What's all this about?

By way of introduction this blog is, broadly stated, about art and visual culture. More specifically it’s about very personal and present engagements with art and spectatorship rather than a strongly historical account of works discussed. I will not be focussing on a particular period of art production or a particular genre of work but on what happens when an artwork, any artwork meets an eye, a body, a mind. I am intrigued by the difficult to articulate moment in which two entities, the viewer and the work, two sets of cultural baggage, two modes of communication meet. My accounts are deeply and unapologetically subjective informed by my personal reception of works viewed now and in the past. It’s easy to go to art exhibitions and stare and then leave again but to then attempt to put that experience into words, to describe one’s reactions, what one’s thought processes were makes that engagement far more demanding, thoughtful and lasting.

Wenceslaus Hollar: Civis Coloniensis Uxor (1643)

But why ‘The Substance of Shadows’? In the first instance it is the name of my first solo curated show for the History of Art Department at Bristol University soon to open (June 20th 2009). This exhibition displays a selection of the department’s print archive that I have been working on over the past nine months (more of this soon). But secondly it expresses the ways in which our experiences of art, literature and culture stay with us as memories, they inform everything that we subsequently do and see. They colour our interpretations of the present and future by their link to something past. I see these connections as resembling a metaphorical shadow, they have a specific source (in the form of an artwork) and yet their shaded reflection goes through something of a metamorphosis as it is transcribed from source to shadow, from artwork to the mind of the spectator. That reflected double is by no means inferior to the original, it is rather deeply effected by whatever mental reconfigurations it inevitably passes through. My own writings represent in themselves further shadows of the art I have seen and thought about, they are necessarily imperfect proliferations of their original.