Dennis Farnsworth

When I was younger I used to look up to artists like Yves Klein, Niki De Saint Phalle and all the other French and American artists of that time.

They seemed like the coolest people ever. Niki’s husband Jean Tinguely blew things up and titled it ‘Homage to New York.’

Niki shotgunned canvases covered in wet paint and plaster in an act of revolt against the men who had fucked her over since childhood.

Klein spoke of the immaterial and was mad – judo master, foreshadowed his own death, leaped into the void, created a monotone symphony and was able to perform silence.

I remember reading about how he once wanted to cast air – that which is all around us but at the same time is not. So he slapped IKB-paint on an empty canvas, strapped it to the roof of his car and drove from Paris to Nice hoping that the air would make an imprint. Physicalizing air. What does air look like?

De Saint Phalle built a tarot garden. She lived inside one of her sculptures and worked day and night – inspired by Cheval – to build a sculpture park that was to be her life’s work.

But at my art school we’re encouraged to live in the present and look forward and outwards to the world. What is around us? What is happening? And how do we engage with, tackle, the issues we are confronted with?

And it’s not only a result of what teachers tell me, but as I have started my bachelor’s degree in fine arts, in central Europe, I’m questioning what the point is in being a tortured, crazy, megalomaniac artist who as Freud put it is urged on by instinctual needs /…/; he longs to attain to honour, power, riches, fame, and the love of women; but he lacks the means of achieving these gratifications. So, like any other with an unsatisfactory longing, he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, and all his libido, on to the creation of his wishes in the life of phantasy /…/.

It seems futile and quite boring, at this point.

I’m doing a course in artistic research and I still don’t know what it means, but it’s opening myself up to a world of research and understanding of art that I am eager to explore as the limitations of what it is to be an artist are non-existent, and the possibilities endless. We can speak about anything, tackle anything, and embrace the fact that an artist is unplaceable.

I want to engage – be political. Learn. And not sculpt for the sake of sculpting and having something to do, but rather doing it with a purpose that is beyond creating the object of one’s desire.