Questions and Paradoxes, Enigmas and Wonders. 
Excerpts from The Manifesto of a ‘Global Village’–Idiot’. Artist Statement Antony Clarkson 2012 (Revised 2024)

What is art? Why am I an artist? The second question appears easier to answer: I am an artist because I experience a persistent compulsion to make art. Yet this response immediately generates a paradox. If the nature of art remains uncertain, what precisely is this impulse directed toward? How does one recognise the moment at which something becomes “art”?

The question What is art? persists as both philosophical problem and cultural enigma. Within much of contemporary society, art, particularly contemporary art, occupies an ambiguous position: visible yet opaque, institutionally validated yet widely misunderstood. My practice frequently engages in a reflexive examination of this condition, interrogating art’s relationship to the social structures that frame, legitimise, and consume it. It is within this relational field, rather than within discrete objects alone, that I locate art’s significance.

Such an approach resists hierarchies of scale or subject. No proposition is too banal or too grand; no gesture too outlandish or too modest. Indeed, I am increasingly drawn to the notion that the artist’s task may not be solely to fabricate objects, but to recognise configurations, moments, situations, or relationships, as art. The act of designation becomes inseparable from the act of production.

It has been suggested that being an artist is the only occupation no one explicitly requests. This observation frames art as surplus: an indulgence rather than a necessity. Yet the concept of indulgence is more complex than it first appears. To claim the identity of “artist” may seem self-authorising, even self-serving, an activity undertaken without mandate. However, society simultaneously sustains and institutionalises artistic practice. It funds, exhibits, archives, and critiques it. This paradox implies that art, while apparently superfluous, fulfils a latent function.

With indulgence comes responsibility. If society permits the artist a certain autonomy, it does so with implicit expectation. Artists are tasked with articulating questions that remain unspoken, with inhabiting conceptual territories that others hesitate to enter. They are granted licence to destabilise assumptions, to expose contradictions, and to provoke reflection, even discomfort.

Yet this sanctioned otherness also marginalises. As in earlier cultures where the shaman occupied a liminal position, both integral and peripheral, the artist inhabits the edges of the so-called “global village.” In a world characterised by hyperconnectivity and accelerated exchange, the artist assumes the role of the ‘global village idiot’: a figure permitted, even required, to ask naïve, disruptive, or inconvenient questions. It is precisely through this constructed marginality that art retains its critical potential.