Performance: Re- (RITE)

Re - was a performance reading developed collaboratively by Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, to mark the launch of the publication RITE, at PSL (Project Space Leeds) on 26 March 2010. 

Re-

Drawing on Emma Cocker's Re: Writing 1993-2009 as a point of departure, Re- is a collaborative reading where Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker repeat, rework, rewrite, reread and react, whilst responding to and relocating ideas generated from, through and in relation to RITE. The reading presses on two writers - and two writing practices- coming together, whilst focusing on the tension between the improvised and rehearsed, and on the play between the visible and invisible, or public and private states of not knowing within the performed act of writing.

The disparate fragments of documentation (below) reflect upon different elements of Re-, intimating towards the potential for further (re)iterations or versions of the work, the possibility of future (re)adings.

Documentation: Stills from the video from the performance reading Re- (2010). 

                                   
Documentation: Video excerpts of the 'work' produced during the performance reading Re- 


   
   Documentation: Screen grabs from the video (detail) from the performance reading Re- 

          
Documentation: Video excerpts (detail) from the performance reading Re- (2010)

Documentation: 'Script/score' from the performance reading Re- (2010)

Book chapter: The Cartographical Necessity of Exile

My proposed essay 'Exit Strategies – The Cartography of Escape' has been invited into the next stage of submissions for the publication, THE CARTOGRAPHICAL NECESSITY OF EXILE (ed.) Karen Elizabeth Bishop (Harvard University).

Background to the Publication.

Derek Walcott identified a cartographical necessity of exile in his 1984 collection of poetry, Midsummer, when he wrote:

So, however far you have travelled, your
steps make more holes and the mesh is multiplied –
… exiles must make their own maps

This collection will seek to understand this cartographical imperative. What is the relationship between exile – understood broadly in its most modern, splintered sense to include external and internal exile, diaspora, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, expatriation, migrants, refugees, nomads, the disappeared and the ex-disappeared – and map-making? Mapping is a certain science that enables emplacement and facilitates movement. Yet it can also be an aesthetic project that draws on a heightened awareness of space and place, memory, and historical imaginary. So what kinds of maps do exiles make? Are they private maps or maps that can be shared? How are they conceived of and how are they read? How do they provide for new ways of thinking about the experience of exile? How do authors writing in or about exile represent the doubly ontological and epistemological exercise of map-making? And how, finally, might a cartographical necessity of exile challenge how we conceive of mapping, its history and future, its function, tools, and media?

‘Drawing a Hypothesis - Figures of Research’

I have been invited to contribute an essay/hypothesis to a forthcoming publication edited by the artist Nikolaus Gansterer entitled ‘Drawing a Hypothesis - Figures of Research.

Image: Nikolaus Gansterer (from the website http://www.gansterer.org/) 

‘Drawing a Hypothesis - Figures of Research' will be
 released in Autumn in cooperation with Springer Science Publisher
 (Vienna/New
 York), the Jan Van Eyck Academy and the University of Applied Art in Vienna. Essays on the topic of science, drawing and perception are combined 
in this
 book forming a fragmentary encyclopaedia of lines of thoughts.
 The publication will be released for the Frankfurt Book Fair in the Autumn.
 

Rubric - Document

Site-specific images taken of the series of postcard texts that I have produced in response to the work of the project, Open City, will be appearing in the next issue of the journal Rubric which focuses on the issue of 'Document'. I am currently working with Open City to produce a publication which draws together the whole series of postcard texts (1 - 10) produced throughout our collaboration.

                                     
Image: Open City Postcard Series 

Open City Postcard Series (No. 2.2.1, 2.2.2, 2.2.5, 2.2.6, 9.4.2)

OpenCity is an interdisciplinary art project involving artists Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday, working in collaboration with other artists and writers including art-writer Emma Cocker. It is an investigation-led project that attempts to draw attention to how behaviour in the public realm is organized and controlled – and to what effect – whilst simultaneously exploring how such ‘rules’ – even habits – might be negotiated differently through performance-based interventions. Open City’s projects often involve inviting, instructing or working with different individuals to create participatory performances in the public realm; discrete art works that put into question or destabilize habitual patterns and conventions of public behaviour.

The Open City Postcard Series is an ongoing serialized essay written by Emma Cocker to accompany a series of instructions by Open City (on the reverse of each postcard) that invite different forms of individual and collective action in the public realm. 

Field Proposals

ART WRITING FIELD STATION was an event that took place at East Street Arts Patrick Studios, St.Mary’s Lane, Leeds, LS9 7EH, on Saturday March 27th 2010, 10am – 1pm as part of the RITE publication launch. ART WRITING FIELD STATION is an ongoing event and publications series at which practitioners present material and evidence of the “field” of art writing. The aim is both to make a field recording of the field of art writing as constituted by a set of practices, and to offer an example of that field in poetic operation. As well as individual presentations, each ART WRITING FIELD STATION produces a lexicon or live writing archive of its group discussions, which serves as a script and provocation for future events.

ART WRITING FIELD STATION at Patrick Studio’s will feature presentations of new work by David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Mary Paterson, and Nathan Walker.  

In terms of responding to the David Berridge’s proposition of ‘Field Station’  I have attempted to map a field and propose it as a field station; the text/objects that I presented are both reflective and prospective, (like Breton’s ‘double headed-arrow') they mark the territory of what has come before but also suggest a possible future use. I wanted to propose a series of maps as a response to the idea of field: field-maps: My hope is to use these ‘field-maps’ to help me to better understand what might constitute the ‘field’ of my own practice, and the method of my own writing, which I am increasingly coming to see as a restless practice, or a practice that uses the idea of restlessness as its method. Thinking through field-station has forced me to think about ‘the field’ in terms of the architecture of my own art-writing practice, thinking about architecture as:

*  A spatial structure or model (what is its shape)

* Verb: The action or process of building (of assemblage) (how is it produced, what is it methods). Field as an act or of doing something: a sphere of activity, to put into action, a complex of forces that serve as causative agents in human behaviour.

*  Network: the way components fit together (how are connections made and re-made)

(1)   * A mapping or rhizomatic field (the network of ideas, practice, bodies – field as community). An attempt to articulate or map or chart or diagram a sense of my writing practice, which operates under the title, Not Yet There. The tension between or field created between different practices (art/encyclopedia; ‘knowing’/knowledge; the gallery/the academy).

(2)   * Field Station – what constitutes a (art-writing) studio and how can this be made portable or mobile or taken to the ‘field’. Studio as constituted by a set of practices (produced); by the physical surroundings (belongings) and by what it affords (thinking space). NB) In order to build in spaces that are more speculative you have to build in spaces that are more speculative. Mind-mapping habitually presupposes a starting point, a point of original. Here my attempt is to remove the need for a fixed or determined start, or rather to replace the propositional of the conventional starting point with the notion of a potential Macguffin.

(3)   * Open Field (as open space – thinking space)  - a template, work and tool. An imaginative proposition and an operational model. An attempt to articulate or map or chart or diagram the idea of the ‘field’ as open space, a space of thinking, a germinal terrain. Mapping the process of thinking, without this being about what that thinking is about; a mapping of a process and the producing of a map that corresponds to that process.

(4)   * An operational model: using the ‘field’ model as a device through which to explore my field of art-writing practice. A proposition of an essay as map, the essay as a network or proposed community of ideas. The field as essay.  Visual essaying (essay as rhizome). An attempt to use this open field as a device to lay down (or seed or plant) a few specific ideas. A model to be used: what is the field of this event?

* Clearing: an expanse of open or cleared ground

* Event: the area in which (field) events are held

* Space of Contestation: a battleground.

* Force/Agency: (physics) the influence of some agent, as electricity or gravitation, considered as existing at all points in space and   defined by the force it would exert on an object placed at any point in space.

* Horizon: (optics) the entire angular expanse visible through an optical instrument at a given time or (photography) the area of a subject that is taken in by a lens at a particular diaphragm opening.

* Interconnectedness: (psychology) the total complex of interdependent factors within which a psychological event occurs and is perceived as occurring.

* Record: (in a punch card) any number of columns regularly used for recording the same information

* Playing the field - to vary one's activities, a kind of promiscuous practice, "avoid commitment" – a restlessness

* Flat land – a non-hierarchical playing field

* Skilfulness: To respond to

* Incisive: the site of a surgical operation

* Classification: a data structure

RITE launch

RITE will be launched at PSL in Leeds on the evening of March 26 2010. The event will include propositions on the subject of art writing and live readings by RITE contributors. 

Published in 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 19 original texts by UK based art writers (many from the Yorkshire region) 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.

This event is supported by Arts Council England, PSL and New Work Network.

Emerging Landscapes

My paper (see below) has been accepted as part of the forthcoming conference, Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation which will be taking place at the University of Westminster from 25-27 June 2010. The paper explores ideas which have been emerging in a number of recent conference papers that I have presented in relation to the work of Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon.

Exit Strategies  – Cartographies of Escape

Focusing on work by artists Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting, this paper examines how their interrogation of the – physical and virtual – landscape operates parallel to questioning the controlling, striated cartographies that habitually map contemporary subjectivity and social identity. Within their practice, landscape becomes the contested terrain upon which – and by whose terms – the formulation of self and one’s place in the world becomes mapped out and defined. The impact of various social, geopolitical and technological changes upon the representation and conceptualization of landscape is considered synchronous to the production of new modes for conceiving of and controlling how these emergent landscapes are inhabited. For the artists, reimagining and reimaging how landscape might be navigated/negotiated differently is simultaneous to the emergence of an active and dissenting form of subjectivity, intent on creatively and pragmatically exploring other – potentially less acquiescent – models for living or performing a life. The paper draws the exemplar of Brandon and Bunting’s practice into dialogue with a wider philosophical and theoretical landscape, to explore how the cartographical imperative of their work is less a practice of naming and knowing (of territorialization and representation) as a strategy of deterritorialization for rendering the – social and spatial – boundary or limit porous.

ART WRITING FIELD STATION

I have been invited to participate in:

ART WRITING FIELD STATION  

East Street Arts, LEEDS

26th March 2010
Curated by David Berridge
ART WRITING FIELD STATION was initially developed as part of Field Recordings 06.02.10 - 21.02.10, Five Years Gallery London.

From David’s Press release/statement about the project

“Histories of experimental poetics and writing are often related to practices and metaphors of “the field” - from Charles Olson’s "open field” poetics to engagements with anthropological field trips and field notes as models for situational and performative writing. The aim of ART WRITING FIELD STATION is to try and explore how such ideas can inform current writing practices by offering an event that models the idea of " a writer in the field" and also offers a "field recording" of such practices in operation … ART WRITING FIELD STATION gathers a group of practitioners, each of whom presents some "material" or "evidence" of their own "field."”

Failure

An excerpt from my essay 'Over and Over, Again and Again' has been selected for inclusion in Failure, ed. Lisa Le Feuvre, (Documents of Contemporary Art Series, MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery). This text belongs to a cluster of research entitled The Potentiality of Failure (within my broader research enquiry, Not Yet There. It focuses on developing a vocabulary for advocating a critical value for failure, by positing it as a form of resistance to or refusal of the dominant progressive, teleological or goal-oriented tendencies of contemporary experience. Central to this enquiry is an elaboration of a specifically Sisyphean model of failure, where the familiar (but habitually under-interrogated) figure of Sisyphus is considered as a cipher for investigating irresolution and incompletion as purposeful, generative strategies within artistic activity, where practice is valued as a contingent space of rehearsal, trial and endeavour. This enquiry focuses on an analysis of contemporary and historical practices where the ‘fail and repeat’ gesture is used as a critical device to thwart or challenge the authority within models of normative (habitually outcome or result-oriented) ‘success’. An text extract (of over 4000 words) is going to be included in Failure (ed.) Lisa Le Feuvre (Documents of Contemporary Art series, Whitechapel /MIT, 2010), a survey publication including writing by Giorgio Agamben, Samuel Beckett, Gilles Deleuze, Jörg Heiser and Stuart Morgan. 


Below is a draft version of the chapter.

PSi 16 Performing Publics

My paper Performing Stillness has been accepted as part of the Performing Publics conference taking place from 9–13 June 2010, Toronto, Canada

PSi 16, Performing Publics, will take place in Toronto as part of a collaboration between York University’s Faculty of Fine Arts and the Ontario College of Art & Design. The conference will investigate the power of performance to intervene in, reshape, and reinvigorate the public sphere at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We invite proposals that take up notions of “public” in a variety of ways, pointing to the critically generative and fraught aspects of the term as it has been adopted within performance studies. The conference will theorize the relationship between performance, “official” public culture (public culture framed and sanctioned by state and/or corporate institutions), and the production of what Michael Warner calls “counter-publics” (social formations developed in opposition to the discourses and interests of the official public sphere). As such, it will explore the coming together of individuals as a social totality – as a community, nation, organization, etc. – and the enactment of public as a form of social activism, as a means of rehearsing, querying, and producing alternative forms of local and global citizenship. In both contexts, performance has the potential to frame affective and critically nuanced responses to public events, issues and crises and thus to model politically and ethically engaged forms of public life. The conference also seeks to problematize the idea of “publics” as it has been applied to performance by exploring the limitations of this term and the kinds of social exclusions that it often has been used to rationalize.

Guiding questions will include: How are we hailed by various publics, and how does this shape our behaviors and social interactions? How are publics spatially and temporally constituted? In what ways do publics participate in forms of activism, civic engagement, and “poetic world-making” (Warner)? What affects and effects are produced by such utopian interventions? 

Performing Stillness

Reflecting on recent work by artist-led project, OpenCity, this paper interrogates how participatory performance-based interventions in the public realm contribute to the formulation of active – potentially resistant – forms of subjectivity and community, focusing specifically on the power of collective stillness or inaction for resisting the ideological expectations and pressures of ‘official’ public culture. Stillness and slowness are often presented as outmoded or anachronistic forms of mobility, antithetical to the velocity, speed and efficiency proposed by new technologies and the accelerated operations and interactions that temporally and spatially determine how public space and the lived environment are encountered. However, rather than understanding the performance of stillness as a counter-cultural strategy for ‘opting out’ of the accelerated narrative of contemporary society, this paper explores the potential within those forms of stillness specifically produced within and by this very context, examining how they might be (re)inhabited collectively as sites of critical action. With reference to the writing of Gilles Deleuze – especially in relation to Spinoza’s Ethics – the paper explores 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. Whilst a critique or disruption of an existing social/behavioural paradigm, the performance of collective stillness also has the capacity to produce unexpected configurations of ‘community’ no longer bound by existing rules or protocol; a nascent ‘counter public’, ‘temporary invented community’ (Kwon, 2004) or even liminal form of ‘communitas’ (Turner,1982) momentarily united within the shared act of being still.

Ethical Possession

My essay ‘Ethical Possession: Borrowing from the Archives’ has just been published in the online journal 'Scope' in their 10th Anniversary Special Issue and e-Book, which is focused on the theme of 'Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation' and edited by Iain Robert Smith.

Image: still from (On the Heights All Is Peace). 1998.

  Directed by Angela Ricci Lucchi, Yervant Gianikian

The issue (15, November 2009) can be found here 

My essay explores the possibility of a redemptive or empathetic form of appropriation (as a progressive politics of sharing or ethical possession) by focusing specifically on the borrowing of found archival footage within the work of filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi.

Performing Collectivity

I am writing a new essay/article for Dance Theatre Journal that aims to explore some of the shared concerns and connections within three recent exhibitions, Victor Alimpiev’s To Trample Down An Arable Land, at IKON; Johanna Billing’s I'm Lost Without Your Rhythm at Arnolfini gallery, and FrenchMottershead’s Shops project at Site Gallery. In each instance, the work is underpinned by a performance often drawing explicitly on forms of collective choreography or movement or action. In different ways, each of these exhibitions presents an exploration of the relationship between the individual within the collective or community, ideas around social ritual, tensions around participation and the performance or choreography of collectivity.

In the article I am proposing to explore:

* The performance of collectivity (specifically examining the threshold/’fray’ between individual/collective behaviour)

* The space of decision-making in performance (within an art context and also as part of the performance of everyday life)

* The emergence of heterogeneity within collective action (e.g.comparing shoaling with schooling; performative ‘symphony’ with ‘synchronicity’ affinity with conformity). 

Images below: Victor Alimpiev and Johanna Billing

Social Assemblage

I have been commissioned to write an essay as part of FrenchMottershead's forthcoming publication in conjunction with their SHOPS project. The publication is edited by Gerrie Van Noord and will be published in 2010. In the meantime below is an extract from my essay, Social Assemblage. 

Below is a version of the text which will be published in the forthcoming SHOPS book, a culmination of the SHOPS project by FrenchMottershead, (published by Site Gallery, 2010) 

Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art

I have been invited to write an extended essay for the forthcoming publication, ‘Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art’ that is contracted with I. B. Tauris for publication in 2011. The publication is the second in a series of books that began with Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art (2007), and is edited by Phil Sawdon and Russell Marshall (TRACEY – Loughborough University). Whilst, Drawing Now focused on what drawing can be (what it might encompass in more abstract or conceptual ways, by demonstrating the contemporary use of the relatively traditional materials associated with drawing), Hyperdrawing intends to extend into the use of other materials including time, space and sound to challenge the assumptions of what drawing is or might be. The prefix ‘hyper’ qualifies something as being 'over', 'above', 'beyond' and usually implying 'excess' or 'exaggeration' or 'more than normal'. This publication will consider aspects of drawing that exceed predictable expectations of what drawing might be - conceptually, visually and as importantly technologically.                                               

Image: Tim Knowles, Wind Walk

Below is an outline of my proposed essay

The Restless Line

This essay approaches the concept of ‘hyperdrawing’ as a particular species of hyperactivity or restlessness, a ceaselessly unfolding or agitated practice that appears reluctant to be wholly stilled or settled, that instead remains perpetually unfinished, unresolved, ‘eternally incomplete’ (Dexter, 2005). Restlessness describes an acutely sensed comprehension of the infinite and immeasurable permutations or possibilities within a given situation, signaling a refusal or indeed failure to commit to any singular or distinct path of action or system of thought. Seemingly non-committal, restlessness is nonetheless a commitment to the promise of potentiality, a desire for things to remain undecided or open-ended, to not be too quickly closed down. By persistently attempting to resist or remain beyond the grasp of various systems of capture or measure, restlessness emerges as a critical method intent on preventing complex (human) experiences from becoming reduced to any single or stable position, from being fixed or simplified. In this essay, I want to explore how the act of drawing corresponds to or encapsulates a particular restless state or sensibility, that can in turn be seen as indicative of an emergent form of critical subjectivity or subject-hood, the point where a body becomes activated or animated by nascent thought. In these terms, drawing can be understood to operate in an analogous way to thought – not to pure intelligibility or rational reasoning, but rather to the more uncertain and inchoate space-time of thinking itself; to deliberation, to a state of critical human self-consciousness. The essay will approach the concept of hyperdrawing by elaborating on how restlessness can be considered as a critical and potentially dissident practice that finds a specific form (or rather ‘form-giving’ force) within the act of drawing. In some senses, the essay proposes to embrace restlessness as part of its own methodology – where the work of various artists provide points of provocation or interlocution prompting and indeed enabling a meandering conceptualization of ‘the restlessness of the line drawing’ to emerge.

In the first instance, I propose to explore the connection between restlessness and forms of physical wandering, and the relation to drawing therein. Within certain art practices, the act of drawing performs the role of both follower and followed, having the capacity to simultaneously lead and trace the errant trajectory of the artist’s body. Here, drawing might correspond to an event having already taken place in the past, to one that is happening (live) in the present or in anticipation of some future moment yet to come. The drawn line has the capacity to function as both itinerary and residue, as instruction and evidential record. The line might be used as a proposition that promises towards some future event or performance, as the primary event of the drawn line is repeated, followed or used as a score for a second inscription, where the entire body of the artist replaces the moving pencil’s point, its graphic mark becoming a life lived out in three-dimensional space. Alternatively, the moving body of the artist can be seen in more analogous terms, where their restless movements become drawings performed in time and space beyond the realm of the blank page, scoring the surface of more expansive terrains, carving invisible lines across the ground of a specific landscape or location. Or else, drawing becomes used to capture the ephemeral act of wandering itself – in fleeting scenes unfolding and then disappearing before they have begun to fully form, of faltering footfall rendered palpable as a quivering scribble or GPS line. In these terms, the restless line is conceived perhaps as an endlessly unraveling trajectory, active and always in motion, ad infinitum – akin to the trace left in the wake of a rolling stone.

However, restlessness might also be conceptualized as a state of oscillation or vacillation, no longer describing the unfettered meanderings of a nomadic line moving ever forward, but rather its ricochet between various points or positions, an endless performance back and forth, to and fro. The drawn line emerges somewhere between hand and eye, observation and imagination, imitation and invention, between internal and external forces or pressures, somewhere between self and the world. Drawing involves a mode of attendance or attention to these different and often competing forces; moreover, an intuition for knowing when to yield and for recognizing when to assert control. Our own experience of being in the world can equally be thought of in terms of these interrelations and co-dependencies. Drawing then, articulates the subject’s capacity for affecting and of being affected by other things, in turn evidencing the very contingent nature of subjectivity itself. The experience of the subject and also of drawing emerges as a consequence of a social encounter or interaction with. The oscillation or vacillation between different positions (of responding to and indeed producing different pushes and pulls) creates the dynamic of movement that operates as a form of desirable friction, wearing or worrying a gap or interval between the terms of one thing and another. By endlessly moving between, drawing attempts to leave or indeed make space, creating germinal conditions within which something else – something new or unexpected – might emerge, exceeding the terms of what is already known. Here then, hyperdrawing describes a practice of endless oscillation, a restless line intent on producing the possibility of the unexpected, unanticipated or hitherto unknown; that which is somehow hyper –  ‘more than normal’, ‘in excess of’, ‘over’ and ‘above’ what could have been conceived or planned for in advance. Hyperdrawing is thus a practice performed along the limits of the comprehensible or sensible; it is that which (by its nature) attempts to resist or exceed existing definitions or expectations.