Fragments

 

There is in my possession a collection of photographs of cities, photographs taken in the middle of the last century on the kind of camera every family once owned and used to record important occasions.  The photographs, all black and white, are of the standard size of 3” by 4”, and each has been glued to a page in a photo album.  This album is itself defined by its quotidian nature. The photographs are of ruined cities, no more than heaps of rubble and fragments of architecture. Each is accompanied by a hand-written inscription – Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne.

Second-hand bookshops are time machines, cabinets of curiosities that allow the shifting between the present into the past of the once-owners of the books that cram the shelves.   The books themselves allow further slippage, into the past of the author, into the past of the ideas in the book.  Forgotten histories and out-of-date views, layers of interpretations now no longer relevant, the bookshops invite a kind of imaginative archaeology. The random nature of the arrangements often means that serendipity plays a part in what is discovered, it being easy to slide from a shelf of books on cookery via science fiction to the publications of the Age of Aquarius.   Here can be found books that begin with a simple fact, for example the sighting of lights in the night skies of Pembrokeshire, and then build this into a fantasy involving aliens and megaliths.  The second fact, that of there being military establishments in that area, and night firing by tanks, is absent.  And then there are those books that deal with real secrets, with the hidden side of the military industrial establishment, with the listening stations and the test facilities that hide behind razor wire fences.

Large nineteenth century paintings hang at the side of the staircases, and one in particular always drew my attention.  This depicts Samson and Delilah at the moment that Samson is bound by his enemies, while Delilah holds aloft the hair she has cut from his head to deprive him of his strength.  Delilah has the appearance of a starlet from the 1920’s, as if this painting is a publicity still from a film by Cecil B. DeMille. The painting is by Solomon J. Solomon, an artist little known these days aside from those who have a passion for the obscure end of Victorian painting. He has another claim to fame, and a surprising one for those who regard art and artists as useless in times of war.  During the training for use of the Mark I tank at Elveden Explosives Area Solomon J. Solomon was stationed in a barn where he worked on developing camouflage schemes for the machines, trying to find ways to make the slowly crawling tank blend in with the shattered landscape of the Western Front.  The abstracted pastoral scheme may have helped to disguise the vehicle at the first encounter, but the rhomboid design of the first tanks was too recognisable to be fully hidden.  The image of the member of the Royal Academy literally painting tanks is one that is comical because of the unexpected juxtaposition. The markings on tanks carry symbolical meanings beyond the strategic, beyond the numbers and signs used for identification of formations and battlegroups.  The first German tanks had the name Wotan painted on the side, and the British tanks had the symbol of an eye on the front.  The eye that sees all danger.  Mythology and symbols, a magical language to ward off evil.  And to increase power.

One item in the newspaper drew my attention, not so much for its description of the ongoing fighting in Europe, but for one fact about the loss of a battleship.  The battleship was carrying a fragment of the True Cross, and had been blessed by priests. When the battleship sank the shock came not just from the loss of the ship to a supposedly inferior enemy, but also from the fact that the vessel was, in theory, protected by magic, by an invisible barrier guaranteed to defeat any common weapon.  The rites had been observed, the invocations made, and entities made to submit to the greater power.  Now they must protect the vessel with means that were beyond technology.  To bind these forces to their task of protection a relic had been placed at the centre of the armoured ship, and the perfect fusion of weapons technology and occult belief produced. To name something is to be involved in a complex web of meanings; naming as giving a degree of control over forces that are unknown; naming as identifying something as autonomous, as individual, as alive.  Naming means that the entities are under your power.  And naming a machine gives it life.

The legend of the golem deals with information as an animating force, the figure of the golem brought to life by the insertion of the correct formula.  I am not certain about the animating force that is called into action, is it something that is inherent in the clay of the figure, so that the paper on which is written the magical text merely brings forth what is already there?  Or does the text bring something from outside into the golem?  In which case the text is like the runes that carry the curse. I knew of the golem from stills from the 1920’s film, and fragments of the legend discovered in books on myths.  There are other stories of humanoid figures animated by means that seem magical rather than scientific, and behind the robot in Metropolis are symbols that carry occult meanings, and she sits on a throne that makes her seem like a goddess rather than a machine.  And that image, the mechanical future Eve, kept reoccurring in my dreams. In this the magician was not a Jewish Rabbi, but an industrialist, one of those who supported the rising militarisation.  He places his animating text in the chest of an armoured figure.

As familiarity with a building becomes part of how it is regarded, the imagination works to produce new narratives to populate the quotidian blankness.  When factories were part of everyday life, when industry was a central part of life, there was no threat.  Once fallen into disuse they become the site of ghosts, of the possibility of strange events.  Perhaps they follow the same route as the church, once the centre of a community, now a place to be avoided during the dark, when the owls and foxes fulfil their task of being messengers between worlds.  This may be a function of the interior spaces, for in both old churches and factories the roof is high, in one allowing space for cranes and lighting that ensures no one sleeps at work, in the other the space is lit with the ethereal light from tall windows, and spirits may inhabit the rafters.  These old factories contain the traces of vanished industries, abandoned as if the demise of engineering had been a sudden event and the workers had fled as industrial capitalism was overtaken by the service industries.  The remains of the test facilities had that feeling of forced evacuation, of there being some reason for the immediate closure.

In the medieval period there were stories of automatons, of machines endowed with life either through cunning art – the sophisticated application of hydraulics and fakery – or magic.  This latter was used to discredit those with too much mathematical knowledge, perhaps because such understanding was not being used for the furtherance of the aims of the state, the monarch through whom all power must flow.  Philosophers became magicians, and their machines were animated by demons. Roger Bacon is said to have constructed a head of brass, an intelligent automaton that could speak and foretell the future.  When Bacon’s assistant interrogated the machine while the Friar slept, it spoke three phrases and then fragmented.  Whether this was mechanical failure or the anger of a trapped spirit is not recorded, It was growing dark when I left the site and returned to my car.  As I switched on the headlights a sign was illuminated.  A sign that simply said this was the site of an ancient monument.

According to what has been released from the official report into the closure of the site, all the machines were buried in the munitions disposal area of a military range in the South West.   The documents gave a list of those in charge of the final disposal, a list that included a senior cleric.  Some sort of ceremony had taken place before the machines were buried, something akin to a burial service – or an exorcism.

Labour of Love.

 

Although my mum told me grandfather worked for the Post Office, I found it difficult to imagine him in a postman’s uniform, sack of letters over his shoulder, trudging the streets of Liverpool 8 in the rain, avoiding the puddles with their reflections of terraced brick houses.  I could see him working at the sorting office, placing the letters in the correct box for each street in Toxteth, streets with names drawn from the novels of Dickens, or from small towns in Wales.  But delivering letters?  No, not really.

 

He was a quiet man was grandfather, and, in my memory, he is forever knocking out the ash from the pipe, cleaning the stem, filling the bowl, lighting the tobacco, then contentedly sitting wreathed in smoke.  That ritual of the lighting of the pipe was undertaken with the same quiet care he brought to everything, which may be why the idea of his working at the Post Office did not ring true. It is possible it was something I made up later, though why I would do that is another matter.  Which is not to say he was boring.  He had a ready line in nonsense songs that he would sing when he came to look after me, and his favourite saying was “I’ll knock your head off and throw it in your face!”.   It took me a few years to understand the joke, serious child as I was.

 

I think he must have retired from the Post Office just after I was born, and so used the freedom this now gave him to concentrate on his passion, the job that was his real calling.  This employment was in keeping with the ritual of the pipe, with the quiet contemplation of the slow passage of time while engaged in a task, for my grandfather rebuilt and fixed old clocks.

 

In the last century clocks were common, real clocks that is, ones that took their power from a tightly-wound (though not too tight I hear my grandfather say) spring, mechanisms that ranged from the bedside alarm clock, set to wake the worker to another day in the factory, to the late Victorian long-case clocks that could still be found for little money.  These grandfather clocks must have come from from the houses of the well-to-do, houses that were slowly being given over to bedsits as the local economy changed and the financially secure bought country houses in Cheshire.  Naturally I thought they were called grandfather clocks because my grandfather fixed them.

 

My grandparent’s small house was full of clocks, two large grandfather clocks on the upstairs landing, various mantle clocks on sideboards and cupboards, and an upstairs backroom full of clocks undergoing repair and rebuilding, a room full of tins of gears, small screwdrivers, and the smell of light machine oil. 

 

I have often wondered where he gained this understanding of the mechanisms of clocks, this knowledge that meant he was a local celebrity.  He was the man you went to with your late-running alarm, with the old clock your Gran had left you when she passed away, with the pocket watch you thought looked good, but which no longer worked.  Did he pick up this knowledge from magazines and books found in second-hand shops, becoming like many in Liverpool a self-taught expert in an obscure discipline? A Scouse autodidact with a love for knowledge?  I doubt there was anywhere he could go to learn the trade.

 

I can imagine him in these bookshops, standing in the dusty interior searching for manuals, part of a secret brotherhood who met to discuss the arcana of gearings and escapements, the twentieth century equivalent of the Medieval Guilds.  Craftsmen allied by the love of their craft.

 

On my trips back home I often visit these second-hand bookshops searching for the out-of-print volume that will help my own work.  Standing between the shelves, scanning the books of art and design, the philosophical tracts now forgotten, searching for half-remembered science-fiction classics, I listen as the bookshop owner and customers talk knowledgeably about obscure occult philosophers with all the assurance of Oxford Dons.  This desire to find a subject and make that your own comes, I think, from the history of the city.  Liverpool has had its problems, with high unemployment.  But, rather than allow that to define their lives, people become experts, using their time to explore a subject that fascinates them.

 

My grandfather had a son, Frank, who inherited his need for self-education, though not in a realm as practical as the mechanics of clocks.  Uncle Frank was quiet, reserved, shy.  He still lived in the family house, the result, so my dad said, of a love affair that broke his heart.  When my parents, my brother, and I, visited on Sundays, because that was what a good Catholic family did after Mass, I would ask to look at the newspaper Uncle Frank had bought.  This newspaper was the Sunday Times, at that time the only newspaper with a colour magazine, and with supplements dealing with the Arts.  Uncle Frank was an avid reader, with a small library of books kept in the locked cupboard in the front parlour, that room that was only used on special occasions.  When I was allowed into the front parlour I would wonder at these books, many with titles beginning with the phrase “Teach Yourself…”, with some on subjects totally unknown, even to my dad.   What, for heaven’s sake, was Theosophy? 

 

Uncle Frank was entirely unpractical, despite having been in the Royal Engineers at the end of the war, or maybe because of this, and his exploration of philosophy, science, and politics, was his only passion.  He had once worked in a shop selling carpets, and, when that closed, became a taxi-driver, though a taxi-driver who had very little interest in driving people around at night-time, or indeed during much of the day.

 

When my grandfather died, and shortly after my grandmother, Uncle Frank stayed on in the family house.  He sold all the clocks to someone who offered to ‘take them off his hands’ without really thinking.  Perhaps all those clocks marking out time in a now-empty house was too much for him.  When I moved away to study art I didn’t keep in touch, something I now regret, for I know he followed my progress from Masters to PhD. 

 

I look back at my grandfather, at my uncle, and think about their work.  Not about their jobs, not about the thing they did to get money, not about how they fitted into the system of employment that in theory defined them, but never did.  I think about what they did that meant something to them, that gave their days contentment, that felt like discovery without someone, or something, controlling their actions and thoughts.  And in that I see myself, another Scouse autodidact reading philosophy and making things.

The madness of the real

 

One of the ideas floating around in my mind when I began to make the model architecture was a connection of JG Ballard and Derrida, with a nod to Mark Fisher; the idea of structures that seemed like ghosts from the future, ruined semi-military bunkers that appeared to foretell the return of war, as if the future was casting shadows into the past as a warning of paths that should be trodden with caution.  Do not pass through this rusting barbed wire, for if you do you will enter a time stream where the dogs of war once more stalk the land, and ruined concrete and rusting wrecked machines of war litter the landscape.

Although the technologies of war are ever-present, the underpinning of once empires and those who wish to rebuild their empires, they were shadows.  Conflict had shifted to finance, to resources, and militias sought to control places far away from the shining towers of The City.  There were still the dealers, those who took stands in the Fairs of Death to sell the latest piece of expensive equipment, and the factories still made the machines, and the research establishments still ran simulations and tested things that looked more fiction than fact. 

 But we passed through the wire, and the landscape changed.  We hold onto the belief that we can find a path through, that the light will disperse the fog and smoke and the ruins and wrecks will return to history, that tanks in museums will be relics and not functional, that lights in the sky will bring hope and not death. 

Meanwhile…I continue to make scenes that chase the world, wishing ruins to be hopeful signs of what has been left behind rather than a present reality.  There is hope in agency, we can do things, even little things, and work to change the path we travel. 

Aliens have no class

 

There are those files on the desktop that are constantly reworked and revised.  These include the c.v., that list of things achieved that can skirt the borders of fiction, and the artist statement, the little bit of writing that is always in need of revising as it never quite says what you want it to say, or that is my experience anyway.

To my set of revisable texts has now been added a short biography.  This slips between the first and third person depending on the requirements, and first made an appearance when I was making a public artwork in National Taiwan University.  This is the elite University of Taiwan, and as such has a student cohort that stems almost exclusively from the upper echelons of the social economic strata of Taiwan.  As part of the project I wanted some students to discuss ideas of utopia with the non-academic staff of the University, especially the cleaners and ground staff.  This proved problematic, as for the students the idea of engaging with the workers was beyond understanding.  What ideas about utopia could such people possibly have?

At the same time I was teaching in one of the many private universities in Taiwan, and during a discussion with another member of staff, an artist who had studied in the UK before returning to Taiwan, I was astounded to hear the complaint that “the common people do not understand my work”.

These occurrences made me look at my written biography, at the omissions in the discussion of my origins and identity.

 

I was lucky.  I was born in the 1950’s, brought up in a working class Roman Catholic family in Liverpool.  I came into education at the time when the hierarchies of class in the UK were under attack, when a working class Scouser could get a grant and attend polytechnic.   That now obsolete term – polytechnic – brings me up short.  Was that the start of the return of class, when polys became unis?  There was always a distinction between the two, with the academic standing of the university being held in much higher regard than the industry connected polytechnic, nicely symbolised  by the polytechnic I attend being named after a make of car.

My time on the BA was not filled with success, and I did not have the confidence or qualifications to either continue to MA or get a job as a lecturer.   I did have a small skill in painting murals, and so became a community artist, part of a team placed in a deprived area of Coventry. 

Here my feelings around my class and origins were in flux.  The Community Arts Team were based in the centre of the deprived area, and my role was to work with a historian to produce a mural reflecting the history of the area.  My personal ideas about art were confused, as I felt the pull between the kind of work the local community liked, and the kind of things I wanted to do.  There was also the idea at this time that artists working in a community should not try to be experimental – was this a foreshadow of “the common people do not understand my work”?  The Arts Team were from a variety of backgrounds, but we all had a vaguely socialist outlook, which was why we were there.  And we assumed that this outlook was shared by everyone in the local community.  And then Thatcher became Prime Minister, and everyone wanted to buy their council house as they fell for the property-owning propaganda. 

And yet…decrying the desire of the local working-class community to buy their council housing is a bit rich coming from the University-educated middle-class who have bought and are doing up that nice Georgian town house.

Housing produces a metaphor (stolen, I will admit, from Michael Landy), that of the artist from a working-class background who is ‘semi-detached’ from that background by reason of education.  It was during my time as a community artist that the idea of this dislocation became something that is always there.   The Community Arts scheme finished after a year, and I went back to trying to work out what kind of artist I was.

It was not until I returned to Liverpool to look after a gallery that I began to feel as if I was starting on the road to being an artist.  The gallery was a strange affair, funded by a local businessman to keep his daughter happy.  I was not paid, but given a free bedsit and a studio, my first dedicated studio space.  At the gallery openings I met local artists and others from the cultural scene of Liverpool (most importantly the wonderful poet, painter, curator, critic Adrian Henri) and these red-wine-fuelled discussions helped me to see that my ideas and ways of working connected to others.

Liverpool was a good place to be at that time (the 1980’s), for the perception by the government of the populace as unemployable trouble-makers meant that being without a job was fine – we all took the dole and joined the black economy.  To keep body and soul together I taught leisure painting and produced the occasional mural, building on previous experience as a community artist.  The glut of empty buildings meant that studio groups and studio group exhibitions were common, and the local publicly funded spaces (hurrah for the Bluecoat) provided more opportunities to both exhibit and see the work of a wide variety of artists.

I returned to Fine Art Education at the grand old age of 40, studying MA Sculpture at Winchester School of Art, and then getting a PhD scholarship at Nottingham Trent University.  And yet….despite now being ensconced in academia I still suffered from a feeling that I should not be there.  While my fellow PhD was invited to work with the students, I was not.  I was a technician, working in the gallery, installing the work of others. 

Since being ‘doctored’ (as it were) I have applied, and failed to get, numerous academic posts.  So I have worked in galleries and museums as invigilator and technician while exhibiting, and felt that this is my allotted role.  This has given me an insight into the mechanics of exhibiting and the relationship of artworks to the public beyond that I could not have gained by being safely inside the walls of the academy.

Where am I now?  By a series of accidents and the following of opportunities I have found myself in Taiwan, working as an artist and as a lecturer.  Finally in academia, but in a place where the nuances of my background are difficult to read, a place where my accent does not count.  Here I am obviously an outsider, and valued for the insight that brings.  As an alien, I have no class.

 

As I stated at the beginning, I have been lucky.  I am still the only member of my family who has been to university, and the chances of my nephews and nieces attending further or higher education are non-existent.  Without the underlying confidence and financial support that other classes enjoy, anyone from my background wishing to pursue a career in the arts is now facing an impossible task.  If you want security, a house when you retire, a family…don’t do this.  I am exhibition rich and in financial poverty, and fear for my future.

 

It is not the personal account that is the main focus however.  It is what this shifting of the arts towards the expression of a subset of the population means that is deeply worrying.  Culture holds up a mirror to society, and this mirror increasingly reflects the concerns of a minority.  This is seen not only in the work, but in the manner in which the artist glides through the world as if set apart, encountering only the curators and critics who have a similar background.  The technicians, those who build the temporary walls and ensure the paintings are fixed firmly to the gallery walls, are invisible, there only to ensure the artist’s (or increasing the curator’s) vision is achieved.  If this shift can be discerned in the artists, then it is reinforced in the curators.  The public are an annoyance, only addressed by the education staff who are trained in the ways of speaking down to the great unwashed.

I am reminded here of the worries by the upper echelons when it was proposed that the British Museum should be open to the working class, and the similar concerns that accompanied the plans for the Great Exhibition.  In both cases the worries were unfounded, as people came to not only look at the exhibits but equally to be seen looking at what was on display. 

Is the art world like that depicted in The Class Sketch (The Frost Report, 1966) in which John Cleese, Ronnie Barker, and Ronnie Corbet, were the three classes?  This social stratification still holds true for the arts I feel, curators at the top, artists in the middle, and technicians at the end.  

What I find most troubling about this is that this is replicated in Taiwan, indicating that the problem is more wide-spread that just being a by-product of the entrenched class system in the UK.  There are differences here, stemming in part from the hierarchical nature of the society and the fact that Taiwan is a recent democracy threatened by a dictatorship, but a student from a working-class background here will find it difficult to be accepted.

Works that look at the experiences, the history, of the working class now seems like anthropological reports, a view from an outsider of a totally alien form of life.  There is little sense that the work stems from personal knowledge.

The Oriel Davies is a publicly funded contemporary art gallery in Newtown Powys.  On the Saturday morning after the opening of each new exhibition a boy, about seven years old and poorly dressed, would come in and wander around, looking at the works.  At first it was assumed he might cause trouble, but each time he came in he was quiet and looked carefully at the works, sitting and watching videos, looking at paintings.  My friend asked him why he always came in when they had a new show, and he said, simply, because he wanted to look at the new works.  She asked if he wanted to bring his family, and he replied “no, my dad doesn’t want me to come to places like this.”

Art is for everyone, not just for the cultured elite.  This applies to the making of art as well as to its reception, it applies to the chance to push ideas as far as they will go.  No one should have their desire for education in the arts dictated by financial considerations.  The idea fostered by the present incumbent at No 10 (I will not put a name here, as recent experience has shown that the only long-term inhabitant of Downing Street is a cat) and by others that the arts are somehow of secondary importance shows a poverty of imagination and knowledge that only someone from a public-school background can hold. 

 

I am dis-located from my working-class origins, yet know that the scepticism and humour that comes from that background is crucial to what I do.  As indeed is the knowledge that manual labour is important, and that taking joy in the building of an exhibition enables me to connect to my background.  My dad and my brother can connect to what I do by the shared experience of building things, and I enjoy that moment when the curator realises that the builder is also the artist.

On Models

 

 

 

The model does not propose a recreation of an existing structure, each model is a memory, although often a memory of something that has yet to be encountered. As such the model does not focus on an exact recreation of details - the obsession with the correct number and placing of rivets in the scale model of a tank - textures and layers of paint, dust, produces surfaces that allow interpretation, the idea of time passing by the layers, as if each iteration of the structure had produced a surface that has subsequently been partially obscured.

The layers and textures are that of the slow process of decay, and, as with this entropic process, chance plays a part in what results. The chance flows of paint follow the pull of gravity, the sinking of the structure into the earth, the collapse of the sheltering roof that now provides only partial protection from the ever-present rain.

In scale-models there is the desire to illustrate a story, to produce the vehicle of a specific unit at an historical moment. Scale models therefore are fixed in the flow of time, related to photographs that can be placed in history at an exact moment. Each detail gives the clue to the date, and no great process of detection is required to pull the scale model out of its existence defined by size and into the memory of a once-existing past.

Scale models are seldom uncanny in the manner of a doll’s house, which for all its period detail retains elements that disrupt direct connection with a historical moment. No Lord’s mansion had a frontage that could swing open to reveal the class-structure within.

Time, Ladies and Gentlemen, please...

 There comes a point when I need a break from the seemingly endless French Flute Sonatas that haunt early morning (ie afternoon here) Radio 3, and I have had enough of shouting at yet another Tory who seems to have forgotten the UK has been suffering under the rule of the Eton 'elite' for a very long time.  In these times I turn to audiobooks, and scroll through endless stuff on Youtube in the hope of finding something interesting.

Yesterday I discovered a reading of J G Ballard's Kingdom Come.  This is set in the towns around Heathrow, and concerns the malign influence of a huge shopping mall and the rise of a fascist/consumer cult based on violence and racism, for when your life is defined by the wandering of a mall and the purchasing of consumer goods there is only violence to bring excitement.  Although deeply disturbing, there is an element of satire in the fact that the narrator is a failed advertising executive, and therefore partly responsible for the rise of the mall and the central position of shopping in everyone's lives.  I am still listening.

But yesterday there occured one of those odd moments, an strong sense of deja vu.  This was during a description of an apartment, the last home of the narrator's recently murdered father.  I knew the description, I knew every sentence before it had been uttered, and as the description continued there was a feeling of the world shrinking, of there only being the light on the table, the voice from the computer, and me listening to something I already knew.  I have not, as far as I can recall, read this novel, but at sometime I must have read that description, for the sense of familiarity was overwhelming.  But it felt as if I was split in time - there was me listening in the present, and, in a not too distant future I was listening as well, so that the present me was remembering what the future me was listening to.

At this point I should reach for various philosophical and scientific tomes on the nature of time - which is an illusion, and lunchtime doubly so (spot the quote).  But I think it is mostly due to present problems, to not venturing forth often enough as the weather has been less than friendly lately.  I do not like summer, and endless hot days fill me with despair, I am a child of winter and much prefer autumn. 

That sense of deja vu has caught me a number of times recently, is this because I am mining my own memories for ongoing artworks?  Maybe, maybe...

To quote Week Ending, "Makes you think...."

Angry Old Man 1

 

It has been some time since I last posted anything here, and I can't really understand why.  Except that, too often, I put stuff on Facebook or into turgid emails my poor friends have to wade through in order to discover the state of my mind, and if I need help, or cake, or coffee.  Mostly it is the last two.

However, I think it is time I began to write again, rather than discussing my views with the dog on our short walks taken before the heat rises from barely acceptable to utterly intolerable, which latter may in fact be how I feel about the artworld.

Having reached that stage where new opportunities have ceased hereabouts, and the only worthwhile things are in Europe (oh, and the UK, I forget we 'got Brexit done' and have utterly buggered the arts - and sciences - for years to come.  But hey, we got control of our borders, something we already had, but don't tell the Surrey rascists who still think Brexit a good idea) I have fallen to musing on (dot dot dot) curators.  I am sure that once upon a time there were more gallery directors, exhibition assistants, and curators lived mostly in museums.  Now there are more curators than artists it seems, and the curators vie for funds to produce publications and attend conferences and, and here is the point that affects my reason, get money for exhibition proposals and then search for artists to 'respond to the curatorial concept'. Meanwhile the artist just sits and waits, devoid of any ideas, a mere automaton requiring the magic formula of the curator's concept to kick start the corpse into life.  I am a mere lump of clay and need the slip of paper to animate my base material.  

I object to this, to having to bend my ideas to fit the views of a curator fresh from an MA in Curatorial studies.  Maybe curators should, post MA, do some on-the-job training - five years of being a technician in a gallery building walls and painting things white, a few years standing in a gallery looking after exhibitions, that kind of thing.  Actually, this would be good for everyone in the artworld.  Especially those cloistered in academia.

This is all deeply unfair, and many of the curators I know have indeed spent their time painting walls white and fiddling with lights while the opening deadline for the exhibition looms.  But I wish there were more open calls were curators would develop ideas with artists, rather than proscibing what the artist(s) can produce.  And then that artist can make the work and the curator can deal with all the other bits, like getting money, arranging transport, painting walls white...