planning the next event

Discussion: Sunday may 18 2008.
We tried to work out how to create an event where doing was to be prioritised over talking, writing and reading.
We discussed some kind of rules: Maria quoted the day they had had together customising cars with Richard Gaspar. All kinds of materials, cut outs, additions were collaged onto radio controlled toy cars and then taken to the park.
There were suggestions to give everyone instructions to do something.
The three of them described the music events they had initiated that weren’t to do with being able to play a musical instrument but were more to do with a collective activity.
We discussed moving out of our comfort zones.
Everything seemed contrived and forced as if we were making people do things rather than generating something, and offering something relevant to ‘doing’, and to ‘what do artists do?’
The discussion clearly demonstrated how problematic ‘doing’ is when it is removed from the support systems of talking, writing and reading. It is as if ‘doing’ is – has to be - accompanied by some kind of verbal language based activity to give it credibility.
The event proposes to question and undermine that expectation.
In the end it was agreed to have a weekend when as many participants as possible would be encouraged to come along and be in the space for as short a time or as long a time as they wanted. On the Sunday, the musicians would arrive to round off the weekend followed by a meal. The musicians would not be playing in the conventional sense – maria had indicated that patting the chair, or stroking one’s leg could be participating in the ‘music’ just as much as Jason playing the drums. It reminded me of Cornelius Cardew’s Soho Scratch Orchestra. And the poetry sessions that went with the music ( awful!). Sometimes the sessions were really extraordinary...with so many different people involved and, yes, it was a kind of escapism, but very generative and searching ( end anecdote here)
This seems appropriate to ‘what do artists do?’
Artists try and broaden their field of operations.
It could be gardening or collecting.
Or cooking and cleaning.
Or playing football.
Things we do as artists are banal and mundane.
But they become relevant to making art just as making art can change the banalities of what we do in an everyday way, when it isn’t art. But it can be turned into art. Chopping a cucumber can be art, so can digging and mending roads. They are also not art. But making an armature for a clay figure is art but can also be prop making, window dreassing etc as well as bad figurative art....and so it goes on, and on...
Is this what Charlotte means?
That a simple activity enables something to be done without the framework and demands of being creative...
So the example of the gymnastics movement classes, where someone who has never handled a ball before, is given a ball and told to bounce it and catch it, and they become very confident and relaxed, is evidence of how simple, physical acts of doing become productive.
Playing and making music with no knowledge of how to play an instrument can be the same. It can provide an escape into just doing with no particular result expected other than to make music. Bouncing a ball and catching it is nothing more than that. Cooking for a family and making sure it’s a good meal is just that: a creative process is generated but undercover of something expedient and functional where a job has to be done in a straight forward way, but such a job also harbours creative potential.

fabian's first blog

I would like to discuss Intuition and Experimentation sometime.

intuition and experimentation an e mail exchange begun by maria

In reference to our discussions on Sunday I was just looking at some entries on intuition and experimentation, and thought I'd share some snippets of that with you:


Intuition is apparent ability to acquire knowledge without a clear inference or reasoning process.
It is "the immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process" [Oxford English Dictionary].


In the scientific method, an experiment (Latin: ex- periri, "of (or from) trying") is a set of observations performed in the context of solving a particular problem or question, to retain or falsify a hypothesis or research concerning phenomena. The experiment is a cornerstone in the empirical approach to acquiring deeper knowledge about the physical world.
x
Maria

thanks for these definitions. But how these words become applicable to the visual arta and its processes has to be flexible and approximate. the definition for intuition seems applicable to making art but the experiment definition does not. however it does seem debatable whether there is such a thing as experimentation within art...it seems to be something else, testing out, trying out etc. Apologies for incoherency, but more of this I hope, Phyllida

I think the precision offered by dictionary definitions is fascinating, valuable and quite seductive: they offer fixed points you can attach other things to and that's not to be underrated. But I also tend to agree with Phyllida that terms should be up for grabs when applied in different contexts. And perhaps it's worth remembering that for most of its history, language (and the English language in particular) has always been rather fluid in terms of definitions, grammatical structure and spelling -and that really it was the Victorians who have made the most concerted effort to fix rules of grammar, spelling and definitions all as part of their great philosophical mission. It could be argued that we are suffering from a hangover of that ethos even today....? best wishes, Jon

blog tutorial

here we are learning to blog. come and join us. we are planning a walk on the marshes ending up at the pub on the canal. we are meeting tomorrow sunday may 18 to plan which weekend to do the walk.

reeling and writhing comment

About yesterday, the reading event. i remember the links between the texts. the white cone and the space of the voice; the porn imagery and the flesh eating; the butterfly and the swan and the Borges mapping; the description of a thing and the list of things to make; the sounds of words and the menu of objects; the fetschistic polishing and the deceitful use of domestic objects; the car salesman's sons and the illusionist's box....also, theatricality and self-consciousness, real romanticism and staged romanticism; words as description and displacing description; acting out language; touching; doing...

Library Catalogue as at 14.05.08

Battcock, Gregory - The New Art
Bachelard, Gaston - The Poetics of Space
Benjamin, Walter - The Arcades Project
Cadere, André - Peinture Sans Fin, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2008 (exhibition catalogue)
Carroll, Lewis - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, illustrated by Mervyn Peake
Clark, Kenneth - The Nude
David, Elizabeth - Italian Food
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
Heidigger, Martin - What Is Called Thinking?
Hobbs, Robert - Robert Smithson, A Retrospective View
Hoyer Hansen, Lorne - Sculpture 1980 - 2005
Jacobsen, Georg - Noget Om Konstructiv Form I Billedkunst
Jarrett & Steinmeyer - The Complete Jarrett
Jay, Martin - Downcast Eyes
Kaprow, Alan - Blurring of Life and Art
Klee, Paul - The Thinking Eye
McEvilley, Thomas - Sculpture in the Age of Doubt
Medau - Rhythmic Movement
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)
Thompson, Jon - The Wandering Rocks
Thrane, Charlotte - Instructions for installing work
Thrane, Charlotte - What do artists do? A non-private diary
Tomkins, Calvin - Duchamp, a biography
Vad, Paol - Erik Thommesen
The Art of the Real. An Aspect of American Painting and Sculpture 1948 - 68, MOMA New York (exhibition catalogue)
Gravity and Grace, South Bank Centre 1993 (exhibition catalogue)