This image is everywhere.

Why? is it because it is ‘good’ art? I am not sure how to judge such a thing. Is it because it is brave and fearless in the face of unyielding bureacracy? Perhaps there is some of this here. Is it because it captures a mood- a national feeling against an unjust law? I hope so. God knows, we need our post-modern Prophets even more than the ancient Israelites did.

There remains something else too that makes me slightly uncomfortable- the celebrity mystique of protest art that is allowable somehow because it has been owned by the establishment – permissable as a democratic safety valve that pretends towards non-conformity whilst at the same time playing the art game as well as everyone. The Banksy machine is very well oiled after all…

He even made a self-aware film in which he describes the rules of the machine…

Michaela tells me that the inverse snobbery in me never allows me to fully enjoy anything that is popular, and this skews me towards art that is made on the edge, the fringes rather than the centre. The irony here is that I love art that challenges our culturual assumptions injustices but in order to do this, it has to break through the algorythms somehow to reach large numbers of people… just as Banksy has managed. For art to engage, it has to find vehicles that will allow it to travel.

Here is a case in point. I was recently asked to supply some poetry for an art exhibition entitled ‘A colourful world’. The idea was to place some poems on coloured cloth and drape them in the entrance. I suggested this poem from 2014 as it seemed to fit the theme rather well. Each three-line verse taking a different colour as inspiration. It was my attempt to consider the beauty and brokenness of this wonderful life that we have, in all its different colours…

Blue hangs like a limp flag above him

Stirred only by half-a-breeze

Always waiting for tomorrow

.

Light falling through these trees

As if through ten green bottles

Hanging on for the fall

.

In a crush of commuting greys she wore bright orange

Less to draw attention to herself, more in blazing protest

Against complicity, against the curse of ordinary compliance

.

Yellow says hello

As the summer strips the grass to straw

And flowers forget their gazing upwards

.

Red bowl of the sun in a darkening sky

Curtaining so fast that I reach out

Grasping as to cup it, to keep it close

.

Pink flesh unfolds like a flower

This fragile child, as if fearing the late frost

Now wrapped up safe in mother

.

The night is purple, not-quite-dark

Wide open like the mouth of a whale

Or the space between stars

.

Black like before-life, like un-pregnancy

Like before the big bang roared outwards into us

Before love made anything possible

.

Grey like the day she came to say “The time has come for leaving”

The sun itself was choked by cloud

The very sea was weeping

.

Water falling down on these old rocks

Gilding them with liquid silver

This normal place, anointed

.

Age has turned your hair pure white

Like the soul that dances in you

You are cathedral and I, your evensong

.

Sunlight makes alchemy from mountains

Now gold in the evening mist

Far beyond the wealth of kings

.

Brown like the ground where we lay down

The earth is pillow-soft

And waiting

After accepting this suggestion , the curator later gave me a print-out of the poem with crosses next to the verses he wanted. Black, pink and brown where all out, as was white. He only wanted ‘positive’ verses, or ones he could understand. He wanted a kind of ‘Hallmark’ poetry that was pretty, ornamental, but unchallenging. When I suggested this was not the way that most of us experienced this colourful world, or wanted to engage with it through art, he told me that I would have to deal with the ‘complaints’. In the end, we did use most of the poem, but it left me thinking again about art gatekeeping.

What does this look like at my end of the market? Where are the organisations that would foster/network/encourage/publish this kind of art?

Of course, in this internet age, we are all our own agents, our own publicists… each one of us has the same chance, right? The same access to the communal megaphone? Except it does not seem to work like that. In a world in which we all have access to mass connection, it has remains as true as ever that the media IS the message.

Art that challenges can not play by the same rules. It must find other ways to support and sustain itself.

It is for this reason that I am involved in the Proost project, which is an attempt to network and bring together a community of artists around the intersection between faith and social justice. This is not about selling product (although this has to be part of it) rather it is about finding a collective voice.

This meet up is a chance to be part of what Proost might become. We would love you to be part of it.

Saturday will be a day for networking, sharing ideas and making art together.

There will be a ceilidh in the evening!

Sunday will be outward facing, inviting the wider community of Castlemilk into spaces we have created. There will be live Raku firings and other installations.

We are very grateful to St Oswalds, Kings Park Parish Church and to the wider diocese for hosting and trusting us.

For more information, check this out…