Out of ideas

Of all places to find myself last night, I found myself at the The Camberwell College of Arts Summer Shows. Every room of the labrynthine building is crammed with students’ painting, sculpture, photography, graphic design. And crammed even fuller of friends, family and a gigantic student love-in of self-gratulation. I am being waspish. But, my dears, I am feeling waspish. Allow me to me unburden myself.

One chap had made a chess set of puppets out of metal – scary Queens with great branching talons, Rooks as little gun-turrets with a soldier peering over the top, the King sat on a cross between a wheel-chair and a chariot, and one little pawn with an almost mouse-like face peeking out from under his helmet, five inches high. Behind the chess-men, a screen played a stop-motion animation, featuring the little mouse-pawn darting through the raging battle, nearly mown down by passing rooks. The time he must have spent on this, the care, the thought, the creative mind and clever hands that went into this. I had to keep ploughing back through the crowd to find people to drag over and show it all to. People I’d never met before even. And why? Because this gem, this charming, original opal of a piece, was so alone.

If not as delightful as the chess set, a few other pieces were also worthwhile. Luckily, the friend-of-a-friend’s pieces we’d come to make rather supportive noises at were good – elegant, adult and thoughtful photography exploring reflections and geometry. I noticed a pair of small plaster horses, one detailed and ‘classical’, the other rough and lumpy and expressionistic, which I thought clever. And another set of photographs still haunt me. They each showed a young woman or man, lying peacefully on the grass, in bright summer dresses or teeshirts, their eyes a horribly blank pink sheet of flesh.

Having duly noted the honourable exceptions and quarantined them at the top of the page, I shall now lift up my voice and bitch [And if any of you have loved ones exhibiting at the Summer shows and are feeling uneasy, bless you and please go away. I can't stop her - Ed}. One student took a time-lapse sequence of twelve photographs of Big Ben, from the other side of the river, over a 24-hour period. The sun, the clouds, the shadows, the position of the crane on the barge, all shifting and vanishing, until the last four photographs showed Big Ben's white face shining out of the dark above the flecks of street-light on the river. But then he or she lost faith. It was as if a little shrieking voice, an Editor of their own perhaps [I never shriek - Ed], with less taste [Ah. Thank you - Ed] and a bad Damien Hirst habit, had barged in: ‘Everyone photographs Big Ben. It’s not original. You have to do something original and whack and that. I know! Stick that little plastic figurine of wossname the footballer in the foreground! Like the gnome in that dumb French film your girlfriend made you watch! Yeah, wickED!’. And so a beautiful, eloquent photo sequence was utterly buggered up by an out-of-focus pointy-headed thing interfering with the lines of Westminster Bridge and ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair,’ went PoMo.

But the rest, my dears, oh, but what a wilderness of paper and plastic and plaster and paint. Who was it who famously said: ‘Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good’? [Samuel Johnson - Ed]. Thank you. [I exist to serve]. A great many of the exhibits were tainted with Impending Deadline. One in particular smacked of ‘Oh Christ it’s due in tomorrow.’ A passage-way covered in approximately 50 sheets of A4, stuck untidily (but not randomly. So it merely looked untidy) with gaffer tape, on which the artist had written, well, stuff. In black felt tip. In fairly neat handwriting. This is apparently what you do in Graphics BAs. By the door, the perpetrator had added a note ‘daring’ us to ‘read all of it’. ‘Motherfucker’ and ‘What eva’ to you to with brass nobs on, mate.

I went and stood outside in the drizzle, feeling deflated. Do people not draw any more? If not, why not? A few students could and did draw, even if it was just the sketches and workings out for other media. A few. The rest… Look, stick men and ‘childlike’ art is not necessarily clever. Even I can tell the difference between work done by someone who can’t draw, and someone who won’t draw. As Terry Pratchett’s [Of all people! - Ed] heroine Esk put it in Equal Rites (though she was actually talking about the Creatures from the Dungeon Dimensions): ‘not using magic because you can’t, that’s no use at all. But not using magic because you can, that really upsets them.’ See?

I grew up in an artistic family and in the firm belief that being able to draw would be a minimum requirement for entering art college. I, family freak, couldn’t draw a circle with a compass. Had I known I could’ve just blobbed about with felt-tips and plastic gnomes, you people would not now be enduring this blog and I’d probably have quite a good career in cereal packet design. But as ever, the past is another country, they do things differently there, and besides the wench is tired.