Forever Young: Juvenilia, Amateurism, and the Popular Past (or ‘Transvaluing Values in the Age of the Archive’)

Pinned on the back of my studio door I keep a brown ‘daub’ made on sugar paper by my nephew when he was just three or four years old. The picture has a strangely satisfactory sense of completion and conviction, the kind we might just be looking for later in our lives and careers as artists and writers. It is imbued with the value of a certain unconscious audacity, a kind of omnipotence born of naivety. As a hoarder as much as an archivist, I also find it all but impossible to discard my own earliest artworks and writings, anything I have completed that is made by my own hands and might be called my ‘juvenilia’, believing that these early works may contain treasures that are inaccessible to me now, and may deserve to be re-evaluated one day, by myself or some responsible and hopefully empathetic other. Even though my own professional status and influence is still not particularly high, I am convinced that these often inspired and unbound beginnings should not simply be regarded as the crude and tentative overtures of an oeuvre that became increasingly bold and refined, but should be simply seen as other and different works, arising at other and different (not better or worse) moments.