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.
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