Category: LAB

CREATIVE JOURNAL—Gallery Visit—Cullinan and Richards

I always enjoy visiting studios, there’s obviously a mixture of voyeurism and some envy going on there.

Today we visited the studio of Charlotte Cullinan and Janine Richards, previously known collectively as Art Lab and more recently as The Savage School(?). Charlotte gave an extremely lucid overview of their work, which raises many interesting issues for me regarding the work of the artist as facilitator or ‘platform’ for other workers. This has particular resonance with the text we have just read regarding relational aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, and indeed the one’s we are currently reading about the ‘death of the author’.

From a personal point of view, their earlier work recalled my own degree show where I invited the artist Peter Fend to exhibit his work in my stead. Sorry if I harp on about this – it’s my greatest moment so far, I think, so I feel warranted to flog it until it’s dead.

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CREATIVE JOURNAL—Lab—Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. and Debord

The Lab session today extended our discussions about postmodernism with a showing of Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. (2004) by Johan Grimonprez and Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu’hostiles, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film « La Société du spectacle » (1975) by Guy Debord.

Both films have a somewhat similar formal quality – they present a collection of seemingly disparate film clips with a voice-over. The Debord film (of which we only saw 5 minutes) uses commercials and sequences of a military character, overlaid with Debord himself (I believe) speaking about the critical reception of his earlier film La Société du spectacle (1973). His voice seems to be coming over a bad telephone connection, it’s very harsh and distorted. Grimonprez’ film also uses footage and voice-over, but there is a connecting narrative to the whole of a record of a number of airplane hijackings.

In my mind, both films present a number of critiques. To summarise two such critiques, you could take them as indictments of the media’s manipulation of events and their audiences, or as comments on the viewers blasé reactions to such events (or both at the same time, of course).

Looking at it from the point of view of the texts we’ve just been reading regarding allegory and postmodernity’s love of the layered text, I can see how these each take their collections of film clips to create a whole (the overall film) which sets up a negotiation with the viewer resulting in a set of possible readings. The films in themselves are more or less opaque to this process, creating their own readings at the same time as creating an alternative space for the viewers’. There is always a context which dictates certain of the possibilities of the reception, but this is just one of a potentially infinite number of readings, each one dependent on a particular viewer and conditions in which they come to the film.

Trying to pick out some relevant quotes from our recent texts about postmodernism. Andreas Huyssen in Mapping the Postmodern says:

The point is not to eliminate the productive tension between the political and the aesthetic, between history and the text, between engagement and the mission of art. The point is to heighten that tension, even to rediscover it and to bring it back into focus in the arts as well as in criticism. (Huyssen, p. 337)

Thinking about allegory, from the Craig Owens’ text, adds many dimensions to the two films. I don’t really know how Debord would view such a reading, but I doubt if he would have been happy.

Or perhaps that was one of his points – any statement is always already usurped into some other order, the order of the system or the audiences self-created orders of reception. By saying ‘always already’ I am of course implying that any reading is always implicit in any statement, which would be a very Derridean point of view?

  • Huyssen, A. (1984). Mapping the Postmodern. In Preziosi, D. ed. The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. pp. 329–337.

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PRESENTATION—Lab Presentation—Notes and recording

Here are my notes for today’s presentation. A recording of the event is at the end of the post.

Introduction

As I’m sure is true for all of us, I’ve found this course to be a bit of an emotional roller-coaster ride. Not only from day to day, but from lecture to lecture, and even within each lecture I can go from elation to depression in the course of a few minutes.

What I think this shows is that I’m at least being challenged by the work we’re doing, which has to be a good thing, when all is said and done. I keep telling myself, when the tasks seem insurmountable, that if I wasn’t feeling this way I wouldn’t have any way of knowing when I was up against my limits and potentially making progress.

There is a distinct difference between this presentation and the first. The first was an introduction to me and my life up until the point at which I entered Goldsmiths, concentrating on personal, anecdotal evidence.

Review the first presentation

List of objects:

  • DVD: Jacques Tati’s Playtime (my sense of humour, modernism, architecture in general)
  • Some Monopoly houses (suburbia – my upbringing, architecture)
  • my iPod (music, electronica)
  • A small maquette for a sculpture (lovely objects, my interest in art)
  • 2 of my own artworks – the erratum slips and the Malevich book (the work I was producing while at College)

New objects

List of objects:

  • Performance
  • Blog
  • Deleuze and Guattari

This time around I’ll talk about specific things which have developed during the course and which I hope will develop during this term and beyond.

Perhaps the main theme (or problematic) of last term was my search for a hook within the course subject-matter on which I could hang my own interests and (potential) work. This has only very recently started to become clear to me.

Up until the end of last term I think I was somewhat at a loss as to how the course actually intersected with my own interests. The main problem being that I’m not sure what my interests are at this point, which obviously makes any kind of connection and subsequent progression difficult. This has always been a problem for me – even before we started this course I was viewing it as more of a move away from a negative than towards a positive, real goal.

Diagrams/Performance

But the presentation that I did with Ian in the last week of term clarified some things for me. Certainly what I enjoyed most in this presentation was the analysis of the display of the Beuys work at the tate, and—perhaps more pertinently—the representation of that analysis through diagrams and performance during the presentation itself.

In relation to this presentation I’ve started making links with aspects of previous work I’ve done (specifically my activities at Middlesex University doing my first degree, where I would write and “perform” those writings). So the writing, and performance of those writings; the concern with space and perceptions of space; the systems of awareness and control of space—I can see this as a method for future work which will now be placed on a far more informed basis than anything I was able to do in the past.

Blog

As a parallel exercise, over the past few years I’ve been keeping a blog on my website. This serves as a repository of thoughts and comments on what’s been happening to me. At the same time I’m seeing this more and more as another performance space for my writings, another area in which they are being presented.

Deleuze & Guattari

Another thing which is developing is my interest in Philosophy.

In what at first appeared to be a huge mistake I chose to take the Philosophy and… course. I originally came to it wanting to improve my knowledge and experience in this subject, but wasn’t prepared for the obscurity of the teaching. To begin with it was very disheartening to have to sit through lectures week after week and not be able to grasp the point of anything that was being talked about. Here was a situation where I felt completely out of my depth, but at the same time knew that I was learning something completely new that could only expand my thought processes, as painful as it felt.

At this point in time I don’t claim to have much more of a clue about what it’s all about, but I have been introduced to some authors whose work I’ve found interesting. I was particularly taken with the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. Right now I’m attempting to write an essay on the concept of ‘the refrain’ as a musical motif as well as a wider concept applicable to other forms of art and society. This is described in frustratingly obtuse detail in their book A Thousand Plateaus. Needless to say I’m finding it quite ‘interesting’ (and challenging). For me, it’s a new way of thinking and thinking about thinking, and I’m keen to see where it leads me.

Conclusion

So essentially my objects are the writing – represented by the blog; the performance – represented by this presentation; and the philosophy – represented by this book, as my objects for this presentation.

I can’t tell you what implications these objects will have for my future activities – that remains to be seen.

Recording – 24mins (Ogg Vorbis format – 10.6MB)

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PRESENTATION—Lab Presentation—Initial thoughts

Next week we’re back at college for the Spring term and straightaway we have a presentation to do for our Lab session.

This follows on from our initial presentation back at the beginning of the course, designed to allow us to introduce ourselves to our colleagues by the selection of six objects through which we could talk about our backgrounds and motives for being on the course.

This time around it’s a review (or “reprise”) of the original presentation, with the effect of progress made over the previous term. Again, the format is to bring a number of objects. We’ll be looking at transformations in our approach to the course and possible lines of development.

—

For the original presentation I talked around the following objects (they are followed by some bracketed notes on how I accounted for their inclusion):-

  • DVD: Jacques Tati’s Playtime (my sense of humour, modernism, architecture in general)
  • Some Monopoly houses (suburbia – my upbringing, architecture)
  • my iPod (music, electronica)
  • A small maquette for a sculpture (lovely objects, my interest in art)
  • 2 of my own artworks (the work I was producing while at College)

—

For the forthcoming presentation the main theme (or problematic) I want to talk about are my search for a hook within the course subject-matter on which I could hang my own (potential) work. This has only very recently started to become clear.

Up until the end of last term I think I was somewhat at a loss as to how the course actually intersected with my own interests. The main problem being that I’m not sure what my interests are at this point, which obviously makes any kind of progression difficult. This has always been my problem – deciding on this course was seen by myself as more of a move away from a negative rather than towards a positive.

But the presentation that I did with Ian in the last week of term clarified some things for me. Certainly what I enjoyed most in this presentation was the analysis of the presentation of the Beuys work at the tate, and—perhaps more pertinently—the representation of that analysis through diagrams and performance.

Relating this back to previous work I’ve done (specifically activities I was initiating while I was at Middlesex University doing my first degree)—the writing, and performance of those writings; the concern with space and perceptions of space; the systems of awareness and control of space—I can see a method for the future forming.

Another thing which is in the process of bubbling up is my interest in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. Right now I’m attempting to write an essay on ‘the refrain,’ specifically where mentioned in A Thousand Plateaus, and am finding it quite ‘interesting’ (and challenging). For me, it’s a new way of thinking, so I’ll be keen to see where it leads me.

I think those are the two major results of this course so far. They are both effects of extreme and ongoing trauma for my patterns of thought, displacing me from what I already know to new pastures, potentially deterritorialising my thought (I have a feeling that that word will become more common in my writing from now on – this being one of the side-effects of reading D&G).

So, as far as the presentation goes, there is a distinct difference between the first and forthcoming one. The first was concentrating on personal, anecdotal evidence, while the next will be focused on the course itself and it’s effect on my thinking. The objects to present remain to be decided – books would be too obvious, so I must come up with something a little more intelligent to show. A difficult proposition.

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