“A phenomenon is a specific intra-action of an ‘object’; and the ‘measuring agencies’; the object and the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them.” (Barad, 2007, p. 128). From Sauzet, 2018 – https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/p/phenomena-agential-realism.html Accessed 21/10/2019
From Deborah Lupton’s Data Selves (2019) I have discovered Karen Barad who is a key figure within new materialist philosophy. Her background in quantum physics makes her significantly important to the ideas behind the work I’ve been developing. There are lots of relevant things going on in this short video but I will do some reading before doing a longer post about some of her ideas. But essentially, for her, everything starts with entanglement and in the following video, she describes how measurement is one aspect of an assemblage (entangled collection of processes) that results in a phenomenon (how does this relate to objecthood?). Things don’t exist independently of each other – they come into being due to their interaction. I feel like there will be much to gain from looking into her theories further and I may need to reword some of my lit review to be more accurate/specific and ascertain that measurement is seen as an emergent process not a fixed external object. Here are some links for now.
Ideas in here relate to DI&C work specifically A2 & A5
One of the other collaborators from A rumour reached the village posted the following, so I had come across Barad before but her name had not stuck – although I liked the post very much when it first appeared.
All of this also ties in very much with some of the arguments I made in the DI&C essay I wrote in particular referencing Ariella Azoulay’s ideas about reconfiguring logocentric linear history.
Write a 2,000-word literature review that identifies, summarises and critically discusses the most relevant texts that currently explore the subject area of your practice (i.e. the subject area you are exploring in Body of Work). Try to contrast differing points of view and indicate how you will expand your research into your extended written project.
Your essay should include a bibliography, be fully illustrated and reference citations appropriately throughout. See the extended written project submission requirements at the end of Part Three for more information about how to format your literature review.
Demonstration of subject-based knowledge and understanding:
I didn’t set out to write about Brecht but once I realised that Fried had relied on his theory to prop up his own writing I was able to draw on previous knowledge. As an A level student in 1989 or so I was barely literate but I managed to get top marks for my Brecht essay. I just loved learning about his plays and methods. I am also interested in reality so pulling these strands together was enjoyable although I feel I have only scratched the surface. I will need to read Fried more carefully as I’m pretty sure I’ve made some mistakes based on assumptions.
Demonstration of research skills:
As I say above I need to dig deeper and make sure I’m not assuming things. Having written this, I feel I can now go on to do the real research. I have just about finished the Lupton book and once that’s done I can get to grips with Fried and Object Ontology.
Demonstration of critical and evaluation skills:
I have shown that I am able to question established views and even if others don’t agree with me, I hope I have given reasons which go some way towards supporting my arguments.
Communication:
It’s always tricky getting the balance tight – overly academic writing isn’t fun to write or read. Before she left, Ruth suggested experimenting with the form and I would enjoy that – not sure the OCA assessors would agree though. I love Chris Kraus’s ability to intertwine critical theory and autobiography and novel into one.
Writing a literature review was new to me – should we include our thoughts? Some fo the advice I got from fellow students was contradictory and confusing to say the least!
Please note: I will need to go through it with a very fine-tooth comb before printing for assessment, and there will be typos and repetitiveness, however, I am likely to revisit it and hone it in the run-up to sending it in.
Spend some time reviewing your personal reflection and yourtutor feedback. Develop a series of carefully considered images that moves your idea forward. Hand in this series to your tutor together with a new reflective commentary setting out where you plan to go from here.
After discussing my plans with Ruth, I decided to submit new work rather than developing the first assignment, Sirens (2019) any further. The research, development, and various elements I made during the leadup to this submission have many of the same qualities and tropes as Sirens, i.e. exploring versions of collaboration, working with archival images and moving-image collage. However, what I’m actually submitting is very different. Nevertheless, the work is still ‘my voice’ and ‘style’ and I see it as a development from the previous work.
A brief preamble:
I submitted OCA DI&C work to pic.london’s open call. A blog for We Are OCA (Field 2019) describes my experience albeit in a relatively easy to digest way. I didn’t feel in a position to write anything more analytical in that forum but it may be worth scanning, (although there is no need for the purpose of this assignment as everything necessary should be on this page).
Up until very recently, I thought I would submit the work included in the show for this assignment – see here. However, after more thought (explained below), I decided not to, as the book I’ve made seems more of a cohesive project than the collective ‘manifestation’ – and stronger than the collage film I edited.
Therefore, for this assignment, I will talk about my experience in the collaboration as well but submit a proposal for a book which is not part of the pic.london exhibition but a development using some of the material I included there in a different format.
In the book version, the verse is split across pages emulating the Bourgeois book below but I might prefer it on one page.
Assignment work
ON THE EDGE OF THE VILLAGE
Individual Plates below or PDF of A5 -BOW Assignment Two Draft 5 (Please click on images to see a larger version)
Work in progress and contact sheet
Some of these images were originally included in the film – I really wanted to experiment with found and original images together. But I didn’t feel it was working so took them out. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t work but I was unable to find a way with this. I feel like this work has the potential to grow into something else and may eventually include something of the film or an element that might emerge from it.
I am submitting this work as work in progress – knowing the sequence isn’t finalised and some of the images could yet be replaced and crop revisited, the text re-set. Below is a small contact sheet. Should I wish to add to these in the future (perhaps before assessment) I think I would want to make sure they were taken in the same village, which would mean waiting for my next trip there.
I have also wondered if I would just present the text with a single image and played around with that option.
Additional layout suggestion (added 16/10/2019) which does not follow Bourgeois’ pattern and keeps the verse in one place (although still not content with the way it’s presented here). Again – sequencing not set.
Although there is a wide range of influences feeding into my ongoing work, and I discuss them at length in all my blogs, some key artists and writers are summarised in L3 BOW A2 Research & Reflection, Cultural Influences blog, there are three significant ones for this project as presented above.
Louise Bourgeois He Disappeared into Complete Silence 1947
I was very struck by Bourgious’ book He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947) when I saw the plates in a retrospective at Tate Modern (2015). I have wanted to do something inspired by the layout, and combination of text and image which don’t seem obviously related. (See my UVC notes on Barthes Rhetoric of the Image (2016)) Bourgious’parabels are individual whereas my text follows on, but I hope that my plates could function as self-contained items too. I have emulated the layout in the PDF mock-up above.
2. Assemblage
I am currently reading Deborah Lupton’s Data Selves (2019) as I suspect it will be integral to CS and BOW work. She summarises her ‘more-than-human’ approach in the opening chapter: she “recognizes that humans and non-humans are entangled in hybrid, unstable, and generative ways; takes into account the importance of considering the distributed agency and ‘vital capacities’ (‘thing-power’) of human and non-human assemblages” and “places an emphasis on the embodied, sensory and otherwise material nature of meaning, knowing, perceiving and making as part of human embodiment” (43)
Lupton is interested in “where the boundaries between object and life are constantly blurred” (25). “Western societies”, she says, privilege “world views that seek to stringently define and police the boundaries between humans and non-humans and nature and culture.” (25). She defines her approach as diffractive but stemming from a feminist new materialist viewpoint. A significant part of her book is about the boundaries between life and death, and of course, digital culture and technology’s impact on that. Although I had not read or even heard of Deborah Lupton until recently, many of her ideas seem related to systems theory, Santiago’s theory of cognition, and quantum-influenced philosophy which inform my own thoughts. I have also since discovered, thanks to fellow OCA student Holly Woodward, Object Orientated Ontology (OOO) (Field, 2019b) which rejects materialism and is suspicious of the over-belief in scientific philosophies where the idea of process rather than object dominates, but also rejects the privileging of human beings over everything else in the universe. (I don’t understand the view that materialism is reductive because emergence is so important – emergence, it seems to me, is where the inexplicable occurs, where the strangeness and ‘enchantment’ (Lupton, 2019: 32) (Bennet, 2001: 2) take place. Emergence, I think, gives us this vast mysterious area that exists between raw information (process) and solid lived experience (objects). For emergence to occur there has to be various types of assemblage.
Lupton also quotes Donna Haraway who “now positions humans metaphorically as compost, intertwined with other living and non-human entities in a rich dense matter in which the boundaries between objects cannot be distinguished” (Lupton, 2019: 26) (Franklin and Haraway, 2015: 50). She refers to herself as a compost-ite according to Lupton. (26) As much as I like the metaphor (and the humour) and personally buy into a rejection of Cartesian separateness while embracing the idea of relationship and a multi-dimensional meshlike universe, I think language, our parochial positioning, and our evolutionary visual system prevents it from accurately describing our reality. Granted, our version of reality may indeed be a complete illusion and according to Donald D Hoffman, author of The Case Against Reality (2019), the objects we see may effectively be icons on a desktop, contrivances in a user-interface which we have evolved over a very long time to give us the best chance of surviving long enough to make and raise offspring. Nevertheless, it’s the only reality we’ve got access to for the moment and I suspect quite a long time to come. And isolating, defining language is fundamental to our being.
3. Alain Fleisher Mummy, mummies 2002
I have quoted and referenced Alain Fleisher’s work repeatedly since Self & Other when I stumbled across a mention of him in another student’s blog. I describe why I noticed him on my Sketchbook blog while writing about some images I took of my family,
“Each year I visit a small village in Umbria called Ferentillo where my mother owns a house. While there, like most mothers I take lots of photographs of my children. Ferentillo is one of two places in Italy with a strange and unusual history relating to mummification. Beneath the church, Santo Stefano, in Precept, one of two sides to Ferentillo, there is a crypt where 20 mummies are displayed. The bodies become mummified due an unusual micro-orgamism in the soil. You can read a little more here. After reading a paper via a fellow student’s blog which links the mummies to photography I decided to explore this further since I had already made work for an early module in the photography degree I am doing while visiting Ferentillo about my family called This Family. In the previous project I documented my family and combined words in a short book. (2017)
I mention and refer to him again at the end of S&O when describing the still images element of my A5 project, i will have call you
“Mummification and photography are united against the disappearance of appearances: they are alike in their materiality, their techniques, and their codes of resemblance” (Alain Fleischer) A photographic performance, placing mirrors in my mother’s garden in Ferentillo, known for a micro-chemical in its soil which mummifies the dead. Mirrors have historically been seen as a doorway between the living and the dead. Phones nowadays perform some of the same functions as a mirror, seen most notably in relation to Selfies. (2018)
There is a decent image of the front cover of Fleischer’s book here. He has photographed the mummies in black and white and made them look very much more dramatic than they do in real life. Although that is quite dramatic too. But in Fleisher’s images he’s beautified the mundaneness of them. For many years there was a huge shabby 70s table (which my ex-husband was desperate to buy and I’m very glad he didn’t/couldn’t because it struck me as ugly, shabby and not in a good way, which could also describe the venue) at the entrance fo the ‘museum’ which has the feel of someone’s basement. The mummies are behind glass and are rotting (albeit arrested/extremely slow rotting) and there is something quite tacky about these poor souls on show. They are simply dead bodies – the word mummies exoticizes them somehow. They’re not very pleasant as you might imagine. However, as Deborah Lupton says about some other remains, they are “reanimated with affective force and meaning” (38) and so a ‘lively’ element in the universe (which she likens to digital data). Death when seen in this way, she says, is a continuum. (39)
Collaboration
A rumour reached the village is a collective inquiry that began in a game set in an imagined community, riven with witchcraft, industry and accusation. Over three months, six artists exchanged challenges and responses, out of which common themes emerged: loops and circles, colonies and growth, architecture and language, nature and storytelling. The culminating exhibition is a settlement of images, objects, moving image and living cultures, questioning the stories and materials on which communities are built. (2019)
The work I’m submitting emerged from my collaborative time with 5 other artists working under the auspices of pic.london. My collaborators were:
As part of my on-going research into language, culture and reality, I’d been reading Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox (2019) and books by Nicholas Christakis who wrote Connected (2009) which is about social networks (in general, not just digital ones.)
Wrangham’s book centres around the idea that human beings evolved with an ability to temper their immediate aggression, while simultaneously developing a propensity for calm, rationally-considered, pre-planned violence. Humans also became hyper-co-operative; and today collaboration is part of our DNA. Wrangham suggests these trends are underwritten by our ability to talk to and about each other, and that we have an ever-present unconscious fear someone might be watching, gossiping, and planning to do away with us if we don’t conform. Gossip allows us to conjure up stories, deny and blame others, and plan punishment for anyone deemed a deviant. Wrangham’s theory along with Christakis’ ideas about connection sit at the centre of my contribution to the project. (2019a)
We created a research booklet, thanks to the efforts of Rowan Lear and the Publication Studio at CCA Glasgow, and built an installation onto which we placed images, objects, moving image, and living cultures. (see below)
I hesitate to write the following as I am well aware much of my frustration comes from my own uncertain place which is bound up with having been an actor and wanting to incorporate that into new work. Despite leaving acting years ago, it’s still a huge part of my inner being. What’s probably important for me to take on board is the others are visual artists rather than actors. They did not go to drama school nor did they spend a lot of time attending acting classes and learning to improvise.
When you begin a theatre job as long as you’re lucky with your director you might spend a good amount of time playing games that allow you to build up relationships. Even simple rehearsing with a text should be like game-playing and games are often used to facilitate exploration. These relationships go on to help form a universe. It has to happen fast – you might get three weeks to rehearse and then you must create the universe you’ve made every day in a show where it should continue to evolve and grow. At the end of a job (they are often just a few weeks long), it often dissipates just as fast which can feel weird given how close everyone might have felt a few days earlier.
I come from a school in which ensemble is highy valued – companies who work this way often work together for a long time. You cannot have an ensemble unless all contributors are invested in the universe you’re creating. Being invested means different things, but having conversations and responding to others helps. For some reason, this was extremely difficult and I don’t think it was simply because we were scattered about the world, although technology did play a part.
Ensemble is – I think – all about making that compost which Haraway describes. But definition or form which might emerge cannot happen unless the compost has been made. And because we are creatures of language, definition seems worth aiming for – when collaborations are most successful the definition is often something no individual could have created on their own. There is a synthesis in that middle emergence ground as described above.
Although there is some valuable work, I don’t feel we made rich enough compost. And so the work is less of an ensemble than a collection of individual’s work presented in a form which shows potential but which ultimately doesn’t meet the criteria for ensemble. The word collaboration seems to carry many versions of people working together though – and ensemble is probably the most cohesive ideal to aim for.
Saying all of that we worked together well when we began to install the work. And communication is much freer now after the event. We were also by far more of an ensemble than any of the othe groups who worked in pairs or alone or with others outside their group. (William Kentridge is a good example of an artist who embraces collaboration and ensemble).
Nevertheless, an overwhelming sense of isolation is what I’ve made work about here. Because that is what I picked up during the months we were trying to forge a common language. And it probably began to emerge quite specifically for me when I suggested a visual improvisation. We had agreed we wouldattempt to improvise using images/text via social media. After saying, let’s create a ‘self-portrait’ based on the character we’d played in a game during one of our workshops, someone refused saying, “portraiture was so isolating”. I felt blocked and frustrated by this probably because I had this memory of ensemble in my expectations; but, while I respect someone’s discomfort with the idea of photographing themselves (I don’t like it either) that kind of response goes very much against the spirit of the process. One of the most important rules in improvisation is to avoid blocking. If you’re handed something, no matter how awkward or difficult or uncomfortable, you go with it. You transform it. You make it work. If you don’t the improvisation dies and so when you refuse something, which you may feel ideologically compelled to, you should know you’re making that call. What’s more, what I’ve submitted here is a self-portrait although I don’t physically appear in any of the images. We can and must take liberties with language when improvising. For improvisation to flourish, we absolutely must take the baton pass it on. Anything else goes. That’s it for improvisation. But without those two crucial foundations, it cannot come to anything. I didn’t feel this happened and perhaps mainly because it’s not a familiar language for artists who are used to working on thier own.
Hence, my work explores that isolating experience and literally isolates objects using the flash, and in the text, I convey isolation hinting to much that was discussed before the Collaboration section in this blog as well as those feelings I’ve described. I was interested to watch Netflix’s The AO (2016/19) which explores the isolated lives of the characters who are separated by glass while forced to live in a cave – one of a plethora of modern productions about people who break boundaries between life and death, or else live in the afterlife (and I am looking at the significance of this if any in CS.). As I say in my CS literature review, unlike Plato’s Cave, the reality is not happening outside. It is inside the cave, the characters are the shadows themselves. There are many references to digital culture in the programme.
**
In the end, I made a film for the exhibition. All of the elements in it are a response to the conversations we did manage to have. But it was made alone and we never reached a place where we could share constructive criticism which I do find useful – plus it allows for a collaborative conversation to take place. I do know reaching such a point can take a good while and requires trust.
A group where the impro/game rules were very clear and the resulting example here truly collaborative https://artlicksweekend.com/2019/event/short-straw/ I woud not have known about this group if not for one of my ccollaborators. (Added 17/10)
What I showed there:
I showed three minutes of four-minute film on a Kindle within the collective circle (as described here)
The Kindle is an object of value itself and perhaps in a McLuhanesque way, perhaps it doesn’t matter what was on it. However, I wish I’d showed the final minute (Challenger exploding) rather than the first three. It’s called Gossip.
I also showed the same three minutes on a TV screen on the wall which alternated with a film of us playing the stick game. In fact, I wish I hadn’t added it. It’s a film made for projecting or watching on a computer or small digital device. Not a TV. But that’s just something to learn for next time. Before making final decisions about equipment make sure you’ve seen the work on various options.
The room is very light so projecting it wasn’t really an option although others just put up with the light or got the organisers to build them a dark space (which wasn’t desirable in our case).
I made a full version of the film available online. (see below) This differs from the exhibition version too as the sound online is the Game Boy audio-track. I do not like the space sounds I added to the exhibition version – it’s quite rubbish, really. And there are silly reasons for making that mistake but it’s done. I like the kitschiness of the online version of the film – it’s made that way by the combination of colours and the music and that works for me.
I showed the verse in full unlike here where it’s cut into segments on each plate. It was placed beside and under other’s contributions which worked well enough.
These elements existed in relation to others’ work and functioned as objects regardless of the material (digital/growing/image/archive/glass – crockery etc).
See the installation below. I do plan to take some images when I invigilate on Wednesday.
Some of the images I constructed on my phone while away and added to the IG platform (often but not always appropriated, some from a Situationist book, and adjusted using proprietary apps – playing with the accessibility of digital tools) Sadly my phone broke while away and I lost quite a few too. (click to see larger version)
Although I feel I have submitted a more cohesive element/work which emerged from this process, I like the kitschiness of the online version of the film. I think it is far better in the end than the version in the gallery but the sound was too much without earphones and one of the collaborators expressed ‘a hatred’ of earphones in galleries and I didn’t feel it was worth arguing about, perhaps because I was uncertain about the work in the first place. I also think the first section of the film is too long and it could afford to lose a minute or so.
I was also grateful to Josh Phillips for being in charge of the wooden platform and building it and making it work. Installation images:
OCA Reflection:
Demonstration of technical and visual skills
Further evidence of strengthening skills and the ability to recognise what and why things work or not. Lots of work to draw from.
Quality of Outcome
I think the book I’ve suggested is potentially much less incoherent than the film or the collective work. I quite like incoherence to be honest, or at least don’t’ have a problem with it but think something potentially precious never emerged in the collective, although it might have done. I think there is some interesting and strong individual work within the collective but that it does not work as an ensemble piece as well as it could have done. I am really interested in collaborating, assemblages and objects, however, and look forward to exploring this more. A book or an online version of some type is an assemblage in any case, as is the film above. I found it very difficult to think straight in a group of six quite different people. I think I also prefer the verse unbroken so if I decide to print a booklet for assessment I will play with different ways of compiling it.
Demonstration of creativity
The book format is much more sedate, perhaps even more mature, less histrionic than previous work. The written work is a good standard. (The film which I’ve not submitted is not as potent as my previous one although some aspects of the montage are are successful, the music with the challenger seems to have an effect on viewers.)
Context
Strong, pulling from different sources. Perhaps could add a photographer although looking at the issue of photography as a medium (rather than an art in itself) to make art within CS A2. References:
Blatt, Ari J.(2009) ‘The interphototextual dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s L’usage de la photo‘, Word & Image, 25: 1, 46 — 55, 27 – Alain Fleischer, Mummy, mummies (Lagrasse: E ́ ditions Verdier, 2002), pp. 15–16. Translations mine. (Blatt) Available at: https://www.tcd.ie/French/assets/doc/BlattOnErnauxMarie.pdf (Accessed: 24/5/2017)
Cluitmans L & Zeqo A(2011) He Disappeared Into Complete Silence, Rereading A Single Artwork by Louise Bourgeois, Amsterdam, De Hallen Haarlem/Onomatapee
Christakis, N. and Fowler, J. (2011). Connected. 1st ed. London: HarperPress.
Fellow OCA student Holly suggested looking at Graham Harmen
A useful counter-argument to the overwhelming direction in science to reduce everything to process/event (naive realism)
Two kinds of knowledge – 1 what it’s made of (physics), 2 what it does (Some modern philosophy) But problem with these – they are related. Duomining (over and undermining but never really getting the true essence of the thing) PDF of paper – http://dar.aucegypt.edu/bitstream/handle/10526/3466/Duomining.pdf?sequence=1
Relate to New Materialism
Relate to Michael Fried’s writing about photography
See assemblages (Feminist New Realism) (Lupton 2019 – very relevant, will need to record notes/bullet points soon for CS)
Rhizome
Relate to Thing-Power (Bennet, 2010, Lupton 2019)
Harmen – a phenomenologist
Relate to Klein object relations
Objects relate to each other, there is some causal power – this is also key in new materialism although much else is opposing. Harmen is not a materialist. But link this to Santiago theory of cognition.
like new materialism humans are not better than other objects (compare this to animism)
Doesn’t believe in matter – the world is made of substantial forms, there is no such thing as shapeless forms
You can’t describe the world, the best you can do is hint at what the real is
Does not believe in absolute knowledge, likes art because it alludes which is a better way of trying to describe the world than spelled out scientific language, believes metaphor is a better way to access the real (i.e. Zizek’s real rather than Lacan’s version)
Harmen’s philosophy is directly opposed to Donald D Hoffman’s theory about reality.
One of the people who was recommended to counter James Elkin’s final sentences in What Photography Is that photography might actually be ‘boring’, was Michael Fried. I’d not read his work at length before, although had read the passage about him in Fifty Key Photography writers, and so have spent some time trying to introduce myself to a few of his key ideas. (Of no genuine importance unless you’re an avid Freudian, he has the same family name as my dad before he changed it when he was a young man.)
Objecthood – I suspect this is probably a subject quite close to my heart, but reading further will help talk about it using language that people writing about art tend to use. And certainly, there is a lot more to it that my constant referrals to Rovelli’s statement about relationship rather than objects. “[Quantum mechanics] does not describe things as they are: it describes how things occur and how they interact with each other… [] Reality is reduced to a relation.” (2014)
From a handy summary by the ever-reliable Chicago School of Art. “Maurice Merleau-Ponty breaks down Descartes system of binaries and conceptualizes the self and bodies as thoroughly intermeshed and indistinguishable, especially with respect to the body. With no clear distinction between subject and object, objects can be part of the subject’s being.” (See Klein’s object-relations).
This ties in with the quote I’d identified in Hayle’s work and which is discussed at length in various essays about cyborgs and the way we other-ise cyborgs/AI in fiction. “Only if one thinks of the subject as an autonomous self independent of the environment is one likely to experience the panic performed by Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics and Bernard Wolf’s Limbo. This view of the self authorizes the fear that if the boundaries are breached at all, there will be nothing to stop the self’s complete dissolution. By contrast, when the human is seen as part of a distributed system, the full expression of human capability can be seen precisely to dependent on the splice rather than being imperilled by it.” (1999)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty seems to go onto say that paintings are above and beyond that – they have a special place in the world. “The special category of objects, paintings, especially eludes this process, and returns the spectator for a moment to a time when the dichotomy, between subject and object, was not yet formed. The view of a painting does not move to perceive and define the object before them.” This seems rather like Benjamin’s aura. As if some objects carry something of ‘god’ or the ‘spirit’ in them.
According to Fried, “During the experience of art subject and object, space and time become collapsed, negating the possibility of objects [see time, space].” [See Hoffman’s dissolution of space-time and therefore of objects within space-time. Also Rovelli, System’s theory and a number of other books I’ve read recently]
Apparently, “Descartes relegates color to a secondary property of reality. This allows him to construct a unitary and undifferentiated model of objects, by making shape, a spatial property, the defining characteristic” which seems a bit nuts nowadays.
“The essential norms or conventions of painting are at the same time the limiting conditions with which a picture must comply in order to be experienced as a picture. Modernism has found that these limits can be pushed back infinitely before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object. [11]” Modernism in these terms is the start of expressions which refute the existence of God, even though they still continue to refer to a kind of divine experience.
“By virtue of its opposition to the banality, worldliness, and gracelessness of objecthood, art takes on transcendental significance.”
Ah – here is what is at the core of my own thinking – Other writers do not distinguish art from objects by way of arguments about perception or phenomenology, but examine the way art objects behave socially to gain their status. Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “aura” depends on art as an object residing in specific spaces. The fact that forms of art such as painting and sculpture must exist in one spatial location corresponds to their social and class function. But Benjamin is still thinking in Cartesian terms because this aura relating to social class and function is tied to religion too as these institutions cannot really exist as they do without each other.
“This art, unlike art with an aura, has no specific spatial location, and is unable to be located as an object. It would be difficult to term the art of film as an object in the sense that has been discussed above.” Well, I am not so sure about this. A film can be seen as an object if we think about the screen on which it is shown and we begin to imagine that we might function in a similar way which is what theory likes to point to nowadays – we have a desktop (reality) and we draw on information to construct objects [icons] in our world (Hoffman, 2019) This assertion that non-aura art has no spacial location remind me of the mentality that just because something is digital its not material. If I am looking at the letter on my screen (underlined in red due to all the typos – I know exactly where it is. It is here, in my construction of space and time which my many ancestors evolved to ‘exist’ within in order to recognise what will help my system continue for long enough to procreate and take care of the little systems that emerged from me. (ibid)
“Rather it is a set of social practices that define and declare the object art.” Re Raymond Williams. This makes the most sense to me – art seems to be mostly about money and status and daft games. I say mostly because I am sure there is valuable work being made which has nothing to do with all of that. What is probably quite a good question is what if all of that nonsense is eschewed and just a few people see the work, perhaps in someone’s back garden in Croydon (honestly hypothetically as I know no-one there), is it art? Does something only become art when a middle-class art-history graduate deems it so? If it’s not got any fiscal value because no-one wants to buy it, is it art? Is Art just about something being a commodity? If yes, then art is a load of tosh that deserves the reputation it has amongst some people. I don’t think it is just that – but wading through it can be challenging.
THIS WAS THE DRAFT FOR A2 BUT IN THE END, I DECIDED TO SUBMIT QUITE A DIFFERENTLY REALISED PROJECT – ALTHOUGH USING THE SAME MATERIAL AND SO HAVE LEFT THIS UNFINISHED AS A RECORD OF MY PROCESS
Spend some time reviewing your personal reflection and your tutor feedback. Develop a series of carefully considered images that moves your idea forward. Hand in this series to your tutor together with a new reflective commentary setting out where you plan to go from here.
After discussing my plans with Ruth, I decided to submit new work rather than developing the first assignment any further. However, it has many of the same qualities/tropes, and moves my practice forward, i.e. exploring versions of collaboration, working with archival images and text, and moving-image collage.
Quotes below were not included in the final work but the work circles around these ideas and if I pull together a booklet for assessment, they wouldn’t be out of place.
“It is hard to imagine [] considering the inherent silliness, cruelty and superstition of the human race, how it has contrived to last as long as it has. The witch-hunting, the torturing, the gullibility, the massacres, the intolerance, the wild futility of human behaviour over the centuries is hardly credible.”
Noel Coward quoted in The Goodness Complex by Richard Wrangham, 2019
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“[Quantum mechanics] does not describe things as they are: it describes how things occur and how they interact with each other… [] Reality is reduced to a relation.”
Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli, 2014
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“Just as brains can do things that no single neuron can do, so social networks can do things that no single person can do.”
Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, 2019
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“There is a glut of images in the world and a stubborn obsession with holding on to them… [] Far from satisfying our need for information, the ungraspable abundance of indiscriminate data leaves us just as ignorant but much more confused .”
Pandora’s Camera by Joan Fontcuberta, 2014
The Goodness Complex by Richard Wrangham centres around the idea that human beings evolved with an ability to temper their immediate aggression, and simultaneously developed a propensity for calm, rationally-considered, pre-planned violence, for which language is needed. Humans also became hyper-co-operative across all activities, in particular with childcare and hunting/gathering, and are unlikely to have been the success they are without collaboration. Alongside that drive, there is an inherent desire to be good even when there is seemingly no payoff.
Wrangham suggests these paradoxes were facilitated by our ability to talk to and about each other, and that even when we aren’t necessarily being spoken about, there is always an unconscious awareness that we will be. Once humans were able to gossip, they could avert blame, conjure up stories and plan punishment for anyone who deviated or might be seen as a threat. Gossip, in these terms, underpins who and what we are as a species.
Wrangham’s theory sits at the centre of my contribution to this project.
Work to be included here:
About Pic London:
Workshops:
About Hal Silver:
Artists involved in the collaboration:
Resulting work:
Group Statement:
A rumour reached the village is a collective inquiry that began in a game set in an imagined community, riven with witchcraft, industry and accusation. Over three months, six artists exchanged challenges and responses, out of which common themes emerged: loops and circles, colonies and growth, architecture and language, nature and storytelling. The culminating exhibition is a settlement of images, objects, moving image and living cultures, questioning the stories and materials on which communities are built.
Images of Group set-up and links to relevant collaborator’s work where possible:
Individual work withinexhibition:
Gossip emerged from the original game via an imagined midwife and evolved over time during off-and-online conversations with the other artists/characters in the group. The result is a reflection and response to that interaction; a mixture of text and, downloaded from the Internet, appropriated still frames, moving image, and sounds from space.
There are two versions of the video. Each has the same footage and edit but the gallery version has a simple audio track of sounds from space from the Nasa website. This will be/was shown on an electronic tablet in amongst the other objects and accompanied by some text and still frames from the film captured and printed in newsprint.
A second version of the video is available on my website. There is an instruction to visit it built into the installation (assemblage.) This online edition has music from a well-known game from the eighties which was played on an early handheld device.
Research booklet:
Additional Context
” The circle is timeless but also modern and hi-tech: lenses, records, cogs and clocks. Time is circular on Napoleon’s personal carriage clock, seized at Waterloo, the hands always showing the hours past as well as those to come. And perhaps space is circular too, at least in the mind of Anish Kapoor.” Cumming, L. (2016) Seeing Round Corners: The Art of the Circle review – the joy of life in the round, The Guardian [online review] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/29/seeing-round-corners-the-art-of-the-circle-review-turner-contemporary-margate [Accessed 13/10/2019]
Given my growing focus on Plato’s Cave and contemporary references in popular culture to similar metaphors, I thought it was interesting to see the Penguin edition uses one of Kandinsky’s image of Circles (1923) on the cover.
From Amazon, 2019, [shopping] Available at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Republic-Penguin-Classics-Plato-ebook/dp/B009LVOFPU/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=platos+cave+kindle&qid=1570964028&sr=8-3 (Accessed: 13/10/2019)The group talked about Bosch’s painting in one of the few meetings we had in person after one of the artists had created a plastic digital 3D print of a building she’d been photographing. I could imagine the object in the distance much like the pink and towers in the Bosch’s background, and indeed, everytime I saw a photograph it did (for me anyway) make reference to Bosch’s work.
Neurophilosopher, Patricia Churchland discusses the biological origins of empathy here. Her article includes:
“The overlap of moral virtues across cultures is striking, even though the relative ranking of the virtues may vary with a clan’s history and environment. Typically, vindictiveness and cheating are discouraged, while cooperation, modesty and courage are praised. These universal norms far predate the concept of any moralising God or written law. Instead, they are rooted in the similarity of basic human needs and our shared mechanisms for learning and problem-solving.”
“Neuroscience reminds us that our social nature and cultural practices, including the ones we call morality, are products of evolution, constrained by our biological heritage. Perhaps that knowledge, of a sense of morality rooted in nothing more than our mammalian origins, makes us a little less likely to be infatuated with our own moral superiority, and more likely to cast a sceptical eye on those who peddle utopian remedies to our problems.” (2019)
I have been thinking about this word ‘assemblage‘ and ended up talking about it with friends. I was directed towards Kaprow who used the word and titled a book with it – but relied on the French accent – I have a feeling it wasn’t really used in English at that time (50s) although I can’t pinpoint why I would think such a thing and may just be making it up.
Search for etymology brings up the following:
1704, “a collection of individuals,” from French assemblage “gathering, assemblage,” from assembler (see assemble). Earlier English words in the same sense include assemblement, assemblance (both late 15c.). Meaning “act of coming together” is from 1730; that of “act of fitting parts together” is from 1727.
One of my Pic London collaborators told me about James Richards:
From the Tate site:
“Richards generates meaning through abundance, by way of allusion, ellipsis and unity of tone, the lack of legibility counterbalanced by a strong sense of mood. The White Review”
Richard’s work will be really useful for me as he’s doing the same sort of thing – improvising, mixing, creating audio-visual collages. Here are some of the key phrases which stuck out for me from his Tate SHots interview:
The material… none of it is abstract… it is all stuff from the world… continuously gather and experiment
In the film below the time-lapsed Lillies are filmed in front of a painting that has a slight cartoon quality to it – of a wolf and bloody sheep, creating a ‘moving image still life‘ with death and gore in the Lillies as we watch them open and wilt, and in the painting that surrounds them. Death, dying, life, living, beauty, terror, sex all in this tightly compacted text. Content becomes abstracted by the close-up crop. Good for me to see how he relies on others to edit and animate. This later work has more of a polished feel and although I’m beginning to feel that the Brechtian/Deren habit of opting for less polished settings is not fashionable at the moment – I think my heart still resides more with a raw and under-commodified aesthetic.
Since sending out various versions of work and receiving the feedback I have developed the overall concept and presentation further – seeing what could be ditched but also how I would bring some of the various elements I had created together into an ‘assemblage‘.
I do not much like the word assemblage but after reading it used (a great deal) in a blog by Deborah Lupton, the author of Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives, it seems like the correct word for the collection of images, sounds and materials I’ve gathered together. She writes:
I examine the interplay of human and nonhuman affordances associated with digital technologies – devices, software and the digital data they generate – and the agential capacities that are opened up or closed off as these things assemble. I ponder the questions of who benefits from these agential capacities, and in whose interests they operate. Here again, affective forces are central to the engagements of humans with these nonhuman things and the capacities that are generated by their gatherings. I address how human-data assemblages can generate agential capacities that empower and vitalise actors in the assemblage; but can also expose them to vulnerabilities and harms.
This approach recognises the entanglements of personal digital data assemblages with human action, reaction and understanding of the world. Personal digital data assemblages are partly comprised of information about human action, but their materialisations are also the products of human action, and these materialisations can influence future human action. While digital data assemblages are often conceptualised as immaterial, invisible and intangible, I contend that they are things that are generated in and through material devices (smartphones, computers, sensors), stored in material archives (data repositories), materialised in a range of formats that invite human sensory responses and have material effects on human bodies (documenting and having recursive effects on human flesh). (2019)
I am therefore creating an assemblage although I have not used this word.
The assemblage consists of:
A video – itself a collage, a type of assemblage. While not a still collage like Höch’s were, it was made to emulate that trope, cutting up and pasting material that exists in the world. It includes audiovisual material that is available on the internet but contains signifiers of earlier technology. It will be shown on a Kindle – a handheld device.
The film will also be available on my website but it will be a different version. Mostly the same apart from one or two tiny sections, but with an alternative audio track. The instruction to visit the website is printed on newsprint and is part of the assemblage.
Still frames from the film which have been ‘captured’ and frozen – in more or less the same way a photograph of life is captured and rendered a still image, using a slightly different tech/method – and printed on newsprint. These will be placed on the platform or hung from sticks.
The poem printed on a tabloid page, orientated portrait. I hope this will hang above and slightly behind the kindle, perhaps alongside printed newsprints but I will need to see how this pans out when we set up. I was very influenced a long time ago by Louise Bourgious’ He Disappeared into Complete Silence. This is a book with several plates each of which consists of text and a drawing. The drawing is not an illustration. And sometimes it is hard to make the connection. But they are made to be seen together. I feel the poem and the video work this way too. Each can stand on its own but the point of the work is only brought to the fore when they are placed beside each other: A moving image piece alongside text, working with it but not illustrating. I might have read/performed the text in a video or even live. But this did not feel the right place (collaboration) for that – perhaps I might have reached a way of doing this if we’d had longer or were working in a smaller group -and it is something to consider for the longer-term, BOW-wise.
The work will exist in a ‘village’ (the platform) alongside other work made by my collaborators. The contents were influenced by their interests and the interactions I had with them. It is a reflection of them and my time with them. So my work is part of a greater assemblage, a network of creators which itself exists within a further larger assemblage – i.e. the three groups organised/curated by Pic London. That too is an assemblage which is again part of something greater. And so on = the fractal nature of existence.
Looking back, this is the pattern of my work. And now I know why. I am not focusing on one tiny aspect. I am recreating the chaos and interaction of conscious experience (not an individual, not an isolated and alienated concept, not one thing).
When I submit the assignment I will include critical information I sent to Pic London – but here since it is relevant, I will just add a quotation I used which I have inserted into my work previously, and put at the front of my Self & Other blog:
“There is no such thing as a single human being, pure and simple unmixed with other human beings … [the self] is a composite structure … formed out of countless never-ending influences and exchanges… we are members of one another.” (Joan Riviere, 1927) It seems the assemblage whether it’s made up of flesh or tech or both and all sorts of other stuff is a description of Riviere’s statement.
After sharing the previous blog where I reflect on topics and subjects I aim to explore in my extended essay, and looking at the references I will discuss in A2: Literature Review, I have had some useful comments from other students which include helpful sites as well as suggestions of writers and practitioners. I will add to this page as more arrive.
A guide to writing a critical review (as opposed to a literature review):
Another note that fellow students have reminded me of: The literature review is not an essay. (Yet, it should still be written as well it can be.)
Work I might find useful
I mention in my blog that I want to begin to tackle Deleuze. A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari has been recommended as a good start. I have looked at a couple of videos in the meantime. And immediately thought, Oh! this is related to Systems; and to how a linear Cartesian understanding of existence is being usurped by a picture of a networked reality, and the end of the Triangle of Being, replaced by a less hierarchical system. Therefore it will inform knowledge already embedded most notably from a System’s View of Life, Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, 2014 (Kindle)
Charlotte Cotton’s Photography is Magic 2015/16 Exhibtion and essays, which I have downloaded. There is an optimism in this show and, I believe the essays, which might act as a counter to Elkins’ darkness. Cotton also talks about ‘post-disciplinary art’ which sounds very much like ‘multidisciplinary’ as discussed by Capra.
Comments via email:
A few thoughts in response to a quick read …
I wonder whether Michael Fried’s “Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before” might be a work worth looking at for a ‘counter view’. He’s a good old modernist (though you yourself say, in passing, that “intention is key” ).
You also say …
So the poor old still photograph has a great deal to compete with.
I might, if being contrary, argue that we still get an enormous amount of our information (and, perhaps, unconsciously, our perception of reality) from still visual images – even if they’re sometimes flashing by us momentarily. I’m not sure – are you looking to argue that the moving image has a closer relationship with reality; or that we humans regard it as more ‘real’; or that there’s more of it so it’s more influential on our perception of ‘reality’; or possibly something else or a combination ()? Are you, maybe, looking to understand (justify ) your own focus on the moving image?
Maybe (just ‘maybe’, not definitely) you will need to focus your attention somewhere? Be it still or moving image, the contextual scope – selfie/holiday video/online newsreel/archive photo/celebrity publicity/Jeff Wall artwork/feature film/indie documentary/magazine ad shot – is huge, and that list could go on and on and on.
Hope that’s useful – fascinating stuff, as always.
I replied (edited):
…. really useful. These discussions help me to see what holes I’m leaving and there are as usual many! Fried has been suggested to me before although I think in … 50 key writers on Photography. I shall take another look.
Do be contrary – it helps. I like how you have differentiated what I might be arguing (I must be honest, I do not know yet!)
I agree – I may need to focus my attention – it is such a very big topic and thank you for your suggestions. Super useful.
Here I add:
Am I looking to justify my own focus is a very good question and if so, I think I need to avoid doing so – I don’t need to justify it, do I? But I am more interested in using whatever form works to make the point – whatever the point might be. At the moment, I think I am trying to suggest that the momentous revolution we are living through now, moving from analogue to digital, is part of and exists in a feedback loop that is about something far more fundamental, a complete overthrow of logocentrism which dates back really far; and is probably well-served by fewer fixed boundaries between forms because the boundaries across reality are currently disintegrating while at the same time being redrawn. This view of mine is taken from far away and is not about the current decade or generation although this is a pivotal moment.
Some great feedback which includes potentially relevant quotes for me to look up and consider:
Something pops out at me which is that photography has been seen as this special medium, better and more real than what came before. And we have since realised that it has its limitations to capturing reality which has released an explosion of creativity that undermines its original intent. Does a loss of faith in the mediums initially perceived presentation of truth ultimately liberate it or condemn it?
Similarly the accessibility of photography through smartphones etc has democratised the medium which creates new causalities. Photography may become artisan again (analogue already is) when it is replaced by another medium. Is it a familiar cycle in all mediums? (Yes, so agree with this which is why the current obsession with alternative processes irritates me. It’s so predictable.)
Quotes (google the bits below)
Richard Serra – “Art is not democratic”
John Tagg – “More significantly, perhaps, if a piece of equipment was made available, then the necessary knowledges were not.” (Tagg, 1988, p.17).
Nicholas Bourriaud – “An artwork is a dot on a line.” (Bourriaud, 2002, p.21). In reference to linear art history. Do we repeat history
“Otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities. but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist.” (Bourriaud, 2002, p.13). Have we chosen to live in a constructed reality?
Overall I think you have a lot of interesting enquiries. Try to narrow down a central idea or interest, not too many because I know the word count fills up fast. It doesn’t have to be a direct relation to your BoW. My tutor said you can’t resolve everything in 5,000 words. (Good point!) So you want to leave room to enquire in other tangents potentially in the future.
).
)? Are you, maybe, looking to understand (justify 
SJField - OCA Level Three Study Blog 