Bums on Seats Part IV

This week is all about colour. Yes I know, colour theory has been done to death but I feel that it’s important to consider it- especially following my recent works “First Past the Post” and “Straight from the Horse’s Ass”. I would also say that because I haven’t worked on a painting for a while (in the traditional sense) it serves as a reminder to not make any schoolboy errors. Experimentation is all well and good but the wrong choices will confuse everything. Or will they?

Up to this point the work has been mainly talking about the progression of time and the obsessive nature of your own online presence. So how do these abstract concepts relate to a colour scheme?

In truth it’s all down to interpretation; would I consider a month with crap viewing figures as being a cold colour? Or alternatively, would a green or a blue indicate a calmer feeling of, “oh well last month went alright so I don’t need to worry about it...”? On the flip side, warmer colours mean something different but essentially carry the same set of  contradictions. It’s a bugger alright.

Christ, don’t trip over your laces on the starting line, it’s only colour, they’ll fade over time anyway- which does in fact lead me into the next point. I mentioned the passage of time earlier and this work (which will account for a year’s worth of analytics) represents how something as trivial as a statistic is all consuming but is then quickly overtaken by the latest data set. In the gallery below are some of the tests that I have been doing, beginning on canvas. In the later versions, even though the simple progression around the colour wheel can be digitally altered to any preference, it’s interesting how complimentary colours cancel each other out even in a computerised simulation.      

The acrylic tests include some experiments with opacity using a gloss medium as a thinner. I would say that I’m unsure about which is the best ratio but in any case it felt like I was painting with dead expensive shampoo or conditioner- not ideal! However, translucency is something I should explore further as it gives the image more depth and would make a change from the block colours of the previous works.

Next week: preparing canvas ……..YAWN…… but seeing as I’m writing about everything…

Bums on seats dear boy! (Art in the Age of Analytics)

There’s an old saying in the English theatre business, “Bums on seats, dear boy, bums on seats”.

I heard it many times during my brief tenure as a spotlight operator some years ago, either in the auditorium itself, in the green room or after the show and I used to cringe every time someone uttered it. In any case it humoured me that this stereotype really did exist and that how such a comment on attendance rendered the quality of the actual show largely irrelevant. All that matters is how many people saw it.

The story, characterisation, music, lighting, script, backdrop etc- all crunched into a series of figures that can be looked back on as evidence of a hit once the run is over.

I am of course referring to if a show is in any way more popular than expected. If there are lots of people to see it each time, then in most people’s eyes, it’s considered a success; even if the production is awful and strewn with errors, “you can’t argue with the box office”. The added hype that circles around popularity has always been impossible to stop before it naturally ends up like a used ticket stub in a wet gutter somewhere.

I only mention this back story as a type of introductory allegory for what could be discerned these days as a by-product of the ‘attention culture’ and to broach the subject of this post.    

What is ‘attention culture’ and how did we get here? From my own perspective, artists have to compete with each other, let alone the general public and its difficult to say how long your ‘moment’ can last for; add to the story, add to the story, make it more goofy and irreverent so that everyone can see that you’re not a pretentious tosser.

Twenty four hours seems way too long in all honesty, it’s now down to mere seconds. It’s not just the creative industries either, anyone who publishes anything can become easily hooked on the rush that comes with grabbing someone else’s attention; stealing time from busy lives is essentially addictive…

I mainly speak of what social media has done to change our perception of what is considered as having the right kind of impact. I couldn’t count the number of times that I have fallen into the black hole of rolling news, dumb videos and other things far removed from what I initially logged on to do, just because I became quickly bored with it.

It seems quite vague as to why some things capture interest and others do not; how stuff becomes viral is anyone’s guess, most of the time it appears quite unintentional. The term ‘snowballing’ comes into this and can be achieved without a massive PR campaign.   

The universal ease of the Internet is a blessing for many, speaking as an artist in a socially restricted time but it is also a massive problem. People have always made art for sure but the way that it is recorded, delivered and discussed has completely changed over the last ten years or so; the limited life spans of social media networks and fanzines are certainly evident of an increasingly temporal frame of mind. The damage that digital saturation causes is a common theory and a well known issue but it also led me to think of a new piece that could ask questions about the attention culture.

Next week in Part Two- Conceptual Outline

Straight from the horse's ass (Part 3)

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The as yet untitled work about the duality of power is now complete. These photographs of sheet five (taken over a period of five or six hours- click to enlarge) show my method, which in itself was entirely driven by rules; firstly dividing the shadows into blocks and then layering them up like a screenprint. Again, here we can see how the reverse side of the piece shows through the masked, negative spaces of the other.

The statue depicted here is of Emanuele Filiberto, ‘Testa di Ferro’ in Piazza San Carlo, Turin. A character of considerable fame from sixteenth century Italy, namely because he made Italian the official Savoy language instead of Latin and moved what became the Turin Shroud to the city cathedral. He is also known however, as being a ruthless strategist and exploited any weaknesses for his own ends. My inclusion of him in this project reflects the unavoidable problems related to how powerful people have to present themselves. What are they hiding? What don’t we know? Such ‘PR’ battles and embarrassing ‘reveals’ dominate our news feeds these days but monuments like this one have a wonderfully bombastic way of ignoring everything but heroism- so much so that you get drawn into the romance of it before anything else.

I think the work has been a success; power is portrayed in a graphic sense but it’s also abstracted due to the complimentary colour scheme. Failures would lie in the difficulties I had in finding a workable technique and sometimes losing touch with the concept as a result. Above all, the work has been an intriguing one in terms of using painting to ask sculptural questions.

Coming up in part four:

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Once an appropriate venue presents itself, the five pieces will be mounted and placed together in a sequence/installation yet to be determined.