The Art of Forgetting

I have undertaken to try and produce a range of artworks that are eminently forgettable. I want to see if I can erase my ego and produce works that are unnoticed or eclipsed by the setting or the everyday around them. I want to do this for several reasons, firstly to push my thoughts on memory and art and secondly, to understand why some artworks are forgotten, and what is happening in the process of forgetting. I hope that this exercise will shed some light on how the memory works and whether it is possible to consciously produce forgettable art or whether art becomes forgettable because its bad, indistinguishable from works around it, falls outside the artistic canon or for some other reason.

So sitting down with materials and ideas, I begin making work. But none of it so far appears to be forgettable. Am I doomed to failure before I start or is there something else going on in the way I make art.

With colleagues this week I showed them the work I’ve been making and solicited their feedback. But I could have answered the question myself. The work I made was memorable, particularly the film (working title armless which will become The Jealous Memory).

I think this is happening because before I can make new work I often have to purge myself of all the remaining ideas for work that have been swilling around my head for weeks, months or sometimes years. These ideas have a habit of popping up after a gestation and I cant do anything until I have attended to them.

Gregory Hayman, The Jealous Memory, film 2014

It is curious. As an undergraduate, I found that I sometimes was at my most creative after a unit hand-in. It was as if I had been incubating a body of work during the preceding period and adrenalin or the relief of completing and handing in work unleashed an excess of creative energy that I could not ignore. Sometimes in these post-hand in periods I often produced some of my best works – like the piece which was short-listed for the Jerwood Drawing Prize – this and the other pieces linked to it emerged in one of these creative orgies.

So in the past few weeks I have made 7 artworks worthy of documenting and sharing, and another 3 are in production. What then of the project to realise the forgettable? Clearly, I have failed thus far and with several other works doomed to fail I am seriously running out of time or energy to attempt my quest. It may be that after this period of artistic fecundity, I will have provided myself with the space to attempt the works I plan, although, I know not what form they will take. I am thinking about the pared down or stripped back aesthetic of artists like Gedi Sibony or Carla Black but I wonder whether that is too easy an ambition to seek to develop or whether it is too darn difficult and that to make things which seem simple is in fact the most challenging artwork to make.

My Notes on: ‘Unmonumental the object in the 21st century’

A book produced by the New Museum in New York to mark an inaugural exhibition at its new home. The aim of exhibition and the book is to try and detect a global trend towards the ‘fragmentary and contingent’ in some of the stronger sculpture being made in the 1st decade of 21st-century.

“Making art in the 21st-century is just the same as making art in any other century, except for the money the coats everything like ash. It is accompanied by the creation of artist hierarchies where vanity and insecurity go hand-in-hand like the opposing strains of a Labradoodle.” So says Richard Flood in his introduction. Apart from his obvious comments on money and a deep sense of stratification in the art world, Flood believes that contemporary artists are clinging to nostalgia as if it were an antidote to some terrible disease. Other artists cling to technique, which has become “the varnished mausoleum for masterpieces.” He continues, “nowadays there are masterpieces everywhere, racing into the marketplace like sperm to the womb. Paintings are, of course, where the masterpieces are most frequently identified, they are also found in highly produced moving image works digitised photography, drawings and the lately rehabilitated art of collage and occasionally sculpture, particularly if there are high fabrication costs.”

Gedi Sibony

Flood is pretty damning of the art world especially the part responsible for the canonisation of so-called masterpieces. He believes in the current age that no time is wasted waiting for an art work to be awarded the connoisseurial status of masterpiece. He just believes that are crowned when some art-world guru pronounces a work so and that’s that. In his words “the appellation has replaced the reality.”

He believes the masterpiece syndrome is neither a reaction to the instability of our times but just the marketplace. He believes the time is right for the anti-masterpiece–things that are cobbled together, or pushed and prodded into a state of suspended animation–stubbly, brutish forms that “know something of the world in which they may are made.”

He believes that is anti-masterpiece can be identified in the work’s materials–those materials are ones redeemed from the rubbish heap and are Franciscan in their simplicity. Extravagant gestures have given way to a handshake or a hug (maybe even a shrug). Sculpture, he believes, is one of the final frontiers for the artist who truly wants to tempt fate. Outside of the white box, today’s most innovative, essential sculpture is testing the limits. One of its strongest characteristics is the inherent ability to camouflage itself from any formal hierarchy. Traditional sculptural materials that were long approved by the market are not the favoured materials of the contemporary sculptor.   There isn’t enough time or distance to perpetuate monuments because we live in a world of half gestures but there’s no definitive stance because the sands shift incessantly over a desert of evidential truth. Sculpture is now that thing that jams its foot in the door and scurries around looking for a comfortable corner from where the new becomes inevitable. No absolutes are reliable and no hierarchies are consistent to that which seems most part of the world and its freshness, rawness and anxiety trumps the autopsies of acceptable in the negotiable. Sculpture is the medium that knows best how to live in the present and find the past.

The book features the work of a number of artists. Most notable for me and my interests are Isa Genzken – the German artist who lives and works in Berlin.. Genzken’s play with scale and montage produces assemblages which combine lost and unlikely combinations of objects which are coloured themselves and/or have colour drizzled over them.

Other artists whose work I found interesting were Aaron Curry- retro fifties feel to the pieces, and Tom Burr – interiors and flat plains like Jesse’s work and Carol Bove, which must have inspired Benedict’s work.

Gedi Sibony

 For me personally, the work of Gedi Sibony’s is most inspiring. He uses construction materials, carpet, plywood, cardboard etc. there’s more than a hint of Jessica Stockholder here – an interest of mine since year 1.

Jessica Stockholder