i don’t want what you want, i don’t feel what you feel-the strokes

Since it’s been such a long time since either G or I wrote for this blog I felt it was time to get motivated.

For whatever reasons, I have been rather maudlin and drawn lately. What once seemed to have a silver lining, now appears grey and miserable; it’s almost as if my personal outlook is covered in crap weather, without a break in the cloud cover.

This sense of being maudlin and melancholic got me thinking a bit. What is it that I am actually doing as an artist? The focus of this blog is to explore and try and better comprehend experiences, in whatever shape or form they may come in: gigs, art, sex, food, drugs, whatever. However I tend not to write from my own first person perspective as an artist, because I have another blog for doing that and I’m still establishing who I am on this blog versus the other one. But what I want to look at doesn’t necessarily fit there, at this moment in time, so bear with me, although this might not make sense in parts, but hopefully it will pull itself together at some stage.

Being melancholic and maudlin are feelings, or ways of feeling, that have always interested me. When I was a kid and the time came to colouring, the other kids gravitated towards the brightly coloured crayons and pencils, but not this kid. Give me some Rothko-like blacks and blues and fuck the yellow: to me yellow wasn’t even going to come close to expressing the ways that I was feeling. It didn’t call out to me and say ‘look at the depth and range of how to feel utterly shite’. (Perhaps it’s wise to insert a note here. Blacks and greys are not always depressive colours but it’s safe to say they work very well for the depressed).

I guess what I am trying to tackle is what happens when you step back from yourself in times of emotional mire or crisis and think ‘what here is usable for the work, and what here is simply going to hurt like a bastard and break my heart?’

Currently I find myself engulfed in a considerable amount of emotional strife, which seemingly gets larger by the day. At some moments I do actually step outside of myself and think ‘well, it already sucks, but what can I use, what can I reclaim back to be mine and be good?’

Fucking hell, I know, it seems cold and calculating, but I have two more installations to make, eight records to do and a ton of unanswered questions are looming. If the pain can feed and motivate that work in some ways, then why not use it?

So why all the bitching? What the hell is my problem?, you may ask. It’s not a problem per se but rather a quandary. The work I make is experiential – touching largely upon the idea of memory and a sense of looking backwards to look forwards –and it’s in this sense of memory that I find the melancholic and the maudlin to be useful. It’s the tinge, the hint of these emotions that seems to resonate most strongly within others. Since all of my own personal feelings are amplified to what seems like 200 per cent, if I won’t be adding the ingredients right, instead of a pinch, it will be a bucket load.

I mean I am not setting out to make work about whinging: that is the thing, that’s private. So much of this is private and applicable to me, but what’s useful is the transference of a set of emotions in order to create an experience for others.

At the end of the day the only thing I have to go on when I make work, is myself. I have stopped lying to myself when I say it’s all about me doing the artistic thing alone in my studio. Yes I make this work because it gets me out of bed and it’s who I am, but I also make work because I want to interact with people. I want to speak to them about certain things in a way that I can’t put in words.

As humans we all have emotions and it’s through these emotions that I try and bring people in. But the strangest thing about these emotions is the way in which we understand them. I choose to work with the idea of the maudlin and the melancholic: I know what the resulting emotions mean to me, how I feel within them and how they make me feel. That’s all I know. Because if both G and I say we’re sad, who’s to say that our sense of sadness is the same, and how can we even start to identify similarities? Sure, you can measure brain-waves and look at results of physical tests, but at the end of the day you’re left with words, and they’re words that fail us. I mean they have limitations. Saying the word ‘sad’ only provides the other person with his or her own personal understanding of it. How the hell do you climb inside and get a true comparison of your sadness versus mine?

Hmm, maybe I won’t be able to tie this together, but let me give it a go.

Making work is about trying to find the common ground between my ideas and the personal emotional stuff that generates it and my viewers who will use their own personal knowledge and frame of reference to understand what it is that I am doing. Right, that part is simple and a bit of a given. What’s harder is when you want to scratch beyond the surface and the idea that it has the potential to be a given. Everyone at some stage is sad, so they will get sadness. But it’s not just about getting sadness – it’s about understanding it, gathering it up and picking through the nuances. How do you do that?

-APS