".....so the question left unanswered is how do you theorise in a living sense - that is to say, one which is linked completely to our practice as artists, when theory is being branded as unhip...""Well that happens all the time, just get on with it. In many ways I don't think of myself as an artist "living a life" as an artist, whatever that is. I'm a woman who makes things which I like, but the first thing I think of in the morning is giving my child breakfast, and getting him to school and myself off to work. And sometimes he takes up all my day, and where's any notion of "profession" then? Despite the discourses of the postmodern and the lessons everyone has supposedly learned, it's still easy to get seduced by classic modernist conceits - you get into some grand notion of authorship and "the work" - it comes through in notions of "rebel" artists as strongly as ever. If you take conceptualism in its initial forms - it still seems to me largely to have been based on a classic stratified realist approach. If we have moved on from that, then perhaps we can say that what constitutes an interesting set of visual "texts" are those which create a dynamic tension between an en-vogue aesthetic/anti-aesthetic and the drive in the viewer to construct some sort of narrative around or about the show. That's not suitable terrain for wunderkinds - or theory which secretly panders to that sort of notion of "genius" - young, British or otherwise. It seems to be the same voices who whooped it up for "Post Modernism" in the eighties who are now cheer leading for individual talent in a rather old uncritically high Modernist fashion......"
Someone turned the telly off.
© John Timberlake and Richard Cook1996
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