Alex: I wanna discuss art as a manifestation of pure emotion. This relates to a conversation we had earlier. I’m basically trying to figure out what it means to try and channel experience or emotion while creating art, when most of my experience and emotion happens when I’m not creating art. And therefore what the validity is of trying to channel emotion or experiential events after the fact, or whether when I’m creating art, I’m not channelling experience at all. I’m simply just documenting the way that my brain is configured at the moment of creating art.
Eris: So the uncomfortable possibility is that the emotion lived in the living, and the studio only records whatever state your brain is in when you stand at the canvas. What makes you suspect that second one is the truer account?
Alex: I don’t really know, actually, whether it is the truer account. I mean, there’s an argument that says that everything adds up to any given moment, or the current moment, and the current moment is the only one that exists. Therefore the experience of me walking through some woods two hours ago informs the experience I’m having now, and therefore it sort of doesn’t matter what I’m creating at this moment in time, because that experience was part of the overall continuum. And therefore I shouldn’t worry too much about whether I’m reflecting something, if I’m just channelling whatever feels like it wants to come out now. Presumably the experiences and emotions and the thoughts that were valid most recently are the ones that are gonna come out more distinctly in my work right now.
Eris: That’s a tidy argument, but it makes the work unfalsifiable. If everything feeds everything, then whatever you make is by definition faithful, and nothing can be wrong. Does that actually settle you, or does it quietly remove the very thing that used to tell you a piece had landed?
Alex: Well, exactly right. And that’s exactly the problem I’m wrestling with, is that if there’s no intentionality to my work at the easel, as it were, then what is to say that what comes out at that moment is of any value at all, outside either pure aesthetics or some externally derived idea of completeness or beauty or something like that.
Eris: So the worry only bites if you assume value has to be intended, and that’s the assumption you haven’t tested yet. Can you think of one thing you’ve made where the moment of recognition arrived before you’d decided anything?
Alex: Does that question even have any meaning? Every piece of art is a result of thousands of tiny little decisions. So I’m not a bloody illustrator. I don’t set out with an endpoint in mind. Even if I’ve got a subject in mind, I’m not looking to achieve a specific goal, so all I’ve got are individual decisions. I guess the problem I have, the anxiety, comes from the fact that if you hear other artists talk about their work, perhaps they’re retrofitting the intentionality, but some of it just doesn’t ring true to me. A lot of the time, what they’re really talking about is, oh, this is just how I think about the world. And therefore that’s how my art is, rather than this was a particular study to explore the inner workings of the human mind via the depiction of a flower, you know, like Cézanne’s bloody apples, right? And you can’t tell me that while he was at the easel, he’s just going, well, this is just what I wanna do right now, rather than I’m gonna make a weird fucking study of apples so that the dimensions are a bit off.
Eris: You’re right that the question is misplaced if “intended” means setting out with an endpoint. The intention might not sit at the start at all, but inside the choosing. So if all you’ve really got is those thousands of tiny decisions, what’s actually deciding between one and the next?
Alex: Well, exactly. And so is that a product of what I’m doing now, or is it just a part of a continuum of thought and feeling or experience, and therefore has less meaning in its own right. I think that it’s not a frivolous question, right? So much of what you see, particularly around painters, in terms of critics, how their paintings are interpreted by other people, relates to their use of things like brush strokes. They’re talking about things like intentionality, and the state of the artist, that has been retrofitted to a particular painting, based on what the observer has observed about that and what they know about the artist. But if the artist doesn’t choose to reveal anything about themselves other than the painting, then what the fuck does anyone know about why one decision was made versus another? And most of the time the explanations provided by the artist read as gobbledygook.
Eris: So if both the criticism and the artist’s own account are unreliable, the only thing left carrying meaning is what the painting does to whoever’s standing in front of it. Does that make the artist’s intention irrelevant, or just permanently unknowable?
Alex: Well, I suspect it’s a matter of both. I think part of the issue I have here is epistemic, I guess, is that you simply can’t know what the artist was thinking, and the artist is not gonna give away everything they’re thinking, so they know what they’re thinking. We talk about flow states, which Csikszentmihalyi says that we don’t know what we’re thinking. We’re just sort of going with the flow of whatever is happening to us at the moment, and that’s the ultimate artistic state. It seems to me like there’s a fundamental disconnect here between the way that people view work and interpret work, and how they experience it, versus art criticism, which seeks to analyse that, which seems quite arrogant to me. I can see how you can say that you like something, and there’s this expectation that artists talk about their work in the same vernacular as art critics do, which seems completely at odds with reality to me. I just don’t think that’s how most artists work, and if they do, they’re either being disingenuous or they’re probably not a very good artist. I guess part of my issue here comes not from what’s happening inside my brain. It’s that if someone asked me to explain how and why I create my work in the way that I do, the answer is because, well, I do, because that’s what my experience to that moment has led me to do. It doesn’t have to mean anything, but then that’s a very unsatisfactory answer to most people, particularly critics and art dealers and the like. Everyone wants an explanation. What if there is none? What if there’s never any explanation?
Eris: So the demand for an explanation may belong to the market rather than the work. And your answer, “because that’s where I was,” is only unsatisfactory to people who need the work to be legible before they’ll trust it. If you refuse to supply one, what’s supposed to happen instead when a stranger stands in front of the piece?
Alex: Well, I guess the point isn’t whether it’s my business what happens when the viewer stands in front of the piece. It’s that pretty much the only way to get your piece in front of an observer is to have someone validate that piece, at which point they’re expecting you to give them some ammunition for their validation, and we get back into the same cycle of art criticism and having a point of view on your own work, as opposed to just fucking doing it and putting it out there. So the problem is capitalism has got in the way, and the only thing that’s going to get your work in front of an audience is for someone to tell the audience what it’s worth. And if you’re not willing or able to do that, then your work simply isn’t going to get seen. And I find this, I mean, it’s clearly art critics, and the art world likes to pretend that this interaction is somehow intrinsic to the artistic process, when it’s actually antithetical to it.
Alex: And it’s got to do with society and not art itself.
Eris: Then the wish to have it seen is social too, not artistic. The frustration would be about access rather than the work. Would you actually be fine making it and never showing anyone?
Alex: I like to kid myself that I am, I would be, but ultimately I’m not. I think that art is a communication between observer and artist, and each piece of art is a cultural artefact. I think that if you make art for your own mental health, you should never ever feel compelled to show it to anyone else, but not doing so, for me, constitutes a, not a criticism, but a shame. And a sort of missed opportunity to reach people and create culture and conversation and ideas and to further the overall human experiment. After all, this is coming from humans, right? Art is created, culture is created by humans. And so not sharing art seems like a wasted opportunity if nothing else. But one way or the other, I kind of feel compelled to share my art with other people, and for me it gives me pleasure that other people might enjoy it. I’m just questioning, for me, the issue that we have, that people who say that they really care about art seem to care about explanations that bear no real resemblance to the art itself, and simply exist to create their own sense of culture around someone else’s art. Most art criticism is just outriders, in my opinion. Maybe they’re necessary outriders, but they’re outriders. They’re not really contributing anything to the overall discourse and the artistic medium and practice itself.
Eris: So the criticism is a separate culture growing on top of yours, and the annoyance is that it grows without your permission. What’s actually being taken from you there? The meaning of the piece, or just the authority to say what it means?
Alex: It’s less about either of those, it’s more about the right to be seen. And the right to be perceived by anyone is fundamentally dictated by a bunch of other humans who don’t really contribute much else of value to the overall endeavour. It’s that if you can’t talk in nonsensical artspeak about your art, you’re less likely to be seen, when I think most of the best art, and most of the art that’s been most revered over the years, has been fundamentally intuitive by nature. And people love it because of its intuition, and what it tells them about the world around them and what it makes them feel, yet then they’re supposed to be able to describe that in concrete terms, which is actually a contradiction. It’s a paradox. You can’t really have both. And this then leads directly back into the artistic practice itself, when I look at something and I think, well, I don’t know what my own painting means, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about what other people think about it. But the reality is maybe that doesn’t matter. I don’t think it should matter. I think that all art deserves to be seen, and that people deserve to be able to react to art on their own terms.
Eris: So the translation into artspeak is the toll for being seen, and the price is paid in a currency you don’t actually hold. If you drop the idea that you need to know what the painting means, what’s left doing the work when you’re deciding whether someone’s reaction is real or just polite?
Alex: Yeah, well, I don’t know. That’s exactly the question I’m trying to answer, and whether I’m totally off the mark here. I mean, is this about personal expression or communication, and is there any difference? Is the right for me to be seen dependent on audience, or universal? How do I go from a state where I feel confident about my own artworks and how to talk about them, without passing the need to fucking learn how a bunch of stuffy academics want art to be spoken about? I think maybe the point is the whole melange of culture is the only thing that matters. But if you can’t find your way into that culture in any meaningful sense, then it leads you to a pretty lonely place. And that’s sort of where I find myself. And sort of asking questions about why any of this exists in the first place.
Eris: You’ve assumed the culture you’re locked out of is the one that matters, the academic gate. Picture a room where the work lands and it isn’t lonely. Who’s actually in it?
Alex: Well, viewers, right? I want my art to be seen by people who might appreciate it. And I know that there are people that will appreciate it. I ultimately think every artwork has an audience of at least one person other than the artist. And I just want my art to be seen by those people. And I also want my art to be understood on its own terms. I don’t have an issue with people understanding or being curious about how or why or under what conditions my artwork was created, but I don’t feel the need to have to be able to express that in terms that are acceptable by the art gatekeepers. I don’t know. The problem is I can’t seem to navigate between the idea that art for me is a very solitary, personal and necessary practice, with the idea that someone would look at my art and have an opinion on it. I simply get stuck on that one every time. I don’t know how to think about this.
Eris: The two only collide if someone else’s opinion has some claim on the work. What do you fear they’ll take, the privacy of the practice, or your right to say what the thing is?
Alex: I think there’s a point of honesty here. I feel like the work itself is being mediated. There should be a transmission between artist and observer, and that transmission is always honest, right? Except when someone else inserts themselves and starts to guide the narrative in some way. And that can be an art critic or someone expressing opinion, or it could just be the placement of the work in a gallery and where it’s placed, and under what conditions, or in someone’s house or something like that. But it could also be the existence of that piece of art as something that someone would present at all, right? The people always looking for the value in something, to be able to sort of display it, say in a public space, and from that point, once the gatekeeper has done their job and presented something that they perceive as having value, then I think the conversation between the artist and the observer is very honest. I think it is quite intuitive. And I think my problem is that I feel like the pressure to be able to create works in any sort of idiom that people can make sense of is antithetical to my actual practice. But if I can get my work seen by the right audience, then the conversation would be quite immediate, right? And very, very honest. And I think when it boils down to it, it’s the honesty of that conversation that really compels me. And that I’m looking for a very real and direct communication between my subconscious and somebody else’s subconscious. I don’t think I’m actively trying to do that. I don’t think intellectually that’s how I think about it, but from a spiritual or from a societal or a cultural perspective, that’s what I think that I’m doing when I think about it after the fact.
Eris: You’ve put all the mediation outside the work, the critic, the wall label, the gatekeeper. But if the honesty is subconscious to subconscious, you can’t control what lands, only what you send. So is the honesty in the sending, or in them receiving it without translating it first?
Alex: Well, it can’t be anything other than in the sending, because I have no control over how people perceive my work, and part of what my difficulty here is, is that I simply have no idea how other people see my work. But when I create something that has some clear, universally acceptable pictorial or symbolic meaning, say a human face, or something that’s clearly a car or a house or something like that, I could at least say, well, you’re seeing a human face and I’m seeing a human face, and how we’re experiencing that might differ, but at least I know what I’m showing you. But once I get into the abstract realm, I’m like, well, I don’t know what you’re seeing, and people seem to see things fundamentally differently from me. And I don’t know whether I need to feel like I need to control that in any way, shape or form, but it’s hard then to judge whether or not what I’m doing has some sort of symbolic value outside of myself, simply because I don’t understand how people are going to see it. And that sort of gets in the way of my idea of finishedness and rightness and quality and aesthetic value of something.
Eris: So the face only ever guaranteed you both agreed on the sign, never on the experience. The abstraction is where the stakes actually are. So what is it missing? A shared referent, or just a way of checking that anyone felt anything at all?
Alex: It’s a bit of a philosophical problem. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. And I don’t get enough opportunity to show my work or to gather feedback to get any sense of that, and I guess part of the question is, well, does it actually matter? Does any of this actually matter? Given that my art practice is driven by compulsion, and mental health, whether it ever matters, or how someone else reacts to a piece of art that I create. I think part of the reason I decided to start trying to have these discussions is to try and tease out why any of this matters. I don’t think I can ever stop wanting to show people my work. And so there’s some synthesis between the idea of me as an artist, who is insular and solitary, and does art for the purposes of maintaining mental health, and this idea of an art world that may be interested in my output, and so it being something I could potentially at least show to other people, if not necessarily make money now. There’s an external identity and an internal identity, an external motivator and an internal motivator. And I struggle, and I’ve always struggled, to get those two to agree in any way.