The Jenny Holzer exhibition opened at the Talbot Rice Gallery this week to a sceptical audience. Was there enough space to hold such physically powerful but also emotionally vast works? The ‘truisms’ were particularly pertinent, how knowledge can act as both a gift and a curse. Intelligence is different to being clever, or having common sense, intelligence is insight, not something that can be cultivated through learning. The ultimate desire for knowledge can break you down. Holzer’s art is a tool for raising social conscience. These sentences and slogans form mantras referring again and again to this desire for insight, the sacrifices to happiness and health that may come with.

“When something terrible happens people wake up.”

“Symbols are more meaningful than things themselves.”

There is something medical or indoctrinating about the notion of flashing words into your audiences’ eyes over and over again; reiteration through exaggeration forcing an indelible imprint onto your memory. It is subversion from within. Like the early video artists of the 60s - using the medium of video to explore this medium itself. Holzer uses this method as a political weapon to explore the politics of knowledge and oblivion. She talks in her documentary footage accompanying the exhibition about the moving message pieces as streaming by, “more bad news than one can bear.”

“The presentation of beautiful and ghastly in ways that are lovely and exacting.”

Short moments for people who don’t have much time.

Referring back to the book I’m reading Welcome to the Machine, there was a passage that I enjoyed after visiting this exhibition – the statement, ‘knowledge is claimed free of value’ is a false claim. “Have we ended history under the common denominator of capitalism?”

Last week I took two books out of the library. Now, like most people I pick my research items through a threefold criteria if it has neither been recommended to me or I have no previous knowledge of the author, publisher etc. Firstly I go to the library and type in a key word, this time it was ‘surveillance culture’, secondly I browse the titles to find the most intriguing, and thirdly make my selection from these titles, mainly, it has to be said, and being a highly superficial individual, on the front cover.

My selections were these:

1. The Intensification of Surveillance: Crime, Terrorism and Warefare in the Information Age edited by Kirstie Bell and Frank Webster, Pluto Press 2003

2. Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance and the Culture of Control by Derrick Jensen and George Draffan, Chelsea Green Publishing 2004

The first I am yet to explore, the second I picked up immediately for its front cover image which I recognised from an article about the artist from some newspaper this week. This artist is Nick Veasey, who uses the radiographic machine to take x-rays of machines themselves, humans and animals, and most interestingly, humans within machines to analyse what really lies beneath the surface. The book starts with a wonderful quote by Antonio Machado, “The eye you see isn’t an eye because you see it; it’s an eye because it sees you.” The book traces what its authors believe as the point at which the eye of surveillance took over from the eye of God in our contemporary situation for the creation of fear. Science, they argue, is not about one unitary truth; it comes from the same literary root as scire, scindere, schizein... schizophrenia, “a mind split into pieces.” I am yet to fully explore this book but am already drawn into the seemingly sci-fi descriptions of real, physical creations, the mapping of brain waves associated with thinking specific words or sentences, fabricated technologies that will allow materials to be inserted with energy packs to make people move faster, be stronger, go invisible. As Donna Haraway predicted in her Cyborg Manifesto of 1985, it is no longer a case of not surviving without, it is a case of morphing into.

Brink, Henderson Gallery 23/03/10

This week I have been working on a group exhibition at the Henderson Gallery, Edinburgh. This consisted of mainly 4^th year Intermedia students and a few painters. Entitled ‘Brink’ it feels very much the final push before the dreaded, fast-approaching degree show. I was rather sceptical about how such a small space would hold sixteen pieces but I think it has worked quite nicely (although it is always hard to be objective about your own work). The thing about group shows, unless the work is made in/for the space, is that it is always going to look a touch disjointed. However, because all the work seems to be quite monochrome and subtle it does not overpower the space too much, I hope. I really wanted to use the chance to display my ‘escaping the wall’ drawings which work well in a conventional white cube space because they make people get down on the floor, peer in and over and really adapt their usual movement. I felt it was important to frame one of the works on the wall almost as a counter-balance for the floor pieces, a reminder of the conventional I suppose. The first thing that my friend said on entering the space was, “why didn’t you sort the lights out?” There is always something that you forget, the bulb nearest my work, rather than picking out the piece itself, was nicely trained on my name plate!

(photos to follow)

I having been mulling over the idea of art with a life span to it. The Blinky Polermo wall painting at ECA, I recently discovered, is no longer officially ‘a Blinky Polermo’ for the mere fact that at some point it was painted over then re-painted at a later date. This stands in stark contrast to another article I read today in the Spring Issue of Map on ‘The Artist Remake’ suggesting that the artistic desire to revisit their old work is on the up. I am still a believer in the fact that even if a work exists in exactly the same form but within a different time then, if the original had a set life-time which is now over, the piece is not the same. A piece exists as itself, then, when taken apart exists in another form – some kind of document, with the passing of time. The remake, I agree, does have a place within artistic practice, like the before and after shot perhaps. I too believe that it is too easily used as a self-indulgent self-historicisation by the artist in a bid to find a context for their work. It is also perhaps, as the article suggests, a mere engagement with ‘reproduction’ made necessary by our times – we are so used to viewing the event distributed and dissolved into so many other forms that the remake becomes just another record. None of these things do I have a problem with – in fact a lot can be learnt from re-seeing a work that originated, in idea at least, in a time past, a different value system. They are a method of assessing change, not necessarily of the artist’s practice, but the changing outside forces that condition that artistic practice. The problem I have however is giving these works the same title, dating them from their original production to now. 1972-2009 suggests that this was not considered a finished work in 1972; it took till 2009 to be completed. This is not true, as soon as you put a work out there as a finished ‘thing’ for a public to engage with IT IS FINISHED. Likewise, when it is removed it becomes something else. While I understand that the Blinky Polermo is not the artist’s remake, I do agree that any work whether remade by the artist, or someone else, can no longer be given the same title/ongoing date. The Blinky Polermo does not exist, the artist remake is just that, a remake, it does not represent an extension of the original but a clean break from it.

http://www.mapmagazine.co.uk/index.cfm?page=984F1E34-BDF5-2379-71075D0184E53D92&articleid=422

Last week I was asked whether I see my performances being accessible to the outside public, how do I see them being disseminated? I could not think how to respond at the time but on reflection what I should have said is...

“I place my work as a general rule into the gallery context because, ultimately, my main interests are in the politics of space; my work is about ‘the gallery’. A gallery or institution holds a ready-made set of assumptions to subvert or breakdown. These pre-conditionings do not apply in the same way to the outside world. The gallery frame offers me a microcosm, an exaggerated state of control to play with. It is the role of those that see it to disseminate it into the outside world.

Artists like Francis Ayls and Mona Hatoum, not brought up in Britain, make us aware of how unusual our surveillance system is. We take it for granted, however, to someone entering the country for the first time, it is an all seeing, all pervasive eye that you can never escape and perhaps, as a result, learn to ignore.

Article: ‘The Soldier and the Fox: Francis Alys Gets the Measure of London’

http://www.hughpearman.com/articles5/alys.html

Francis Alys is an artist who has intrigues me for some time, particularly since I studied his work When Faith Moves Mountains in depth for my dissertation. I was interested in whether the word ‘immersive’ could be used to describe the experience of this piece; immersion as an act of labour and how this experience changes when brought back into the gallery. I found out recently however, that Alys was also the artist behind another work, Nightwatch. This capitalises on the CCTV system in the National Portrait Gallery to film a fox released into the space. I have long been fascinated by pre-conditioning, by subconscious conventions that make people move and interact with works in a certain way. The strange interaction that the fox has with the institutionalised gallery space highlights subconscious preconditioning. The fox keeps to the edges of the room, branching into the centre to move around obstacles, as if aware on some level of being watched or followed. Humans too move in a different, yet equally systematic route through the gallery space. With the fox it is an instinctive natural urge to avoid danger, with a human however it is not a natural instinct but a convention built into their subconscious over time. The work presents an interesting parallel where nature and nurture have come to produce the same response.

'Of the Remainder' - Bethan Maddocks and Anna Robbins at Sierra Metro 2010

Anna Robbins and Bethan Maddocks have achieved the seemingly impossible task of tracking the effects of time passing in their current exhibition at Sierra Metro, Granton, entitled Of the Remainder. Water drips onto unfired clay, ice melts onto raw steel or through dissolvable fabric, unpredictability has a changing beauty and constant intrigue. In Maddocks’ work Untitled, what initially appeared as structural units – the strings and fishing weights, fall slack as the clay is eroded, the roles of the structural and the aesthetic elements (or what appeared so initially) are reversed. The leaflet description for these works appeared particularly apt, “oscillating between transient experience and fleeting memory.” The subject matter also held a certain pertinent to me as I am constantly trying to battle with this notion of a time speeded up by the age of technology. This was a different time, the pace of nature not technology, destroying itself and feeding itself, growing into something new.

Two Map articles recently discussed the performance lecture format.

1. ‘Performance and Pedagogy: All Talk, Some Action’ Karen Archey, Febuary 2010

2. ‘Temporary Experts: a Response to Karen Archey’s All Talk, Some Action’ Joanna Fiduccia, march 2010

There seemed from reading these articles that there is much confusion to where this format originated and a fluidity, and questionability, of this as a medium at all. What really defines the performance lecture? Both articles seemed to want to place it within a history – referencing Joseph Beuys, Andrea Fraser, and John Cage among others. However, for me this ambiguity is its strength. Like video art of the 80s it has emerged as a hybrid, indefinable medium, picking and pulling from history in an unashamedly liberal manner. In my last entry I discussed how, while art itself is pushing at the gallery structures, the legitimising texts somehow seem to be ever pulling this expansion back into the spatial confines of the white cube. At the moment critics seem confused as to how and where to place the performance lecture in a historically linear framework, into a singular discipline and as a result the medium has retained a contemporary freedom – after all, the only way to keep something contemporary is to keep history at bay! In the book Liminal Acts A Critical Overview of Contemporary Performance 1999 by Susan Broadhurst, she discusses Foucault’s notion of the unity of statements such as medicine, economics or grammar. “What appears as a well defined field of objects is no more than a series full of gaps, interplays of differences, distances and transformations.” Broadhurst says that the grid of specification must be analysed. Having sat through many a university lecture and many a fine art performance, I am now troubled by the idea of defining my work as a ‘performance lecture’. A lecture implies factual information, a performance, as Roselee Goldberg suggests in her essay, ‘Performance: A Hidden History’, assumes access into the world of art itself. Pairing the two suggests a hybrid when in fact I believe that one necessarily negates the other. Maybe I should call my works, ‘NOT a performance lecture’, ‘opposed to the performance lecture’, ‘an inverted performance lecture’. I do not want to offer people access to this ‘art world’ that I’m not sure I inhabit, or exists, nor offer them knowledge that I don’t necessarily have. Instead I wish to make them aware of a system beyond our own control.

http://www.mapmagazine.co.uk/index.cfm?page=984F1E34-BDF5-2379-71075D0184E53D92&articleid=418

What has Information Overload Done to us?

In light of my recent reading on our contemporary technological and visual overload I decided to put together a performance that would re-create this experience of being bombarded by information. I set up a running projection, changing frame every ten seconds. The imagery was a melting pot of historical references, my own work, stolen internet images, book covers and magazine clips in no particular order. Over this projection I gave a lecture, the notes are as follows:

(First slide stated, “What has information overload done to us?”)

1. This is the television slogan for a search engine (google-esque) – apt (the idea of the search engine is) increasing our information overload while capitalising on a fear of doing so at the same time!

2. Global phenomenon created by technology is something that I am really interested in within my work

3. Grant Kester – Conversation Pieces 2005

4. More antagonistic inter-human relationships than Baurriaud’s Relational Aesthetics

-Art’s role to shock us out of perceptual complacency, challenging not just modernism’s fetishism of the visual but also challenging the way an audience related to the work (and can be forced and manipulated to do so) CONJUNCTION WITH ARTICLE on sight (Frieze Magazine)

5. “Only 20% of the neural pathways from the eyes travel to the visual cortex, 80% come from other areas of the brain, such as those in charge of memory.” “If reality is based on snippets from memory about constants in the universe then what is reality, and how can we be certain to possess an accurate perception of it? Vision is a dependable (yet inaccurate) depiction of the world; the brain provides much omitted information to create a complete, coherent idea of reality. If reality is 80% memory its potential for instability increases.”

6. The artist Keith Tyson talks about this destabilisation of our understanding of one unified reality as a direct result of technological information overload

7. (Kester) – Privilege as artists to be able to pick indiscriminately from various disciplines – science, philosophy, history… BUT also fact and fiction

8. specialised knowledge can be a confinement but art can assess the interconnections between various disciplines and is in a unique position to present problems differently, ‘seen in a new light’

9. Hirschhorn – the trick is not to make people see but to make people think

(MY OBJECTIVE)

10. Make an audience actively engage with whatever point I am trying to make (not necessarily the pieces in front of them) – normally to do with our contemporary situation, (point at which this is really hard within the gallery cultural highway) map, guided tour, audio guide, shop, restaurant, BRAND

11. HOW DO I PROPOSE TO DO THIS(active engagement)?

12. Returning to Kester – indiscriminately picking from disciplines BUT ALSO MEDIUMS (for example)

-Reaction to white cube gallery – I used traditional materials to subvert their inherent associations... OBSTRUCT THE NATURAL ROUTE OF THE VIEWER

-As people interact with the work they would also interact with the idea – fox in the gallery space (Francis Alys Nightwatch)

HOWEVER awareness of surveillance control required a more direct approach – the pseudo lecture, the alarms going off – MEDIUM SPECIFIC TO IDEA

RECENTLY...

13. Derrida, second life of outdated objects – the frame, the camera the screen –they become symbols of something else (as they move into history), not interested in the time that they now represent but more that they are defining markers of a time passing

14. “A blank canvas, before a brush lands on it, contains certain assumptions implicit in the art of its era.” – O’Doherty

15. Technology and globalisation – time is passing faster, there is no linear history, the world is paradoxically expanding and shrinking

16. Objects become signs before they have time to reach the mass market consumption

17. Notion of second life is becoming more relevant

18. Laura Mulvey – rear projection, (within old Hollywood films) creating this cinematic sublime and flattening iconic characters against a back drop (Marilyn Monroe against Niagara falls) Niagara 1953 – elevating the idea of the star

19. artist Mark Lewis, taking this idea Rear Projection: Molly Parker 2007

20. (Visual Culture) Madonna video ‘Don’t Tell Me’

21. I have been particularly affected by this idea of a second life when I started to think about documentation, the space between the document and the act and how rather than one representing the other they can become polar opposites

22. Second life may have nothing to do with initial intention

23. A lot of my work is quite exprience based... can this second life be pre-empted, manipulated (through what I chose to keep or throw out)

Finally....

We have come to this bizarre juncture within art, why I chose this format…

It is no longer possible to say, “This is my work, this is what it is about, this is where it came from when we are so under fire from visual and technological information.”

Sensory Overload

I have been thinking a lot about the set, the frame, the situation an artist places their audience within to create a more engaging, full body experience. My subject matter, the increasing relevance of our awareness of the technological and visual overload through which we live our lives, requires some sort of articulation beyond me, the performer, merely standing in front of people, giving a presentation with a slide projector. To create feelings of information overload there must also be a breadth of imagery, of visual overload. Ray Eames talked about the multi-screen performance in his masterminded operation Glimpses of the USA in the Moscow World Fair Auditorium in 1959. This sensory overload of screens and imagery mimicked the subject matter itself. The space of the multiscreen, like the space of the computer, compresses physical space. Each screen could be used to show a different scene around the same subject matter creating unusual connections, “an avalanche of related data that comes at a viewer too fast for him to cull and reject it… a twelve minute blitz.” This idea, which effectively pre-empted internet, could really be useful within my work. I love the notion of creating a performance space that has a certain potential for something to happen, and in which something might happen, sporadically, but doesn’t have to – that has two lives. What Eames talked about as the information machine, designed to give a lot of information in a short amount of time can be absorbed into the performative space. Eames selected seven screens – a credible number but not so many that they couldn’t be scanned in an allotted time. I am now going to attempt to design the seven-screen-changing-performance-machine-space for my own practice.

Book: Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon Art of Projection Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH & Co KG 2009

Book: Jaques Derrida The Truth in Painting 1987

Article: Irina Costache ‘”The Truth in Painting” or Text? The Dialogue Between Studio Art and Theory in Education’

http://www.aesthetics-online.org/articles/index.php?articles_id=9

Costache discusses Derrida’s book from its initial title – a direct quote from Cezanne appropriated by Derrida. The cover image is a reproduction of Adami’s study after Derrida’s Glas. From the front cover onwards Derrida is addressing the layers of meaning derived from textual and visual attributes and appropriations. Costache says that visuality only exists within certain structures that make it accessible and coherent – the structures of text. “Where is truth to be found? In painting or in text?” – How far do we go? Would the absolute truth of Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire be visiting the site itself? Truth and reality are in fact multi-layered constructions, the points of juncture at which we apply meaning are ambiguous and blurred. Costache argues that art is at a point of eclectic paradigm, using the example of Bernini’s 17^th century Trevi Fountain alongside Deuchamp’s 1917 Fountain – both have the same name, each popular for different reasons yet, within the all encompassing realm of art, each competing for attention as art objects.

Costache talks about the discrepancies between visual concordance and artistic worth – a system based on a historical grounding that no longer exists, yet has not had time to catch up. While the art of our era has tentatively stepped out of the frame, the gallery, verification of that art object has not. Legitimacy and codifying systems are still based on discursive norms, not visual perception. Essentially the text and the image are only legitimised in conjunction. While artists are slowly moving their work out of the institution it seems that quality and worth are still defined by re-assimilation back into that frame. Costache discusses the strange irony within the art world that, at a time when ‘image is everything’, within these art-world confines, image is no longer enough. However neither are people content to make their own decisions, instead they readily accept as fact the label, the guided tour, the structural systems in place within the gallery that navigate them passively and subconsciously through the space. “Acceptance of a visual illiteracy”. This hierarchy between making art and writing about art never used to exist, they were seen in conjunction. Why now has this paradigm shift occurred? If art exists as a changing entity within a changing time and value system why should we rely on its verification through text? Much better we make our decisions, in our own time, write our own texts!

Last month I was lucky enough to hear the acclaimed author and critic Laura Mulvey (author of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 1975) give a talk in Minto House, Chambers St on ‘Rear Projection: the work of contemporary artist Mark Lewis’. She discussed the film and the photo in the context of ‘the essential medium of time’ and the new preciousness of the technological device as a result of time passing. Memory of film is all that remains as its inscription is disappearing even from avant-garde. Mulvey then went on to discuss rear projection, where the separation between studio and setting come together; ‘the estrangement effect’. Within early film there was a disassociation between two times and two places, a layering effect, montage of scenery and a portable nature eroding the unity. Mulvey then asked the question, “What does it mean to use old technology within a contemporary context?” Walter Benjamin discusses in ... a new life within outdated objects. Obsolescence allows an altered aesthetic when a use value is transferred to a cultural value and becomes a point of reference. In the age of mass consumption when technology is expanding at such a rate that an item is obsolete before it hits the mass market, turning our attention to their second life beyond their original context is a fascinating topic. Technology becomes a sign for times already past. Rear projection is now being employed within contemporary art to different effect. Rather than nostalgia for times past it becomes a signifier for the pace of life itself.

“Documents and photographs challenge the historical imagination by presenting it to an art that is already dead. The way to remain modern is to keep history at bay.”

Brian O’Doherty ‘Context as Content’ Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space 1976

http://www.societyofcontrol.com/whitecube/insidewc.htm

The final chapter of Brian O’Doherty’s book Inside the White Cube The Ideology of the Gallery Space 1976 is called ‘Context as Content’ and discusses the disregard for the ceiling. It attributes its re-discovery to Duchamp’s 1200 Bags of Coal in 1938 when he transferred previous history’s idea of looking down to looking up, “which gently reverses the viewer into a walking stalactite.” As O’Doherty said, if invention is making us conscious of what we agree not to see 1200 Bags of Coal, while unobtrusively physically but obtrusive psychologically, invented that ceiling. He argues that with the electric light, the ceiling became an intensely cultivated garden of fixtures, and modernism simply ignored it.

“By exposing the effect of context on art, of the container on the contained, Duchamp reorganised an area of art that had not yet been invented.” Through works such as Bags of Coal and Mile of String Duchamp literalised the portrayed space of the painting, harassing the spectator resulted in this alone becoming the memorable feature and cultivating his audience through hostility. O’Doherty then goes on to discuss the unwritten function of the gallery space – the place for selling things. “The arcane social customs surrounding this – the stuff of social comedy – divert attention from the business of assigning material value to that which has none.”

It has not always been this way…

· If we return to the 19^th century

“The perfect hanging job was an ingenious mosaic of frames without a patch of wasted wall showing.”

· Each frame established its own limits; each frame was a self-contained entity.

· Brunelleschi, late 13^th century, is attributed to the discovery of perspective which happily coincided with easel painting.

· Each frame became a window penetrating the wall, there was no concept of continual wall space, and paintings could be hung together like sardines

What changed?

TECHNOLOGY – the camera was developed into a compact, portable device in the early 20^th century

With this the edges became fragile, the photograph was now the ultimate perspectival window!

However, “Art’s changes often seem one step ahead of obsolescence.” (O’Doherty)

Painting evolved into something else when perspective was removed from the frame.

“Space became increasingly shallow.”

· Following this route of lateral expansion the frame was dropped as the limiting factor.

This resulted in a peculiar occurrence

- The edge became the structural unit, in dialogue with the wall itself.

- Enter, stage right, the curator, the gallerist, asking the questions,

“What goes together? What doesn’t?”

“How much space should a work have to breath?”

· The wall became a territorial battle ground, a hostile frame in itself…

· At this point O’Doherty ends…The story of the frame, however, does not.

Another frame enters the gallery space – THE SCREEN

· Technology, once again, changes the space forever as the white cube morphed into the black box.

· Howard Wise masterminded the first video exhibition in 1960 ‘TV as a Creative Medium’

· Opinion was divided – was this really a utopian antidote to bourgeois painting, an art for all, accessible to all? The ultimate integration of art and life?

· Or was it the distillation of life into art – something collectable, package-able, frame-able and controllable?

· Philip Leider (editor of Artforum 1962-71) asked the question, “are computers, consumer electronics and communication theory transforming art production or simply obscuring it?”

· Either way, technological gain does not come without a loss. While this… was lost to a post-industrial society (Walter Benjamin’s aura 1935 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’), the documentary image remained.

· The reproduction has now wheedled its way so deeply into art history that it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate physical reality from its document.

· In 1966 Susan Sontag wrote her article, ‘Against Interpretation’ – on reading her article I felt that her principles on interpretation could just as easily be applied to ‘framing’.

- Framing too (like her interpretation) is a way of translating, creating a sign, making art comfortable. Placing an ever expanding image into a manageable, bite-size chunk.

The best example I could find to illustrate these points was Francis Ays’s ‘When Faith Moves Mountains’, the footage of which he sold to the Guggenheim as the Artwork in 2002 transforming an absurd physical act into a three channel video installation with sound.

His pertinent retort - the absurdity of the pointless gesture, was somewhat de-valued when given physical form – the video installation.

ALARM – move outside (continue impromptu discussion of cast collection via taking photos.

· Transition into document, memento, tourist shot, collectable image… PHONE (return to studio)

· Where O’Doherty found himself in an era able to analyse the minimalist frame – “The white cube gallery cell”, perhaps we are now in a position to analyse a broader framing system afforded by technology.

· The frame still exists but perhaps is more transparent; however every act of transparency necessarily produces its opposite. Its purpose has changed.

· BUT who is it for? How does it function? Does it protect or confine?

Framing is all we can do. Framing is all we do anyway. We cannot not frame things. Our minds cannot perceive of reality without framing. Is framing a way of limiting the reality to a more digestible dosage?

Yoko Ono 1995

This is the script for a performance – part of an ongoing project examining the politics of space from Brian O’Doherty’s essay ‘Notes on a Gallery Space’ Inside the White Cube 1975 to Peter Weibel’s Ctrl [space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother 2007.

A frame is a sign, translating an ever expanding visual field into manageable, bite-size chunks. Technological advancements have expanded our frame of vision while paradoxically making us less aware of the frame’s existence at all.

The transitory nature of the frame places its subject in a transitory value system. Before a mark has been applied to the page work is invested with a specific temporal belief system. Contemporary framing systems are perhaps more dangerous for this transparency. We live our lives as apathetic acceptors of controlling structures.

· (Greetings) Can everyone please leave their bags outside, turn their phones off and sign the attendance register before entering the space. Warning – electrical hazards (I have to warn you all as we’ve had a few technical difficulties but they seem to have all been ironed out)

· Brian O’Doherty’s essay ‘Notes on a Gallery Space’ Inside the White Cube 1975

· The first time the gallery is discussed in terms of the white cube gallery cell, “the ultimate Modernist frame”

· “Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory joins with chic design to produce a unique theatre of aesthetics.”

· “The outside world must not come in – walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes a source of light. The wooded floor is polished so that you click along clinically.”

· The work frames the space OR “context becomes content”, “the disease of the Modernist cube”.

Perhaps it is this very space, a hangover from Modernism that has created my work aesthetic.

This weekend’s gallery visit was to the Collective –Cockburn St, Edinburgh. The exhibition is called Documentalist (a play on the title of the annual exhibition Documenta perhaps?). For this reason I was intrigued. The Documenta format is a multifaceted system for which the exhibition becomes just one part of. With the website of the Tate now recognised as its fifth site, this multifaceted art machine extending beyond the gallery walls into satellite exhibitions and cyber space, Documenta’s format seems refreshingly relevant and with this in mind I headed to the Collective. Deimantas Narkevicius’ short film Revisiting Solaris is described as, “a critical look at film, its ability to communicate, and its importance in a primarily visual culture. Deconstruction, ruptures and random juxtapositions push the spectator to fill in the gaps of the story...He creates a back and forth between the past and the present, connecting history to personal experience. He pits documentary truth against potential fiction.” Watching this work I found the disconnection between the photographic stills of endless seascape cut in with his pseudo documentary shots jarring, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. It is human instinct to want to connect one image with the next and the state of confusion and anxiety created when this is impossible was perhaps the most successful result of this piece. Susan Treister’s Wall Drawing; A Timeline of Science Fiction Inventions: Weapons, Warfare and Security by contrast was all about the chilling points at which fact meets fiction – “It allows us to see the meetings of worlds as these weapons sometimes travel from the fantastic into the real, like the ‘Atomic Bomb’ described in ‘The Crack Doom’ by Robert Cromie in 1895.” Horizontal histories are hard to read and harder to accept.

Is turning a (hypothetically white cube) gallery space into a cinema a bit of a cop out? Well yes and no. This piece is in connection to my recent contribution to our annual Mathew Gallery exhibition, Chambers St, Edinburgh. My first point is this, this is not an exhibition you apply for, are selected to enter or even voluntary, it is a requirement by Edinburgh University for its fine art students wrapped up as a privilege. The space falls neatly between the white cube and the black box – a grotty shade of grey, a site where no piece of art, or film sits comfortably, set within a highly secure, card operated university building system which few people can enter. This year the idea was clear, we take a few hours or a day each, set up a running program of events and get in and out of there as quickly as possible. My concept was relatively simple too – move the entire contents of my flat in for a day, a kitchen area, comfy lounging space etc and a giant movie screen to show classic films. While thought was minimal, logistics were not, in fact if simplicity was the only goal there were many things I could have done which would have been more effective. Why make this my ‘piece of art’? Circumstantially I feel that now perhaps this was not the time to be churning out another piece of paper or two for under the bed, or worse, a sculpture that would not fit under said bed. Instead it seemed more realistic to work with what I’ve got. More than this however it seemed the most appropriate time to give people back a day, to legitimately laze around watching films, eating cake and not feel guilty. In our fast paced society the art of getting people to stop relax and come up for air should not be underestimated. Once you put the bed in the gallery you might as well get in it and enjoy the show!

A recent related article below is a round table discussion between Pedro Costa, Catherine David, Chris Dercon called From Black Box to White Cube.

http://www.janvaneyck.nl/0_4_6_text_files/David_Dercon_Costa.html

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article7050481.ece

Two recent articles took my attention to do with surveillance culture. The first, published in the Times on 03/03/10 ‘The Strange Case of Security Cameras’, stated that the average Brit might conceivably be caught on one of the 4.2 million CCTV cameras on average 300 times per day – the result of a study by the Government’s Privacy Watchdog. The second Times article was one published on 07/03/10 called ‘The Shooting Party’. This stated that, “the days when you could photograph freely in public spaces is disappearing fast.” The camera is becoming an offensive weapon, airports and train stations are no longer the only out of bound spaces. “Did you hear about the mother banned from taking a snapshot of her baby in the pool? Or the student prevented from photographing Tower Bridge at sunset? Be warned. The authorities now have the power to confiscate you – or even arrest you – for daring to take a picture in public.” One wonders how much we are in danger of losing as the price we pay for supposed safety. 80% of crime is left unsolved!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/david_aaronovitch/article5834725.ece

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article7050481.ece

In 1997 Amelia Jones wrote her article ‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation for Art Journal. This can be found on http://art.usf.edu/File_Uploads/Presence.pdf

While I agree with most of Jones’ points – particularly that immediacy is, precisely, a modernist (and also clearly avant-garde) dream within the cyber age, I cannot agree wholly with her belief that a live audience is a non essential factor, that the photograph is the necessary component to prove something has happened. Of course words like’ truth’ and ‘reality’ can no more liberally be thrown around within a live performance than when viewing a photograph of said performance, but live time does not cloud comprehension within histories/narratives/processes, it offers an alternative. Why should a live act trigger fewer associations than a document and what privileges something that can be packaged neatly into an art historical framework over something potentially breaking away? The camera was developed into a transportable device early in the twentieth century; it is a medium that will be tied to an era as a result, tied to the speed of its technological advancement. The live performance on the other hand has an endless future potential bound to but not reliant on a materiality.

The Fluxus photographer, Lisa Kahone, once said, “The performance is a distillation of a real life event, the act of photographing it distils it even further.” As a result she argues that the camera does not fetishise the performance/the spectacle/event, but the spectre/ghost and retains a mythological status. However the words spectacle, spectator and spectre all have the same etymological route – the act of revelation, ‘to behold’. Derrida wrote on, ‘Spectres of Marx’ saying, “The notion of the spectre is the visibility of the invisible. Invisibility, by its essence, is not see, which is why it remains… beyond the phenomenon or beyond being. The spectre is… what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see.”

In this respect the document can never become the act, which is why I believe that the point at which Francis Alÿs sold the documentation of When Faith Moves Mountains to the Guggenheim in 2002 as ‘the artwork’ – a three channel video installation with sound, the work became de-valued. It is almost impossible to exist as an artist and avoid documentation. Confusing the two however, places a work, with the premise of an absurd act of labour void of material form, back into a material form. Alÿs discusses this work in the context of a desire to create, ‘a collective hallucination’ that would exist as a fable or rumour outliving the event, fed by the imagination. Fables are kept alive by the act of telling but fables must be free to shape themselves along the way. When Faith Moves Mountains will never exist as fable when video installation is sold as the artwork.