From page 42 of the course folder:
A: Is there anything you feel compelled to do at this point in your work but you can’t figure out exactly how it will fit into your project? Talk to your tutor or write about it – perhaps it’s a change of direction.
B: Would you be comfortable using opportunistic encounters to create your art? In your view, has Calle been deceitful or intrusive in creating the works discussed here? How would you defend or criticise her approach?
- I read in another student’s blog they had decided to leave CS aside for the moment and concentrate on the making. This worked well for that student. I, however, have done the opposite – certainly, in terms of images although I have concentrated on the ‘writings’ which I am likely to include in BOW (I do not like the word poems). Even so, one of the most challenging things with CS & BOW is doing them both together. And, I have really needed to understand – as best I can – some immensely complex ideas. So, the time taken to unpick these has been valuable and necessary – but I have reached a point where I really do need to start making imagery. However, when someone asked me what my subject was, I couldn’t give a concrete answer. (Not sure I can yet but perhaps getting there).
- One of the first writings I pulled together was Orpheus in Homebase. At that point, I realised Consumerism was very much on my mind. but the work is not simply about that.
- Reading the contributing essay’s in Edgar’s Martin Soliloquies book has led to finding some excellent quotations to add to the essay, and the whole book has given me a further understanding of how and why Martins’ is using multiple sources, which I feel compelled to do. I attempted to do this in A2 but for the submission, settled on a much simpler single series (original) to include although always with the idea that I might include that mini-series within the larger project – using multiple sources.
- I will write up notes elsewhere but the following from Martins’ book is key and sums up my own intentions very well:
Roger Luckhurst (academic, writer, literature and science fiction) describes how Martins’ uses found, original, vintage, and parallel projects to ‘derail the over-coherence any series or display or exhibition or book inevitably imposes, fighting to keep the grid of meaning open, defying the dread determinism of the forensic field’ (2016: 118) This reminds me of Robert Wilson’s intentions to keep meaning open, to explore and even embrace ‘the terror’ rather than comfort his audience with trite reassurances. ‘I try to open up, not narrow down meaning’ (Holmberg, 1996: 7)
- I have been trying to find ways of doing the above since UVC and not really understanding why – until recently when I think it has started to become clearer. Such experiments were sometimes received positively by OCA tutor guidance, but other times not so much. I see in photography (but not in some avant-garde theatre) a desire for simplicity and a rejection of complexity, which irritates me. It’s true, experimental attempts can be less successful when the outcome comes across as so incoherent there is nothing to grab hold of. (And I’m not saying my failed attempts were, in fact, anything other than that.) But there is something in academic photography that is stilted, conservative, and yes, ‘boring’ – which I find stultifying, overly myopic (ironically for a medium that is all about seeing) and smug. John Tagg talks about photography’s ‘fixity’ in his video on the cabinet and the Victorian desire to categorise and appoint value into the system (2011) – and it seems to me that photography is so mired in this urge – a systemic, ontologically encapsulated motivation, that it becomes almost impossible to avoid. And that even when photographers claim to be addressing the system by making work which is meant to query, unpick or criticise elements within the system, they invariably can’t help but confirm and reinforce the very thing they want to dismantle. (see Flusser 2012) I think Martins’ – and others such as Edmund Clark, Clare Strand and Joan Jonas, all people who work across mediums, are putting themselves in a good position to avoid the traps that working with an inherently isolating/othering medium sets for artists. These artists, to a greater or lesser degree, create rhizome-like systems of work which can respond to spaces or platforms as necessary, using multiple devices and materials. A single project might contain work from other projects and also appear in books, videos, galleries and online – and in each space it will be different and appropriate to the situation.
- Indeterminism is the heart of reality, so Carlo Rovelli tells us (2016). We little humans can’t stand that. We want certaintity. We want fixity. Indeterminism terrifies us. Contemporary fluidity terrifies us (as well it might when utilised and taken advantage of by badly motivated actors).
- The ‘habit of the Cartesian mind’ (Barad, 2007) dominates our consciousness and perception. This is something we humans need to begin to understand – that the habit is constructed and therefore it is possible to deconstruct it. We are in some ways beginning to embody it but without consciousness/cognisance. What informs this habit and the underlying and ‘intra-active’ processes that are emerging today (and have been for a century) are the impetus of my evolving project.
- Wendy M said when I was doing S&O, think of what you want to say and say it. I have summarised my key statement in an earlier post – STOP CATEGORISING ME!! That’s at the heart of what I want to say. And then, from that springs a whole range of other topics which we cannot ignore – there is an urge to encourage others to consider the ‘habit of the Cartesian mind’ which spreads out and can be applied to anything and everything from feminism to economics to climate change to migration. By writing the small texts I hope to trigger thoughts and questions assumptions.
- By refusing to work in the usual way – i.e. the Cartesian way (which is so often tautological) and embracing context, intra-action, relation, emergence and rejecting discrete isolated objects, I hope to address those assumptions. (I genuinely have nightmares about how this will be received by OCA assessors!)
- The way I’ve been doing this to date is to write – and the themes that have emerged are as stated above consumerism (the modern religion) and mythology and ‘the simulation‘ (i.e. the spectacle, the panoply of visual and aural – moving – realities we live with and as). These are not singular nor are they isolated. They are intra-active and relational. They are lively and rhizome-like.
- Finally, Martins manages to explore similar subjects through the doorway of ‘death’ and in particular violent suicide. At the moment I think my overriding subject is Entanglement and I am not sure that is as potent or direct. As mentioned the idea of the ‘agential cut’ and therefore ‘Cut’ and its various usages may serve as the title. The idea of lits of little micro-narratives in the form of the writings leads to me thinking about using ‘notes for a short story‘ or a variation on that as the subtitle persists in my mind. But I am aware it’s a bit nebulous for now – although this nebulousness is crucial to the message too.
B – Sophie Calle
I wrote about Sophie Calle during S&O (2017). It’s not really relevant or helpful for me at this point to cover her stalking or revelatory process again. But she is an interdisciplinary artist so a useful reference in that sense. I would, however, point to Sylvere Lotringer’s comments on revealing all in our capitalist culture – see Overexposed (2007) but will leave it to others to consider whether Calle is critiquing this aspect of our society or not by engaging in it. It’s interesting, however, to compare her to Lortinger’s ex-wife Chris Kraus who wrote I Love Dick (1997) and the comments about Calle being ‘exploitative, invasive, silly if not simply crazy,’ (Shilling, 2011) – sexist or accurate or double standards? (Think of the many, many violent and sick broken men out there whose behaviour continues unabated and excused constantly by a complicit society …)
Field, SJ. (2017) Self & Other Sophie Calle WordPress [blog] Available at: https://ocasjf.wordpress.com/2017/04/30/artist-sophie-calle/ (Accessed 03/01/2020)
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