What Do Artists Do?

And in short, I was afraid

2009-03-03T03:55:00.000-08:00

The mid line of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock poem, possibly a way of thinking about of the role of the artist when faced with the cannon of art history or the subject of art. In order to enter into being for any individual artist means going beyond their station and perhaps that could bring to the surface insecurities that could cause paralysis of the artist and so movement becomes essential. This point of potential paralysis could be a point where some kind of guidance is needed and the form of this guidance becomes the cannon itself or is within the cannon itself. So getting into something or being part of something, the something becomes part of the solution.

Umit & Sons Film Screening

2008-10-06T04:03:00.000-07:00

There are these two young fish swimming along,

2008-09-30T05:22:00.000-07:00

and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

I’ve just been reading that article that you mentioned Jess [an adaptation of a lecture given by David Foster Wallace in the review section of the Guardian, 20.09.08 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/20/fiction].

I thought it was really interesting what you said about awareness and how that relates to the project. It seems to be all there in the title “What do artists do?” but maybe that can seem like an external question, as if asked by someone who isn’t an artist, or by one artist to another, or as if we might just be debating or contrasting personal approaches or models, but models that we know – studio based v project based, making objects v ideas / events, commercial v non-commercial etc. I think it’s more subtle than that, asking questions of what it is that we don’t realise we’re doing. Like fish not knowing what water is. The things we’re wet with, without even realising it - not the ideas in the work, or the subject or the content or the form or the relation of any of those things but the way you go about being and doing and the assumptions you make that mean you reject certain activities and directions. Yes, maybe more that, the things you don’t do, the things that don’t touch you, aren’t your methods, the negative space of what artists do.

And why should travelling to a light industrial estate in Clapton help? But I think it does, perhaps because it can act as a container or a frame for things. A distancing. And I thought that the water is all the daily stuff we’re embedded in too. Like what you might pass on your daily journeys or read in the paper. I particularly like the way you’ve incorporated what you’ve seen in the newspaper into what you’ve been doing during the project – the phone videos on the blog and the images you’ve been painting.

Being here and thinking about being here.

Mark Twain's Writing Hut, Costcutter etc

2008-09-17T08:58:00.000-07:00

I spent the first stipend on one hundred 60x40cm ‘off the shelf’ canvases. I took these to the space at the same time as Anna completed her platforms. These platforms and the parameters of having a task gave me a place to be and an activity. I believe that if I had worked at one of the trestle tables I wouldn’t have had the same experience. The planes of the platforms at various heights motivates physical and mental movement. Their rhomboid and triangular shape take you away from the walls. They reminded me of Mark Twain’s octagonal writing hut

“…octagonal with a peaked roof, each face filled with a spacious window…perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city...”—Mark Twain, Letter to William Dean Howells, 1874

A Costcutter is on the corner of Theydon Road. Costcutter is a franchised local and urban convenience store. The ambience of the new community in which it has been located, is not yet established. In its' newness it seems not settled. The ‘project’ of rejuvenating and giving this area of Clapton a use, will descend down the other side of the sine curve into a ‘real’ situation. That is without the fabrication of investment, it will be the people who live in this area and their economic situation that grounds it’s atmosphere. The mise en scene in this sense is not yet entrenched. The environment as ‘the totality of surrounding conditions and circumstances affecting growth or development.’

There is an all-round congenial atmosphere in this shop. They have introduced an in-store bakery, broad sheet newspapers, newsmagazines and periodicals including New Scientist and The Economist, alongside photographs of healthy consumers as an apparently integrate part of an aspirational whole, perhaps improving the mode of living of this community.

On Theydon Road the businesses keep to the excepted set hours of industrious activity. There is a lot of movement of loads out of and in to warehouses. Many interactions happen on the street itself. This visible and audible backdrop are marked by its absence after five thirty. In the quiet, out of working hours, the view from the upper space becomes more noticeable. It is unusual to be able to see across such a distance as Walthamstow Marshes in London.

I think this present position, the difference felt by working as an artist in this community and it’s binary nearby rural location (I have seen tractors plough sections of the Marsh set aside for some kind of agriculture) have enabled a sort of objectivity. The 'difference' was the push to start making work. The paintings are allowing me to take on new subject matter and the expanding content informs new subjects. As a sculptor I also feel free from the painting is dead argument. The mobile phone videos posted on the blog are part of this project.

Imaginary Companion

2008-09-10T09:15:00.000-07:00

In response to August 30th Performance Event my friend SD and I contributed an unobservable performance. SD has been a performance artist but recently discontinued this aspect of his work. In preparation for the event we discussed how artists who do not perform could take part in a performance event. SD gave me texts to explain his position as resistant to performance. These texts are about invisibility and camouflage. We also considered Clare Bishop's argument against participation in her anthology Participation.

Together we non-performed or didn't perform. If I had explained or drawn attention to the non-performance at the event, the explanation would have served as an adjacent or alternative performance, and the non-performance would have no longer been invisible. SD also wasn't present at the event or had any knowledge of the non-performance taking place. The event may have been changed by the non-performance, by some kind of transfiguration, but more likely not, as no thing was added and no thing was taken away.

The immateriality of the non-performance lends itself to Romanticism (Scheonberg the Late Romantic composed Transfigured Night, the compositional structure based on poem that tells of the night being transfigured by the revelaton of a secret), the history of Identity Politics, insanity and delusions.

“It came as the third instalment of a series of political movements that grew out of the increasingly radical politics of the 1960’s. It was the third of, in retrospect to what we now know as Identity Politics…that is politics based on who you are and making that the centre of your political commitment and political action. Obviously the first of these movements, and the historically most important, was the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960’s in which African-Americans made this issue the centrepiece of their political endeavours. The second manifestation was the Women’s Liberation movement… in which the issue of gender was made the principle of unity in political action. You know, Gay liberation came along as an obvious extension, logical extension, of this Identity Politics to a group that felt equally or comparably oppressed and in need of political action …I think it’s fair to say the centrepiece of this movement, and what distinguished it from the preceding Identity Movements… was that Gayness unlike African-Americaness or femaleness was, or at least was perceived to be, invisible. This was not a population that you could identify visually in most respects. It is more complicated than that but this was the common perception. Indeed the issue of invisibility became the central issue from the point of view of the people leading [intellectually] this movement because they came to the conclusion that the foremost problem, the central problem, of the Gay population in this country [America] was precisely that it was invisible, which was theorised in it being in the closet. The closet is a metaphor to indicate this invisibility and it also suggests that the invisibility from the point of these figures was largely self-imposed…”
Paul Robinson, Historian, Stanford University

The imaginary companion or friend is arguably a dramatic idea but even if it is only known to the creator existing in fantasy it can contribute socially. The unobservable companion effects some kind of change to the atmosphere or events, although it requires language to be revealed beyond that of the creator's imagination. The Lemur, who's name is taken from "spirit of the dead" in Roman mythology, appears to the alcoholic, a mischevious ghostly companion. Franz West's Lemur Head contains a rubbish bin, in Henry Koster's film Harvey (1950) the Lemur takes the form of a big white rabbit. "And then I introduce them to Harvey... and he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed."

This text is here given as the language form of the Imaginary Companion performance, with the aim of it functioning as a map or diagram.

One version of Franz west's Lemur Head was included in the exhibition Pre-semblence and the Everyday. The following quote is taken from his essay for his exhibition poster:

"It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or "window shopping". that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. they allow us to grasp only a relic set on a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. these fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. the trace left behind is substituted for the practice."
Author: Franz West
http://www.renaissancesociety.org

The clip below is given as an example.

Jess

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBvpxzl54D8&feature=related

...from Maria

2008-09-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

[I]t is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented.

(Jean-Francois Lyotard, What is Postmodernism? - Answer to the Question, 1979)

She looms large

2008-09-01T09:52:00.000-07:00

She looms large, tilting herself forward. The angle slants the room towards the windows with blue metal frames.

Her head is abnormally big, even for a body her size: she stretches about three meters into the air. The limbs are uneven, monumentally wrong-looking, constructed rather than modelled. She wears a dress, but has no feet.

One arm reaches forward, grabbing the air in front of her. The other arm lies flat against the space between chest and stomach. Rectangular patches of white lie flat over the top of the head, the arms, around the waist. The rest of her body is reddish brown, unevenly coloured, with a rough-looking surface. Various shades of red blend into the sand, cement, and filler mixture that covers most of her exterior.
Her dress opens onto a light wooden frame, drilled and screwed together; displaying large holes in the wood where the screw has disappeared into the material. The wood is planed, smooth, with splashes of burgundy lumps.

2008-08-31T14:50:00.000-07:00

Clapton planes
Planes across the London sky.
The best thing about the sky in London.
Up in the sky above London there are planes, always.
For 72 hours after the twin towers came down there were no planes in the sky over London. That was the most frightening thing about 9/11. The silent skies.
A plane comes from top right of the window pane and travels diagonally across the underside of the glass into the crest of the poplar tree before falling into the dark blue rim of the industrial unit opposite.
A plane emerges from the centre of the window pane to my far right. It moves towards the tip of the crane which is upright at an angle of 85 degrees. Fifteen geese in V formation rise up from the straight edge of the industrial unit roof opposite and bisect the plane just before it cuts into the roof edge some 10 cms to the left. The geese formation flies at an obtuse diagonal angle over the crane to my extreme right and into the vertical edge of the window pane.
A plane travels horizontally in the centre of the upper window, parallel to the horizontal bar of the window pane. It moves slowly. A pigeon flies beneath it, faster. The 393 bus has stopped below. The soft suction signals its doors opening. The plane is still in view. Its angle has tilted downwards. It passes between the wires of the pylon on the left. Another plane whines to my right and another is visible between the two new blocks of flats to my far right. This one is at a slight upward tilt and passes into the left hand building to re-emerge now from the top edge of the sloping roofs of the housing development.

About the Type I

2008-08-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

Mobile phone video.
Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking, Cleis Press Inc. 1999
Om Mani Padme Hum 4, Popol Vuh from the album For Me and You
Heigh-Ho, Dwarf's Chorus, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture).

About the Type II

2008-08-11T08:48:00.000-07:00

Mobile phone video.
Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking, Cleis Press Inc 1999
Om Mani Padme Hum 4, Popol Vuh (music)

How I fell in love with Wikipedia

2008-08-07T05:15:00.000-07:00

The Guardian 10-04-08 and Popol Vuh, They Danced, They Laughed, As of Old (music). Video made with mobile phone, newspaper and download.

Rough Edit

2008-07-14T00:02:00.001-07:00

I have a working edit of the film available at this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T7auTlnufw

jesse's mobile studio

2008-07-12T01:48:00.000-07:00

the mobile phone video clip opens up all the neurotic questions i have about video art and its relationship to documentary ( as in tv documentaries etc...), and completely overturns and refutes my prejudices! this clip is like squinting at the world through a key hole and seems very much about the artist as a secretive and private observer of the world around -
it's fascinating and compelling and somehow relates to the images of making gnocchi with nettles.
i'm envious of how video deals with being there, wherever 'there' is, and the moment, and how it challenges laboriousness
thanks jesse

Mobile Phone Video

2008-07-07T09:59:00.000-07:00

The Times 25th June 2008, Cafe Nero and Popol Vuh, Mitten im Garten (music).

Video made with mobile phone, newspaper and downloads.
Cut up and collageing could decode the implicit meaning of text and images. Idling with a portable studio. The blog as democratic super audience and not being able to place or locate the virtual activity of making whilst on the move.

Objects for a film

2008-06-29T16:29:00.000-07:00

During the course of the project, I have been manipulating and arranging a group of objects within the space. Basic materials were used: plaster, felt, wood, light. The whole process was shot on video, and in June, some elements of the video were restaged for a 16mm film shoot. The material shot in the space will form the center of a film which incorporates material shot in and around the space. I've added some photographs of the sculptural arrangements in the space, as well as some stills from the film.

Jason

Doing Event Pictures

2008-06-27T06:28:00.000-07:00

I have uploaded a series of photographs from the Doing Event to Facebook. Please go to http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=24387&l=b35a8&id=628582995 to see the album.

planning the next event

2008-05-18T13:51:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-17T03:11:00.000-07:00

I would like to discuss Intuition and Experimentation sometime.

intuition and experimentation an e mail exchange begun by maria

2008-05-17T02:55:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-17T02:46:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-17T02:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-14T13:22:00.000-07:00

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)

the 3rd reading

2008-04-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-28T07:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-28T07:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-17T02:51:00.000-07:00

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