Showcase: Joseph Hulme

Liverpool John Moores University graduate Joseph Hulme’s practice is, he says, tightly routed around the concept of failure. He is concerned with questioning the understanding of the artistic idea itself: how ideas are generated, how they fail (and are abandoned) or succeed (and are pushed forward through self-justification).

‘Fragments of fragments piled up on each other. Can you have an associative work which rests on the idea of having an idea and then not following them up? Hulme's works range from the bringing together of cutouts of unfamiliar objects from freely distributed Chinese newspapers to videos of Elton John adorned in a Daffy Duck costume that has become a green-screen for tricoloured woodland films. Hulme has said that the works mainly attempt to look at “Scrutinising the idea itself. The concepts are often intentionally half formed and abandoned, cast adrift and left bumping into one another.” Hulme assembles an array of aesthetic one liners edited into half finished jokes. Bad alchemy has been cast here, to manifest a situation, that Hulme describes as “works [that] are greatly ambiguous, created with the sole aim to confuse, misinform or mislead the viewer. A projected stream of thought that you're constantly running to keep up with.”’ [Josh Whitaker]

Sentences on Joseph's Art
1. Joseph struggles with commitment issues.
2. Joseph rarely completes anything successfully.
3. Joseph's art thrives off his failure.
4. Joseph's art is easy to like.
5. Joseph's art could be mistaken as shallow.
6. Joseph enjoys simple, repetitive things.
7. Joseph's ideas are sometimes good.
8. Joseph's ideas are often bad.
9. Joseph's art is nervous.
10. Joseph hates art that tries too hard.
11. Joseph's art is relatively easy to make. 
12. Joseph's ideas move on too quickly.
13. Joseph's art is retroactive.
14. Joseph is rarely happy with his results.
15. Joseph's art is too easily distracted.
16. Joseph wants to be Ray Mears.
17. Joseph's ideas are sporadic.
18. Joseph hates art that looks like his.
19. Joseph's art is not clear to the viewer.
20. Joseph does not make art that meets requirements.
21. Joseph enjoys working alone.
22. Joseph regards Sol Le Witt as his Grandad.
23. Joseph guesses you will dislike his art.
24. Joseph requires no incentive to do things.
25. Joseph cannot work with loud noise.
26. Joseph's ideas need space.
27. Joseph does not like small places.
28. Joseph's art is unclear to you.
29. Joseph's art is by no means confident.
30. Joseph does not regard this writing as art.

Joseph Hulme
2013

(Dedicated to The Master of Conceptualism, Sol Le Witt. R.I.P)