Classical Myth/Contemporary Art

My essay, Over and Over, Again and Again, is going to be published in the forthcoming book, Classical Myth/Contemporary Art which has secured Ashgate Press as its publisher (more information to follow soon). My essay explores various practices in relation to the myth of Sisyphus (more information here).

    Image: Vlatka Horvat - Restless

‘Over And Over, Again And Again’ represents The Potentiality of Failure, a sub-section of my broader enquiry, Not Yet There (http://www.not-yet-there.blogspot.com/), which posits a critical value for failure as resistance to or refusal of the dominant progressive, teleological or goal-oriented tendencies of contemporary experience. The contribution to knowledge is the elaboration of a specifically Sisyphean model of failure, for investigating irresolution and incompletion as purposeful, generative strategies within artistic practice. A  4000-word excerpt has subsequently been published in Failure (ed.) Lisa Le Feuvre (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT, 2010); a survey collection including contributions by world-leading thinkers including Giorgio Agamben, Samuel Beckett, Gilles Deleuze and artists John Baldessari, Francis Alÿs, Fischli & Weiss and Bruce Nauman.

The chapter’s ideas have been tested at international conferences (PSi # 15 Misperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading, Zagreb, 2009) and interviews conducted during the research have been published (‘Flagging Possibilities’, in conversation with Vlatka Horvat', Dance Theatre Journal, 2009). An essay on Horvat’s practice was included in a monograph (In Other Words …, Bergen Kunsthalle, 2011). Parallel investigations have since interrogated the critical potential of failure, irresolution and accident as ‘tactical’ methods within artistic practice including: (Re–) – performance lecture in collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham in Accidentally on Purpose, Quad, 2013, ‘Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild’ – journal article in art+research (2011) addressing the critical efficacy of incomprehensibility within artistic practice through the prism of Alain Badiou’s philosophy; ‘Not Yet There: Endless Searches and Irresolvable Quests’ – book chapter in Telling Stories: Countering Narrative in Art, Theory and Film (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009); and ‘Salvaging a Romantic Trope’ – book chapter in Shipwreck in Art and Literature (Routledge, 2013).

Between wandering and waiting

            Image: Roman Ondak, Good Feelings in Good Times

I am in the process of further developing a phase of research activity that investigates the creative and critical value of forms of non-production within artistic and performance-based practice, and which will be used as a way of refocusing some of the ideas that have been emerging over the last few years within my practice. This research area is a distillation of a number of concerns emerging within my ongoing art-writing practice, Not Yet There. This broader enquiry explores how irresolution, uncertainty, disorientation and the process of ‘getting lost’ can be discussed as strategic conditions of artistic practice, by attempting the critical recuperation/interrogation of subjectively-felt experiences such as failure, deferral, disappointment, boredom, indecision, restlessness. 

Emerging from my own practice – and the questions/struggle therein – my research explores the critical value of those moments before a decision/resolution has been reached and the points at which ‘thinking’ is activated/provoked within practice. My practice is concerned with prolonging, emphasising and honouring this space of indeterminacy or potentiality in order to investigate the specific qualities of the critical ‘thinking’ that precedes – or might indeed be different to – ‘knowledge’. My work attempts to shift attention from the deliberate (directly purposeful) to the process of deliberation (care/weighing-up) insisting that purpose or meaning might not always be synonymous with the notion of achieving a ‘goal’.

Critical Communities

I have been selected to take part in the writing-based project, Critical Communities.

Critical Communities is a dialogue, discussion and writing project that will explore and expand what it means to be critical in writing on and as new work (live and interdisciplinary art). Its purpose it to explore and discuss contemporary notions of the critical and the role of critical writing in relation to new work. The project will culminate in a print-on-demand publication, produced by the writers and artists involved in Critical Communities, to be published in 2009.

The Yorkshire Critical Community includes Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Amelia Crouch, Joanna Loveday, Charlotte Morgan and Nathan Walker. With special guest provocateurs Sohail Khan, Alfredo Cramerotti and Derek Horton.

The London Critical Community includes Emma Bennett, David Berridge, Chloe Dechery, Rikke Hansen, Tim Jeeves, Emma Leach, Bill Leslie, Johanna Linsley, Mary Paterson, Jim Prevett and Cally Spooner.

Together the participants represent a community of new work/writing practitioners who will meet regularly in London and Yorkshire to discuss notions of 'the critical' in relation to critical writing both on and as new work. We will be critiquing our own art/writing and that of others, examining alternate critical modes both on and off the page and collaboratively developing a publication. The community will also act as a sustained network for experimental writing/new work practitioners in the London and Yorkshire areas.

Critical Communities has been developed by Open Dialogues and New Work Network (NWN) and is supported by East Street Arts, The London Consortium and Space Studios.

The Communitas of Stillness

My essay 'From Passivity to Potentiality: The Communitas of Stillness' has been accepted in the forthcoming issue of the peer-reviewed online journal m/c. The issue is entitled. Still (more information below). The essay explores recent research with Open City on the notion of stillness and can be found here.

Image: documentation from Open City (Andrew Brown / Katie Doubleday), 

Radiator festival, 2009

“This paper presents the concept of stillness through the affirmative
 Spinozist lens of the ‘positive 
possibilities of life’. It expands existing research around this very
 fertile arena of 
trans-disciplinary thought by examining the affects of publicly sited 
performance […] A timely piece that 
addresses a certain mode of social engagement of vernacular life that has become a public platform
 for other activities.” Reviewers’ comments.

"For Emma Cocker, the significance of collective acts of still have the capacity to augment the affectual capacity of the body. Here, experimental practices of still in the city constitute events of resistance that disrupt habitual modalities of inhabiting the city, producing fissures within which new lines of flight can emerge. Such deliberative attunement through collective practices of still produces an affirmative model of subjectivity; a challenge to the choking assemblages of governance that stratify bodies." Editors' introduction

Abstract
Referring to my collaboration with the artist-led project, Open City, I will investigate the (im)mobility of stillness as a creative strategy. I will explore the potential of an active and resistant – rather than passive or acquiescent – form of stillness that can be activated strategically within a performance-based practice; in turn producing conditions in which a radically dissenting – yet affirmative – model of subjectivity might be developed. Stillness is often presented as antithetical to the velocity, mobility, speed and freedom proposed by new technologies and the various accelerated modes by which we are encouraged to engage with the world. Stillness and slowness have been deemed outmoded or anachronistic forms of mobility, as fastness and efficiency have become the privileged terms. Alternatively, stillness has been reclaimed within a resistant – or at least reactive – “counter-culture” for challenging the enforced and increased pace that we are required to perform. Rather than focusing on a model of stillness based on the attempt to ‘opt out’ of the accelerated time-zones, mobilities and narratives of contemporary capitalism – the move towards a more spiritual or meditative existence by removal or denial of contemporary societal pressures – this paper will explore the potential within forms of stillness specifically produced in and by contemporary capitalism, by reflecting on how they might be (re)inhabited as sites of critical action. With reference to the writing of Gilles Deleuze – especially in relation to Spinoza’s Ethics – I want to explore how the asignifying or affective possibilities produced by the collective performance of stillness can be understood as a mode of playful resistance to or refusal of habitual social norms; additionally producing the germinal conditions for a nascent community of experience no longer bound by existing protocol, a model of “communitas” emerging from the shared act of being still.

Background to the issue 'Still'
'still'
A topology of stillness haunts the space of flows. Against a backdrop of increasing research in mobilities and the mobilisation of forces of all kinds, in this issue of M/C Journal we seek submissions that attend to and reflect upon stillness. 'Still' might be many things: stillness as descriptor of a particular form of action, behaviour or disposition; stillness in an object sense; or still as in an action - to become still. This multiplicity, in turn, prompts many questions. How much effort is required to remain still or keep other bodies, things or ideas still? What might it be to think through 'still' not as a coherent and singular being-in-the-world, but something that is more fluid, diverse, fragmented and splintered? As such, what are some of the various configurations, vocabularies and politics of stillness?

Perhaps this could involve stillness as a strategy, such as to ignore or dissipate the actions of others. In the writings of idlers, or in the actions of those who refuse or cannot move into lives of permanent transit, we can see the actions of still. Here, stillness might emerge as a particular capacity in order to achieve something - where stillness becomes a productive tool rather than apprehended as a weak form of action. Alternatively, there is the still implied by delegation that comes about through trust in objects or various dispositions of delegation. Can we think about still as form of Spinozian pact, or a collective suspension? Stillness might be restorative whereby rest or being still assists with the activities of the day. Is mesmeric, dreamy stillness different from radical stillness? What about stillness that is, paradoxically, active - where it is willed, coerced or designed? What about a more passive stillness that is not willed intentionally by the body? What do these different forms of 'still' do to the body? What do they demand from the body? What are some of the bodily shapes and comportments that are associated with different forms of being or doing 'still'? And since they are not mutually discrete, how are different stills related to each other?

Still in the social sciences has often been a limited antithetical relation with life, animation and ineluctability of perpetual motion: it is the arrest of photography, or the limit of a frame. Perhaps in Walter Benjamin's phrase the 'archaic stillness' of text we see the power of stillness moving through time, but on the whole, still has enduring pejorative associations with passivity, the feminine and notions of negation. In this issue we seek to expand, recuperate and explore further stillness beyond these narrow affiliations. What does an appreciation of still do to our understanding of action and practice? As Paul Harrison claims, perhaps stillness is a necessary and 'intrinsic rather than contingent aspect of activity'. For instance, contemporary networked infrastructures produce subjectivities and ontologies in which the relation of stillness to movement is not binary or negative but fully integrated into the processes, aesthetics and politics of mobility. Stillness in all its forms is more critical in contemporary life, by virtue of and not despite, increased mobility. And yet stillness remains more or less unexplored. In this issue of M/C Journal we ask what, then, is significant about still?

Commonwealth (The Shimmering of the Tipping Point)

Over the last few months I have been working with artist Katie Davies in conjunction with her residency at Sheffield Town Hall. On Thursday 5th February Katie will be screening her new film, Commonwealth - produced during this residency - at the Showroom Cinema, followed by a launch of the work and exhibition in the Town Hall itself.

Image: Emma Cocker in collaboration with Katie Davies, Commonwealth  (The Shimmering of the Tipping Point), plans for online video/text work.

Katie's video work in the Town Hall is accompanied by a text work which I have produced as a response to the work, as well as an essay. The text attempts to operate dialogically with the video, providing triggers through which further speculation about the work might be provoked. Following the exhibition Katie and I will be producing an online work which attempts to bring the video and text work together in order to create random moments of collision and connection between the images and writing. 

The Shimmering of the Tipping Point

(extracts from an essay)

1. Between the events of the past and a future way of being
2. The pivot about which things turn
3. The precarious authority of tradition
4. A gesture of tilting that sets in motion
5. Where they remain equally present
6. Others are relinquished, forgotten or are cast aside
7. A space to be treated with caution
8. However anachronistic the pledges might seem
9. A code of conduct for ensuring a smooth passage through
10. Functions to remove or limit certain rights and privileges
11. A method for managing instability
12. Assume their place within the agreed order
13. Attempts to momentarily erase or dampen the specificity of the individual
14. Become little more than empty gestures
15. The presence of latent societal values
16. No longer and not yet classified
17. Existing rules and hierarchies become reinforced and sustained
18. Where one thing suddenly slips into or becomes something else
19. The future has not yet begun
20. The continuation of common values and beliefs
21. Suspended at the point of anticipation or of preparation
22. Perpetually tuning up and ever maintaining readiness
23. Before an allegiance is pledged
24. Begin to operate within a mysterious choreography
25. The invisible boundary scoring the limits of a particular belief system
26. Remain hanging in the balance
27. A necessary part of any process of decision-making
28. The moment at which a decision is made or an opinion changed
29. As it hovers at the point of collapse
30. What it might mean to belong
31. When the mask of duty or anonymity momentarily falls
32. Laughter fluctuates between derision and affirmation
33. Any decision involves a gesture of renunciation or rejection
34. Where a group becomes frayed at the edges
35. Before a definitive choice has been made or a fixed stance taken
36. Termination of one trajectory of possibilities in favour of another
37. Narrative silently ruptures the surface of proceedings
38. The quiet reminder of what is actually at stake
39. Endeavour to support an existing order or keep things in their place
40. An inevitable period of instability and unruliness
41. They must follow the rules and offer their pledges and promises on cue
42. Without which they could lose their power
43. Simultaneously inside and outside
44. Inevitably creates that which it seeks to control
45. Not wholly knowing how to respond
46. The point at which things begin to waver
47. Devoid of specific purpose or functionality
48. What is to be gained, what forfeited or lost
49. Not experienced in the same tenor
50. Before order is returned

Living Landscapes

My paper 'Beating the ‘Invisible’ Boundary: Navigating the space in-between' has been accepted for the Aberystwyth University Living Landscapes conference, June 18 - 21, where there will be papers, presentations, performances and workshops from artists and scholars from the fields of performance, geography, archaeology, fine art, folklore studies, anthropology and literature.
Click here for more information about the conference.

Focusing on projects such as Heath Bunting’s BorderXing and Status Project, and the collaborations between Blast Theory and the Mixed Reality Research Laboratory (Nottingham), my intent is explore the critical function of the artist as both a guide or broker to the indeterminate geographies emerging between virtual and 'real' landscapes. Such practices articulate a performative crossing of physical or spatial boundaries, played out at the terrain vagues ‘betwixt or between’ the real and virtual; the visible and invisible; the physical and psychological. Making conceptual reference to the mythical figure of Hermes - god of gaps and thresholds, of boundaries and travelers who cross them – I am proposing to position the artist/wanderer as a disruptive and resistant (mis)guide to the nascent and unstable territories that are emerging between physical landscapes and digital worlds.

Writing Encounters within Performance & Pedagogy

The following paper has been accepted and will be published in a guest-edited (and peer reviewed) issue of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice with the subtitle of writing encounters in performance and pedagogical practice. The issue is co-edited by Dr. Susan Orr and Claire Hind from the Faculty of Arts at York St. John University. It will explore writing and performance for artists, writers, critics and academics, and has been informed by the Writing Encounters Symposium which took place at York St John University 11th – 14th September 2008

“The paper is beautifully written and was a joy to read … a wonderful and articulate essay. Insightful, academic and creative, detailing a fascinating project… of very high standard and contributes significantly to the field.” Reviewers’ comments

Pay Attention to the Footnotes
Drawing on my experience of working in collaboration with the project, Open City, in this article I reflect on how this close encounter with a performance practice has enabled a critical shift within my own approach, from a mode of writing about to one of writing in dialogue with or alongside performance. Focusing on this dialogic encounter between writing and performance, I want to draw attention to a specific form of writing encounter within performance that emerged as a result of the collaboration. Open City is an investigation-led artistic project – led by Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday - that explores how public space is conceptualised and organised by interrogating the ways in which our daily actions and behaviours are conditioned and controlled. Their research activity involves inviting, instructing or working with members of the public to create discreet interventions and performances, which put into question or destabilise habitual patterns or conventions of public behaviour. In 2007, I was invited by Open City to produce a piece of writing in response to their work for a series of publicly distributed postcards, and have since worked more collaboratively with the project on a phase of research investigating how the different temporalities within the public realm might be harnessed or activated creatively, and how movement and mobility affect the way in which place and locality are encountered or understood. In this article, I reflect on how different forms of writing – specifically the series of postcard texts - have performed in response to the work of Open City, focusing in particular on the use of footnotes and the different concepts conjured by the word. Rather than operating in their habitual role as the maligned referencing system of academia, footnotes are one of the ways in which the different temporal possibilities of writing have been explored and exploited within the project; as a creative and critical device for producing points of slowness and blockage within the act of reading, or alternatively as a form of performative invitation that encourages both textual and physical wandering by proposing tangents that demand to be – both literally and literarily - followed.

Fail and Repeat

My paper 'Fail and Repeat' has been accepted as part of the fifteenth annual Performance Studies international conference which will take place in Zagreb, Croatia, June 24-28 2009. The theme of PSi # 15 is MISPERFORMANCE: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading. More information about the conference can be found at http://www.psi15.com/

Image: Francis Alÿs, Caracoles

Abstract: Endless actions. Illogical quests. Misguided tasks inevitably doomed to fail or recursively performed – over and over, again and again. In diverse conceptual and post-conceptual art practices and performances, an artist appears locked into some hapless or hopeless endeavour – the repeated demonstration of a fall or failure, hide-and-seek games using the most infelicitous form of camouflage, the futile pursuit of impossible or undeclared goals. Referring to work by artists including Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alÿs and Vlatka Horvat, I want to explore a specifically Sisyphean model of failure, dysfunctionality and inoperativeness within artistic practice. I propose to move beyond an absurdist understanding of the Sisyphean paradigm towards an affirmative reading where the loop of repeated failure is actively performed as a generative or productive force, or as a mode of deliberate inefficiency through which to challenge or even refuse the pressures of dominant goal-oriented or teleological doctrines, by deferring closure or completion. Here, meaning can be seen to shift from a Beckettian articulation of futility and an individual’s resignation to the rules or restrictions of a given system, towards a form of performative resistance to and eventual displacement of the system’s authority, where its logic becomes pleasurably adopted as the rules of a game which reveal porosity and flexibility within even the most rigid framework. Sisyphean failure and repetition is thus proposed as a model of wilful non-production or open-endedness, inhabited or played out at the threshold between investment and indifference, insouciance and immersion, seriousness and levity.

Image: Francis Alÿs

Context
THEME AND RATIONALE
While we want to examine performance as a phenomenon, as experience and a function, a process, a complex and a concept, our aim is to approach it from the perspective of failure, dysfunctionality, futility, and inoperativeness. Misfiring, misfitting, misreading: it is all about the prefix. Misnaming, mistaking, misrecognition – the prefix mis- is always amiss: moreover, it is determined by what follows. There is no misnaming without naming, no misrecognition without proper recognition. Since our broad notion of performance and its possible misfires owe a great deal to Austin’s philosophy of language, rooted as it is in the paradigmatic Western metaphysical dichotomies of play vs. seriousness and success vs. failure, efficiency vs. loss, we are often forced to perceive and value cultural forms and events in terms of binary oppositions. At the same time, modernism embraced the apparently inessential, the misguiding, and the missing as leeway for a new perspective on the very constitution of new cultural systems. On the one hand, the notions mistake and infelicity are deeply embedded in modern western thought. From the Freudian slip via J. L. Austin’s misfires, the Girardian and the Derridean pharmakos/pharmakon and the Lacanian misrecognition, to Goffmanian breaches in the construction of social reality, Judith Butler’s failed gender-performances and Homi Bhabha´s inappropriate signifiers and anomalous representations, scholars have evaluated the irregular, the unforeseeable, and the unaccountable – in a word, the mistaken – as essential to rethinking the categories of what is right, correct, true, whole and serious. On the other hand, by abandoning classical ideas of universality and verisimilitude, modernist art transformed mistake into its enabling limit. From Futurist Evenings and Dada´s Cabarets to Action Theatre, Events, Happenings and Performance-Theatre; from performance art to the postdramatic concept of afformance art, performative aesthetic practices not only intentionally exposed themselves to the risk of accident, excess, and contingency, but also managed to harness their liminality as a normative – even marketable – quality.

Ethical Possession

My article 'Ethical Possession', has been accepted by the peer reviewed journal, Scope, for a forthcoming issue focusing on ‘Cultural Borrowing’. Scope is a fully peer-reviewed online journal coordinated by the Institute of Film & Television Studies at the University of Nottingham. Scope is dedicated to publishing material of the highest scholarly interest, and work with a distinguished Editorial Advisory Board of academics and critics. For more information see http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/


"This is a thoughtful consideration of the way that film and video artists borrow from, and re-present, found amateur footage and archival material; the essay provides an eloquent discussion of appropriation within contemporary art practice, anchoring its example to work by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Lucchi." Reviewer's comments

"This is a beautifully written article that ... draws upon a range of salient critical positions – Bourriaud, Huyssen, Landsberg – to suggest a move away from the 'temporal tourism' of earlier models of appropriation (postmodern pastiche) towards more empathic models of engagement with memory, history and the archive." Reviewer's comments

"The essay is fluent, extremely well-written, and has lots of interesting things to say about art practice." Reviewer's comments

Abstract: Ethical Possession: Borrowing from the Archives
It is possible to witness a resurgence of interest in the act of cultural borrowing, in a way that is different to earlier moments of appropriation. I am interested in how this can be explored through the notion of ethical possession. The current borrowing of found amateur and archival footage within artists’ film and video can be framed as part of a wider paradigm shift, where artists and filmmakers are increasingly searching for and testing out experiential or empathetic modes of engaging with moments of the past and present. The resurgence of interest in found-film or archival material within artists’ film and video operates at a curious interstice in which a history of ideas relating to theories of production and consumption - copyright and ownership, the found object and the readymade - collides with debates around memory, amnesia and social responsibility. Referring to writing by film theorists such as Andreas Huyssen and Alison Landsberg, the aim is to explore how notions of borrowing, quotation and prosthetic experience are no longer viewed as indicative of negative pastiche or nostalgic appropriation, but are seen as re-politicized gestures through which to develop empathetic possibilities in a fragmented world.

Say the Word - “Non”

The short text below was commissioned to respond to or act as a form of 'foil' for a performance by Terry O’Connor, Frances Babbage, Steve Nicholson and Bill McDonnell.

Image: Say the Word – Non, from rehearsals

The performance was part of a project led by Terry O'Connor entitled 'Say the Word' in which she invited various individuals to submit a single word that she would then develop performance-based work in response to. This specific performance was based on the following:

"On 26th October 2007 the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle sent a single word to Terry O’Connor in the School of English.

S. The word was ‘No’.
F. Actually it was ‘Non’, the French for ‘No’, written N.O.N.
S. And Sophie Calle sent a P.S. ‘P.S. this is my word, and it is not a refusal- see already how ambiguous is this word, since I’m saying yes by answering no. If you don’t like my word for some reasons tell me, I have other words in my vocabulary.’
F. This word became the starting point for the performance today. We began by collecting instances of refusal, denial and absence from literature, history and our own personal lives – instances that contain the short and simple word ‘No’."

The performance took place as part of the festival www.urbaines.ch. The individual artist/curator Simone Aughterley who selected this piece is a choreographer based in Switzerland. She chose three women artists- Terry O'Connor, UK artist Fiona Wright and the NZ dancer and artist Kate MckIntosh (who was recently performing in Nottingham as part of Nottdance 08.) Previous UK artists at des Urbaines are Franko B and Marisa Carnesky

I was invited to produce a text that attempted to explore some of the ideas addressed within the performance (text below). I wanted to use the text as an opportunity to further explore ideas in relation to refusal and potentiality, which I have also been exploring in other work such as the essay 'over and over, again and again', and within a prospective phase of new research entitled 'towards an ethics and aesthetics of non-production, inaction and refusal'.

" ‘Non’ - the French word meaning ‘no’. Look up the word in any dictionary and you will be told of its negative connotations; how it functions as an interjection that only refuses, denies or seeks to cancel out. It is an utterance that stands in the way of things or that declines to participate - a form of obstacle or dampening down, like the stubborn voice of the party pooper or killjoy for whom the glass remains half empty, never half full. Or else it expresses nothing but a deficiency or dearth, a lack or absence, the failure of something to materialise. It is the response dreaded by the unrequited lover, the puncture wound by which a proposal gets let down or loses it verve. It is the final call that brings about an end, the cruel blow that nips things in the bud, the cut by which hopes and dreams and nascent possibilities are dashed and then wither. Functioning as a measurement, it is the marker of all that is nonexistent, missing or simply not allowed. Alternatively, when taken as an instruction or a rule, it is the governing voice of restrictive authority that tells us what not to do, which attempts to silence or stop us still in our tracks. Or maybe it is the calling out of the mother whose child’s hand draws too close to the fire. How quickly a term can turn. As a protective intervention it can be seen as an ethical gesture that wishes to keep the other from harm’s way - an act of care or of responsibility, a pledge, a promise, or a commitment made. It is a way of stopping one flow of action in order to allow another to continue or to develop; an interruption based on being able to conceive an imagined future and the consequences of each individual act. Whilst the ‘yes’ of surrender can signal the passive and acquiescent acceptance of the seemingly inevitable, ‘no’ is a defiant gesture of protest that refuses to give up or give in. It is the rally cry of dissent, the declaration that enough is enough, that a line has been crossed, that things have gone too far.

The binary logic of opposites thus collapses in on itself. Here is the yes of the no, which is to inhabit the position of no in a way that allows, opens up or enables things to move forward, to move on. It is to inhabit the position of no as a form of punctuation or as a momentary pause, as a space of refusal and of potentiality, as a tactic for creating time to think and re-imagine the trajectory of future action. Look up a word in any dictionary but remember that definitions can be irredeemably imprecise, for meaning is never still, nor ever wholly certain. Consider ‘non’ - the French word meaning ‘no’." 

© Emma Cocker, 2008.

Being in Two Minds

Forthcoming conference paper
As part of the 35th AAH Conference "Intersections", at Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester
2 - 4 April 2009


Image: Ben Judd

Abstract: Being In Two Minds
This paper will examine the notion of being undecided or more particularly of ‘being in two minds’, questioning how this seemingly pejorative phrase might in fact function as a critical condition of both artistic practice and the process of thinking more broadly, and how this can then be located within a wider interdisciplinary interpretative (and theoretical) frame. In my recent research the notion of being undecided - through the tensions of deliberate or ‘critical’ inconsistencies within an artistic and writing practice, through contradictions or paradox, through undertaking an activity as a foil for something else, through occupying more than one or remaining in-between positions - has become increasingly fore-grounded. I am interested in how moments of doubt, indecision or deferral within practice perform the live event of thinking between different positions, how they operate at a threshold of potentiality before options are closed down or forever fixed one way or the other. Referring to work by Bas Jan Ader, Vlatka Horvat and Ben Judd, I want to further examine the different ways in which a sense of indecision, duality or even ambivalence is inhabited within these different practices and to what ends. Here, a form of secular agnosticism – the doubt that a particular question has a single correct answer or that a complete understanding of something can be attained – becomes tactically deployed as a way of refusing to commit to any singular position, disrupting the binary relationship of yes/no, either/or, by preferring the condition of ‘being both’.

Context
The paper was proposed in response to the strand titled 'Inconsistency', which is convened by Steven Gartside, MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University and 
Sam Gathercole, Department of English, Queen Mary, University of London


In writing on art and architecture there is often an implicit assumption of a necessary consistency in the work addressed. A similar consistency is expected of the writing itself. Consistency is a measure regularly employed in locating value in the object or text. Security is sought in the consistent. All of this leads to the notion that work reflects essential and immutable elements that are directly identifiable with the author/producer, and this in some way assures authenticity. The pressure for consistency is one that is exerted by the terms of professionalism (whether that is the commercialism of the marketplace, or the structures that determine artistic, architectural and academic careers and reputations). The pressure for consistency is also one that might be seen to undermine the intersections of practice and theory that inform any action or statement (or, indeed, any gesture of refusal). Work that does not fit an established pattern can be sidelined as of little importance, even though it can often provide useful indications of thought process or method. It is also possible that inconsistency can be seen itself as a fundamental part of experimentation, and a productive way of exploring new ground. 

The strand seeks to question the notion of consistency as an illusional, or possibly even delusional state. It will explore all aspects of inconsistency in the production of art and architecture, its critical and public reception, as well as in the different forms of writing about work.

Somehow between the Water and the Wind

I have been invited to write a text in response to a forthcoming exhibiton, Isoli [cont], by Brigid McLeer in Coventry.

                                                   Image: Brigid McLeer, Isoli [cont.] 

Below is the PDF of my essay 'Somewhere between the water and the wind' written in response to the work of Brigid McLeer

Press Release

Isoli [cont.]
Works by Brigid Mc Leer Lanchester Gallery Projects, Coventry School of Art & Design
9th – 30th January 2009.
Isoli [cont.] is a solo exhibition by Brigid Mc Leer which brings together recent work, current work in progress and a related work from 1997 all of which explore contingency – as a method of production, an aesthetic form and as a way of thinking about subject formation. The work aims to question the notion of the ‘individual’ as an ideal construct, and to draw attention to the extent to which investment in the individual prefigures many of the more damaging tenets of capitalism. Instead it proposes contingency as a founding, and preferable, state of being and society. The works in Isoli [cont.] circle around a set of pieces made while on residency at San Servolo island in Venice (Summer 2007). San Servolo housed the Veneto region psychiatric hospital for 250 years until it was closed in the 1970s. The ‘islands’ (isoli) of the title therefore refer both to the literal island of San Servolo, the carceral ‘island’ of the psychiatric institution and the supposed island of the individual. Having a continual interest in process, Mc Leer’s current work consists of extensive, durational and laborious activities of solitary writing or drawing that translate particular sources. Strongly influenced by the systems-based, repetitive and serial strategies of minimalist and structuralist art, film and literature, this new work inserts into this pure, and often masculinist dream, a labouring, st(r)aining body, that is also producer of ‘images’- of reconfigurations within the contested terrain of representation. As with much structuralist and poststructuralist work, individual ‘expression’ is superseded through the use of procedural approaches. The intention however is not to evacuate the work/world of a subject, but rather to demonstrate the inherent interdependency of both. Many of the works use a rule-bound method to transform particularly chosen sources (texts, sites, images). This process is often recorded - in video, sound or still photography - and these ‘records’ are reconfigured to become new works in their own right. As such the figure of the artist herself operates as an equivocal presence in the work, caught up in the representational realm that she is also producing. Activities such as drawing over the moving shadow cast by the sun shining through San Servolo’s original hospital gate (Isola:Incontro, 2007), or the writing-out over and over themselves of all the words listed under ‘a’, ‘b’ ‘c’ etc. in a dictionary (Concise Chambers 2008), or the gradual erasure (using masking fluid) of every word, except the capital letter ‘I’s, in Kobo Abe’s 1964 novel The Face of Another (The Face of Another 2009), are all simple repeated procedures which not only develop complex reconfigurations of texts or sites, but also establish a temporal field of labour or production. In Mc Leer’s most recent, and most ambitious object-based work to date, The Face of Another (cont. version), the doors of a 8’5” corten steel shipping container become a free-standing ‘wall’ and site for the installation of 16 pieces of 2’ x 2’ hand-engraved sheet copper. The copper itself bears a pattern of interconnecting ‘I’s (taken from Abe’s novel) and the tarnishing sweat marks and hand-prints of the body that drew them. Together the elements invoke the co-dependency of the individual and high-capitalist global trade, at the same time as they perform new, and more productive versions of dependence. Contingent versions: archipelagos. Working through literal, metaphoric and synecdochical modes the work offers, and at the same time, disrupts signification. A name therefore could be both a person and a shape; or sheet copper could be a reflective surface, a quotation of a minimalist work by Carl Andre and a market commodity; or a videoed action could be a record of time spent working in a site and a time-based image entirely implacable and ectopic. In addition the work is made of multiple, interconnecting parts or series and in continually modified versions. So it is always work in progress and as such the defiance of the island/individual and/as the (art)object is encountered, contested and made contingent. Cont. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with a commissioned essay by Emma Cocker.

Brigid Mc Leer is an Irish artist living in London and Course Director of Fine Art BA at Coventry School of Art & Design. She trained in Fine Art at University of Ulster, Belfast and Slade School of Art, London. Her work takes many forms including gallery and site-based visual artwork, image-text work for the page, critical and creative writing, and collaborative projects. Recent exhibitions include, group shows ‘Drawing Breath’ at Lugar Do Desenho, Foundation of Julio Resende, Porto, Portugal and ‘L’Isola Di’, at San Servolo Island, Venice, Italy and solo show Vexations as part of ‘Site Platform’, Site Gallery, Sheffield. Forthcoming shows include The Face of Another as part of ‘Curating Knowledge’, Alsager Arts Centre, MMU (March 09) and ‘Unspeaking Engagements’ group show curated by Brian Curtin and Steve Dutton for Chulalongkorn University Gallery, Bangkok (October 09).

The Shimmering of the Tipping Point

During October and November I was involved in researching and producing a series of pieces of new writing in dialogue with Katie Davies, who was undertaking an artistic residency at Sheffield Town Hall and Persistence Works. Katie Davies' practice investigates manifestations of language, the timing of comedy, and the spectacle of ceremony. For the residency she has proposed to develop a film work that looks at the performative dynamics and procedures based within the meeting rooms, function rooms and Council Chambers. The work will explore conventions of protocol within official, ceremonial and social behaviour that takes place within the Town Hall and will aim to explore the choreography of institutional conventions through the visual language of film. More about Katie's work can be found here

My essay The Shimmering of the Tipping Point explores how Davies' work often explores and attempts to capture the 'shimmer of a tipping point' (the point at which things oscillate or waver), by focusing on the nature of the ambiguous threshold zone between one state and another, or on spaces that are somehow liminal or transitional. An extract can be read below.

"In sociological terms, a ‘tipping point’ describes the moment of a critical turn, the unstoppable momentum of an emergent trend, the accumulation of innumerable minor factors resulting in some form of major – often epidemic or catastrophic – transformation. It is the final straw that breaks the camel’s back; the moment of recognition or realisation that prompts the declaration that enough is enough, that things have gone too far. It can be imagined as the invisible boundary scoring the limits of a particular belief system or moral code, which once breached might force the individual or collective to rise up and make a stand. It has been used to signal the point at which the metaphorical tide turns, the irreversible passing of the point of no return. Here, the tipping point designates a line of separation that distinguishes between the events of the past and a future way of being; it is the threshold where one thing suddenly slips into or becomes something else. However, tipping points can also be experienced at an individual level as those daily yet often imperceptible shifts and transformations that form part of the fabric of lived life. The term can be used to describe the moment at which a decision is made or an opinion changed; or the threshold crossed when you realise that you are no longer a child. In these terms, the tipping point is not experienced in the same tenor as that of the sociological model - as a clear or abrupt cut between one state and another – but can be understood instead as a pivot about which things turn; as a gesture of tilting that sets in motion. It is that which creates the interstice between one thing and something else; an interval of reflection that momentarily holds two or more possibilities in the balance where they remain equally present. Here then, the tipping point inevitably produces a zone of potentiality or ambiguity, a period of instability and indecision before a definitive choice has been made or a fixed stance taken. This is the shimmering of the tipping point, the point at which things begin to waver". 

Extract from the essay 'The Shimmering of the Tipping Point", which will be published by Yorkshire Arts Space.

Drain Magazine - ‘Psychogeography’

Images: Open City, 2007

A photo-essay of documentation from a recent project in which I worked in collaboration with Open City  is going to be published in the forthcoming issue of Drain magazine focusing on ‘Psychogeography’. The work will be displayed online as a slide show of still images in the Art Projects section of the magazine. A series of postcard instructions and the serialised essay (viewed as postcards in use in the public realm) will provide a critical structure for the photo-essay, which will also include documentation of collective actions undertaken as part of the project.

Investigating stillness

During September I was in Japan with Katie Doubleday from the Open City project for an Arts Council funded research trip, which extends the work I have recently been doing in collaboration with Open City. This will be a short joint investigation-led phase of research where I will be working further with Open City to explore notions of slowness and stillness, in order to ask questions about how space is conceptualized and organised, and examine the ways in which our daily performances are conditioned and perhaps even controlled. As part of this research phase we presented a paper at the Constructing Place symposium, which was part of the Dislocate festival in Yokohama. For our visit to Japan we also produced a number of new postcards, which presented a specific instruction relating to slowness or stillness on one side, and on the other part of a serialized essay in which I extended ideas from an earlier text I had been commissioned to write for Open City.

Image: Documentation of publicly sited postcards produced for dislocate festival

Within this phase of joint research we are interested in how both the shape and speed of our encounters with the world - and engagements with a given place or location- are often subjected to a kind of standardisation, where individual action is increasingly managed according to a regulated template - an agreed and endorsed temporal and behavioural pattern which we are then perhaps put under pressure to inhabit. We are interested in exploring ways of introducing flexibility, porosity or even moments of contingency into situations where our options for individual ‘performance’ might appear rather limited or predetermined, and in finding ways of creatively testing-out or playing with the expectations and demands of existing situations, suggesting ways in which they can be inhabited in different ways.

Image: Documentation of publicly sited postcards produced for dislocate festival

Our research trip to Japan was part of a period of joint research where we collectively wanted to further explore the possibilities of the different temporalities at play within the public realm, and to examine how movement and mobility might affect the way in which place and locality is encountered or understood. We were both interested in how different behavioural or performative speeds can be drawn attention to or inhabited, as a way of somehow resisting the pressure to perform or behave in homogenised ways. Our joint research as part of this phase of the project attempts to explore (quite speculatively) how moments of slowness, stillness, obstruction and blockage can be investigated to create points of anchor and location within the urban environment, affecting both a psychological and critical shift in the way that space is perceived.

Image: Documentation of publicly sited postcards produced for dislocate festival

At one level the dislocate festival provided a context in which to further consider the role of technology and new media in relation to these ideas – a frame of reference within which to think about the complex and often contradictory relationship between temporality, technology and the body. In one sense, technology has almost unquestionably come to be associated with the notion of accelerated speed and increased velocity, and has then often been discussed in terms of disembodiment and dislocation. In contrast perhaps, the temporal patterns of the body or of the physical world are frequently framed as operating naturally according to a slower pace where such slowness or even stillness is synonymous with or equated to an idea of embodiment and locatedness. Within this research we wanted to explore the point where the logic of these seemingly binary positions begins to collapse or blur, in order to ask whether certain technologies might in fact enable or even legitimise subversive or disruptive forms of performed slowness and stillness, and how, under scrutiny, these slower modes of spatial inhabitation can be revealed as a sites of perpetual and shifting meaning - where stillness is in fact rarely ever still.

Image: Documentation of dislocate presentation.

In our presentation for dislocate we wanted to test how spoken word and instruction (presented to participants using i-pod technology and wider publics through postcard texts) make it possible for different ideas and propositions to explored within the act of stillness itself, in order to invite physical, conceptual and imaginative engagement with the work. We wanted to explore notions of agency, authority and intention within the act of stillness. Through the use of the i-pods and spoken text (see image), we interrogated how the act of ‘being still’ might shift in meaning as it moves from or between different positions - ranging from a form of stillness experienced as a controlling or restrictive mode of enforced waiting; as a hopeful state of anticipation or of expectation; as an act of resistant refusal or protest; as a posture for quiet observation; as a tactic for disappearing or becoming invisible/unseen; as a ludic form of game-play; or as a site for contemplation or idle daydreaming.

Interview with Lucy Harrison

My interview with artist Lucy Harrison has been published in the issue of Drain Magazine which is focuses on the theme of Psychogeography. The interview was initially undertaken as part of my research for the article, The Art of Misdirection.


Image: Lucy Harrison:Guided Tour; Riga (2005)

Psychogeography: background to the issue
In 1955, Guy Debord described psychogeography as “the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Debord’s psychogeographical map The Naked City (1957) challenged traditional ideas of mapping relating to scale, location, and fixity, and drew on the work of urban social geographer Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe’s concept of the city as a conglomeration of distinct quarters, each with its own special function, class divisions, and “physiognomy,” which linked the idea of the urban plan to the body. An important strategy of the pyschogeographical was the dérive, “a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences”. The ‘psychogeographical’ has had a pervasive if somewhat amorphous role in contemporary art and culture. As a creative, social and political tactic, wandering through psychogeographic spaces is pertinent to a diverse range of practices including the use of GPS systems, Internet art, photography as well as sound and performance art. This issue of Drain attempts to gather a series of essays, artworks and creative writings that reflect on the current state of psychogeography. How have contemporary artists, writers and thinkers interpreted, or been influenced by, the legacy of psychogeography?

PSi #14 INTERREGNUM- In Between States

See http://www.interregnum.dk/ for the context for this conference
PSi # 14 conference in Copenhagen 2008, August 20-24
Image: Heath Bunting, BorderXing

"Beating the 'Invisible' Boundary: Navigating the space in-between" is a paper I presented as part of the PSi conference #14 INTERREGNUM- In Between States, at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark from 20 - 24 August. INTERREGNUM is a term designating the exception, traditionally the period in between monarchs, but in a wider sense any state of disorder and discontinuity. INTERREGNUM thus does not only apply to a temporal break, but also to spatial in betweens or terrain vagues as well as to social and psychological states of exception. As a metaphor INTERREGNUM further refers to that which is in between disciplines, that which is interdisciplinary, postdisciplinary or simply ‘undisciplinary’. To investigate Interregnum of our present condition is to ask not about the fixed state of affairs but about the gaps between. Interregnum as concept will guide the PSi conference and focus attention on the brief moments of instability or surplus that exist between two sets of conditions. We ask what shapes the transition from one phase to another, what initiates a change in perspective and perception. For each of the three main days of the conference we choose a subtheme for inquiry that relates to Interregnum. The subthemes are:In Between States of Spaces/Geographies; In Between States of Disciplines; In Between States of Subject/Body. My paper was proposed as part of the strand - In Between States of Spaces/Geographies which deals with the upcoming of new spaces of belonging and of changing geographies. We wish to discuss how the concept of the nation state worldwide is challenged by both regionalism and globalism. New conceptions of both place and space are coming into effect as a result of these changes. How are our concepts of place and space, of belonging and longing, affected by the ongoing negotiation of ‘borders’? How does ‘place’ connect to spaces of identity? How is visual culture and imagery in general mobilized to reinforce ideas about belonging within changing and unstable geographies? How are we made to look upon ourselves as simultaneously situated and disconnected subjects? The concept of Interregnum addresses relationships and exchanges between cultures, changing geographies, and changing spaces.

Image: Heath Bunting, BorderXing

Beating the 'Invisible' Boundary: Navigating the space in-between
"In this paper I want to explore how certain artistic practices appear to tactically inhabit or play out a particular state of exception in order to then reveal, resist or even critique the increasingly limited or restrictive terms by which society and space are organized and controlled. New types of interactive and increasingly pervasive technologies are irreversibly transforming our understanding of public and private space, simultaneously delimiting and monitoring known environments, whilst creating newly imagined territories at the interstice between the real and virtual, the visible and unseen. Our engagement with the world is now shaped by and often mediated through the logic and order of invisible infrastructures whose influence and reach is difficult to discern. Whilst undeniably useful at times, these various locational, informational and observational technologies reflect a cultural context in which the desire to determine an individual’s whereabouts and scrutinize their daily (trans)actions has become both a private and political preoccupation. In one sense it is possible to read the increased and ubiquitous use of networked surveillance technologies, and the surreptitious monitoring of individuals’ actions through such technology as symptomatic of a more general extension of the structures of power and control used by governmental agencies in supposed times of crisis - the paradoxical infringement of civil liberties framed as a form of necessary state security. Giorgio Agamben refers to these increased extensions of power as states of exception, where individual rights can be diminished or even rejected at the authorization of a government during a state of emergency. Agamben goes on to explore how these so-called provisional or interregnum strategies can easily slide into prolonged states of exception, which can be then used to strip certain individuals of their rights to citizenship, reducing them to the status of Homo Sacer, a person who exists in law in a perpetual state of exception – a non-person, an exile, a declassified state. The terms of Interregnum thus afford curiously contradictory possibilities as the suspension of habitual rules and legislation has the paradoxical potential to both liberate and further enslave – where the capacity for an extraordinary increase in the authority of the structure is often exponentially, inextricably related to a diminishment of an individual’s power or agency. In this paper, I want to begin to explore how certain artists appear to upset the inevitability of this equation by attempting to disrupt or invert its rules, often using technology in order to playfully exploit the grey areas and loopholes between physical and virtual worlds. There are artists who appear to tactically recuperate the possibility of critical value or political agency within the individual state of exception itself – by momentarily inhabiting the liminal position of the wandering exile or by becoming invisible, as a way of drawing attention to, undermining or questioning the logic and authority of the system. Here, an individual state of exception is transformed from a punitive measure into an affirmative (or at least resistant) space of inbetweenness, exemption or even liminality that can be creatively inhabited – where the notion of exile is recuperated as a mode of wandering or of wilful unbelonging".