Watched Network during the time of putting the project together. A satirical black comedy from 1976 about a deranged news presenter who exposes television journalism as a sensationalist wasteland where entertainment value and short-term ratings were more crucial than quality. Amazing dialogue and again seems like another prophetic fiction..or more evidence that our current ‘post-truth’ landscape has been around for decades before now.
I’m the kind of person that finds it difficult to get going making art (well making anything really), I will draw a line, it won’t be right, I’ll scrap it and start again. I feel like I’m always on this quest for perfection which always leaves me feeling anxious and normally results in work undone or out of time before a deadline. In a way I am creating an alter ego which will give me licence to be reckless with work…or work in a more organic way which will require me breaking some old habits.
I will be making art I don’t believe in. A lot of it.
My post truth art needs to be impulsive. The intention is to overload you with artwork, artwork with no particular common thread and with limited thought and executed in a deliberately poor or unskilled way.
Much like being overloaded with information in this post truth media climate, I want to leave you in a state of confusion to whether I’m for real and feeling like you don’t know where to start with my exhibition of tat!
I intend on having a description for every piece of art I make, all relevance in after thought. I will create the art first and then relate it to the political climate in some way.
As a reflection on the current state of news and media I am taking something that I have decided is true and circulating it until it becomes true.
Is self-proclamation enough?
So in my previous posts I mentioned an interest in semantic satiation – the repetition of a word until it becomes meaningless.
In the case of the lie repetition makes it real, as Nazi Chancellor Joseph Goebbels is famously quoted as saying, “if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.”
If a lie can be shared enough and people want to believe it then it will be true. And, if repeated enough will become so intrinsically linked with the subject of the lie, that you cannot separate them. David Cameron and the pigs head for example. He did it. Whether he actually did it or not because people prefer to believe the entertaining story.
In the hope of believing my own bullshit, I created a very simple little mantra to affirm my new career as an artist. A phrase I could repeat over and over to myself and anyone who would listen…I AM AN ARTIST.
Making a slightly crazed sketch where I wrote IAMANARTIST until it felt right to stop, I couldn’t help but go into a little trance like state where I got caught up with thinking…maybe I am an artist? Could this actually be the beginnings of a career as an artist? Is this a totally out of this world, original, brilliant project that literally no one has thought of before?!?!…. I AM AN ARTIST.