Analysing my past career I appear to have dealt with three mythical artistic stereotypes in the genres I worked in.
the following dates approximate:
1980-1990 – The artist/painter patriarchal stereotype as loner in garret, sickness paint on shoes and under nails.
archetypal figures : Picasso, hospital Guston, viagra sale Miro, Motherwell, Stella, Pollock….
1990-2000 – The left-wing poet/ visionary attached to sense of place and modernity not post-modernity in output.
archetypal figures: Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Basil Bunting, T.S.Eliot, W.C.Williams.
2000-2007 – the doomed singer-songwriter – drunk and usually loose-living with a literate angle – Texan usually
archetypal figures: Townes van Zandt, Guy Clark, David Olney, Lucinda Williams, etc etc.
In each case I fully lived out the role model expectations and did fairly well as an ‘authentic’ artist.
But in all three cases I felt a certain amount of role-playing and living up to people’s expectations.
All models were male with exception of Lucinda Williams who has adopted many of mannerisms of the male songwriters.
Now I find myself POST-MYTHICAL and uncertain 1) if am artist at all and 2) If I am what sort of artist that might be as the boundaries have changed so much in intervening twenty-five years since I left college.
The artistic goalposts have shifted so much that a lot of what I would call ‘lesser roleplaying’ is now intellectualised onto a level it simply does not deserve. Art students are more like finishing school boys and girls who want to be architects than any of the genuine romantics I grew up with.
In a PC and cleaned up artworld fake ‘rebels’ like Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin parade their insecurities and obsessions but not their artistic qualities. In light of their success I pretty much threw away the ‘artist’ model as irrelevant. Advertising replaced hard work.
Now I regret having wasted time actually trying to be like my ‘heroes’ or mentors as we now call them in this cleaned up world. How silly to actually believe in hard work and application to one’s practice ( or work as we used to quaintly call it).
Feeling somewhat like a wilderbeest left at the artistic watering hole to be devoured by lions as the gazelles trick their way up, up and away I have had time to ruminate and brood. That brooding has resulted in some quite sharp criticism which has made me few friends and even more enemies. But I remain true to certain principles.
Shallow doctrine produces shallow work.
East thought = easy art.