RITE

Rite, write, rote, right and sometimes wrong.... 

Forthcoming in October 2009, RITE is the result of a nine month collaboration with Critical Communities, a New Work Network and Open Dialogues project exploring the practice of critical writing on and as new work (interdisciplinary and live art). 

Featuring the work of the Critical Community, RITE is a collection that brings together 18 original texts by UK based art writers that enact expanded acts of criticism, question the essay form, use language as material and attempt to work the different ways that writing can be on or about new work. 

Contributors include Emma Bennett, David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg, Emma Cocker, Hannah Crosson, Amelia Crouch, Chloe Dechery, Tim Jeeves, Emma Leach, Johanna Linsley, Joanna Loveday, Charlotte Morgan, Mary Paterson, Jim Prevett, Nathan Walker and Wood McGrath. 

RITE is commissioned by New Work Network, designed by Wood McGrath, edited Open Dialogues and produced by the members of Critical Communities with external editorial advice from Maria Fusco. It includes a foreword by New Work Network and introduction by Open Dialogues. All material is copyright the authors and Critical Communities 2009. 

The publication RITE can be bought here.

A review of the publication can be found here and below is a selected extract from the review:

“ … Emma Cocker’s piece, ‘Re: Writing, 1993-2009, 2000 words’ (p. 13-21), is a collection of 296 footnotes, including one image, separated by neat semicolons and displayed in small, professional-looking type at the bottom of each of seven pages. Phrases range from the art-typical, ‘(202) Pause is then a critical gesture’, to the romantic, ‘(269) The pages flutter like butterfly’s wings warmed in the sun’, and the psychological, ‘(255) Keeping certain voices at bay’. A curious attempt might be made to read the notes as a linear, or a dreamlike, narrative, however what is more useful about them is that they appear to refer back to a multitude of unknown/unknowable thoughts, texts, actions or observations collated by the artist. Footnotes become, therefore, a way of figuring those longing-filled gaps in contemporary criticism that initially provoked Critical Communities to begin writing for, and amongst, themselves.
 […] Both Record and RITE are broadly titled after their respective functions. However, both books spill quickly outside of their remits, working more as textual-visual performances or displays, rather than as critical, or even truthful, documents. In this way, Record and RITE, though very different publications, feel similarly romantic, desirous, self-conscious. This marks them out as books by artists. These books ask to be read differently, slowly; sometimes critically, at other times emotionally; with caution, with patience; with generosity and with pleasure. They show that paying attention to the ways in which artists use and expand text is particularly appropriate right now, gently to challenge and to refresh what is typically acceptable as art writing, both for artists and for critics.”

* Periphery

A new text work of mine (part of which is shown below) is going to be included as part of a limited edition journal/publication entitled *Periphery, which is the first project by YH485 Press. The work specifically explores the notion of the periphery in relation to the idea of 'footnotes', drawing on work undertaken as part of my collaboration with Open City, where footnotes have been explored for their capacity to break or slow down the experience of reading, by creating obstacles or sending the reader into the margins.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Image: extract from 'Pay Attention to the Footnotes'

Artists included in *periphery are: On the Edge Research, Jeremy Miller, Alice Carey, Mike Pearson, Rosemary Shirley, Duncan Higgins, Joanne Lee, Lawrence Bradby, Evi Grigolopoulou, Ann Churcher Clarke, Emma Cocker, Ian Hunter, Jo Robertson, Jonny Aldous, Lee Triming, Andrew Pepper, S Mark Gubb, Jennie Syson, Georgina Barnley, David Berridge/Hyun Jin Cho/David Johnson/Pippa Koszerek, Dean Kenning, Exocet, John Plowman, My Villages, Bruce Ayling, Theo Turpin/Frederico Campagna, Fiona Woods, David Reid/Fiona Maclaren, John Newling, Kathleen Coessens/Marie-Francoise Plissart.

YH485 Press is an independent publishing organisation conceived in March 2009 by Aaron Juneau, Jonathan Watts and Glen Jamieson.

Telling Stories: Countering Narrative in Art, Theory and Film

My essay 'Not Yet There: Endless Searches and Irresolvable Quests' is now available within the publication:

Telling Stories: Countering Narrative in Art, Theory and Film 


Editor: Jane Tormey and Gillian Whiteley



Isbn13: 978-1-4438-0532-2


Isbn: 1-4438-0532-7


Trespassing disciplines and binding together practice and theory, Telling Stories: Visual Practice, Theories and Narrative crosses strange territories and occupies liminal spaces. It addresses a contemporary preoccupation with narrative and narration, which is being played out across the arts, humanities and beyond, and considers how visual and performative encounters contribute to thinking. How might they tell theories? Telling Stories results from a series of symposia, held at Loughborough University School of Art and Design in 2007. The programme included papers, screenings and performances and was based around the convenors’ shared interests in Peggy Phelan’s notion of ‘performative writing’ and in the examination of inter-disciplinary forms of narrative and counter-narrative. It specifically focused on three aspects - experimental forms of Theories and Criticism, Objects and Narrative and the particular form of the Cinematic Essay and explored how the performative move could also be said to apply to forms of contemporary art practice: to what photography, film, objects wish to say. This resulting edited collection presents contemporary making and writing practices as multi-faceted, interdisciplinary and trans-medial and is indicative of an attitude that sets out to encounter the world, its social conditions, its global perspectives and the nature of aesthetic discussion that is no longer confined by formalism.

More information can be found here

A sample PDF of the publication can be found here:

Essaying Essays

I am currently participating in the project 'Essaying Essays'

THE ESSAYING ESSAYS TEMPORARY COLLECTIVE
A Temporary Collective of Readers
A project by FREE PRESS/ PLAN 9 BRISTOL
1st July- 1st October 2009

For three months the Essaying Essays collective will explore the possibilities of the essay form. What forms can the essay take and how can such texts be read? What is an essay and who is essaying and where? What kinds of knowledge can be produced? What is lost and gained in moving beyond conventional discursive approaches into using visual and textual material, the space of the page, variations of typography and design?

Essaying Essays was proposed by David Berridge as one of seven research projects by members of Free Press, a collaborative project between seven artists/ writers exploring economies of ideas and alternative modes of dissemination and exchange. The seven projects developed from a workshop at Plan 9, Bristol in March 2009. Details of all the projects can be found at www.tradeunionartfreepress.blogspot.com

Free Press are David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Karen Di Franco, Pippa Koszerek, Matthew MacKisack, Sophie Mellor, and Ashkan Sephavand.

My reasons for involvement are as follows:

I have increasingly come to think of the essay as a form of Sisyphean labour, where its etymological origins in the French word essayer - meaning to try, a tentative attempt – are remembered and posited a value. Whilst there is perhaps a danger - even a sense of futility - in thinking about the essay in terms of its potential (indeed inevitable) failure, there is also a certain liberation in acknowledging that the essay is not always about arriving at a definitive conclusion but rather serves, at times, as an act of rehearsal where possibilities become marked, propositions trialed. The tentative, propositional indeed potentially failing possibilities of the essay are something I would like to explore further, as these are ideas that relate closely to my ongoing research that operates under the working title ‘Not Yet There’. In spite of my interests in the provisional, unresolved and incomplete, my writing has often tended to follow the format of established even conventional forms of essay writing, which I freely admit might not always be wholly appropriate to the ideas expressed therein.  In recent work I have become more interested in the form that my writing might take, thinking about how it might function as a practice rather than simply as a structure, vessel or convention for holding together ideas. I have become interested in using strategies of listing for assembling fragmentary or partial sentences and in the conventions of footnoting as a critical and creative device for constructing non-linear (even wandering) text-works. 

Stillness in a mobile world


I have been invited to write an extended essay for the forthcoming publication, Stillness in a mobile world, eds. David Bissell and Gillian Fuller, International Library of Sociology Series, Routledge, 2011. My chapter Performing Stillness: Communities in Waiting belongs to a cluster of research entitled Performing Communities which interrogates how participatory performance-based interventions in the public realm can help cultivate models of social agency, sociability or temporary collectivity, in resistance to the increased experience of atomization/individualization within contemporary urban life. It investigates the capacity of participatory performance to intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated and navigated by producing ‘counter-publics’, new social formations for rehearsing and testing alternative – ethical, political, critical – forms of individual and collective subjectivity. Central to this area of enquiry is my own practice-based involvement (as an art-writer) in the art-project Open City, which in this chapter is interrogated through the prism of a specifically Deleuzian-Spinozist philosophy. My chapter brings together art and philosophy to interrogate the critical potential of performed stillness, conceiving of ‘being still’ as an affirmative and constitutive space of ‘being-with-others’ (Nancy) or of ‘bodies in agreement’ (Spinoza). The chapter’s argument is developed from my earlier article 'From Passivity to Potentiality: The Communitas of Stillness', in the peer-reviewed Australian online journal M/C - A Journal of Media and Culture, Vol.12, No.1 and has been tested at international conferences (PSi #16 Performing Publics, Toronto; Mobilities + Creativity, Narrative, Representation and Performance, University of Surrey    

Background to Publication: This collection on the conceptual, political and philosophical importance of stillness is positioned within a world that has increasingly come to be understood through the theoretical and conceptual lens of animation. Criss-crossing the humanities and social sciences, metaphors of movement, from Manuel Castells’ space of flows to Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modernity underpin much work within the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry) that is interested in understanding the world through relations of movement and flux. Moving away from a sedentary metaphysics of being-in-the-world, burgeoning mobilities research illustrates a commitment to exploring the differentiated dynamics of a world increasingly characterised by networks of corporeal, virtual and imaginative mobilities. This collection suggests that while a focus on such a dialectic of stasis and movement is significant, it neglects other registers and modalities which still and stillness inhabits: where still emerges through other configurations of matter which are not necessarily reducible to the dialectic of mobility and immobility. What happens if we think of stillness not only as rhythm, but also as technic or trope? As attunement or perception? As such, each chapter in this collection attends to stillness through a range of different grammars and vocabularies from human geography to media studies, from cultural theory to fine arts; illuminating the multiplicity of ontological and epistemological registers through which still moves. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the diversity of this collection illuminates the multiplicity of ontological and epistemological registers through which stillness moves: from human geography to media studies, cultural theory to fine arts. With the help of luminaries such as Deleuze, Bergson, Barthes and Beckett, this book interweaves cutting-edge theoretical insight with empirical illustrations which examine and traverse a multitude of practices, spaces and events. In an era where stasis, slowness and passivity are often held to be detrimental, this collection puts forward a new set of political and ethical concerns which help us to come to terms with, understand, and account for (im)mobile life.

Below is a PDF of the forthcoming book chapter:

‘Performing Stillness: Communities In Waiting’ in Stillness In A Mobile World, eds. David Bissell And Gillian Fuller, (International Library Of Sociology Series, Routledge, Oxford 2010), pp.87 – 106.

‘Performing Stillness: Communities In Waiting’ represents Performing Communities, a sub-section of my broader enquiry, Not Yet There (http://www.not-yet-there.blogspot.com/), which investigates the capacity of participatory performance to intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated by producing ‘counter-publics’, new social formations for rehearsing alternative – ethical, political, critical – forms of sociability and collectivity.

Central is my practice-based involvement (as an art-writer) in the art-project Open City, whose performance-based practice is interrogated through the prism of Deleuzian-Spinozist philosophy. Key research was undertaken in Japan (dislocate festival, Yokohama) supported by an Arts Council Grant, Exploring New Strategies of Participation within Site Specific Performance, 2009. The contribution to knowledge is in exploring the affective potential of performed stillness, conceiving ‘being still’ as a constitutive space of active, embodied citizenship.

The chapter develops an earlier article ‘From Passivity to Potentiality: The Communitas of Stillness’, published in the peer-reviewed journal M/C – A Journal of Media and Culture, Vol. 12, No. 1, Still, 2009. Its ideas have been tested at various international conferences (including PSi #16 Performing Publics, Toronto, 2010 and Writing, Site+Performance, ANTI festival, Kuopio, Finland, 2011). Related investigations exploring the use of invitations for producing collectivity have resulted in journal articles ‘RSVP – Choreography Collectivity through invitation and response’, published in the peer-reviewed online journal Rhizomes (‘Hives, Tribes, Assemblages: New Collectivities’, 2011); ‘Pay Attention to the Footnotes’, in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 2010; ‘Social Assemblage’, in FrenchMottershead - SHOPS, People and Processes (Site Gallery, 2010), and ‘Permission Granted’ - essay in the online journal, Drain, 2011. The Spinozist notion of affect was further elaborated as part of an invited essay in Reading/Feeling: The Affect Reader, (If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, 2013).

The Summer of Dissent

I will be producing a new piece of critical writing in response to the proposed Summer of Dissent at Plan 9. The Summer of Dissent brings together a range of practioners seeking to dismantle and reassemble cultural norms through collective action and singular acts of sedition. Events reflect concerns around physical and mental survival - ranging from The Keepers, a mapping project that seeks to preserve and build knowledge of urban wild food, to The Coming Insurrection, a discussion around freedom of speech and textual terrorism. By collectively scrutinising the current geo-political situation through the prism of cultural production these events invite the audience to view, collaborate and question. 

Image: Ali Jones, Everybody Move

The programme at both Plan 9 and off-site venues, includes the enactment of Guy Debords' Game of War by Rod Dickinson & Class Wargames; a psychic meeting calling for an Art Strike by the Second Temporary Art Strike Action Committee (Alytus Chapter); weapon making with Girl Gang; research into insanity by the collective Alialani; and a public swim protest with Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting. 

A publication will also be produced to document Summer of Dissent with a commissioned text by Emma Cocker and a specially produced flyposter from Laura Oldfield Ford.

More information can be found here.

(UN)Folding Zagreb

I am going to be participating in this research-creation workshop as a way of developing and extending some of the performance ideas developed in collaboration with Open City. I am in the process of developing further research – entitled Between Wandering and Waiting – which continues to investigate the creative and critical value of strategies such as wandering, waiting and performed stillness within an artistic practice, by asking how they might contribute towards the production of pragmatic models (‘tactics’) for interrogating contemporary forms of subjectivity. As part of this research I am in the process of developing critical connections with other artists, performers and theorists interested in similar concerns. Whilst my practice is primarily theoretical/writerly I am interested in opportunities through which to (tentatively) test out some of these ideas through practice.

(UN)Folding Zagreb is a three-day collaborative workshop that will take place during PSi15 directed by Sara Wookey, Bianca Scliar Mancini and Christopher Brunner

In a format that resembles a workshop but that aims at a collective research-creation process participants will use movement and rhythm as techniques to explore how to know Zagreb through affects. Participants will share a short reading pack, which includes philosophical texts, as well as other relevant writings and images that will set a common ground of knowledge about the city.

With three molecules of actions, each one with a specific focus on either movement, visual or sound elements, this method of approaching the city is strongly based on improvisation techniques, both from dance and music, which priories flow and process; it is anti-flaneur as it proposes participation and movement of the body as a tool for engagement with the others in the space of the city, exploring the notion of gestural contamination.

(Un)Folding Zagreb consists of intense work during the three blocks of three hours of  activities in the studio (physical propositions), outdoors (tasks of collecting) and on mapping techniques ( collective composition). 

No Longer and Not Yet

The text below has been written for this year's NTU degree show catalogue.

"The conclusion is the event whose occurrence brings about the end; it is a point of resolution that draws the experimentation to a close. An answer has been found, a result gleaned, a decision made. Conclusions often rest upon the production of something definitive, something certain. They describe the final chapter of the thesis, which attempts to draw together the loose ends, to smooth out or reconcile the differences or inconsistencies within an argument or investigation. Here, the indeterminate or unruly meanderings of an enquiry become dutifully reined in or stilled, where the restless activity of a thinking process is required to steady itself, to fix upon its goal. Conclusions can terminate the trajectory of a given episode of time or line of narrative – they are the final scene; the end of an era, the protagonist’s last breath. However, within art practice conclusions are rarely definitive or final, but rather present as provocation for future action or as moments of pause within a never-ending permutational chain of possibilities. Enquiries become shaped into one form, before being collapsed back once again for the process to begin afresh. The fine art degree show itself should be seen in such terms – less a marker of closure as an opening out into the space of the future. It is a double-headed arrow – pointing back towards the creative labour of production and of thinking, and forward as a promise of what might still be to come. It signals and celebrates the results of an imaginative process that has already taken place but significantly is also charged with potential.

 

Strictly speaking, the degree show is not an ending at all, rather a space of transition, of new beginnings. It is the visual manifestation of a rite of passage according to whose terms art students exit the realm and restrictions of the university to navigate their way into the world beyond. The duration of the degree show is a zone of expectant limbo. We are between times – no longer and not yet. However, this rite of passage is not just about the initiate (student) increasing their status on the hierarchical ladder of social standing, of graduating into the – employment – ranks of the ‘with honours’. Rather, an (art) education has the capacity to function in more critical terms. For social anthropologist Victor Turner, universities should be understood as ‘liminoid’ settings or as an ‘antistructure’ capable of generating alternative ways of being and thinking to the mainstream or habitual. Whilst the liminal experience often reinforces and works with existing social hierarchies, Turner argues that, “liminoid phenomena … are often parts of social critiques or even revolutionary manifestos … exposing the injustices, inefficiencies, and immoralities of the mainstream economic and political structure.”[i] Rather than being easily – unquestionably – assimilated back into the existing social order then, the critical subject produced through the liminoid experience has the capacity to conceive of things differently or invite change – they have a transformative potential. It is this questioning potential that a fine art course hopes to nurture. Undoubtedly, there will be those for whom the degree show will function as the final conclusion to their practice, indeed those for whom the art degree itself is valued only for its transferable properties in an ever competitive job market. However, perhaps there will also be others for whom the experience will continue to function as a provocation or as the catalyst to go out and make things (differently)."

---

[i] Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre, The Human Seriousness of Play, (PAJ Publications, New York, 1982), pp.54-55

(not) new work

I am currently developing ideas for the publication which is being produced through collaboration with other art-writers/artists as part of the Critical Communities project.

Re: Writing

Abstract:

In the process of writing about other things I have noticed that there are often these embedded fragments, half sentences and curious revelations that seem to simultaneously describe or equate to the act of writing itself, and the struggle therein. I want to use the publication as an opportunity to produce a piece of writing that is perhaps approaching an idea of practice. I am interested in recycling or reusing text fragments from existing work. I want to return to earlier writing and rescue fragments that had perhaps seemed incidental or unremarkable and collate them as a litany of reflections on writing, on writing as a practice. I am interested in the way that this format will ultimately allow me to bring fragments of ‘academic’ writing into proximity with material that is rather more personal, doubtful or which has hitherto remained hidden. I want to find a way of introducing a sense of inconsistency or contradiction or a feeling of moving between critical, philosophical or even theoretically (sounding) fragments and those which speak much more about a feeling of a love affair with the process of writing, or of the inevitable experience of failure or inability or inadequacy encountered in the process of trying to write about art practice. It is a rule based piece I suppose – the rule being (not new work) or (nothing new). I suppose the other rule I am considering is in terms of the length of the text – which is going to use the 'rule' inherent within the brief which is to produce a piece of writing with an upper limit of ‘2000 words’.

(sample excerpt below)

Re: Writing

(1) I am not sure how to begin; (2) It is certainly taking the shape of words; (3) However this is subject to revision; (4) Categories quiver at the point of collapse; (5) Trying to produce some other way of adequately describing the experience; (6) I am hesitant in speaking the words out loud; (7) Without due care things might spiral out of control; (8) She begins. The pages tremble; (9) Subject position is cast adrift; (10) Words unfurl, not knowing how they got there; (11) Uneven and discontinuous; (12) Always out of reach; (13) Full of holes; (14) A tender documentary residue; (15) Not so much a beginning then as a suture; (16) It is a liquid state or heavy like an industrial accident; (17) In which the seams remain critically visible; (18) Unassuming moments when nothing happens; (19) Breaks things down but also leaves them open; (20) Bringing into crisis, intensively, with care; (21) Within the limited constraints of a given language; (22) Things remain insensible or nameless; (23) I won’t play by their rules; (24) Pushing at the edges of one meaning whilst holding back the terms of another; (25) Worried until they begin to recombine differently; (26) In a more contingent, disruptive manner; (27) Complicate the possibility of arriving at a single answer; (28) But rather to conceive of new names; (29) By reassembling its languages into counter-narratives; (30) Always happening in the present; (31) It is impossible to ever exactly duplicate an action; (32 The discrepancy between what is visible and what is not; (33) I feel something; (34) Flutter-flutter; (35) Wanting more; (36) To feel its letters over my tongue; (37) I try to take it all in at once; (38) It is in these things that I remember; (39) I have not forgotten; (40) A graft of something already existing; (41) Meaning to try, a tentative attempt; (42) As an echo or vibration drawn and performed through the body; (43) Clandestine love affairs with another’s thoughts; (44) Once uttered they become rather hard to delete or forget; (45) Each bringing the other into being; (46) Silences that mark unexpected endings; (47) Ideas buried beneath the surface; (48) They seem to resist forming words; (49) Instead bleed across one another; (50) Contiguity is only ever a form of being in contact with; (51) Rather than unnecessary interference at its periphery; (52) Both a spatial form and a temporal event; (53) A pivot about which things turn; (54) Proposing tangents to be – both literally and literarily – followed; (55) Haunted by memories of earlier inhabitations; (56) Whether this thought can be mine alone; (57) A memorial to those unspoken; (58) By one’s own volition; (59) Like the nagging of an obsessive’s itch; (60) Intellectual holes that may well be revealed in time; (61) I feel duly torn in two; (62) Not wholly knowing how to respond; (63) It is not that easy; (64) Something has been left unsaid; (65) Sometimes a foil is needed through which to conjure reflection; (66) Language can be irredeemably imprecise; (67) In a language that cannot be read; (68) Only infrequently captures the experience of the moment; (69) I am letting you in; (70) As a process for producing tangential experiences; (71) I am willing it to happen soon; (72) An intuition for knowing when to yield; (73) Touching upon; (74) There can only be so many ways of saying the same thing; (75) Yet there is an inherent incompleteness in the task at hand; (76) Dialogue broken, a sentence stalled; (77) A speechless mode of incommunicable proximity; (78) A mode of attendance or attention; (79) The prospect of hearing me on your lips; (80) As closely as possible; (81) Logic might become frayed; (82) Thoughts well in my head, heavy and meaningless; (83) A kind of restlessness; (128) I have had such thoughts before; (84) Being struck by something; (85) In case of an emergency to let in breath; (86) A desire to avoid the temptation to simply repeat; (87) Making blind leaps into darkness; (88) Stammering in the path of understanding’s procedural flight; (89) Resilient sites of criticality; (90) That emerge simultaneously; (91) An action is required; (92) Proximity to the work does not guarantee any certainty or assuredness; (93) Conditions; (94) Refusing to play by the terms of existing power relations; (1) The cycle of iteration begins again once more; (95) The notion of the telos is often rejected or sabotaged; (96) Beyond words as such; (97) Without obligation; (98) The continual reconfiguration of the rules of engagement; (99) Between producing illumination and further opacity; (100) Before other meanings have begun to fully form

As part of the project we have responded to the abstract's of each other ... here is an excerpt from the response to my work from Nathan Walker :

"Into Suspension. Re guarding. Guarding. Taking all that stuff and re-cognising it. Because there is so much writing in the world the job is not to make more but to construct new texts out of the ones that already exist. This is working clever. Emma is removing the specificity and allowing for a kind of openness. In context. Emma is not producing academic writing. This is practice. This material is different material. Like instead of a new quilt we have a patchwork. Instead of starting again Emma is sifting, dealing (like we deal with cards) with the writing stuff. Emma is interested in plagiarism. The thief. Les Voleurs. Stealing your own work and writing into it. Saying things without knowing what your saying. Arrows. Indexically. Storage space. Holding space. Writing about one thing and it really is writing about an other thing. The stuff behind the words. The reclamation of recycled materials that perform the space of writing. This is about the process of writing itself. The struggle within the labor of practice. The hesitation, the deliberation of practice. The fragile moments of writing. Foil the goal. No goal. Own Goal. Re-Writing. Re(ally)Writing"