Socio Paths #2: The Shoreditch-Based Artist
‘Art is my mistress but I remain monogamous with my medium’. It’s a soundbite that Jean (formerly ‘John’ but he threw off all filial manacles when he started to read Genet) has been saving for his first important prize acceptance. But in the absence of any valid cultural, professional, financial – and lately, sexual – recognition, he’s resorted to cracking it out to the bespectalcled, pustular Brick Lane nuFemmes in the hope of a lay or – the next best thing – an add and a poke on his new facebook collective. Members are few at present (ten) but Jean knows it’s only a matter of time before his peers finish masturbating over the glossy self-published pages of ‘Wall and Pizza’, clean up the excremental daubs from their self-appointed ‘Dispatches from the Cold Front’ solipsisms, stop trying to re-rectify Goya using limited variations of the word ‘cunt’ and using it gratuitously on their blog rolls and start appreciating painting again.
It’s not that Jean is a stuckist per se; he can straddle the painful divide between misty-eyed congratulatory colonialism and the barren glazed gaze of postmodernist objectivity. After all, he was the first male with an East London postcode to combine the empirical splendour that is the Pith Helmet with a properly tied cravat and yellow skinny jeans. Nor is he lacking in mixed-medium epiphanical inspiration; praise for his ‘dervish, devilish and defiant typographic explorations’ remains unparalleled by student reporters at the Goldshowers Revue and he was exhibiting contraception plied with pile cream smeared on sheets to selected peers long before Emin got into sculpture. It’s just that anything that isn’t painted is, you know, soulless and banal. Secure in the knowledge that representing the insides of shoeboxes in gouache is the pioneering first step in the New Pessimism movement that his name will – in time – be symbiotically linked with, Jean must first navigate the hinterland of disdain and occasional slapped face.
For him, the creative impulse is the fuel, posthumous appreciation the final destination and nihilistic detractors are the grungy waiting room plastered with ‘Boz was ‘ere’ on the journey to artistic self-actualisation. Thankfully, self-awareness of his social reception is not part of this self-indulgent caricature’s mediocre and increasingly middle-aged travel metaphor.
