Having had my fill (I suspect for some time to come) of art criticism I’m hoping to get back to art. I did spend some time this afternoon looking through various things I have written, attempting to introduce viewers to my work. It did occur to me to ask how I normally go about trying to make sense of what I am doing to somebody who comes to it for the first time.
I am greatly relieved to see that I avoid the kinds of overblown abstractions that plague so much discussion of art. It did come as something of a surprise, however, to realise just how much I have taken to telling a story about how I came to take an interest in the subject in question. “A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum”, to quote Frankie Howard. On reflection, I don’t think that it’s a bad way of going about there task. In fact, when I think about it this way of presenting work is used to good effect by some other artists much more eminent than I am.
David Hockney is fond of this kind of “let me tell you a story” introduction to some of his projects. To my surprise, however, I realised that the only occasion on which I really came to grasp what Tracey Emin was about was in an interview with Laurie Taylor, in which she was talking about how her famous “unmade bed” came about. She gave a simple narrative of a specific occurrence which sparked the idea.