Photo Anne Bean 
Photo Martin v Haselberg 
Photo Martin v Haselberg | Until the Flowers Die (1973) |
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An autobiography and sixteen biographies of a shared day Reading University For my final thesis, I sat reading various philosophical texts whilst drawing and writing my thoughts with my head framed by a screen. Sixteen friends simultaneously wrote and drew until some tulips, placed in vases without water, drooped over approximately 24 hours later. These writings and drawings became my thesis. The initial question to myself was “what is art and what am I doing in it?” Art as life or life as art? Was I keener on being an explorer rather than an artist? No matter how radical, questing or unique one’s visions, art has rules which circumscribe the results, even if only perceptually. I was very conscious of recognisable style being considered a mark of maturity and found it mysterious how one achieved this style; it seemed so arbitrary and artificial and unstimulating. I was interested in the multiplicity of being and endless potential of ‘whom’ one could be. I wanted to push buttons such as embarrassment and fear and complacency, both in myself and those around me. I wanted to challenge any stability I might feel. I sensed that when I disappeared in the work it had the most potency. I was aware of James Joyce’s questionings of himself in his semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man written about his own awakenings at around my age at the time. I placed all the results from the day in a very smelly herring box and tied it above the door of the art history department. I also included some of the letters I had just opened, written as a teenager from myself to my older self, questioning who I am, who I was, who I will be. Much of my work from Reading University was re-visited in Autobituary, an installation and publication at Matts Gallery in 2005. See Ghost of a Shadow, Ventriloquist and Dummy, Self-taut, White Room |
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