From: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/art_news/schaun_belcher_saatchi_online_critics_choice_by_victoria_chaine_mendrzyk/6192

Shaun Belcher is a prolific artist whose practice encompasses photography, painting, drawing, poetry and song writing. We will focus here on his cartoons that are visible both on Saatchi Online and more extensively on his website.

Belcher frequently posts his doodles on his blog, which thus functions like a diary. They retrace his mood, his frustrations with the arts scene or his views on the art world with a deadpan humour. His drawings are a mixture between comics, scribbles and caricatures and are made with an unhesitating black pen. The message is straightforward and clear. In some of his cartoons such as “Give me the Turner Prize, I am as shit as anyone”, his slang vocabulary as well his definitive statements can have something moving and aggressive at the same time – as if distant remnants of teenage hood. They reveal an unsettled state of mind and tell disarmingly touching and droll stories.

His ironic and shameless comments on the art scene are indeed serious and make him at times sound desperately ambitious and direct. For instance “I am a pretentious 25 year old with no fucking skills but by networking, crawling, by doing voluntary works in a gallery I now have a small foothold on the art world…” By talking about his experience, he brings up questions that any artist might ask himself: How can I be visible as an artist in a saturated art scene? Can I make a living from my work? How can I network even more than I currently do? Even though his works refer a lot to very English contemporary art events such as the Turner Prize or the Nottingham art scene, they can apply to every artist striving to succeed and to be recognized.

Shaun Belcher was born in Oxford in 1959. He is currently living in Nottingham and is now a multimedia lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, freelance web designer and practicing digital artist.

To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here, and visit the artist’s own website, www.shaunbelcher.com.

Victoria Chaine Mendrzyk

Victoria Chaine Mendrzyk graduated with an MA Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, a BA in Fine Art and History of Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London and a BA in Philosophy from University of Paris X, Nanterre. She has worked for Beaux-Arts Magazine, the Grand-Palais and at the Maison Rouge in Paris, at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York, at Documenta 12 in Kassel and at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. She is also an international correspondent for Art India Magazine.

Published on 08-02-2010

Jackson Cage
Down in Jackson Cage
Well darlin’ can you understand
The way that they will turn a man
Into a stranger to waste away
Down in the Jackson Cage

Well I not exactly this far gone but there some pretty bad side-effects of the always-on internet life. As a lecturer in almost impossible to ’switch-off’ from the always on environment. Students are online on facebook and twitter and I actually push them into the ‘online’ life. But there are significant downsides. Soon it will so encompassing that I will only move once a day to ingest food (still a requirement) despite everything the web can do….not good healthwise. It a good job I still have to physically meet student body (despite e-learning ventures) or I’d probably lose use of my legs.

The enveloping nature of the internet means that everything we, see, do and think is processed through a web lens and recently I have noticed this happening to friends of mine too. Facebook is a dominant force in shaping the local arts groups events and actually channelling local arts debate. Like mobile phones what did we do before facebook…talk…ring…email…make posters…thinking back to my pre-internet art school how on earth did things happen at all? Happen they did though as my Alumni group on facebook for Hornsey College of Art attests..http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=189414558562

In writing this blog entry I will have a fairly constant online ‘audience’ through facebook and virtually everything I currently mulling over is now appearing as links on facebook or twitter or both. This can be useful as a kind of strategic bookmarking but instead of being personal and private it is open and capable of endless revision….in fact holding a fast opinion seems to be becoming ever more difficult. This can have unexpected bonuses but also problems arise. A factual mistake…e.g. did I really imagine a Ceramicist won the Nottingham Open show becomes a hard fact that has to be retracted. Private opinion is spread so quickly that it becomes more than a blog note and a career defining standpoint. Where is the boundary between a provisional and a fixed opinion. Or is that where we now stand in endless revisionism territory?

The price of spectacular connections across continents and time is a fluctuating lack of finality in artworks and strength of opinion. In a web that always on and always in a sate of flux these things become expendable. Springsteen’s album becomes simply a stream of out-takes, alternative album shots, a flood of all the mistakes he made as much as an album. Finality and craftsmanship becomes a negotiable stream. Today through twitter/facebook I became aware of a live performance of songwriter Tom Russell. Did it change the perception of the song because in a new context. The fixity of art-forms is lost. All very post-Derrida the academics would scoff..but it happening. How do young people hold an opinion in such mutable environments?

This is the real price of never-ending revisionism. The real artefact becomes lost in a fog of ‘versions’. I love to touch a vinyl album and remove the actual ’sculpted’ object. I remember sitting and staring at Matisse’s Red Studio painting when on loan to the ‘old’ Tate. I love this private photo I found on web (there are thousands of version sof this image in a range of hues) as it reminds one that no reproduction can supplant actual viewing.

More than simple cramp I feel that the internet has supplanted all the physical artefacts I once held dear and like the proverbial bathwater what have I and by extending the metaphor ‘we’ lost? I cannot put a finger on it yet but as I see students in our local tea shop flicking through positions and networks on their macbooks I feel a nostalgia for a pre-internet time of certainty and argument away from the shimmering stream. Oliver Reed banging his fist on the wooden table in a mock Parisienne cafe in Tony Hancock’s ‘The Rebel’ was a cliche but it feels more real than current debate. I can talk to everybody at once but really I am addressing no-one but mysefl in a loft space on a cold, dark winter night. Reality exists beyond the screen but somehow I have lost touch with it.

Maybe if the web splinters it may not be a bad thing. Content will start to re-assert itself as ‘definitive’ once again. Maybe people will read the same version, listen to the same song. This endless variety flowing across the screen will start to slow down and we will all have time to concentrate instead of time to be distracted.

To make art at this juncture is to my mind impossible. We are looking at the remnants of art-forms post-internet. We seek out the novelty, the half-finished..the mistake. With no fixity one cannot create anything but a blur? I am simply adding to the blur at present. I seek the fixed stare..a Ruskinian calm maybe and then I can proceed.

Artists at present are like so many sparrows flitting through the halls..which will survive to next summer and which will smash against their own reflections here?

Basically this means that ‘tethered applications’ and a kind of ‘ring-fencing’ of creativity and open-ness has started to creep into the web. This may mean that Peter Kay’s mum can simply book a expensive ryanair flight or swim around facebook but for the rest of us the long arms of capitalism seem to have finally found a way to literally ‘tether’ freedom.

Jonathan Zittrain’s book ‘The future of the internet and how to stop it’ seems even more prophetic than when first published in 2008 and all the debate flying around about the iPad and its meaning seem connected with his concepts of tethered applications.
http://futureoftheinternet.org/

Momus
Altermodern Week 2: What’s it all about, Nicolas? | NoiseLoop
http://www.noiseloop.com
Welcome back to Altermodern Week here on Click Opera. I very much liked how yesterday’s conversations went — in the wee small hours people were exchanging recommendations for Chinese pop videos. Today I want to round up definitions of the Altermodern, from its inventor, curator Nicolas Bourriaud, but also via the Chinese Whispers about the idea that have percolated through the press and the web since the Altermodern show opened at Tate Britain last month. In a way I’m just as interested in the misconceptions as the official version, and I think Bourriaud — eager not to overdetermine the idea in advance — has kept things tactically vague

Wayne Burrows
Altermodernism is yet another attempt to build a cack-handed theory that ignores the fact that Modernism contained every single aspect of Postmodernism at its own inception, including the irony and superficiality, alongside everything else it did (read Edith Sitwell’s Facade (1923) or Eliot’s Prufrock (1917) if you doubt it). And Surrealism was pushing post-colonial positions in the 1930s, hence its influence in places like Martinique and Francophone Africa (again, look at Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor for evidence). Much of the art theory of the past 50 years seems to have been one big concerted effort to ignore the grey areas and complexities that have made art interesting…but I’m guessing Bourriaud wouldn’t make the waves he does if he didn’t keep manufacturing a straw version of Modernism (which contained its own opposition) to gloss the present against…

Shaun Belcher
interestingly this set of articles written by one Momus and I believe it the ex Creation singer…good reports..there is something below the hysteria though …and it looks like modernism to me.

Shaun Belcher
check out stephen hicks below which a calmer analysis of what basically a end of the frippery of postmodernism..

Shaun Belcher

Hicks says…..My second theme will be that postmodern art does not represent much of a break with modernism. Despite the variations that postmodernism represents, the postmodern art world has never challenged fundamentally the framework that modernism adopted at the end of the nineteenth century. There is more fundamental continuity between them than discontinuity. Postmodernism has simply become an increasingly narrow set of variations upon a narrow modernist set of themes. To see this, let us rehearse the main lines of development.

Or your argument entirely?

Wayne Burrows
My favourite quote (can’t remember who said it, but it stuck in my mind) was to the effect that ‘postmodernism is the mannerist strain of modernism’, which I felt then (late 1980s/early 90s?) struck the proverbial nail squarely on its head, and still does…

Shaun Belcher
I like that a Postmodern Fin De Siecle Yellow Book era seems apposite..Hirst as the Wilde, Emin as Beardsley?

Which leaves us where..pre WW1 and Bourriaud as a new Roger Fry?

I dislike the ‘tie-in’ nature of much contemporary curation…even NC guilty with its spurious and completely facile aping of 1968 recently…one of reasons I think curation at NC ‘trendy’….

Bourriaud well aware of the echoing of ‘classic’ modenism and Altermodern. Can we see a pattern maybe?

Shaun Belcher
There was an excellent radio 4 (yes I must be 50 as I finally listening to radio 4!) on Frankfurt School and it struck me that much of what modern(post/alter)ism drew in terms of its ‘terroir’ was from this particular soil..Adorno, Benjamin etc..fatalistic, nihilistic, etc etc…the shock of WW2 led to its virtual manifesto being adhered across the art world….ending in Beuys and Richter..we can only fail..someone like Fuller with his positivist message was ridiculed by its followers….so we end up with Hirst’s mock religiosity..ironically..

Wayne Burrows
Fuller’s promotion of Ruskin was taken, I think, as part of the wider (big and small C) conservatism of the time, as in Thatcher’s comment on Victorian Values, the promotion (and frequent misconstruing) of Samuel Smiles’ ‘Self Help’ and the rest – somewhat wrongly, although many of his favoured contemporary artists weren’t much help in making his case either (eg: Robert Natkin).

There also seemed to be a bit of Oedipal revolt against Berger in there that led him to move from one extreme (ex-SWP Left) to the other (books like Left High and Dry: the Posturing of the Left Establishment) so his positions didn’t seem as nuanced or ever quite convincing (I talked to Christopher le Brun last year, and he mentioned that while he felt his painting was linked to the kind of Ruskin ideas Fuller promoted in Modern Painters, Fuller didn’t like his work largely because it was linked to the neo-Expressionism Norman Rosenthal was pushing, and NR was the enemy…). So I’m not sure Fuller ever made his case as well as he might have done, really…certainly less convincing on the UK turf than someone like Robert Hughes in the US, maybe…

Shaun Belcher
Interestingly there an article published in Modern Painters after his death where he cites ‘landscape painters’ much more convincingly (including Terry Shave! *Professor of Fine Art Nottingham Trent University)..I think the ‘High Church aura’ skewed his argument as did writing for Telegraph however a lot of the good stuff he did was thrown out too especially by the Goldsmiths crowd …

I would have thought Le Brun closer to Fuller than Rosenthal’s Neo Brutalists…in long term but then Fuller didn’t have long term..wonder how he’d react to present set up?

Shaun Belcher
I was interviewed by Goldsmiths twice in 1987 then again in 1988 on second occasion I referenced Fuller and they started screeching like hoot owls! To them he was the anti-marxist traitor…pivotal moment for me I thought they clowns…was year Hirst arrived and the rest is history. Still support Fuller not Craig Martin any day.

Shaun Belcher
Ah Ruskin as exemplar of a fake Victorianism Conservatism instead of the Ruskin of the Working Man’s College??….to this day there a fundamental clouding of his name and meaning…especially in Oxford …Ruskin School of Art V Ruskin College….two sides of a coin maybe?

Shaun Belcher
Ironically Berger the winner in short term. His Ways of Seeing in a pile in Waterstones (Foundation text) whilst no Fuller to be seen let alone read..I can see how Berger fits into the altermodern scenario and his Peasant Culture texts were ahead of their time. I feel Bourriaud has condensed essential traits of the post 1968 left..anti-colonialism…eco politics and anti-capitalism into a neat construct but once it examined in detail it does seem to fall apart.

Theorists seem agreed that postmodernism shot its metaphorical bolt but nobody seems quite sure where we are now…that indecision has been cleverly built into the altermodern ‘anti-theory’ positioning.

I like Momus’s idea of it merely being a ‘placeholder’ for whatever comes next. Hopefully it won’t be generated as before by cataclysmic war…but then maybe we already in that phase it simply, in an Orwellian sense, being kept beyond the borders of our comprehension. Haiti, Kabul, Baghdad..all becomes digital chaff…we are not receiving truth so what price artistic truth anyway? Seems like a vain posturing to even care..

Wayne Burrows
I think Fuller’s best case was the pressing for a moral dimension to art but what this meant got distorted, as the broadsheet left had at this point (and after 1968) too often conceded the meaning of morality to the right…thus (I suspect) the championing in the academies of such a profoundly conservative and academic artist as Warhol as a … See Moresubversive fugure when he’s more like a Versailles courtier to the New York glamour set; and then there’s the suspicion that tended (then at least) to attach to figures like Kiefer… Where Fuller failed (and he died at 42, so was probably still working all this stuff out – I think he’d have had some interesting things to say through the 90s/2000s had he lived) was in allowing his SWP instincts to see the situation as polarised: you have to choose one thing or the other, from a very narrow pairing of opposed choices (so, you’re either an old elitist Modernist or a tolerant Postmodernist, etc, even though both positions are wrong as they’re presented in such daft arguments). Maybe in time he’d have come round to the idea that Helen Chadwick and Therese Oulton, Ivon Hitchens and Ilya Kabakov, Sarah Lucas, Susan Hiller and Winifred Nicholson all offer viable models…

The Journey piece is a good critique, but also shows where Fuller’s thinking went astray – in arguing for the move from one extreme (marxism/materialism) to another (faith/transcendence) he misses what a cursory reading of a range of surrealist, expressionist and other writings (not least some of … See MoreHerbert Read’s excursions into Romanticism) could have told him, which is that the two aren’t contradictory: you don’t have to ‘make wagers on transcendence’ because the sublime is a function of the physical world we inhabit – the error is to think Descartes was talking about an absolute split not the two ends of a continuum (or, if he was, that his idea needs finessing to work convincingly): by insisting on ‘faith’ and ‘the spiritual’ (I imagine a meeting between Fuller and Tony Blair might have been entertaining) he fell into the trap that did, of course, produce exactly the nonsense he’s attacking in Lincoln (and again, as with le Brun, he fails to see how Richard Long stands pretty much in his own camp). I’m especially suspicious because although I didn’t see the LA show he mentions (The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890 – 1985) I do own the catalogue, which is very thorough and mainly persuasive as an argument linking Kandinsky/Mondrian via Malevich et al to certain strains in the present – and it doesn’t exclude the thinking of the 1920s and 30s around dimensions, relativity etc. I suspect his pat dismissal is based on an ideological stance rather than a coherent assessment, which I think is probably his weakness (I realise I’m slagging him a lot, so I’d add that I do think Fuller was an interesting thinker on art…) As is Bourriaud, to be fair, but neither is to be taken entirely on trust…

Igor Stravinsky “Poetics of Music” 1

“….knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal and equivalent capacity to forget knowing.”
Lapique by Jean Lescure 2

“I believe that art is the interpretation of emotion and consequently of the idea. I recognize that the discipline of the technique is necessary to this emotion, and at present I feel that the simpler the technique and more limited, the better the idea emerges.”

Henri-Gaudier Brzeska – Letter to Sophie Brzeska 3

“As I squeezed out everything that smacked of literature…I was so naturally a painter that the two arts, with me, have co-existed in peculiar harmony – there has been no mixing of the genres.”

Percy Wyndham-Lewis – Super-Nature V Super Real 4

“The poet thinks in images – art cannot teach anything – write across the paper instead of on the lines”

Andrei Tarkovsky – Sculpting in Time 5

“Works of first intensity obey the dictates of their own material, works of second intensity imitate and ‘disperse’”

Ezra Pound – Theory of Imagism 6

“No ideas but in things”

William Carlos Williams – ‘A sort of song’ 7

Welcome to the Future. We live in a supposedly always on ‘digital’ age where ideas and concepts like megabytes freely flow across borders. In this ‘Alter-Modern’ world all previous states of the avant-garde have been absorbed, rendered obsolete or simply been ‘re-configured’ if we believe ‘postmodernism is coming to an end’ (Tate Gallery Alter-modernism 2008) .

The modernist quotes above are not instantly available from the internet. They were all written down painstakingly by hand by the author into a folder of ‘art notes’ kept during the heyday of his physical practice in the 1980’s. They are not easily dropped into facebook or to be found on twitter yet they have an immediacy and a relevance, in my opinion, to the current debate around the manipulation and ‘dumbing down’ of certain parts of the international art world.

We live in such a ‘sound-bite culture’ that it becomes easy to forget that the achievements of the original modernists were hard won and against prevailing trends. In this ‘connected’ world where vacuous posturing and dilettante ‘intellectualism’ reign supreme it can be chastening to read anything from an artist in the early part of the 20th century especially against the din of success and ‘flash’ fact or fiction.

What was once the preserve of a ridiculed and elitist band be it in Bloomsbury or Manhattan has become a far more fluid, fractured and fashion-orientated ‘scene. That scene bares little resemblance to the world of Wolf, Bunting and Yeats, Pound and Eliot. Maybe that is a ‘democratic’ good as some would argue but year on year the ‘cutting-edge’ of this new cyber ‘elite’ becomes more blunted, more introspective and less vital. The death of Dash Snow is somehow emblematic. His threadbare output couched in bohemian verbiage and his limited artistic estate popularised and administered for the best return but all along we know this is merely role-play. This is an affectation of avant-garde principles not the real thing.

So where did the cutting edge lose its cutting quality? Do we ransack the archives for the exact moment? Was it Fluxus…..Cobra.. was it Barcelona or East Village….Miami or Berlin? Myths outweigh the reality.….

So do we examine the avant-garde’s apparent ‘implosion’ against a wider backdrop? In terms of my own practice it became most apparent in the mid to late 1980’s. It seemed then and seems now that the very process of ‘making’ itself started to lose ‘currency’ for a certain part of the art world and ‘thinking’ or at least the affectation of thinking became its default replacement. The internet of itself had hardly begun then so it cannot be blamed for creating the phenomenon but its arrival did signal a massive acceleration in the propagation of singular themes and certain dogmas.

The web allowed disparate and possibly provincial scenes to merge and intellectual bodies, be it in studio groups or academia, to find common cause and we began a new era of unacknowledged ‘dogma’. The idea that ‘knowing could be accompanied by an equal and equivalent capacity for not knowing’ was anathema to minor talents emboldened by group certainties. This new ‘certainty’ translated swiftly by osmosis into a new dogmatism in the academies of learning. One not only shouldn’t get one’s hands ‘dirty’ with the reality of stuff but one could quickly pick up a intellectual (usually French) justification for not toiling away in a studio. From being places of ‘instruction’ the academies became places of ‘imitation’.

In Pound’s words we had arrived at a period dominated by works and artists of ‘secondary intensity’….imitation was and is still rife. To walk round a modern art college is to view the international art world as seen in a magazine then turned into a template and recast again and again. The place of ‘ideas’ became an ancillary to career development. The idea that an artist should struggle with the physical aspect of paint or steel became ‘old-fashioned’ as artists busily networked and contrived ever more fanciful variations on themes. Yet the concept of a ‘new’ idea hard won through years of toil as exemplified by many an early modernist suddenly fell from favour. Art markets gorged on the fountain of investor’s money and had no time to wait. Careers exploded, imploded and fortunes were made as a completely new industry was born.

That industry fed on secondary works of art. Certain artists with either too much integrity or an inability to jump on the bandwagon continued to apply the methodology and principles of the works of first intensity but were and are increasingly ignored. Fractured by the new ‘everybody wins’ cash imperative these two art worlds began to exist side by side. They still do.

So if this analysis is correct and the art world has become a double-headed beast how do we then is the artist to proceed? How do practicing artists produce artworks in a fractured system? Or is it impossible to actually function in a dysfunctional model?

Despite convincing evidence to the contrary there are reasons to remain optimistic. It is hard to believe that technology will actually affect the outcome as much as it once appeared to be doing. Cyber reality is so different to actual reality that, apart from the most obsessive 3-d avatar driven individuals, there will come a time when fashion in the art-world will swing back towards experiential theory and fully craft-based instruction systems. The signs are there that this is already occurring. Students brought up on a screen-based diet are finding the simple pleasures of drawing and writing to be vastly more satisfying than photo-shopping and pointing camcorders at anything and everything. This is because the complexity of actual hand-eye co-ordination goes beyond anything achievable through point and shoot technology.

Practice….or creating artworks.. or simpler still ‘creating’ will increasingly draw on a constellation of ‘inputs’ and ‘outputs’ some of which may be digital some of which may not. The underlying patterns of investigation and exploration that create meaningful artworks will need to resolve and connect with the early modernist programmes and the depth of intellectual and practical endeavour they represent.

No ideas but in things?

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Endnotes
1. Stravinsky, Igor ‘Poetics of Music in the form of six lessons’ Harvard University Press Cambridge 1947
Available from: http://www.archive.org/stream/poeticsofmusicin002702mbp#page/n17/mode/2up
Accessed 6.01.2010

2.Jean Lescure, Lapicque, Flammarion, 1956

3. Ede, H. S. Savage messiah / by H.S. Ede Fraser, London : 1971

4.Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writing 1913-1956.
Introduction and notes by Walter Michel and C.J. Fox. London: Thames and Hudson, 1969.

5. Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time – Reflections on Cinema, The Bodley Head, London, 1988

6. Pound’s artists: Ezra Pound and the visual arts in London, Paris and Italy
Richard Humphreys, Tate Gallery, 1985

7. Williams William Carlos The Wedge The Cummington Press 1944
Available from: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/
Accessed: 06.01.2010

http://www.sharkforum.org/2009/12/shaun-belcher-and-moogee-new-y.html

check out sharkforum

http://www.sharkforum.org

Shaun Belcher November 2009

Like a viewer lodged behind a camera obscura that which I describe in the following short article may appear upside down and nonsensical to some and is but a snapshot of my wandering thoughts at this particular juncture.

I am a somewhat unusual case to be writing about my ‘fine art’ practice (Indeed I am not sure I if I have one at all in the conventional sense) as between the years 1993 to 2003 I could be hardly said to have ‘practiced’ the finer art at all. However I did continue with other ‘praxis’ notably poetry (published by a Scottish academic press) and song-writing (I released a series of Americana CDs).

In conventional terms this kind of indeterminacy and genre-hopping is frowned upon as not being quite serious enough. Thankfully I have enough USA based models to not worry too much about that e.g. Terry Allen and his ilk. However whatever my ‘practice’ entailed throughout this period one thing remained constant. My commitment and seriousness about what I was depicting in whatever medium. What also remains constant is any wider appreciation of my wanderings…especially here in Nottingham U.K. I remain an ‘outsider’ artist in more ways than one.

Throughout my ‘art-working’ life some things have remained stubbornly, one might even say obsessively’, constant. Be it in digital images as recently or in drawing or poetry and song I have remained constant in delineating a clearly ‘map-able’ terrain. This terrain extends about 5 to 20 miles in radius of my hometown of Didcot in Oxfordshire, England. Always the poor relation of the illustrious centre of learning that resides but a stones throw away.

There runs a hard core of intention throughout which draws on politics, ecological thinking and that obsessive returning to notions of ‘place’ and ‘landscape’. I regard my work as being a mapping of constant themes which recur sometimes years later. The River Thames is one theme the Berkshire Downs another. Local folk tales and oral literature mined from local libraries another. A recent song ‘Hanging Puppet’ drew on one such ‘tale. In fact one could describe it as artistic ‘Anglocana’ to differentiate it from Americana. I have written well over 2000 songs over the years..mostly recorded in lo-fi and only really coming to life when in the hands of other more talented musicians (see the Moon Over the Downs CD 2003). Poetry has appeared in various magazines and in the Scottish anthology The Ice Horses (1996). I have at least 4 unpublished complete books of poetry on the shelf.
One could describe my work as multi-disciplinary with a strong streak of green politics colouring the waters beneath.

I have drawn on some clear influences in writing and art. Seamus Heaney’s concept of a personal ‘Hedge School’ going back to John Clare is one thread. My forebear’s personal involvement in Agricultural Unions is another (see Skeleton at the Plough poems). I also am influenced by a ‘working class’ sense of writing picked up form Carver and Gallagher and other dirty realists. In song almost any Americana act would suffice but most importantly Townes Van Zandt, Lucinda Williams and Johnny Cash come to mind. I can reference them in a USA directed essay but it means nothing to the artworld or academia here which increases my sense of internal exile. I am not American but I have strong American influences going back to Walden lake.

To try and build an alternative approach I have increasingly been drawn back to the English Civil War when the notions of science and arts were more fluid and interchangeable. I have recently purchased a reproduction of Robert Plot’s Oxford a marvellous Natural History of Oxfordshire from 1677. In it one finds specimens such as ‘Stones that look like Horses’…wonderful….

It is this kind of merging of scientific natural history and folk-lore terminology that I now most interested in. Both in poetry (see Downland Ballads) and artworks (see TRACK..2009)

So how does theory inform my practice? Well I see no distinction between the various arts. I am widely read in poetry and song and that informs my practice whatever I do.

Join the School of Moogee

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=181984094372

So here things that really impressed me this year…yes impressed..not made me feel miserable, or reach for a doggy persona…or generally resort to spitting vitriolic posts at the perpetrators ….impressed….here goes…could be hard to get to 12

BEST SONGWRITER
Slaid Cleaves: Everything you love will be taken away
http://www.slaidcleaves.com
If one person personifies the best of the american songwriter tradition then Slaid is it. This record is to my ear his finest performance and best production..and that means it is very good indeed. Notable mentions in this field…Sam Baker, Malcolm Holcombe, Vanessa Peters and Gurf Morlix.

BEST GIG
HOWE GELB – BROADWAY CINEMA NOTTINGHAM

This was easy as I only saw about ten performances this year. Winner hands down was a brief solo set by Howe Gelb late one Friday night at our local cinema Broadway where Howe was introducing his film. Superb stuff….both film and songs..shame so short a set but hey glad to have him here however briefly. Second best was Gurf Morlix at The Maze followed closely by a bonkers but brilliant Norwegian folk set at one of Nick Butcher’s local Folkwit gigs (http://www.folkwit.biz)

BEST BOOK
PHILIP ROTH: EVERYMAN

I hardly read at all these days – everything is snippets from web and paper BUT I spent a week back home in Oxfordshire at my mother’s house and I read this straight through in one go. I have since purchased Exit Ghost. Stunning tale of an ‘Everyman’ sliding backwards from his ‘death’. Amazingly well written.

BEST POEM
JAMES WRIGHT: In Ohio

Again I hardly read poems nowadays at all but a chance purchase of James Wright’s ‘Above the River’ – the complete poems (Bloodaxe) opened my eyes to a wonderful poet.

WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE
MORE

BEST MEAL
I am blessed with a wonderful partner who cooks better than most chefs but when eating out this year two meals came joint first. One was freshly barbecued local fish on a verandah in Ayamonte in Spain as our friend Mike and his family made our honeymoon as perfect as a dream…..closely followed by a meal in Vila Real de Santo Anonio (Portugal! – a ferry across the water from Ayamonte)
Also deserving of a mention in despatches was a meal at The White Horse in Blakeney
http://www.blakeneywhitehorse.co.uk/

BEST SOFTWARE
ubuntu 9.10
http://www.ubuntu.com/
EASY IT NOT WINDOWS YET BUT IT GETTING DAMN CLOSE….and it free and not owned by capitalists (yet)
lets hope we all headed to a open source future

BEST CLOTHING ITEM
again easy..some black Pikolino shoes purchased day before my wedding…not only got me out of jail with future Mrs Belcher but are cool, and comfortable…and supposedly Eco friendly AND Spanish to boot…..

BEST DRINK
SAGRES BOHEMIA – could be because straight from fridge in a blazing hot Portuguese side street …but….very nice

BEST GADGET
ACER ONE NETBOOK ( cheap from Tescos)
Still not sure exactly why I have one but it brilliant as a MP3 player….running Ubuntu…sweet…

BEST FOOTBALL TEAM

Only one answer to this and despite major dissapointments The Arsenal still the most beautiful game out there

BEST EXHIBITION
ED RUSCHA – HAYWARD
A brilliant career and eye opening how much he done. The Johnny Cash of painting….enough said….

Mention for PRUSSIAN PROJEKTE in Sherwood, Nottingham for proving that not everything in the art world is bollocks ..well not locally anyway….well done Ed and 3rd Space…good stuff intelligently done…

BEST NEW ART GALLERY
CORNERSTONE : DIDCOT, OXON ARTS CENTRE
Half as pretentious as local edifices and probably twice as well designed. Good to see my ’shitty’ home town take a giant leap forward..and have something after years of being in Oxford’s smug shadow….now guys just give me a show and I’ll love you forever

Now if only Nottingham Contemporary would put on an Elvis show
http://www.cornerstone-arts.org/8.id

Hornsey Art College burns…a great start..

I am going to describe the 1980’s artworld as it really was for the majority of art-students. Not the cosy new money YBA’s and their cohorts or the city-slickers with loft-spaces and pockets to fill. No this is one lowly art student’s coming of age in the brutal underbelly of North London in the years when Lady Thatcher was in charge and you could get round London all day for £2.50!

I will start with the photo above. Hornsey College of Art burning well in summer 1980 just after the previous year’s final show. Alexandra Palace had sat safely on the hill above North London through over a century but in June 1980 a considerate workman was deemed to have inadvertantly set fire to a roof. Most at the time didn’t believe it and it sad to say that both the council and developers gained much from the resulting fire. An art college burns very well by the way what with all the paint and combustibles contained therein. My favourite story from the conflagration was the one about etching tutor Dick ‘Sleepy’ Fozzard who having worked a plate to the final stages was sleeping throughout most of the fire and only an alert staff member prised him away from the presses before they melted. I watched the whole thing from my parent’s council house in Oxfordshire after my mother kindly pointed out that my college appeared to be on fire on the T.V. Hot enough to make the BBC news! I sat in an armchair with my pork chop and two veg and watched two years paintings burst into some spectacular flames and then it was gone…next day I pointed out where my space had been in The Sun’s coverage …now empty sky….

I sometimes try to recall not only my artwork but that of those around me…ironically Bell & Langlands (later Saatchi chosen ones) had just left and had probably removed their ‘burnt-books installation’ before the real fire got a hold…life imitating art? I can’t say I was that impressed with Bell & Langlands then it seemed mediocre conceptualism and I can’t say my opinion shifted much since. I did see them sucking up to someone form the Tate years later and evidently they played their networking hand well..but art??..hmm not in my book. Ironically looking at the archive photos it just as well that most of us actually more intent on learning our craft and developing theories..if the same occurred now half the students would be ‘documenting’ the ruins and the other half either rolling in the ashes for a site-specific performance or claiming they had burnt the whole thing down as a protest against neo-stalinism in the Hackney gulags…

As it was we suffered in silence watched the building collapse and got on with drinking ourselves stupid and occasionally making splendid art at the original college which still contained the Foundation Course about two miles down the hill. We were all shipped back in there come September 1980 and told to get on with it..three years work to be done in one..oh yes we were a hardy lot….no digital archives then just new paint. canvas and stone..oh and cameras…

My first memories of the new building were that it had changed little from the grainy footage of the Hornsey ‘Riots’ which was religiously shown to all new students ( along with a healthy helping of art history tutor Peter Webb’s porn collection rebranded as art history). Now although some real Situationists did make it over to sleep on the floor and smoke dope with the Hornsey crew in 1968 it was hardly Paris ‘68. Indeed the footage confirmed our suspicions that most were spliffed out hippies having a damn good time and sandals and kaftans aside there was no real riot just a bunch of students carrying coffins and getting bitten occasionally by friendly police dogs. Kent State it wasn’t in fact it wasn’t even Guildford. The College had been purpose built at turn of century and had some fantastic north-facing studios, perfect for painters and if truth be told was better equipped than the now crumbling Palace with the exception of the much-missed Panorama Bar which had been the handiest bar to an art college ever devised. Situated directly below the college one short stairwell down and half the college had written off another afternoon in fierce debate or shallow drinking depending on your viewpoint. The view was lovely….I remember listening to the Iranian Embassy siege on a tinny radio and watching the smoke rise across the London skyline to the south. Dearest Margaret was untroubled by our Leninist revisionism and Barthes semiotic signifiers she was too busy deploying the S.A.S. and getting ready for the real enemy within ‘Oop North’.

As we struggled to unload the batches of new easels and paint stocks from the lorries ( the technicians as ever too busy to help as they rebuilt yet another american car engine) little could we guess that the 1980’s were going to be as troubled a decade as any of us would ever see. I managed to set myself down in a bunker below ground with my welsh compadre and stone sculpting house-mate Ken Absalom who defined hippy chic in a way many of us had never known. Five years after punk he still wore a kaftan embalmed in pitchouli and owned more tie-dye and crocheted shirts than any man should. A miner’s son from Blaeanavon on a cold welsh mountaintop he’d ended up in India discovering large amounts of hashish and women in about equal measure. A return to his village was precluded by a fierce isolationism that was to affect us both sooner rather than later. For now I tried to rationalise the fact that I’d chosen to occupy a space about ten feet square next to a mad welshman who was power-drilling his way in true miner style through a ton of portland stone. Each time he started up a piece of stone would hit me in the ear or back and the dust….It was only when my ‘personal tutor’ (they could afford to be called that in those days) almost lost an eye and choked her way out of the plastic tent I was trying to protect myself in that I realised that a painter could do better in the purpose built studios upstairs.

Easy to say in retrospect but as I spent most mornings developing tinnitus by ‘drumming’ ( loose description) on old dustbins in a freeform jazz orchestra/ punk supergroup that later became the ‘Fuck Pigs’ most aspects of reality had probably already passed me by. None of this was drug induced the major drug was the ale sold at the new ‘Art School Pub’ The Railway conveniently situated downhill from the College in pre-yuppified Crouch End. Hard to believe that what has become the land of lattes and expensive three whelled buggies was then a pretty rundown suburb with a few pubs……and not a wine bar in sight….most of us then would have guessed a Pinot Grigio was an Italian dancer…maybe we were right…

My Proustian moment #1

In a vain attempt to prove my solid postmodernist hypertextual qualities I will occasionally sidetrack by digressing on a particular piece of artwork and see what hidden depths it may reveal or shallow inexcusable art pretensions it unravels before me after all these years. Starting in September 1980 is as good a point as any as everything pre June 1980 had just disappeared in smoke with the exception of a Foundation and school folder which remained tucked in my parent’s loft. Whereas my memory of the sculptors ‘Neffertiti at the waterhole’ remains strong….he was still hacking away at it six months later..my own work has slipped from my mind. I do however have the sketchbook from September 1980 here and it reveals a strange concoction. I had started drawing house plants whilst still at my parents. To save money most students (especially those unemcumbered by rich parents and trust funds) would go home for the summer to save paying rent which in my case set at a fiendishly expensive £9 a week thanks to the wonderfully eccentric yet generous Jewish Hashidic family the mad sculptor and I roomed with in Stamford Hill…The Gordons..of them more later….

The sketchbook reveals the influence of solid painters like John Walker, Alan Green and John Hoyland. Everything was very ‘mark-making’ in those far off days. We are talking pre Zeitgeist, pre R.A. New Painting Show. Recently there has been a spate of re-assessment shows in USA and Australia looking again at the supposedly ‘dead’ area of painting during those minimalist and conceptual 1970’s. ‘To the victor’s the spoils’! The art history has been rewritten from the more recent perspective as once again we are reminded that painting is ‘dead’. This memoir is in part a redress to this manipulation of history.

I remember distinctly taking Samuel Palmer and Graham Sutherland books from the newly restocked College Library and the drawings show their influence. I was encouraged in my focusing on ‘British’ art by my tutor a wonderful printmaker called Tricia Stainton who unbeknowns to me also taught part-time at the Royal College. I was the world’s worst ‘networker’ and so focussed on my own concerns things like that just went straight by me….others were less naive.

The sketchbook contains a print by Fragonard which came from a cheap artbook my Auntie Sue had bought me one Christmas from our local W.H.Smith….It wasn’t until my early twenties that I could afford more than a few large art books. The sketchbook stays in its dark foliage, slightly gothic mood throughout until the following March when Picassoesque forms take control. Maybe a subconscious reaction to the fire ..who knows..I know many of us struggled in those early months after the fire and the staff (in most cases) were very helpful. Needless to say the technicians helped the most attractive girls and the owners of american cars the most…

As my mood (and circumstances lightened) the drawings took on more Matisse and Picasso touches and a trip to see the Picasso bequest in Paris certainly helped..although my strongest memory of my fellow student’s reaction to first plate of snails must wait another day…Jackson Pollock comes to mind but not in a good way…..

Here is one of my very few prints that survived from the printroom then and Tricia’s influence. Samuel Palmer and Sutherland put through a blender certainly…