Nicholaj Kai Nielsen

I write this havnig just installed Wordpress on a new site provider - I have lost count of the number of times I have done this in the last year.
Originally I used WP just for the blog on my site, this time I am going to try to build the whole site within the script. So there is no home page as such as yet…

A professional artist needs an ARTIST’S STATEMENT. This is hallowed piece of text that is supposed to introduce his work. It is, in fact, a commercial device built up from different “keywords” or buzz-words in my jargon. It is put together to show that he / she is aware of “contemporary practice” and to situate him / her in the commercial landscape.

I find writing about my work very difficult - I lack that self-promoting “look at me I make the best thing since sliced bread” skill. It is not that I cannot use words, it is that I cannot use them about myself.

The design of the site shows this I think. It will not escape anyone that looks at it that there are many images without commentary but also I have two types of gallery - individual works and themes. The themes are real the motor of the site for me, because that is where I am trying to work out what I am doing. It is through setting up the galleries that I realize that there may be links and common threads that allow me to define things about my work.

My problem is this : if I write something like “my work is about…” it seems to me that I am in some way making a contract with the reader / viewer that he will find that characteristic in all my work and that when I am making work I have the feeling that it must be present. It may be completely illusory, or me being too serious, or even some psychotic relationship to language, but I feel that in some way it is more of a hindrance than a help to any development.

However a word came to me the other night which seems to help me out of some of my problems : “idiosyncratic”. The best definition online is here “a structural or behavioral characteristic peculiar to an individual or group”.

This fits because I don’t.

I’ve never been able to say “I do this because I belong here”. My influences come from all sorts of places and I have never been able to accept dogma. My only dictum is “this seems to work at the moment - where does it lead ?”

There are, no doubt deep-seated reasons for this, and I shall probably write on this at a later stage.

However, if I solve part one of the problem (how to write about my work), there remains part two : by using / being “idiosyncratic” I divorce myself from the commrcial “quick fix” of the artist’s statement. I define myself as being outside “-isms” and “-ists”.

Can’t have one’s cake and eat it I suppose.

Just a small hint for web designers if you write “font-family:serif” in your CSS, in Linux (or at least Ubuntu), the text will occupy almost twice the width as in Windows - to get an equivalent put “font-family: serif, freeserif” this makes it use one of the default fonts in the Linux distribution and restores the width of the text.

Yep, I’m trying to say goodbye to Bill !

But what strikes me about much contemporary theory is that it mostly about interpretation. I have been listening to lectures from the Slought Foundation for example. They are interesting but what strikes me is that the speakers, citing Lacan, Freud etc. usually in a fairly hermetic conversation, only talk about their reading of a work. They do not speak of the effect of the physical presence of the work itself. To ignore this is to fail to address the process of apprehending the work as a whole. And I don’t think that the experience of art is only about interpretation.

I have just watched an interview with Danielle Mitterand on the publication of her autobiography. For those who don’t know, she is the widow of François Mitterand, erstwhile president of the country in which I live.

She drew the distinction between those that only think in terms of “the market driven economy” and “consumerism, profit etc.”, in short, those that can only express themselves through a spreadsheet - those values that can only be counted - and another wealth, that which values people, whatever their origin, whatever their beliefs, and seeks to give a decent quality of life to all and protect those resources which would make this possible.

The site has moved house.

The thing about having to use free hosting services is that one is never sure what one is getting until one has signed up. It is only when you begin to upload your material that you find out what is in the package. This is, I think the seventh host. There are bits of site wasting space on the web, and I have forgotten where.

It was hosted on one of the Byethost group’s servers, but as most people I gave the address to couldn’t get access, so I moved.

Here there is no advertising, no popups, no popunders and no funny cookies.

This also means redoing the pages as I no longer have to provide space for third party advertising. The remix will be ready soon - at the moment it is “as was” with the ad iframe removed.

It still means that I am not working on content however…

Now that’s done I can get back to thinking about what I do.

As I said in a while ago, nothing much has changed in art theory since I last looked : the language is still as impenetrable, while at the same time much of the discussion centres on the public and accessibility !

I have a slightly cynical view that much of what is said has a common sub-text of “Why is no-one looking at my work ?” !

One of the things that Bourdieu showed in “L’Amour de L’Art” is that the relationship of a person to art is directly related to his or her ability to decode the work. The problematic of his book is that, given the universal accessibility of museums, why is attendance limited to the upper levels of the social spectrum ? He observed that there is a direct correlation between level of education and attendance (to which one has to add the “habitus” of cultural participation associated with each level of the social strata).

This puts the “socially engaged” artist in something of a paradox. Let us presume that he has the education to understand the codes in contemporary art, and, as a result wants to produce work related to these codes. As a socially engaged artist, he must also be seeking a wider audience than the “niche” audience usually associated with that style of production. But attendance is related to the ability to decode, which means that the public he is trying to reach is unreachable - unless he functions on a kind of “trickle-down theory” of social change and artistic appreciation and we all know how effective that has been economically.

He is in the delicate position of trying to serve two masters. If he produces work that pleases “the ordinary man or woman”, he will have to use means that can be apprehended by that public. And he will be told by his contemporary chums that his work is old hat. If he adheres to contemporary principles, he will hear comments from the man in the street like “It’s too clever, that sort of thing ain’t for the likes of me”.

Related to this, there is the “bread-and-butter” question. The fundamental business of every living organism is staying alive. This, in our modern, evolved, market economy means money. And for the artist, where does this come from ?

For the man in the Clapham omnibus, art purchase does not feature very high in his list of priorities - he’s rather more preoccupied with how to work 48 hours a week to pay the bills and how to prevent his children (whom he never sees) from becoming delinquent. It is therefore unlikely that many pennies will come from this direction. So it has to be from the dominant, educated, decoding-enabled folk who don’t give much of a damn about accessibility - or democracy for that matter.

Tricky, ain’t it ?

Well, it’s up and running !

There’s still a lot to do, but I I think I’ve found the shape of page that I want. There’s a bit of a problem with colour though, I realize that modern screens have a much greater depth of colour, which means that what looks bright in an old screen, looks quite dark in a modern one.

Now I have to get my head round styling Wordpress, which is a whle new set of headaches (and long nights !)

Some time has elapsed since the previous entry. Below is the explanation.

In the last post I was full of praise for Stu Nicholls and his site CSS play. I still am, and have consumed a considerable amount of his bandwidth going over and over the site, trawling for information and learning from it.

But there is a problem - his work uses XHTML doctype and everything hitherto has been HTML 4. Switching has caused problems.