Introduction :
This is no semi departure, or some volte face, this is my alter ego trying to make some meaning of contemporary Arts woeful dependence on Conceptual Art. So, in broad daylight, I'm going to salivate at the potential of subjecting Conceptual Tart to satire, parody, mockery, disdain and even pastiche. Do i need a crystal ball, or a medium using tea leaves,or superstition in the stars? No, let all of it just play-out, whilst I gaze 'wondrously' at the parked shark next to the unmade bed etc. But I have come to the conclusion that it would be more revealing to let my spoof of an alternative fantasy( I mean a conceptual Art Exhibition) open itself-up to expose the farcical nature not just of conceptual Art but its whimsical fair-weather friends in the Academic and literary Art History world. Why so heavy on the cognicienti ? For their scandalous abandonment of the medium of Painting based upon short-termism of course!
Objects and assemblages:
1. Bag that once had 'top-soil' in it (Yes, I do get the metaphorical 'superficiality' of its contents) and has little purpose but to carry something from A to B.. So split it right down the horizontal on one side. Inside will be both recycled and usable contents, or are they? Welcome to the acrylic and oil tubes of paint, bulging out like spilled intestines,where the recent TV drama of 'Fortitude' reveals these 'dinosaur infection', which can be passed-on by the 'carrier' by spewing it into someone else's opened stomach. This poison has been reactivated after thousands of years of hibernation, much like the Art Top Table', who keep Painting as collateral or even insurance if they need to get out of a tight corner when austerity is killing-off their more technically advanced 'prospects'.
2. Money for old plastic? Why not have a hot water bottle act as a marsupial for all the plastic bags you can fit in it! 'One hundred green hot water bottles hanging on the....it's melting the plastic isn't it? No sparks, no smoke, just a burning fume clogging up the marsupial! Climate change will pollute the green bottle...just as 'plastic' and therefore dangerous Art exclude the possibility and dominate alternative Art media, like Painting.
3. The Toilet seat has been painted with bland colours and shapes that undervalue both Miro and Duschamps as the inspirations of this work. It is a work based upon devaluation and not hype! Beneath the toilet seat that is mobile and for rental, lies a hat-box painted with the sharp white colour of a 'public convenience', and is meant to signify the sanitized ideas of today were once iconoclastic ground breakers of yesterday. Bleached by Painters brushes, turpentine, and rags to clean brushes or palette knives., all passed by societies deification below. This waste of Painting has become a medium of recycle and fertilizer, even if 'Miro took a shit here',and no doubt people would want to sell his shit (literally and metaphorically speaking) on e-bay! There self-evidently is no flush to remove the stains and the collection of muck where there is no brass!
4. Previous Ownership.Art sold and resold based upon the infamy, notoriety or even celebrity status; this is 'hype Art'. Art by 'packaged ownership' on the Art holiday of a price time! If it's (and the work becomes a commodity) inflated a purchase and from the Baroln Monroe or Fat Nicholson...then all the better for the approval of both sides of the deal! Here the mask of self-flattery, self-absorbed 'I have arrived' is emptied of all aesthetic sense - it becomes empty Art. So do we have to wait for its resale to begin to unravel its mask of concealment? Here's my version:in this exhibition I'll have a series of masks and animal figurines that conceal their humble origins of ex-charity status and with the fact that they have also been discarded and no longer 'viable'. Paint and pattern mask the real price because it isn't paid from the buyer but from the Painter. He or she hands over work that have an unknown future rather than being able to consolidate a portfolio of work for him/her to remain inspired by without succumbing to the very materialistic element that he/she may well have become an Artist to escape from?!?! Furthermore he/she literally and metaphorically masks all separation from its original intention, function and ethnic origin by challenging its visual and spiritual identity. This could lead to having to protect beautiful original wood carved at considerable effort and skill lost to western ignorance, by not buying it oneself!
5. Finally, here's the Tower of re-label - a series of tables stacked with a private view through a converted second-hand TV screen - It's called 'Pretentious bullshit' for its self-evident reason! Conclusion: Painting doesn't have to be an isolated victim of 2D funereal death mask! It will always be true to image creating invention where clearly the barriers of formalism championed by today's Art big-wigs are being questioned for artifice and rumour mongering in dumbing-down the medium of Painting. Indeed its dispute with the Art top table of today isn't meant to be reconciled, it's meant to restrict all parameters, but on a very unilateral level - guess which way!?! But the 'dark ages' for contemporary Painting have begun to be addressed, just not from Academia or scholarly text but by.............. 'Landscape Artist of the year'?? Has the down-market making pop TV Painting show been given approval from on high whilst quietly sniggering with all the snobbery it can muster at it ? 'You've all done very well!' or 'methinks he doth protesteth too much'? Patronize or the slamming of it? To the Art God's this is a golden opportunity to reject the medium of Painting in yet another avenue? There is no point in denying it, the fault lies squarely at the feet of ourselves! "The fault dear Brutus is not in the stars but in ourselves. Painter's have also been negilgent! But the barricades versus the Gods of Art? Who are you kidding!! This exhibition shows that Paint is transient a type of mark whilst being long-lasting in terms of longevity, but this time of exclusion from a fair fight just requires that we re-boot rather than ransack! But it comes with a warning to the High Table : Next time you're in a fix about 'formalism', don't scapegoat the 'medium of Paint' just because you can readily change the software and rely on the hard drive of pre-existing market of centuries of Painting to lead the commercial sector of the Art market and cover your own backs.