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.