Contested Ground - Eric Randolph (fanzine contribution)

Contested Ground
Eric Randolph

I think I’m supposed to give the outsider’s perspective here, the spontaneous unadulterated reaction of someone who knows close to nothing about art. That’s supposed to be easy: all I have to do is be honest about my impressions. But actually it’s not that easy, because we enter any situation with a clutch of prejudices and interests that distort any notion of honest feeling we might have. And prejudices and interests are not simple either; often they are contradictory and swayed by mood and circumstance. So I walk into the main room of the exhibition and I look up at a big wooden tower sort of a thing, and it’s kind of wonky and has some bits of metal stuck to it and so on, and my initial reaction is to scoff. What am I supposed to do with these bits of wood here? How long am I supposed to look at it before I’ve fulfilled the requisite quota of art appreciation on this piece? It means nothing to me. But then some other prejudices kick in which tell me that I know there’s more to this than the simple construction of the thing itself. That there’s a relationship to the space, that at some level there’s an interaction happening between me and this piece however little my cynicism wishes to acknowledge it; that the mere act of having carried out the task of building it and erecting it and opening the doors to people is an artistic act in which I am complicit. This is the part of me that wants to be considered culturally aware and observant and analytical, the part of my brain that sends me every so often to the Tate Britain to pay £10 and walk around looking at famous things and stroking my beard and adopting that pendulum swing walk that people adopt in art museums, occasionally leaning in to peer closely at some detail of a painting so that others can see that I know what I’m doing.

I continue around the exhibition, aware I need to write something about this when I’m done. I’m looking for a crux, something to hang the writing on. There’s a very clever piece using dry ice to make a CD skip. I quite like the music, but this won’t do. I’m told about a piece called Concrete Chunk. It’s a concrete chunk. It’s holding the door of the office open. This is shit, I think to myself. Occasionally, several people are roped in to move it around. What a pain in the arse, I think to myself. The aspirational part of me is losing out to the cynical moron. Need to regain inspiration. I head back downstairs. There’s a close-up of the little dove that used to be on credit cards. This is good, I think to myself, I used to like looking at my mum’s one of these when I was a kid. Hmm, I wonder, do they still put these on credit cards? I take my wallet out. There’s no dove on there. I feel disappointed, but somewhat enlightened. Another room is playing a film about Mexican gangs. Next to it is film about Ikea. What a depressing juxtaposition – how boring are our lives in Britain that artists feel there’s something worthwhile to be had from making a film about Ikea, while in Mexico you go out on the street and you find all sorts of horrible shit going on: Real Life. Of course, real life in this context consists of drugs wars, several thousand murders per month, and the decapitation of police officers. It’s easy to have a reaction to that. It must be a lot easier to corral your reactions to art in Mexico.

I walk into another room and find a tug-of-war going on. This is nice, I think to myself, some entertainment to keep the children amused. I discover later that in fact this is art, too. I protest, but I’m shouted down. I try to imagine why this is art. Are we supposed to look at this as the essential violence of man – that we can only ever succeed at the expense of another? Or is the tension in the rope a metaphor for the unbearable tension of our lives, are we the ribbon in the middle being torn from left to right by competing human pressures? Or is just a game of fucking tug-of-war?

And then it dawns on me that this is the point. That it has little to do with the form or the meaning or the context or the essence. The effect here is not the result of interaction between objects, or between objects and humans. The interesting relationship, as far as I am concerned, is that between the setting and vocabulary. Looking at these pieces of art, we find new ways of describing, new ways of interpreting, and categorising and analysing. This is a fun game, a hobby. It occupies the time of thousands and thousands of professors and students and art critics and artists and anyone who wants to immerse themselves in the pastime of stretching vocabulary to the borders of its logic. The uncertainty I often experience around art is less about what I’m feeling, then, and more about how I’m supposed to rationalise those feelings, translate them into English.

So I look again at the bunf about the exhibition: “Results or outcomes are rarely left to chance; the indiscernible is unacceptable. This rejection of the unforeseen creates a closed system where predictability and predetermination are celebrated.” Filtered through my brain, these sentences are meaningless constructions lain around a collection of nice and interesting, but ultimately pretty random, bits of stuff. The great hypocrisy of this brief is that it is itself an attempt to draw discernibility – through vocabulary – around the meaningless collection of pieces on display. If we follow its command and embrace the unforeseen, then it becomes foreseen. And let’s try to forget the fact that, mid-economic crisis, we actually live in a world horrifically riven with uncertainty and unforeseen consequences. But what wonderful fun is being had with English there! Where else can you get away with this shit but in an art gallery? Brilliant.

I take a step back and reassess this reaction I’m having. I realise this is the same contest happening within me that I spoke of earlier – between wanting to be true to my immediate reactions and aspiring to deeper levels of understanding. And if I’m truly honest then it’s between something that I do indeed have little control over. And that’s between wanting to write something honest, and not wanting to sound like a complete twat.