membership / artist member

Jonathan Callan

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Jonathan Callan was featured in Contemporary Art Society's ARTfutures 2003 and 2004.

Here are a few thoughts on the nature of what I do.

I don't have a theory.

Artists are prone to telling lies.

An artist is perhaps the least reliable authority on the meaning of their own work.

Giving a reason for something having been made is not equivalent to giving the meaning of the work.

Most of my work is derived from a fascination with materiality. I'm interested in fluff, dirt, dust. I'm interested in things
breaking down.

I'm interested in that which cannot be said but can only be shown.

Most objects to me are not real until I can find what is inside.

Which presents a paradox. Since we can only ever see the surface of things, the interior of any object is seen as a series of surfaces beyond and behind which are only more interior surfaces.

This is a morbid inclination. Perhaps implying that things can only be understood after having been broken down or destroyed, suggesting that the attainment of knowledge is an invasive procedure, no gaze or observation leaving it's subject unmarked.

My work is often frank about the history of it's own making.
There are often, accumulative marks, counting the hours and days of the works own manufacture.

Meaning, like life, needs no encouragement to colonize almost every conceivable environment and it's subtlety is enriched by allowing it to evolve from the bottom up rather than forcing it to devolve from the top down.

This is perhaps why all my work begins with very ordinary low-level observations, the kind that would be of no interest to most people.

I have made a lot of work using books and I suspect that for most people a book is an abstraction residing only as a matter of necessity in the form of an object. Most of us will assume that a book is a culturally significant vehicle, the words being of far more importance than the fact that the object itself is a layered thing made of ink, binding and glue.

I attempt to reverse this assumption, using the book as an armature, as the platform for a series of investigations into the physicality of those things which can only be shown.

The English philosopher, John Austin described language as a net which we use to try and catch our experiences of the world, much is caught and much is missed and it's the stuff that's missed that interests me, more often than not the stuff that is missed, because it cannot be made sensible with words is disregarded as nonsense.

I like being a torch bearer for ignorance. Dreams disappear with the loss of false understanding. Children constantly re-invent the world in an attempt to understand it from a position of necessary ignorance.

One of the things that used to bother me was the apparent contradiction of practicing an activity I didn't know the meaning of. I still don't.

Beyond the broad idea that art is a very subtle form of communication and perhaps also a form of inquiry, I am still non the wiser.

In order to get the work made an artist will use any and every form of conceptual scaffolding. For me, that kind of support is only temporary, it must be taken down once the work is finished. Structurally it may have no correspondence at all to the conceptual integrity of the finished piece.

- Jonathan Callan, 2009

mail@jonathancallan.demon.co.uk

http://www.kudlek-vandergrinten.de/cms/de/-/artists/jonathan_callan/index.html

http://www.nicoleklagsbrun.com/callan/callan.html

http://www.grusenmeyerart.be/gallery/artists.php?id=3&show=Jonathan_Callan

http://www.theapartment.gr/callan.htm

http://www.marcselwynfineart.com/artists/callan/callan.htm

• ARTfutures 2004

  31st March — 4th April 2004
  City of London School Queen Victoria Street, London EC4