The Emperor's New Clothes

A news story of an escaped Lion in Essex in 2012 gave me the opportunity to explore the influence of how our perception influences the world and how we record it and how the gallery environment can enable a flirtation with the predominance of subjective influence. As an accidental objectivist I am at odds with what I perceive as a contract of delusion between artist and viewer.

Polaroid from 'Lion Hunting in Essex' © Richard Ansett

The fine art practice is most commonly described as 'a singular and personal response to the world infront of the lens' and so therefore semantically much of the work is and perhaps should be inherently esoteric. Something that appears to be ‘nothing’ to one person is 'something' to another (very often only the artist). We as audience are invited to empathise with this alternative state of mind within the boundaries of the gallery space.

A conventional arbiter of success is in some form of connectivity to the 'hive' mind. To the photographer that wishes their work to be successfully received, the line between our personal view and the audience must be considered and who that preferred audience maybe in our minds eye at all points of the creative process, but most importantly at capture and edit. Alternatively, if our works are overtly propagandist or provocative, we must accept that an audience is essential and therefore we are not as nihilistic as we would like to think. To be freer of influence is to accept that we are continually exposed to forces internally and externally that are influencing us.

Criticism of art (and fine art photography especially) is that much of it acts as a form of dog whistle or password, (it's a form of self harming passive aggression) and to belong, one feels one must agree to be part of it. The success of this form of golf club mentality inevitably excludes those 'not sufficiently evolved' to grasp the subtle complexities of this hidden language of those invested in the pursuit of 'favour at court'. Both groups of people appear on the surface to be so far removed from each other to be considered an entirely different species. I know because I consider myself both a progressive secular leftist elitist liberal and an earthy peasant, face pressed against the gates. But I accept responsibility that my psychology and glass ceiling is to be suspicious of belonging. It does however give me a unique perspective on tribalism with my detached adopted perspective. So, super ironically, I am destined to always challenge any status quo that I attain. From this permanently objective perspective I see that much of any understanding of reality is driven by a misguided sense of our empathic ability but the trouble with empathy is that everyone thinks they have it but it is not for us to decide. It can only be determined by those that are receiving it.

As much as in the creation of work and interpretation of space, I am observing the influence of state of mind on finished works. Very often the more open and potentially ambivalent a work appears, the more easily it is subject to the emotional projections of others. In a section of society where direct expression of feelings has become an anathema and to some extent terrifying, the artist and the artist space is a safe place to connect and feel something. A screaming and laughing addict masterbating into the lens of my camera (attached) is not something one would feel at ease with confronting whilst returning to one's Audi with one's weekly shop from Waitrose and may still even be too visceral for a gallery space or certainly above our dining room table (if not carefully contextualised or juxtaposed). Much rather the calm ambiguous landscape with some hidden primal tension under the surface. I get it.

Ambivalence ultimately is the key to a successful work. 'Successful work' safely explores and exploits the 'world out there' under the guise of some patronising misplaced empathy. The very worst examples play artistically with desperate and dangerous documentary themes re-framed as art, virtue signalling with a political agenda.

Because I am childless I believe I have re-appropritated a sense of legacy, projecting it towards my archive. Legacy is the enemy of weak work, the practice of nothingness and egocentric banality maybe a fad and future tragic-comedy document of how we lived now. How embarrassing, when the work of the early 21st century is pondered over by future audience and the context from which this work has been inspired is nolonger present and we are left with innumerable, content-less landscapes, thousand yard stares (guilty), endless photographic reinterpretations of paintings from art history (guilty), in now clearly tragic attempts to imbue the photograph with the gravitas of ‘real art’. The gate keepers of the photographic industry increasingly disdainful of the pure medium and the photographers so desparate for the glimmer of success dance along to the piper’s tune to the edge of the cliff. The photographic art community is so urgent in its need to be recognised as part of the art world that the pudding is over egged and our own self doubt is exposed.

So when a friend of mine says with anger in his eyes at my 'Lion Hunting in Essex’ private view that he just doesn’t get it and that these are just pictures of bushes, little does he know that he is the child in the crowd shouting ‘mummy mummy why doesn’t the king have any clothes on?’ I can't tell him of course it would spoil it but also no-one is listening, we are all too invested in maintaining our position in the club but what we fail to see as the leftist progressive middle class (of which I am clearly one) is that we are passively patronizing those that dare to call us on our hypocrisy and our failure at any semblance of civilized engagement with a wider world.

Ritchie, from series © Richard Ansett