Art

Like sport, I hardly excelled at art when I was at school. This, I fear, may be of some disappointment to my father, who had himself attended art school, and perhaps also to my mother who was very good at drawing. This lack of proficiency rather coloured my later views toward art, and I’m sure at some point I must have regaled my ex-girlfriend (herself something of a dab hand with a paint brush) about the inherent subjectivity involved in appreciating art, and the pretentiousness of some artists and their work. I probably also tried valiantly to argue the case for music as art, and probably failed.

I enjoyed drawing as a child; I was particularly good at creating line-drawn pictures involving very small, very detailed objects and characters, but as soon as I was no longer drawing for pleasure, I disliked the skill terribly. Painting was a messy chore, and hampered still further by my colour blindness. I remember one Friday afternoon at High School where our teacher, the spelling of whose name I can no longer recall but it was similar to Fraggle, asked us to mix paints and come up with a spectrum in the form of a pie chart. Despite the difficulty of me being able to identify the differences between shades of red and green (the result being a sludgy flat brown mess), she kept me behind after class until it was complete. On a Friday. I think I had a dentist appointment that evening too, which I only got to by running hell for leather out of the school gates.

And thus my early experiences of art left me feeling somewhat negative on the subject. However art has a certain pull and over the years I have found myself drawn to this area more and more. One of the things that awoke in me an interest was the 1994 Underworld album Dubnobasswithmyheadman; Underworld are part of the Tomato design collective, and the sleeve featured what seemed like random fragments of sentences repeated and overlaid so as to obscure parts of the words and create jagged shapes. It seemed so simple and yet so intriguing, and so in very poor imitation I created some similar images using one of our university PCs. Around the same time I found myself drawn to M.C. Escher’s geometrically-warped pieces, but in general any interest in art I possessed was very much leaning toward modern works rather than traditional oil portraits or watercolour landscapes.

Working in London arguably affords anyone with an interest in art of whatever form the perfect opportunity to see excellent works of historic and cultural significance. We are awash with galleries of every shape or size covering any area of the artistic spectrum. In the Tate Modern we have gained a populist masterpiece housing all sorts of unusual works that works as a place for kids to visit right through to the connoisseur, those seemingly polar opposite groups that should mix as well as oil and water (colours). But there is no snootiness here. No surprise to find therefore that this is the most visited art gallery in the world. If I’m feeling pretty energetic, it’s possible for me to leave my company’s offices on Old Broad Street and walk across London Bridge and along the South Bank to the Tate Modern, pitch up for some reflection in the Rothko room (anyone who’s ever listened to the second Joy Division album would find a certain resonance therein), hop over the river on the Millennium Bridge and be back at the office all within an hour’s lunch break. But, hey, what it all means I have no idea.

There was a work being ‘exhibited’ in Milton Keynes in September which I think I do understand. Artist Wolfgang Weileder, along with construction engineers R. Bau and students from a local college were involved in Transfer Project, which ran in the plaza outside Milton Keynes station. Transfer Project saw the group constructing an exactly-sized replica of the boxy Milton Keynes Gallery’s external structure by constructing one wall after the other, and deconstructing the previous wall so that the entire structure was never complete at any one time. As my only passage through the plaza was early morning and early evening, I never saw anyone actually working on the project, and so it was quite enthralling to notice the changes that had been made on any given day.

And therefore for once I am prepared to offer an interpretation of a piece of art. For me, with its constant construction and deconstruction, Transfer Project is the embodiment of ‘impermanence’, a subject I’ve been mulling over for much of my adult life. Nothing in this life is permanent; even the apparently most enduring things are, in the grand scheme of things, over in but an instant, and this is what Weileder’s project represents for me. It also echoes the current trend in architecture toward buildings with a defined lifespan. Gone are the days of projects being built to last; instead buildings are erected with the explicit intention to raze them to the ground and start again some two or three decades later. A friend who works as a property fund manager once told me on a journey on foot through the City that there are office buildings in the Square Mile being pulled down and replaced only twenty years after they were first constructed, that the current elaborate schemes under construction may only exist for a maximum of twenty years until city planning decides that more space is needed and that buildings should reach higher than the current limits dictate.

Impermanence is a frightening subject when considered, morbidly reinforcing one’s mortality and all-too-brief existence upon this earth, and there is a further echo of this in the flat, largely featureless and blank structures of Weilder’s walls when they are constructed; hollow, lifeless, silent. The walls are sheer with the exception of holes where the windows and doors of the actual Gallery would go; whereas the actual MKG is painted a lively, lurid pink and has a roof structure evoking a buoyant wave, Transfer Project is sheer greyness. Perhaps it is also a reaction against the flat concrete, glass and steel buildings evident elsewhere in Milton Keynes.

But then again, maybe it’s just a pile of adult-sized Lego bricks in an otherwise empty space normally utilised as a rudimentary skate park by local youths.

Frustratingly, just before the project ended in mid-October, I walked past the security fence slowly enough to read the description of the installation posted by the Gallery. Apparently Weileder is chiefly interested in the relationship between the temporary and the permanent. At first I thought to myself that for once I had correctly interpreted a piece of art, and I was momentarily elated; this elation rapidly turned to disappointment some seconds later when I realised that my interpretation of the piece above was actually informed by a cursory trip to the artist’s website earlier in the month.

Therefore, my dear friends, you have just read an article that is frankly pointless, banal and irrelevant.

But I guess if you wanted to be highly subjective you could actually call that art.

Fast forward a few months to June, and you would find me being escorted around the Royal Academy of Art on Piccadilly for this year’s Summer Exhibition, which the company I work for has sponsored for the past two years. There is, of course, much here that I do not understand whatsoever, much that I find pointless, but also much that my eye lingers over. The architecture area in Gallery IV is fascinating, and David Hockney’s enormous Bigger Trees Near Water painted on no less than fifty canvases is breathtaking but to these unappreciative eye is so awe-inspiring simply because of its scale.

In Gallery IX there is a piece which once again prompted me to ponder the briefness of our existence, I Just Have To Have You Here A Little Longer, an encased dresser made entirely of cake, sugar, colouring and a tiny bit of wood by artist (patisserie?) Rachel Mount. For the odd sum of £16,320 this piece can be yours, but it will presumably at some point rot away into nothingness.

For me, I’ll stick with my purchase of item 269, The Artists’ Gate by Neil Woodall, not because it is trying to say something to me, but because I happen to think it looks nice. It’s also cheap, tasteful, pastoral and unchallenging, proving that art from this most renowned and esoteric of exhibitions – 239 years and still going strong – can also be appreciated by art dunces like myself.