1052 Artman Project Progress

I discovered my space in February 2007 after attending an X factor finalists concert, looked up the X Factor site and this lead to a MySpace site and the rest as they say is now, and tomorrow.

It has taken six weeks for MySpace to evolve into MySpace 101 a part work component of 101 9. 3. 39.

101 because I bought a book of 100 works which Saatchi suggested had changed British art by the commencement of the 21st century. I wanted to create 101.

We live at a time when everything that we do can be viewed, recorded and altered by anyone anywhere anytime with the technology of 1's and 0's.

Why 9.3.39. This is a recent renaming as originally when the project was commenced it was entitled monument to a failed dyslexic artist.

9 .3. 39 is my birthday and while I am not a numerologist I have been fascinated by the symmetry of 9. 3. 39 and more recently when for a period of two months my mother was aged 99 and me 66.

From the outset the project was to create one A4 size card to represent every hour of my life to the age 0f 65, in sets of 24 plus in addition an artman glitter frontispiece card (using glue glitter on photopaper) and a set signature card which included information on the set number and classification, and which in total will amount to over 500000 cards in over 20000 sets in volumes of folders with some in boxes.

While the period from birth to 65 is the core component, the work explores available information about ancestors and includes the process of work creation.

We live in era of forms of 24 hour reality experience in TV and the Internet and my argument is that for a creative work to be contemporary then the process of its creation is part of the work itself, just was we have belatedly understood that the life of every human being begins at conception and that our lives are the product of inherited genes, and with the experiences gained in the womb as significant as those during our formative years before we develop what we and others regard as our separate identities. The project is therefore divided into sets on the development of the work, those which chronicle events and experiences, those which are records including lists, such as all the films, live theatre and sporting events experienced, recorded music, voice and sounds, and my libraries of books audio and video material and homemade CDroms. The project is also known as public and private art because there are parts of my experience which should or must remain confidential, either because of the work I was engaged in, or because it involves the lives of others who are living and who have not agreed for their involvement in my life to make into a public work. In relation to MySpace, published Blogs, photos, comments are therefore a public part of the work but e mail communications are not, except by prior agreement. Confidential work will not be exhibited unless sealed in black filing cabinets which take the form of monoliths influenced by those in the films 2001 and 2010 and the black sinister sculptural work of Eva Grubinger. Other creative artists who have directly influenced are Tracey Emin, Bruce Nauman, Hanne Darbovan and Sarah Lucas, although my creative consciousness was formed out of Jazz, Promenade concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, Sculptural work of Rodin, Hepworth and Moore, squelch and splodger painters starting with John Bratby, the kitchen sink dramas of the 50's and 60's to Shakespeare, and diverse literary and poetic work from Betjeman, T S Elliot and Dylan Thomas to Byron and Keats, Lawrence Durrell, CP Snow and Anthony Powell to Virginia Wolf, Tolstoy and the Bronte's.

Why to 65? The age when society has determined that in general we should pass into a different phase of involvement in life. A better time would be between January 1999 when I discovered who my father was, a glorious epiphany of day in 2003 when I visited Saatchi and Tate Modern exhibitions, and when my mother reached the magical age of 100 years.

To-date 6200 sets are completed and 150000 cards. One autobiographical work 101 in Black and White, with 101 copies printed by the Daily and Mail and to be exhibited one day in 5 black and 4 white boxes under the title an attempt to convert the Daily Mail, together with 101 Black and white photos and 101 statements both in the form of A 4 Cards, a family history of the Smarts of Calne Wiltshire and the present work in progress 101 MySpace, 101friends, 101 Blogs, 101 comments and 101 photos selected to represent aspects of my life. Other component work planned includes a biographical work to be published Fragments of Time and Fragments of Memory, one on the relationship with my mother and the other on the relationship with a father I never knew in the form of a prolonged letter telling him about my creative development and search for an artistic identity, and a play about old age and severe memory loss with psychosis, God willing. May your God be always with you, especially those who have no concept of forces greater than their own self awareness?