The Artist Labourer project is dedicated to exploring cultural theory subjects by producing videos and generating projects which illustrate or examine new ideas and new perspectives and is directed by artist and video-maker Graham Johnston.
Video works include two films on Professor John Onians’ thesis based on the application of neuroscientific observations to a new understanding of art history and the creative process. Neuroarthistory: an introduction with John Onians sets out the background to European Art: a neuroarthistory, Onians’ ambitious application of his thesis. Intensity and Repetition: neuroarthistory and the art of Gerard Caris challenges conventional notions of creative agency in a case study of the Dutch sculptor. A Table of Elements is the first of a series of videos documenting the annual exhibitions staged by RCA Professor of Painting Graham Crowley in his Suffolk studio. Crowley asserts that painting has entered what he refers to as a post-conceptual phase and in follow-up videos, Subbs’s Kongarou and the forthcoming Indoor Voices, he gathers works which exemplify this emerging direction.
Creative Spaces is a strand of research which looks at creatives of all types and the spaces they have dedicated to producing their work. The focus, featured in the blog pages here, is not on the meaning of work produced or an analysis of the content of the work but instead concentrates on the material and intellectual resouirces that creatives gather around them and how they maintain. Two have been completed, on painter Duncan Pickstock and screen-writer Bill Anderson, with more researched and being prepared for publication. This is an ongoing project which will seek to find correlates between creatives working in different media and genres.
A further strand of work is R&D video work exploring the boundaries between painting, photography, video and narrative forms.
the artist labourer
GJ OCT.2020
The Artist Labourer 