Video Art aaNews aaStatementaa ProjectsaaHD Blog
This is an age of image making. For my money a contemporary artist/interventionist like Banksy is in direct lineage from Duchamp, Magritte and Warhol. Duchamp: "I reject patronage determining what is counted as art so from now on I the artist will choose what art is and what it means", Magritte: "I openly question the idea of representation especially in the delineation of the 'real'," Ceci n'est pas une pipe. Warhol: 'Now we should look at what's around us with a gaze that was previously reserved for 'art'"... and the contemporary acts of Banksy: "let us intervene in our own destiny by direct action in the marketplace which currently symbolises human exchange and human values". All direct art statements and the work they made supported their articulation of what was important for them at the time of that understanding.
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. Both asking 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 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 outside of 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 I am investigating is in fact more important than what is uppermost in the mind of the contemporary zeitgeist - because I am interested in something that underpins every zeitgeist which itself is continuously transforming yet remaining the same.
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 trade - and it is in that description that lies the answer to my pursuit. As an artist I want to go beyond that 'trade' so that the work I make matters and is significant in some way. What that significance is, is your, the audience's, call. The only game in town 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 - because God needs all the help s/he can get.
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