Mill workers-beer commision2 artists’ statement “Artistic vision The artist has been selected for this commission on the basis of their past work, for this commission they will be give a free hand as to the nature of the work they produce with the following conditions: 1. It will
be consistent with their previous practice in terms of artistic quality Mill-workers brief I was asked to produce a new piece of work by Mill-workers at the end of November 2005. There was a strange paradox in the brief of complete freedom to produce anything I wanted, but within a defined amount of time based on beer money collected at a previous Mill-workers private view and divided into time at the recommended amount for someone of my experience. I was allowed not one second more or less than 4139 seconds to produce the work. I again had total freedom to interpret how I used this time, whether it was to include mental space, administrative duties and/or physical labour. I was informed that I had been chosen on the basis of my previous work, which can be seen at www.andrewbracey.com and this directly informed what I had in mind for the project. I intentionally decided to take the selection criteria literally and to make the commission a sort of retrospective of previous work. I selected 9 different pieces over the last 5 years of my practice, which was the length of time the recommended amount of money was worked out by. I had decided to work on each retrospective piece in oil paint on a miniature canvas, which was in keeping with a previous piece called Various Titles. I decided to use oil paint because of the drying time ensued which would not allow me to produce the paintings all in one go. It would thus mean that the exact amount of time would be stretched over several weeks. I also made a decision to only start the clock once my brush hit the paint and stopping it once it left the canvas. This meant that only my painting labour was being paid for, ignoring any time it took to come up with the idea, get pictures to paint from, mix paints and so on. One thing
I was intrigued by was the impossibility of me finishing all, if any
of the 9 of the paintings in the set time. As it turned out I managed
to properly complete two (Vision Incision and Clout) and made a decision
on two that they were finished after the first minimal layer of paint
(Why Hawaii? and Various Titles) whilst the other 5 have been left unfinished
when the clock hit zero. Another curious thing for me is that this has
always been intended as being a web project and yet I have never thought
of it as such, thus Mill-workers will now have to implement their curatorial
policy on the work in order for it to get shown on their cyberspace
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