Assignment 5

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Assignment 5: curate virtual exhibition of five artists including me.

 

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Borders of Identity

 

In creating this exhibition I have employed criteria that have come
from my ongoing critical engagement with my practice. I'm always asking
questions of it: What am I doing? What is its place in the world? What
are the characteristics of the artworks? This is an ongoing process
that takes place all the time, in every decision I make, to a more, or
less-conscious extent. It is a hermeneutic process that continuously
informs my sense of myself as an artist. It can take a more formal turn
when I write about my work as I am doing here, and elsewhere in my
studio journal, but I'm conscious of its place in the way I approach
individual pieces of work, individual drawings. That critical
judgement, and the interpretive bias that emerges as a result of my
concentrating on the things I find useful and informative to my
practice exists equally in the things I choose to look at, and in the
things that I read. What strikes me other's work is that which strikes
a chord in my own practice, in sympathy or in contrast. The ongoing gap
between what I respond to and what I do
is the gap of the hermeneutic process of working-through-practice. It's
why I keep doing it: there is always something un-done to respond to.

 

What I have done to create this virtual exhibition, with its
intention of providing a basis for a comparative analysis in the form
of a catalogue entry, is produce a number of statements about how I
currently characterise my work. I've used these to select artists whose
work I think reflects on some of these same criteria, either
sympathetically or critically.

 

  The criteria I have employed are:

 

• 
      historical/literary sources- there is a use of historical/literary material or background
   



• 
      interpretive- there is a conscious effort being made to interpret the found and historical imagery and situations
   



• 
      gamespaces- there is a sense in which the work establishes a place of operation within which the play of the interpretation works out
   



• 
      identity- the work deals with questions of identity: postcolonial, gender and sexuality, etc
   



• 
      narrativity- the works use character and plot to allow meaning to unfold with the effect of narrative
  

 

 

The artists whose work I have chosen to explore these critera with are:

 

• 
      Helen Douglas: Illiers Combray
   



• 
      Roni Horn: Doubt by Water
   



• 
      Peter Greenaway: Luper at Compton Verney
   



• 
      Isaac Julien: Vagabondia
  

 

  Finally, I have chosen my own book The Remembrancer as a representative piece of my work for comparative analysis.

 

Before discussing how these criteria or themes work across
the exhibition, I will take the works one by one, saying how they
feature some of the criteria, and exploring some of the links between
them. The sections below are my 'catalogue entry'.

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Helen Douglas

Illiers Combray

  Helen Douglas' Illiers Combray is a long
accordion-fold type book full of pictures of the countryside around the
town of Illiers in France. Combray was Proust's name for the town in
his celebrated extended novel À la recherche du temps perdu. Much
of Proust's remembering takes place in the environs of the town, and so
a trip to the real-life location (even though actually conflated with
instances drawn from the real life town of Auteuil) would be a must for
any devoted Proustian.

 

Douglas' work has long been concerned with notions of place, and in
particular with border lands, zones of doubtful demarcation. We can
take her books Wild Wood: A Border Ballad, and Unravelling the Ripple , dealing as they do, In Wild Wood's
case with the wood as a metaphor for the disputed (or at any rate
outlaw) history of the Border country between Scotland and England
(where Douglas lives and works). The wood's untamed quality comes to
represent something of the history that informs the identity of those
who live there: untamed: unclassified, and carrying the influences
(scars?) of historical conflicts in their nature. Unravelling the Ripple
consists of images of the seashore, the zone between sea and land which
teems with life that must survive across the differences offered by the
twin elements. Here, too there is a zone whose definition is constantly
under refision, a shifting world.

 

  Here in Illiers Combray, Douglas seems to be examining
another kind of border country in tandem with Proust's own traffic
between the actual and the remembered. Proust's readers encounter
Proust's world at least partly through his books: they encounter books
as places, and the places they visit as Proustian tourists, they
encounter at least partly through the books. Our experiences are
mediated through the remembrance of cultural experiences we've had,
reading being one of them. That, in Douglas' own words, is why the
book's visual journeys are bracketed at the begining and end by images
of women reading : "I wanted to bracket my seeing, and immersion in
this place through these women reading". There is a real town, Illiers,
and a fictional one, Combray: the experience of one coincides partly
with the experience of the other.

 

Proust's reflections are part of the subject Illiers Combray
embraces. These perambulations through the town and country are marked
by their reference to the real and the imaginary: in their conscious
referencing of Proust, they refer to an imagined, rather than real
world alonside that which actually exists. Similarly, the work exists
between a present and a past time: the presence of historical stained
glass figures and  tapestry testifies to the continuing presence of the
past haunting the spaces the book traverses. The glass, the tapestry,
the legends seem woven into the landscape which erupts into fresh
spaces as if manipulated not by the rules of topography but by the
metaphysical camera of reverie: here we're back with the experiences
offered by Proust.

 

If Douglas' work is often about 'beating the bounds' of border
spaces, there is a pathway to be trodden in such cases: through a wood
or along the seashore for example. In this case we walk two 'ways':
Swann's way and Guermantes' way, typified by the town and the country,
and existing on either side of the long straight track of the
accordion-folded book:

  "I conceived my book as a long concertina strip with two sides in reference to his [Proust's] two ways and long flowing sentences"

  Each of these walks or ruminations contain visual equivalents of what Douglas refers to as Proust's

  "embroidered effect, his interjected detail,
all brilliantly observed with his eye and bodily understanding of his
text.", something Douglas achieves herself in the digital interpolation
of imagery woven together into one long continuous textile in which one
horizon merges seamlessly with the next. Douglas explicitly
acknowledges this technique of visually weaving things together in the
digital medium, comparing the matrices offered by digital imagery to
those offered by Jacquard looms. But there is more than visual weaving
taking place: in Illiers Combray, Douglas is weaving together the real,
the imaginary, the remembered in a traverse through the space and time
of a book form.

I
earlier referred to Douglas' bracketing of her seeing by reading: in
this case, that bracketing her seeing in the remembrance of past
things. Tacita Dean, writing about the experience of reading Roni Horn
(the next artist to feature in this virtual exhibition), quotes Emily
Dickinson's lines:

  "There is no Frigate like a book/to take us Lands away/Nor any

  Courses like a Page/Of prancing Poetry"

When we travel
in a book we affect any travels we might make in real life. Can we ever
experience France's Illiers for its own sake having first encountered
Proust's Combray? Douglas seems to be saying that the experience is
always one woven from the contradictory realities of the world and of
fiction. In Roni Horn's work we will see a version of personal identity
constructed from similar contradictory sources, but where Douglas shows
us a narrative of different, but woven-together realities, in Horn's
work meaning is always melting in and out of focus.

 

 

Roni Horn
Doubt by Water

Roni Horn's Doubt by Water
consists of 30 two-sided prints mounted on aluminium stands. The prints
show the face of an adolescent on one side, and water, or blocks of sea
ice on the other. A stuffed owl also features. As one goes through the
pictures, the obverse of the print seems to echo the gradually changing
expression on the person's face. Later, the situation changes, and one
is comparing the face to a slowly melting block of ice, then to the
repetition of the head of a stuffed owl.

 

  Doubt by Water fits into Horn's oeuvre
by way of its use of repetition, its narrative potential and its
tapping in to themes of identity and change. The installation itself
spills out of the rooms it's housed in, like meltwater seeping away
from a central block. Who is this person whose face is repeated across
these dispersed images,barely changing expression (but changing
perceptibly nonetheless)? This adolescent face is probably (I think)
male, but it's somewhat in doubt. Here is a person of a mutable age,
whose character is still relatively unformed. Pubescent, neither a
child nor an adult. The decidability of identity is as changable as the
ice or the play of light across our features: it may seem sharply
defined, but it melts away, it shifts, and we are left with something
other than what we started with.

 

  Doubt by Water is the work of an artist who has often used books as a way of presenting her work, as in Still Water or An Index of Water.
I am intrigued by the way in which she has used these stands to
distribute the experience of change, repetition and metaphor across a
physical space whose demarcation is uncertain, but which is activated
by the presence of the pictures in the stands. What are the dimensions
of the work? Unknown: the stands appear in several rooms. Is every room
affected? Is there a story being told? The work wants to support some
interpretation. Something appears to be happening. But what? Horn
offers a distributed play on repetition, change and the metaphor of ice
as an unknowable shape, always changing into flowing, changing water. Doubt by Water.

 

  Peter Greenaway

  Luper at Compton Verney

 

 

 

 

 

  Greenaway's Luper at Compton Verney is one of several manifestations of his ongoing project, the Tulse Luper Suitcases,
which has so far produced three films and several exhibitions.
Greenaway's ambitious plans for it include further film and television,
amongst other works.

 

  The material I have chosen was an installation at Compton Verney
, a large country-house gallery in Gloucestershire, which Greenaway
practically filled with a selection from the 92 suitcases the work
revolves around. These were accompanied by film and various sculptural
manifestations.

 

The number of
suitcases- 92- corresponds with the atomic mass of uranium. Greenaway
has described the project as “a personal history of uranium”, or,
alternatively “the autobiography of a professional prisoner”. The
suitcases contain collections of objects: dolls, letters, clothing,
books, etc. Many contain metaphorical elements: blood and ink, ice, and
so on. The contents suggest, variously, the autobiography mentioned,
and a survey of a significant part of European history ( which
coincides with the emergence of the modern world through the Holocaust,
the development of nuclear weapons and the global character that
emerged). The continuous reconsellation of these elements made by
viewing and the coincidence the viewer finds in one and another of the
possible stories being constructed points to the project’s overarching
form: as a system of memory. The suitcases are a mnemonic net: each
fragmentary node reaches out to others in myriad combinations. In this,
Greenaway’s collection resembles the table of elements: necessarily
finite, but nonetheless encompassing the past and present. The
suitcases also recall the many fragments of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.
Benjamin’s unfinished work sought to capture the vanishing world of the
Parisian street. It too depends on a network of fragmentary material
(here on thousands of index cards and notes) in its attempt to conjure
and preserve memory.

    

Does the net
accomplish its task? Can the suitcases contain the world? Criticisms of
structuralism shed critical light here: Luper’s world cannot be a
complete logic of the world. Whatever these nodal points represent,
their symbolic coherence is liable to deconstruction. We sense this
ourselves, in the slippery abduction of one pattern by another in our
attempts to understand what is being referred to. Such an effect is
Greenaway’s intention. The creation of formal systems is something that
reoccurs in Greenaway’s work, but they are seldom, if ever, intended as
a coherent whole. Rather, they are often an armature for a playful
echoing of the main text, frequently  threatening to overwhelm it.

 

The
spatiality of this installation reflects the work’s supposed
distribution through space and time (each suitcase representing a point
on Luper’s journeys). The suitcases are assembled here as a collection
of Luper’s life: one could imagine them as a series of chapters of his
life. As we make our way through the various rooms of the installation
we are in the process of creating, as if through a process of
investigation and reconstruction, a narration of Luper's life (or the
life of uranium, or any of the other possible 'lives' the installation
refers to). Who was Luper? He is a fictional character, but also a way
of exploring a loss of identity: he is not so much the sum of his
parts, as expressed here, as much as he is the vehicle for them. He is
lost in the superabundance of his own evidence and its significance.

If we compare the ice that Greenaway deploys as the contents of one of the suitcases, with that implied in Roni Horn's work Doubt by Water,
we are looking on the one hand at a substance whose properties are
reported and constrained in a system that gains its life from its
continual reexamination by the viewer as a table of combinatory
possibilities. This ice, is fixed, and does not melt. Rather its
capabilities (of freezing, melting, coldness) are signified and
deployed (albeit that we are invited to doubt the stability of the
signification so deployed). Roni Horn's ice, however, is under
observation. It melts. changes, flows. Roni Horn's ice is not part of a
collection, it is part of an observation. Isaac Julien's work Vagabondia shows another way of encountering a collection.

Isaac Julien
Vagabondia

 

  Vagabondia  (which
means 'realm of the vagabonds') is a video installation by the artist
Isaac Julien. Its setting is the bafflingly replete house of John
Soane, the architect. It's now a museum
, left to the nation by Soane, on condition that its original state not
be altered. It has remained a treasure house of Soane's mania for
collecting antique sculpture and assorted other material. The house
itself was designed and continuously altered by Soane to house his
collection. Consequently it is riddled with views through to other
spaces; there are many skylights and unexpected twists and turns. A
room built to house his collection of Hogarth paintings has fold-out
walls that double the space available for showing. One wall
unexpectedly swings open to give a view of another floor. All the
surfaces of the house are covered in bits of sculpture, paintings and
other evidence of Soane's collector's mania, This is the setting for
Julien's artwork. Julien's work has previously examined issues of
sexuality, race and identity. This is an opportunity for him to produce
a contemporary reflection on how these issues crop up in the colonial
collection of the Soane museum.

 

A reflection is literally what Julien offers. His installation is
set up with two touching screens, twinning each other as a mirror
image, which plays on the repetion and symmetry of forms echoing each
other across the visual space of the screen. This is also an
opportunity for Julien to show difference from this repetitive rule:
when it is not obeyed, we really notice it. It ruptures the harmonious
order of the reflection. Julien has set the the Soane house as a scene
which becomes an echo chamber of time and space for us, the viewers,
and for the people he shows us moving about inside. A black museum
attendant sees ghosts: sees aspects of the houses' history, sees,
perhaps, versions of herself. Soane, along with white and black
characters in contemporary eighteenth century and modern dress move
about in the museum, each involved in reflecting upon themselves. Soane
looks gloomily into one of the house's many distorting mirrors; a lady
puts on pearls, stroking them as if unfamiliar- as if this is a sort of
'dressing up'- something out of the ordinary. Julien also includes a
dancer figure, whose movements, choreographed by Javier de Frutos, seem
suited to the vagabond of the installation's title. This figure is the
representation of the intersection of the realm of the vagabond and the
ordered classical world the house aspires to. The vagabond is free, but
tortured. His movements flow where the house stands implacable, but he
is also prone to gestures of apparent agony. There is an interface
between these two worlds, but it is not an altogether comfortable one.
Our reflections, shown by Julien in the formal aspect of the
finstallation, and again through the narrative device of the museum
attendant's reflection, correspond to just such an interface. We
reflect the the history of the Soane museum in ourselves. It is a
wonderful kind of dressing up for all of us, white or black, but it is
the product, inescapably, of a colonial past that affects white and
black identities alike. This is a potentially productive interface, but
one fraught with attendant agonies: free, but tortured.

 

The vagabond/dancer bounces off the walls, flows through the
spaces, seems trapped by them. Are they a prison? (And this is a
strange prison, full of mirrors, unexpected spaces and communicating
passages). Is the chaotic served by the order of the classical space?
Or merely oppressed by it? Certainly they derive identity from one
another. The vagabond haunts the space: it is at once a true spirit of
the place and a being trapped in the space. It is surrounded by cool
stone, but it seems to speak more in the erotics of the flesh: dance
rather than sculpture.

 

The way in which Julien has employed a space to contain his
narrative, its historical interpretation, and its meditation on
identities are aspects of his practice which I relate to strongly.

 

 

 

  Andrew Eason

  The Remembrancer

 

 

 

 

The Remembrancer, like Luper at Compton Verney and Vagabondia,
is based on a collection set in a particular history. Like them, it too
unfolds an emerging identity that likewise questions what it means to
fashion an identity from the interpretation or critique of historical
sources. This same space for doubt is also seen in Doubt by Water and Illiers Combray. The Remembrancer
is based on a cache of original photographs from what was then British
India, taken in the early 20th-century. These photographs were signed
and numbered, the apparent record of a trip through the Indian
subcontinent, showing a wide variety of lanscape and urban subjects,
but steering clear of portraiture. A stray photo shows a man in
colonial khakis surrounded by cameras, tiffin tin and his Jack Russell
dog (who appears in several photographs as a dot amongst the gigantic
scenery of mountain passes and waterfalls). Accompanying these was a
letter from the Remembrancer of the Lord Mayor's office, inviting a man
(presumably the photographer) to the Lord Mayor's Banquet in 1933. I
began to imagine this event taking place, and began fashioning a story
around the idea of the photographer's reminiscences of his time in
India. He reconstructs the journey he took earlier in the career which
has culminated in this banquet, journeying again in memory. He imagines
a remembered place, one essentially unreal, though supported by his
photographs. In a sense he acknowledges this himself. His recollections
are of a place and time he cannot return to, cannot touch, one he can
only corrupt. He yearns to contact, but finally wants only to exorcise
his ghost from this remembered land.

We as British
viewers (of all ethnic origins) have a chance to reassess these images
and daydreams and reconstruct and revisit our attitudes to our shared
colonial past. Like Julien's Vagabond character, the photographer seems
to haunt an unreal world, one with which he continues to interact, but
one with whom his interactions are perpetually under reassessment. This
is no less true in our own world: our history is one which is
continually written, continually re-membered in the ongoing
interpretation and refashioning of our individual and collective
identities.

In the overtly character-narrated form of The Remembrancer
I am suggesting the permeability of stories: we can find the present in
the past, the past inside the present. Our contemporary meaning for
these pictures is not actually that spoken by my narrator, nevertheless
he is involved in a process of interpretation similar to our own, one
which ongoing.

---

What
has been striking in writing about this collection of work is the
different ways in which they have explored their common grounds of
identity, history and narrative. The two books shown use different
strategies to explore what are in some ways similar subjects. The
border between memory and reality and the journeys we make traversing
it are the subjects of Illiers Combray and The Remembrancer
alike. Yet despite similarities due to the book form of both, they
remain contrasting works of art. Douglas' work is wordless (in fact it
is accompanied by a soundtrack designed by Zoë Irvine) and there is no
overt narrator (perhaps perambulator
is the correct term). Yet there is a bracketing of the work by the
presence of the reader, and the figure of a dreaming subject occurs in
the book. There is a narrative force, a framing subject, despite the
work's subtlety in including this. My own work, The Remembrancer, is
quite specific in identifying a narrator who provides a textual
narrative. However, because he is clearly a character placed in a
historical context, whose views and presuppositions are presented as at
least as circumstantial as the imagery he reframes, I think that the
story he tells remains open to our fertile reinterpretation. There are
differences in metaphorical structure, too. Douglas' tapestry is not
the same as my journey. (Which seems to occur in a series of stacatto
sections. Perhaps, as the narrator consumes each new recollection, we
might come to see it as a banquet, with a series of courses.)
Nevertheless, we are both undertaking journeys into memory and
imagination.

The Remembrancer shares with Luper at Compton
Verney and Vagabondia, a grounding in events of historical and
political significance. But the three artworks are very different. To
speak only of their subjects, Julien's work with the historical
backgrounding of the Soane museum has a particular connection with
Black British experience and identity, and Greenaway's work seems cast
in the direction of presenting (at least in part) connections of Jewish
identity , with Europe's engagement with its post-war future defined
powerfully by nuclear weapons and its historical coincidence with the
establishment of the state of Israel. My own work with a collection of
material pertaining to  India does not reflect  any particular
involvement with Indian history and identity. Instead, I am approaching
issues of British (and in my own case White British identity).  None of
the three present their examinations of identity as a polemical
project.  All three share the characteristic of using the viewer's
reaction to a collection of artefacts to show how all identities are
continuously constructed, that all interpretations from history, and in
that sense all identities are potentially shared. At any rate all the
historical material we can muster cannot close the borders of identity
to traffic. The uncertainty of The Remembrancer is the uncertainty of an identity that cannot reliably reconstruct itself through its own extant stories.

This
open border is seen again in Helen Douglas' work and that of Roni Horn,
both of which reference identity in terms of interpretation. Other
works by Douglas refer to lansdscape as an influential force in
creating identity which would lend them greater coincidence with
Horn's. On the other hand, other works of Horn's feature more literary
references. As it is Horn's work Doubt by Water
is an installation, but it features certain pagelike qualities. Each
individual image is part of a whole. The sequencing of the images is
very much more fluid than that of a book, though there is a perceptible
sequence to them. Douglas' book, on the other hand, occupies its
virtual space. Its perambulations through the imagined and actual
worlds of Proust and the Proustian tourist are physically realised in
the very long accordion format of the book. (This feature, especially
with the sound piece that accompanies it, is very tunnel-like. It seems
very much a passageway, with incidental sounds from off stage informing
the space to either side, as well as the spaces of imagination and
remembrance they spark off). Horn's and Douglas' spatial references
have certain affinities with Julien's use of the  Soane  museum as an
enclosing  space and a collection.  Greenaway's space is defined
wherever he sets his suitcases down, and the collection referenced is
that which the suitcases themselves express and contain. The spatial
metaphor of The Remembrancer is less strong. The book itself presents
the narrative as an enclosed space, even going so far as to be sealed
with wax and ribbon in reference to the original invitation to the
banquet to which the photographer is invited. Within this, the
photographer's journey takes place 'on the road' in India, which is too
large a remit to be considered enclosing. Nonetheless it is an
exploration of the borderlands between memory and actuality:  the
enclosure in question is the one that defines him in actuality, in
identity and in society. Can he cope with his dreams and remembrances.

This exhibition Borders of Identity, shows
how several artists have found ways to explore the unclear differences
between states of identity: real, imaginary, remembered, historical,
literary and so on. They have found several ways to present their
meditations: as a tapestry, as a banquet, as a net, as a journey, as a
collection, a dance, a room, a house, a book.

Poisonwood Bible

Link: Poisonwood Bible
I just finished this book in order to be able to talk to the guy who runs the ferry I catch to work in the morning. What a great book. Far too complex and emotional for me to offer my opinions on, unfortunately. It was, for some time, popular with reading groups, which tended, to my contrary misanthropic side, to register as a mark aginst it. I'm glad I got over that prejudice to read it. Worth (I think) all the time I spent reading it when I should have been sleeping or working.

getting ready for LAB

I'm going to be at the London Artists' Book fair at the ICA tomorrow. I need to pack, obviously, but more important will be the scene-setting I want to do for myself. I want to use the event as a chance to make a few informal contacts with artists and survey work I think I will want to consider for possible case studies. Since my research is going to be about studio practice, I want to try to sound out how I will talk to artists about this aspect of things. It needs to be somewhat distinct from a regular critical discussion, and closer to something which looks at how ideas are managed and developed, nurtured even, through the enabling form of the book. My hunch, as I've written elsewhere, is that book artists all use books as an heuristic tool to get some conceptual leverage on their ideas. They give access to discrete qualities, particular sorts of media articulation and a full circuit of roles within the creative field. Anyway, I want to find a way to tal to artists about this, in so many words, to find out what it feels like to work on books from their point of view, and to what extent the y feel books are an enabling factor in their work.

It'll also be a chance for me to enjoy other's work and look at some of the best new books available. I've been feeling a need to return to my own work, in terms of quality and intensity, things having been on a bit of a commercial footing of late, and sacrificing something of the obsessive quality that makes the books tick. It'll be good to have this chance to be inspired.

Also, and no small thing, there'll be a chance to have a beer or two with some of my acquaintances from Wexford. I can't get too drunk (are you listening to me, Andrew?) but it'll be fun.

How Art Made the World

Link- How Art Made the World
I just finished watching the first three episodes of this series which was on BBC earlier on this year. I'd wanted to see it for a while because it seemed to tie in with some of the other reading and thinking I've been doing about artwork, intention and intentionality, consciousness, and artists' books. (Phew! It's a big net, and I'm tring to haul it in on my own).

I was delighted to see Vilanor Ramachandran turn up as the
presenter's very first talking head. Ramachandran's theories on the
neurological foundations of art are still a bit scientistic for my
liking when they appear in their 'raw' state, but the sorts of
modifications and elaborations on similar themes which crop up in some
things like Draisma
, Claxton, et al, are a bit more promising, and form a sort of
hovering, unconnected background to my preparations to try and talk to
book artists about what makes them tick and why they do books at all (
my latest addition to the motley family of theories clustering like
flies... is to do with Robert Darnton's essay What is the History of Books where
he talks about the circuit of  readers, producers and distributors that
make up the field of book history's study. It's a model of
interdisciplinary interaction that tries to bring together some of the
many strands of book history. I'm currently  involving it in a
spirited  mashup with Johanna Drucker's notion of the Artists' Book as
the 'quintessential 20thC art form and the bits of Ricoeur I know via
Kearney's book On Stories.)

Anyway, I'm straying rapidly... I enjoyed the show, indulged myself
in a couple of soliloquies on how I would differ from the presenter
about how art enunciates intention and creates and is created by
culture (which is, I say, a thing explicable as much as needs be by
natural sciences when we find suitable models, which allows the
application of bits of the modified Ramachandran-stuff, too.) Virtuous
circles all over the damn place.

I'm sorry, I seem to have triggered an avalanche of brain dandruff,
here. Show was fine. Wanted to find out more about some stuff and
wanted to argue about some.

Jonathan Caouette | Tarnation

Link: Jonathan Caouette | Filmmaker - Tarnation. Saw J. Caouette's film today... first of my new screenselect dvds

Worthwhile. Lots of edited together bits and pieces, great narrative vision and atmosphere, and a story worth telling. I'd wanted to see this at the cinema but never found the time. Vibrant, intense, alive, and tough too. I'm very much blessed with a supportive and easygoing family and background, but J.C.'s story is a lot grittier. It sparkles a bit more too, though. The schtick about this film is that it was put together on iFilm. That's great, and perhaps it explains the editing style, which is, I think, the most skilful aspect of the film, along with the narrative conceptualisation- of course, they're really part of the same whole- but the editing is very far in the forefront, very much the area of control whereas camera, lighting and the available material aren't really part of an intended effect, though they do produce a particular aesthetic. It did make me wonder about doing likewise, though I haven't made a film since a lighthearted 90-second effort about losing stuff called Personal Effects, which up and died after its first rejection. Cauoette is clearly made of more determined stuff. Excellent and unique.

DRAWN preamble

It turns out that DRAWN, which is the show currently on in Plan 9 in Broadmead in Bristol is only open from Wednesday to Saturday, so my initial thoughts on coming to the space and finding it locked were out of place. ("Hmmm. Perhaps this is some sort of ironic statement about how the dominance of multinational corporations in our marketplaces essentially "locks us out" from the available cultural capital in our cities...or maybe the invigilator has a hangover") Er... I just turned up on the wrong day.

It was a wee while before I realised this however, and, thinking
that they were probably just a bit tardy in opening up, I took myself
off to the nearby Super Sari Sari Philippine Supermarket and Café for a
cup of tea to see if someone would've turned up by the time I got
finished. Whilst there, I wrote some notes about how difficult it was
for artists to put on shows in cooperative or alternative spaces when
they usually had to invigilate them themselves. Most artists, for
better or worse, have other jobs that they need to take time out from
in order to do this, so a lot of shows probably end up subsidised by
people's holiday pay, despite the funding they sometimes receive. (This
was based on my assumption that the problem with the DRAWN show was
that noone could turn up. In any case, it's more of a residency thing
there, anyway). What I realised was that the blurb about DRAWN "looping
back to a 'perpetual state of becoming'" and "Eschewing the recent
emphasis of product over process" (what, in pop surrealism or
something?)- paralelled a shrewd bit of logistical planning. This
'perpetual state of becoming' is work that's done on site, and in the
space (the artists are relating to their environment), and it also
means that time spent on site is at least productive and that there is
a minimum of work to do preparatory to appearing (though of course
setting out a proposal is a bit of an effort in itself).

I wonder about the "process over product" thing espoused here. I'm
all for us trying to peer inside artists' processes, but I do wonder
how communicative this can be. One needs a specialised sort of
curiosity, I'd argue, to be curious about what's going on. Am I wrong?
Is this more zoo-like than I thought (with the artists playing the role
of the beasties). I noticed a sign saying "do not feed the artists"
which seemed to hope this would prove to be the case, but I have some
doubts that will need to wait for a proper look for me to develop
further thoughts on it.

I also wrote some notes up about Richard Serra, whose work currently
is all about channelling people through a space and having them travel
through it and around it: my interpretation was that the
"perambulators"- the viewers- were the ones doing the "drawing as a
verb" in this case. I have my misgivings about what we viewers, we
perambulators, of DRAWN will be able to draw from the show that's on
here, but I'll have to reserve judgement until I have a chance to see
the show, which in any case is set to become more and more interesting
as time goes on.

More on this when I have a chance to see the show.

Plan 9

Plan 9 is a temporary art space in Bristol's Broadmead shopping district. There's a new show there called "Drawn" which I'm planning to get over and see tomorrow.

I've been having a pretty quiet weekend after giving my class in book binding at Spike Island, but I'm going to get back to work tomorrow- work being my continued reading, and getting back to grips again with my PhD. Not thinking a great deal about artwork just now, but getting the teaching done clears my mind a bit.

Flying carpets, dissolving woodlands and French curses

I was able to get to the RWA (the Royal West of England Academy) in Bristol on the 22nd to see a show I'd seen some notices for some time ago, and thought I'd try to get to see before it ended up as another Fruitmarket scenario. An exhibition of the work of members of a group called "Lan2D" was on, which is a group working on art's relationship to the landscape, and the various cultural and philosophical offshoots of that. It's coordinated by Iain Biggs, who's one of my PhD advisors, and it features the work of several people I've been taught by or worked alongside, so there was a feeling of familiarity about the show which was only dented a little bit by having to pay to get in to see it.

It's been a while since I've been into the building, which was refurbished last year (parts of the interior are still looking a bit imperfect, but I think the way it is is sort of characterful, like the desk fans screwed to the wall to provide ventilation on the admittedly rare hot days).  There was quite a lot to see here. I'm not going to write about all of it, because I could go on for ages.

Mick McGraw's work first. I met him a couple of years ago when my friend Andrew Atkinson had a residency at Glasgow School of Art, where Mick McGraw runs Printmaking. I had a chance to review one of this books for the artists' books yearbook a couple of years ago, but despite my writing admiring things about his book, the copy got lost somewhere between my writing it and the printing. Mea culpa, most likely, but it's a shame. The book I reviewed, Three Fifths Fluid, seems to fit in well with the work I'm seeing here. There's a relationship with the Scottish landscape that's partly personal, partly historical. partly scientific (geological), and partly mythical, I think, too. The creation of myth around landscape is always a conflation of these different human approaches to the world, layering the experiences and thoughts of others onto the world we experience. This is a theme that comes up again and again throughout the exhibition, not just mythical, but all sorts of cultural overlays. In fact "Overlay" might have made a good essay title for the show. Returning to McGraw's work though, there were a series of large stretchers with letterbox-format photos and prints on them. These have a theme running through them- different images of the ancient remnant forests of Scotland. If memory serves, these are patches of forest that survive from a time before Scotland's forests were largely coniferous, so there are lots of different species of a less Scandinavian character. They're like little islands. I can't remember clearly enough to say what their relationship to glaciation is, but there is one, so that the forests themselves share the timescale of the land they're growing in: the events that shape the rocks around them have also shaped them. In a sense, there is a "culture" a relationship, anyway, here, that isn't human- it's an older relationship where the trees overlay (that word again) the land with their ecological culture. This changes, different events and forces drive away the old culture and replace it with the new (coniferous, human) cultures.

There are senses in which trees, forests, capture human culture, too. The growth rings of trees capture data about air quality, holding it under the trees' skin like a tattoo, and the macroscopic scale of the forest carries traces of habitation and industry. ( I can remember being in such an ancient remnant forest, years ago, where charcoal works had served a foundry. The forest held this archaeological data, too) The remnants hold out, are islands in a sea of change that can't be absorbed (like the early charcoal workings), waiting for the axe to fall- or more likely to be swept aside by the bulldozer. Well, maybe not. At least some of these sites are protected. They remind me of a passage in The Child That Books Built, by Francis Spufford. Spufford is talking about the character of the forest in story. They stand for wild places, inhuman, or maybe just soaked in primeval humanity. Spufford talks about the notion of an untouched piece of forest down a ravine somewhere in Britain where noone has ever set foot. I don't imagine that this could be true of our Ancient remnants, but they hold that sense of time just the same.

McGraw's photos and prints look at these patches of forest and individual trees, surveying land and tree together and showing the tenacity but fragility of the forests' hold upon the land. It's patchy, windswept, hemmed in by roads and civilisation. It's a rich resource though, a hidden archive, a holdout that has been overlaid so long but used so natively, that one might never know it was there.

I walked on, by now glad of the desk fans screwed to the wall. It gets rather warm in this gallery.

Paul Gough's work here consists of a series of studies for "Southern Region". Gough's work has been rooted in war imagery for a long time. Memorials and landscape and story come together in maps, grounds, structures and masses, weaponlike, fortresslike forms that rise up almost heraldically out of the ground. One of these pastels is a sort of x-ray of a tunnel, a sapper's hole with an entrance at one end and a crater at the other. The land bearing the traces of the event. And the traces marked and encoded here as a memorial of the event, but made unspecific. There's a symbolic and spatial shorthand here, the cutaway view, the x-ray, that simplifies and dramatises the event so that we can approach it, and the events it relates to, as a story.

I really started to get the sense of 'Overlay' as a theme, when I looked at Jane Millar's work. Several pictures, painted and pastelled- in, literally overlaid with lines of beadwork. Three sets of pictures: some based on pictures from a Mars Rover, one at least of a mountain scene, and several of a tornado. The concerns of these groups mesh with one another. In the "Mars" pictures, the desolate Martian surface hosts the proxy human gaze of the camera, taking the photo the picture is based on. There have been several points over the last couple of decades where evidence seems to have been found for the presence, at some point in history, of microbial life on Mars. We still don't know. But the Rover's job is to find out, and to send us back images of our new lands. They're already mythologized. The map of mars is covered with names, (Who gets to pick them?). The surface of Mars, depicted in this picture, at least, sports carpets. These carpets (products, traditionally, of desert cultures on Earth), lie in the dust of the Martian desert here. As the rover's lens pulls them into focus, they're literally embroidered onto the surface of the image. The strings of beads, themselves resembling mats of microbes, are overlaid onto the desert ground. The surface of the planet is covered in a culture like the surface of a Petri dish. The carpet implies both the presence of life, and the codifying presence of the human gaze, filling the land with stories.

The "Mountain" sequence, though recognisably Earthlike, shows a snowy mountain scene, with the summit of a mountain and a small Alpine settlement below, separated by a forest and the towering bulk of the mountain. The small house and the peak are embroidered. I'm starting to read the embroidered parts at this stage as a cipher for human presence. The picture’s called (I think) "So where are you now?". The options seem to be- either cosily ensconced in the lodge at the foot, or shivering at the top. There seems to be an implication of a 'phone conversation, so there may be a pair of mobile-equipped people, with one in each location, but which one's doing the talking, I don't know. Again there's a sense of human culture moving across the landscape here- at the summit and the foot of the mountain. No in-between here, only destinations, with the invisible words communicating across the distance. Beamed across the landscape's intervening darkness and confusion of the natural world, just as the Martian carpets fly across the vacuum between the planets. Both are digital, both quantizing the world into short, separated statements. The pixilation of the beads recapitulates the "pixilation" culture imposes on the world.

Finally, there's the "Tornado" pictures. These look like weather, with the pastelled cone of a tornado whipping across a horizon just out of frame, or a square the colour of overcast, stormy sky. Here the beadworks seem less human, I think. There's a sense in which they resemble a very definitely human overlay- systems of pressure and ionisation, metaphors for understanding the forces at play in this natural phenomenon. There's also a sense in which they portray (and so I suppose, to that extent, they still are a cultural portrayal) actual patterns of pressure and charge. There may be channels for lightning here, there may be hanging sheets of charges locked into the atmosphere. There is dust swept up into the vortex, or perhaps, here amidst the destruction, the threads of human culture are swept up and separated- perhaps the embroidery we see here is that of a pattern being torn apart and redistributed by nature. There's an irony at work here- the closer we get to a depiction of a peaceful, habitable landscape ( From Mars, down to the arable plains that Tornadoes frequent), the more violent the image becomes. Mars is peaceful: our gaze weaves complexity here, and we can hold out on the rugged slopes of a mountain, but at home on the farm everything's gone wrong. The best we can see here is the gaze of scientists trying to hold the smallest ideas in place amidst the maelstrom. I'm not sure if this is intentional on Millar's part (nor, of course, am I sure of any of it- I am merely working my own embroidery across the surfaces her work provides), but there seems a strong comment about where our intelligence turns its gaze, its effort, its humanity. To Mars, or to shanties and trailer parks?

Sian Bonnell's "Serving Suggestions" are photos of food made up as landscapes. Again we've got the humanisation of landscape going on. Here, perhaps literalized in agricultural terms: a field could raise so much beef or so many potatoes. A chalk cliff is a face of mashed potato fringed with the green of peas. The cultural significance of food (bully beef for Britain, boiled beef and carrots to see us through) is played on, with the humour of the images patching into the nostalgia their depictions suggest. The raw material of the land is transformed through enculturation into the "cooked" material of the landscape, here quite literally.

Iain Biggs' work is represented here too. Quite a lot of his work recently has centred around material collected and inspired by Borders history and culture. It's a bit too close to my own projects in Whistling Copse for me to see it very clearly. Biggs has approached the material from a number of different angles, mythical and historical and even musically examining the subject, which shines out cryptically.  There are series of related images forming a semantic field that tells us something over time and examination, like the interpretation of x-ray crystallography that allowed researchers to interpolate the structures of molecules. The images themselves are like unknown hieroglyphs, hovering on the edge of meaning, but with a definite syntactical relationship with each other. My own approach to similar material ( at the moment everything's a bit quiet on this front) has been more literal, possibly more textual. There may be something to be said for this less literal imaging, something which I'll be thinking about over the next few days.

Dan Shipsides' work comprised a number of photos of large, old looking boulders somewhere in France, and a video piece. The video showed people climbing on these rocks. Not easy climbs by the look of them, but one which can be taught, codified, tried against and eventually overcome. A climber tries and fails, tries and fails, tries and finally makes it. Climbers falling the few feet to the ground utter FRENCH CURSES as their grip gives way. Diagrams appear on the screen, showing the diagram of the climb: climber's notes and the special marks indicating holds and positions appear on the roughly depicted anatomy of the boulders. It made me think of one of the first stories I read, of the discovery of the caves at Lascaux by children. These boulders, so old and French, seem to have been 'peopled' long long ago, so worn and smooth are they, presumably by some geological or water effect, but seemingly by being immersed in the intensity and relentlessness of human habitation and human regard for so long. Not to mention being scrambled over by wiry French guys with moustaches. There's a sense in which the access we normally make with our gaze/intellect to the landscape, is here dramatised physically. Rather than tracing a contour or balancing along the line of a shadow by eye, our protagonists here are physically engaging with the big rocks, enduring the agony and the ecstasy of getting to the top the hard way. This is paralleled in the text which come up on screen, a long text of Cézanne addressing Basquet ( I'm sorry to say I don't know who Basquet is). The gist of the text is about the difficulty of capturing images of the real world, the difficulty of addressing one's gaze, one's concentration, to the subject just right: "if I pass too high or too low- bang", paraphrases a passage. As if Cézanne is shuffling along the ledge himself, gripping tightly but trying to stay nimble. Even the end of the ascent is difficult. The final few feet over the curving lip of the edge are deceptive- finishing the climb and finishing the picture are difficult.

Another part of the gallery was showing the work of Michael Garton, a member of the RWA who died recently, and whose later work was concerned with landscape. The standout pieces for me were a pair of diptychs with a high horizon, showing a piece of forest in summer and winter. I met Peter Reddick, the printmaker, as I was looking, and found out from him that Garton would go to a place and leave his equipment there for a long time, as he visited and revisited, looking and looking and looking, climbing slowly towards the picture. They're monumentally observed. The depth and form of the trees, stacking themselves off towards the horizon with twigs flaring and boskiness rampant, is realised far better than any photo could in this subject. There's a depth of formal realisation here that takes on the formidably abstract drawing problem presented by a bunch of trees and works with it on terrifically brave terms. These images interrogate the landscape closely, and above all, personally. Although the style and handling couldn't be different, I'm reminded of Ivon Hitchens, toiling away in his wood, trying to capture something of the place. What I think Garton found, and which is here in his work, is a kaleidoscope of change and fixity, painting that is firmly realistic, but goes so deeply into the seeing that it becomes abstract. Working in these spaces, returning and returning, and getting closer and closer to the land itself. Imagine returning and having to clear away the ivy twining about the easel.

Like all the other work I saw that day, there was a human gaze working on a landscape, finding there not only the plants and animals and earth, but the dreams of everyone else as well.

On Carrión

Ulises Carrión's The New Art of Making Books first appeared in 1980. It's a sort of manifesto for artists' books, made up of a series of statements contrasting the "Old Art" with the "New Art". It's split into a number of sections; What a Book Is, Prose and Poetry, The Space, The Language, Structures, and The Reading. It has a slightly polemical style, comparing the virtues and values of the new art to what are portrayed as the staid, static, didactic values of the old art. In this, Carrión is poising his arguments on the new art's ability to be inclusive, to be intersubjective- not to be dominated by its' author, not to be didactic. There is a thread running through this piece about intention, a notion which is one of those I'm using to examine artists' books myself. I have some of my own ideas about how it can give us a way to understand artists' books, and I have some other reading to bring to my relationship to it. However, though I've known about Carrión's text for several years, I only read it through for the first time a few days ago. I'm going to set out some remarks on it now to try to establish my relationship to some of the points in it.

Having read it, I think I can agree broadly with Carrión about the much greater role of interpretation in creating meaning in artists' books, (the New Art) and with the importance of structure in creating a space within which this interpretation can take place. However, Carrión implies a shift in the expressive qualities of media embodied in artists' books that I don't think I could agree with. I certainly see a sea-change in the role of the reader here, but stories, narratives, have always had an implicit structure that is made explicit in artists' books. Artists' books make concrete the metaphorical space of reading, they make concrete the containment of an artwork's notions, they make concrete the elaborate array of intention the artist is working with. I'm inclined to view the artists' book as having the properties of concretizing the metaphors that artists' use all the time to deal with the notions they manipulate to produce their work. Artist's work is informed by strategies: techniques of thinking about and doing their work: these are metaphors and the heuristic yield they produce. Which is to say, ways of seeing and doing. I think they have always been part of creativity and that books simply make some of it more obvious, more self-aware, more self-referential. Carrión would, I think on the basis of his essay, disagree with me, in my saying that there are- and always have been- multiple ways to read the old art, and that this is something that is multiplied and enhanced in artists' books, rather than being a different experience on the order of a paradigmatic shift, as seems to be implied here.

"A book is a sequence of spaces"

Comparisons with metaphors of memory come to mind: memory as a sequence of quasi spaces, with the artists' book making this metaphor concrete, and signifying consciousness' traverse of memory in the form of narrative recollection. The metaphor of the book form recapitulates the convolutions of recollection. St Augustine's remarks on memories as being

"retained in the great storehouse of the memory, which in some indescribable way secretes them in its folds".

Introspection, recollection, both take place in these quasi spaces: the reader has always had to construct them to understand the plot of a story or the abstract encounters of argument, played out on inner stages. Carrión's assertion that the book is "a series of spaces" fits well into this traditional metaphor, with the book transmitting the metaphor in concrete rather than strictly narrative form. The book is a series of constructions, too, each unfolding and blossoming from the last, like a series of logical connections, or the tangled connections of brain cells that must ultimately be the keepers of such spaces, in all their richness. Augustine himself wondered at this, holding in his mind the awesome scales of mountains and rivers and stars, all contained within the circumference of his own skull.

"Each of these pages is perceived at a different moment- a book is also a sequence of moments"

Again, much as memory unfolds as an episodic rebus, so books unfold their constructions in a sequence of representations. Books, as I have said, could be considered as similar to the model of memory as a storage space. To simulate the unfolding of memory, or of introspection of other sorts, we would want books to enfold a series of relations, a series of moments, happening in time as well as in space. As Carrión says, a book is "a volume in the space", it is also a span of time.

"Written language is a sequence of signs expanding within the space; the reading of which occurs in the time.

"A book is a space-time sequence."

But just as our memories and our store of impressions and thoughts remain available for us for purposes of introspection, just so are books: holding patterns, temporary constructions of idea. Where memory brings with it attachments, trails, traces of other recollections associated with what we have sought, the book will do the same, its allusions reaching beyond itself. In our minds our memories are in constant flux, each recollection, fading, changing, attached to new chains of recollection, altering and shifting. It is the same with all representations. We can look on memory as a representation, too: it takes consciousness to turn the biology of memory into meaning. And as for books, Michel Foucault, in The Archaeology of Knowledge says this,

"The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. "

Just like memory, our book is part of life, subject to the same stresses and strains, the same changes in meaning. Our questions about what the book means are directed in two directions: what was the author's intention? And, what does it mean to me? We might ask our memories how sure we were of their accuracy, and try to be aware of the quality of our introspection in a similar manner. Books need be no more didactic than memory: we may trust it or not, we may interpret it one way or another, just as we wish. And this interpretation is, argue philosophers like Ricoeur or Kearney, a continuous process, one which constantly refigures identity and relationships to memory and outside materials. Identity itself is subject to emplotment, to entanglement in the stories (and, I think, to the structures of representation at large) which embody human culture. Artists' books make some of these processes concrete, they set out metaphors of interpretation and creation in their construction: in this they do something ordinary artifacts do not. They ask us for interpretation, and they model our processes of introspection in a structure.

"To make a book is to actualize its ideal space time sequence by means of a parallel sequence of signs, be it verbal or other."

The sequence is a sequence of relationships in syntagmic and paradigmatic array. This is the "plot" envisaged by Peter Brooks in his work Reading for the Plot: it is at once a series and a space. It is a series of events in syntagmic order, and a series of allusions and echoes in time in the paradigmatic order. And it is also a space: the arena within which the events take place. Read, take part in this story, and your life is part of this plot, the space and time of it are those of your life. Our relationships with plot are sympathetic because we feel that they are part of us, part of our memory and our future. This is because we recapitulate the space of the plot in our minds, in the space of introspection, to work with, to percieve and understand the ideas of the plot. Books actualize the space of the plot, making concrete the whole of the work, reinforcing the structured entity that is the work, holding, keeping, containing, enveloping.

"In the new art (of which concrete poetry is only an example), communication is... intersubjective, but it occurs in a concrete, real physical space- the page...

"A book is a volume in the space

"It is the true ground of the communication that takes place through words- it is here and now."

Books are both physical and refer to a mental space. The "ground" they offer is a concrete metaphor, made of paper and binding, of the semantic field that "grounds" all representations. As Foucault notes, and I have repeated above, such a ground is slippery at best: the ever-shifting labyrinth of allusion and connotation makes any construction into a shadow-play, lit by ever-changing lights. Nonetheless, we are talking here of temporary structures ( a notion I have brought into my writing before, and one which seems to gel with similar notions of social constructions (John Searle) and presuppositional frameworks. These are spaces to enact, to represent intention. The similarity to the "inner stage" of introspection, the "storehouse" of memory, remains striking. They are places where we can explicitly examine relationships between notions. When we stop to think of the implications of a scene in a novel, we jury-rig one in our mind's eye. Artists' books do something similar with the ideas they contain. They are spaces where our incredulity about the author's intention is set aside, where we pursue the meaning of the construction against the odds that we may never discover what it means. But simply trying to do so, simply understanding this freedom is, Carrión says, to understand the work,

"In the new art the reading itself proves that the reader understands."

Understands, that is, that one has been drawn into a perfomative space.

"In a book of the old art words transmit the author's intention.That's why he chooses them carefully.

"In a book of the new art words don't transmit any intention; they're used to form a text which is an element of a book, and it is this book, as a totality, that transmits the author's intention."

I would disagree with what Carrión seems to be saying about the "Old Art" here. He seems to be saying that there is no other order to the old art: that the transmission of intention occurred solely through the words, and that reading them creates no intersubjective occurrence. I would try to argue that one's involvement in reading is always intersubjective, and I would carry on with the ideas of emplotment of several paragraphs earlier. I would also allude to the performative space that exists literally in artists' books, and point to their function as a concretization of the metaphors of introspection. This introspection is going on in the old art, too. Reading demands it. Nonetheless, the new art makes it more explicit, and the new art turns in on this process consciously: it may not be about intersubjectivity and all that, but the subjects presented in an artists' book do presuppose a particular awareness in their readers, "the reading itself proves that the reader understands". I wouldn't draw a line between the old art and the new, here, though.

The book is a holistic entity, not a textual communication. How does it stack up against a notion like "story" which is performative, and intersubjective wherever it occurs. Kearney's book On Stories, is all about how they permeate our societies and our minds, indeed, they form the core of how we describe ourselves to ourselves- we have a life-story, after all. Story, too, is in the here and now, continually shuffling between teller and listener, author and reader, history and the present, and just as continually shuffling the meaning and the identity of all of these. What books can do is like the form of the story: they can contain it. Books can suggest a certain structure, a certain way of assembling the story, a certain metaphor for examining the notions contained, and an associated heuristic yield from that way of thinking. Bruno Bettelheim writes of "The Uses of Enchantment": how stories provide templates and ideas for dealing with life, for thinking about identity, for working-through one's emplotment in the real stories that comprise our human world. Artists' books place artists' work within similar boundaries, which may, as Foucault points out, be ever-shifting, but which allow the artist to work-through the story of their work as a maker of ideas.

Phantom Work

Today has been one of those days occupied by turning around in various directions wondering what task to take on. Thus it was I found myself reading all about phantom limbs and bits of neurology and cognitive science (Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain, a bit of a sidetrack that has come out of my recent reading on imagination and the unconscious. I feel that I've probably come a bit too far away from my central reading at this point, though Draaisma's Metaphors of Memory has been a really excellent, highly recommended read with material on the epistemology of representations as they impinge on the phenomenalism of the senses. And how these representations are modified by their media and the metaphors that grow up around them. But it's time to get back to artists' books- so Tuesday will see me getting back to Artists' Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook. There are already some notes I want to draft about Ulysses Carion's use of "intention" in his writing, so I'll be posting about the book shortly.

Nuts

Nuts.

An Aside, the exhibition curated by Tacita Dean finished on Tuesday. I'd really have liked to have seen it. I wonder if it will end up anywhere else, like the soon-to-be-reopened Arnolfini for example. That would be good. ( I hope the Arnolfini can resurrect its once mutually beneficial relationship with the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. They used to co-publish at one time. At any rate, I've missed this show here in
Edinburgh. I've had a sort of on-off relationship with the Fruitmarket:
as a teenager I used to really love the shows they had here which I
would come to in all naivety with no inkling at all about what was
happening, and maybe a more honest reaction (sometimes I have to
remember to laugh at the funny stuff these days- or maybe it's just not
as funny as it thinks it is). As an art student I used to come and look
at the shows more carefully, trying out my critical claws, and feeling
more detached from the program. I feel that things have drifted more my
way again, now. The last couple of years has seen me try and place work
in their bookshop- unsuccessfully. This rankles with me because the
books produced by some of my contemporaries are there, people I've
shared exhibitions with, people whose work I've reviewed for goodness'
sake. The truth of the matter is that it's a production problem. My
books are made to order, pretty much, and I don't have the
wealth/credit/patience with the byzantine strip-the-willow of arts
funding to finance a larger, cheaper edition in more recognisably trade
materials. I'm not inclined to believe that the quality of my work is
in doubt, and the representation of artists' books there is wide enough
that I don't think I'm offending against a house style too egregiously.
One day- sigh. In the meantime I have books to make, which is the main
thing, even if I end up turning into a sort of Emily Dickinson and
keeping them to myself. I did get to see one of the pictures from An Aside
as the gallery assistants toted it downstairs. It was a landscapey
screenprinty sort of thing in muted greys and greens, sort of like
Sigmar Polke on tranquilisers. I looked up from having a coffee and it
sailed past into the darkness where there was packing and dismantling
going on. One is tempted to look on it as some sort of ominous metaphor
for my fitful imago of a career, but such melancholic entertainments
are probably not a good habit to encourage. I was more successful
seeing some of the other shows I had set out to see.

My memories of Edinburgh's City Art Centre
include two spectacular shows they had there in the 1980s: The Gold of
the Pharaohs and The Emperor's Warriors were massive, blockbuster
things of great prestige that filled the whole building and brought the
whole city filing in. I've not lived in Edinburgh for a long time, and
these exhibitions bask in the rosy glow of childhood recollection, but
I can't recall such shows having been there since. Not that the Centre
has an empty calendar. Far from it. But the shows it has hosted, whilst
of value in their own right, and I'm sure many were excellent, don't
seem to have measured up to the splendour of the Centre's heyday. It
was nice to go back there: it must be five years since I've crossed the
threshold to do anything other than have a cuppa at their excellent
cafe. However, there were three shows here today which held my
attention.

On the lower floors a show about 150 years or so of Scottish Art was
set up, so the place was full of colourists and vaguely arts and
crafts-y Glasgow Style stuff and neatly done Kailyard
bucolic scenes with nifty brushwork. The temptation, almost inevitable
with a show like this is to attempt a generalisation, to try to take a
reading on some sort of national character, whatever that might be.
It's not as absurd as all that, although far more fleeting and
changeable a thing than the sort of lumbering ur-style that lets one
say "The Scots are a dour race of farmers". Whilst this might have
certain useful things to say about Scotland's history and prove a
useful stereotype to deviate from, it's far easier, in this show, to
track the waves of different influences and the emergence of different
schools. Each of these, subtly modified and interpreted in the hands of
individual artists, might tell us something about what was happening
then. To chance a metaphor, looking at this show, we can see a shifting
kaleidoscope (Scottish invention, by the way),
lots of the material is shot through with undercurrents of class
awareness, even sentimentally, and a certain interest in national
identity (though this may reflect the purchasing criteria of the
various public bodies doing the buying more than anything else). It's
difficult to make anything much out from the patterns this kaleidoscope
produces, but one can see certain bits of material floating by
repeatedly.

While I was sitting in the Fruitmarket cafe before this show, I was
looking around me and seeing various books blaring their titles at me,
including one about "New York Architecture". One seems to see New York
everywhere, and sitting at my brushed steel table, sipping a cappuccino
and listening to the be-bop the cafe chaps have put on for our
education and dubious enjoyment, I can see a certain amount of
aspiration to an international style represented by New York here. Paul Gray's show up the road at the Stills
shows how the Heart of Midlothian football ground, Tynecastle, shows
how a place's character can be deliberately swathed in the charmless
but slick high standards of style associated with, say, a football
boardroom or an arty cafe. What would the place be like if it were not
for these universal influences? I don't decry global styles or global
culture outright. I just wish it was a bit easier to modify, a bit less
based on inalterable materials and unhackable structures. The joy of a
universally available technology like printing, for example, is that
itís different in different countries: different technologies,
different inks, different artwork, emerging from the one particular
understanding of the technology that arises in that one place. Can one
imagine a national style of computer operating system emerging? But
perhaps itís too early to tell. Maybe different people will see fit to
use the new tools the new styles, the availability of blond wood and
brushed steel to do their own thing. Meanwhile, the same sort of
espresso machine on this countertop continues to multiply across the
face of the earth.

On another floor of the Art Centre, an exhibition about the new
Bibliotheca Alexandrina was doing its thing. I was disappointed in
this, essentially a large corporate display with the expected custom
display stands and promotional videos. The building itself had
something to say, and this exhibit is primarily one about the
architectural design of the place. As to the history of the library of
Alexandria and their aspirations for the future, only the most tired
and anaemic trot through the past and future is possible with this sort
of exhibition ( a couple of art objects commissioned for the building
are trapped in amber, entirely ineffectual). The new library itself is
a sort of giant tilted circular tablet, bout the proportions of an
extra strong mint 200m wide and tilted at an angle of about 15 degrees.
The circumference that sticks up as a result is one huge wall, which is
covered in a gigantic stone relief covered in alphabets and writing
systems from all places and times. This is just about the only
interesting or informative thing in the show. A shame, really. Finding
out about the struggle for the library's emerging identity might have
been fascinating, but one can see the deadening swathes of corporate
homogenaeity falling in great drifts over the project. However,
libraries at least have the virtue of being purpose built, and use will
soon batter the place into some sort of character.

More about Looking Both Ways, One For All and Hateball later.

 

Douwe Draaisma's Metaphors of Memory

I'm reading Metaphors of Memory by Douwe Draaisma just now. I was excited to hear about it. I had been reading a couple of other vaguely related books about consciousness and media: Guy Claxton's The Wayward Mind is about how the changing consciousness of humans can be reconstructed from the various artworks (including books) left behind by particular cultures. Claxton look at the various ways people have addressed the idea of  'the unconscious' (to use the general term that Claxton employs), so I might describe Claxtons work as relating to Metaphors of Memory by renaming it Metaphors of the Unconscious. The other book is Francis Spufford's The Child that Books Built, which is an examination of the formation of certain aspects of contemporary consciousness (as exemplified by the expressed contents of Mr Spufford's head) through reconstructing the child's passage through the books they grow up with. As one might expect, various psychological references emerge, amongst the most telling being those to Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. Both books include material about how books themselves affect and reflect consciousness. For Claxton, books contain material that are the expressions of Romantic or Freudian (to give two examples) images of the unconscious. For Spufford, learning through books of the concept of the city or the forest, they are the building blocks in fathoming an extended understanding of the world. In both Spufford and Claxton's works, books are channels through which new ways of understanding the world and the mind are expressed.

Draaisma's Metaphors and Memory is a history of the ways in which memory has been expressed and explored through different metaphors. These metaphors are often linked to the emerging technologies of the time, be they wax tablets, books, the discovery of phosphorous with its 'light-recording' properties, or those of photography, and so on. Perhaps the most useful areas for me are the sections on Draaisma's approach to metaphor itself and the section on The Book as Memory, the Memory as Book.

In his section on metaphor, Draaisma explores various definitions of what metaphor is, starting with classical definitions and moving towards more contemporary definitions that describe metaphors as the combining of two semantic fields. (Ironically giving us new ways to think about metaphors by employing new metaphors for their description). Draaisma also pays attention to the heuristic properties of metaphor: that is, how the modelling of metaphor gives us clues in the production of hypotheses. This is how, for example, metaphors used to explain neurological functions set up models that inform hypotheses bridging gaps in our knowledge about the positively observable mechanisms of neurological function. My interest in Draaisma's work has been to see if I can use any of his ideas to inform my own about artists' books. It seems to me that the heuristic function of metaphor- its tendency to form useful structures that can enable further hypothesis- has something in common with the heuristic function of working-with-books. In my view, this doesn't simply stop short at being a comparison between two heuristic tools. I think that there are further correspondences too. I have written at other times about how artists using books are using them to solve problems of practice, amongst which is the problem of the representation to oneself of what one is up to, what one's work means. It seems to me that the form of the book as an enclosure, as a narrative, as a structure, is not only a physical medium with certain properties, but also a condition of practice that artists could employ as a metaphor for their work, with the heuristic benefits that accompany metaphors. The identity of being a book artist, then, sets up the possibility of structures of identity that belong to the metaphorical structure of the book. What do I mean by these 'metaphorical structures'? Briefly, and obviously, the book is a physical enclosure, but it is also an enclosure for ideas. It is a sequence of pages, but it is also a sequence of metonymic and metaphorical relationships- a plot both physical and temporal and narrative-  that the artist can exploit. It is possibly a form which combines different media, and which combines different roles for the artist, and these too have internal echoes where the artist can compartmentalise and cross-fertilise different parts of practice. I've characterised Claxton's book as Metaphors of the Unconscious, Draaisma's work is entitled Metaphors of Memory. I might characterise my interest in artists' books as an interest in them as a Metaphor of Practice. Artists frequently discuss their practice in terms of strategies: ways in which they see their work, organise their work, challenge themselves. I think that each of these strategies will be found to be explained via a metaphor, whose mechanisms and heuristic potential are exploited to some extent by the artist.

Draaisma also includes a section on the book's own heyday as a metaphor for memory. Memory's place in terms of what was regarded as intelligence is discussed as well. In St Augustine's day, memory is regarded as the wellspring of intelligence, with imagination taking a back seat- a reversal of our contemporary evaluation. Nowadays we depend to a great extent on external means of capturing and organising memory and prize flexibility , quickness of mind and 'inspired genius' most highly. It was not always thus, as Draaisma's extensive quotes of people praising the memory of St Augustine attest. Contrasted to this, the intelligence Einstein exhibits is far more to do with originality and imagination. Succinctly, Draaisma puts the difference in views of memory thus; in St Augustine's day we would say 'I must remember this so that I can write it down.' Today, we would be more likely to say that we would write something down in order to remember it. Draaisma notes the transience of human memory. The magnificence of St Augustine's mind would have died with him if it were not for his writings and those which attest to his brilliance. Books harbour and preserve that brilliance to an extent. In an age where generations succeeded one another far more quickly than is today the case, a book- most likely a family bible, would span many generations and form a link between one's ancestors and one's own time. The book is a metaphor of continuity, and a very real ark through time for the intelligence of the writer. Draaisma tracks the decline of the book's cachet too, as they became more widespread and less valuable, and as the wilderness of writings became vaster and vaster, more secular and more various. I don't entirely agree with the simplicity of this diagnosis. There is still something about books which gives one cause to believe their contents will be preserved somehow, even if only temporarily. This accompanies the physical setting-aside that enclosure within covers gives, and, I think, cannot be wholly explained by the book's physical seperateness. They are still arks of intention to some extent, an idea I hope to examine in greater detail as my research progresses.

Draaisma's other chapters (so far- I'm about half way through) deal more explicitly with various metaphors of memory that occur as new technology and paradigms of though sweep through culture. I think that my main interests in his book have already been addressed, and that further reading will only inform my ideas about memory, rather than about books. I've also benefited from his early discussion of metaphor. However, I will continue, since there are chapters on, for example, the metaphor of memory as photography that will be of interest simply for their relevance to visual culture at large.

Francis Bacon: Portraits and Heads

I have a long(ish) personal acquaintance with Baconís work. First introduced to his work at school by Mr Turpie, my art teacher, because of his painterly ways and his ways of organising space- still things that are relevant to my ways of producing work now- I have been looking at Bacon's work since I was 15, This is the first time I've had a chance to see a large number of pictures by him at once. I think this is a highly successful show. There must be some 50-70 odd pictures here, along with photographic materials from Bacon's studio- scraps, folded and torn and paint-besmeared. Working material, of course, rather than jewels from the dragon's hoard, but one can't help seeing a certain amount of theatricality and disingenuousness in Bacon's mounds of paint and scraps, the painter himself squatted amongst his misunderstood midden. As fascinating as theatre too, these thumb-folded, torn remnants that have seen action at Bacon's hand. As have his subjects. One feels Bacon's relationships to these sitters strongly. For all that there is a depersonalising undercurrent to Bacon's reducing the figure and the face to torrid chunks of swimming-in-and-out-of-focus meat, one nonetheless is under no illusions when Bacon knows the people he is portraying. It is as if the violence of Bacon's methods of depiction depend on his knowing them well enough to know the meaning of his transgression. And it's not all violence, by far. There are tender portraits here too, where the dissecting and refashioning gaze that gives us Bacon's howling popes can also pass across the face of a lover, sometimes elegaic, sometimes joyfully. Bacon is never triumphant. There are no pictures here that announce his mastery of the depiction. He is successful, even in his own words, at coming closer to his portraiture, but it remains an approach to grasping an evanescent impression.

There are images that don't depend on Baconís recognition of the figure, and indeed, he's always shoehorning in resemblances to other, impersonal, sources and studies. Bacon's series Man in Blue is here too, and whatever resemblances there may be to lovers lost and found, known or fleeting, there is above all the sense of a stranger in these pictures. Perhaps they are linked to people Bacon knew, but they are those people made strange, made once again into strangers. The Men in Blue lean against bars in the dark, their suits supporting heads that testify to Bacon's handling. They are marginal likenesses, smears that coalesce slowly and in the corner of the eye into faces one might know. This is a lonely nightclub, with this man's pale face alone in the darkness. The bar is a place intended for meetings and conviviality, a man alone because he has remained stock still like a man getting a shoeshine in an early photograph, visible only because he has stayed still. The man in blue is lost, and perhaps he is also a man whom Bacon has lost. Still there, at a bar somewhere, waiting for god knows what. The same might have been said of Bacon.

Another room includes a late self-portrait. A triptych of 1979 shines with mirror light. The theatre of Bacon's studio again, with the mottled disc of his great mirror swinging into view for us as we contemplate this work. Bacon's face, still, examined. His eyes do not meet ours. The face holds together, not energetically lensed and smeared like many other pictures, but held almost tenderly in the coolness of the painter's gaze. The blurb accompanying this picture says something about the emphasis on bone structure, on the skull. I don't see this. But a different memento mori does seem to be there. This face seems to house an intelligence that is trapped, that cannot comprehend the way the light reflects back from this casing, the sort of meat that Bacon has been fastidiously seeing through for years. He doesn't look at home.