Amongst the endless grid copying, papier mâché body parts and the big hitters, the one unifying thing that people seemed to do in art at school was a pencil drawing of a shoe. I recall two or three being brilliantly exact, photo-realist masterpieces, some half-decent to middling efforts, a few were more joyously cartoonish whilst others merely resembled dead slugs or something else that was clearly not a shoe. We put them all up on the wall and had a good laugh at the really bad ones, whilst the teacher stood back, desperately scanning for any glimmers of talent. I guess that the exercise was to try and represent something that you knew inside out on a crappy sheet of A4 - a non-art object as a symbol of your way of thinking.
Of course at the time we had no idea about this. Our opinion on the said work was nonchalantly critical - as it tends to be at that age - we had either, “That’s shit mate” or “Alright Mike-el Angelo..!” and not much inbetween to be honest. Imagine for a moment if this was still the case on judging panels. I don’t think I’m far from the truth by saying that anyone who is currently part of a British art selection committee has done this and might still react like this on the inside; as a flashback to how their own shoe drawing was ridiculed by others. It would be interesting to know if this still goes on in mid-September art classes or perhaps your phone is now the subject. Back then, I wouldn’t have had any idea about how to execute a reflection on glass or draw straight lines without a ruler, so maybe, just maybe, modernity has screwed the budding artist over.
Once the shoe business was out of the way we moved onto Cubism fairly quickly. Come to mention it, I don’t remember much about anything pre-Modern - perhaps the school realised (and quite rightly) that nude blokes on clouds and distant European countryside wasn’t really going to cut it for a bunch of twelve year olds. We looked at Picasso, Braque and other such artists and tried our own versions of the still life that we had arranged on the centre table, switching positions occasionally but never quite shouting “Finished!” because how can a cubist work ever be so? Again the results varied , “ ’s alright”, “Copycat!”, “No, you copied me!...Miss!” etc but this time I remember more attention being paid to parts that before seemed insignificant. Having had very little knowledge of perspective, it was too hard for us to draw the whole thing so many just did a cup or simply copied someone else’s.
I remember that sometime during the next few weeks the teacher showed us one of the early French collages - the type made out of bits of newspaper, tram tickets and so on - and introduced us to the ready-made, which as everyone knows, changed the course of what art could be. It must have changed our collective mindset because by the end of the lesson, almost everyone had turned out their pockets and had stuck together whatever they had. The odd confidence that came with being able to draw (or even unable to) quickly evaporated when we knew that we could make something that looked similar to what was in the book without really trying. It was easier and faster. I personally recall pasting in a green, canteen card over a charcoal guitar neck as if it was between the strings. Yet the best thing by far was seeing a dozen collages that all featured the same type of used single ticket from the same bus company in roughly the same position. In any case, it did symbolise some level of understanding – that non-art is art, or at least that the same bit of paper can get you a good mark in art as well as get you home. In any case, I don’t think any of the Day Rider holders had the guts to sacrifice theirs in the name of art on this occasion.
So what if they didn’t but would a return ticket have meant more? Probably.
I was glad to have been made aware of such work at a young age because it prepared me for the more complex implications of modern and post-modern sculpture - when material was king. It stands to reason that the material nature of work has changed (now that we are well and truly into the virtual age) but I think that these early experiences with the bus tickets told me this about appropriation:
Uselessness has a use because if something is useful it is useless because it is still being used.
or
Worthlessness has worth because if something has value it is worthless because it still has value.
You could say any of this any which way but the fact remains that no matter what your work is made from, it will always sit somewhere on the spectrum between conceptual uselessness and material value. Such fluidity of meaning is everywhere. Take people who steal lead from church roofs in the middle of the night for example; do they sell it on for more just because it has been blessed? Of course they don’t - its sentiment has no meaning to them but it’s still a church roof. On the flip side, take how old art increases in price if it serendipitously becomes part of a market trend – in this case, then it is banal sentiment that makes it more valuable than its actual worth, despite it being the same piece.
But sentiment does have value, as the saying goes, or at least the strand attached to possibility does. You wouldn’t keep hold of something for no reason other than for a possible future use. I am often accused of hoarding but I strongly deny it, or perhaps I should simply put it down to the English art school system and be done with it!
Coming up in Part II - Kurt Schwitters, Rauschenberg, past projects and sacrifice…