#critical reference

[philipbarnesart]

Berlin Gallery Weekend

[philipbarnesart]

Research trip - Berlin Gallery Weekend

Having visited Berlin fir the first time in August last year, I was keen to get back and The Berlin Gallery Weekend was the perfect opportunity. Most galleries tend to put on strong exhibitions for this event and I managed to see a range of intersting works.

One of the most intersting pieces was by Valie Export at Zak Branika Gallery,this work entitled 'Fragments of Images of Contingence', was made in 1994, a live installation of lightbulbs on motors dipping in and out of various fluids; oil milk and water.

Alexandra Bircken's work was also impressive, the gallery space floor covered completely in fabric, only to be viewed from outside. A trip to the Daimler Collection also gave an opportunity to see some fantastic minimalist work including Sol Le Witt and a work from Leonor Antunes,  favourite contemporary sculptor of mine who is based in Berlin. 

On a larger scale, works by Nina Cannel at the 'New Gallery' were also impressive for there 'live' element, sometimes subtly erupting and shimmering. An excellent show at the KW rounded it off, the new curator giving clues as to the past historical events that had taken place within the building while also reference exhibition that are to come as the instillation of work currently being made for future shows was visible to the viewer of the current.

[philipbarnesart]

Interim show crit

A brief discussion on the work form the interim show wotha group of Camberwell p/t students and D'OC;

The work of Pipolotti Rist was mentioned in relation to the projected environment.

Spatiail and formal concerns are evident in the work

Looks more confident than previous attempts to combine video and sculptural elements.

One of the most interesting things that came out of this conversation was the perception or insight others had in to my practice. The constant change within the work was discussed as part of the making, also the hesitancy and search for a solution was discussed, how i document and review continuously and often make last minute changes. It was interesting to see how the group had picked up on this element of the work and how i seem to express it as a quite a stressful process. This way of working still relates to my understanding of the painting process I had as a painter, constantly adjusting until there is a feeling of completion.

[philipbarnesart]

Tacita Dean - Hillary Lloyd

I have recently become interested in the work of Tacita Dean, I had seen her film at Tate some years ago but became more interested when I saw a piece of her works in Venice this June. This piece contained a film projector (16m), projecting a film of a drawing by another artist, a simple piece of work that moved around the composition. The simplicity of the film affirms my interest in the low-tech aesthetic ( however this may actually be very technical!) the materiality if the projection is far from HD. Indeed the projector as part of the installation has pushed em to consider how relevant this could be to my work. Hillary Lloyd also includes the projector as part of the work, however Lloyd's is far more formal in its installation and content. Lloyd interests me too, while her works are technically accomplished in their composition and colour - she does not edit her clips. i like the idea of this, in some way this takes a traditional stance, needing correct composition, lighting etc in the work- one shot needed to make the piece successful.

[philipbarnesart]

Reflection for symposium 2

When starting the course, I was interested in extending my knowledge of painting and drawing into other disciplines and developing a practice in installation that connected with painterly, formal concerns.

The main material I used initially was latex; this was of interest as like paint it was a liquid substance that could be applied with a brush but could also be cast and was quite straight forward to use, and can become an object, its pliable, formless characteristics; being able to pack it away and then expand it within a space also made it a material of choice.

My interest in responding to space and the characteristics of a particular site became an important part of my practice-based research. On the Joya residency I got to test 2 areas that had developed as areas of interest;

Collaborative practice and working in a site specific environment.

  The residency clarified that the site-specific nature of my work would not for now be within the landscape, however the architectural space was what I wanted to respond to and shortly after this I made a more completed piece of work that came out of the research in spain. The performative element and tracing and tracking of the body and the relationship to objects became a clearer area of interest.

 The exchange exhibition with Griffin University gave me the opportunity to research what might happen if I passed on materials of interest to another artist, the receiver being responsible for that which came into being. This also lead me to understand how the notion of ‘Chance’ was playing such an important role in my work, in this case in passing on the authorship of the piece (sending instructions)

These elements are, first, a recognition of the creative intelligence of materials and following from that a recognition that making art is an act of self realisation (individually and collectively) at that place and time.’ (Paul Carter)

Many of the earlier works were temporary, fragile pieces. lightweight, impermanence, often lit to create a dramatic element that.

•       How materials behave and what the suggest, thinking, relating, feeling, mapping and material articulation. Attempting to make works that were both pictorial and sculptural. Chance in relation to gravity. Temporal states/situations of flux

 I’ve used balloons a lot in my practice and I have a fondness for them for 2 many reasons;

They are instantly sculptural

They contain breath

I became interested in the idea of developing a laboratory style creative environment, where form and absurdity met.

Recording these experiments has provided a platfor for them to behave and introduced a live element to the work that interested me. Still, lo-fi materials.

The use of video allowed me to find a way to intensify this live element within the objects. It was around this time that I became interested in referencing Beckett and how hre had characters ‘who had no reason for doing what they were doing’

Becketts search for dramatic minimalism

The interest in Beckett spread into the area of psychoanalysis. I discovered that Beckett had been particularly interested in a lecture given by Carl Jung in London on the subject of th ‘Never Properly Born’ this subject subsequently become a lasting theme through the rest of his works.

Psychoanalysis in sculpture, Kleinian theory

Im interested in the contingent and the open-endless of things, reactions and chain reactions, a chain of events. The relationship between objects, between the found and the made. Part of the process of how I work involves working with objects and sketching through taking photographs of the changes I make, the reviewing and considering what is working

My research into contemporary sculpture made me want to attempt to add an element of permanence to the work and to make a sculpture that had more traditional sculptural associations; being able to walk around it and see a clear weight and form – however I still wanted to keep this element of chance, site-responsive and keeping an element of unpredictability in the work.

unconscious acts and intuition, and indeed dialogue with the sculptural process

the indeterminate and the uknown (chance)

Immediate experience (phenomenology)

I became interested in how the video and sculptural could work together and the use of light as a sculptural element within the works.

Chance in relation to how the objects behave and their ‘aboutness’

The live element of the work and phenomenological aspect, the interaction of objects- the idea of ‘aboutness’

Suggestivity, balance between a formal and narrative content -  comfortable in a language that is ambiguous and has an open-ended translations or reading

A sculptural environment

‘the juncture between stillness and motion’ krauss

[philipbarnesart]

Briony Fer : Studio (document notes)

'Quasi-infinities and the Wanting of Space' (Artforum 1966). What he had to say (Kubler) about death (or not principally) but about what kind of space a tomb was in ancient cultures. The thing about placing objects in tombs was that it was a way of bothdiscarding and retaining things at the same tiime. Kubler contrasted this with a modern understanding of obsolescence.

 Smithson refered to hesse as making psychic models. Discarding and retaining become twin functions of psychic as well as material and cultural life.

Discarding and retaining, saving and leaving, is also the ecoonomy of the studio, this is particularly true in Hesse's case, given her habit of reusing discarded materials from one work in the making of another. Photographs of her studio bear witness and indeed arepart of this circulation: ropes and strings piled in heaps or hanging in works, polythene drop-cloths in and out of use, arrangements and rearrangements of the things she made.

[philipbarnesart]

Herbert Molderings : Duchamp's Studio as a Laboratory of Perception (2007)

'epistemic objects' These are experimental scientific systemsor devices which do not illustrate or symbolise existing knowledge but rather are objects which generate knowledge; they are the unknown, the unclear, the ambiguous.

They were (the readymades) aesthetic experimental objects, the purpose of which was to generate a creative atmosphere a speculatively imaginative thought process, the outcome of which was always carefully recorded and preserved. They did not objectify any new, experimentally acquired knowledge but rather the opposite; non-knowledge, or to be more precise, the very fragility of the seemingly so safe epistemic foundations of  modern, scientifically organised way of life.

Why do we in fact assign directions to space? `Poincare's answer was thus:

Space is in reality amorphous and the things which are therin alone give it a form. We should therefore bot have been able to construct space if we had not had an inistrument to measure it; well, this instrument to which we realte everything, which we use instintively, it is our own boddy. It is in relation to our won body that we place exterior objejcts, and the only spatial relations of these objects that we can represent are their relations to our body. It is our body which serves us, so to speak, as a system of axes and coordinates.

..the visitors to his studio at that time had no idea of the theoretical consequences of Duchamp's spatial experiments. They could only sense very vaguely that a new aesthetic was evolving for the 'chaos' and the 'useless objects' that greeted them. It is precisely this aesthetic - an aesthetic in which it is not the objects themselves that are the 'works of art' but rather the room, the ambience and the experiment, ie the paradigmatic action - that was not to be rediscovered and further developed until the advent of the space related installations and interventions of the 1960's.

[philipbarnesart]

RESEARCH TRIP: WHEN ATTITUDES BECOME FORM, VENICE

I highly anticipated this exhibition when I found out it was on at the Foundazione Prada alongside the Venice Biennale. Curated by Germano Celant and dialogue with Thomas Demand, this exhibition is a remake of sorts of the exhibition 'Live in your Head: When attitudes become form' in Bern in 1969. Among the artists presented at the original exhibition were, to mention just a few, Carl Andre, Giovanni Anselmo, Richard Artschwager, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Jan Dibbets, Michael Heizer, Eva Hesse, Jannis Kounellis, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Mario Merz, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Ryman, Sarkis, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Lawrence Weiner and Gilberto Zorio.

This exhibition is fantastic and will remain with me for a long time. The possibility of almost time-travelling to see this work, as close to its original curatorial context adds an extra element to this exhibition, indeed the concept of re-making it adds to the legendary status that this time in sculpture and installation has.

One of the striking things from visiting this exhibition was gaining an insight to the importance of the curatorial role that was emerging at this time- the dialogues, tensions and relationships between the works themselves is strongly evident and what is really interesting is the visibility that these works have had on contemporary sculpture, when we think of the arrangement in the work of an artist such as Eva Rothschild for example, it is clear to see the various artists languages have been threaded together in contemporary sculpture.

'To present, today, an exhibition from 1969 just as it was, maintaining its original visual and formal relations and links between the works, has posed a series of questions on the complexity and very meaning of the project, which has developed through a profound debate from various perspectives: the artistic, the architectural and the curatorial. Though underlining and highlighting the transition from the past to the present, the complex identity of which it is important to conserve, it has been decided to graft the exhibition in its totality – walls, floors, installations and art objects, including their relative positions – onto the historical architectural and environmental structure of Ca’ Corner della Regina, thereby inserting – on a full-size scale – the modern rooms of the Kunsthalle, delimited by white wall surfaces, into the ancient frescoed and decorated halls of the Venetian palazzo.'