We don’t often take ourselves seriously, us Britons. It is not in our constitutional make up to expound, ruminatively, on our philosophy of life. If anything, we excel at debunking such efforts, as if to think and take stock with no accompanying note of irony was in itself tantamount to a criminal degree of self-importance. The Meaning of Liff – an anthology of place names in the United Kingdom endowed with humorously fictitious etymologies by its authors Douglas Adams and John Lloyd – sums us up. We’re better at liff than life. Better at stand up than grandstanding. Lovers of wisecracks rather than wisdom.
All of which goes by way of a preamble to my main anecdote, triggered by a conversation with an artist at my printmaking class.
It has been on my mind, lately, artistic endeavour. The question of what makes an artist an artist. And so, at an opportune moment, I asked my printmaking friend, whose work I find both visually appealing and interesting, to explain to me how he’d arrived at his artistic practice. In essence, I asked him for his look on life. He could have told me to bog off. Or he could have assumed a faux gravitas, a mock mantle of pretentiousness, to undercut the otherwise seriousness of his response. After all, it was a serious question. A serious question that demanded a serious answer. In retrospect I might not have raised it quite so lightly. But, to his credit, he more than rose to the challenge. His response was considered, self-aware and thought-provoking. Neither po-faced nor self-debunking. It sounded like something he’d thought about, authentic and original. I more than got my answer, even if he did undercut himself, ever so lightly, at the last minute, by saying: “that’s my spiel, anyway”. Forgivable self-deprecation. He’s a Brit, after all.
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Ariadne Birnberg 