Pretentious Little Shit

Before I took my A-Levels, I had already decided I was going to be an artist. Therefore, I didn’t really bother studying too hard - so long as I passed Art, I could get onto a foundation course and rocket up through the artistic Valhalla of The Slade, Chelsea, RCA or Central Saint Martins. It was preordained; I’d been told since an early age that I had the gift.

I spent the two years that I should have been reading my English Literature syllabus and my Government and Politics texts under the covers of my girlfriend’s bed, just doing enough to scrape through. The foundation course was a delight. I was finally in my element - shaving off all my hair and painting oils while wearing a pinstripe suit. Pretentious little shit. But I told myself pretension was almost obligatory. It was the only way you could push yourself to a level of discomfort where you could test your boundaries.

I passed my foundation year and, true to form, delayed applying to art college until very late. I don’t think I had even done particularly good work. I had just enjoyed myself and become fully immersed in the art world - travelling up to private views in London, drinking warm white wine from plastic cups, passing comment on splashes of colour and smears of clay. Most weekends, I was up around Cork Street or Dering Street, Bruce Nauman and Antony Gormley all the rage. I realised that to succeed was really to have more belief in yourself than the art actually deserved. The more you were able to talk up Tàpies, Beuys, and Pollock, the less you had to worry about the fine artistry of Velázquez, Vermeer or Ingres. To be an artist now lies more in the words you use than the brushstrokes you put down.

I ended up getting into East London University, only just converted from a polytechnic, for my Fine Art degree. I told myself it didn’t matter, that I was still in the heart of it, an underground journey away from the throbbing centre of my passion. In truth, I was surrounded by others just like me - a little lost, not very driven, but full of faith in the idea of art. I lived at the top of a tower block in Leytonstone, sharing my space with a very nice but suicidal Business Studies student.

It was then that I decided the university itself wasn’t where I was going to find fulfilment. My real teachers were elsewhere: Annette Messager, Howard Hodgkin, James Turrell, and Anish Kapoor. The Young British Artists were about to be a thing, and I knew I was somewhere close to its pulse. When I couldn’t be in the galleries, I immersed myself in books and magazines. My favourite bookshops were attached to galleries - the ICA, the Serpentine, the Photographer’s Gallery. I’d skip meals so I could afford the glossy art magazines that proved there was money in wild ideas, sexy rebellion and sardonic reflection.

Looking back, I realise the books that shaped me most during that time - On Photography by Susan Sontag, Ways of Seeing by John Berger, and The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe - were already passé, but their truth was soft, human, and accessible, just like the left-wing idealism they had sprung from at the end of the ’60s. There was a comfort in that. They permitted me to look without judgment.

Sontag’s essays on Diane Arbus helped me see radical photography through a different lens. Berger taught me that context was everything - that by placing a battered chair or a cracked sink in a gallery, you forced the viewer to see it anew, as form and colour rather than function. Wolfe seduced me with his flamboyance, with his ability to intellectualise what others sneered at - to turn Jasper Johns’s white canvases into a kind of high-wire philosophy.

Those books helped me look at Joel-Peter Witkin’s mutilated bodies without flinching, and to delight in Marc Quinn’s Self - his frozen head made of his own blood - and in Serrano’s Piss Christ. Not because they were beautiful, but because they revolted the likes of my dad and stepmother, who preferred Gainsborough and Constable.

Ultimately, I didn’t last more than a year at the university. But I suspect I learned more in that one year than I would have from three years of painting in the studio, chasing a second-rate degree from a university barely on the cultural map. What I learned wasn’t how to make art, but how to see it - and, perhaps more importantly, how to talk about it without feeling like an impostor. Those books - Sontag, Berger, Wolfe - permitted me to think critically, to question the hierarchy of taste, to believe that meaning could be made as much from language and context as from paint or bronze.

Afterwards, I left the course before the end of the first year. I’d realised, too late, that belief alone wasn’t enough to make art. You also needed discipline, curiosity, and perhaps a touch less wine from private views. So I went back, retook my A-levels, and, somehow, ended up with a science degree. It still makes me laugh. I’d set out to be an artist and wound up studying the measurable instead of the mysterious. Yet in a way, it was the same search: a fascination with how things work, and how we make sense of what we see.