Documentary and other strategies

Is Whistling Copse okay?
I've been working on it for some time now- over a year. This is very luxurious but seems right for this project. It's a very solemn subject, after all (the murder of a gamekeeper by a poacher), and deserves my composure and respect. It's also a deep project, with many possible avenues of research leading into it. Quite early on in the project's history I realized that I might be looking at more than one book, more than one voice, and hence more than one method of investigation. I still think this is the case, and making it so will allow me to look at some abstractions (strategies) I've been formulating about practice. In particular:

Narrative Dialectic

where the "voice" is both the instrument of the artist and,
oppositionally,a set of rules (a personality) in its own right. See the
homunculus create a synthesis. My framing & the narrative voice's
own energy.

Formalist Logic/Temporary Structure

I create frames for investigation that produce richness through
their limitations. Also give me freedom to make more... freely. Having
arbitrated the boundaries of the work (that is, having created a
Temporary Structure) I can allow myself the full-blown
romantic/expressive/illustrative frenzy that will feed more and more
detail into the work. This seems to be a blueprint for making Fine Art
as a bifurcated activity... one part cultural operation: creating
formal games, temporary structures...other part filling it up with
stuff. And then the processes of reflection and editing. Result: no
fear of beauty, no fear of craft, no fear of illustration: no anxiety
to produce lasting or wholly-transparent cultural matrices to sit the
art into (an impossible task, anyway). The full embrace of the
temporary gives me back all of my tools.

And this is where Text versus Image sits, too. There's no necessary
divide between the forms of making. No fear of it. All working with the
same limits. The writing chosen and couched as a particular voice. The
digital medium helps too: the reduction to the same medium. Also
helping is my...

Documentary-head

I'm telling stories. They need voices: they could be visual (annette
messager...) or otherwise. happens that the written word is acceptable
currency for the expression of documentary investigation.

A worry. I don't know what my exact relationship is to documentary.
There are problematics of truth-value (not to mention use-value in
documentary versus propaganda) even in direct testimony, far more so in
artworks. I'm mining the problematics, not making documentaries...
although, sort-of... I am. An exercise that arbitrates the boundaries-
the frictions between fictive and documentary voices would be
interesting. I don't know what value it would be to me though. Isn't it
something I'm already doing in every researched work I make?

Which brings me back to Whistling Copse, and the ways it's going to help me beat the boundaries of these strategies.

To return to the things about documentary, and the things it looks
at and how... documentaries are primarily good or bad because of the
quality of their twin methodologies: the methodology of research and
the methodology of how the film is created. This is a model for the
bifurcation that exists for me where I am making artworks and also
researching topics. The fact that I am not making straightforward
documentaries illustrates a different methodology for story-telling. In
Tiercel, for example, I'm retelling a story -the battle of maldon-
that's originally cast in an old european paternalistic mode- a fascist
epic as Susan Sontag might have it. Essentially a story about death and
the glory of obedience. But I'm reframing it as something else, or
trying to. I'm trying to create a more complex sort of tragic
narrative...

I have a chance to explore this more consciously with Copse. I can
choose to subvert the expected story. I was able to subvert the form
more than the story in Tiercel, and with Remembrancer, I reframed a
history in an emotional register that settled on a complex landscape of
imperial guilt and nostalgia. I'm not sure that I'm not sometimes
guilty of celebrating these things in a sort of "hinged" nostalgia: ie one that isn't deconstructed but has a few more degrees of freedom.

When I ask "is Whistling Copse okay?" I'm really saying "is my
practice okay?". Running through these things has helped me to see some
of the limitations, some of the rusted machinery. I am, however,
getting to grips with some of the issues I've found most appealing. The
thought of myself, of my books as a sort of documentary investigation
is especially helpful, and might help me develop a few new modes of
practice.

Touching on which, I suppose one might be the ways in which i deploy
evidence- my research. Typically i have used poetry to edit, condense
and reframe the things I've researched. I'm not finished with that, and
want to take it further in itself, become more conscious of it. But
what I also want to do is to find other ways of presenting narrative,
particularly text. By validating my practice to myself as documentary,
i may find that I am able to include transcripts or prose, or perhaps
spoken or recorded words. What of the integration with the image? I
think in the model I am constructing the guide will be to serve the
investigation in whatever sense it comes to be. What might the
investigation be in Copse?

Poaching Class
Hunting/Tracking/Stealth Guns Land Vegetation Blood Folk art Ceramics
Food Night Murder Ownership Ballistics Trial/Law Proof/Knowledge Sport
Clothing Pheasants Shotgun shells Mathematical distribution Photography
Newspapers Reporting Police

The areas that seem
most interesting from a historical culture point of view seem to me to
be those of Class and Proof/Knowledge. The other things are a setting
for these and if they struggle to illustrate my points perhaps that's
alright. But what are my points? Am I dispassionately re recording what
happened? No? What am I choosing to change, choosing to highlight. HOW
AM I TELLING THE STORY? Up to now, I have been working on a poem that
would sandwich images of poaching and hunting with the images of
murder. This has some milage in it as far as illustrating some concerns
about class goes, but less about the quality of judgement given to the
story later. I had at one point thought of the project as two paired
books (paired, not unlike rifles perhaps, or a brace of pheasant). One,
Whistling Copse, and two, A Complete Science. I'm going to return to
this model now, with a greater consciousness that I am using them in a
deliberate and modular way to narrate a documentary.

I think, however, that I will also make a third piece, probably not
in book form alone. I anticipate using video and voice recording. Armed
with a good deal of research information I could make a video of myself
as a sort of tourguide for the wood. Just clearly stating some
impressions and recording my research: documentary as plain as I can
make it. Then put it with the books...what will happen? Will it want to
mutate. What else is there?

The other thing, and a thread I simply must chase up, is the
existence of a BBC documentary that was made of the case in a series
about an expert witness. I've not really had a chance to pursue this
yet...

Aside from all this diverting thought, I really must get round to writing some of the stuff I'm meant to be doing.

Themes and Strategies in Practice

Documentary-head

Bigger!

Temporary Structures

Dialectic of character-formation: narrative strategy for authors

Trajectory/frame

Containment and its opposite

Site-specific research/research-specific site

Guerilla Bookbinding

Gave the "guerilla bookbinding" class today. My first all day class at Spike Island, and it went well. More soon.

I'm off to the small publisher's fair in Londres tomorrow. Hope it's fun.

research group weblog

I've just created aresearch group weblog on my own site, using typepress.

I'm still learning how to use the controls, and I'm having fun fiddling with the design. I must get hold of my fellow-researcher's contact details to invite them to contribute.

events

Illustrations to Bradford, went well. Piers & Fiona satisfied with results. Have sent new colour version of cover yesterday PM.

Heard from them this morning about my keys (Which I'd left in Bradford on A, foolishly. I should be made to live in a hut for not taking better care of my posessions.

At college today, later, then helping L move furniture. I should go in and do some litho work, probably will, but I need to check

Projector

Other materials (ie number of handouts, rulers, scalpels, bonefolders etc)

for the Spike course.

Also nerves frazzled from keys. Think I'll take the morning "off" and regain composure.

At library at 2 to help A Beeson and Sarah with "librarians books", so I'm getting in an hour's laziness now.

Guerilla Bookbinding

It looks like I'm going to be without a projector for my bookbinding class on Friday, which is a big pain the arse, though not a fatal one.

Some notes for talking follow.

The idea with these: to present a number of books for passing
around. Some books illustrate some points, mostly this is a handling
exercise, to show the simplicity of books and the effects they can
quite easily produce. Some examples are well-finished, some push the
book form a bit out of shape.

This is an introductory talk to help us to settle into the idea that
we'll be talking about books all day: there is a richness to this that
can carry us through...

Books

What is a book? Some conceptual notes.

Sequence
Container
Project
Presentation

This tells us, inevitably why binding is useful.

IE for Sequence
Container
Project
Presentation

Sequence

Bookforms
not always sequential: often spatial. But they allude to sequential
form and are readily accepted as such in a way a suite of prints, say,
has to work harder to attain. Not all book artists would see this as
desirable, and some want to push away from the boundaries of the book.
Notwithstanding, their protest is predicated on the book form itself.

the idea of sequence leads to the idea of...

Container

A book is a container. Amongst other things it contains the
narrative function and sets the boundaries of the narrative within its
covers. It has a certain amount of play within these borders, but
nonetheless is a container we can work with or out of. Its virtues as a
container allow it to create a "microclimate" for creative activity. We
can isolate a part of practice within the borders of a book in order
that we may explore more easily.

the idea of container leads into the idea of...

Project

The book is a tremendous way of manipulating visual practice and
research into projects. Because we can use the book as a container for
sequence, for relating one idea to another and articulating one with
another, we can pusue complex ideas in them. This isn't unique to books
of course, but as a strategy for creating permissions for oneself to
work, it's a good strategy. Books can also be private: what is within
is not necessarily ostentatiously displayed.

Presentation

The way a book displays the ideas within has powerful potential to
create narrative drama, coolness, atmosphere, certain effects of play.

This section would link quite well into my existing introductory notes about structures and planning of books.

I might like to say something as an afterword about what happens to
the book after it's out of the hand of the artist: its durability, its
life in the hand (its portability), its ability to support readings,
its ability to present the artistic intention in an extended way.

The Ten Strategies

An ongoing list of projects, schemes and brainwaves that will characterise the time between now and the end of term...Probably more than ten, but the idea is to sound out the activities I'm engaged with... some complex, some simple. Probably, to limit to ten, and to better embrace the concept of strategies, I should distill and recombine these notions to approaches- so rather than saying "will read J.Searle Book" I'll eventually say "Read key texts"

Today, though, I'm firefighting: too many deadlines.

Things I'm going to do in the near future.

GO to fairs/ small publisher/LAB, any openings that i can get to
Films to watch?
Research at National Gallery: people and books in portraiture
reading I'll undertake? Includes Searle, Drucker
My list of artists: their enthusiasms and why they matter: this is going
Themes of practice: the way I'll be organising my slideshow taps into this
Running course at Spike: this should, I hope, elucidate certain tropes within bookbinding for me

sidenote: my bookbinding talk :
]
what being able to bind gives you: the ability to organise and compartmentalise

I'm going to chase up and try to read as many of the original theoretical texts on book art that I can find. (eg Carrion, etc)

I'm going to be writing a piece that will point a key text (searle)
at an older artists book, and a more contemporary one, in order to show
my conceptual tool
kit at work and in order to road-test some of my assumptions

More exploratory essays to condense and concatenate some areas which
would otherwise be problematic to me: eg history of books and printing/
spatiality of books/ some assessment of the philosophical supermarket
of conceptual tools that are available.

I'm going to continue to work on an artists book and reflect on progress. I think this constitutes 2 activities, namely:

An engagement with an actual project- the praxis of practice, so to
speak. [Specifically, developing my work on Whistling Copse]. Photos,
collating research. Writing-into research.
A self reflexive monitoring of this which is recorded in my journal, adminicle

Assembling a pictorial resource that will allow me to create
lectures and talks on a number of topics associated with the book arts.
I'll also be thinking of "modular" sets of ideas that I can use to
create a number of different talks from, based on my areas of interest
and expertise.

I'm going to be showing books , prints and drawings at several
exhibitions (Bradford/LAB, small publisher's fair) : producing work and
showing it. Also illustration work.

I'm going to be designing a floorplan for the library, thinking
about visual communication: one thing that has occurred is the problem
of differentiating rules for representation by simile and by symbol-
the task of cartography to indicate yet simplify, and the task of
design to unify, yet differentiate.

Series of notes pertaining to "personal buzzwords": phrases that
capture some of my current concerns in artistic practice. I'm going to
make a seperate "parking lot" post for this...

I'm going to be working at the library, helping develop an artists
book with Anthony Beeson for Sarah's librarians books project, as well
as developing a book for the project myself.

I'll be taking part in a binding workshop organised by Sarah.

I'll be becoming familiar with the litho workshop and hopefully starting work on an editioned book there in the next few weeks.

Tutorial With Iain and Sarah

We talked about the things which I had written about in the draft of my RDa. At the moment the proposal is a net too widely cast to be of much use except as a sort of prospectus for my interests. Not so bad as a breezy introduction to things, but not the guide to research- the series of useful guideposts that I could wish for. Sarah and Iain are of the same mind.

I'm okay about the tasks arising from it, though there are a couple
of things that I'm rather nervous about, to the point of feeling almost
upset about it at the moment... which isn't the most useful attitude.
To be exact, I'm to produce a couple of pieces of work which establish
a characteristic critical method for the project, and I have to
introduce a couple of exemplars within the field of artists books to
talk about. Only I know quite how little I feel I know about either
artists books or the vast supermarket of critical tools available. This
is a rather disheartening thing. (I wanted to write "realization", but
it isn't: I've felt the lack of background for some time).

This is not to do myself in: I'm quite capable of fielding a couple
of perfectly decent exemplars that will serve exactly the roles they
are intended to serve. But I don't feel I have a command of the canon
that they belong to. That has to change, and will. Likewise, I don't
have a wide range of knowledge of critical tools for approaching visual
culture, although I do have quite a good knowledge of a modest range of
things. I'm not going to worry about that right now: the aim at present
is to narrow down the critical approach to something that can be
written about.

On the more positive side, I have good native critical awareness and
originality. Sometimes this gets me into trouble, but I'm glad of it.
Secondly, I can structure my writing quite well and I write with
reasonable legibility, given some grounding in my subject. Actually
writing cogently shouldn't be a problem, I think. The exegesis of my
method will be a task I will warm to quite well: what concerns me just
now is the strange fear I still have of this task before me. But let me
look at it anew: all we are trying to do is to introduce a localised
critical language: a set of smaller questions that we can tool around
in.

Localise. Yes.

I wrote earlier about a part of my thinking on methodology whereby
my framing of the subject and method would produce a series of
"clients' that would generate a "brief" that would commission the work,
and that the process of interpreting the results would be revealing,
and would inform my conclusions. We spoke about this a little and
discussed the possibility of including external influences and review
in this process: I would have the commissioning process and the results
interpreted by others as well as by myself. This isn't a specifically
illustrative commission, it's a way of formalising the relationship of
the artwork to the research.

Anyway, here are my notes from the meeting:

-2 sides of A4: take an exemplary text (John R. Searle The
Construction of Social Reality) and mine its main planks and critical
method for my language. Use the critical method thus outlined to
critique an older artists' book and a more contemporary one. The idea
is to establish the critical method i will be using in my research.

Arguing with the text to illuminate the problematics that arise out of its application.

My characterisation of books as containers: temporary structures. (A
dialectic of difference and similarity). Iain mentions Kearney on this
point. Certainly I can see how the patterns of story and the errrr...
transactions of narrative are poised between the universal and the
particular. Solipsism and language. How culture overcomes
aloneness...ramble ramble...

-Refine RDa: firstly excise the "junk dna". I'll be building up from
a chosen critical language from now on. (Of course this will change a
good deal)

-Client Model is good: some external review of "briefs" formed will be useful ini establishing critical method.

-Meetings with other candidates would be good: likely on a Tuesday.
I am to look into the possibility of a group blog to share text and
other input.

-Some advice on dealing with reading by condensing. I do need to
keep my interests streamlined and a bit of ruthless reduction will help.

Staking the Claim

The danger factors uppermost in mind at the moment as regards my research are those of, on the one hand, the Reader's Digest History of the World syndrome, and the danger that I'll promise the earth and deliver a thin scraping of nothing much on the other. Both problems arise from my natural curiosity and equally natural lack of focus on individual issues.

There is a certain amount of artificiality involved in trying to focus down onto a few specific topics within a field, especially in a fine art milieu, where every possible locus of study is a kaleidoscope of subject and object, and where literally everything is a cultural artifact. Staking out the ground is going to be one of the most difficult things I do, it seems. The staking-a-claim metaphor seems oddly apt: I have some idea that the general region I want to excavate holds some promise, but the material matter of the work is still essentially subterranean.

The exercises I'm going through just now are intended as aids to
giving shape to my own interests in artistic practice, and as such
should allow me to examine the scope of exemplars I pull into my field.
Although this will definitely produce an area of general interest too
large for any one study to comprehend, it will hopefully pitch up
enough for me to conduct a broad analysis of the common tropes I could
use to delimit the terms of my interests and hence the terms of
comparison my practical output could be measured against- in the sense
of an explicit critical analysis.

My impression just now is that this is an area of
knowledge-production that will be more useful in terms of
problem-finding than solution-finding. The "solution" is artistic
practice: a notoriously infinite progression of gestures whose
lifeblood is the continuing search for solutions rather than
the solution itself. There are areas of research in art colleges that
deal with materials and media in more amenable and more technical ways.
I seem to be working with:

a critical background

the history of a medium

the integration of both with artistic practice

the transferability of these structures to digital media.

Now, this is an enormous framework, but narrowing it down, though
necessary, carries the largely aesthetic problem of long-title
syndrome. I could quite feasibly end up with a title that set
boundaries so prescriptive, so defined, that it would look absurd, and
might reasonably be of almost no use to anyone. I'd rather not.

What's to be done?

What have I got? Well, I will have a vocabulary of exemplars for the
tropes that interest me; those artists will belong to categorisable
groups I can start to define and start to narrow things down there.
This will also give me a timeframe.

I'll be choosing a few key critical texts that I will either pay
tribute to or attempt to argue with. Although there are bound to be a
few cases where footnotes will have a tendency to spread off into the
ether, this choice of a limited canon (or organum?) will probably help
me hedge my topics in a bit, too. There is a fear in me that, because I
haven't read literally everything, this is at root arbitrary,
literature search or no.

I'll be working with real artifacts. There will be books I make and
other projects (films, digital projects) that will become my evidence.
The conversation between the artworks themselves and the methodology I
try to establish to "commission" them under will produce a dialectic I
can study in and of itself. My suspicion is that the comparison of what
actually gets produced with what I formulate as my methodology will
constitute an important part of what I do: that my exposition of how I
am interpreting the results will be as important, and as revealing as
the other parts.

The other parts, while I'm thinking this way, would be:

The articulation of a field (the exemplars, the medium, the present critical situation)

The articulation of method/approach (the background to the critical
situation, the identification of problems to be examined, the things I
hope to find out and how)

The body of work, commissioned by the method

The description (ekphrasis) of the work. (I just mean the
recording of the artwork. This would also be by exhibition or
photography or print. I just mean the presence of the work's
appearance, so that we can see in as objective a way as can be managed,
what's being talked about.)

The interpretation of the work by way of the method: an analysis of
the work with reference to artistic and critical exemplars identified
earlier. An assessment of the work's success in achieving an example of
work produced by the methods laid down, and value in the light of the
critical framework given.

The articulation of the differences between the method and the
interpreted results: the interesting ways in which the work refuses to
conform to the critical framework (or attempts to frustrate it); the
interpretation of the results in terms of significant divergence from
the existing critical background.

The conclusions drawn from the results, and their significance to the field: what the work says is happening; what happened.

The more I write about this, the more I feel the need of a wider
vocabulary of analysis. For example, the clarity of expression needed
to separate the interpretation of a work of art by way of its success
in fulfilling the brief of a particular methodology, and on the other
hand, the articulation of the map of accumulated differences
encountered in that interpretation is no simple matter, and in fact
deserves tabulation in simplistic forms:

1: how the
work fulfilled the brief 2: what the ways in which it failed are and
what that seems to tell me about how making the work differs from the
way i imagined it when I constructed the original methodology

Then, this is followed by:

3:
What the difference between the methodology and the results of my
interpretation of the artwork have to say to the field at large
(remembering that I have defined the field with reference to its
history, exemplars, literature and key critical texts.

Actually,
this seems to make some sense, even if there probably are better ways
to put it, and probably cleaner lines of organisation available. What
symbols are the dials on the dashboard of this machine going to show,
though? What and who are these exemplars, these key texts? How do I
analyse the work? How do I construct commissions as experiments having
decided who these "clients" are?

Nonetheless, this seems to be a set of tasks that call for some balance, but which are tasks, and can be performed to achieve the aim without recourse to magic.

Derrida Dead

There's a Simon Jeffes/Penguin Café tune called "Cage Dead" that plods along like Thomas Tallis and beats the muffled drum over the author of so many temporary structures. I'm thinking of it now after a friend sent me a link to the news item where I found out that Jacques Derrida had died.

I wonder if he's left a will, and finally, literally transformed his volition/will/intention into text?

Interpretive Bias

Interpretation and description
Interpretations are inferred from the artifact

Descriptions are of perceptions of the artifact that “elicit universal agreement from audiences familiar with the medium” [Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

It seems clear that interpretation adds value to the experience of a work of art. Description without interpretation cannot allow us to ascribe meaning to symbolic dispositions or narrative constructions- at least in the visual arts: without interpretation the use of historical context and genre in our understanding of a work of art cannot allow us insight into the work’s meaning. And any investigation into the work’s genesis and the intention of the artist in producing it requires an effort of interpretation that involves processing the collected descriptive qualities through a set of cultural values. If we would give a work a meaning within the context of human existence, we must attempt to perform actions on the work that redeem it to our own consciousness as if we were experiencing the work. This is an act of interpretation, and an act only possible in cultural terms: that is to say, immaterial terms. Interpretation is what is done to the materials collectable in descriptions.

Intention and interpretation
One amongst several strands
of interpretive meaning (which also includes historical context, genre
context, iconology, narrative interpretation), ascriptions of artistic
intention by the viewer can greatly add value to a work. Sometimes this
is undertaken as a project by a viewer who has already enjoyed a piece
and wants to know more about how the artwork came to be how it is,
sometimes it is undertaken as a project in trying to recover the
passage of meaning through a complex work where interpretation is
useful. [ A metaphor of tracking comes to mind: it is easier to
track someone who has an objective we can readily ascribe to them than
it is to track someone who is arbitrarily wandering. We try to achieve
such an advantage by “getting inside the mind” of the quarry: a
strategy that has been very successful in tracking the world over. It
is also a sort of creative empathy that I think has some cultural
significance. I digress… ]

“Tracking” the mind of the artist will often lead us to red herrings
(I mis-typed “read herrings”, there, which would probably stand, too).
And there are powerful reasons not to rely upon the recovery of
artistic intention as a means of guiding interpretation. We’re too
easily misled, and the successful implementation of intention shows up
in the work anyway.

But artists are not naïve about this. Artists have been creating
personae and laying false trails for a long time. There has long been a
culture of intention that has empowered some artists and frustrated
others, and I think has been one of the ways in which fine art has
tried to distinguish itself from craft and design: a distinction which
has always been reacted with by practitioners in the fields with strong
senses of artistic or political direction.

“Direction”…”False trails”…the tracking metaphor continues…

And artists have been quite savvy about bracketing intention in the media they choose too…
Intention and Book Art
My
(admittedly undeveloped) thought is that artists have developed
practices whereby they try to reinforce the milieu of the individual
work of art by creating systemic forces within their oeuvre. Sometimes
this takes the form of belonging to a school or movement. Sometimes an
elaborate formalism, sometimes a dogged banging on the same drum for
years and years and years. Sometimes the medium itself can act as a
pocketing device that can act as a temporary structure that allows the
rules and devices of the individual work to exist in a space
temporarily set aside from its context in some ways: film can do this-
framing itself does this- and so do books. I think that artists want
their track to be read- that they will go to some lengths to produce
artefacts that formalise their boundaries, the better to be seen as the
work of an individual and powerful point of view.

To be continued…and possibly revised beyond recognition…

Peter Greenaway at Compton Verney

Compton Verney is an art gallery a few miles Southeast of Stratford-upon-Avon. Acquired and wonderfully adapted by the Peter Moores’ Foundation, it holds very high-quality small collections of art from Naples, Chinese Bronzes and British Folk Art.

At the moment, it’s also home to an installation from Peter Greenaway’s Tulse Luper project. Entitled Tulse Luper at Compton Verney it’s based around a number of suitcases: filled, arranged, installed, confounded and integrated, the suitcases are installed amongst the collection in a number of different rooms. Objects relating to the life of Tulse Luper fill the suitcases.

An uncertain figure, whose life seems to blend fiction with documentary existence, an alter ego
whose own adventures echo and distort those of his creator, Luper is a
chimerical identity that pans across the span of a century or perhaps
longer. The many fragments and symbols that fill the suitcases indicate
a life of flight, a lack of fixity that sits strangely within its
setting of an established country pile: the very image of conservative,
steady identity. Yet Luper’s inner life is very strongly fixed, even if
it is out-of-focus. Sequences of letters, poignant epistles whose words
are read aloud, spill their emotional content into the rooms filled
with fragments and animate a strong sense of personality attached to
the objects. There is also a sense of humour, with absurdity and red
herrings cropping up regularly as one paces from one room to another.

Although much of the material is clearly part of the ongoing project
establishing Luper as a sort of fictive hybrid of refugee and
documentarist, there is also much here that seems to relate to the
house and grounds. A collection of Chinese bronzes of figures on
horseback is echoed, first of all in the traditions of British art that
delights in depicting features of the chase, and secondly in
Greenaway’s appropriation of such figures on horseback in his
installation. This is especially appropriate in the setting. Other
elements echo the surroundings and collections: a pig in a suitcase
evokes and perhaps satirises the imagery of livestock in folk art; a
(real) block of ice sits in another suitcase, reminding one of the
icehouse one passes in the grounds, relic of a pre-refrigeration
penchant for ice-cream that necessitated careful storage and
forethought to provide the materials necessary. A spyhole, fitted with
the cross hairs of a perspective glass, stares out of a gallery wall,
aligned with an enormous boulder of stone that seems of the same
material (though much rougher) as the house itself. The balance of the
picturesque landscape: the natural and classical elements fused in the
gaze of perspective seem to be indicated here- though unfortunately the
perspective-glass’ aim seems to be somewhat off and strikes the ground
immediately before the boulder. Perhaps I’m choosing to see what I know
is there, rather than what the frame actually shows. This is one of
Greenaway’s concerns in The Draughtsman’s Contract , a work that is clearly referenced in the use of the perspective-glass.

The most striking piece, in the house’s Adam hall, is an
installation of several dozen suitcases suspended y wires from
scaffolding, each suitcase individually illuminated with its own
lighbulb. A sophisticated lighting and sound installation with music (a
piece of Handel I can’t identify, but certainly picturesque music)
takes us through a rainstorm, a dawn, a night and a day, and contrives
feelings of atmospheric effect and emotional depth from a few battered
suitcases and some lighbulbs.

I wish I’d had a lot longer to read and absorb and piece together
this sequence of enigmas. The strategy of array, the cascading richness
of more-piled-on-more, the cavalcade of red herrings, emotion,
formalism and sequence that is so typical of Greenaway is a strategy
that I warm to and applaud for its imagination and guts. It’s not easy
to come away from the feast feeling that you have penetrated to the
heart of the mystery however. Greenaway himself once described The Draughtsman’s Contract as a mystery piece without the usual explanatory denouement,
and certainly one feels, coming away from the work, that one’s
intellectual probing has perhaps only built a number of castles in the
air. But, there again, the same is true of everything, sooner or later.
The
conflation of a practice where documentary and fictive elements
coexist, and where a formalism and narrative frame help produce
temporary structures is one that I feel is akin to my own methods and
ways of seeing artworks. I found myself identifying strongly with this
installation, profoundly interwoven with the fabric of its setting, but
also flitting, moving out from the space into an uncertain reality. I’d
love to have the chance, the opportunity, hell, the gumption to produce
something on this scale and in this manner. I hope one day I shall.

Here are some related articles from the Guardian.

And here's Greenaway's page about it. I was allowed to take some photographs myself, but only for use with my PhD. Hence they can't be published here.

Box Model Fix em up

I've just "solved" (ie it's still not widely-tested) my box-model problem on my website. It looks a little simpler now, but seems to work better, which is all to the good.

A big sigh of relief and a thank you to glish. for saving my non-web-savvy behind.

notes for methodology assignment 1

I've already mentioned that I have my new assignments. (These are part of my orientation into fine art research methods, rather than full-scale research, and this part is really just about my introduction to the group)Assignment one reads:

prepare a ten minute online presentation of your practice in which you identify the key themes and interests evident in your current practice together with a summary of those practitioners you find to be of particular interest

my plan is to re-edit this post to use it as a staging-ground for my notes for the assignment.

Assignment two is about keeping a Studio Journal, which this weblog should prepare me for quite well. I'll need to have a good deal more visual material though.

Anyway...notes for Assignment one will follow...

Key themes and interests

Artists books, obviously: but this isn't an interest. it's a mode of practice.
History: interpretation and creation. Re framing cultural meaning.
Narrative. (a temporary structure)
Text and image
digital/print in fine art
temporary structure
conflation substitution: textual strategies
...but what visual interests?
Photographic
Landscape

Summary of practitioners
The embarrassing position of being
interested in countless things, but sufficiently knowledgeable about so
few of them. What do I enjoy, or identify with, then, regardless of how
well i know their work.

Peter Greenaway
Comics guy
Svankmajer
Photographers
Authors
Poets
Filmmakers/authors
Stephen Poliakoff- probably more than any visual artist currently
William Blake- kind of for the systemic qualities and historical position
Woman who did Teignmouth electron
Man who did the film in the Soane Museum

Curators/Institutional bods
Hell, Sir John Soane, why not?

More Notes 10.10.04

Thoughts on structure.

I've been harping on about several themes recently: temporary
structureand documentary/fiction being the most obvious. Both of these
attach to concerns about intention and reception in art, but from the
perspective of the artist, trying to refine or construct modes of
practice that facilitate interpretation on one hand, and allow the
artist some leverage on how the interpretation takes place on the other.

My current roster of artists include artists who illustrate facets
of the themes of temporary structure and doc/fic: I think it would be
an interesting way to structure my assignment by choosing exemplars,
showing some of their work, and then showing my own, to illustrate how
I've been pursuing the theme (...temp struc and doc/fic..) in my own
work. Thus the presentation will not be chronological, a series of
works, but will be based around the oragns of practice I'm trying to
develop as a "life-support system".

tutorials and first presentations

Quite useful at college today, though I have a lovely headache from staying up too late loading things into Flickr.

I'd a tutorial with Amanda wood and Iain Biggs to discuss my future progress in the modular structure, since I'm in a sort of "square peg" situation. I think I'm going to have plenty to do without worrying too much about all the other optional lectures I'll be missing: something for a loose end, perhaps, though I imagine that it would repay me to keep an eye on particular things that I'd find useful.

The assignments that I'm to do basically take me through a research
program of defining tropes and concerns in my artwork. It'll give me
some critical tools to work more reflexively to my research subject.
Although it looks like it'll be very useful in terms of me analysing my
own practice, I'm less sanguine about some aspects: I feel like it
needs my input to take it beyond a masters level and into PhD
territory, and that I should beware of trusting the syllabus too much.
I'll need to put my own input into things to a great extent: but the
feel for things will, I realise, take some time.

A number of student presentations today, people showing and telling
about their practice. Some interesting sidelights on issues concerning
me.

Iain said a thing about each of us having multiple selves engaged
with different things and that part of the problem, and fun, of
building a sustainable practice was to get these different selves
communicating with each other respectfully. I'd say that I enjoy some
success in this: the interesting parts of my job at the library have
their input into my work, and the different ways I work all have some
place in my working environment.

One of the other students had made a series of film studies of
spaces he was going to use for a film he wanted to make: these in
themselves were studies, but had beauty of their own. What happens
quite a bit with me is that my working studies go directly into my work
more or less unmediated. Well, only some times, and there is some
mediation, through medium and adjustment. But often i won't rework:
I'll re-place things sometimes. What I wondered was that, in the course
of doing a piece of visual research, and with the ease of feedback that
digital media and video give 9for example)- whether one could go with a
particular project in mind, and be swayed by the beauty of the study
itself. Sometimes I think that the immediacy of digital media do drag
us away from original intent, but they also give us new ideas more
quickly sometimes. Is it bad that they can drag us away from our focus?

Temporary Structures: Atom Smashing: Eliding Expectation

No, really.

Sometimes I think my way of making artwork is a bit like a sort of mathematical process, where I start off with an interesting expression and try it out with other interesting expressions to see what the outcome will be. Just like that, I'm hoping for products that will solve or partially elucidate other, further problems, and like my imaginary mathematician, I'm drawn towards the most elegant solutions, and feel the urge to whittle off the ugly nubs that won't fit into my streamlined vision. While there are probably further analogies to be drawn in the working-out of proofs and the processes used to validate and analyse the mathematician's efforts and my own, I'm not getting into them just yet.

What I do find interesting is the sense of play and unjudging
experimentation this image conjures. I'm expecting something, but I'm
prepared for something else, too, and it often surprises me. This
happens when I

a: write my way into a text

b: pursue an analogy for its own sake to see what the model can tell me

c: use exotic filters in photoshop

d: put one picture next to another

e: find out some new historical thread to my researches

f: have another look after a cup of tea

and so on. Moments of epiphany, perhaps.

The atom-smashing bit comes out of the thought that what I'm doing
is whirling carefully-selected and sometimes quite tightly controlled
ideas at one another to see what comes out: there's the famous "fruit
salad" analogy in particle-acceleration speak, which says there's lots
of stuff (subatomic particles, novelties) produced but lots of research
depends on knowing how to look and what you expect... but, very
importantly, not always.

Another problem that I've been thinking about is the one of
meaningfulness. This is something that I've kept off my back by making
books, and I think that the practice itself has been a sort of critical
tool. A sort of big analogy: I will explain. Lots of artists and other
theory eaters have cause to complain that without a sense of truth and
validity of feeling etc, it's quite impossible to make meaningful
statements. I also come across the complaint that with no controlling
narratives to cling to, the field of possibility for art is hopelessly
vast.

I found that I coped, quite by accident, with this, by ignoring its
ramifications...or, more pertinently, by eliding my expectations of the
artwork. I did this by choosing to make books, which did two things.

A: It gave the work a physical boundary and a base form that I would work out from.

B: It gave me a cultural norm to depend on.

Both of these things have to be taken in the sense I used them- as
temporary structures (of which, more later). Of course, they are also
inter-related and serve one another, too.

By choosing books, I am choosing a form with powerful expectations
appended to it. We expect, with the strongest possible faith, that
books will give us a continuous narrative and have a particular
sequence and so on. Knowing that, I can choose how to work with it or
confound it. Either way, I'm depending on the notional book: the social
construction of the book.

The book is also a structure complete within itself. We are quite
used to books being complete within themselves ( or certainly, we feel
that way, even if it is a fallacy). We are quite used to suspending our
critical faculties to entertain notions of fantastic spaceships and
unlikely love stories in fiction. We pretend in them, that we can peer
inside others' motivations as well. All this is the successful
accomplishment of the novel, which goes on being, even if we are now
aware of how the insides leak out into the world and vice versa. Of
course, it was always thus, and that didn't stop anyone writing
meaningful fictions. What writing a novel, making a book, or in the
wider sense making a finite work of art does, is to limit the
responsibilities of the artifact. By limiting the physical boundaries
and eliding the cultural expectations demanded of the object one is
creating a temporary structure.

Such structure can withstand varying degrees of critical buffeting,
like all theories. ( The allusion is to the critical rigour of
scientific theories, with the difference that the artist does not look
to falsify their theory, rather they are-I think-most likely to publish
the most interesting result). The use of the artwork is as a critical
tool, as an analogy itself, to be used in the next cycle of
atom-smashing.

Working in books, is for me, working in temporary structures. each
book is a temporary home for my practice and has its own microclimate.
There is a pun here, too. Since most of my subject matter comes from
the retelling or refiguring of historical events, they are also
temporal structures. And since they are also narrative pieces,
controlling the viewer's experience of time through the narrative, they
are again temporal structures.

This is an untidy piece of writing, and has many problems, but these are some of the ways I think about `artistic practice.

At Whistling Copse

I've had a good day's working on my ongoing Whistling Copse project, producing several hundred photos, ( from which a sample are here) which I hope will make their way into the work at some point. I'm extremely tired though, not being used to so much fresh air and trudging about in wellies!

I've been lucky enough to get a lift up to Whistling Copse itself
today and get to have a look around the woods and take pictures.

I must also confess a slight sense of guilt at not spending the day
doing something less immediately fun in the library, but as I said to
myself, in order to have an artistic practice, I need to actually do
some artwork occasionally, as well as do all of the study and
intellectual rigour bit.

It was great. I took pictures of fungus and insects and berries and
trees and it's going to go very well with the other material I've
collected for this project. It's building up to something now, and once
I get my workflow for college settled in I think I'll be in a good
position to develop things further.

For now, I think I'll just enjoy the collected imagery and let it
sink in a bit. Plenty of time later to turn these collected pictures
into artwork, although many of them are visually interesting in their
own right, they're only part of the work.

deli.icio.us

My first ever RSS feed. I've just included a del.icio.us feed in my sidebar which will feature some of the things i've added to my del.icio.us account recently. I've been using D as a way to keep track of the websites I've found useful or interesting, even when i'm using computers at, say, work, where I can't save bookmarks direct to the browser. The feed here basically takes the recent contents of my delicious page and displays them.

The feeds are generated by RSS Digest, who are great, because it works.

I'd love to have a browser plug in that was adapted to read del.icio.us feeds and make them into bookmarks on the local browser. No idea how you'd do that, though.

Depict

I'd been on tenterhooks for about a week, waiting to find out whether or not my entry for the Watershed's Depict Film Festival had been shortlisted. Somewhere in the tunnel vision of my own creativity I thought that my film "Personal Effects" had something that might get it shown.

As it turns out, it's not been selected for the shortlist.

I'll need to have a look at the films that were selected of course. I
was a bit surprised that, for a festival of 90 second long films, there
were only 15 shortlisted entries. I'd have thought more like 50 for an
afternoon's showing...

I'm a bit disappointed, but I'll try pushing it around elsewhere to try and get it shown. The Cube cinema in Bristol do regular "Bluescreen" events where people can show their efforts. I'll give that a bash, I reckon.

Those other films had better be good or I'll sulk. After I've had a
chance to look at them I'll see how I feel about it. All in all though,
not so bad. I made the thing and sent it away. What I was really after
was the chance to get some feedback and validation anyway, and I can do
that in ways that are a bit more open. And it was my first film, after all.

A rash move

I've done something slightly rash. in the meantime, here is a picture:

I've taken out a year's subscription to Flickr, a photo hosting sit that will allow me 1GB of uploading per monthand unlimited storage for the life of the subscription (that's at least 12 GB per year of storage online, year on year) Perhaps I'd have been cheaper learning how to host my own server, but it seemed like a good idea at £2 per month for all the uploading I could handle. I've decided to celebrate with a mammoth upload of some photos i took last Autumn as research for my still-in-development Whistling Copse book. (link to follow when album has uploaded...)

flaming eyeball

Untitled-5
Originally uploaded by aesop.

here's one of the illustrations I'm doing for the art dictionary I'm working on for Ale + Porter in Bradford on Avon. This is my version of a book label. As you can see I've decided to go with the old "Flaming eyeball" motif: a classic standyby for exlibris plates.

An Ideal World

In an ideal world, without all the other distractions and hangups attaching to my research, what would life be like?

One does wonder. Of course, I've barely begun and certain things about this lifestyle must be supposed to straighten themselves out- not least the fact that I have a number of opportunities and commissions that I'm following up at the moment and which, if they all come through, will give me enough cash to pay for my first semester's tuition fees a couple of exhibitions and some valuable teaching experience. So I'm not complaining, for all that I say about feeling ragged and tense.

What I would love though, is to have an unfettered stretch of time, devoid of any distractions that would allow me the chance to refine and compose my thoughts and intentions. Achieve mystical union with my research proposal, that kinda thing.

Thinking about it though, it's clear that the sort of experiences I most want to have in this imaginary intellectual retreat are exactly the same experiences likely to produce the sort of tasks and workload I have now. In my fantasy world, of course, I'm teaching more than a simple evening class and the book illustration and exhibition work I'm doing is more elaborate and achieves something close to nirvana in its fulfillment of my artistic intentions, but I'm glad to have the more realistic opportunities I really have got.

Anything I'd enjoy doing is going to always produce things I'd like to do with the new knowledge and expertise &c and I'm back where I am now, juggling. And the more interested I get (looking forward to the reading group, for example, and the sparks that'll come out of meetings with my supervisors) the more I'll have on my mind that I want to do.

What I could dispense with, however, is my part-time work in the central library, which is an eater of time and energy and which, while useful for the cash and proximity to books (to some extent), is nonetheless a major frustration when I'd rather be- need to be- getting on with more important things.

I realize that identifying my workload as a Bad Thing rather than as evidence of my success and as the natural results of my interest in things is just a personal position. By walking myself through it like this, it's become a bit clearer that things are actually okay in an odd sort of way, because I'm busy and engaged (if a little tangentially).