Contemplating loss

Critical dialogue with Rhiannon Jones established earlier in MA.

RJ Rhiannon Jones
MP Michael Pinchbeck

RJ: My first question to you is what exactly do you mean when you use the term catharsis, in relation to your project? There are many definitions for catharsis and it can become over used - can you define 'it' in less than 10 words - what is it for you in this project?

MP: One could argue that all creative acts are in some way cathartic, being dependent on the artists’ mood, mindset or source of inspiration. Especially when leaning towards self-as-source and creating stage-personalities that are meta-personae of performers. The space I am using in Rise Park is a place of personal resonance. I am a divorcee making work about the religiosity and secularity of weddings. But I strive to objectify emotions not to exploit them.

My starting point for the MA was a cathartic journey. The definition of catharsis that first alerted me to its relevance was a celebration of releasing emotion OR an evacuation of the bowels. That would be my 10 word definition of catharsis. It is a celebration or commemoration of objects or spaces that I am interested in not of emotions per se. And in the case of the car project by stripping the objects of value and eventually discarding them – as with The Cathars – I was keen to reject their materiality in favour of spirituality. The emotions triggered by the audience interaction with these objects or spaces are beyond my control. I was interested in how the project and reactions to it - when people knew the reason for the journey - straddled the line between a perceived celebration of emotions and a purgation of the bowels. In the car project the act of celebration and of purgation is exhibiting and destroying the detritus of grief.

I was going to interview artists about the force of the cathartic within their work. One schizophrenic artist told me he ‘made work that showed his condition was a blessing not a curse’. But I realised that in some ways the most important facet of producing work was the work itself not the reason behind it. Did we have to know he was schizophrenic to appreciate what he was creating? No programme note, gallery interpretation or biog should be needed to understand the work. It should stand alone. In Acts of Communion the journey is more communal than cathartic. A shared not a solitary experience. More for the sake of the audience than for the sake of the artist. In Stealing the Mona Lisa, Darian Leader suggests artists make work as a self-defense mechanism. Perhaps it is more a form of self-attack. Daring oneself to be different. When exploring cathartic work or reasons for making work it seemed to me that it was a form of unspoken therapy. Where art becomes a means to express something one could not easily do without being looked at strangely, referred to a doctor or locked up. That is my definition.

RJ: My second question is to do with the 'soul' of the work, where does it lie? What is it that is at the heart of the project for you? It is very important to retain a sense of what this is because further down the line for your own motivation and focus of meaning for the work.

MP: There is a german word – lebensart – that means many things. Life as art. Way of life. The art of life. It is a broad brushstroke to describe the work I make. Using self-as-source and ‘notes to self’ to create a product that can be identifiable to as many as possible. Turning the personal into the universal, the private into the public. In this project there is a personal factor – the resonance of the church, the resonance of am dram, the resonance of the wedding reception.

I wanted to live as an artist. Make art my religion. Be like Alfred Jarry, Antonin Artaud, Salvador Dali or Joseph Beuys. But I didn’t want to be referred to a doctor or get locked up (see answer above). Perhaps when Joseph Beuys locked himself in a gallery in New York (I love America and America Loves Me) with a coyote he was not only commenting on his views as a visitor to the United States but also on the life of an artist in society. Lebensart. The coyote is the critic. The non-artist. The audience. The objector. The dissenter. The Daily Mail saying ‘An artist got £30,000 to turn a tree upside down outside a health centre. Why didn’t they just pay a nurse for a year? Or buy some life-saving equipment?’ I always feel the journalist in question should just sacrifice their salary for the good of the NHS. Why can’t they see the beauty in an upturned tree? Can’t someone in the health centre for whom every breath’s a struggle look out of the window and smile? I seek beauty. Beauty in words. Beauty in images. Beauty in the unexpected. Beauty in an upturned tree. I see beauty and I am always trying to write something beautiful. I portray loss. Loss of life. Loss of love. Loss of loss.

In Acts of Communion my central question is What is not there? I am interrogating this idea of absence. What we do and don’t need to know to appreciate what we see. Whether it’s an interpretation on a gallery wall or six missing characters in a rendition of Brecht’s A Respectable Wedding. I keep writing down ‘I am interested in what is not there’ and crossing out the letters. To see when it stops making sense. Difficult when I know what was written in the first place. But that is what it is like making work. You have to forget what you know. Or you become too absorbed in the making to remember the fact that it is for the audience not for the artist. I don’t want to make work with hidden references and meanings. I want to make work that can engage an audience. So at the moment the heart and soul of this project is about presence and absence. How do we remove something from something else and create a new narrative? How do we make something make sense with the minimum and maximum of information? What do we add? What do we leave out? What is the residue? How do we problematise something by removing a part of it or adding something to it? How does loss affect text we think we’ve heard or images we think we’ve seen? How does it cease to mean. How does it puzzle? I am reminded of Joseph Beuys' lecture:

'Art has to come over people like a cloud and, in the final analysis a picture should keep alive a profound question in people. Art is as such a puzzle. A puzzle that wants to be solved - but not straight away.'

This idea of loss is implicit in everything I’ve done. As William Blake was inspired by the death of his brother so was I. I think to understand loss is to understand love. To see beauty in death. As William Blake said ‘Exuberance is beauty.’ I want to be exuberant in the work I make. In the way I live. In my lebensart.