As my last show was drawing to a close, I had a bit of a revelation. I realised it was really something of a remaking of the first installation I made after graduating college - in 1990, almost twenty years ago now. That piece was called 'In Mourning for Nothing'. It was a six month project to make a long term installation. After six months work in the same site, I indeed had something that has haunted me ever since.
After thinking about that for a while, I concluded that I was actually stilll making that first installation, that indeed I had been making the same piece of work for almost twenty years. And if I was still trying to resolve that first piece now, there was little chance I would ever finish it. So the concept of an entire career making the same piece of work raised its head, and was found not unpleasant. From that I swiftly (in my head) invented the concept of 'Slow Art'. Then I Googled it and found that Grayson Perry had in fact launched a Slow Art movement back in 2005. It doesn't look like anything much has come of it since, but then that's the nature of the beast. The Slow Art movement is now well and truly underway, and I'm signing up for it.
Slow Art - it's the new Slow Food. No, really - Grayson Perry - Times Online
Let's kill speed, says the Turner prize-winning potter in the first of his new weekly columns
As a producer of art I feel an increasing pressure to keep in step with our 24/7 culture-on-demand society, and as a consumer I am overwhelmed by a tyranny of choice. I hereby declare the launch of the Slow Art Movement (I have not hired a PR). Artists, I call on you to spend some quality time with a sketchbook before pointing the digital camera out of the car window. Think long and hard, perhaps even discuss your ideas in a Hoxton café before ringing up the fabricator and ordering that monument to a one-liner. Maybe even take the rebellious and increasingly fashionable step of learning how to make something skilfully with your hands.
Picasso set an awesome precedent by knocking out three art works for every day of his life but Vermeer is held in reverence for a surviving oeuvre that wouldn’t crowd out the wall space in a squash court. So I ask gallerists and curators not to expect artists to churn out cool stuff like some cultural ice machine. Often I plan to see a certain exhibition only to find it has been superseded in the blink of an art historian ’s eye by the next show. If we all spent longer thinking, making and looking perhaps less bad art would get made, shown and seen.
