I wonder sometimes at the fact that I avoid commenting on my own art work here. It’s all the stranger, to me at least, that I have no such qualms about my washboard playing activities. This even with the fact that I perfectly know how limited my ability at scratch, rattle and rolling this greatest of percussion instrument is; and how greater my possibilities as an visual artist are.
But perhaps that there is part of the reason and not that strange after all.
In any case looking through my posts it seems that I omitted mentioning the selling of one of my works to the cantonal art commission. This was a nice surprise that happened at the very end of the exhibition in February.
I mention this because yesterday one of E’s work colleagues gave her a page from last Friday’s local newspaper which had a full page article about the canton’s cultural minister, in which there is a picture of her posing in front of the afore mentioned art work; which gets a whole little paragraph of it’s own.
It would be nice to make some fundamentally deep philosophical remark here, but as always I am rattled up by too many contradictory feelings to do that.
My work was pretty much abstract and even concrete, in a purely visual way, until 4-5 years ago, and although I have always looked at art with a certain suspicion, it has never stopped me from working at it.
However when my eldest son became a young adult, dubya Corp had just invaded Iraq and I had been watching for some time how the populist right, everywhere, was sharpening its new version of an old power getting strategy: give folks things to fear with simplified stereotyped examples, offer “safety”. And I woke up one morning and it was simply impossible to make another “powerful art work” that would look good over someones chimney.
What was this society my son was going out to live in? Making art for what, for whom?
One side of me, the negative one (?), felt the basic solution was to throw it all out. But its a lot of passion to junk and it wouldn’t prove much either way. Another, the negative one (?), wanted to ignore it all. And yet another, the negative one (?), wanted to be more constructive, put more thought in to it.
Too long (and complicated to write) to get into the details of the hows, but it all lead to the work that I have been doing these last 4-5 years, and this is the first of these that has escaped from my studio. Yes, a pleasant surprise… and it looks good on that wall too…
2 Framed Fragmentation Bombs, Submunition Wallpaper (The air was thick with metal) – acrylic and paper on linen – 180×120 cm. / 71×47 inches