Dear Friend,
Think of a recent meal that has repeated on you, where one dominating flavour re-asserts itself like a bad dream over the rest of your day. A meal in which you spent the next ten hours tasting that same flavour, an alchemised remnant of its initial taste. The garlic of the garlic bread in the starter. The acerbic roast of that extra black coffee that you didn’t need at 3 p.m. The fatty sludge of too much peanut butter. They all point distortedly to that initial thing, which may have been more delicious at its outset, and yet, always, given enough hours of digestion, makes you feel a little worse. That is what this space is for; for that which repeats, reoccurs, and remains as a trace in the cavity of one’s mouth. Because what is commentary but evidence of the (in)digestive?
It was 11:50 a.m. I had had so many coffees that I was vibrating. After a good year and a bit without caffeine, I was strung out and intoxicated. Since the morning’s first sip, an animal had been living underneath my skin. It crept, palpated, swarmed. It did animal-like things. Some of those things were with my organs. And yet for all this movement, none of the caffeine removed the fundamental layer of exhaustion that was the reason for this excessive consumption.
When I’m so tired that my bones ache, my first inclination is complaint. I say ‘I’m just so tired’, as though if I say it enough times, the state of exhaustion will shift. It is a wish and a demand. An act of faith. I’m attempting to manifest energy with the same desperation as the saint attempting to manifest something of God. Nothing shifts exhaustion more effectively than caffeine - and a communicative plea. And nothing is more faith-y, than a verbal proclamation.
I'm just so tired, whines my racing heart.
I think in part the caffeine fixation is an outcome of a recent turn in my employment. In this new labour, I have encountered a plenitude of boredom. And so the coffee makes a day glitter, forcibly. It means that I’m too involved with the internal chemistry of my body to experience much of the external world that I’m trying to suppress.
Aside from the caffeine, I have turned to reading The Book of Disquiet each morning as a mental salve. This is Fernando Pessoa’s meditation on life amid the flattening, numerate boredom of a bookkeeper. In between the contemplation of ledgers, the narrator gathers aphoristic, ecstatic fragments that are like many, many hits of a bong. One such snippet from this morning:
“Right now I have so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say that I suddenly feel tired, and I’ve decided to write no more, think no more. I’ll let the fever of saying put me to sleep instead, and with closed eyes I’ll stroke, as if petting a cat, all I might have said.”
Where is my kitten?
Since I graduated from art school in 2019, I have worked many jobs. So many jobs within so many sectors that I have come to devise methods and modes of job-working and job-applying that are almost as creative and disturbing as anything that I made at art school. These labours and my many methods of gathering them were born out of the ragged necessity of graduating in London with £100,000 of student loan debt from a creative degree. Which is to say that you must be resourceful if you are to survive.
Given this multitude of jobs and the exigencies of boredom, I have spent a lot of time thinking about art school. One aspect of reflection was the period at the end of the year when the school descended into the chaos of the degree show, a month-long in which the graduating students turned their gaze towards the outside world.
Those who were not graduating were asked to show a selection of what they had produced throughout the year to a panel of tutors. It was an expectation of the institution that we would have a certain level of productivity each year, throughout the year, which they could examine. Many of the tutors did this reluctantly, refusing to enforce too hard the demands of the academy, but the experience of standing in front of a group of hierarchical powers was chastening. The aim was ultimately the assignment of numbers, a relative grade. They did what they could to make it not feel meaningful and yet still, it had the feel of a standardised assessment, a strange concept when applied to the subjectivity of art.
Each year in the assessment I encountered the same difficulty. Nothing I produced during my years in art school seemed to be physical enough, object enough, or complete enough. Nothing looked like ‘Art’. I would look at the tutors sitting at tables listening to me and think that they looked frustrated and perplexed. I made up that what they were struggling with was not the lack of what I had produced but the lack of narrative that I had produced around the nothingness. If I had said I had not made anything substantial and it was a piece of performance art about the vicissitudes of expected artistic labour, I think they would have responded encouragingly and well. However, what I said was always inflected by a parasitical doubt. I was perpetually yearning for a finished object and yet constantly unable to produce the hoped-for thing. Everything that I made was too small or too provisional. Pathetic, ugly objects or fragmented ideas that I could never figure out how to display, or where to put them. Mostly, I kept loose-leaf pages of neurotic plans and tiny objects in old shoe boxes, pretending like they were steps towards a ‘real’ thing that I could stick on a plinth, or display in amalgam, or at least make some claim about a unified intention. The tutors in their kindness always tried to reassure me that eventually, it would come together; eventually, I would make some 'Art'.
With the prospect of the final show, what they encouraged did kind of happen. Acutely aware that this was the one uncertain opportunity to be inserted into an art world - to move from the more anonymous background, where art students gathered, closer to a potential foreground - I was induced into the excitement of the debutante’s ball. Driven by a deep unconscious force, I started to make things for the first time that looked like, felt like, smelt like, and sounded like art. I hung things on walls. I made plinths and stands. I engaged in the exhausting rigmarole of exhibition display, a practice that is as stressful and tedious as moving house. The things I produced gathered cohesion, seemingly, enough at least for the tutors to no longer look at me with the same concern and frustration they had in prior years. I had finally started to make recognisable ‘Art’, and the irony was that they had absolutely nothing to do with my own life.
What I didn’t see, what I failed to comprehend, was that I was producing objects for an imagined life. For an imagined room in an imagined house for an imagined person. This imagined reality haunted my peripheral vision. I say that and I don’t mean metaphorically. I mean it seemed to exist in the corner of my eye for an entire year. I could see it there but I didn’t know it. I was aware of it and yet I was entirely asleep to the desire for its fulfillment and how that was the guiding force for much of my artistic decision-making. Despite the image's power - or because of it - this vision never came into focus. It was an unreal place, made up of an amalgam of rooms that I had never been into but perhaps seen on TV, in books, or online, or just simply absorbed from the cultural imaginary. From what I could gather, this imagined space was the empty home of a collector. The primary space was a modernist square box with empty walls and floor-to-ceiling glass. Beyond the glass was a various array of green foliage. In the impersonal stillness afforded by excessive wealth, there was a display of my art.
What beguiles me now is that it took three years post-graduation to realise that this image had been disciplining me throughout my final year of art school. It wasn’t until I threw away the entirety of my degree show, ripping things apart, and taking most of it to the recycling dump that the spell lifted. For the first time, I saw the reality of this empty room and its power over me. I saw for the first time how it had determined what I made, not only in essence but in actuality. Without knowing it, I had spent my final year in service to this image, an image that I had not chosen nor really seen with any acuity. The room dictated the size, shape, design, and material of my degree show. I created large hulking sculptures and impossibly fragile glassworks to serve its purpose. Everything was breakable, and most of it aimed for an impenetrable beauty that was meant to be an accompaniment to this unconscious space. The work was cold and hard and wanted to never be touched but for the caress of sunlight through the glass panes of the modernist hellscape in the corner of my eye. Thus unmasked, I realised that I had acted in concert with this vision, colluding with it, toiling for it, lusting after it. Some part of me wanted to see this made-up place and so made work for it. I urged it into existence through my making, and my making awaited its existence.
And yet, disposal released the spell. Three years later, upon conscious examination, I could see I had produced artwork for a space that was void of moral, social, or spiritual value. It was a room that was devoid of life and people. I had wished for an abandoned place, an empty room, to stick large gallery-worthy objects that were interior decoration for this place of moneyed disembodiment.
Is this really what I wanted? What I had yearned for? The sudden clarity was unsettling. Where did this desire come from? Who had given it to me? Was this my own, or was it some kind of cultural inheritance? For the first time, I experienced the conscious despair of the empty room's vision, reckoning with the shadowy limits of my imagination. Apparently what my unconscious hoped for was a modernist mausoleum. How imaginative…I comforted my disturbance with the consolation that at least my mind had conjured plants to disrupt the deathliness of the empty room.
This insight into the empty room and its power over me led me to look through some of the earlier work that I made. The ugly objects that I stuck in boxes. While the empty room was structured by a disembodied wealth and fixity of attention, these cardboard boxes full of objects were the manageable outcomes of my own life. They were minor objects and ideas because my life and its material spaces had nothing to do with the spaces that, with the pressure of degree show, I had fantasised into being. The spaces that these objects existed in were under beds, in a cupboard in my mother’s house, or stacked in studios that were given to us as students that were temporary and changeable. They were made with contingency in mind. Contingency - a future event or consequence which is possible but not certain. Made with doubt. That was one of the things that it took me years to realise, that I had been making art not for my world, but for someone else’s. And worse still, it was not even objects for a world that I actually wanted to will into being.
I was left with a question; with access to some level of conscious awareness, what kind of world did I actually want to create Art for? What did I want to be in service to?
