delinquent antics and meta irony in art practice

Delinquent Antics and Meta-Irony in Art Practice

Matt Watt

My practice is an ongoing negotiation of perception and an attunement to the instability of:

Meaning
Making
Meaning in Making

This is because to speak of ‘art-making’ is to impose a teleological narrative – beginning, middle, end – where I argue only process persists. It is (or in its most naturalistic form, should be) a methodological condition. It is consequence more than intention. It is sustained interrogation of the forces that govern visibility and interpretation. To engage art sincerely and prescribe some sort of meaning is already to misrecognise its nature: sincerity presumes authenticity, yet authenticity is the internalisation of external expectation. The art world thrives on this illusion – mistaking affect for intent, and intent for significance.

Artistic meaning is upheld by systems that manufacture legibility at the cost of complexity. In the same way maps impose order on a field that resists fixity, art imposes frameworks onto flux. Meaning cannot be fixed.

As practitioners, it is our responsibility to not impose meaning. We should bear witness to its construction, its circulation, its dissolution. Creation and deconstruction should coincide. To make is to operate within a system of signs that conceals its own arbitrariness and to produce “meaningful” work is only to concede to institutional logic. But even refusing that logic doesn’t let you stand outside of the system; it is just you entering a meta-interstice. Once you have entered you cannot exit, even if you choose a desk job.

Instead, one must navigate with detachment: acknowledging the stakes but refusing to enlist in them. Methodological skepticism rejects the affective economy of sincerity and recognises that meaning discourse is more constructed than the works themselves.

I don’t think resolution is possible because alternatives imply choices within false binaries. My practice is a way of loitering within the system critically. It doesn’t offer an alternative. That’s why I can do what I want.