Pin the Tale on the Donkey

We're on the phone arranging to take work to a show in a month or two, and he voiced a concern about a fellow practitioner. What was contemporary about the work he had seen just recently?

For craft practitioners, the material and it's expression comes first, quite often in a functional way, and to defunctionalise that crafted object is a breed of "art" that has spawned the 'neither this nor that' offspring, but we are made to contemplate aforesaid offspring, because if we don't, we're heathens. No wonder at some of the dumbstruck silence that pervades. The pursuit of beauty has many poor relations, cruelly and unfortunately. Cristín Leach, the eminent Irish critic, recently wrote an article about the Summer Degree shows at NCAD, and to her, it's maybe a matter of marrying craft skill to concept: few of those artists will survive, breed, but we'll have a new landscape in which to wander. For those with skill and no concept, as Bill Bryson ignominiously commented on Norwegian television "It gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience", as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Beauty, that Scarlet Pimpernel, elusive and undefined. And for those with concept and no skill, pass the planks and hammer.

But it's easy to get bogged down in the craft of the matter, for those who are so inclined. Rather than raise one's head above the parapet, and comment on the wider arena, in the same way that one raises a wet finger to see which way it's blowing, it's far easier to stick it in the mud and Carry On Regardless. Is it important to create new art that is relevant, refreshing, innovative and engaging? To carry on the conversation of art, an artist's practice within the big picture, the vista, the landscape...?

I went to Rainham Marshes recently, and I know nothing of birds, at all. Still a fabulous sight to see, and I can understand the endless enthusiasm for spotting and classifying birds, albeit through a long lense: give me that long lense and I'll happily spot the lesser warbled artist stuck in the grassroots or feminist '70's, the glam '80's glitteriness of style without substance, and then the conceptualisation of the artist (by merit of signing their work) to the hastily bashed together planks of wood with the indescribably poetic yet fundamental profundity of hot air. The Emperors clothes. That's pretty scathing: all of this art is known to have validity, but I'd like to open the newspaper and then look at the stuff on the wall and imagine these things have a knowingness of each other. But this isn't fashion, for me, it's about animals, and to pin the tale on the donkey, we need prior visual memory of aforesaid donkey, aim for it's arse and give it the Tale it's asked for.