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.

Reading room, Bristol Reference Library

Reading room, Bristol Reference Library, originally uploaded by aesop.

From a set of photos I took for the forthcoming book on the library, which celebrates its centenary this year.

The Amber Room

A question on, of all things, University Challenge, last night, was about The Amber Room, the famously lost treasure-room made of gilt-backed amber. It was a present to the Russians from the Prussians, and disappeared following WWII during which it was looted by the invading Germans. Various theories exist claiming that the work does or does not any longer exist.

It seemed to me that it might make a fine starting point for a book. Given my recent reading on hermeneutic analysis and the ways in which hermeneutics approaches objectivity, I thought something examining the history and possible continued existence of an object seemingly 'lost in time' (a thing I see in a lot of Stephen Poliakoff's films) would be an interesting way of exploring issues of being in an artwork. I propose not to produce something documentary so much as a poetic exploration. This would sit alongside my current projects; the 'windmill' project, 'Whistling Copse' and the version of 'The Three Ravens"

blogbits

I've decided not to use Typepad's own reading list plugin anymore, since I already use LibraryThing, which has more useful bits and pieces, and can generate an almost identical RSS feed which now appears to your left. Less successful has been my attempt at using my iScrobbler list to generate a list of recently-listened stuff. The feed updates rather sporadically and there's the combined vagaries of iTunes, iScrobbler, LastFM and, finally FeedDigest to contend with. The only wonder is that anything gets through all that at all. I wish I could produce feed of individual sets in Flickr, too: that way I could use them as gallery pages. In fact, there's an example of a lovely gallery system running off of Slideroll, which now allows you to drag and drop stuff straight from your Flickr account. One day soo, I hope Geoff, slideroll's creator, will make it possible to post the flash interface onto other pages.

Update: he has! Also, the Flickr import now includes sets. Good work Slideroll. Carry on!

Great website

Dino Felluga's Introductory Guide to Critical Theory does an outstanding job of presenting material on various linked critical disciplines (Gender & Sex, Marxism, Narratology, New Historicism, Postmodernism and Psychoanalysis) and covers lots of ground on many of the most significant figures in the various fields, whilst making explicit links between them. Each field has a taxonomy, and the occurrences of the words therein are all linked back to their explanation.

I've yet to see another public-accessible website that does such a good job of expounding these fields, and while it claims to be introductory, I learned a lot in my first couple of visits, which certainly won't be my last.

Holden's silence

a slideshow of the images used in my book Hoden's Silence.