You Can’t Do That

12th September

I would like to show how it is important to me to maximise opportunities by having an open mind as to how to function as a sculptor. In the crisis of the artist (circa 1970 – 2001), we are ideally placed to risk everything. We must struggle to accept the absence of the meaning of art in order to find a new one. We must also pounce upon any perceivable weakness in the mass media to overcome that tyranny. If we are not soldiers, we are decorators. We must pray and fight and work for a role for art.

Last month we witnessed the shadow cast over the power of cinema by the even grosser pornography if the bombing of the World Trade Centre. If the glare of cinema can even momentarily be overcome by that event, that then suggests light may once again be able to fall meaningfully onto the practice by the visual artist.

We have learnt to not hold our breath however, in the meantime we must take advantage of that lack of powered purpose by forging one. We are potentially explorers in an unnavigated landscape. A life without purpose is the ultimate privilege.

For me there is no relationship between an elite context and the quality of a work. All of the sculptural interventions I have been involved with take as understood an openness as to how success can be achieved. In the absence of a large market for sculpture, or a culture that acknowledges the value of sculpture, we must take opportunities where we can find them. As much as it is comfortable to centre one’s practice inside the constraints of a particular set of standards, it is too much of a luxury. We will always have to pay for the privilege by doing other more lucrative work outside an art life. That is an option I have abandoned.

To build a life of practice as a full time sculptor, it is imperative to seize opportunities as they arise. Often opportunities need to be invented. I shall show examples of the various excuses I have found to make a work.

It is possible and satisfying and fulfilling and sometimes remunerative to park inside a fixed program. Some artists commit themselves to a practice determined by the demands of the commercial gallery. Produce a body of work in the studio, show it, deal with the success or failure of it and start again. Work produced out of these conditions produces some of the best work currently made, however, that process has not consistently brought out the best in me.

When a particular way of working proves consistently rewarding to a large group of artists working now and throughout history, it is with some risk that we experiment with other methods.
Some artist’s work is entirely formed around doing commissioned works. These artists are in the business of design, of computer generated seductive submissions. They communicate to an established and proprietorial code, which moulds them. A commissioned work is one defined by a client, or by the demands of a particular prize, or site, or community requirements. The studio needs to be moulded by these practices in order to fulfill the demands of that practice.

It is my view that some of the new prizes available to sculptors are virtual commissions. Prizewinners invariably reflect the most recent fashions in art imported from elsewhere, to reflect the judges’ familiarity with ‘contemporary discourse’.

To survive as an artist, either financially or spiritually, we are bound to break through the barriers between territories. What appear to be irreconcilable differences between philosophies, are imaginary ones. We have to forget where we were up to. We cannot mark our place in the book, so that we can pick it up when we are ready to proceed. Progress is random and is fuelled by the slow flow of blood.

I have found that responding to the brief of a commissioner can sometimes bring out more of the best in me than I can, out of my own studio project. The brief is a fertiliser and opens me to aspects of invention or imagination. The acknowledgment of a final application of sculpture is also empowering as is the money the completed job attracts. Making commissioned work is useful provided one is not dominated by it. One or two commissions a year serve to fund time for other work.

Inevitably, the wandering between modes of practice can weaken the health of the body of work. The sliding may ultimately serve to avoid a more desirable depth induced by focus and singularity. That, however is another luxury. Sometimes also we work towards the easier life of future historians who won’t have to find meaning from the task of disentangling an untended ‘oevre’. Sometimes as artists we contrive an easy map for future navigators. In a life where art is losing social power we we are sometimes inclined to design significances for an imagined future.

For me the only way to progress artistically is to freely cross over between the bounds of each territory. To remain fixed by the limits of a fixed work process is to become caricatured by it.
To be so progressively free-ranging between philosophies is anathema to seriousness. It is ‘anti-product’, anti ‘clarity’ and anti- commodity. It presents as the enemy of western cultural practice and as the enemy of western thought.

What is unpalatable is also indigestible. It cannot be framed and is therefore invisible. We seek to rise above the tide of artists spawned out off our education system by marking our place with an identifiable style or philosophy. The design for visibility is an act against art.

In western culture, art is grown in batteries under artificial daylight conditions. Artists are force fed nutrients which make them fat and immobile.

The growth that occurs out of a free ranging approach is wild and unpredictable. It is prey to predators, to boundary riders toting shot guns. It is prey to impulse and hallucination. Was it there or was I tricking myself? Where we are not trained to identify the enemy, trickery and short lasting sensation often fool us. We are frightened when there is no danger and then we dance onto minefields.

Fences comprise the false identification of landscape. We think like we break up the land into ‘property’. We intuitively know it but we will not accommodate the dis-ease of it.
Making art is like love. We must fall into it, surrender to it. We cannot plan it and play it safe. It grows out of our control. It grows out of control.

Because the journey is so random, so arbitrary, I mark each event with a great weight. Sometimes we break away from the weight of our inertia to find the freedom of our movement. For me a sculpture serves to mark and break my fall. We can so easily lose our place. I can look back now and see at lat a path . It is a path behind and now that I can see it, there is a map.

And for all of this, for all of the mountain of mental paperwork, nothing is as useful or as influential as the extent that a particular forum can provide a venue for transparency, which is the ultimate goal.

Australia is a big open space with lots of room for the three dimensions to be housed. The light is so bright however that every object put against a backdrop flattens out, so it may as well be flat. Once that flatness is recognized all manner of spacial representation is possible.

In a life of distraction from the single core, moving forward is a direction determined by moving 360 degrees simultaneously. Each move has become more or less comfortable to me. I no longer have to reconstruct myself with each turn of the head. An increased fluency ironically is born out of this momentum. I may be less focussed, but I feel myself to be more complete as an artist.

The revolution will not be televised’, according to a member of The Black Pnther movement in the US.

The organisation of art through sculpture triennials, art festivals, and commercial gallery outlets represents the subjugation of art to the prevailing power stuctures. Art forums will only ever impersonate the televisability of mass media. Art cannot compete with the mass media and must therefore abandon all forms of competition with them. The only way for art to regain its social power is to be non-compliant to these systems. To play the game is to play second fiddle. In order ti for art to find a rightful and powerful place, it must look elsewhere.

While my voice is heard here today, it will leave to echo because the view cannot be digested by the machinery of publication. I have caught you now unwittingly unguarded. You are in a trance and when you emerge from here, you will remember nothing. The machinery is pervasive and all powerful.How can one therefore proceed inn the face of this defeat? How can we find a voice and leave a sound?
We are as artists divided in our quest to find power. There are so many of us and so few resources. Australians justifiably hate and love art. To qualify for a stake in the limited resources we join an art club. An art club is a subculture which shares the same philosophical guidelines. Those who do not share those ideas are viewed as inferior. They form a different club. Members of clubs establish identity by associating with their club and distancing themselves from others’ clubs. The art world is thus fully divided and powerless. In our war. In our war with the new mediocrity of the arts we turned upon ourselves and drained each others’ power.

The only way to overcome this suffocation is to deny the chasms between ideologies. The imagined mountainous terrain is one flat Australia.

And so, why is the revolution not televised? Because to televise it is to undermine it. It is to sap it of its power. We must duck and weave. We must remain invisible; unframable. We run under the cover of dark. We are underground. We appear in one category. We fail to appear in another.

I have consistently failed to be awarded a grant from the Australia Council with one exception in 1975. I have been in three of the last ‘Sculptures by the Sea’ and failed in my last attempt. I have been hung in the Archibald for the last two years and I failed to be selected for their Lempriere Sculpture prize and The National Sculpture Prize. I have been selected for The Woollahra Sculpture Prize and I am making a commission for King Street Wharf presently. I have made a thirty metre tall plaque for Sydney two and a half years ago and my Balmain Traffic poem is currently being resited on Victoria Road at White Bay. I have shown at the Mori Gallery since 1984. It is a venue for contemporary art.

When we need to know what we think, so that we know where to stand, we find ourselves in a place determined by our nature. We have to accept that.

Ironically, my publicness is my privateness. To belong to all the clubs is to find oneself if not alone, then invisible.

A vehicle for publication, whether it is any of the facilities offered by any of the clubs is the extent that one can find oneself only momentarily at home, where something or somebody has said something or done something that just happened to crack open some seed which was lying there anyway.

It is always a mystery. We seek the mystery out. The mystery is the path of the fall.

© Michael Snape 1973-2008