My latest body of work,
recently shown at Winchester School of Art, explores the relationship
between tourism, art and everyday life. The work investigates the
ways in which we can learn from our experiences of art and tourism
practice to develop beyond habitual ways of seeing and being. In this
direction, everyday practice becomes as an attentive ethics of care
through which we can separate personal ontological value from
symbolic or exchange value within the cultural systems of late
capitalism. One of the aims of my multidisciplinary practice, which
includes painting, collage, photography, video, installation and
artist-led projects, is to explore the relationship between art,
leisure and everyday life in order to expose the paradoxes and
inadequacies of commercialised leisure in terms of reward and
liberation. Moreover, I also seek to produce conditions to make
visible the affective labour of everyday production as a capitalist
resource. Further to this, I use relational practice and processes of
authoring / de-authoring, to highlight the ambivalent and paradoxical
nature of object production and exchanges within late capitalist
systems.
The practices of art
and tourism encompass both immersion and reflexive subjectivities and
can be used to develop a duel consciousness of everyday life in an
age in which it is rarely possible for the everyday to be fugitive or
to exist outside of specialist practices. Within the biopolitical
structures of late capitalism all practices are specialist within the
'creative' economy, characterised by the de-differentiation between
work and non-work. Subjective practices and everyday escapes become
affective capital within globalised neoliberal systems. New knowledge
cannot exist outside of this logic unless it is a situated and
contingent knowledge, formed in the gap between the immersive and the
reflexive, as an ethics of everyday practice. Artistic and touristic
practices, then, become ways of envisioning alternative ways of being
and seeing – of imagining possible futures and entertaining the
idea of flux and change in the ungendered potentiality of the moment.
Above all, we can utilise art and tourism subjectivities as a means
of seeing difference in de-differentiation, seeing through the eyes
of the 'alien' other, in order to see beyond the alienating same.
HOTEL (installation views)
The images above are a
series of A1 photographs documenting a an installation of my
paintings at Urban Beach Hotel in Bournemouth. The gallery display
itself becomes an installation, mirroring the pseudo-domestic
environment of the hotel. The project originated when I gave ten of
my paintings to the hotel on permanent loan. This was not a simple
act of altruism, just as neither are the 'value added' creative acts of
the front of house staff at the hotel - such as producing beautiful, hand drawn chalk board designs. Whilst their everyday
creativities may be considered to be unconditional creative and their
emotional labour altruistic generosity, this is muddied by working
conditions, the blurring of work and leisure, and the ambivalence of
social relations. My creative act of painting could be considered a
tactic of 'making do' or of making everyday life more bearable, if it
were not for the fact that the paintings have become actors in a relational
artwork. This is not as problematic as it at first seems, however, as
the paintings, despite attempts to articulate narratives of coldness,
exclusion and alienation, in their eagerness towards the objects of
tourism become complicit in the pseudo-liberation of commercialised
leisure. Despite their critical content, they clearly become
commercial objects and await their roles as objects of commerce and
the exchange value that the market assigns them. An
uncomfortable flicker of being emerges from the work. The images set
up the equipment for exclusion and alienation but refuse to fully use
it. Instead, seducing the viewer with the expectations of his / her
gaze. Their status is always up for negotiation and their meaning
always at risk of negation: a constant cycle of dissolution and
retrieval. Larger works would shout out their intention “I’m
here, look at me, I’m not what you think I am”. The paintings
become ephemeral objects, 'snapshot' paintings representing fleeting
moments that are themselves fleeting objects. They sit where they are
supposed to sit, offering eternal blue skies and complimentary
colours to their fellow hotel décor. Thus, there is the suggestion
that by handing the paintings to the hotel – passing them clear of
both the aesthetic rhetoric of material production and institutional
objectification as art – their status is reduced to that of the
ready-made. They neither address, demand anything of, nor solicit the
expectations of the viewer – they lack the context of the gallery
and simply become décor. The negation of their status allows them to
exist among things; among the guitars, surfboards and other 'cool'
ephemera, which sit dumbly behind the thin veil of the venue’s
aura. As mildly distracting ambience, as mise-en-scene, the paintings
become part of the backdrop for the actors of everyday life, which
instead of absorbing them (as spectators) in the search for meaning
in the paintings (as work), is absorbed by those passing through
(perhaps as a poetic images) – as meaning not sought, but carried
from this fleeting rendezvous. Moreover, their status reduced to
décor, they join the affective objects and emotional workers of the
venue - providing an unquantifiable 'value added' at no extra cost to
the business.
The Consequences (parts 1 & 2) (installation views)
"The Penthouse - cosy seaside BnB"; a
high price for emotional labour'; subtle
and covert modification; under the representational demands; playing 'tour-guide' for others; navigating
the objects, interests and values that made up 'home'; the devolution
of our shared life and an opening out to
change
and flux; oscillation between private and public, ontological meaning
and representational meaning; “we love
playing host and welcoming guests into our home”; the desire to go
backstage, to penetrate the heart of their host’s everyday life;
“before
long we were feeling very at home”; something
was eating away at the 'staycation' dream; a hub of transient
sociality; “we
hadn't
realised that we shared the bathroom with the hosts”; “records,
bands and DJs are an important part of our life”; “we
spent some
quality time with Bev who was kind enough to mix some '80s
music for us”; mutability was key to our success; “Bev's
paintings are all over the place and give it a very personal
feeling”; emotional
selling
point; the fallout of aesthetic rhetoric; art
becomes commerce, place becomes space, home becomes homelessness;
staged
authenticity concealed the essence of...
Living Under the Tourist Gaze (in collaboration with Stephen Hill)
Living Under the Tourist Gaze (installation views)
Representation IV (Mike's holiday photo, Kos 2012)
Rather than face up to the problem of quantifying my labour value as a reproducer of images, I simply recognised the photographer's gesture in comparing his image with mine and made the choice to paint it for him for free. Was this an act of altruism, dissent or cowardice?
Representation IV (Mike's holiday photo, Kos 2012) (installation view)
The
end of work vs non-work equates to the
end of leisure.
<obfuscation>
Punch and Judy Show (edge of representation) (installation views)
Punch and Judy Show (edge of representation) (SD video)
Gift / Exchange (before and after, installation views)
Art
practice is about bringing substantive
personal meaning and value to everyday life
and not letting life be something that is imagined as happening in
other places, times or as being created using materials that are not
to hand. We
are
no longer making art, we are making life!
Representation III (after Harold Baim) (installation views)
Representation III (after Harold Baim) (SD video)
