Meeting notes

Work done on creating questions and shortlists was time well spent.
    • structured the methodology
    • showed complexity of thought going into subject
    • sets the stage for prog exam
    • criticisms arising are constructive: mostly about couching terms/sensitive interviewing
    • will knit well with assignment materials

As regards assignments:
    • Iain will get hold of the new, simpler set of instructions for me.
    • It's expected that some work I have done will fit in quite well (in particular, my assumptions about the taxonomy of terms exercise seem to have been more or less corresct)
    • It's important that my advisors can say that I will have this work done, but it may not be essential that it is done now, though clearly I'd like to get it sorted out anyway.
    • There seems to be more leeway about providing work that obviously fits the intention of the assignments without adhering to the letter of the law. This is good news because I've done a lot of work on the relevent areas: maybe just not the specified work.

On the artwork:
        • General agreement with my self-criticism. Work has lacked material and expressive richness of late because of time constraints and production capabilities. My stated aim of spending more studio time doing autographic work (versus digital production chipped away at inbetween my research studies) seems well received as a proposed remedy. I just need to make that work! However, no complaints about my work. Quality could be better, but I'm obviously doing what I can under the production circumstances.

Some points not covered:
    • joining art practice to my case stufy methodology: I've a pretty decent idea of how my writing and researching is going to perform self-reflexive/hermeneutic research, but as yet, I've only pencilled-in how I intend to examine issues in the research in my artwork. Although I'm clearly relating my own work and its' accompanying propositions (my understanding of what book arts are and my work's place in it), to the work of others, and stating an aim to scurry backwards and forwards between my assumptions and what I glean from other folks' practice, this is more about comparing theory. I'm not really comparing the work itself that clearly here. So it's not comparative analysis, this reflexive process that the work is supposed to take up. It's more, I think, going to be about finding understandings of issues raised through art means... Obviously I'm unclear here. How can I make work that forms part of my investigation. Do I have to wait and see what I start finding out?

• I also want to figure out how I am going to construct my thesis. I was reading about Ricoeur this morning, about how the studies in the Rule of Metaphor gradually unfold the different levels of R's theory of metaphor. From a stylistic point of view, I think I'd like to take up something similar, I think. I haven't read the Rule of Metaphor yet, so I can't say what this unfolding means in terms of R's methodology (one presumes, in setting out to writew, that he already knows what his theory is, and is using these 'layers' as illustrations rather than as hermeneutic experimentation) Nonetheless, my existing metaphor of 'back and forth' or of 'repetition' could easily make for dull reading if there is no 'dramatic structure' to how my understanding unfolds. The problem is, that I don't know what I'm portraying. So I can't decide in advance what to unfold, what bits will unfold in different case studies, etc. Perhaps it won't be possible to do this. Or, perhaps, I will discover a story in the course of my research which I will later be able to edit into something readable. A hermeneutics of continuous repetition or fractious back-and-forth could be very trying, and I aspire to something less dull. Fingers crossed for a good story! This would be an interesting point to discuss another time.

case studies matrix. notes

case studies matrix.

notes towards case studies. artists and criteria/ranges generated from personal propositions about book art.

	roles	narrative/discursive	Enabling
Jon Bently	as poet/printer/writer /musician/publishing	poetic narrative, songs, text	zine, magazine, broadside, poetry. Repro, utilitarian press
Tracey Bush	as paper artist/ artist/printer/small editions/ survey	of events, of thames, of paper traces	paper structures, page is line of events. Container as world
Les Coleman	printer drawing artist	minimal. narrative of books discovery and of artistic investigation	presents investigations into form as experiments
Tacita Dean	publishing as part of project. recording, documentarist. artist	as document, record, contains differing histories. journal of discovery	as part of project. Used as adjunct to filmmmaking. Record of written aspects and stills. Not key to practice, but similar to documentary investigation.
Helen Douglas/Telfer Stokes	as book artsts, primarily. Printers, photographers, artists.	integrated with page spaces. interrogating page space implicitly. generally without text, often rebus of narrattive	see discourse: space is an implicit subject. not a series of images but a concretion of book form.
Douglas Gordon	see Tacita Dean. Not documentarist, but commentatin on the films of Hitchcock. artist	as Dean	Legitimates investigation differently. Produces catalogue. Not key to practice
Susan Johanknecht	as writer poet artist printer historian interpreter	yes, visual and textual. often pays attention to materials and physical construction of the book	yes. book form is key to construction of narrative. is main outlet. ideas interrogate book form in various subjects
Paul Etienne Lincoln	as published material.artist. as sculptural object, as game maker, as narrative	implied. many works are part of a constellation of characters. ongoing and presented as a potential array.Cards. As in Tarot	Not particularly. Enables a publication of work with particular connotation- ie, a publication.
Andi McGarry	as artist painter, poet, writer, publisher	yes, poetic and visual.	yes.projects clearly actuated in book form
Andrew Mockett	primarily as artist, printer, cataloguer,	not usually. Presence of stylistic continuity. books tend to be compendia- scrap book like.	not really. Books highly finished and very lovely prints, but not really whole pieces. Prints could easily exist externally. Interested to know more.
Old Stile Press	publisher, printer, designer. occasionally as artist. Collaborator, publisher.	as part of design. Illustrative. Balanced book design all part of narrative. strong discursive/ textual element. definite consideration of image/text narrative relation. Roles as collaborator in producing book as holistic narrative.	yes. clearly book projects. Although consistent style, each book is considered separately. Evolution of book as balanced form incorporates all aspects of development.
Ti Parks	as performance artist, sculptor, assemblages. book sculptor	very 'sideways'. Implications of conceptual associations. Narrative structures of bookworks are very much to do with conceptualising book narratives and 'bookness'	inasmuch as books are the subject.
Mark Pawson	as publisher, collector, artist, writer. mail artist	as narrative of collections, as record, sometimes as informative publication.	yes, as adjunct to collections. expression of collections. create a different aspect to the collections quite deliberately. But the collections seem to be there first.
Christine Tacq	as printer, artist, illustrator	yes, often incorporating book structure and visual metaphor. sometimes text, though seldom incorporated in images.	yes.conception is of presentation as book construction.

tangled

Tanpit Woods 2, originally uploaded by aesop.

Today is going to be all about setting down some of my ideas into the structures already in place for the progression exam writing I'm doing. There are plenty of ideas and sufficient theoretical framework in the background, even though the more I see of it, the better I would like to delve into it more fully. In particular the theoretical articulation of how studio parctice is a form of research. I'm reading Graeme Sullivan's book on this just now, which is ever-so-slowly peeling away layers of theoretical grounding: I'm waiting for the chapter where he begins his exposition of the theoretical heuristics that allow the richness of research within artistic practice to be examined critically. As I say, I'd rather know more about my application of this at the moment. Beyond a certain hermeneutic program of interrogating and instigatingmy work through the selfsame questioning matrix that I will be bringing to my case-study data, I'm not too specific about how cog 'a' will mesh with gear 'c'. I suspect it's something that by definition will work itself out in the hermeneutic process.

Be that as it may, I'm now writing so as to have a locus to edit, to add ideas to. At the moment, I'm conscious of having many different vectors of thought on and around my research interests and in tandem with several interpretations of the web of theoretical and other 'outside' references.