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

First Past the Post - Project Review

First Past the Post

March/April 2020

This video shows the incremental development of my recent piece ‘First Past the Post’ - a ‘real time’ concept painting that investigates the audience, colour theory and decision making.

Background

The premise for this work, in actual fact, arose from some self asked questions relating to something else. Sometime in early March I read the brief for a graphic design competition and produced two different contenders but became stuck as to which one I should submit. After failing to decide I asked a group of colleagues as to which one they liked and went along with whatever was most favoured.

Once I had submitted the work however, certain questions came up regarding what I had asked and the somewhat blind acceptance of the answers. All I had actually sent them was an image and two or three words about the theme of the competition, so how did they reach their final choice given the limited information? Instinct? Guessing? Or did something else influence it?

What really got me thinking is how people’s judgements are connected to facts or instructions. In the end, I thought that it would be fascinating to subvert this and somehow allow the audience to make the decisions that became the work itself. In the sense of what should be done; not what is done. My role as the artist being reduced to that of the maker.

The piece

In order to make the work as simple as possible to the widest possible audience, my idea was to initiate one word responses that could repeat in real time, then translate them into some sort of code for visual representation. The prospect of changing people’s decisions into an abstraction definitely had some legs. But what could people choose from? A shape? A word? In the end, a range of colours seemed ideal in this case and led me to the construction of the rules. Here are some parts of the script from an instructional video, as the project was going out:

“The rules are simple. Pick one colour from the available list of ten, once a day. They range from primary, secondary and more synthetic colours”

“There is no real meaning for these other than that they are the representations of choice and embody the real question that we are asking; is there any connection between what you decide to do when presented with a seemingly unending process of randomisation.”

“Once a colour is selected and sent to me, it is then painted alongside the others for that day in the order that they were voted for. Colours that appear more than once in the poll are grouped together to create dominant blocks.”

The voting process for the artwork was carried out over various social media platforms with each day’s results being painted every morning for thirty six days. As the work progressed past its second week, some interesting patterns began to emerge despite the obvious nature of chance (namely the diagonals that radiates from day 19). Consequently, my thoughts ran to politics and how voting intentions etc. are often analised to the point of visual exhaustion (during election campaigns for example). The manic search for political significance is symptomatic of any poll in that they merely express opinion, but seeing as this artwork has no purpose (other than itself and its own completion) it raises some questions about the power of decision when related to a largely pointless activity. Were my collaborators choosing purely on the basis of aesthetic value or were there other things in play?

A further point to make at this juncture relates to the title. ‘First past the post’ is a political system whereby the first party to achieve a overall majority wins, thus rendering the remaining votes largely irrelevant. The title is a pun on this concept given that all of the votes were gathered through social media posts.

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Some screenshots of the voting process

Summary

“A blind man can make art if what is in his mind can be passed to another mind in some tangible form” - Sol LeWitt

I enjoyed producing this work because I had relinquished all control regarding what should be done. For sure, I came up with the rules, the colours (straight from the tube) and the overall style of the piece but not its actual content. As a result, the lack of judgements regarding composition makes it an exponent of Process Art; a way of working which puts how something is made above the end product. To that effect, ‘First Past the Post’ has reaffirmed that my work should continue to go in this direction; the involvement of other people (albeit in this virtual form) gives each individual work a very different feel, despite each one beginning as a set of rules. I also find it interesting that some have now contributed to more than one piece; which now begs the question “Who is the artist?”

Thanks go to:

A.Fitzgerald, C.Pomes, A.Leone, A.Turner, S.Collura, K.Richards, S.Abate, V.Torta, Snitch Publishing, M.Druet, K.Horden, D.Partington, V.Janmeijs, M.Borelli, M.Vickers, B.Newsome, J.Ledger, P.Thomas, L.Leone, D.Vickers, F.Halliday, B.Vickers, R.Magson, J.Inglesi, J.Magson, A.Mew, B.Smith, M.Denitto, J.Lawrance, P.Vickers, M.Kunstler, J.Smith, R.Vickers

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:

Title

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

A tribute to John Baldessari

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550 x 250 mm

Vinyl on polythene

Torino 2020

January 2nd brought the sad news that John Baldessari died at home in California aged 88. I have always considered him a huge influence, not just in terms of his varied subject matter and visual presentation but also of how he thought about art.

For the most part Baldessari’s work always carries a sense of humour which quickly eradicates any sense of pretension. You only have to look at works such as “The Pencil Story” (1972) to see this in action; also, in this instance, the very fact that the idea is written out instantly reveals the concept in a very succinct manner. (see source link below)

Furthermore, it is obvious to note that any other visual parts deemed unnecessary are deliberately avoided. Certainly an interesting decision on the grounds of how something is made; staying honest to the idea is often difficult, especially if time elapses between conception and final work.

The sensibility of Baldessari’s work (especially during the late 60s-early 70’s) goes beyond the conceptual angle into the realms of graphics and advertising. I see the similarities stemming from how publicity picks up on details, quirks and things that break up the rhythm of everyday life in order to garner attention. Is there any huge difference between concept art and advertising in that they are both subliminal? You could argue this case for any artwork but it seems more evident in works such as Baldessari’s.

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On to the tribute work. The question of originality came up whilst I was producing The Coincidences Project some time ago; one offshoot from this (that was never fully explored) was how artworks may appear the same even if produced by two different people in two different places.

This line of inquiry was ripe for a ‘Baldessarian’ take, so introducing text back into the work was vital. The as yet untitled piece introduces the term ‘Coincidentalist’ as a joke on the many ‘ists’ and ‘isms’ that the art world uses to classify thought. In order to strengthen the message, I decided to minimalise the work to such a degree that even the base for the vinyl lettering (MasterType Roslyn) is transparent.

Has, in fact, another artist made this before I did and for the same reasons? It is definitely odd when you do stumble across something which asks the same questions or at the very least looks similar. There has always been a debate about originality in art and how artists try to ‘own’ their own style but what does it matter if you’re oblivious.

RIP John Baldessari 1931-2020