the 3rd reading

the third reading is scheduled for May 7th at approx 11.30 give or take half an hour, I'm not sure what the text will be yet but I am drifting towards an essay by D. H. Lawrence about Walt Whitman..............maybe

with best wishes, Jeremy

Library Catalogue as at 24.04.08

Battcock, Gregory - The New Art
Benjamin, Walter - The Arcades Project
Clark, Kenneth - The Nude
de Francis, John - Character Text for Beginning Chinese
Hallward, Peter - Badiou, a Subject to Truth
Harris, Marvin - Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: the riddles of culture
Jacobsen, Georg - Noget Om Konstructiv Form I Billedkunst
Kaprow, Alan - Blurring of Life and Art
Musil, Robert - The Man Without Qualities
Noack, Alfred - Hostelbro Kunstmuseum 1988 (exhibition catalogue)
Olson, Charles (ed. George Butterick) - The Maximus Poems
Rothenberg & Joris (editors) - Poems for the Milennium vol1, from Fin-de-Siecle to Negritude
Russell Taylor, John - The Penguin Dictionary of Theatre
Seuphor, Michael - The Sculpture of this Century
Smithson, Robert - The Collected Writings
Smithson, Robert - MOCA California 2004 (exhibition catalogue)
Thommesen, Anna - Hostelbro Kunstmuseum 1995 (exhibition catalogue)
Vad, Paol - Erik Thommesen

Construction for a library

I began to use the space at Theydon Road by reading there. My thoughts turned to what books other people are reading or will bring to the space and to the idea of a library. I would like to invite everyone to place books that they bring to the space on the narrow shelves I have installed in the smallest room and to look at what others have left there. None of the books should be taken away from the space except by their owners. You can leave books there for as long or short a time as you feel they are relevant to your use of the space, or as your own use of the book allows. There is also a book on the shelves which will remain permanently - the catalogue - into which any book placed on the shelf, even for half an hour, should be entered. In this way the room and shelves will function as a fleeting, evolving and contingent library for the project and the catalogue as a bibliography. The catalogue will also be available and updated here.

Introduction

What do artists do? is a project initiated by Phyllida Barlow to establish a working environment where she and a group of artists, can engage with the processes of making work when there are no outcomes expected or provided for those processes or the resulting work. The project will therefore not culminate in an exhibition, its emphasis being instead on the invisible activities of how artists make work - those processes which though they may not be seen, acknowledged or known about, form the resources and motivation for an artist’s creative activity.

The contention is that once an art object has achieved a destination - whether that be gallery, public space, commission or sale – the process of how it arrived at what it is becomes diminished and erased. This is understandable because the art object in its final realisation no longer requires the baggage of its production for it to exist. However, with such a persistent emphasis on commodification of the art object, since the late 70s to its current form, there is an impact on artists and those aspiring to be artists which the project will address. An ignorance of how art becomes made and how artists work – what artists do - is prevalent at all levels of art, from secondary school through to high level retrospective exhibitions at international venues. The participating artists in the project will not all necessarily agree or support this contention and may have been appointed with that in mind.

The project began in September, 2007 with the formation of the group of artists that would participate and the search for a suitable space – somewhere that could function as a “hybrid”, neither studio nor gallery. In February 2008 a space was found on an industrial estate in Clapton, East London, and in April 2008 the participating artists began using it. An important component of the project from the outset is its documentation. Apart from photographic records being taken regularly, it is intended to develop other forms of documentation: books, video recordings, texts, recorded conversations, etc. and this blog which will act as a discussion forum for the project’s participants as well as a way of giving access to the project and its progress to a wider audience.

What do artists do? is funded by the Arts Council England.

Participating artists:
Jeremy Akerman
Anna Barham
Phyllida Barlow
David Cheeseman
Melanie Counsell
Jason Dungan
Jess Flood-Paddock
Max Holdaway
Steven Johnson
Brighid Lowe
Fabian Peake
Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead
Charlotte Thrane
Roy Voss
Maria Zahle