The public and the private city

"A view can belong to you, even if the land itself doesn't...". Something I've written about This City's Centre 1: Window by Blind Ditch, which is showing at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter until 22 September.  http://www.a-n.co.uk:81/interface/reviews/single/3691005 …

Hands-on versus hands-off making

I became an artist because I liked making stuff. And for a long time after I graduated that's exactly what I did. I drew, I painted, I assembled things. I made photographs and videos. I brought together exhibitions and even studio spaces. 

So it's a bit disconcerting to look back at the past 12 months and realise I have mostly been initiating and project-managing the making of stuff by other people. I have taken data collected by a glider pilot and a bird biologist and asked a programmer to help me visualise it. Worked with engineers to fabricate sculptures out of virtual models using a high-tech process I only just understand. And collected environmental data using  expertise and technology borrowed from Plymouth University. Even my recent publication about bananas was made partly from appropriated imagery and actually printed by another artist.

It's a perfectly respectable mode of operating  for a professional contemporary artist, so why do I occasionally feel like a fraud? After all, I've brought about number of new things that wouldn't have existed without me. What's more, the collaborative networks of expertise and ideas that came into being to serve these projects undoubtedly make a far bigger impact on the world than any of my paintings.

I suppose I'm very conscious that, in the popular imagination, hands-off artists are often seen as 'not real artists'. Like many people, I admire the time, commitment and talent that goes into the mastery of a skill such as printmaking or casting. So sometimes I'm a bit embarrassed to have to say, "no I didn't make that with my own two hands".

However, I know that unless I'm prepared to restrict my ideas to the craft skills I do have, I'll sometimes have to accept the role of commissioner or collaborator instead of maker. That said, I badly miss making stuff. Perhaps it's time for a new hobby - one that involves canvas and paint?

Not of this world

At a recent talk at Exeter Phoenix, artist Charlie Tweed was asked by an audience member to rate his powers of creation against those of God. I can't imagine your average video artist inciting such big questions. The enquiry seemed a little odd at the time but, in fact, there is something beyond the human going on in Tweed's work for his current show 'I Am Algorithm'. Through it, we are almost looking back at ourselves from somewhere beyond.

Made largely of appropriated images, sewn together in cut and paste narratives, the thrust of his work sits in a highly contemporary space between ecology and technology (and rather, like writer Tim Morton, he seems to suggest there is no boundary between the two). It is also somewhat posthuman. We're shown many images that were made possible by humans but have been created by machines. (The synthesised voice that accompanies them underlines this.) It's all housed in a spaces built of what look like black roofing panels, which emit a strong industrial odour in the summer heat.

This isn't an viewer-friendly exhibition. Coming across like a series of monotonous, relentless corporate videos gone wrong, it's actually too much to take in one sitting. Quite a contrast to the work (from the Notes series, I think) that won the 2009 Exeter Contemporary Open. This had  a lighter, more humorous tone, despite its sinister undertow.

In 'I Am Algorithm', Tweed seems to have entered a darker, more intense place. There's lots to admire, but not much to like. And I don't think that's a bad thing.

I Am Algorithm -  Friday  19 July 2013 - Saturday 31 August 2013, Exeter Phoenix, Gandy Street, Exeter EX4 3LS
www.charlietweed.com