General Catchup Post

A bunch of stuff I've been working on of late.

Presentation

I
recently gave a presentation about my work to the MA students I meet
with on Tuesdays. I’d been putting together material and approaches to
this for some time, but in the last decided to start afresh, having
worked up an inappropriate sort of thing where I was working with
definitions of strategies, sources and exemplars to illustrate my
practice in some sort of context. As it was it was sufficient and
actually more appropriate simply to show some of my recent work and
talk about what was concerning me at the time. It amounts, given enough
time and expostulation, to the same thing with different approaches.
However, as it was it was all a bit rushed there wasn’t time to really
unpack the various notions I’ve been working with, through, on etc. I
felt that, actually, I didn’t really communicate the things I wanted to
have out with other people about things: didn’t present the areas I
particularly wished for feedback. It may be, though, that since I
presented more or less impromptu, and since I have what I myself
consider to be quite a sturdily articulated practice, that I presented
quite a well-defended front, as it were, and didn’t invite useful
criticism.

Whistling Copse

One of the things I spoke about was my wish to continue with my project Whistling Copse.
It’s been a long-term project, as I’ve said before. But now I find that
I want to work with it in a more documentary style. I really wanted to
get some discussion about the different voices and values that can be
articulated in the documentary form (and maybe drag in a bit of
Kearney’s On Stories to further articulate the relationships
and their social dimension). As it is, I have the idea that I want to
produce a little bit of film and I want to produce a number of books
that start to explore the idea of different voices- different modes of
research, as it were…poetic, array, visual, document-style, etc…

 Twelve O’Clock Wood

Is the first in this series. I’ve been inspired by Zoe Irvine and Helen Douglas’ Illiers Combray to produce a book in one long continuous strip. Because I’m using my existing Whistling Copse research photos
in the main, and because I was already intending to use bits of art
from pottery and so on, it looks more derivative than it really is: the
coincidence of material is really just that. But the form of the book,
whilst it wes something I had thought of already, (to use with the wide
format printer)… actually getting to handle an example and see the way
the structure works has been an inspiration.

  Wide Format

Yes, I’m producing
the book on the wide-format printer. It’s an expensive beast (unit cost
per book of something over £12, and I’ve still to see the results.) I
must say it’s an easy method oof production though. I hope I can sell
them, having laid out £70 for the printouts. Hopefully at Bradford and
Spike… It’s good to finally produce something at UWE, even if it is
this mediated halfway house where I simply hand over the files. At
least people will see me making something. This has been lacking and I
feel under-represented: as far as anyone knows I just mooch about.

 Under the Wire

…Is the second book,
same format. I’m not certain how it’ll develop from the last one, but
at the moment the P’shop files are denser, more layered, less simply
photographic, darker…

 BFI

I’ve also sent an email to the BFI to see if they can arrange a viewing for me of a documentary-drama from a series called “Call the gun expert”. There
was a 1964 episode about the evidence in the Whistling Copse case.that
I want to see- it’s another voice, after all, and another format.

Rooftops

I’m
also working on a short book, that I’ve called, in the interim-
“rooftops”…it’s a short book that is mostly an exploitation of the
unusual structure. I’m hoping also that because it’s essentially
possible to print it on one piece of paper that I can use it as a
project to reintroduce myself into some print processes. Visually, I
want to go for a dense pen and ink line vaguely reminiscent of Edward
Gorey.

Reading

Of course I’ve been reading, too. Mostly…

 Searle

 Heidegger

 Derrida

 Drucker

Writing

 Book as solution/ pharmakon?

 Elements of presence (reading/immersion)

Books versus films.
Agentive intention producing the institutional fact of the narrative,
rather than as a sensory experience, or rather, as a combination of
agentive production and sensory involvement.

 Product
and process- my emphasis is or will, I think, be on the process( ie the
artistic practice) of artists’ books as a strategy, as a solution, as a
sort of cultural game, than it will be on a survey of books in
different historical moments and locations. This means, actually, that
I’m asking “How artists’ books?” rather than “What is an AB?”

 Decisions about research- need to talk to living artists about practice

The importance of
describing how artists’ practice actually uses books means that it’s
going to be important for me to ask artists how they use the book
concept as a strategy.

 Furniture at sea

All of this thinking has had me
feeling like my ideas are skittering about like furniture in a big
ship, not nailed down. However, I think the landscape is becoming a bit
clearer. I still have a lot of gaps to fill in, and a better general
knowledge of the available conceptual tools would help a lot.