Friday, 28 October 2011
Thursday, 27 October 2011
What a way to start the day...
Listening to Christiane Meyer-Stoll and Rolf Ricke talk about the life and work of Bill Bollinger at the Fruitmarket gallery ahead of tonight's exhibition opening. This is the first show in a long time, (anywhere, not just at the Fruitmarket), that has genuinely given me butterflies. That seems like such a rare experience these days, maybe because I'm getting older... Of course I instantly question whether its the work or whether its the work + Rolf Ricke's anecdotes. That is, am I fetishizing the work and the period of art history... probably, but it still seems really exciting and the work is really very good. I feel an certain affinity with Bollinger's ways of operating, (which aren't out of sync with the rest of his peers, Smithson, Tuttle, etc.) It all makes sense. I love that the work is clearly two fingers up to minimalist artists, eg, Judd, who were making work before Bollinger and whom he clearly disagreed with, but that this doesn't stop the work from existing in its own right, with it's own merits, for it's own reasons. I'm interested to see how my perception of this work will change over the course of the exhibition but I suspect that I'll have more to think about with this show than the last... I really want to take Christiane and Rolf to the pub so I can listen to more stories...
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
Monday, 24 October 2011
a written response...
I need to write about the project space last Friday and also today's triad tutorial... I'm going to start with the latter...
So this was the first official triad of the semester, though, due to participating in the workshop at the start of the year I was familiar with the process. The other two participants were Kyle and Ellyse, (both first years), and Catrina, (photography tutor), was present to facilitate... The order of running was Kyle - speaker, me - listener, Ellyse - observer. Rotating, me speaking next with Ellyse listening, then Ellyse speaking last. All three of us seemed comfortable monologuing for the required 10 minutes and I hope that my feedback on Kyle's presentation was useful. In my crit I did my best to give an over view of my working practices and methodologies as well as talking about the collaborative work that was presented in Friday's project space. Given that I only had 10 minutes, (and I was freewheeling), I couldn't in any way explain every aspect of my practice. Ellyse's feedback seemed to reflect this. At one point both E & K heard me say temple work when in fact I had said temporal work, I can only imagine the confusion this must have caused before i felt compelled to correct them. It only goes to prove that one should annunciate... or that people should listen carefully, I'm not sure, but I'll take the blame this time... The feedback I received was well put but nothing that I hadn't already considered. This, again, I feel can be attributed to the time constraint and to my inability to say it simple. This is something I will continue to work on but I also think that I might consider being more specific in the next triad. In my role as observer I decided to take a more traditional tack, as the other two had made more subjective observations about the conversations and offered feedback in a similar way to the listeners role. This was fine but I decided to take notes of just the body language rather than comment on the content of the presentations. I was, however, criticized because it was impossible to know how the two things married up... hey, you win some you lose some. I agree that if I had noted what was being said as well as what they were doing it may have been more useful but as I pointed out, that is a skill I have yet to develop...
And so to the project space...
It went well... there were a few pre-show problems, namely Kim's photos kept falling down. We had hung them first with white tack, which we quickly decided was not good. Then we hung the whole show with double sided tape, which seemed to work wonderfully, until the next morning when we found half of them on the floor. So we finally settled on velcro, which meant we had to take down the remaining photos too and rehang them all, so they all stood off the wall the same. The other thing that should be noted, only for notation's sake really, is that after we opened the show we had a retraction of consent regarding one of the photos. The subject, a friends daughter, was upset by seeing herself blown up to almost life size and therefore her mother asked that it be removed. It took about 30 seconds to realize that the only thing to do was to take the image out of the show, and in hindsight I feel slightly guilty about the fact it took so long. At no point was upsetting anybody an aim of this project, and so the solution was obvious. This did leave us with a gap in the hang which in itself didn't bother me, if anything the 4 squares of velcro acted as a record of the photograph in a similar way to how the rest of the show recorded the ESW event. My only concern, given that this happened 1 hour before the crit, was that the conversation in the crit would become one about ethics and consents. This is not an uninteresting issue but we had operated according to the colleges ethical requirements and felt that to go down that road would have been going off point... I had suffered in my last project space from a lecture on ethics in the morning which meant a lot of my participants ended rebelling for the sake of it... still, in the end it didn't happen so all was well... In the crit there was a good amount of conversation, all around the ideas Kim, Yaya and I had talked about. It was acknowledged that we had collaborated successfully and all in all was well received. Due to the fact that I've been mulling over the idea of the transformation of performative work though documentation for quite a while now, none of the crit conversation was particularly surprising to me. I took this in two ways... firstly, I was pleased that our plan had come off. The work we had presented raised the questions we had intended it too. Secondly, I was a little disappointed, I always hope that someone will drop a bomb in these things and that there will be huge revelations which open up new and exciting paths... this didn't happen so much. But there was something niggling at me with regard the project that I couldn't put my finger on. Kim W pointed it out to me straight away today. The performative work I make, (at least the better work), has an element of instability... not just literally. There is something provocative and engaging about the live work that wasn't really present in this project space. Thanks Kim for pointing this out as it's given me the thing I need to chew on... mull over... you know what I mean. If the work transfers from one form to another how do you transfer/document/communicate those aspects, the things that seemed key to the performance but may not come across in a poster... One thought is the idea of model making that Andrew and I discussed. Because the ESW felt so sculptural maybe it is appropriate to document it sculpturally... Maybe the posters weren't the most appropriate method of presenting the voxpops... who knows? This gives me plenty to think about though... If you bothered to read all this, thank you... you nutter.
So this was the first official triad of the semester, though, due to participating in the workshop at the start of the year I was familiar with the process. The other two participants were Kyle and Ellyse, (both first years), and Catrina, (photography tutor), was present to facilitate... The order of running was Kyle - speaker, me - listener, Ellyse - observer. Rotating, me speaking next with Ellyse listening, then Ellyse speaking last. All three of us seemed comfortable monologuing for the required 10 minutes and I hope that my feedback on Kyle's presentation was useful. In my crit I did my best to give an over view of my working practices and methodologies as well as talking about the collaborative work that was presented in Friday's project space. Given that I only had 10 minutes, (and I was freewheeling), I couldn't in any way explain every aspect of my practice. Ellyse's feedback seemed to reflect this. At one point both E & K heard me say temple work when in fact I had said temporal work, I can only imagine the confusion this must have caused before i felt compelled to correct them. It only goes to prove that one should annunciate... or that people should listen carefully, I'm not sure, but I'll take the blame this time... The feedback I received was well put but nothing that I hadn't already considered. This, again, I feel can be attributed to the time constraint and to my inability to say it simple. This is something I will continue to work on but I also think that I might consider being more specific in the next triad. In my role as observer I decided to take a more traditional tack, as the other two had made more subjective observations about the conversations and offered feedback in a similar way to the listeners role. This was fine but I decided to take notes of just the body language rather than comment on the content of the presentations. I was, however, criticized because it was impossible to know how the two things married up... hey, you win some you lose some. I agree that if I had noted what was being said as well as what they were doing it may have been more useful but as I pointed out, that is a skill I have yet to develop...
And so to the project space...
It went well... there were a few pre-show problems, namely Kim's photos kept falling down. We had hung them first with white tack, which we quickly decided was not good. Then we hung the whole show with double sided tape, which seemed to work wonderfully, until the next morning when we found half of them on the floor. So we finally settled on velcro, which meant we had to take down the remaining photos too and rehang them all, so they all stood off the wall the same. The other thing that should be noted, only for notation's sake really, is that after we opened the show we had a retraction of consent regarding one of the photos. The subject, a friends daughter, was upset by seeing herself blown up to almost life size and therefore her mother asked that it be removed. It took about 30 seconds to realize that the only thing to do was to take the image out of the show, and in hindsight I feel slightly guilty about the fact it took so long. At no point was upsetting anybody an aim of this project, and so the solution was obvious. This did leave us with a gap in the hang which in itself didn't bother me, if anything the 4 squares of velcro acted as a record of the photograph in a similar way to how the rest of the show recorded the ESW event. My only concern, given that this happened 1 hour before the crit, was that the conversation in the crit would become one about ethics and consents. This is not an uninteresting issue but we had operated according to the colleges ethical requirements and felt that to go down that road would have been going off point... I had suffered in my last project space from a lecture on ethics in the morning which meant a lot of my participants ended rebelling for the sake of it... still, in the end it didn't happen so all was well... In the crit there was a good amount of conversation, all around the ideas Kim, Yaya and I had talked about. It was acknowledged that we had collaborated successfully and all in all was well received. Due to the fact that I've been mulling over the idea of the transformation of performative work though documentation for quite a while now, none of the crit conversation was particularly surprising to me. I took this in two ways... firstly, I was pleased that our plan had come off. The work we had presented raised the questions we had intended it too. Secondly, I was a little disappointed, I always hope that someone will drop a bomb in these things and that there will be huge revelations which open up new and exciting paths... this didn't happen so much. But there was something niggling at me with regard the project that I couldn't put my finger on. Kim W pointed it out to me straight away today. The performative work I make, (at least the better work), has an element of instability... not just literally. There is something provocative and engaging about the live work that wasn't really present in this project space. Thanks Kim for pointing this out as it's given me the thing I need to chew on... mull over... you know what I mean. If the work transfers from one form to another how do you transfer/document/communicate those aspects, the things that seemed key to the performance but may not come across in a poster... One thought is the idea of model making that Andrew and I discussed. Because the ESW felt so sculptural maybe it is appropriate to document it sculpturally... Maybe the posters weren't the most appropriate method of presenting the voxpops... who knows? This gives me plenty to think about though... If you bothered to read all this, thank you... you nutter.
Sunday, 23 October 2011
Images from project space install & crit...
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| the "smells like community inititive" hang |
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| Too much colour as you walked in... |
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| put up too many posters then took them down leaving this arrangement... |
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| close to the final hang |
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| how many times did these need rehanging... lots |
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| the crit... |
Thursday, 20 October 2011
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Too many irons....
to do list...
- get back to Mike Windle about the proposed GD crit.
- blog about that meeting and the things discussed.
- really get a handle on what that crit needs to be.
- look into the various method's of model making that have been suggested to me over the last couple of days... including CAD etc.
- blog about all my thoughts around model making/3d documents/work transforming from one thing into another... legacy?
- prepare for our seminar on friday morning, even though I'm sure it will be just as improvised as last weeks...
- Install the work for project space.
- think through my rationale and my problems with the project space before the crit.
- write the statement I've been thinking about for the last few weeks.
- meet with class mates regarding the degree show... which seems a way away.
- make new work...
and many more... I'm reminded of point 1 on Fischli/Weiss's 'How To Work Better'
Tuesday, 18 October 2011
After the Monday tutorial....
In today's tutorial Andrew kept coming back to the sculptural quality of the work at ESW. He proposed that I have the drawings modeled some how... it seems reasonable to document a work 3 dimensionally. I'm already using posters, videos and texts. If nothing else it means meeting and working with new people and is another process that might throw up new questions and produce new work...
...I'm meeting up with Mike Windle tomorrow to talk about the possibility of some sort of crit with the MA graphic design students. I hoping that this will throw up something new...
Project space seems to be going to plan, this in it's self is a worry, things never really go to plan do they? Doesn't that mean you've forgotten something?...
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| FISCHLI, Peter WEISS, David Suddenly this Overview 60 sculptures, unfired clay, exh. copies. 60 x 70 x 50 mm and 820 x 830 x 50 mm |
...I'm meeting up with Mike Windle tomorrow to talk about the possibility of some sort of crit with the MA graphic design students. I hoping that this will throw up something new...
Project space seems to be going to plan, this in it's self is a worry, things never really go to plan do they? Doesn't that mean you've forgotten something?...
Friday, 14 October 2011
Thursday, 13 October 2011
bits and bobs...
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| This mornings studio greeting... |
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| Autopsy, Mark Wallinger. 1996 |
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| House arrest No. 1, Eva Kotatkova. 2009 |
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