On writing

In the zoom on Thursday, I made the claim that I just bang these posts out. I’m not sure that that’s really true. I think it’s more that I have come to understand the value of the writing. I still don’t find it particularly easy.

When I was an undergraduate, I was struck by how resistant many of the other students were to the idea of writing. It was framed as being really quite confronting: “I am an art student, why are you asking me to write?”

I wasn’t horrified in that way, but the thing about the writing is that it makes you put something on the record. For (not just) me that formalises things. And that’s something that you have to come to terms with. It might be how you feel in the moment, but you might well not feel like that tomorrow but by then, well hey-ho, it’s too late. The internet never forgets. And we live in an age when the archive is operationalised mercilessly. I write these posts and let’s be honest, I’m not particularly controversial, but even so I can imagine a version of the current world in which my journal entries do me no favours.

I am a collectivist. I believe in something that I call collegiality. I am not sure that these are values that are currently in vogue. Does this matter? Who cares?

Probably it does, actually.

Because the more I think about the project, the less interested I am in the idea of the artist as a completely self-contained unit, producing work from some private store of originality. Images do not work like that and neither, really, does practice. Things come through other people, other images, conversations, histories, institutions, technologies, and shared ways of working. Perhaps collegiality is part of this for me: not as a grand ethical position, but as an acknowledgement that making is always entangled with other people and other things.

So anyway.

I need to rethink my study statement yet again!

The study statement asks you to say what you are doing as though you know what you are doing. Which is reasonable, up to a point. I guess that you should have some idea. Otherwise, you are just wandering about. Wandering about is not necessarily a bad methodology, obviously, particularly given my long-standing interest in psychogeography, but I appreciate that “I’m going to wander about and see what happens” has limited utility as a research proposal.

The problem is that the statement fixes things. Or seems to. “This is what I am researching. These are the questions. These are the methods. These are the outcomes. There we are then.”

Except I have now been doing the research and, inconveniently, the research has changed what I think the research is.

I think I had been trying too hard to work out what painting might say about generative AI. That now feels slightly the wrong way round. I’m not especially interested in making paintings that illustrate an argument I have already arrived at. What interests me more is what it means to make paintings within an image culture that is increasingly shaped by generative AI, and to allow that condition to affect the way I think about the work.

The questions are still there. Where does an image begin? What is it made from? What does it retain from other images? Where, in all of that, do agency and authorship sit? But I think I want those questions to operate more as conditions around the work than as subjects that the paintings need to explain.

That also brings the research closer to the way I actually make things. Painting and collage already involve selecting, cutting, recombining, repeating, obscuring, translating, and repainting images. An image shifts from one state into another; something is retained, something disappears, and something else turns up that I hadn’t planned for.

I think that last part matters. I need to leave room for accident, intuition, and play, otherwise the work simply becomes an illustration of the research.

This is where the phrase “the weather of painting” has started to become useful to me. Weather is something you inhabit rather than control. Painting also happens within a set of conditions: other images, technologies, histories, conventions, and habits. Generative AI is now part of that environment, but so are photography, digital circulation, social media, reproduction, memory, art history, and painting itself.

Thinking about AI as part of that weather feels more useful than treating it as something outside painting that painting now has to answer.

The research paper has sharpened my interest in emergence and legibility. How does an image gradually become present through repetition, accumulation, translation, and change? And how much can you tell from the finished image about the processes that produced it? What does it show you and what does it hide?

These aren’t really new concerns. Mediation, repetition, authenticity, origin, and the experience of looking were already there in my work. Generative AI has not created those questions. It has just given me another way of looking at them.

So, I don’t think I will be completely throwing the original study statement away (although to be fair, it has already undergone some serious revision). This is more about bringing things up to where the research has actually gone.