Angst as Frog Morris goes back to college
I started back at Goldsmiths College last week. It was a little disorientating being back in the studio. I have not been settling back in very well. Though I have been in the studio over the summer it hasn’t really felt like it because I have mostly been using it as place to run my website design business and I have done very little artwork there. I have been making art at many other location : Sweden, Ipswich, Blo’ Norton, Three Colts Gallery, Shoreditch, etc. Trying to make art in a studio again has felt a little odd.

I have moved to a new white studio box for the new year and I had felt the strange urge to do a painting or sculpture to put in it. I had even found myself in shop in Deptford looking for art material, fortunately once I was out of my white box I soon came to my sense and went next door to the butcher for some scotch eggs instead. Once back in the studio I decided to try and quell my urge to ‘make something’ by making on some videos. I started by trying to sort through some of the video documentation of the shows I had done over the summer (note there are now some additional vids and pics on the previous blog entries).

Thursday was our start of term presentation when everyone on the Masters of Fine Art course takes turns to present a portfolio of past works so as all new students can get an idea of what everyone else does. Still wrapped up in reams of video from the summer, I decided I would try and present it as something. It had somehow slipped my mind that I had stopped caring for taking documentary footage as it was such a poor representation of my live shows [see July entries in this blog ‘Unprofessional Practice’]. I was reminded of this as the documentary footage played to the new students and lecturers and I was reminded that it was almost unwatchable. It probably made a very bad impression in front of my new colleagues.

As stupid as I felt, I didn’t have time to feel down about the whole thing as the next day I was doing a live performance back at my old undergraduate college in Canterbury and I had to rehearse. Rehearsal gave me something to do in the studio at least, though after the video presentation I decided to dump the poems that featured in the videos so as I didn’t have to dwell on them all afternoon and I set about writing some new material.

I slept badly that night worrying about that day’s presentation and worries that I hadn’t learnt the new material well enough. My sleep was disturbed by a reoccurring dream that Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin is not really dead. He had faked his death because he didn’t really care about animals anymore and was hiding out in England. He was spending his afternoons drinking in local pubs where the pensioners who played cards and dominos didn’t know or care who he was. Everytime I went into a pub for a quiet ale Steve Irwin would always be at the bar, drunk and talking loudly in an Australian accent so as I could get no peace.

Jessica Voorsanger had invited me to Canterbury. Jessie is Mrs. Bob & Roberta Smith as well as being an artist with works in recent shows at The Hayward and The Serpentine. Actually her work wasn’t in the Serpentine, it was in a shed out the back. The little garden shed, better know as the Leytonstone Institute of Contemporary Art, had been put in the middle of the beautiful lawn of the Serpentine by Jessie and Bob and filled with art by their friends, including Victor Mount, John Hegley, Mel Broomfield and Sally O’Reilly. It was part of an art project involving the mentally ill.

After all the stress, my show actually went very well. There were only a few students at the performance and they were initially quite confused by but after a few poems they got into it. By the end people were crying with laughter. I’d never seen people do that at my shows before. I must be getting better at something. I did fuck the new piece up, but not as bad as I thought and speaking to people after I seemed to have got away with it. I think I have something I can work on further when get back to the studio.

The performance was in the morning, so after some lunch with some of my old lecturers, I had a free afternoon. I was tempted by heading to a few of my favourite Canterbury ale houses, but decided instead to head back up to London and try to catch a speech on performance art by Marina Abramovic at Frieze Art Fair that evening. There would be plenty more chances to visit Simple Simon’s Ale House I am sure.

When I got to Frieze the Marina Abramovic talk had sold out but I thought I would have a look around the fair anyway.

Frieze is a great chance to see an enormous quantity of contemporary art, but it is all there for sale and the likes of you and me certainly couldn’t afford it. It is amazing and revolting. I had started this blog by talking about my urge to make something as I felt this is what artists should to do. I now realise that this is not what artist should do. I’m not sure that art is about making things so they can be brought and sold by rich people. Rich people have enough things, they don’t really need my help to get any more. It’s mentally ill people that need that need help. But artists are not really supposed to be social workers either, but they can still do some good by addressing some people who aren’t terribly rich... students for example.

At least that’s how I will feel until next week when my credit card bill arrives and then I’ll be begging for Saatchi to stick his dirty money into my oil paint stained g-string.