Prem Sahib was this weeks
guest lecturer which excited us a great deal having hugely enjoyed his show at
the ICA in 2014. Even though we knew about his work and had previously watched
interviews with him going over some of the ideas which lead to its inception,
we were unaware of how much the work is about his gay experiences. These were
fairly specific references but estranged ones none the less; connections and
thoughts which very much hidden when viewing the work ‘blind’. This is not
something that we have any issue with because we tend to deal with ideas over
materials ourselves. When viewing a work we really enjoy that moment when
you’re reading about a work and you form the same connection that the artist
had between the work in front of you and words on the page. However, when producing
a work we enjoy providing minimal information and inducing a level of
uncertainty in the minds of the audience, allowing them to make up their own
minds about what a work might be about. To return to Prem Sahib, he spoke about
this in a similar fashion saying that he had no
prescribed reaction from viewers of his work, they can take away whatever they
want from it. But, he is very much accountable and responsible for the initial
idea and therefore is happy to discuss it and provide the narrative which led
him to producing the work. This is exactly how we think about our art making
but haven’t been able to be so articulate about it. Another noteworthy comment
he made was in reference to his poster works that were upstairs in the dark
area of the exhibition at the ICA. He said that posters are about
something that has happened or going to happen, which sounds obvious but it
becomes a device to talk about ‘event’. So posters are an echo of what has
happened or a premonition of what is to come, interesting when thinking about
ideas to do with mythology.
The
London Review of Books podcast is one of our favourites and with the new Rauschenberg
exhibition at Tate Modern there was a review by the art critic Hal Foster. He
quoted Rauschenberg as saying that he used found objects in his work because he
wanted to make paintings that looks like things as opposed to paintings that
don’t look like things. We always find a stronger connection with work which
contains a bit of real life and perhaps this is where that comes from. The
magazine Art Monthly also conducts podcasts, although fairly sporadically maybe
once a month or so, and we listened to one this week which was all about
abstract painting. Now, this is a subject matter that would usually not be to
our taste but we decided to give it a go and we were rewarded for it! The more
we learn about abstract art the more parallels we find between it and our own
art making; it’s about producing something that isn’t represented in the world
we live and very often this is something that we’re attempting to do, generate
thinking about a fictional or unknown entity.
