10 years pricking the art voodoo doll 2005-2015

Month: February 2010

AXIS RANT #2: Alice and the Curious Curatoriat?

When did it happen? When did the power structure in the arts shift so fundamentally away from the practicing artist and into the hands of a new breed of art school trained curators or as I have re-designated them ‘curatoriat’? The growth industry in ‘curatorial’ courses like the MA at the Royal College of Art reflects a far wider shift and a worrying one for us poor artists at the bottom of the arts funding pecking order. Read the rest on axisweb.orgShaun Belcher: Alice and the Curious Curatoriat, here Feb 2010

You should read the whole article.

HERE: http://www.axisweb.org/archive/news-and-views/the-rant/rant-31/

Time to close down The Arts Council? AXIS RANT…

From the AXIS RANT page
Feel free to bark back…

hoops
Our new Ranter-in-Residence for February, Shaun Belcher, starts off on a topical, if controversial note, asking ‘Has Arts Council England (ACE) failed? Do we really need it anyway?’.

Shaun asks if the lottery years have set ACE up for a fall as we move into tighter financial times and political pressures are heightening.

Read original HERE:
http://www.axisweb.org/archive/news-and-views/the-rant/rant-30/

Saatchi online …really???..you having a laugh?

I still in a state of shock but thought I’d cut and paste here as well just in case it all an administrative error and when I wake up all gone….still in an ironic world this as ironic as it gets!

Original article below as deleted from Saatchi Website in a revamp:-)

turner

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

Withering away in The Jackson Cage?

Bruce Springsteen lyric from The River album

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..

https://www.facebook.com/groups/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?