Am I an Artist?

No, I am not going through a crisis of confidence but entertaining some thoughts about ‘what I am’. Sometimes I get nervous when I am introduced as an ‘artist’. Automatically I start to think how I am going to explain my art practice in the sanest possible manner…a task I have yet to successfully master. Conversations go something like this…

 Person: You’re an artist. What is your medium?

 Me: Err, um. Photography.

 Person: What do you photograph?

 Me: (Jesus, here we go…) Existential dread mainly.

 Person: Pardon?

 Me: My dreams, nightmares, delusions, etc. You know, streams of consciousness type stuff.

 Person: No, I don’t know. How do you photograph that?

 Me: Dolls mainly.

 Person: (Lifting a single eyebrow suspiciously, like Spock on Star Trek…) Dolls? Interesting.

 Me: Yeah…um, yep, um, excuse me I need to, um, go and, um, and, um…bye. (I quickly leave the venue and find a convenient lamppost to smack my head against.) Idiot, idiot, idiot.

Am I an Artist if I can’t verbalise my practice clearly and succinctly? I tend to want my art to talk for itself (like any artist I assume) but problematic if someone who hasn’t seen my art needs a coherent descriptor of what I do.

Is the term ‘Artist’ the problem? Too pretentious maybe? Perhaps I should choose another label, a different title to what I do. I could go back to using ‘Photographer’…no, far too many memories of the days when I was doing weddings, portraits, and freelance commercial work. Photographer, for me, is a term too broad and I am not even sure that is what I do is even photography anymore. Sure, I use a camera and the tricks and trappings of photography, but I do not readily see my work (the end-product as such) as a photograph…more like visual evidence of a thought experiment, a physical relic of memory, or a token from non-existent events. Also, the title ‘Photographer’ alone carries its own (historical and contemporary) baggage and tropes that I do not wish to consider in connection with my work.

So not artist, nor photographer, what then?

Perhaps it is not up to me to decide what I am – in the end, that could be for curators and historians, writers and critics to decide what I am and what my art is…that’s if the work is interesting enough for them to have the temerity to take notice, to look beyond the mere surface, to tease out the intent behind the visual facade.

Am I an Artist? I guess so…only for want of a better term.