What defines my visual or practical language? Action.

In my latest piece, I have attempted to create a scene, a three dimensional still from a performance that suggests the end of the world in a tongue-in-cheek way. I have taken some inspiration from the cheap sci-fi films of the 1950’s by using UFO’s and strange deformed monsters (in this case, an extremely tall elephant). The work itself is a full of various actions, from beginning with its creation, to the final look. It began when I was playing with cling film around my arm and deciding it looked quite animal-like. While none of it was planned initially, ideas I’d been having all year went into the creation of the piece. One of the most important things for me in its formation was the action of wrapping the cling-film around my body, creating moulds to create everything with. To me, a lot of the creation was itself a performance – wrapping the cling film around my arm, struggling to cut it off each time and sowing it together, then sowing each people together to resemble something unlike me but where you can recognise what the parts came from; spinning around making myself sick to create a shape to sculpt pieces out of – in many ways, the action of created the piece is just as important as the completed piece itself.

I often work with the mindset of failing. What I mean by this is I don’t think about rating or comparing my work with others, or how people will see it while I’m making the piece, as it will influence the outcome of the piece, most likely negatively as it will be less true to the original idea. If I were to experiment and fail with a piece of work, I’d feel a lot happier than if I were to do repeat something I know and get a great mark.
While I am obviously influenced by certain things and my work shows this, I try not to copy/emulate anything that anyone or I previously have done. I like the idea of creating something truly original.

Antonio López says that the photographs of Gregory Crewdson capture isolated moments with no past and no future, and an imaginary possibility hangs over them like a pregnant pause.
I think Crewdson’s and my work are quite similar. We have both created pieces which take a snapshot of time, and they suggest that something is happening before and after but that’s it. It’s up to the viewer to decide this.
With my piece, I added sound which hints what’s happening, but that stopped with silence, so the rest of it was up to the imagination of any onlookers.
One reason to create a piece of work showing a still of an action, rather than creating a film with the action occurring is that to have a piece of work which doesn’t show exactly what’s going on creates a kind of enigma. Nothing is more menacing than the imagination left to its own devices.

In my current piece of work, I can see a strong relationship to some of the work of Joseph Beuys, for example ‘The Pack’ (1969). It’s a line of sleighs, each with a torch and a blanket, leading up to a van. Rather than being a performance or action piece, it merely suggests that of an action happening and there are some people who find this a lot more powerful than if Beuys was to show the action itself as it’s open to a lot more interpretation.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of Beuys’ work as I find it too conceptual and pretentious. I feel the pieces exhibited in the Tate Modern in 2005 were uninspiring and missed all points. A lot of Beuys’ work to me felt very forced, as if he thought for too long before creating it, and didn’t let anything go to chance and this is possibly what ruined it for me.
In some ways, my work is a lot more obvious as a performance than Beuys’ work, but at the same time, there are many different connotations to it. I feel that while my work has certain meanings to me, these shouldn’t be imposed on other people and the piece can be related to many other things or nothing at all, and enjoyed as a purely visual piece.

In my work, the most important action is that of thought. I spend a lot of my time racking my brains for ideas, and to many people, this constitutes as laziness. But to me, all my best ideas come from lying around, thinking or dreaming. Many of these ideas I promptly forget, others I unsuccessfully try and remember, knowing I’d just thought of a great idea, and the remainder I remember and become the basis to my art. I’ve found lately that I’m often dreaming about things from the perspective of watching a film I’ve never seen, and imagining it.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. (Newton’s 3rd Law)

During a trip interrailing around Europe in 2003, I visited the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna where there was an exhibition on Viennese Actionism including work by Hermann Nitsche. I walked around literally in shock of what was in front of me. I'd never seen anything like it, but it was probably the most influential exhibition I've seen in my life. As the title suggests, the work is about action, but it was also very political. The main thing I felt it was trying to achieve (and succeeding in) was its ability to shock the viewer. It also felt like the whole movement was trying to rebel against the world and the most powerful way they could do this was also the most shocking.
This year, I visited Saatchi's Triumph of Painting exhibition. To me, the stand out pieces there were Nitsche's Splatter Paintings. They had urgency to them which I find is rarely achieved in painting.

I'm not sure how much the work of the Actionists directly influences my work. I don't intend to shock people and at the moment, there isn't any real political message that goes into my work. I have regularly tried to create work in a similar style to some of the Actionist pieces but often feel like it would just be a b-grade copy of a piece created 50 years ago. In a sense, the work Nitsche et al is entirely the opposite of what I’m creating right now. While I’m making clean, almost beautiful art, the Actionists were creating rude, angry, dirty pieces which were intended to alarm people.

Parts of my work could relate to film-makers like Ray Harryhausen who created the special effects for films like ‘The Beast From 20000 Fathoms’ as I have a sci-fi element running through my work, although I haven’t seen enough of his work to be able to call him an influence. Maybe by watching films from this era, like ‘Them’ and ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’ also gave me some ideas for how I want my work to look.

Also, Christo & Jeanne-Claude could be seen as an influence in the way they transform structures and spaces into something completely different by wrapping them in materials. Their latest piece was designed to give the effect of a sea of orange in Central Park, New York. While I find what they do interesting, I wouldn’t say that I am influenced by what they do.
Salvador Dali is another artist that I find quite fascinating and love the style of, and sometimes I feel like my work has a similar sort of surreal theme to it, I wouldn’t say he’s a direct influence on my work.

During a talk with Bill Drummond, somebody asked him about his influences. While he didn’t mention anybody specific, he said that he’s influenced by everything. When thinking about it, I probably feel the same way. Everything that I walk past, see or think about and everybody that I talk to, whether not I take an idea from that, it influences the direction I go in. If I see a piece of work I like, I may not try and copy it, but it might give me some inspiration. At the same time, seeing a piece of work I don’t like might make me decide to steer clear of doing anything looking like that. On the other hand, it might motivate me more by making me want to do something far better than that piece. The same thing goes to everything in my life. By just noticing something, it will make me think something and in one way or another, influence me.

Several people have said to me that they feel that by knowing me, it adds more to the work, which in some ways is good, but I’d rather have my work totally separated from my persona, because it takes away from the piece itself.

I feel in the future my work will take on a more performative/film based practise. I feel at the moment my work is quite theatrical in style.

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." -- Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

I like the idea of this. What van de Snepscheut is saying is that doing an action is entirely different to thinking about doing the action.

There are many philosophical arguments that say what can constitute as an action:
“If a person's head moves, she may or may not have moved her head, and, if she did move it, she may have actively performed the movement of her head or merely, by doing something else, caused a passive movement. And, if she performed the movement, she might have done so intentionally or not.” (George Wilson, 2002)

The above two quotes are slightly different ideas of what constitutes as an action. I agree with the second asking if because the persons head moved, it constitutes as an action. But it only states here it wasn’t necessarily an action by her. To me, everything has come around because of one action or another. With my current work, I feel an important part of the piece was its creation. Wrapping the cling film around my body and creating ‘organic’ moulds, then sowing them together to create other forms was one of the most important parts of the piece to me.

“There is nothing inherently deviant about using a syringe to inject opiate into one's arm because doctors do it all the time in hospitals - deviant behaviour is no more than behaviour people so label. However arbitrary the labelling process, it is the fact that the criminal chooses to engage in the behaviour knowing that it can be so labelled that distinguishes criminal choices from other choices” (John Braithwaite, 1989)
I like this. It says that while there are two actions which are virtually the same, they can be perceived in totally different ways. I’m interested in the action of social behaviour, what’s perceived as acceptable and not and the way people act without thinking of the surroundings. I’m also interested in the fact that in modern society, so many actions are taken for something they’re not and the consequences of these are wrong (for example, political correctness).

With a piece of work I created in a corridor, it was perceived in a different way to work that I create in a studio. People who wouldn’t normally see the work don’t know what to do when they walk past a piece of work in a corridor and the reactions to it are far less successful. Also, there’s a set of guidelines you have to keep to when working in public space for health and safety reasons. After my work abruptly fell on somebody’s head, it became clear that I had to remove it at once. In a way, this made me rather annoyed because I don’t feel it ever achieved its full potential. But by creating work in a public place, the rules they provide you with often mean the work is never as full as the artist may like. On thing I did like was the idea that anybody can see the work, and being in such a public place means the work becomes less about the artist who’s created it but the people viewing it. They’ll see the piece themselves and make up there own personal view of it rather than if you see a piece in a gallery where you’re often almost told what to think about the piece.
I have never had an urge to try and understand my work, so writing an essay on the visual and practical language of my work, I find difficult. I feel like writing about a piece of work and trying to find out what the piece means (especially when there is no specific meaning to it) takes away from the work. I like the idea of a piece of work being there without any information about it so that viewers can make what they want of it themselves.

2005-05-05 (perhaps a younger, less matured mercer)