I don’t want to add to the cliché of the suffering artist in his garret, but I do feel that there is another aspect of childhood that often profoundly shapes us as artists. The human being, the human mind, has a miraculous ability to transform the traumatic experiences of its life into a positive. This amazing survival mechanism can often translate the most harrowing brutalities into masterpieces that speak to us all.
The clinical neuroscientist Raymond Tallis said, ‘Art is expressing one’s universal wound – the wound of living a finite life of incomplete meanings.’ I like this idea that it’s quite a noble journey we’re on.
Of course not every artist has been shaped by a terrible upbringing. I understand there are many artists – though I’ve not met that many of them – who are happy and who haven’t got this traumatic thing in their past that they feed on. But I think most artists could cite a crux event in their past, a central motif of some time in their early life, which they can self-mythologize about why they became an artist.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is Joseph Beuys, a German artist in the mid-twentieth century. He was a gunner on a Stuka dive-bomber on the Eastern Front in World War Two and he was shot down over the Crimea. He says they crashed and he was thrown from the wreckage and was later pulled from the snow by some Tatar tribesmen who covered his broken body in fat and wrapped him in felt blankets to keep him warm, and they kept him alive until they could get him to hospital. And this is the reason, Joseph Beuys says, why he uses fat and felt in his sculptures – they’re his signature materials – and also for his deep interest in shamanism, which was the Tatars’ religion.
My signature material is clay, so my personal artist narrative starts when I made my first pot as a nine-year-old at school. I’d probably been a little bit naughty in class and I was put with the girls – you can see where this is going – and to make pottery I had to wear a PVC smock buttoned up the back with snappers. Mine was a little bit tight and it was light blue and very shiny, and they had a very pretty teaching assistant who snapped it on to me. And I can remember feeling quite turned on by this whole scenario and I made my first primitive ceramic in this heightened state. Whatever sensitivities were fired off in unison that afternoon in 1969, perhaps they formed early pathways along which my subsequent art career would follow.
Now I don’t want to overdetermine anything from this – why I went on to make pottery that often had sexual imagery on it – by making out there is some literal link from my childhood experience to the form of my art. Or maybe I’m doing what Joseph Beuys did, which is to twist the truth quite a lot to mythologize his own past to fit in with his later artwork, because the story he tells isn’t quite how it happened. Apparently he did crash, but no Tatar tribesmen, or fat, or felt, were involved in his rescue. My story, though, is true.
But when you’re growing up, art is certainly serious play. When I was a child I had a big, elaborate fantasy world – where my teddy bear was the king – which acted as a place I could escape to. It was very seriously crafted and it was a place I could go and survive during frightening times in my childhood.
Indeed, one of the most serious purposes that art, like play, can have is helping children deal with the difficulties in their lives.
In 2013 I visited a marvellous charity called The Art Room that offers severely troubled schoolchildren a beautifully equipped and staffed art room as a refuge where they might catch a glimpse into their own creative power; where they might be reflective and not tossed about by the chaos of their lives. The teachers are also trained counsellors who help them, and together the room and the teachers and the making of art provide a safe haven.
I loved The Art Room because it seemed to formalize my own experience of the therapeutic benefits of making art. I was very moved by their pragmatic approach. They encourage the children to make solid artefacts that won’t be thrown away, unlike the drawing that ends up tacked to the fridge at home. They would find some old furniture and ask the children to decorate it and then take that home. When a child takes a decorated stool or lampshade back to a home that has little furniture and bare light bulbs it must give them a sense of empowerment, that in a small way they have begun to change the world. Because of course art’s primary role is not as an asset class and it’s not necessarily about being an urban-regeneration catalyst. Its most important role is to make meaning.
For the young, that’s quite a subtle process. While they’re making art, the meaning of their art and the message they’re sending, and the feelings they’re expressing, they’re all sneaking out under the radar. I’m sure my art teacher saw my unconscious leaking like some sort of stain on to my paintings when he suggested I might do well at art school. He noticed I was giving away more of myself than my embarrassed, teenage grasp on self-expression would allow in language.
Art is not some fun add-on to life. Go back to the Ice Age and the artists then were still making art even when living constantly under threat from starvation, cold and predators. They set aside hours and hours and hours to make art. The need to express oneself runs very, very deep. The problem is often accessing this need, this primitive creative urge that we all have, without the self-consciousness that so curses teenagers and the art world alike.
One group of artists who perhaps don’t suffer from self-consciousness as much as others is outsider artists. Since I was a teenager, I’ve loved outsider art. Outsider art is art done by people who haven’t been to art school and probably don’t have much knowledge about the art world or the market. They are artists who spontaneously create work, usually just for themselves, with little reference to art history or awareness of what else is being made today. And, of course, with little self-consciousness. Maybe they’re not even doing it for other people; they just do it for themselves and never show anybody.
One of the most famous outsider artists was Henry Darger, who lived from 1892 to 1973. After a terribly traumatic childhood he found work as a janitor in a Chicago hospital. For the rest of his life he laboured away in his spare time on hundreds of large drawings and collages some ten feet or more long in his small rented apartment, never showing them to anyone. They only came to light after his death. He wrote a 19,000-page novel called In the Realms of the Unreal for which these paintings were the illustrations. They depict a fantasy world riven with conflict, child cruelty and stormy weather where Darger could play out the injustices and traumas of his own early years. There were seven princesses and a complex story of child slavery and the American Civil War is all woven in along with Catholicism. He was fascinated by storms. Once the novel and the paintings were discovered, researchers found that he was so driven to create that he spent most of his money, his meagre income as a janitor, on having magazine illustrations photographically enlarged so he could trace them on to his works using carbon paper, because he didn’t think that he could draw.
I find this fantastically moving: that in the pre-Photoshop age he had to go through this elaborate process because he didn’t think he was good at drawing. His paintings are now selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, something he didn’t live to see. But I like to think art did give him one thing. I like to think it gave him an incredibly rich life.
I decided to become an artist at about the age of sixteen when my art teacher saw my buried emotions poking through the surface of my artwork. I noted my decision – ‘I will be an artist’ – on an imaginary piece of paper and I tucked it under my imaginary mattress and I’ve never really fetched it out again to re-examine it.
But ironically, at almost exactly the same time as I made that decision to become an artist, I lost my ability to play. I can remember almost to the day: I found myself alone with a box of my brother’s toy cars, and usually I used to lose myself for hours narrating car races and dogfights under my breath. But that day I picked one of the cars up and realized I could no longer lose myself (note that phrase, ‘lose myself’). Self-consciousness had crept in; a pall of embarrassment cast a shadow, lik
e the Wicked Witch of the West, across my imaginary landscape. To paraphrase Picasso, it took me four years to be able to draw a bit like Raphael but it would take me a lifetime to regain anything like the joyful freedom I felt with a box of Lego as a child. The sound a box of Lego makes is the noise of a child’s mind working, looking for the right piece. Shake it, and it’s almost creativity in aural form.
I wanted to be an artist because I loved drawing when I was a young man but I’m not sure I really knew what contemporary artists did. I hadn’t been to many art galleries or anything like that.
Recently a friend told me about a child she encountered in an education programme she was working on at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. At the beginning of the project she asked the children, ‘What do you think a contemporary artist does?’ And this particular child rather precociously put her hand up and said, ‘They sit around in Starbucks and eat organic salad.’ And I imagine that is a pretty accurate assessment of many artists’ behaviour in the fashionable parts of a city. At the end of the course, after they had spent some time looking at what contemporary artists did, my friend asked them, ‘What do you now think a contemporary artist does?’ And the same child said, ‘They notice things.’ And I thought, wow, that’s a really short, succinct definition of what an artist does. My job is to notice things that other people don’t notice.
Alain de Botton, a writer about philosophy, talks in his book How Proust Can Change Your Life about people (literary tourists) looking for Combray, the fictional village where Proust set his masterwork. And he said in many ways they’ve got it wrong because if they want to have a true homage to their hero, instead of looking at his world with their eyes, they should look at their own world with Proust’s eyes.
An artist’s job is to make new clichés.
But becoming an artist is not just a matter of having low impulse control or a burning, unconscious desire to express your humanity. At some point these urges need channelling. Going to art college is one of the few fixed rungs on an art-career ladder that feels more like a greasy pole. Of course people can become artists without going to art college – outsider artists are a fantastic example of this – but it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to make a career as an artist if you haven’t gone to college.
Of course many people would say art is a non-career, but in many ways, by defining ourselves as contemporary artists, we are saying, ‘I’d quite like a career,’ because the idea of an untutored genius seems quite quaint to me now, particularly in the West. Maybe there are still undiscovered geniuses in countries with more developing contemporary art scenes. Here in the West, though, the idea of a person suddenly springing up and being a brilliant contemporary artist never having gone to art school seems weird and a little bit naive.
The troubling, challenging thing is that deciding to attain an art education is to sign up for an advanced course in self-consciousness. Ironically, the very enemy of expression is also a tortuous necessity for anyone wanting to present their work to the art world. Two hundred years ago the painter John Constable said, ‘These self-taught artists were taught by a very ignorant person.’
So when I said to my mother, ‘I’m going to go to art college,’ I got the usual reaction – as you would get from a working-class family – which was, ‘It’s not a proper job.’ And in many ways, she was right.
On page thirty-one of the Department of Innovation and Skills Report, The Returns of Higher Education 2011, there’s a rather stark graph. I feel quite bad bringing this up but we have to confront this situation. And that is, that compared to someone who’s never been to university at all, the average art student will make just 6.3 per cent more money than that person. Although the gender difference is striking: women will make 11.7 per cent more; men 1 per cent less!
For an individual, it is self-evident that you do not go to art college if you want a guaranteed route to making money. I feel very heartened by the fact that so many young people are prepared to risk the debt and disappointment because they believe in art. Even though statistics are staring them in the face, telling them they’re probably perpetuating their poverty by doing it, they still go. I think that’s lovely. I think that’s a good thing.
I talked to a group of fine-art students recently and fundamentally I think their reasons for attending art school were very similar to mine. I heard the same uncertainty about who they were and what they wanted, the need to find themselves, the desire for freedom but also the desire to know what to do. Most of them still made ‘things’ but now with the added overwhelming problem of there being so many artists, galleries, possibilities, influences, techniques. One lad said whenever he had an idea he would google it and usually someone somewhere in the world had already done it.
The skip outside an art college is probably the repository of the ugliest objects on earth because they’re not just ugly objects; they’re ugly objects trying to be art. That skip is like a potpourri of broken dreams.
But that’s how it should be! An art college is a place to experiment, a place of unique freedom. Often that freedom is the freedom to get it wrong. A large part of creativity is making mistakes and then noticing what’s good about them. The art critic Martin Gayford wrote: ‘Mistakes are as big a part of art as scholarship or truth. The Renaissance, for example, was based on a creative misunderstanding of classical antiquity. A great deal of nineteenth-century art derived from an incorrect assessment of the Middle Ages (and the Renaissance). Picasso didn’t comprehend the first thing about the meaning of the African sculptures he used as source material for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.’
Art history is a global version of that old children’s game Chinese whispers.
That’s the fascinating, brilliant thing about it – that people get it wrong – and that is a very, very important part of being creative. Though when faced with one’s mistakes it can be a harsh lesson.
The essential thing one learns at art college is difficult to condense. I think the most important thing is being exposed to a certain sensibility, of what it’s like to be an artist. You’re a trainee bohemian and you’re there with fellow travellers on this journey, with facilities and tutors on hand. This feeling of being among kindred spirits is vitally important and one I find very moving. In this book I’ve mocked the pomposities and joked about the contradictions of the art world, but it’s been like teasing a dear friend because in reality, when I joined the art world, it felt more like arriving in Kansas than in Oz.
For young people who feel a bad fit with their families or with wider society, to come within the tolerant and accepting embrace of the art college is a profound experience. The acceptance and tolerance of their difference and their imagination is an important thing. It’s a subtle experience being at art college because what you pick up is an understanding, a bodily understanding, of what art and being an artist means at that moment.
It’s also a great joy to learn a technique, because as soon as you learn it, you start thinking in it. When I learn a new technique my imaginative possibilities have expanded. Skills are really important to learn; the better you get at a skill, the more you have confidence and fluency. I like the idea of ‘relaxed fluency’ when you get into the zone and you’ve done your 10,000 hours and you’ve become really skilful. And it might be traditional skills, but it might be becoming skilful at negotiating an intervention in a municipal car park or gathering a group via Twitter.
At the end of it students emerge hoping to have found themselves unique. But, as the old saying goes, originality is for people with very short memories.
Of course, originality does exist and that shock of pleasure when you encounter it is one of the greatest things that anybody who’s interested in art can experience. But the best artists can take quite a while to find their voice. An art career, after all, is a marathon, not a sprint.
I think one of the best descriptions of that process comes from Arno Minkkinen, a Finnish photographer. He came up with the Helsinki Bus Station Theory
in 2004. He said that when you’re leaving art college and you choose your style and what path in the art world you’re going to take, it’s like going to Helsinki bus station. There are about twenty platforms and maybe ten buses leave from each platform, and you choose your bus and you get on the bus. And each stop is a year in your career. And after about three stops you get off and you walk into a gallery and you show them your work and the people look at it and they go, ‘Oh, very nice, very nice. Reminds me a bit of Martin Parr though.’ And you go, ‘Uurrrgh!! I’m not original, I’m not unique,’ and you get really cross. So you get a taxi back to the bus station and you get on a different bus. And of course what happens is the same thing. What you need to do, says Arno Minkkinen, is stay on the fucking bus!
I think that’s a marvellous description of the process. You know the buses are often on the same road for the first ten, twenty stops away from the bus station. Most artists are going to be influenced by something for the first ten years of our careers. Originality takes time. Carving out a career takes time. I didn’t start making any money until I was thirty-eight, so I was well down the road before I got going.
(I left college with a 2.1. Nobody’s ever asked. It was from Portsmouth Polytechnic. I was once interviewed by a radio journalist who rather mischievously asked if Portsmouth Poly was one of my female alter egos.)
I did what many people do when they leave college: I immediately applied for an MA. I was terrified of becoming just another artist in the world. I applied to Chelsea for an MA and was rejected because, and I quote, I was ‘too much of an artist and not enough of a student’.
This is probably the most difficult moment for a young artist, leaving art college after all those years of education. Suddenly it’s just you and the world – unprotected, undirected, and nowadays very much in debt. It’s not just an anxious time for the ex-student but also for their parents, particularly if they have little conception of the world their child is trying to enter. I find it very poignant at degree shows when I see parents up from the provinces looking bewildered, trying to figure out what little Billy or Jilly has been up to for three years and how on earth they are going to make a living out of tying string round the banisters or making warships out of cardboard or videos of shadows.
Playing to the Gallery Page 7