"Meet the Artist" - Long Version

On the train on my way to Didcot to see the "Bite!" exhibition by @AThirty4 and to attend the meet the artist session, I was pondering what might happen and whether I'd be disappointed. 

 

Was I going to be drawing back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz? Or would it be a completely new world? A chance to witness the inner workings of an enigma, wrapped in a social media tag? A mystery hidden behind digital bits?

I was keen to find the living breathing @AThirty4, but I wasn't sure what I would find.

On the long train ride over there, I’d also never thought of myself as a train nerd, but I realised there’s actually there's a whole world of systems, language, metaphor, understanding, rules and procedures that are as rich and prone for discovery as the works of Tristan Zara or Richard Hulsenbeck.

It may be a far stretch to consider the railway network to be the Dada of British industry but in so many ways its defiance of logic...is a fitting crown.

It's notable too that Didcot that is a railway town. It's a place where journeys intersect, where passengers are en-route. Obviously people live Didcot, but for the most part it sees an enormous quantity of human interaction that doesn't stick around.

So, of all the places for an an artist who lives primarily outside, who exhibits in the exterior in the uncharted waters outside of the gallery, to have chosen Didcot for an exhibition, a place to stop and pause to lay forth their wares like some kind of peddler spreading a blanket full of accumulated trash and treasure...it seems entirely appropriate (and yet still a mystery).

Things began, as you might expect, with introductions and an interview with a member of the gallery staff, where @AThirty4, in disguise, as they always appear in public, answered questions about identity, art, and whether creativity should be for sale.

Twenty minutes into the interview, however, visitors witnessed an unexpected turn of events, when an identically dressed figure entered the gallery, also claiming to be @AThirty4.

Visitors witnessed a war of words with each artist emphasizing their authenticity.

Cornerstone staff and the audience were baffled as they were ultimately left wondering who really was @AThirty4?

Just like any of the other audience members, I was expecting to meet the artist, in as much as one can in an interview situation like this.

But I would put the confrontation we saw on a par with Will Smith at the Oscars in terms of a confrontation, a claiming of the rightful ownership of something, the mystique of two masked men arguing their place in the cultural vanguard.

Frustratingly, the battery on my camcorder began to show signs of going flat and some of the more action-oriented pieces do seem to possibly have been lost. I tried to continue filming on my phone, but I'm running out of space on there, unfortunately.

But through the camera lens, normally seen as some kind of frame of authenticity, we witness something uncertain, unauthentic perhaps, unapproved even. “Which of the versions of @AThirty4 is @AThirty4?”.

It's here where the metaphor with the road breaks down. The road is reliable. It is tarmac, it is asphalt.

But within the realms of the artist, we only have one person's word against another, and even with the art audience, the facilitators, the staff at the gallery not being certain exactly what had happened...one was left wondering quite what happened.

As I was pulling out of Didcot I tried to gather my thoughts about exactly what I just witnessed. We had 25 minutes perhaps of a of genuine Q&A with plausible answers about the creation of the works and the intent of the artist, and yet we had a disruption which cast doubt across the entire event.

The purpose of the Saturday afternoon in the gallery, the the purpose of the gallery, the purpose of the exhibition, the questions around agents, actors, anonymity, the intrigue of @AThirty4 continues.

The mystery, if there is one, is not solved.

Was it the person who'd done the majority of the work of the Q&A? Was it the person who burst in with only minutes to go and disrupted the entire event? Was it even me? Apparently, some kind of “common thread” running through the whole thing?

I can assure you, it is not.

Part of me knew I wouldn't meet the artist, Of all the artists who wouldn't turn up for their own exhibition, it will be @AThirty4, and I'm of the belief that neither of them were @AThirty4.

They're somewhere behind the artworks, they're somewhere in a shed, in a studio, creating away as we speak.

And they've roped in their friends to be part of this tapestry, this tableau.

At least, that's what I want to believe.

And perhaps that's all one can believe at the end of the day.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Conclusion

Well, it's been some time now since the meet the artist incident, and whilst it wasn't clear to me at the time, having reviewed my footage of the talk and what turned into such a spectacle, it's clear to me now that this was in itself an artwork.

It was part of the exhibition using the exhibition and playing with the fabric of the exhibition.

Everybody in the audience, myself included, were part of the artwork and yet it was both for our benefit...whilst we were part of its experience.

I have mixed feelings about it because I went in good faith to what I had hoped would be a chance to meet the artist and whilst I was rewarded somewhat, some might say richly by the experience, there was a feeling as if I was being duped of being satirised in the way that the street signs alterations satirised the town of Didcot.

There was a sense perhaps that one was being laughed at and not laughed with, and yet at the same time the absurdity, the reliable absurdity of @AThirty4 was apparent.

It struck me reviewing the footage that there with there being two individuals purporting to be @AThirty4 dressed very similarly but not the same size, that resembled a kind of artistic Oddbod and Oddbod Jr, the Frankenstein type monsters from Carry On Screaming.

I can't go so far as to suggest that the gallery member facilitating the session played the same role as Fenilla Fielding does playing Valyeria Watt in the film.

But if you viewed the whole thing as “Carry on Cornerstone”, there's a sense of fast and ludicrous behaviour, reminiscent of postwar slapstick, saucy seaside banter, huddling away under the banner of traditional English entertainment.

Which is great.

But is it art?