Masters Degree Show

MA FA P/T2- MAJOR STUDY

Artist Statement

Robert Smith

My most recent body of work is an attempt to take an experience and unpick it, in an attempt to understand the layers of this experience and try to understand each element of this experience more fully. I began to examine an everyday task and to try and reframe it; to think about it in different way.

I chose something mundane and repeatable, something that is normally automatic but had the potential to be looked at in a different way, something that I could test, over and over. Allan Kaprow writes about brushing his teeth as 'Art' in his text 'Art which can't be art' and in this text he talks briefly about a Duchampian mode of translating a non-art event into an art context, although he sees his own action slightly differently, (without the art gallery destination).

He states 'I began to pay attention to how much this act of brushing my teeth had become routinized, nonconscious behaviour, compared with my first efforts to do it as a child. I began to suspect that 99 percent of my daily life was just as routinized and unnoticed; that my mind was always somewhere else; and that the thousand signals my body was sending me each minute were ignored". (Kaprow, 1993, p221).

And so to the selection of my 'unnoticed', my 'routinized'. Each morning and each evening I walk and often use this time to think about my art- making, to listen to music, sports commentaries, to re-run daily scenarios and often to reminisce. It was soon apparent I rarely thought about the walk, the landscape, my body, the footfall: it was automatic, muscle memory, pedestrian, as Kaprow's Nonconscious.

What struck me most clearly on the walks and while subsequently making drawings of these experiences was the idea of being both there and not there, present and absent, because as I moved through the landscape, I was often thinking about something else. I was often experiencing something different- I was feeling a disconnection with the landscape. The act of walking can be seen as an aesthetic act, an everyday banal act, a mode of transport and an active engagement with the landscape. The walk also offers this chance for a separation of direct experience and disengagement. I was often mentally travelling somewhere else, a 'Robinsonner' as Rimbaud may have said. I am immersed in memory, in music, in sports commentary, in thoughts about art, but very rarely the landscape itself.

Bruce Nauman produced a work called "Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor)" in 1999, and the video was taken of him undertaking an everyday task on his ranch-namely the setting of corner posts for new fencing or a new boundary. The film is an unedited and un-cut observation of him completing this task and this really helped to set the rules for my current visual work. Nauman considered the video work complete once the task was complete. I am now able to work directly from the films of my walks without the problems associated with an aestheticisation of the work produced. I am able to stop working/drawing/painting when the video stops (when my walk stops). I find this to be incredibly liberating and taking this position has enabled me to experiment with different ways of re-experiencing and communicating this walked experience through drawing.

In terms of the rules for the visual works I am making, Cy Twombly has also proved to be inspirational in a very direct way. Twombly made notes about colour choices and this information has helped me to streamline my practice, again without over-aestheticising the drawings in production. He says "Red is reserved for flesh + Blood', while brown represents 'earth'. Also included in this 1962 composition is a furious swirl of green paint and pencil. 'Mirror', reads the accompanying annotation. Beside it is a smudge of white paint, which apparently denotes clouds. Elsewhere on the palette, white is given the attribute of 'diluting dreams' (Cullinan, 2008, p183)

As a result of this you will see in my work, one colour for the horizon, one for the trees/buildings, one for the sky, one for the dog, and so on. These simple rules enable me to work freely as the decision on colour is already made before I try to interpret the video. This has enabled me to build up the layers of the image/experience in stages. One of the challenges of working in this way is to capture something multiple times as it moved toward me on the film. Trees are drawn multiple times; as I see them, as I approach them and as I pass them. The painter Amy Sillman has spoken about the hidden layers of a painting never seen, as the painting changes over time, and this idea had often concerned me in the past. Within my work now is a deliberate attempt to show the multiplicity of each of the elements of the action of the work, and develop the walked experience, at the same time.

The use of the boardwalk as a floor piece in tandem with some of the drawings encourages new views and new experiences. Using the board walk is voluntary, but does offer a new opportunity to move through the space while considering the work. The boardwalk encourages a separation from the experience of the ground, whilst offering a more direct relationship with the wall based work. The boardwalk also gives us a bodily scale and the making of the work allows for the actions of many bodily gestures. The action and experience of walking can therefore be present in both the making and the viewing of the work.

Continuing to explore the conceptual rules I have set within the current work, and the possibilities of new experiments will inform my future practice. I see opportunities to expand my drawing practice through the stimulations of new walks, new films and new experiences.

Selected Bibliography

INGOLD, Tim. The Life of Lines. 2015. Routledge.

KAPROW, Allan. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, J. Kelly (Ed), 1993. University of California Press.

NELSON, Mike. Triple Bluff Canyon. 2004. Modern Art Oxford.

RICHARDS, Judith Olch (Ed). 2004. Inside The Studio; Two Decades of Talks with Artists in New York. ICI. New York.

TWOMBLEY, Cy. Cycles and Seasons. Nicholas Serota (Ed). 2008. Tate Publishing.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/nauman-setting-a-good-corner-allegory-and-metaphor-ar00576- Accessed 06/08/2019