field from Shaun Belcher on Vimeo.

LATEST PROJECT: track

Using images of ‘migrant’ plant life found along a disused railway line in Oxfordshire over which I am superimposing sets of three words which reflect on not only the migrant plant histories but also reflect wider current concerns with displacement, nationality and sense of place.

The Didcot to Newbury and Southampton railway line was axed by Beeching but carried freight until the late 1960’s and I remember it being in use as a small child. Indeed the track represents a key component of my own personal ‘psychogeography’ thus enabling a serious meditation on aspects of rural life, diaspora and the changing role and use of the english landscape.

I hope to publish a very limited edition photograph and poetry volume containing not only the 12 ‘track’ images but also 12 ‘Downland ballads‘ which I am writing concurrently for the project. The poems are a part of the process reflecting on historical links and indeed ‘tracking’ aspects of my life and the history of this small and unremarkable part of the South Oxfordshire landscape that does not conform to ‘idealist’ notions of art and landscape.

Should an application to the recently opened Cornerhouse Arts Centre in Didcot be successful I hope to display the entire series as a digital series and also present the documentation and original paintings which will grow out of this project. This is hopefully to be sometime in 2010.

Moogee the art dog has been savaging the pretentious, the idiotic and all the other manifestations of the I.A.W. (International Art World) for a few years now. This was Moogee’s first trip out of the kennel at the now defunct Egerton Studio in what was once the largest artists studios complex outside London. More of Moogee’s profound art criticism can be found at
http://moogee.wordpress.com

Woof Woof Woof..Woofism

12 paintings each related to a song on the album ‘Suit of Nettles’ (hear below). Drawing on American South Folk Art and contemporary ‘Modern Folk’ artists like Daniel Johnston and Margaret Kilgallen. As the Professor from Derby said ” this is not naive art..this is knowingly done” ..it takes a lot of knowledge to paint this simply…although some didn’t agree…

“Liked most of the artwork except the Shaun Belcher works as I felt my 5 year old could do better paintings that that. I couldnt see the point in it.”
Anonymous comment on Lincoln show

A series of low resolution images  from  South Oxfordshire which were then added to with texts. These were the first experiments in mixing text and photographs and the first time I explored the ‘hinterland’ between ‘artwork and poetry’ which are two key cornerstones of my artistic practice.

The one word additions are not illustrative but explore a ‘no-man’s’ land between concrete poetry/typography and the photograph as a fine art object in its own right.

This images below are created through using wordpress CMS – the images are individual jpegs and the software draws them from the uploads area of a wordpress database.

As they are each stored as full images and thumbnails I can use them as a ‘Flower Typewriter’ and write any message I wish.

The original images come from a Funereal Wreath supplier and each is a plastic flower letter which can be purchased for £10 online from this East Midlands U.K. supplier.

Thus a six letter work of art would cost £60 to order. Anybody wishing to ‘purchase’ a work of art could therefore be provided with supplier and order there own….and hang it anywhere in world they wish.

The original ‘conceptual’ idea remains the copyright of the originator.

Authenticity digital print of image certificates signed by the artist ( LTD ED.) will cost £1000 each up to a limit of 10.

The subject references the Lincolnshire Flower industry, the high number of airbases and my Great Uncles wounding at Arnhem battle.

flower text 1 – ‘Asylum Seeker – web art 2007

flower text 2 – ‘Elysium Fields’ – web art 2007

flower text 3 – ‘Flower Picker – web art 2007

flower text 4 – ‘Asphodel Meadows’ – web art 2007

flower text 5 – ‘Migrant Worker’ – web art 2007

‘Asylum Seeker’ digiprint – A4 – web art 2007.

First in a series of web available digital prints. Illustration here 150 dpi example.

Full 300 dpi photoshop file available for purchase or as full digital print version printed and framed soon.

PHOTO-TEXTS

New Series of phototexts commenced September 2007

CLICK ON IMAGE TO SEE LARGE VERSION

HERE

This was the project I did not complete and show at Lincoln because I became so disillusioned with the course. Instead I showed the ‘Suit of Nettles’ PR show cop-out..to fill the space as I felt this project was too complicated for what was basically a craft show….

The basic premise is as follows and over the next few weeks I shall start filling in the journeys week by week…

(The following article started out as a coda to the evaluation I was asked to write for the Derby Postgrad. Course and ended up as a stand alone piece on my Moogee art criticism blog)

http://belcheresque.wordpress.com

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to loose

Nothing, I mean nothing honey if it ain’t free, no no

Yeah feeling good was easy Lord when he sang the blues

You know feeling good was good enough for me

Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.

Kris Kristofferson ‘Me and Bobby McGhee’ Lyrics

A money culture wants the figures, the bottom line, the sales, the response, it wants a return on its investment, it wants more money.

Art can offer no obvious return. Its rate of exchange is energy, for energy, intensity for intensity. The time you spend on art is the time it spends with you; there are no short cuts, no crash courses, no fast tracks. There is only the experience.

Jeanette Winterson – ‘What is art for?’ – Guardian 2002

Where are we now? – the bigger picture

Arts planning and funding in the U.K. has been thrown into turmoil by two or three concurrent factors. One a slowdown (pace – ‘recession’) globally which may well remove the Labour Party from power in the next two years.

Two a diversion of a significant amount of lottery funding to the Olympics (even if there were no Olympics to pay for the income from lottery is in a downward spiral).

Thirdly a cut-throat bottom-line cash-driven business model in arts education that is pumping out a hundred fine art graduates per institution into the muddy waters of U.K. Creative Industries PLC. Even the most hard-nosed ACE administrator realises that the gravy will be spread thinner and thinner soon on some very poor fare…

Where are all these new ‘geniuses’ going to go?

‘Free Enterprise’?

So here I am 50 years old and advocating ‘Freemium’ policies, freecycle marketing and not-for-profit artists organisation and pressure-groups. I must, therefore, be mad?

I honestly believe this is the only sensible way forward…the arts council’s golden goose has probably laid its last golden eggs for a while in terms of low-end funding..

For new models perhaps we should look to American free enterprise models that are not based on ’state funding’. We need enterprise, imagination and communal enterprise to survive this recession.

Nottingham was the base for the East Midlands Group in the 1970’s that survived and prospered because all of those things..not just because it was state-funded. It high time that artists stopped ‘competing’ like so many little businesses for government ‘largesse’ and actually started producing high quality work people actually might want to take an interest in.

This starts with reskilling our fine arts graduates instead of spilling them out with pretentious notions and badly conceived ideas of being the next Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin. Removing the skills base was one of the tragedies of the past two decades of art education.

GLOBAL/LOCAL?? Digital freedom?

The free market is dominant to a degree we have never seen before and it destroying not only local communities but the old ‘communal’ bonds between creative individuals. Grants and lip-service cannot change the digital wrecking ball creating havoc with creative copyright. Protecting one’s work digitally is impossible. All creative output can be copied and distributed freely…those who do not accept this are swimming against a very strong tide.

The only ’saleable’ commodity left to the artist is his/her own ideas and experience and the ‘authenticity’ of their personal appearances..or substitute appearances in shows etc. Crafts practitioners are strong on the ‘authentic and personal’ properties that sell items but fine artists no longer are because of recent changes in fashion. To have abandoned traditional skills just at the point where they are most needed is madness. I call this kind of art and skills based production ’slow art’ to differentiate from the internet’s dissemination of ‘fast food art’. This ‘fast art’ is eroding the market for all the arts…

A ‘near-perfect’ copy of a Francis Bacon can be painted in China in the time I have taken to write this evaluation ….so why bother being Francis Bacon any more the students argue..we have ideas…such wonderful ideas….Indeed all 100 have wonderful ideas..it is putting them into ‘practice’ literally that requires skills and understanding as well as ideas.

Some digital artists are already ‘outsourcing’ their creative output to others on a massive scale..just like companies.

It began with YBA’s (Hirst and co. had most ‘artifacts’ ‘made-up’ for them) now everyone’s doing it…especially those students coached early in their career in networking and the ‘wow factor’.

Students are no longer taught to make paints or stretch a canvas or cast bronze ..we have entered a period of ‘Warholian’ education.

True ‘authenticity’ is in short supply now and Fordism is a more relevant philosphy to artists now than the ‘Van Gogh’ suffer and paint model..ironically both he and Picasso engaged in bartering – swapping paintings for food and drink when poor….plus ca change….

Everything else in the arts has been up for grabs since the internet was invented.

To paraphrase Kris Kristofferson in ‘Me and Bobby McGhee’…..

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to sell.

Nothing ain’t worth nothing less it’s free

We are all living in the freemium economy.

A fellow artist’s comments on show.

I think this is a good show to be in. It’s travelling to a lot of trendyish galleries and will be seen extensively around the US. The Arlington centre is a DC district space. The N Carolina one is, I think, well visited. There is most likely tobe a New York venue as well.

Artist/curators who are working on the exhibition:

Cynthia Connolly, artist, photographer, Director, Ellipse Arts Center,
Arlington, VA;

Bill Thelen, artist, Director, Lump Gallery/Projects, Raleigh, NC;

Andrew Jeffrey Wright, artist, co-founder Space 1026, Philadelphia, PA;

Wendy Yao, Owner/Director, Ooga Booga, Los Angeles, CA;

Kim Domanski and Gary Kachadourian, Artscape, Baltimore

Metro Newspaper – 28.04.08

Left Lion Nottingham Magazine Artist profile #22 April-May 2008

‘Conrad Atkinson Remix 1978-2008′ by Moogee the Art Dog

has been selected for ‘Penned’

at the Pinkard Gallery, Bunting Center, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore

An exhibition of pen and/or marker drawings including photographs of the pens used to make them. The more than 100 drawings in this exhibition cover a broad range of pens from the generic ball point to the traditional rapid-o-graph and feather quill to the modern array of jell and artists’ pens.

This exhibition will travel to Ellipse Arts Center, Arlington, VA and Lump Gallery/Projects, Raleigh, NC and possible other galleries in the coming years.

Artscape Baltimore Website

New York Times

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: June 6, 2008

Do you remember what it was like back in the old days when we had a New Economy? In the 1990s, jobs were abundant, oil was cheap and information technology was about to change everything.

Then the technology bubble popped. Many highly touted New Economy companies, it turned out, were better at promoting their images than at making money — although some of them did pioneer new forms of accounting fraud. After that came the oil shock and the food shock, grim reminders that we’re still living in a material world.

So much, then, for the digital revolution? Not so fast. The predictions of ’90s technology gurus are coming true more slowly than enthusiasts expected — but the future they envisioned is still on the march.

In 1994, one of those gurus, Esther Dyson, made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product — software, books, music, movies — the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to “distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships.”

For example, she described how some software companies gave their product away but earned fees for installation and servicing. But her most compelling illustration of how you can make money by giving stuff away was that of the Grateful Dead, who encouraged people to tape live performances because “enough of the people who copy and listen to Grateful Dead tapes end up paying for hats, T-shirts and performance tickets. In the new era, the ancillary market is the market.”

Indeed, it turns out that the Dead were business pioneers. Rolling Stone recently published an article titled “Rock’s New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don’t Sell.” Downloads are steadily undermining record sales — but today’s rock bands, the magazine reports, are finding other sources of income. Even if record sales are modest, bands can convert airplay and YouTube views into financial success indirectly, making money through “publishing, touring, merchandising and licensing.”

What other creative activities will become mainly ways to promote side businesses? How about writing books?

According to a report in The Times, the buzz at this year’s BookExpo America was all about electronic books. Now, e-books have been the coming, but somehow not yet arrived, thing for a very long time. (There’s an old Brazilian joke: “Brazil is the country of the future — and always will be.” E-books have been like that.) But we may finally have reached the point at which e-books are about to become a widely used alternative to paper and ink.

That’s certainly my impression after a couple of months’ experience with the device feeding the buzz, the Amazon Kindle. Basically, the Kindle’s lightness and reflective display mean that it offers a reading experience almost comparable to that of reading a traditional book. This leaves the user free to appreciate the convenience factor: the Kindle can store the text of many books, and when you order a new book, it’s literally in your hands within a couple of minutes.

It’s a good enough package that my guess is that digital readers will soon become common, perhaps even the usual way we read books.

How will this affect the publishing business? Right now, publishers make as much from a Kindle download as they do from the sale of a physical book. But the experience of the music industry suggests that this won’t last: once digital downloads of books become standard, it will be hard for publishers to keep charging traditional prices.

Indeed, if e-books become the norm, the publishing industry as we know it may wither away. Books may end up serving mainly as promotional material for authors’ other activities, such as live readings with paid admission. Well, if it was good enough for Charles Dickens, I guess it’s good enough for me.

Now, the strategy of giving intellectual property away so that people will buy your paraphernalia won’t work equally well for everything. To take the obvious, painful example: news organizations, very much including this one, have spent years trying to turn large online readership into an adequately paying proposition, with limited success.

But they’ll have to find a way. Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we’ll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

It won’t all happen immediately. But in the long run, we are all the Grateful Dead.

See and listen to the Lincoln UK exhibition - Here

trailer star – suit of nettles
‘Connect 08′ - The Collection, Lincoln, England 25th April -29th May 2008

First response is the layout of gallery did not help either viewing of the canvasses ( no point where all 12 canvasses could be seen straight on) and music relationship to paintings… ‘conceit’ broken because record player too far away from paintings..disjointed. Also the over zealous ‘labelling’ broke the rhythm of the ‘counter-narrative’. C’est la vie….Ace 1 – SDB 0

A money culture wants the figures, the bottom line, the sales, the response, it wants a return on its investment, it wants more money.

Art can offer no obvious return. Its rate of exchange is energy, for energy, intensity for intensity. The time you spend on art is the time it spends with you; there are no short cuts, no crash courses, no fast tracks. There is only the experience.

Art can’t change your life – its not a diet programme or the latest guru – it offers no quick fixes. What art can do, is to prompt in us authentic desire. By that I mean it can waken us to truths about ourselves and our lives; truths that normally lie suffocated under the pressure of the twenty-four hour emergency zone called real life. Art can bring us back to consciousness, sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically, but the responsibility to act on what we find, is ours.

Jeanette Winterson – ‘What is art for?’ – Guardian 2002

21st April – 9th May

showing two drawings from The Big Drop sequence 1989! Selected by my mentor Terry Shave – Professor of Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University.

Basically I had shot myself in foot in brochure and by specifying Brochure entry as ‘Trailer Star’ and for 12 canvases I cannot switch to a Moogee ‘alternative’. Probably for best and has meant I ‘finished’ the paintings in time for show at last.

So now the plan is as follows….honest!

Exhibition:  12 paintings allegedly by Trailer Star to ‘illustrate’ the 12 songs on the CD. Hopefully the gallery pack CD sleeve will be ready in time for Private View. Maybe installation of Record Player in Navigation Hall or at very least Trailer Star CD’s playing through the ’sound wall’.

Trailer Star Network

http://trailerstar.ning.com

Beyond the Gallery: Develop Goldfactory network and try and set an ‘exchange’ programme going with Derby and Leicester? Three cities approach? Maybe revive TYPO idea but without ‘Press’ angle for now (problems there). June set aside for my using ‘research space’ ending with private view ‘performance’ maybe with VJ and other musicians?

Goldfactory Social Network

http://goldfactory.ning.com

MOOGEE: The cartoons have been separated from rest of output and a Moogee website set up to bring all cartoons (including those currently on show at Trent Bonnington) together.

MOOGEE’S KENNEL

http://www.shaunbelcher.com/moogee