Michael and the Artist Factory

When I came to Grizedale, being a working class boy from suburban Glasgow, I couldn't have been farther from home, in these rural Lake District surroundings of the staggeringly beautiful and impeccable Lawson Park. Thankfully I was met with a genuine acceptance and quiet assistance by the residents, the degree of which has surprised me somewhat. 

I came here without particular proclivity for, well, anything useful. Fresh from art school, your eyes can still be a little dewy - because art schools aren't really schools are they? And what you learn in them can so easily, and often, amount to nothing at all. In fact it seems an absurd misuse of the word art, or artist, if one thinks it can be proscribed or created through a meagre three - four years in a non-school. What they do achieve though, in general, through provision of their nurturing time, space, framework, is capacity for critical outlook and thought, which is a powerful, vastly under valued skill, and quite ominously rare. But this capacity must be applied with rigour and insight to far more than just insular gallery exhibits.

Anyway, when I read the great modernists talking about the merging of art and life, as they do, it always seemed to me to veer tragically and slightly solipsistically back toward art. At Lawson Park, life really is an art, with even it's own type of autonomy in the form of six hundred feet of altitude and an exceedingly long driveway (much to the fury of certain members of the village people.) Indeed, if I could belligerently key a phrase: There is no art but life. That is to say, art here is an integral part of life, not that it doesn’t happen - it just isn’t as precious. In terms of use value though, besides growing much of it’s own foodstuffs, Lawson Park as a site has as strong a cathartic and revelatory spiritual affect as any of the conventional art-forms can claim. At the same time, as locus or matrix, it is able to export these values to make real social head way, creating interesting connections between disparate cultural nerve-endings - even if this is entirely lost on it’s most frequent visitor; the lesser Lake District Mountain-Biker.

I see Lawson Park as a yardstick, a benchmark, a tan line, err... it's like white bed linen that shows up all the dirt, hair and nasty bits that we all leave behind and makes them so obvious that we really can't ignore them any longer, in fact they become to clear that we can examine them in comfort and wonder at how they came to be, and perhaps devise ways of not getting so dirty in the future. The shit streaks and sweat patches that as a society we've grown so used to hiding under dark colours and deodorant that only once you see them you realise how easily they can be washed away. Perhaps I’m being a little think with simile, but simply put, they have a good life here, and eminently worth striving for. There are so many things that are lost to habituation of city life and work - most significantly the manual work of making or growing - which has dislocated so many lives with the reality of our existence.  This disjunction grows greater by the day, observable through the sense of suspicion and uncertainty on the part of the ‘offcomer’ people from cities, at anything that is not qualified by the framing mechanics of consumer packaging, sell-by-dates and GDAs - an odd reversal of the stereotypical country folk’s distrust of everything technological.

I've spent my three months here a bit like a sponge, quietly absorbing and reticently retaining as much as I could. I've even washed Andy Warhol’s collection of cups, and wiped down surfaces used by some great minds. But alas, my summer not-a-holiday at Grizedale is at an end and now I must go off into the night and squeeze myself of all this juice.

So long, and thanks for all those Sophistocakes (copyright Benjamin, M. Z. 2011)

Here are some photos of things what I made, grew and saw:

Michael Davis