Madness and mosaic
I don’t think it’s an accident that mosaic is often associated with madness. It seems to have a metaphorical value — piecing together a reality over which you have some control –combined with the useful quality of consuming vast amounts of time. These are both helpful characteristics in the service of mental health. I’ve been thinking about mosaic and madness as I have doing research for a book I am writing with the mosaic artist Sonia King. Trawling the internet I have found bursting bodies built from lego, still lives of apples made entirely from apples, town halls coated in corn cobs, cars made from cameras, and vast quantities of images of just about anything you care to name made from the unlikeliest of throw away materials. Not that I think that everyone who does it is round the bend of course – after all I do it myself – but the impulse to transform one thing into another, where the new form is both greater than oneself, but meaningfully connected to it, seems to be hardwired into us. It’s kind of good – but you can definitely overdose on it. I mean it is possible for mere obsessive activity to outweigh creativity as such.
With work of this nature, as with some contemporary art, the principle underlying its creation frequently dominates its execution – so judgments about how well it is done, whether it ‘works’ or not, seem beside the point. And that’s not the only thing it shares with contemporary art – there is also the democratising tool of photoshop. If there was ever anything interesting about seeing one thing (perhaps an image of Michael Jackson) constructed entirely of pictures of something else (images of young children for example – it is at its most exciting when there is a frisson of irony) I think the thrill has long gone, and what you are left with is a picture of technology.
Here are some unironic images of a mosaic in my house:
Do you have ironic images as well?
Not really. I think irony really comes from despair and a sense of powerlessness. The artist ironist has to display an awareness of the impossibility of image making now. Of course there are difficulties — it is an anomaly being a mosaicist in the modern world — but it’s up to the individual to find a way to make sense of it — visually and conceptually. In my case I do that by looking at the history of the ceramic industry. Other artists find other ways.
Here’s a quote from Henry James: “We work in the dark, We do what we can, We give what we have, Our doubt is our passion, And our passion is our task, The rest is the madness of art”.