ARTIST PROFILES
1.
DAVID JOSEPH CRIBBIN
1. What is your favourite work of art?
That's a difficult question. It all depends on what mood I'm in. There are works I'll love one day, and dismiss the next. However, there are certain kinds of works that interest me all the time. I'm thinking of narrative works. By that I don't mean conventional narrative genres, like novels or films, I mean works that employ a narrative device, or works where some kind of narrative device is central to the work. An example would be someone like Sophie Calle. A lot is made of the influence of the Oulipo movement on her work, but that's irrelevant to me, I like the way she uses narrative to evoke questions about identity, which are relevant to the ways we live today. If I was just to pick one work, I suppose I'd pick "Exquisite Pain", but if you asked tomorrow I'd probably pick something else.
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| Sophie Calle - Exquisite Pain |
2. What artist has been a constant inspiration though out your life?
Inspiration is a worrying concept for me. It sounds too Romantic. I prefer "Challenging" or "Thought provoking". The only artist to do that is Marcel Duchamp. A lot is made of his "Fountain", signed R. Mutt, being a work of art, when in fact it's an aphorism in plastic form. An "objet d'art", with the pun on dart. He was testing the aesthetic criteria of Society of Independent Artists and the Fountain was aimed at them as precisely as the streams of piss it guzzled down in its former function.
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| Marcel Duchamp - The Green Box |
3. If you could have any work by any artist to hang on your wall who or what would it be?
I don't know if I could limit it to just one work or one artist. There's a film by Woody Allen, I think it's Stardust Memories, where Allen's character has one wall in his apartment covered with a photo. This wall changes according to his mood. I'd have something like that, maybe a digital wall that could change daily. The kind of work? I suppose I'd have to have photographers. I seem to like more photographers than painters. Maybe the works of Diane Arbus on rotation.
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| Woody Allen's Stardust Memories |
4. What would you describe as art and not-art?
Unless you're a Neoplatonist, questions of the form "what is the xness of x?", where x is not a concrete object, are indefinable. All those intangible concepts, such as goodness, beauty, or justice, cannot be defined without contradiction, therefore I usually avoid such questions, especially arguments of the form "what is art?", or "Is x really art?". From an anthropological point of view anything human beings make or do, which is not a tool or instinctive pattens of behaviour, is art. Other animals do make and use tools, but none make art. How a culture decides what of the art it makes is important is another matter. It's a more interesting form of questioning. In our consumerist culture that has become difficult to pin down, since we do not have a shared value system, beyond, of course, consumption. Today, when it is decided, it's done using a capitalist criteria. The art market likes to decide what is important based on what sells for the highest price. Of course, what's important to it is not going to be important to me. The lack of any cultural norm for important art can be seen as a void in the heart of our culture, and it can produce a kind of anxiety, but at the same time it brings with it an unexpected freedom. It means you can develop your own norms. The anxiety about what is important can be exploited to cast doubt on the hallowed and sacred, on those cash-cows worshiped by the capitalist investors. What's important to me, if I have to choose, is that which speaks, questions, and challenges my understanding of what it is to be human, which by the way is a concrete question, and therefore definable. That is what I term - important art. What is unimportant, is anything which diverts, diverges, or distracts me from such contemplation. That's mere consumption. So in a way, my understanding of what is important art is anything that challenges the passive activity of consuming, especially the mass produced definition of what it is to be human, the all conquering hero, the spandex clad Adonis wrapped in the flag of nationhood, the infantile moral warrior, a flat-packed God for a godless age. Drivel. "I am what I consume." that's the motto of junk culture, with it's junk food, junk cinema, junk heroics, and junk ideas. Important art questions, Stan Lee is junk art, Roy Lichtenstein is important art.
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| Roy Lichtenstein |
5. Who would your ideal collector be?
I suppose I want "art-lovers", rather than collectors. Some collectors consider art a market speculation, they want a return on investment. They have no relationship to the work they are investing in, other than as a property sale. I want someone who simple loves it, connects to the work, in what ever way they do, so long as they do so sincerely.
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| Diane Arbus |