#aa.our.sunshine

[aamjp]

In Residence:

Incidentally... here's a work from earlier this year, titled: 'Our Sunshine (a Suprematist Lament)'. I was interested in the mutability of visual form and written language. 

🔳🔲

This work draws on Malevich's 'Black Square' and Nolan's Ned Kelly series to express a skepticism of ideology and narrative authority. 

[aamjp]

Torwache

The urban planning premise underpinning Torwache as a venue for documenta is particularly interesting within Kassel’s history, given that it was largely destroyed during WWII

The Monument to the Victims of Fascism in Auschwitz-Birkenau by Oskar Hansen and paintings by Edi Hila inside the Torwache reflect upon the ideological knot of urban planning and the politics of axial organization. The exterior of the building is enveloped in an installation by Ibrahim Mahama, whose stitched jute sack collage recounts multiple histories of global trade, individual narrations of possession and dispossession, scars of a larger narrative of migration, as well as technologies of masking and camouflage.

Edi Hila, Boulevard 1-4 (2015)

each work shows the nondescript elevation of a buildings and/or view along a boulevard, empty of any human presence > reminiscent of Jan Kempenaers photographs of the spomeniks peppered throughout the former Yugoslavia  

no geographical information from which the location might be discerned is evident (or provided), however the Daybook states that: “the experience of emptiness [...] becomes tangible, timeless, and transcends the totalitarian ideologies that succeeded one another in your country” // some googling says that the subject is “Tirana's main boulevard with its most representative buildings, the square 'Mother Teresa', the University building, the former fountain, the building of the Prime Ministry” > some other words on this exhibition here

oil on canvas, between 120×120 cm and 116 × 167 cm in size

muted blues, greys and greens, keyed occasionally by a brighter blue

range of applications, though generally quite thin > use of washes, flatter more opaque bits smoothed with a palette knife, lots of subtractive marks, lines made by the edges of things // overall, a really quite grubby surface, with pencil marks visible and an lack of ‘finish’

each work’s composition has a careful and definite geometry, akin to an architectural drawing, but the (aforementioned) finish is imprecise in that there's no detail, e.g. a window is just a square 

Nat described something of this as an “accidental lemon sorbet", though I don’t recall what (nor could I even guess)

attention to surface and compositional structure is relevant to me, particularly for works such as Our Sunshine

Annie Vigier & Franck Apertet, Library (2017-)

Another library within documenta, although one that has a questionable (at absolute best) premise.

Installation consisting of a collection of publications and a pair of bookcases [presenting] selected specialist books on the subject of dance and performance published since 2005 that fail to mention [...] the work of the artists. [...]

By putting on display the conventions that critics and connossiouers establish, Library questions the relationship between history and art. Library also highlights the limits of text in describing the living practices of dance and performance, which are inevitably subject to distortions, gaps and compromises when committed to written language.

A curated library of books silent on the artist/owner is pretty fn petty in comparison to a disparate library of books forcibly made absent of owners.

[aamjp]

[aamjp]

thesis plan dot points

basic outline

goals

mutability of language and the oscillation between reading and looking that occurs when a relational, rather than grammatical, syntax is imposed/employed; similarly, the poetic and cryptographic(?) potential of language in this situation 

abandonment of figuration, however use of the image in a dialectic conversation with the text

to avoid any claim within my work as being concrete poetry or being reducible to just wordplays and rebuses (that said, I’m curious as to how puns, rhymes, stutters can be expressed visually)

writing as mark making (looking towards automatic/asemic writing)

sources/themes by which ^^^^^ can be expressed

literary and art historical references (our sunshine, the difference between a flaming cat and a flight of geese, the observable universe)

the internet, as an expression of contemporary society – scale is inherent to this (the street song last on our lips, revision history)

‘found poetry’ in cryptic crossword workings, survey marks, what3words, usernames, search terms etc. as literary and social palimpsests and readymades

conceptual/historical background

caligrams, Ezra Pound’s ideogrammic method, concrete poetry

mark-making and literary references of Cy Twombly and Julie Mehretu

contemporaneity and scale in Simryn Gill, Walid Raad’s Atlas Group, Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street

role of text in art via the Art & Language Group; ekphrastic writing, particularly John Berger and Ben Lerner

other artists I’m looking at: Adam Pendleton, Amanda Marburg, Christopher Wool, Wade Guyton, Clare Milledge, Robert Macpherson; I still don’t know where I fit in yet

outcome and timeframe

things to sort out as soon as possible

use of siccative with glaze

glazing over multiple layers of text set upon unfocused images, without over-obscuring or clouding the ground image

blurring but getting a more even soft focus, rather than a streaky blur > can maybe complete through more dogs

works to complete

the observable universe (large vertical canvas, previously pink)

complete tiny studies with glazing over text

project text

paint and blur text

text describing galaxies, stars, satellites, planets and constellations, layered by apparent magnitude > probably 10 days in this, with the drying times

black and white and red all over —  crosswords

just need to stretch some canvas and start

continue talking with Emmalyn, re: poems created from the work

revision history — wikipedia edit histories, layered by date, set over the cover image

need to establish narrative theme (maybe) for series

need to sort out the soft focus

other works commenced but which probably won’t happen this semester our sunshine

proper(?) version of “slip slop slap” study 

on stretched canvas, at a slightly larger scale

the difference between a flaming cat and flight of geese

already stretched and started planning, but stuck on the planning

[aamjp]

Our Sunshine

Notes

draws on the similarities between NK’s bullet-beaten helmet and the deteriorated surface of KM’s Black Square // also, the ultimate fate and sub- or consequent mythologising of NK has parallels with the trajectory of Suprematism towards Constructivism

capacity for the misuse/misrepresentation/plurality of meaning derived from symbols/icons (in this case, KM and NK-via-SN’s black geometric forms)

this mutability is echoed in text via strategies of translation and decontextualisation

the configuration of SLIP SLOP SLAP is analogous to a SLIP-PERY SLOP-E > wariness of or warning about subscriptions to ideology // also, a skepticism towards of ideology/symbol literary reference to RD

Text

SLIP PERY  SLOP E  SLAP

SLIP SLOP SLAP SOLIPSTIC-TAC-TOE SLAPSTICK LIPSTICK SONRISA ☻ OUR SUNSHINE

[aamjp]