Q&A 31: artistic inputs

Laura Snapes asks:
"How do you manage your diet of visual inputs and the fine calibration between “too much” and “too little”? Do you have any version of the “artist’s date” from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way? And what was the last art exhibition you saw that, to quote Will.I.Am, blew your tiny mind?"

My previous two Q&A answers dealt with speaking to one's younger self, and the difficulty of continuing to curate a selection of new things that one enjoys (in that case music). Both answers are relevant here.

As a young creator I was lazy in many ways, but one of the advantages that I had was a very strong sense of what I liked, and why I liked it. From the age of perhaps ten, my connection to a work wasn't just about the content, but the style. I knew what hackwork looked like. Comics was the perfect way to develop this, because I was exposed to many different artists drawing, or writing the same thing. I knew what "hit" and what did not. I knew when a fill-in issue left me ruing my wasted pocket money. Music was the same; this lands, this does not. This is a singles artist, this is an album artist. But the greatest thing is to be surprised. To hate something, be annoyed by it, but then come round to liking it, or if not that, then understanding it, even if it's not for me. I came to realise that any strong reaction is good, even if I wouldn't always want to live inside that reaction for too long.

But again, as I have got older, it has been harder to be surprised, it's harder to be charmed, one's taste is sharpened to the extent that it becomes easy to be lazy in what you're willing to consume. I've had to re-evaluate why I like things at all. The sharpness and craft that impressed me as a young man mean less now than the manifestation of some kind of inescapable individuality through the work. What I am looking for, for want of a better word, is "personality".

In an era where there is a flood of art, of a volume and competency vastly in excess of what I could ever have absorbed even as a child, the cumulative effect is deadening. There are thousands of wonderful concept artists sharing endless lovely character designs on Instagram, but it's become too much for me. When I moved into my new house a couple of years ago, I visited a number of print fairs to find things for my empty walls. By the third or fourth time I had walked out empty handed, numbed by hundreds of variations on four or five clearly delineated themes, I realised that this was not going to work. As in music, discovery has become a job of work. Having prized my abilities as an all-seeing eye, it has become necessary to put blinkers on and look more carefully for artists who speak to me directly.

So the short answer is, I don't put in enough, because there is often too much for me to parse. I do try to make space for myself to experience things, but I don't protect that space as in the artist's date. Instead, I try to vary the tone and subject matter of my work, so as to introduce areas of study. It's one of the reasons that I no longer plough ahead with one steady story all the time. Switching casts or settings lets me open the door to different things, or at the very least, the possibility of difference in my long steady art trudge.

For NEMS part 2, I have spent a lot of time looking at the work and career of Milton Glaser. How much of that comes through is for the audience to judge. but I found his work, to paraphrase the philosopher Will.I.Am, "tiny mind-blowing".

The last exhibition I saw that had the same effect was Mike Kelley's 'Ghost & Spirit' at Tate Modern. It encompassed drawing, sculpture, video installation, all executed with a playful vision that I found totally compelling. I looked at everything for a long time, and could have easily gone back round for a second lap.