Discover Top Posts Tagged with #facpreflect

Reflecting on an Invisible Girl

I was so proud of this film but it was not well received - ‘it left me with nothing to do’.

I guess this is the distinction between art and advertising where your window of opportunity to get a message across is limited, it’s much more of an imperative.

So I had a message to ‘share’ - what was it and why did I want to share it? I watch the BBC drama ‘Doing Money’ about a young Romanian woman who is snatched in broad daylight from a London street, trafficked to Ireland and used as a sex slave in a series of pop-up brothels. It was deeply horrific and moving. Being a dad to two daughters of about that age the play had personal resonance - it wasn’t hard to emphasize with the parents of the girls portrayed! But what struck me the most were the ‘Johns’, the paying customers and their disregard for what they were doing. Sneaking out to fuck one of these girls while their own wives and daughters were out on a shopping trip - it made me feel physically sick!

Seems obvious to say but if there were no demand then supply would cease - unfortunately, while there are guys out there who will happily part with 120 euro for ten minutes with a sex trafficked girl then the sex traffickers will continue to abduct innocent victims in order to make money.

As a man with the appetites we all have, I tried to imagine myself in the position of a ‘John’. For me, it’s very difficult to imagine how you could not see this victim as incredibly human - the vulnerability magnifies their humanity. I came to the conclusion that John’s just don’t see these girls as being somebody’s daughter, sister, granddaughter or friend - it’s hardly surprising that physical abuse often characterizes their ‘visits’.

Initiating an air of relaxing tranquility, albeit in a slightly unsettling way, and abruptly changing that to one of utter disgust, my film was designed to invoke a dissonance. This is a technique employed by composers who within a melodic structure offer a degree of dissonance or discord following the main theme. This results in a feeling of resolution when returning to the harmonic melody of the main theme.

The information provided at the end of the film was supposed to do the job of offering resolution. All very good if I had been commissioned by a charity to achieve that end, but I wasn’t.

This film and its message means a lot to me and I guess that’s why I was so upset by the response.

It comes down to audience. Mine is not a TV audience watching after the 9 o’clock watershed who need shaking out of their comfort zones to realise they might just know somebody who does this or worse, be somebody who does this.

Mine is an art audience and the message needs to be less apparent. And I concur. It will be more powerful for being so.

#facpreflect

Building in Prescience

Setting out to use ‘smuggling’ in my work does bring with it certain flavours - such as roguish, arrogant, pretentious and naughty. Such a rascal! The cheekiness does suit certain work but perhaps if there were a more serious or poignant message to deliver things might need to be looked at differently.

Prescience is a fascinating word - by definition, it's knowledge of things before they exist or happen; foreknowledge; foresight. This is a compelling word that needs picking apart.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing - when things are looked back on ‘in hindsight’ there is an implication that certain information or a situation did exist at a previous point in time, but at that time was not apparent. There are spaces here for exploits and adventures.

What is it that exists when faced with a choice? Two possible futures? So you decide to follow one and at some future point the other route, the one you decided not to take, looks as if it would have been the better proposition.

Maybe then at the start of a project, there are two possible messages/routes and at the fork in the road, their division, a binary comes into existence. You might be the subject of one of those routes while others take the alternative. If I am on neither, but objectively watching, I am in the gap between the binary.

What if I have created the fork - the fork in itself is an interesting place to be and to explore. What lies in that fork? If I then travel through time concurrently with the other two routes but between them, does the gap increase?

Prescience is a present point in time when looking back, a certain choice seems to have been correct - it's not that you had the knowledge or forethought, you might just as easily have taken the other route, but have ended up in an advantages position it appears that you had prior knowledge - you didn’t really. The choice is still a choice - it later becomes apparent which was the right choice, where the prescience lies.

‘The choice’ is laden with potency - within it resides two or more sets of information that play out through time in different ways. The set chosen to follow comes into existence - the others have a pseudo-existence as something that doesn’t exist but that can be compared with something that does.

So much space here to play with!

At the start of the project the pseudo-existence is created - it appears real - at the end the true existence reveals itself - just a true existence always reveals itself - and the artwork is the looking back at the ersatz and seeing it as it is.

So if I create this situation, what is it that I’ve done?

#facpreflect

Situations, Alien Locations and Art in Context

What would happen If you went to the Fishmonger and instead of a beautiful display of freshly caught fish on, surrounded by green furls of parsley you were presented with socks. This is a Fishmongers so these must actually be fish. The Fishmonger assures you they are fish. But they’re not are they? They’re socks. This isn’t a subjective thing either. The person in the queue next to you isn’t likely to take one home to cook for tea any more than you would.

Accepting that it isn’t Jesus running the gallery, what is it that an exhibition space does that can turn socks into fish?

To think beyond the gallery, outside of the white cube, is to be creative. To understand how art might work in different situations and contexts allows that art to be understood in different ways. However, it remains the 'white cube' exhibition space that is accepted and recognised by the public as a place where objects or activities can be understood as art. The 'priming' offered by the conventional exhibition space is significant.

With few exceptions the place to fully appreciate film is the cinema and likewise with live performance it's the theatre. These are focussed experiences. We are more easily immersed when the extraneous world with its constant flow of interruptions and interferences are removed - we even attempt to recreate that experience in our own homes when watching a movie on T.V. We set aside a couple of hours, some 'time-out', to be exhilarated, to be moved to tears, or frightened half to death, our senses aroused and emotions heightened. We experience different lives, different worlds.

These often deeply felt yet passive encounters are highly valued and their affects taken out from the focussed cinematic or theatre experience to diffuse and disperse through our active engagement with the 'real world'. The skilled, talented, creative film and theatre makers extract from the real world, these concentrations are presented and experienced in a focussed situation that excludes the real world, it is experienced in that situation and it then subjectively re-emerges out into the real.

anyone taking anything and putting it anywhere is art. and it to the point where art galleries have become playgrounds

Duchamp's urinal and Joseph Beuy's assertion that everyone is an artist have caused a dilution. We are asked to consider that anyone taking anything and putting it anywhere is art. and it to the point where art galleries have become playgrounds

contemplative experience of a visit to an art gallery or exhibition seems

Not everything is art: and not everywhere.

If those changes in perspective offered by presenting beyond and outside of the context of the gallery in alien situations and unusual contexts be recreated within the gallery might this not offer the public the best of both worlds.

This what the public expect when they chose these experiences. They are immersive, passive and when successful are deeply felt.

#facpreflect

WTF

good to know my signature specs can do the job

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The Power of Smuggled Information

We had a great session with Sarah-Jane today in which we had to write something on a post-it note with regard to the art practice of everyone else.

Lin Mathias wrote for me “You are the King Of Smugglers”

Back when I submitted my formal proposal for this module I wrote, “The project also will include the production of marketing material surrounding a piece exploring the possibilities it presents of durational priming”.

Durational priming is exactly how I smuggled with I N S I D E. But it isn’t just about smuggling a piece of information or meaning beneath something else - like how a joke works with a set-up and delivery of an unforeseen punchline. r even a magic trick, again set up and reveal. Its about the power that a meaning can obtain from having been smuggled.

Obviously, the contraband has to have value in itself - the challenging of the expectations that the audience brought to the Project Space was a powerful thing, but it was its delivery that made it so much more valuable an experience.

Following I N SI D E somebody said that they’d never see the Project Space event in the same way again. I think had we all been sitting in A18 discussing the conventions of the use of the space, say in the White Cube lecture, and I’d brought up considerations of challenging the PS everyone might have agreed but that conversation would never have been very impactful.

Had I, at the beginning my PS week, overtly advertised some ‘new way to use the Project Space - you’re all going to perform’ then it might have been a bit offputting and resulted in the audience seeking external direction. The piece was made for smuggling and that smuggling effected a performance.

#facpreflect

TEXT and working with words

What I do with text isn’t quite the same as say Wool, Weiner or Kruger. Other than the typesetting and font choices they are just letting the words do the work.

My text pieces are designed to present a degree of puzzlement in reading.

Got the idea from the work I did with the piece foregin poilcy

“There is Cambridge University research that states that it doesn’t matter in what order the letters occur as long as the first and last letters are in the same place we can read any word.”

The Gestalt theory of perception describes how the brain visually groups elements into larger wholes to make sense of the world. We prioritise for simplicity, clarity and order. Even when the elements within a grouping appear as entirely separate entities, we see the whole thing as other than the sum of its parts. In design practice this is known as the Law of Emergence described as:

"the process of forming complex patterns from simple rules. When attempting to identify an object, we first seek to identify its outline. We then match this outline pattern against shapes and objects we already know to find a match. Only after the whole emerges through this outline pattern matching, do we start to identify the parts that make up the whole."

In typographical terminology kerning, expanding the space between letters, is an adjustment usually used to make a font more legible. However, in the case of my text pieces, I intentionally reverse this, joining the characters, making it difficult but not impossible to read. Mounting them vertically, top down or bottom up, adds a further degree of perplexity. This is something called foregrounding perception as a dynamic experience and offers the viewer reward.

Presenting a word in isolation yields multiple possibilities for interpretation affording it a strangeness. Specific meaning is unfixed allowing it to openly converse, entangling, weaving and interchanging with anything and everything around it - an isolated word both absorbs and exudes context.

This is called ‘undeterminancy’. An idea expressed, despite undeterminable intentions, is still received by the audience. They, through the context in which the piece is shown, assume it relevant and seek resolution. Undeterminancy becomes a material with which, subjectively, the audience become creative.

"The first question we should ask ourselves when looking at a work of art is: – Does it give me the chance to exist in front of it, or, on the contrary, does it deny me as a subject?" BOURRIAUD

#facpreflect

INTERIM - evaluation

Watchwords - Season 1 - a team player . . . .

just not with this team

From my proposal: 'season 1' consists of two large scale graphics that can be playfully explored both individually and through their inextricable connections and intertextuality. Their context is significant within an art space, in a wider contemporary art sense and outside of the gallery in the world of politics, news media, social media, human interaction and relationships.

Was so not ready for this exhibition and really feel I exhibited substandard work

Just goes to show that the muse is not on demand 24/7 - I had no piece ready and so brought this into the world before it was ready. It is a weak piece but was further weakened by the context of the exhibition and the diversity of the work surrounding it.

Intertextuality did not work at all and it did not connect with anything.

Perhaps in a solo show with my other text pieces, it might have worked. Placed in an environment where it could converse it would have come alive, but here, amidst this disparate collection, it was incongruous and just didn’t work.

The messages are good, especially in our current political climate, and would have worked well with ENOUGH and MORE. Isolated in this way nobody paid them much attention as there were many much more accessible pieces.

Their size meant that there was never a need to approach them and nothing to entice you in or hold you. They offered incomplete information but had insufficient depth lacking any enticement to puzzle over what the message might be. They could be kept at a distance and would need to be exhibited where every piece did that - to stand in one place and take everything in.

This needs some serious thinking about for the degree show at the end of next year. My work doesn’t always sit well with other pieces - if it isolates itself in this way then maybe the answer is to isolate it - show it away from other work so it can converse with the audience and its environment.

#facpreflect

A Catalystic missile

Back in the promotional video, the wording 'a performance' with its proximity to 'david saunders' inferred the piece be a performance provided by me. Had the word 'by' actually been there it would have been the operative word. However, the minimalist aesthetic of the video, the brevity of text, led viewers to assume its presence. It acted as an operative word despite its absence. It was however a liminal space in which the operative information was unseen - a message that existed through its non existence.

The 'request for permission' at the event was the discharging of a catalytic message. Time was utilised as a vehicle to covertly deliver smuggled meaning from the launch to the situation at the end of the week. At the point of delivery it became indicative of their performance and, with the presence and awareness of a hidden video camera any expectations of coming to observe were dispelled as observers became the observed. Bourriaud quotes Benjamin "The studio shot, wrote Walter Benjamin, is particular in that it replaces the audience by the camera. . . The camera turns into an instrument for questioning people"

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