What do we value in art and in life?
I have discussed previously the growing trend for bricolage/accidental collage. This has been there since Paolozzi first started making pop art images with the Independent Group in the 40s, but seems to, in my opinion, have proliferated in the last few years. Tariq Alvi’s work is testimony to this proliferation as he uses the composite medium to explore sexual and cultural value systems. In a recent Frieze article entitled ‘Cut it Out’ Alvi is described as a ‘post-identity artist’ - ‘problematizing the traps of illustration, pigeon-holing and ghetto-ization.’ I like his titles! ‘The Nature of Price’, ‘The Joy of Price’ referencing iconic books from the 60s (The Joy of Sex) This reference to the revolutionary, liberating message suggests a flip side to the generation of hope as it turned into a generation of cynicism. In this article Dominic Eichler ends with by linking this act of cutting and tearing to the methods of getting over something (or someone). It being a form of closure from a situation. ‘Injuring the things that have insulted us.’ Perhaps now that we are all down with technology, make our own films/websites/worlds from our bedroom, the art of gashing and cutting is more representative of the results of the technological overload on a post-industrial society.

http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/tariq_alvi/

I was lent a book on A R Penck - unfortunately this is yet another point at which my linguistic skills have failed me, it appears to be written in German. I am going to make up what I think a rough summary of the text may be from the amazing images provided. Penck was a man disillusioned with mass consumer culture. His faux-machines ‘standard-modelle’ all come under the unifying title, ‘objekt’ as if they are all one and the same, different in form but the same in function (or lack of). Made from the debris of a throw-away consumer society, their uselessness indicates a broader sense of futility in the face of mass production. Pseudo wheels, buttons and dials hold the potential for a movement made more apparent in its lack by their presence. The rudimentary marks and cut lines have the precision of a hand desperately mimicking carelessness. A deadly seriousness is hidden beneath a surface of nonchalance, a playfulness masking a depression at their own condition.

Book (if you can read German) A. R. Penck Skulpturen und Zeichnungen Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover

Book: Art of Two Germanys Cold War Cultures edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, Abrams 2009

I turned to the chapter ‘Symbolic Revolts in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State’ pretty randomly but under my usual criteria of visual sifting. This is a summary of my findings:

It is a well known paradox that the destruction of tradition in the field of art was achieved by traditional means - or as I have discussed before, subversion from within. In East Germany post ‘61 ‘experimental art’ was represses. Artists were forced back into following a 19th century model or face exclusion from the restrictions of the art world. Art has always been synonymous with power to various degrees. The more confines put on a group however, the more they rebel, test the boundaries of that environment until ultimately the system goes full circle and becomes acceptable once again. So, modernism re-surfaced in East Germany, under the radar of political confinement but no less prolific; it broke free. Modernism became the official signifier of a counter culture (if this makes any sense). The artist I am most interested in is A R Penck. He was well read in cybernetics, information science and psychology. He talks about rejecting ‘painting historically’ (Post 61) and refined his ‘standart’ model. In 1971 Penck wrote, ‘If we agree to place a new standard of values alongside the traditional one, money, then this locating of standard will put us in a position to assert our own space.’ Research on this artist to continue…

http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/art_of_two_germanys_cold_war_cultures/

Television - not all it was cracked up to be!

Television was not immediately and universally celebrated as the medium to and of the masses. Indeed many artists treated it with intense scepticism and as a result it quickly became appropriated as a medium to critique technology itself. Nam June Paik is an artist that I have been interested in for some time, however, there were many of his generation in Germany who treated the TV with cynicism and distrusted the medium’s power for manipulation. It seems that from the start the TV, presented as the American dream, left an underlying foundation of fear due to the inherent power over it held over its viewers. The German critic Theodor W Ardorno and artists Gunther Uecker and Wolf Vostell joined Paik in his quest to expose the medium by blurring the lines between “COLUSION AND CRITIQUE”. This meant working within the medium (but with distain). For example, Gunther Uecker’s attack on brand new televisions with hammers and nails was, in turn, filmed and disseminated via TV. To accept a certain medium for its ability to distribute information quickly and broadly, even if that information is criticism of the medium itself, is a cunning notion indeed.

Book: Art of Two Germanys Cold War Cultures edited by Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann, Abrams 2009

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/art_space/

Slipping Glimpses

The tourist trade and the gallery machine have now combined forces. Take the Tate Modern in school holiday season for instance, where swarms descend in search of a cheap day out (compared to Alton Towers), stampeding there way through the super-structure. The gallery has now been adapted to suit this form of speed absorption of artworks, it actively encourages it. After all, the gallery is a business who’s funding is based on getting as many people through its doors as possible (and out again to make room for another influx). The education room, so often incorporated, has a double purpose - an extra space to store visitors; to hold them captive while room in made for them elsewhere. As a gallery assistant I have often been told to, ‘encourage visitors into the education room if elsewhere is looking too full’ (lest they leave without being accounted for). Robert Storr recently wrote an article for Frieze entitled ‘Art Space’ in which he refers to the contemporary museum as, ‘a machine for ‘slipping glimpses’.

‘The mechanisms in play are horribly like those of a sci-fi monster that ingests people in great gulps, pumps them peristaltically through its digestive tract in a semi-delirious state, then flushes them out the other end with their pockets lighter and with almost no memory of their ‘museum experience’ other than a mild anaesthetic hangover.’
Robert Storr

Time and space have been pushed out of the contemporary gallery/museum/shop/restaurant superstructure to make room for more people.

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/art_space/

Eight Years of Swimming Lessons

In 1987 Pierre Cabanne published his book Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, a wonderful insight into the life and mind of the artist two years prior to his death. I particularly enjoyed the first chapter under the aptly named title, ‘Eight Years of Swimming Lessons’. Duchamp discusses the meaning of the word intelligence, as he puts it, ‘the most elastic word in the dictionary.’ He says that for Andre Breton, ‘intelligence was in some way the penetration of what the average normal man finds incomprehensible or difficult to understand.’ Intelligence is a non-quantifiable, perhaps non-teachable unknown. The problem I found with Duchamp’s reference to Breton is that he is equating intelligence to insight, which can turn too easily to cynicism in my opinion. Intelligence, as Duchamp rightly states, is not the same as being book-smart, especially the type of intelligence he is discussing. But equally if intelligence is a more liberal stirring the status quo (of which Duchamp seems to lean further towards) this too can translate into meaningless antagonism, which is highly unintelligent in my opinion (not stupid… unintelligent!) Likewise, stupidity in one era may be intelligence in another (and vica versa). Duchamp argues that intelligence is a form of questioning yourself, asking yourself, ‘why?’ From questioning emanates uncertainly and doubt of everything else. However, he also states that this is a positive, if everything went to plan you’d lose interest. Going through the motions is the same as acceptance. This is laziness, you stop asking ‘Why?’, ‘How?’ ,‘What if?’ An extraordinary curiously is the most effective driving force behind intelligence. Duchamp believed in a distrust of systemisation, ‘I’ve never been able to contain myself enough to accept established formulas, to copy, or to be influenced.’ I have never thought before about allowing oneself to be influenced as a form of self –control, more the opposite. I will get back to you on this thought when I’ve given it more consideration….

Not a Model for Big Brother's Spy Cycle

Theatrical techniques are commonly employed to create fear and apprehension. Blatant fakes can become symbols of this constructed fear as in the work of the artist Dieter Froese with his Not a Model for Big Brother’s Spy Cycle of 1982/3. Froese mixes live footage and pre-recordings to create installation spaces which pray on their viewers’ increasing sense of panic through confusing reality and pre-recorded image of that supposed reality. His works make their audience ask questions. What is being recorded? Why do I feel physically and mentally intruded upon? Where are the boundaries between security and control? Not a Model for Big Brother’s Spy Cycle is an ingenious mixture of contrasting and contradictory elements that make up an overall unifying experience. Cardboard and mesh cameras represent the tools of public intimidation, however perhaps, more intimidating still, is the realisation that while you have been distracted being hit over the head by these big, brash statements you missed the real threat of the live camera behind you. Cardboard camera acts both as symbol and decoy.

Nano-Technology

I am slowly making headway with Welcome to the Machine (Derrick Jensen and George Draffan), not a light read by any means but fascinating none the less. One particular chapter addresses the predicted effects (all be this hypothetically by the author himself) of nano-technology. “Your body repairs itself through your life by taking material from the environment and discharging it through waste. Eventually, few of the atoms in your body will be the same as those from your youth. But for some reason your identity is continuous.” The idea behind this is that what is effectively your soul (for want of a better word) can therefore be immortalised through some form of backing up system… perhaps! The everlasting man-machine hybrid of the sci-fi villain. However, the author then goes on to point out that this theory totally denies our life experiences having any context; that they are not reliant on other circumstantial events which occur happening in tandem. If the tree falls in the forest and no one hears it etc. The hypothesis, he argues, is a result of our societies’ hatred of the (uncontrollable) body – essentially based on fear of death.

“Just as it would be a mistake to consider the Panopticon to be only a building of stone and glass and light and dark, it is a mistake to consider machines to be only artefacts made of iron and steel, and computers to be only metal boxes housing silicon chips. They are much more. The Panopticon is a social arrangement, a way of life, a way of being in the world and relating to the world and each other. The machine, too, is a social arrangement, a way of being in the world, relating to the world and to each other. And the computer also is a social arrangement, a way of being in the world, relating to the world and to each other. We are inside of the Panopticon, we are inside of the Machine, and we are inside of the Computer.”

A declaration of the Independance of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

I re-read Sarah Thornton’s article ‘The Crit’ the other day, from the book Seven Days in the Artworld, Granta 2008. It seemed particularly apt following the recent television program documenting Goldsmiths students in the run up to their degree show and also with references to our own twenty four hour college opening hours which commenced this week. ‘The Crit’ is the written view point of Thornton after being invited into the closed sanctum of the Cal Arts MFA Fine Art Crit under the tutor Michael Asher, notorious for running indefinitely into the night. No one has to talk, however, as the author poignantly points out, “People remember what they say much more than what they hear.” (Stirring students into heated debate has never been a tricky task). ‘The Crit’ describes the ritualistic setting up procedure – the characters, the costumes, their props. It feels like a story building up as friction and exhaustion mount, yet nothing exemplary happens, just a normal crit over an abnormal amount of time. There is nothing to save the ridiculous art student stereotype, in fact it is encouraged e.g. “Finally a woman’s voice cuts through the air, ‘I’m so conscious of the fact that Jews are totally uncool. Where do we see ‘Jewish Art’?’”

Why is the crit such a closed, secret system? It is not unlike a police interrogation and yet competition for entry into this class is at an unprecedented high. People seem desperately keen for the privilege of their work being ripped apart however only, it would seem, by a limited number of selected individuals, in front of and mediated by a supposed authority, within a closed room. At a recent crit I attended one individual got rather cross that students from other years were wandering in freely at various times without asking to take part. Is taking criticism really a necessary life skill and can it indeed be taught in such a distilled, microcosmic manner? William Jones (a film maker who studied under Asher said, “negotiating interviews, conversations with critics, press releases, catalogues, and wall texts are part of the responsibility of the artist.”

‘The Crit’ encourages the idea of the art school being set apart from reality, existing as a creative bubble that does not necessarily translate beyond. Asher’s own crit sessions, facilitated in a single, closed space, are only the same discussions that emanate from every art school. Perhaps it is telling however, that they have been prized so highly merely for their length and their celebrity mediator (Asher himself).

Self indulgent or fruitful discussion? Is twenty-four hours in an effectively closed cell the best way to utilise and expand the creative mind? I can’t help feeling that more would be achieved if they all got some fresh air!

Proposal to expose under-used space in Edinburgh

At the beginning of this year I was walking along the Grassmarket and counted seven empty shop fronts on the street. I took a photograph of each one and promised myself I would ring each letting agent and find out the vital stats for each space. At the same time I was working on Clemintine Deliss’ Future Collections and put together a small survey for The Modern Art Gallery in Edinburgh which, via a few emails below, I eventually got answers to. I had the view to pair images of the abandoned buildings with photographs of the storage facilities of what constitutes somewhere in the region of 80% of Edinburgh’s Museum of Modern Art Collections (along with my survey information and vital stats) into some sort of book or document. For now this document remains in the proposal stages; half collated information, half idea. Here is some of the information Gleaned…

> From: jamie robinson [mailto:jamie_dodga@hotmail.com]
> Sent: 29 September 2009 16:24
> To: GMA Information
> Subject: Edinburgh Collections

Dear Sir/Madame,
I am in my 5th year of study at Edinburgh University/ECA on the Fine Art course and am looking to work on a social project investigating the collections in Edinburgh that are in storage. I am very interested in looking into some statistical information to do with the various percentages of art on public display vs. stored works, available space beyond these institutions and current works on loan elsewhere. I would be very interested to have a chat with someone from the National Galleries about their views on the current financial climate, its effects on what is displayed from within the collections and some opinions on a term that has been posed to me as 'recessional curation'. I would also very much like to visit some of the storage warehouses for the Modern Art gallery collection.
I hope you can be of help or put me in contact with someone who might be interested in talking about the collections in storage. this is not a college project, it is something I am interested in for my own research purposes although would be happy to get character reference letters from the college or uni if so required.
Many thanks, I look forward to hearing your response,
Jamie Robinson

GMA Survey: Collections and Storage

The following questions are one method of data collection for a study into the use of creative space within the city. They are merely going to be compiled into a non-bias, hypothetical set of possibilities, probably in book format alongside photos.

The answers below are from the Gallery of Modern Art. The PG and NG, our sister organisations would have similar but not identical responses.

1. Where are the main gallery storage sites?

Granton. Divided roughtly a third between GMA, NG and PG works, and also store of some display units. And Dalmeny, we have a store for plinths, showcases, cases etc. We have in the past used commercial storage for some plinth type items, but are consolidating all this stuff at Dalmeny now, where we have a new unit. We have quite a bit of storage at the GMA as well, in the basement.

2. Are these spaces gallery owned?

Granton is rented from the National Museums of Scotland. We had it built on their land.

3. What are the storage and space saving methods employed to protect the work?

Best if you go along and see (BLANKED OUT). but basically sculpture is shelved and pictures are on racks. At the GMA, works on paper (prints, drawings) are stored in solander boxes.

4. How many people are employed in the gallery? Storage facilities?

At the Gallery, dozens. The question would have to be refined for a sensible answer – we have registrar, conservation staff etc at the GMA – they also serve the PG and NG, and the Dean houses our shared finance and HR people, and so on. It’s not straightforward. At Granton, one in the store, but it’s on a big NMS plot and there are NMS staff at the security gate etc.

5. How many works are in storage vs. number on display within the gallery?

Ask (BLANK). But broadly, we have 5000 works in the collection, of which say 1000 are paintings, 500 are sculptures and the rest are works on paper (this excludes Paolozzi and Finlay collections, which are big). We can show roughly 300 at GMA Dean and the rest are in store.

6. How many works are currently on loan elsewhere?

Ask (BLANK), I’d guess about 100 from the GMA collection.

7. Does the gallery have to pay to loan works to other exhibitions?

-What are the loan proceedings, travel arrangements etc

-When is the responsibility of the work passed over to the other party?

Not sure what you mean. We don’t pay to lend our works elsewhere. Other galleries borrowing from us pay the costs and there’s a small admin fee. (BLANK) can answer the other bits.

8. Is this the same for the borrowing of work from other collections for a particular GMA exhibition?

Museums charge different rates. In the past, say 20 years ago, there was rarely a charge and even crating and admin wasn’t charged. In the past ten years, at least, charges have been introduced by most museums. Lending a work involves a lot of work involving conservators checking things, technicians packing them, hiring in crates, dealing with all the admin (customs, insurance etc) and someone has to pay for it, and these days it’s the borrower. We can’t absorb it. Again, (BLANK) has precise figures on this kind of thing if you need them.

9. How has the financial crisis affected the gallery in terms of exhibitions, display of work, borrowing and lending work, the permanent collections, (selling work)?

Well we don’t sell work – we can’t under MLA rules, except in exceptional circumstances. Less shows and borrowing from UK not abroad, are the main things; trying to use the collection is another avenue, but it’s striking how people will come for a paying show which has a defined end date, not for something which will always be here. There are ways around that which you can probably imagine – ie use the collection for thematic hangs and market it like an exhibition.

10. What is the next exhibition?

-How much of it is from the permanent collections

We’ve just opened a show called Running Time, about recent and contemporary art films, details on our website, and its got 100 works, almost all of them borrowed from the artists.

Final question (for my own interest)

Have visitor number reduced without the free shuttle service? If so then by how much?

Hard to say because we have never had a sondage (sorry, I forget the English word) on this, ie we don’t know who, coming in, took that bus. But it was coming in at about £70K per annum and was going to rise to about 100K and we couldn’t afford it. Numbers at GMA/Dean have reduced slightly, but it may be to do with some big shows we had in the last year of the bus (Picasso and Long).

Book: Art School Propositions for the 21^st Century edited by Steven Henry Madoff, MIT Press 2009

I have recently documented the small part I played in Clementine Deliss’ ‘Future Academies’ and so was thrilled to find this ongoing project mentioned in the chapter ‘States of Exception’ written by the editor, given as an example of, “a program that throws itself into the issue of the art school’s social ethos and beyond.”

Henry Madoff describes the urban myth of the art school through wonderful analogies and metaphors; the experimental laboratory, the closed creative sanctum yet with far fewer differences than expected to the military camp. The sealed bubble of freedom in the name of creativity is no longer possible (and perhaps never was) - the market is an inescapable conditioning factor from the way students are judged to the selection of those that teach them. Art school is ultimately an administrator of knowledge, “it is established not only to teach but to administer what is to be taught.” The curriculum itself is an exercise in control which too boils down to market control. The artist has always been a service provider, there is no greater example than the Bauhaus model. However, how does society today use the artist? Can will still claim that while the market place runs the art world, that the market place and the art school are still at odds? Ten years ago we had the YBA boom, not only would I have said that the market place and the art school were no longer at odds, but further still, they were in many instances working together, in cahoots, boosting one another higher up the ladder of fame and fortune.

Henry Madoff hints at a rather idealised view of the artistic service the artist of today can offer. The idea that the artist can reach into the public sphere from its unique viewing platform from which they view the world. They can point strategically into that world through the new social networks coming into play via technological advancements. The art school can become the school without walls, reconnecting with the world beyond, no longer a closed laboratory. I am somewhat sceptical about Henry Madoff’s hopeful vision of art students no longer conditioned by grading systems, semester timetables and documents. As market power over society increases, pressure to conform, to compromise must increase with it. Madoff says, “The benign factory of the art school is now in the midst of reformulating pressured hydraulically by the forces of a larger life-world.” With expansion, compromise must also follow.

I thought I should add some extracts from the script that we wrote for our ‘Future Collections’ presentation with Clementine Delis. The whole thing is 14 pages and might bore to death as it is a literal transcript from our discussions (meant to be read to people, not read on paper). Some of the topics that came under fire however summed up our various predicaments (and also make for a humorous read)...

LAURIE – We’ve talked about digital collections but what about physical objects

IAN – That’s a conversation that would come from this, so like, someone would voice to the group like, what if this was going to be collected, like this could be in a digital collection, then someone else could say that would be, if as digital, just a 2D image on a screen, it will be like everything else and everything’ll be the same and it removes the sort of personal…

SARAH – I think that such an old argument even look at the 50’s and 60’s there were so many debates that like things were being reduced to the 2 dimensional image, we can make it much more exciting than that.

IAN – I wasn’t saying that’s all we are gonna talk about

SARAH – Yeah I know, but the thing is the start, you need to know more something that can go off in changing directions, and could be contemporary and up to date, like the things we’re looking at, the future collections, I think its important that we don’t take like ideas from the past that have been thrown around for fifty odd years, and start with something fresh really fresh and really now.

LIZZIE – What if, er, you know how she, er, she started off talking about, speaking, booty , and collecting anthropological questions, and I was thinking about an anthropologist who wrote about America, and spelt it backwards, could it have the same idea, but if like the situation was a group of people sitting around in like non, but non-specific sort of non-western place who just discovered this piece, or they have stolen it from some foreign place, and its landed in their environment, and they’re gonna try and work it into their collection, or….try to figure out what It is obviously its not, er, because, this could be the worlds most fantastical non-western community, they obviously don’t know you drink out of it, this object becomes non-utilitarian and their in this situation where they are trying to put it in their exhibition and present it to the community and…

MOMIJI – Yeah, I think that’s really funny, I think that’s really good. So you start with that, they just sort of stumbled across this object, an how would it fit into their society like

IAN – Do we know enough…

LIZZIE – I don’t know it’s a bit like it might take a bit of imagination

SARAH - So would you…you’re saying that everything comes down to economics?

IAN - Well it’s still, it’s still, it’s sort of doing something, it’s still a progressive…

SARAH – So you’re calling every single person in the world a business, a brand, I don’t know, I mean yeah, we could say that but I don’t…And maybe that’s the consumerist age we’re in, I don’t know, is everyone, is everyone a business?

PAUSE

MOMIJI - I don’t think I’d like to be thought of…

SARAH - I wouldn’t like to be a busisness, yeah

FIONA - (Mockingly) You’re a business!

EVERYONE LAUGHS

SARAH - Maybe we are all businesses…

MOMIJI - I do find it’s like…

IAN - In a way, we’re trying to…

KATE - I mean if you’re self employed then effectively you’re running your own business…which an artist is.

SARAH - Yeah

KATE - They’re running their own personal, personal business, even if it’s not as you might think, you know…

MOMIJI - It’s just such a vulgar term, that you’d kind of associate with an artist with

SARAH - ‘Cause it’s like money, yeah

MOMIJI - But that just makes me just not want to be in a like…

SARAH - An art institution?

MOMIJI - yeah

SARAH - Yeah same. It makes me think that I don’t want to…

MOMIJI - (interrupts) So why is there no alternative to that?

SARAH - I think there is an alternative to that though

FIONA - To have a part time job and do art on the side for fun?

MOMIJI - Well not for fun

PAUSE

OLIVIA – So can collections operate in a complex space defined by: A – the drive of the market. B – the drive of the social memory. C - mainstream and alternative pedagogies. Will future collections manage to eschew the model of the canon, and work towards idiosyncrasy alongside inclusivity and democratic representation.

LIZZIE – Could you read it again?

OLIVIA – That’s only one question!

EVERYONE LAUGHS FOLLOWED BY INCOHERANT BANTER

LIZZIE – Could you read it again?

OLIVIA - Ok, can collections operate in a complex space defined by: A – the drive of the market. B – the drive of the social memory or C - mainstream and alternative pedagogies…

FIONA – Whats a pedagogy?

OLIVIA – A pedagogy is like an institution, its like the art or science of teaching…

FIONA – Why doesn’t she just say that

OLIVIA – So, Will future collections manage to eschew the model of the canon, and work towards idiosyncrasy alongside inclusivity and democratic representation?

IAN – How does the question begin again?

ALL LAUGH

(Since writing this script we have all found out what pedagogy means... IT IS NOT AN INSTITUTION!)

One of the artists mentioned in the book The Art of Projection, which I have discussed previously is Diana Thater, an artist I found intriguing not just for her ingenious use of the projected frame to merge the real and the computer generated space, but also for her political stand point. She uses new media as a way of defending her own practice and the practice of others, undermined by their critics. Again an example of how the installation can be at once the medium and the defence strategy. Her work is a hybrid of video, sculpture and architecture yet defies categorisation itself. Her installations are not illusion – they do not hide the apparatus, but then perhaps technical apparatus has in fact become invisible to us anyway. Our brains are so conditioned to filter simultaneous images, to select and pull our own relevancies from every moment, perhaps to hide the apparatus would be a way of highlighting it. Beatriz Colominia wrote in The Art of Projection that, “the idea of the single image commanding our attention has faded away. It seems as if we need to be distracted in order to concentrate.” Memory itself has become an act of performance and, as Colominia said, time is memory’s toy, “time is the place where subjectivity is produced.”

So… back to Thater. Where is the memory, the performativity in her installation? With the lack of material disguise the audience morphs into the work itself creating bodily screens and shadows. They are at once the audience and the unknowing performer within her space. Her series entitled, ‘The Best Animals are the Flat Animals’ 1998 were influenced by Alice in Wonderland. Alice encounters 3D animals that morph into 2D playing cards. It is representative perhaps of how people experience nature, or rather, that they think they are experiencing it at all. A changing landscape for the viewer to move through where nothing is stationary, nothing is tangible. More of a comment on our ability to push out the technical details, the price we pay for the lure of absorption.

“Video installation offers a space where intention and judgement of beauty finally separate.” Instead it is up to the viewer to play the part.

www.thaterstudio.com

Tadek Kantor’s Objects – Cricot² Theatre with introduction by Marek Rostworowski (an information guide written in 1986)

Kantor is likened to a Renaissance alchemist; lost in thought, working passionately yet methodically towards knowledge.

“Materials, which Kantor takes from reality in order to throw them into the forge of his performances, are subjected to a transformation of their functions and specific qualities. They are not simply elements illustrating a wider project, (already defined in the initial phase), but reagents which reveal their invisible side, their unexpected parallelisms and contrasts in the process of transformation.”

The audience becomes yet another one of his materials within the performance. Machines are used consistently within his work – both funny and threatening, they become metaphors for a world built on a tension between contrasting, co-existing poles; chaos and geometry, catastrophe and order, chance and constructive necessity. They are described as Kantor’s, ‘traps set for conventional aspects of reality.’ Space is not treated as an empty vessel to fill compositionally – as Matisse called, ‘a comfortable sofa’ (by which I think he meant the lazy use of space, not necessarily traditional, but easy to fall into). Space is not absolute; it exists as a result of contrasts and conflicts.

“Every gesture, even the most banal one, may unsettle the invisible balance, may set the trap in motion. A whole life may depend on the position of a suitcase.” Space is one of the most valuable commodities; we invest in it on every single level, financially, temporally, physically, emotionally… Yet within the theatre it is consistently used as a blank canvas, built on top of with various carefully positioned components. Any space however has a multitude of codes and sign to decipher, within the structure itself and this is I believe what Kantor worked with, rather than working over.

Collecting into the Future

Book: New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art edited by Christiane Paul 2008

This book analyses the reconfiguration of the institution. Participation in or with the artworks today counteracts the idea of the museum as shrine to sacred objects. New media has broken free, evaded definition and escaped categorisation. It is constantly evolving and reinventing itself, the enemy of history, new media has developed out of confinement. In the 1960s the then editor of Artforum asked the question, “Are computers, consumer electronics and communication theory transforming art production or simple obscuring it?”

If the museum functions, among other things, as an archive and ‘cultural memory’, how is this memory influenced by the acceleration of real time processing? What might the archive of the future be?

These questions posed in this book were also some of the questions offered to us as a group when asked to present our opinions on collections and our hypotheses for the future. The discussions took place within the Raeburn Rooms of Edinburgh University between three groups of student from the fine art course, art, space and nature course and curatorial course. The discussions were instigated and mediated by Clementine Deliss – founder of the Future Academy ongoing project.

Each week my group dutifully met up to discuss the possibilities for collecting into the future and each week we found ourselves talking round and round this impossibly large subject full of abstract concepts. Each week we recorded our long, rambling, convoluted and more often than not, non-sensicle conversations on the topic. Finally we decided that the only way to present these ideas, without them becoming merely another collectable, was through a slightly edited script written from our discussion recordings. The script was given to a group of actors one hour before the presentation who made a far better job of reading it than we did constructing it. I shall follow this entry with some extracts...

http://www.metasenta.com.au/projects/projects-completed/53-clementine-deliss.html

http://www.eca.ac.uk/389/

We were recently visited by our external examiner, given a fifteen minute slot and instructed to have an ‘informal chat’ with him about our work. As always, and more for fear of rambling than running out of words, I made a sort of check list of what I felt was important for him to know about my work. Again, as always I veered horribly off the runway and promptly lost track of the list. I have just rediscovered it and decided that it is worth putting into non-scribble, as a reminder that, at one point at least in this mad final countdown, I seemed to have a reasonably clear grasp of where I was headed.

The power of the performance lecture lies in its permission to borrow indiscriminately from multiple disciplines. Fact, fiction and opinion can co-exist in the same space, even in the same sentence. My history of art course has been heavily factually bias, dry, for want of a better word. Within fine art there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – there is little in history either for that matter, however the defence strategies are very different. The performance lecture has the duel capacity to act as both the medium and the defence. Last year I became increasingly interested in the changing function of the brain in line with technological advancements. Our notions of time, space, and indeed memory itself are now all in flux. I took a class last year called ‘The spaces of Contemporary Art’ which lead me onto an investigation into what other experiences in life we take for granted yet have been manipulated and mediated by a growing technological framework. Peter Weibel’s book CTRL: Space proved most enlightening, introducing me to Foucault’s use of Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptic Principle and investigating the ways in which many artists are tackling the subject of a mass surveillance culture.

The performance lecture (or as I have now renamed it, the demonstration) has a real scope for awareness bringing, for raising consciousness. In line with my discovery of Kantor I felt that there was too, a space within this where my objects could also participate, as something akin to, but also more than, a prop. The frame as both an object and an idea proved fascinating subject matter for debate and investigation. It became more than an object, more than an idea but also a metaphor for this abstract notion of surveillance culture with the assumptions it places on what it contains. Recently I have ventured outside the studio frame towards a more obviously terrifying container – the source of where the brain meets the machine, Edinburgh’s Clinical Research Laboratory. It is often difficult to find a source for your investigation. We read round and round subjects and look at the work of others but for me the challenge is always locating that trigger image, space or sometimes person that I can then hang my argument onto, or rather, my defence.

I have recently discovered the joy of the blog! My flat mate thinks it is hilarious, the hours I will spend happily tapping away at a computer under the pretence of putting together a final assessment research document. There is a little more to my new obsession however, something deeper and a bit darker, something that I thought could prove potential fodder for another demonstration. The blog is a self indulgent record of my thoughts and movements. I can be utterly opinionated and cutting (usual unsubstantiated with any actual fact) and yet it is mediated. No one need know who this person is; I can write the things I would never vocalise. It is the most impersonal of mediums wrapped up under the guise of a secret diary. More importantly than this however, it is a track and a trace of where I have been, what I have done. It is a collection of words for a generation that no longer trusts the ability of their own memory. We don’t have to, we can blog! So, the flatmate and I came up with the proposal, a way of putting all these thoughts out there with a few mediators; the computer, the projector, the screen. As if these few mediators suddenly stop the words coming from you; they are from the computer, from cyber-space, not me. I could sit there, happily tapping away, projecting my words out to other people and printing as I tap. This could continue hypothetically until the print out began to form piles and piles around me, perhaps taking on the space and the weight of my own body. They would take over, take my place. The fear of forgetting could become so huge that it may indeed take over a physical space. More important than any singular sheet of paper it would represent the futility of trying to collect everything, retain everything, just in case. At the point where any of these colossal ramblings might ‘come in handy’ the irony would be that for all the attempts to retain information, it has merely been lost in a mass paper flood.

http://framingcontrol.blogspot.com

While researching an idea I was having for the Kinross scholarship (which unfortunately I did not get) I found piece on a contemporary photography exhibition happening in the city of Florence. My aim for the application was to discuss Florence’s mass expansion of mechanical design and production, and little known to the tourist trade.

(Extract)

“I believe that Florence is the perfect location for the continuation of this project. This is because today a new signature market is emerging in Florence, bubbling beneath an art and architectural heritage. This market is the machine. The machine manufacturing industry is the fastest growing market in the city, the only one to see a rise since the recession (according to one report a rise of 50.1 billion Euros). It has turned Florence into a city of two halves. The public perception of its historical artistic identity is fast becoming separated from its actual identity as a global industrial manufacturing centre. I am very interested in how a city deals with such an extreme personality split. Is Florence’s contemporary art scene examining this new economic identity or masking it in nostalgia for its past?”

The descriptions for this exhibition, no images attached, random words found by default, held certain potency for me. The exhibition seemed to be about artists coming out of the ‘end of transmission period’; the fifteen year gap post the enormous geo-political space that was the USSR. It talks about multi-dimensionality in a world we assumed to be 2D for so long and the need to retain links to a past fast retreating from the present. It throws up issues to do with trauma of being thrown into the global world, freedom, and the conditions that come with it. I took some of these ideas for my application. This must, for now, remain as a proposal with, on this occasion, just a slight delay on the execution time.

(2^nd extract)

“The multi-dimensional nature of a city, so embracing of technology and a new global market, is moving away from its historical past so fast that I believe there is a vital space here for young artists to research this past and future and document the schism before points of connection can no longer be traced. One term that I found applied to the work of artists trying to pick their way through this treacherous terrain is ‘progressive nostalgia’. As artists we have the privileged position of being able to pick indiscriminately from past, future, fact, fiction, history, science, philosophy and our own opinions. Travel, movement, labour, globalisation are all words that I see pop up time and time again in contemporary art practice however the imprint of the past is often left forgotten. Florence, the city of extremes, an industrial core hiding inside an art historical tourist industry, is a perfect location for directing this area of study.”

John Baldessari

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty 21.10.2009

Baldessari talks about collage being about pairing images that are as far apart as possible. It is about creating a tension, too far apart and they will snap, too close and they will be flabby.

http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/45538302001#media:/media/45538302001&context:/channel/artist-interviews

Tadeusz Kantor

‘The Work of Art and the Creative Process’ (Kantor’s notes on the artist and the theatre from the play Wielopole/Wielopole)

Tadeusz Kantor, “The act of writing a book, composing a symphony, or painting a picture is acknowledged to be a creative process, and thus a unique and privileged manifestation of the human spirit. For this reason, it may seem strange that the perception of this uncommon process occurs only after it has been extinguished. For what is actually consumed is merely its product, in the form of a book, the orchestral performance of a work, an exhibited picture. The actual creative process remains inaccessible to us. To state this at its most extreme, we may say that in the reception of the work of art there is a paradoxical cancelling out of the most inspired, the most spiritual, moment: of the whole mystery of creativity. Only the trace left by this process is fed to the consumer, he gnaws on its imprint like a dog chewing a bone, desperate to find in it some image of the Great Explosion. Quite fruitlessly.”

Kantor denied the popular label ‘process art’ – he made products, specific end results, but these acted as what he called, “a smokescreen of seriousness,” thrown up to catch the particles of creativity that emerge along the way (but are extinguished on completion). Illusionism in the theatre was, for Kantor, the buffer zone that separated the actor from the audience, the spectator from participator. The problem for Kantor however was that the possibility of participation, implied by bringing theatrical fiction closer to real life, was an impossibility. It was merely creating another deception, or a double-bluff, what he described as, “a born-again fundamentalism.”

Merging art and life, drawing the audience into the entirety of the creative process was more complex than removing the stage set from the theatre and placing it into the factory. This is the worst scenario; creating a greater fiction than the process is trying to negate. Kantor saw representation as a farce, it does not lend substance/conctretize the fictive character but the opposite; it reduplicates fiction. Instead it is better to use a site incongruent to the play’s substance. Kantor favoured places of limbo; the train station, the bombed out house, the post office. These places would resist a homogenous interpretation with the play itself and expose the contraction between fiction and reality. He also employed the use of the BIO-OBJECT; more than props or decor these became part of the actors themselves, actual materials, rooted in reality by their actuality, acting independently to the fictional plot, like the limbo sites.

Kantor’s methods are complex, pre-empting Happenings of the sixties his theatre is neither fiction nor reality. He created a space for art to exist in neither realm but each negating the other to expose the fictions within our own reality, and the reality within our fictional worlds.

Books:

Future Cinema: the Cinematic Imaginary after Film by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, MIT Press 2003

CTRL Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother by Thomas Levin, Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel

The physical reality of actual observation can be replaced by the potential of being watched to the same effect on those under that observation. This was Bentham’s Panoptic Principle – “everyone would internalise the disciplinary gaze.” Foucault wrote extensively on the ‘Disciplinary Society’ in his book Discipline and Punish 1975. What interested me about Foulcault’s attention to the Panopticon is that he came upon it while studying the origins of clinical medicine. He said, “I wanted to find out how the medical gaze was institutionalised, how it was effectively inscribed into social space.” It seems apt that I have returned, by default, to Edinburgh’s Clinical Research Centre to find a set of research images that I thought would appropriately link into my discussion topics of societal surveillance and control. The MRI scanner acts in the same way as an airport security baggage check does... but on humans. As Christian Katti says in CTRL Space, “every act of surveillance necessarily produces its opposite.” Like the MRI scanner (or the baggage check), for the internal to become visible on the screen, the external must be hidden inside the machine body.

Today I was lucky enough to catch the Travelling Gallery in Bristo Square – a gallery in a bus travelling round Scotland and bringing contemporary art to both urban and rural communities. The exhibition was Klook-Klook; seven artists exploring the junctures between natural worlds, where animals and humans meet. The first image was a Charles Avery drawing I recognised from his Islanders collection I saw at The National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh a few years ago, then in the ‘Walking in my Mind’ exhibition at the Hayward last year. I can never quite decide whether I like Avery’s work. The idea of tying oneself to one subject terrifies me – a safety net that can turn into an entrapment perhaps. There was one artist however who’s work I was fascinated by... Ashley Nieuwenhuizen. I went home and googled her and remembered where I had seen it before. Two years ago I had a job at the RSA as a gallery assistant for the New Work Scotland show. Day in day out I sat next to a work, picking up the small taxidermy mouse each morning to turn the light on inside the tea cup it sat, watching a film of a girl gagging on a horse tail as she tried to ingest it. This was Nieuwenhuizen. Her new photographic work has little of the grotesque quality Is aw at the RSA, no gagging and chomping but maintains an unsettling-ness or uncanny-ness unique to Nieuwhuizen’s work. For example in Limbo, where a young boy sits on a fallen tree, the angle of his shoulder blade is mirrored in the gold birds wing he holds clamped underneath.

www.travellinggallery.com

http://www.myspace.com/morphbody

What is wrong with offering an experience that enfolds in real space, in real time? This was the question Bruce Nauman asked in the 2003 publication, ‘Theatres of Experience’. A document is just that... evidence. Performances, on the contrary, can heighten awareness of our often contradictory physical, psychological, social, emotional and perceptual states.

What is the problem with having to move physically round something?

Bruce Nauman’s Performance Corridor of 1969 did just that. It was about control. Passive spectators morph into active participants manipulated, never the less, in their movement by Nauman’s controlled space. He said, “I want to be a director of viewing experience.”

Nauman’s corridor lies somewhere between action and non-action, the viewer can only ever see part of the image and thus moves this way or that trying (futilely) to find a complete view. In the book Nauman is described as, “a controller of marionettes via cameras.” Rather like Brecht’s alienation effect, Nauman says, “a moment when one is shocked bodily into an awareness of... the uncanny... suddenly in the minds of reassuringly familiar forms a space opens up, lit by a strange light.”

http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.nationalgalleries.org/media_collection/6/AR00044.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/ar_home/4:6685/0/89096&usg=__gw1S-wxevnXT-o4RAEOOLQTGPzk=&h=703&w=540&sz=31&hl=en&start=6&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=1paBdWByJwQRlM:&tbnh=140&tbnw=108&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dbruce%2Bnauman,%2Bperformance%2Bcorridor%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26rlz%3D1R2ACPW_enGB363%26tbs%3Disch:1