Innocence and Self-Consciousness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you look for images of “innocence” on Google, you get loads of pictures of children and babies.  You also get, weirdly, quite a lot of teenage girls in skimpy clothing looking rather sultry.  There are a few lambs, and the odd dog.  There are no pictures of men at all.  It seems that, as an adult male human, the territory of innocence is not one that I am supposed to inhabit.

 

And yet, I have a deep desire to enjoy art in an innocent way.  I want to retain the ability to enjoy art the way children enjoy it, to experience the simple joys of playing with materials, colours and shapes.  I want to have fun with it, to create in an unguarded, even naïve way. 

 

I am not ashamed of the naïve part of my personality.  Clearly, nobody wants to be gullible and easily led.  But I do want to retain that part of me that can be natural, unaffected, trusting. I want to keep that ability to have wonder and amazement at the world around me.   I want to continue to enjoy the pleasures of life without analysing everything intellectually.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In one of his recent Reith Lectures about contemporary art on Radio 4 (“Beating the Bounds”), Grayson Perry addressed this issue.  He said, “You can’t be an innocent in the art world.  You can’t be the child.  You have to address the self-consciousness and the art world and the history and the context.  An outsider artist can be a fantastic maker of things, but they never have to deal with what it means to be an artist in the art world.  That is the central concern of an artist since the 19th Century”.

 

Perry clearly has very conflicted feelings about this, though.  He also said, “One of the great enemies of the contemporary artist is self-consciousness.  It’s in the DNA of contemporary art.  You are achingly aware the entire time of the audience, the history, the value, all the things swishing about, so it kills you.  The more successful you become, the more there is the pressure of self-consciousness.  And how I would love to be that little child with the box of Lego bricks again.”

 

Grayson Perry is saying that, difficult though it may be, you have to become more self-conscious if you’re going to get on in the art world.  But I rail against that self-consciousness, because it’s so crippling for me.  No wonder I’m resistant to the idea: it’s only by becoming less self-conscious that I’ve been able to create art at all.

 

I’m not sure where this leaves me, other than possibly facing a stark choice: become more self-conscious about my art, or turn my back on the contemporary art scene for ever.

 

5th December 2013