This WAS a Honda C70

This WAS a Honda C70
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

As an attempt to describe my Art, which is an exploration of the mind's ability to conceptualise without a reliance on high levels of skill (Craft) or significant financial outlays in order to achieve an artificial skill boost. This was once a Honda C70, a very rusty and generally decrepit fifteen year old example when I bought it for twenty pounds (and the opportunity to make my face known to the manager of the university hall of residence where I found the machine and where I wished to spend the final two years of my university studies). The resulting machine only contains the cut and rewelded frame from its donor, the rest is a collection of motorcycle and other bits that I found to fit and which met the needs of my intended use of the machine. Scruffy and cheap it may have been, but the redesign was all mine, and I rode it all around England, around the Alps and even took it for a long weekend to Germany.

The Art was in the conceptual design, and although I trained as a mechanic and an engineer, what you see here is a sound design nailed together with limited resources, one which impressed large numbers of motorcyclists once they saw it perform (yes, they often sniggered when they first saw it). The point is that Art will make itself known, once you see past the lack of Craft, but that most people will assess on Craft and assume that if Craft is lacking, Art is lacking too. compare this with two women - one beautiful and one not, which will people first want to be seen with?

I think I took this shot with my old Pentax ME Super SLR camera, which I had with me because I owned it and the zoom on it was good for pictures of bikes and distant mountains. However, this photo is one view on a particular Art-into-reality process, and a better or worse camera would have made little difference as at the time I only intended recording an interesting event. I am not quite sure how I could have recorded the Art that was going on, I would have to think about it, to produce a new Art expression of a twenty year old art event.

The event happened in the Alps, when the bike ground to a halt with an electrical fault that had been bugging it for days. The sun was shining, it was a quiet back road snaking up a pass, the electrical problem had been bubbling in my head for days - rather than carry out a fix back in the car park, and despite the lack of special tools, the perfect moment had arrived to combine body and soul into solving the problem. If I had repaired it as a mechanic in a workshop, I would have followed procedures, and bought specific products, an almost totally Craft procedure. Instead, I turned my back on tools and used what was available at the moment when the combination of problem, landscape and a matured concept of what I had to do came together.

I used the lack of tools to kick-start my innovation, something that I have been practising at least all my adult life by avoiding specialising in the gaining of a limited number of Craft skills (there are enough of these required for my working life). If I had bought a shiney new motorcycle, I would have had great riding experiences. By struggling to create this machine, I had even better riding experiences because I knew that they were the result of my own creative efforts, not simply the result of the creative abilities of other engineers. The same goes for that fancy digital SLR or revered Leica - your contribution to the final piece includes all the efforts of all those other people - their Art.