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All of my work, like that of any artist is within the context of its creation and it's exhibition - therefore when looking at any excerpts online please view them with regard to my description of their context. If you view a work like 'Un Tempo Una Volta', without imagining that it is shown 6 meters by 3 meters at an angle of 45 degrees, 10 feet above the audiences head whilst they lay beneath, staring up as Venetians do within their city, then you are missing the point.
In the middle of all of this Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay - the Object of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - updated in 1987 by John Wyver's programme for La Sept: the Object of Art in the Age of Electronic Reproduction asked what is the nature of art, and whether the 'aura' of the artwork can still be present in its representation. Place in to all of this the analysis of the Situationists and the notion of the Society of the Spectacle and the fetishisation of commodity and we have a heady, onrushing mix with art placed suitably (always) to question consumption in all of its forms. Damien Hirst unavoidably has had to move to this question with his 'skull', where the value is the issue of the art, where death is a simple counterpoint, where the 'aura' of the work is absent from the beginning.
In amongst all of this as an artist, an image maker, initially with single screen works and latterly with sculptural investigations into the virtual and the real, I find myself perhaps at odds with the evolutionary thrust of art. I don't feel bad about that because every current has to have its eddies and sub-currents without which it cannot exist. Also I like to tell myself that what my intuition tells me to investigate is in fact more important than what is uppermost in the mind of the contemporary zeitgeist - because I like every artist befpore or after me - is interested in something that underpins every zeitgeist which itself is continuously transforming yet remaining the same.
PORTRAITS OF THE SOMERSET CARNIVALS
To that end I am interested in people entering a space (real or imaginary) and perceiving a work and what may happen to them in the moments after its first apprehension. I say the moments following because those first moments are manipulable by any artist who know their practice - and it is in that description that lies the answer to my pursuit. As an artist I want to go beyond that pursuit toward the idea of the sublime (which is of course beyond any evolutionary description of things - Dawkins take note), so that the work I make and we as artists make, matters and is significant in some way. What that significance is, is your, the audience's, call. The 'only game in tow'n is self-knowledge; Art at its best is an enabler of understanding of the world. As Jung says (my paraphrase): "We are here to make that subtle material, conscious awareness reverberate - because Significance/Essence/the existential state/God (whatever is your ultimate depiction of your existence), requires conscious witnesses".
Collected Artwork for sale on DVD
New Projects and Installation Work
Completed Projects from 1976 to 2005.
My work has been purchased by the ARNOLFINI Bristol
and the MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Berlin.
Complete collections of my artwork are available or will soon be found at
The British Artists Film and Video Study Collection, LONDON
Video Les Beaux Jours, STRASBOURG
Contact me at: flaxton@btinternet.com or click e-mail me
E-Mail: flaxton@btinternet.com e-mail me Telephone +44 (0)1749 890 610 Fax +44 (0)1749 890 018 Mobile +44 (0)7976 370 984