An Artist’s Eyes

Hve you ever imag­ined being a talk­ing head in a doc­u­men­tary film? Or a sin­gle-serv­ing side play­er who hap­pens to be going about their hum­ble trade only to dis­cov­er that some jerk with a cam­era is swing­ing it around the room? There’s a moment in Jack Bond’s An Artist’s Eyes, a pro­file of the East Lon­don-born painter Chris Moon, in which cel­e­brat­ed pho­tog­ra­ph­er-to-the-stars, Mick Rock, enters the fray. Hold on to your hats, is all we can say.

This is a 101, all-you-ever-need-to-know mas­ter­class in how to thor­ough­ly muff up your cameo in an painful­ly earnest artist doc­u­men­tary. As a man who has made a con­sid­er­able liveli­hood from behind the cam­era, he cer­tain­ly enjoys it when the lens is turned towards him. From the sec­ond he steps out of a car and into Moon’s ad-hoc New York stu­dio, he starts act­ing like an absolute tool.

Maybe this is his method for calm­ing sub­jects down, or mak­ing them feel less self con­scious, mak­ing it patent­ly obvi­ous that at least they’re not the biggest ass­hat in the room. His attempts at dis­play­ing louche cool back­fire spec­tac­u­lar­ly. As Rock snaps away, shades over his eyes (it’s the mid­dle of win­ter), his ban­ter is pep­pered with per­for­ma­tive invec­tive, like some tip­sy uncle who’s try­ing to con­nect with his grime-lov­ing nephew. He utters some arty banal­i­ty like, ​“I just get the pic­tures, man,” and then, in a flash, he’s gone.

It would be hard to describe this short sequence as a high­light as Rock is so extrav­a­gant­ly obnox­ious that every addi­tion­al sin­gle sec­ond the cam­era ligers on him is a form of sweet tor­ture. But he cer­tain­ly out­shines Moon, who comes across like a decent enough bloke, even though it’s not entire­ly clear why it was con­sid­ered his time to be the sub­ject of a fea­ture film.

We open on his ware­house work­space in Lon­don, then we yomp over to New York in the run-up to a show­case, and then we head over to Andalu­sia where he and a pal belt around in a vin­tage Mer­cedes and fein pro­fun­di­ty on the cac­tus-speck­led land­scapes. Moon is a bit of a poseur. He talks about his work and his inspi­ra­tions, relays a few pri­vate fam­i­ly sto­ries and engages in some salty dia­logue with the locals.

It’s nice­ly filmed by Bond, a not­ed artist film­mak­er from the 1970s who went on to make a string of pro­files for ITV’s The South­bank Show. Yet there’s no real sense of inter­ro­ga­tion or a feel­ing that the film is try­ing to find out what makes its sub­ject tick. He allows Moon self-mythol­o­gise, and it does his sub­ject no favours. His work­ing class back­ground makes him unique, yet there isn’t real­ly much evi­dence that he’s some­one who is cel­e­brat­ed by the art world cognoscenti.