Every time a history
of Adolph Hitler is given it’s always mentioned that he was a failed artist. As
if to be a failed artist was the worst thing that could possibly happen to a
person and the justification for any number of pathologies, that being said, I
am a failed artist.
The image of
artistic success is so solid and pervasive in representation that when judged
against the mythic paradigm, all actual artists must fall short. The ideal
artist, a 19th century literary construction, is all at once rich, poor,
gregarious, misanthropic, short sighted, all seeing, obstinate, compliant to
the point of sycophancy, intellectual, anti-intellectual, intuitive, counter
intuitive, rugged, effeminate, saintly and perverted among other attributes. Taken
as a whole, I suppose over my lifetime as an artist, I have been all the above,
except rich, so therefore I fall short.
The art world is a
very small place populated in each sphere by a handful of professors, curators,
artists and collectors. All are totally anonymous except to each other. The
most famous artist alive today could walk down Broadway from the Battery to
Fort George and go totally unrecognized. In my life as a working artist I’m
conscious I’ve been noticed by younger aspiring artists who are impressed that
I have a reputation, but also feel a kind of contempt for me as either an old
fool or clever fraud.
The only thing that
matters in the end, really, is artistic authority. I felt the same mixed
feelings about the generation of artists that preceded me, but I had the very
good fortune in my unconscious youth to meet some very simple and undesigning
artists at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design who are recognized now, forty
years on, as iconic of late modernist art practice. My artistic authority, such
as it is, flows from them because I was willing to submit to their simplicity
and embrace it.
