Tag Archives: Thinking

Aesthetica ‘Future Now’ Symposium 7-8 March 2019

Posted on by
Reply

Stepped out of the studio for two days to attend the ‘Future Now’ symposium hosted by York St. John University.

“We are currently living in a time of globalisation, expansion and media saturation. There have been considerable shifts in civilisation in the Information Age – we now communicate with each other instantly, yet with an alarming level of disconnect. Through panel discussions, lectures and portfolio reviews, The Future Now Symposium is an exploration of 21st century culture through the mechanism of art.” – https://www.aestheticamagazine.com/future-now-symposium-2019 

There are many positives about the chance to attend a symposium but there is also the impossibility of attending all the presentations and for me the additional frustration of needing to step out of the day to think after attending sessions. This is a brief note of some of the sessions I attended and the things that struck me during them.

The Keynote delivered by Cherie Federico, Publisher and co-founder of Aesthetica magazine and Director of the Aesthetica Art Prize, addressed the themes of the symposium through the work of the artists selected for the prize exhibition and Cherie’s own thoughts on the emotional evolutionary cusp we appear to be on in the world at the moment. Clearly artists are led to question and challenge the politics, with a small or a large ‘P’, of the times they occupy but I find myself in a state of profound inarticulacy. It appears to be impossible to be clear about any stance you take or belief you hold without expecting most of the responses you receive to be confrontational. To be identified as ‘one of us’ is less the issue than avoiding being identified as ‘one of them’. Thus the assumption of you holding a set of ‘moral’ values is made by association with your presence in a particular space. Cherie presented a slide with a set of words that define our times, Leave, Remain, Algorithm, Consumption, and maybe 20 more, and noted that ‘apathy is not an option’ in our febrile times.

A panel discussion led by Kit Monkman with Charlotte Ginsborg, Ludivine Large-Bessette & Rhea Storr, titled ‘Artists’ Film: Storytelling and Concept’ was an engaging conversation about working practice, motivation, audience and medium. Rhea Storr noted that her work was defined through process, that the piece she ended up with was determined through its making rather than established in advance. Ludivine Large-Bessette talked about making work in which you directed your own movie counter to the manner of traditional film in which you are confined into immersion. Discussion continued around the authenticity of approaches to ‘art’ film and the possibility of defining such a thing, with Charlotte Ginsborg noting that any term applied commodifies the object in question. There was agreement that viewers bringing their experiences to bear as opposed to the mediated experience of traditional cinema was a feature of ‘art’ cinema, and whilst sharing their working method they all agreed that making work for its own sake and not for the mediums sake was key. A very interesting session that introduced me to work I was unaware of but that did not really address storytelling and concept. The thrust of the conversation was practice based and I was left pondering whether it is even possible to make an unmediated artwork.

In ‘Rethinking Sculpture: Connecting With Objects’ Jane Bhoyroo, Producer for Yorkshire Sculpture International outlined the development of the project by facilitating collaboration between the four venues in two cities. The event, or series of events, is designed as a set of reactions to Phyllida Barlow’s ‘provocation’ that “sculpture is the most anthropological of the art forms”. The Yorkshire Sculpture International begins on 22nd June in Leeds and 23rd June in Wakefield and runs for 100 days. All the exhibitions are free and there are a lot of things to look forward to, see https://yorkshire-sculpture.org/whats-on/all-listings/ I’m particularly anticipating David Smith at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

YSI has selected fifteen international sculptors some of whom have not shown in the UK before. They have also selected fifteen local sculptors, five as associates who will work with the international artists and a further ten as engagement artists working with the extensive education and community programmes. Jimmie Durham and Tau Lewis look very interesting at the Hepworth and Nobuko Tsuchiya will be in residence at Leeds City Gallery.

Emmy and BAFTA nominated artist Nick Ryan is a multi-award-winning composer, sound designer, and audio specialist, who discussed ‘The Future of Sound Art’ in a fabulous presentation on the Friday. He began by describing his work as examining the relationship between audio, perception and matter, and talked about the lack of a critical framework for discussing sound or listening. It may be that sound, or at least vocalisation, is the earliest art. Sound suffered historically from two limitations, transience, in that it could not last beyond the event, and transportation, sound could not go anywhere except in the memory of the listener. Ryan discussed the history of recorded sound and the way our perception of sound has been coloured visually.

The lion pictured in this image from Lascaux may well be the first visual depiction of sound.

The lion pictured in this image from Lascaux may well be the first visual depiction of sound. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Lascaux-diverticule-f%C3%A9lins.jpg

He went on to show some of his work focusing on the acoustic imagination being multi-modal and the notion of co-authorship in sound art as everything we hear acquires meaning from our memories. He showed us ‘DX17’ his project with the Imperial War Museum, ‘Machine 9’ that tracks space junk and gives it a voice and ‘Tate Sensorium’ for which he built a musical instrument based on David Bomberg’s painting ‘In The Hold’. Well worth checking out at https://www.nickryanmusic.com/

A great feature of the symposium is that you can get portfolio reviews with a good range of arts professionals including some of the speakers and you can book advice sessions with ACE representatives. I did both of these and the sessions were extremely positive and forward looking.

The other aspect of the event is the networking opportunities provided between the sessions. In this regard the layout of the event – limited seats and big tables – is very well judged to encourage conversation, which, in the manner of most networking events, was mainly around the financial difficulties of practice as an artist.

A list of links to some of the projects/artists/artworks seen or discussed over the two days.

https://www.charlotteginsborg.com/ film maker, check out Melior Street

https://kitmonkman.com/about/ and https://www.kma.co.uk/ interactive and participatory art works.

https://www.ludivinelargebessette.com/ and on vimeo https://vimeo.com/106288978

https://www.rheastorr.com

https://www.aestheticamagazine.com/

https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography

https://frieze.com/

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/

Alex Majoli https://pro.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_10_VForm&ERID=24KL53W_0

https://yorkshire-sculpture.org/

https://ysp.org.uk/

https://www.henry-moore.org/visit/henry-moore-institute

https://www.henry-moore.org/whats-on/2019/03/08/phyllida-barlow-sculpture-and-drawings-from-the-leeds-collection

https://www.leeds.gov.uk/museumsandgalleries/leedsartgallery/currently-on-at-leeds-art-gallery

https://hepworthwakefield.org/

https://www.nickryanmusic.com/

https://www.dianabell.co.uk/ The only artist who asked/talked about making.

Studio Build SIX

Posted on by
Reply

Week five in the studio:

Very mild this week but absolutely throwing it down, I arrived wet and my coat was still wet when I left in the afternoon. I’m writing another post on the Doncaster Art Fair that interrupted my building. Today I wanted to treat the leaves so they can retain colour and paint out more of the big drawing.

First I painted in the leaves in the big drawing with Indian ink, then I treated the leaves with PVA and then painted over the big drawing with more white. I only took photographs at the end for reference so these go around the space.

right wall one

right wall one

right wall two

right wall two

garden wall

garden wall

left wall one

left wall one

left wall two

left wall two

projection wall

projection wall

The very light wall taken down further to facilitate projection.

Wednesday started badly, it was chucking it down and the walk to the studio was very unpleasant. I didn’t really know where to start so I set up the light and put the heater on to dry my shoes.

first I turned the leaves which were dry on top but still wet underneath.

Then I dug out the sketch books and did some work on the garden sculptures.

These are sketches towards stand alone sculptures but also inform the look and feel of the space, particularly the right hand wall, opposite the projection wall.

I then cut the wood I prepared last week, or the week before, to build small sculptures exploring the garden in Balby.

The second picture taken with flash to emphasise how dark it was at that point.

I rounded the day off by painting the projection wall out more and resolving to purchase small stepladders.

Friday was a better day weather wise and therefore lighter.

The leaves were dry so I set out to put fishing line across the space and then hang sets of them.

fishing line as ceiling

fishing line as ceiling

Putting the line in and then stringing the leaves took me most of the day and I ended up with this

I did some work on the sketchbooks and thought about the effect I wanted for the leaves in the space, is it getting too busy?

I won’t be here next week so that will give me time to think about what I want from the space and also to work on the projection – in sketchbooks and mentally. I still need stepladders and I need to get the computer and webcams down to the site.

 

 

Drawing Towards Sculpture [TWO]

Posted on by
Reply

How a drawing progresses through thought and action is what I thought I wanted to discuss but as I began to write I found that what concerned me was how the thing made is understood, what expectations I had of an audience and how and whether my intentions could or should be communicated by that thing. In continuing to think about the act of drawing as a symptom, or as a consequence or corollary of sculpture in part one of this post, I brushed against the idea of making a drawing being the subject of the drawing. This is too simple an explanation of process. The two drawings below for instance were made before the collage drawings in the first post but survived the cut, as it were, as they help explain the spaces I’m interested in. There are changes of viewpoint across the picture plane, working to no particular plan, disrupting the perspective to reflect the way that memory disrupts experience. Isolating objects in instances that refer to other things.


The creative act is perhaps best described as an act of translation. The ‘change or conversion to another form, appearance, etc.; transformation:’i Translation is notoriously difficult because of changes to understanding between one state and another. Linguistically this is demonstrated by obvious loss of sense or meaning with literal change, just try google translate to explore it. In artistic terms the same things apply, the nature of a mark implying three dimensional space is different to that of a mark occupying a space and that may imply a different meaning. I have often seen maquettes that fail to translate an appropriate sense of scale for instance. In Greek Poetry Translations M. Byron Raizis discusses these difficulties in translation and steps the translator needs to take to overcome them. In particular he cites anaplasis, transposition,padding, omission, inversion, correction and adjustment, and says ‘by anaplasis we mean a remoulding, a recasting of the words, expressions imagery etc., of the original into new and different but more naturally corresponding lexical features in the target tongue’ (Byron Raizis, 1981)ii This seems to me apposite in describing the act of drawing.

The drawing below (I say drawing advisedly, I have never really thought of myself as a painter and I can’t see a difference in the activities other than their existence as an end in themselves.) illustrates this recasting for me. The scene is the garden of a house on Coronation Crescent in Preston, Lancashire in 1991. The garden is viewed from the front door in the centre of the end wall of a two up two down end terrace property. It had been emptied of plants the previous winter and planted up in the spring. It’s now the end of summer and the garden feels like the whole of the world at this point. The intention is not facsimile, photographic or even technical, it’s not an illustration. The garden is deliberately sparse and the shadow heightened. The desire is to present visual analogies to memories that are always questionable. iii

Today I read an article about an art class in Sydney in which Professor of Fine Art Paul Thomas invited 14 participants from UNSW’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) to examine Bell’s theorem (1964) via their still life drawing of a simple wooden chair.

‘Irene Fernandez, who is doing a PhD in Quantum Computing at the School of Electrical Engineering, said the workshop inspired two ideas.
“The idea that when you make a trace, you statistically determine the reality of the object that you are trying to measure,” she said.
“I could see the chair as the reality that [Albert] Einstein believed in, and my hand as the tool of quantum mechanics.”
“[Secondly] the idea that the material memory makes this interesting effect where you no longer control your drawing, but it is the drawing that starts driving your decisions.” ‘iv

The second point neatly sums up what I have been trying to get at.

 

i. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/translation

ii. Byron Raizis, M (1981). Greek Poetry Translations. Greece: Efstathiadis Group. In the introduction – The Nature of Literary Translation. I am indebted to Mary Jacobus’ book Reading Cy Twombly about the artists use of poetry in his paintings and in particular the Introduction that discusses translation as part of the creative process. Jacobus, M (2016). Reading Cy Twombly. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

iii. There is a good article about this idea on The Conversation blog, “Research shows that we don’t actually access and use all available memories when creating personal narratives. It is becoming increasingly clear that, at any given moment, we unawarely tend to choose and pick what to remember.” Mazzoni, G. 2018. The ‘real you’ is a myth – we constantly create false memories to achieve the identity we want. 19th September. The Conversation. [Online]. [27 September 2018]. Available from: https://theconversation.com/the-real-you-is-a-myth-we-constantly-create-false-memories-to-achieve-the-identity-we-want-103253

iv. Nazaroff, D. 2018. UNSW Newsroom. [Online]. [24 September 2018]. Available from: https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/quantum-physicists-take-art-class-rethink-their-view-reality