“You cannot replace an artwork with any description of it.”

My practice begins with the problem of what art is. I don’t mean that I am looking for an objective definition of art, because I’m not sure that such a definition would be particularly useful even if it were possible. What I am trying to do is establish the best framework I can from what I currently know, make work through that framework, and then see where it stops working. How I understand art determines what I think it means to make art well, so for me the two questions are difficult to separate. I want to become the best artist I can, but to do that I first have to have some idea of what I think art actually is.

At the moment, Object-Oriented Ontology, particularly Graham Harman’s writing on aesthetic objects, gives me the most useful framework for thinking about this. One of the things I take from Harman is that an artwork cannot be reduced back into the things that constitute it. You can describe its materials, the artist’s intention, the gallery, the viewer, the relations between its parts, and so on, but you still haven’t reconstructed the artwork. This is not to say that those things are unimportant; without them there may be no artwork at all. But something different appears through them that cannot then be worked backwards into them without being lost. This is the part that I find useful, because it gives me something that can be tested through making rather than only argued about.

Much of my work starts by establishing particular conditions, systems or instructions and then making within them. I think of there being some separation between myself as the artist and myself as the maker. The artist establishes what the work is trying to do and the conditions through which it should happen; the maker then has to actually make it. The artist is still there during construction, but ideally he is not making every decision according to what looks better at that particular moment. He is making sure the maker is still producing the work that was conceived, or, if something in the process shows that the starting point was wrong, going back and adjusting that starting point. This is not an attempt to remove the artist completely. I am obviously still one of the constituent objects of the work. I just find it very unlikely the most interesting or useful one.

But then there is a problem. If I make a work in order to put a philosophical framework under pressure, the thing produced by that framework can itself become an aesthetic object. The test is no longer outside the problem it is testing. This is where making becomes more useful to me than simply writing about the same question, because the work can do something that the framework did not account for. I can determine the starting conditions as carefully as I like and still end up with something that cannot be reduced back into those conditions. The work interferes with the framework that produced it. At the moment, I think my practice sits somewhere in that interference.