Thanks Matsuko without whom nothing is posible

Uncomfortable Proximity:

When asked to create this site by Matthew Gansallo of the Tate I found myself awkwardly situated by my admiration for parts of the collection and my equal disdain for the social values that framed the creation of much of its Art and of the collection itself. I felt nervous of having to produce this work in a month from scratch and how to deal in amongst the bric-a-brac of the colonial masters. It's easy to wave a bit of shit on a stick, carry up the stairs until someone sniffs it. But there is little or no point to this strategy other then self gain and notoriety which are of little interest. I hope the Tate can embrace this work as a legitimate counter point to some of it's own agendas and maintain the momentum for the glasnost of the Collection.

This work forced me into an uncomfortable proximity with the economic and social elite's use of aesthetics in their ascendancy to power and what this means in my own work. I was delighted of course in the creative power and imagination of the artists in the collection, enjoying the information contained in the works, whether that be the aesthetic formalism, mathematical structures of perception, raw emotion, opto-chemical reactions of light across time or the social history they contain. But when I stepped out of the temple and smelt the filth of the Thames, over-shadowed by the Tate I was reminded that, down their - in the silt - under the stones - under the floor lay the true costs of such a delight. The tragedy of any social elite's possession of public creativity and imagination has led me to try and trace at least two threads of this elite's ascendancy in present history. The first involves mapping the rituals of tastefulness, the distance it creates from the uninspired Victorian mob, the language and manners of the tasteful, and the inherent hypocrisy that this implies. The second centres on the histories of different peoples, my friends and family, either ascendant, static or uncounted which recognise themselves in terms of that tastefulness, or in reaction to it, and act accordingly.

I would like to thank the Tate staff for their courtesy and professionalism and Matthew Gansallo in particular for allowing me the support and space to refine my arguments and for the experience of feeling confused in the face of my delight. I look forward to seeing many other people dissect parts of the collection to recount their own narratives. This Website is a personal recounting of the history of the Tate and some of the works within its collection.

Harwood