Jeremy Gluck working as a neurodiverse, non-linear fine artist in digital art, film, installation and mixed media. Uncompromising works confront the viewer, encouraging a physical, sensitive, or conceptual experience of each. Radical artistic engagement is the mission statement. Embracing pre-conceptual mind-language art.
Self-taught or art school?
In fact, both. Prior to undertaking my degree, I was for years an intermedia artist, with a multidisciplinary background spanning writing, music, and art, and have worked in diverse arts sectors. This year I am graduating as a mature student from Swansea College of Art located in Swansea, Wales, MArts.
If you could own one work of art what would it be?
‘Cardboards’ by Gustav Metzger.
How would you describe your style?
Postdigital.
Is narrative important within your work?
Mainly working with contemporary strategies, by rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, I create work in which a fascination with the clarity of content and an uncompromising attitude towards conceptual and minimal art collides with emotionally fluent ambiguity and concealment.
Who are your favourite artists and why?
Foremost, the British-Jewish expatriate German artist Gustav Metzger, who died in 2017, and whose practice – which I discovered three years ago – has made a tremendous impact on me. His story for me is resoundingly plangent. Born myself a year before Metzger’s breakaway 1959 work, Cardboards, I find in Metzger a deeply affecting Muse and putative mentor. Discovering and deconstructing him, I rediscover and reconstruct myself, aware anew of how my own experience shapes my practice, nature and life, bringing a recognition that my work, before and through my discovery of Metzger’s practice, is so resonant with it. Gripped by his catalytic creativity, I have come to love Metzger’s work. I owe him a great debt, which will no doubt increase. In my practice, with relevance to the above, and contrary to my self-concept as an artist, and character in general, I’ve made connections in my practice with Metzger’s that delight me. Metzger’s focal realisation that “…one could fuse the political idea of social change with art” that saw him shift his aspiration to foment change with political means to those artistic is echoed by me in work addressing issues of mental health and austerity through performance and installation respectively, making that work much more personal, pointed and visceral than the slippery strategies I’d employed previously.
My embrace of digital art, as with Metzger after a determination to paint, reflects consideration of Auto-destruction as a form of ultimate deconstructivism and minimalism, both commanding influences on my style. Aspiring to create work that destroys not only itself but also effaces or obscures its creator, my digital practice reflects ephemerality and ambiguity responding to Metzger’s influence.
Metzger, the Fluxus artists – particularly Yoko Ono – Bacon, William Burroughs, and the Beats fuel my aspiration to communicate visually so that the viewer is part of unitive, experiential energy, merging space, place and meaning.
What or who inspires your art?
Lockdown was quite a special event, a bubble, and now it has burst and all that energy that was somehow safe is loose and less predictable. A sort of freefall, but I am not too disillusioned, it is necessary. Nothing is the way it is. Ever since I created the Manifesto of Nonceptual Art – in fact before I did – the possibilities of production of unremarkable and mundane art have compelled me. The arc from Light and Love to something resembling lockdown limbo is the stuff of myth. A reverse Icarus, flying too close to the moon. Who inspires my art? You and I.
Where’s your studio and what’s it like?
Like me, like my mind…and not like a studio. I have no studio space, as such. I have a laptop and my imagination. Both have a lot of processing power and a lot of memory.
Do you have any studio rituals?
When, at art college, I had a studio space, my ritual consisted largely of not using it. For three of the four years I was at the college, my space remained much the same for three of them, and this became my ritual. With my work based on my laptop, or on-site, I had no real need for studio space and I celebrated this fact by denying it almost all signifiers of my presence. My final B.A. work in part memorialised my studio space, though, as part of an installation entitled Gallericide.
What are you working on currently?
With the onset of lockdown last March, live performances planned for two UK festivals – Bath Arts Fringe, and SHIFT:ibpcpa – I was challenged to reimagine digitally. The solution I found was, initially, to take related text material, convert it into binary code (with which I have a fascination), and then find a collaborator to render it audio-visually. I found an American live coder, Charlie Kramer, and with him have made two videos from this methodology, and we are working on a third. The first, Welcome to the Lockdown- 0 – 1 Binary Performance, ), consists of the conversion of texts concerning healing as art and digital emptiness, addressing issues of machine-mediated communication. The second, Om 0-1 is a generative art video for meditation, yoga and healing, by which conversion of unique mystical text into binary code is naturally meditative and hypnotic, a metronomic, healing digital skin creating a safe space for the soul. In parallel, I have collaborated with a UK designer, Thomas Newton, to produce a physicalisation of the work in the form of a hexagonal light art object.
Nonceptualism and Northwoods: Welcome to the Lockdome: 0 – 1 Binary Performance from Nonceptualism on Vimeo.
Healing as art is the praxis of my newest work, a little-explored territory. What I am trying to achieve with this work eventually is contemporary visual art you can’t see. Energy is the material I will be using; being in the making. It is important to my new work that it uses strategies that are highly accessible and organic and challenge the white cube, art economy establishment: it exists outside art and therefore must be art. Being neurodiverse has faced me with multiple challenges in life and practice, leading me to embrace more and more ways of communicating with a potential audience, often simple and direct but also often obscure. Informed as ever by Gustav Metzger, my new work aspires to be groundbreaking and liberating, founding ‘Auto-destructive consciousness | Disorganisational consciousness’ as its signifiers. In my opinion, neurodiverse individuals are now clearly important in their divergence – witness Greta Thunberg – and are a steward group for our future, when a different way of thinking and being will be necessary to deal with emerging challenges. I am not just interested in making new art, but in showing, we can all be new art. It’s a radical perspective, granted, but my experiences as a neurodiverse artist, having like others to contort myself to conform to basic societal and institutional requirements, have shown me that radical new art is possible and necessary to build a bridge of understanding and co-production between those on either side of the neurotypical/neurodiversity divide.
Where can we buy your art?
Prints are available on-demand from my Facebook shop at JeremyGluckArt
What are your ambitions?
Not to die.
