Landline gossip
Anarchy attracts and repulses me. There are times when I want to defile the picture plane to get rid of any illusion, or any idea that I stood somewhere and painted what I saw. I’ve never seen anything that I put in the pictures in real life. That doesn’t mean to say that they are totally disconnected from reality.
I enjoy the fact that you have to ask yourself what the inspiration for the endless charade actually is. If the answer is only money, my reply is that the gallery, then, should make it quite clear that looking means buying. To be big hearted about it, the real experience of looking at art is complete in itself.
The public is free to come and go, at no expense, to take and upload their pictures on the social media to win friends, and to plagiarise if they think they have the talent. No part of the experience makes parting with money obligatory. But it’s clear that I share my obsession with so many out there, that every kind of experience has become possible. The only thing that has not happened is total destruction, and that is because the pictures themselves don’t reference devils or gods in an iconoclastic way. There is no worship or defilement going on.
I think I’m co-joined with the many artists referencing pop, comics and cartoons, who are saying that this star system is as powerful as any other. But it’s completely imaginary and can be seen, in its softness, as a comment on the way humans have invented celebrity, and how harsh that’s become.
What I have a love-hate relationship with, when it comes to playthings, is their plastic-ness. That means their second life, after creation/animation, as evil toys fabricated from one of the earth’s most destructive materials. Surely, it’s less evil if they become art?