a woman who has been attacked in the street. I’ll Help him up, and call a taxi that I pay with my last clutch of coins. As the cab pulls away I see a beautiful leather handbag lying in the doorway where he was sheltering, and in the inside the front pocket, a notebook. I open the pages and there before my eyes is the most succinct and perfectly calm poetry I’ve ever imagined. More direct and still full of teasing jokes, false paths and political allusions. For days in my Belfast room I read and pore over the texts, and then I write again at last, a letter to my lover back home. ‘I am finished, I have discovered within my hand a masterpiece.’