A model of the world around us

I was very impressed when I first went to Bali, in Indonesia. Every Balinese person either danced or sang or played music or made art. It was simply a part of the ordinary fabric of human social existence. They were making art in relation to their conception of the world — sacred art. A lot of the dancing was sacred dance. There was a sense of the cosmology pressing very close to their daily lives. It made a huge impression on me and it meshed with ideas that I had – possibly Utopian ideas, which I still have – that every child should have the chance to express themselves and be encouraged to find ways of expression that are artistic. It seems to me that it isn’t a question of genius or exceptional talent but of forging your relationship with the world – and that making art lies at the centre of that.

I was very impressed by the book Playing and Reality by D. W. Winnicott. Various other psychoanalysts, including Melanie Klein and Marion Milner, also emphasise how representing yourself to the world through the making of images is a form of play.

Photo by beta42

You model your existence and you model your experience. A child playing with a doll’s tea party or a doll’s house will be modelling their relations with the world. If they make images of that through puppetry or through drawings, they are then extending their expressive relationship with that world that they are modelling in their minds.

So, there is a way in which the current of imagination, as it flows into a work of art, is a form of play – and that is essential to human well-being. We can express ourselves in this imaginative way. I think almost everybody knows that when you have the chance to make art, it is incredibly satisfying and pleasurable and very, very helpful in a state of melancholy. I think in lockdown people have really thirsted for ways of expressing themselves through making things. There have been successful interventions online. Grayson Perry’s Art at H series on Channel 4 reached a lot of people and it was very well received. Making art is kind of central to sanity. It also has a social dimension, which is that it very often involves doing things together.

From lone genius to collective experience

Artists, on the whole, for a really long time, have been alone in their studios and have been seen as lone geniuses, but that model of the artist is breaking down. We have more and more duo artists working together. There’s a drive and a tendency towards assembly, and large performance structures, large rituals involving artists making things. For example, there was a very successful art installation at the Tower of London called Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red; it was a vast sea of ceramic poppies assembled in a huge cascade from the battlements all the way into the moat. People were invited to add their poppy to this sea of poppies. I wasn’t an admirer of it as a work of art, but it was revelatory of the bonding purposes of art in relation to society.

One of the current trends in the contemporary world is making art together, doing things together, going to see art together – which has become central to many people’s idea of social activity. The other thing about making art is that it has a function of tapping this living source of energy, this idea that the work of art is active. If you have the work of art in your hand or on your wall or in your house, you are somehow in contact with some source of something slightly higher than ourselves, of something that is crystallised and which has had more meaningful significance been packed into its energeia, its inner quality.

“Art is meant to be clean”

We’ve seen spectacular rises in prices, not only in the value of classical works of art and old masters, but also mind-boggling prices for contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst or Ai Weiwei. This has caused a huge dilemma for artists. Some might welcome high prices and the extraordinary wealth and status it gives them, but there’s a definite anxiety because art is meant to be clean: it’s not meant to be done for filthy lucre. One of the ways that artists were invoked in the past was to be the moral guardians of some great prince’s powers; if you were a great banker in the Renaissance, you would spend some of your ill-gotten gains by building the Scrovegni Chapel in Padova and asking Giotto to paint it all the way through and paying him for the entire work. It was an act of expiation.

Many contemporary artists flee the status of commodity. Not only are they making performance art, which is very hard to commodify, but also, someone like Banksy, who is very much an emblematic artist of our time, flees the status of commodity by having his work of art actually shredded in the auction room. He made an extraordinarily witty and powerful political statement by doing that, but now he has also bought, like many millionaires, a yacht to cruise the Med. Some say this is his greatest work of art so far. He painted it with an image of a little girl, but instead of the red balloon of one of his earlier works, he painted her here with a lifebuoy in the shape of a heart. He then asked a captain of former refugee rescue boats to captain this boat and rescue refugees in the Mediterranean. You may not think that’s making a work of art, but he works in this non-commodified way. His work is ephemeral, gestural and conceptual — it has only been annexed for sale.

A form of communication

Photo by PUSCAU DANIEL

One of the other aspects of making art that is quite important, and it has played a part in the Stories in Transit project with refugees in Sicily, which I’m involved with, is that making art is a non-linguistic form of communication. You can communicate across language barriers, through images, and that repertory of imagery actually stretches beyond the limited idea of making actual pictures to making theatrical representations such as masking and dance. In our strange contemporary world, in which there are so many increasing national barriers, there is at the same time more fluid and porous international mingling through the internet and through actual migrations.

The arrival of the printing press

The most significant development was probably printing, because the reproduction of images then became possible, and I think we can date the widespread circulation and the impact of images to that time. The first uses of printing were for religious propaganda. The innovation was not only technical, there were many innovations in how you tell a story in order to pack it into a small piece of paper that could be printed and circulated quickly. Symbolic significance was astonishing, became highly inventive and developed into a fully fledged contemporary cartoon, where you have an image that is packed with meaning, illusion, feeling and significance beamed at you in a capsule.

There are also a lot of innovations that follows from print, with the development of the book and colour printing for the book. Lithography was another tremendous technological driver of innovation.

The loss of haptic imagery

I think that the innovation of the internet has actually led to many things that are rather worrying, one of which being that the imagery is no longer haptic. You may say that when you look at a graphic image of a vicious cartoon against a religious sect, it’s not haptic either. Yet, you can see the bite of the etching plate or the woodcut tool; that it’s bitten into the wood and the actual physical print has a materiality and, to some extent, a satisfaction, a kind of aesthetic pleasure to do with the presence and actual physicality of the object. The internet and photographic, or perhaps cybernetic, reproduction pretty much loses that textural effect.

So, there’s a drive in contemporary epistemology towards greater and greater scopic knowledge. We have more and more investigations through our extraordinary instruments into what the body looks like on the inside and what things look like close up. In a way, this is trying to compensate for the fact that we don’t have the feel of anything anymore. We’ve lost the tactile knowledge of it, and, of course, we’ve lost the scent of it. The eye is an enormous part of our senses compared to our fingers or the rest of our body, our skin. We don’t touch things and this has an effect on the erotic. The pornographic is more and more scopic and less and less haptic. I think this lack drives image-makers to more and more extremes, in search of affecting their viewers.

On the other hand, while this is the case with the image online, it is not the case with the voice. Since the internet is a vocal and aural medium, we do have something coming back which is very good, which was not present in the circulation of print, and that’s sound – so, there is more and more aural expression. The sensory texture of the web is enriched by its morality, but it’s also increasingly enriched acoustically. I think sound quality has improved, especially since the lockdown, when we’ve been listening to so many things online.

The future of art fairs

Photo by Padmayogini

Art fairs and art markets are rather nightmarish to someone like me. On the other hand, I’m aware that artists do have to sell their work, so it’s hypocritical just to deplore them. Still, it’s difficult to know how you make them better. Frieze in London has definitely improved because it’s added a historical element. The one in Dubai which I went to had a very good series of exploratory historical talks, as well as some historical sections, for example about Arab women artists in the early part of the 20th century, which was really very instructive and eye-poppingly revealing.

When naked commercialism is ramped down and it isn’t just a kind of meat market, then they do have a function of circulating knowledge and ideas about artists, and of giving artists themselves a platform for their work. I have discovered certain artists through visiting such fairs, but the atmosphere of envy that they promote amongst the artists, the money frenzy, the fashionable competitions and so on is hard on the artists and hard on people who want art to be free of these corruptions.

I think the era of the international art fair and conferences as physical events is over. It will be very difficult, even after COVID, to have such international junketing. It will be a phenomenon of the past, like world fairs. They will morph into a different shape. Museums are under tremendous philosophical pressure to rethink their scope, the way they tell their stories, the possessions they have, how they came into possession of those possessions and so forth, and we’re seeing that revolution. I think it’s led to some interesting experiments.

Inclusivity in museums

In New Zealand, I saw an extraordinary response to the problem in a natural history museum. The idea there was that the story that was told about evolution was the story of the people who’d arrived in New Zealand and colonised it. So, what about other alternative stories of natural history?

On one side of the museum, it tells the Darwinian story of evolution and all the related inquiries and models of how the universe came to be. On the other side, it has the Maori story of creation, with its origins of various stones and animals. They don’t try to reconcile the two and they don’t try and obliterate one of them. It is a poetic and imaginative way of looking at the world, which was believed by some peoples; and the other is the doctrine which we hold at the moment in the West. Yet, because it’s in juxtaposition to the poetic Maori story, its epistemology is put into some kind of question. It is shown to be a possible poetic narrative, too, but it’s the one that we tell ourselves. So, this is all to illustrate that interpretation of art objects is a continually moving story and that museums are aware of that and responding to it.

A pastime of the elite?

I think that art has been made into a pastime of the elite and I think both aspects are wrong. I don’t think it should be seen as a pastime, even though it’s a pleasure, rather as more intrinsic. Something that I deplore about the modern world is how art has been separated in this way and identified with the privileged, although there is a lot of art around which we don’t, in a way, see as art. There’s lots of image making that is influenced by art that is just lying about us and, of course, gets powerfully into advertising. The aesthetics that artists develop somehow pass into the consciousness of styling directors and scenic designers so that films are very deeply steeped in the ideas of art.

The artist Gillian Wearing is famous for having created a series of works in which people held up signs which were somehow antithetical to their identity. This was borrowed by numerous advertising campaigns and can still be seen on the Tube, in London. It was used for safety measures. We had social workers on the Tube holding up hand-drawn signs exactly like her work, which now goes back to the 1980s or certainly the 1990s. Avantgarde and radical artists get noticed by an advertising designer and the idea is simply annexed and taken straight into selling some product.

People shouldn’t feel excluded from what is going on because it is reaching them but, of course, it’s reaching them in a perverted way. I’m against art being elite. I think museums should stay free. I know England is unusual in having free museums, but it is a very good feature of our society.

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Making art

Warner, M. (2006). Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media. Oxford University Press.

Warner, M. (2005, March 19). Game on. The Guardian.

Warner, M. (1993, May 26). Tapping into creativity: Why I live in Kentish Town. Evening Standard.

Understanding the power of art