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ART IN CONVERSATION

by Nicola McCartney

Process Art is commonly associated with the likes of 60s and 70s canonical artists such as Jackson Pollock, Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. Through paint, latex and led, all three artists had a significant impact upon the perception of what qualifies as art; shifting the emphasis away from market values dependent upon the final product towards a new concept that emphasized the act of making itself. One could go as far as to say that Process Art merely wet the appetite of what was to become Conceptual Art, a movement the public commonly struggles to digest: The works of Martin Creed, Sol Le Witt and Tracey Emin often baffle the masses and, indeed, the connoisseurs, because when concept apparently out-weights ‘skill’ or ‘craft’ it becomes increasingly difficult to aesthetically criticize a work of art. Likewise, our dependency upon the artist to explain themselves also grows - If I had an Emin napkin for every time I heard: ‘but my child could have made that’, I’d be a rich woman. Nonetheless, through the performance of splattering paint, ephemeral materials and strewn-across-the-floor led, Process Art successfully demonstrated that the act of making can be just as, if not more, important than the final product.

However, the definition of Process Art grows when we consider that the performance of making art might be considered the work itself. The problem with this interpretation is that it becomes all inclusive and over subscribed - one would have to include under the subheading of Process Art, Performance Art, site specific work, environmental work, work made with ephemeral or fragile materials and, indeed, anything that culminates in documentation. Despite this all encompassing term, one such type of Process Art that I think is often overlooked is conversational art; art that is about the planning and practice of an event, creative or otherwise, that might not ever, necessarily, resolve itself, but manifests in the critical discourse of the creative process. I would like to introduce this concept via the work of Patrick Brill, AKA Bob and Roberta Smith.

Bob and Roberta Smith’s Off Voice Fly Tip (2009), shown as part of Altermodern at the Tate Britain, curated by Nicholas Bourriaud, consisted of a continuously changing installation of hand painted wooden signs and posters that were interspersed with various found playful items such as discarded children’s tricycles. The texts, a common part of Bob and Roberta Smith’s work, that were displayed on the posters, signs and protest boards, were all based around his ongoing conversations with Nicolas Bourriaud over the 12 successive Fridays throughout the course of the exhibition. The texts included witty remarks by both artist and curator, revealing personal snip-bits on Bourriaud (the otherwise intimidating intellectual) and lengthy anecdotes on the ‘how to’s’ behind several of the long words we associate with the pretence of Conceptual Art.

Though Bob and Roberta Smith is often belittled by critics as the artist who resorts to humour in the face of failure: “relying on an improvised, do-it-yourself wit allied to a keen sense of their exclusion from the world which is nonetheless repeatedly the subject of their art.”1, I would like to argue that it has always been his intention to ‘fail’. The very fact that his work exists as conversational, ironic and deliberately challenging the notion of the finished retailed product; previously selling items for 50p, calling his audience to ‘never make art again’ and inviting the community to create potato-print art, means it is unintended to flirt with the commercial market or comply with the conceptual fashion of the mis-en-scene, rather, it serves to undermine it. Furthermore, the artistic identity that comprises Bob and Roberta Smith, in itself, is a constant dialogue in progress. Bob and Roberta Smith is a cross-gendered, collaborative pseudonym that allows Patrick Brill to be more inventive with his work, extending his authorship beyond the realm of the singular artist that must answer for his work. Instead, there is potential for the pseudonym to represent both Brill, the artist, and us, the audience and participant, in a continued flux of conversation about what art is or is not. Whether Bob and Roberta Smith’s duo dialogues are to be considered ‘art’ is down to the viewer.

Another artist whose practice evolves through discourse and process is Paul Carter. Carter is currently exhibiting Hotel at Matt’s Gallery in London, where he was invited to act as artist in residence, transporting his practice to the gallery in an attempt to recreate the conditions of the studio in flux. The result is a large installation that disrupts the architecture of the gallery, transforming it into a transitory place: “a temporary home or live-work space that sets up a new relationship between the individual and the objects and architectures that surround him.”2

Carter’s work is an ongoing experiment testing both the physical and conceptual boundaries of his studio practice through the use of different spaces that he inhabits for fixed periods of time. His practice becomes a form of ever-changing installation, where the preparation, planning and building works for his exhibitions are considered as much the art as the end product that is stripped down before he starts from scratch, elsewhere, again. His materials consist of those that he finds around him in his every day life to and from the studio, which ends up resembling a construction site. Carter’s reaction and adaptation to his surrounding environment become so natural that his process-practice becomes somewhat chameleon-like. It has been likened to that of the exercise of breathing; whereby his artistic endeavors expand and contract as naturally as a pair of lungs.

Both Bob and Roberta Smith’s and Carter’s discursive works demonstrate that the creative practice need no longer be fixed or serialized. Though this transitory process might frustrate those who need an end product by which to judge merit, value or success, it serves an important point to prove that art must question, criticize and ‘fail’ in order to evolve, progress and modernize, or ‘Altermodernise’. Those that set themselves up for ‘failure’; a future of analysis rather than conclusion, are far braver than those who replicate that which is already there. Don’t let rough-and-ready DIY styles and misspellings disarm you, the real works of art are those that are continuously challenging themselves.  To draw an analogy with the theatre, in terms of learning, what goes on back stage in the months of rehearsals, blood, sweat and tears is far more interesting and insightful than the finished product, a flawless rendition or repetition. What we encounter when we experience conversational process art is a privilege, asking us to join the chorus line. This is how we learn, how we develop, how we practice.

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