Dislocate, Japan

Working in collaboration with Katie Doubleday from the Open City project, a 'performative' paper has been accepted as part of the Dislocate festival in Japan,  September 2008. Click here for more information about the Dislocate festival. This part of my research in collaboration with the project Open City has also just received a 'Grants for the Arts Award' from the Arts Council which will enable us to travel to Japan and use the time as a key phase of research and development of ideas relating to 'Interrogating New Contexts and Methods for Public Participation in Site Specific projects'. Bringing together shared elements of my research with those of Open City, this research phase will enable us to examine three main aspects of our different practices:
* Specific areas of focus such as disorientation, threshold, flow
* The use of Instructions/invitations/propositions (in different textual and verbal format)
* Interrogating Context: examining the impact of cultural context, location and individual positionality in relation to these various ideas.
Image: observing stillness/different temporalities/research

Context: 

Dislocate, International Festival for Art, Technology and Locality
September 2008 Yokohama, Japan
Dislocate questions our notions of place and location in the face of perpetual motion through multifaceted environments. The velocity of this passage is accelerated through new technologies, but as a result how does this impact upon our encounter with place and our attempt to communicate this to elsewhere? Through an exhibition, symposium and workshop series Dislocate will examine this encounter and communication, taking a journey through surrounding spaces andexploring our transient connections.Propelled through so many spaces with such momentum, mobility brings freedoms but also responsibilities. While in this state of passage how do we decide which spaces to engage with and what is our dialogue with them? Considering the locations we constantly carry with us, the interaction between the internal/external, virtual/physical, real/imaginary, our locatedness is multiple, fragmentary and in constant flux. Nomadic in structure the festival will focus upon our kinetic force through these various intersecting sites. Employing transitions by foot, bike and public transportation Dislocate will form an expedition into the diverse routes of the city and its hidden spaces, while questioning our relation to the ground beneath our feet. In this state of transit does our mode of transport isolate us from that which we travel through? Is there a destination? And how do we know when we have arrived?

As part of this specific phase of research we are interested in moments of slowness, stillness, obstruction and blockage. Slowness is often presented as antithetical to the velocity, mobility, speed, and freedom proposed by new technologies and the various accelerated modes in which we are encouraged to engage with the world. Slowness has in some senses been deemed as an outmoded or anachronistic form of temporality, as fastness and efficiency have become the privileged terms. Slowness is seen as a glitch in the system, an unwanted delay or moment of ‘poor connection’ during which things cannot progress as expected. Alternatively, slowness has been reclaimed as part of a resistant ‘counter-culture’ as a way of challenging the enforced and increased pace that things (including individuals) are required to ‘perform’, where accelerated and increasingly virtual modes of existence are seen as contributing to a sense of dislocation, disembodiment and loss of located-ness. Here, slowness is connected to the politics of the ‘slow movement’, where individuals have begun to ‘opt out’ of the system and ‘return’, perhaps nostalgically, to a slower pace of life.

We are, however, interested in exploring how slowness, stillness, obstruction and blockage operate within ‘the system’, and are perhaps as much a part of the city space and various technological infrastructures as speed, velocity and accelerated temporalities. We are interested in recuperating a value for these ideas, drawing attention to the potential within existing moments of slowness, stillness, obstruction and blockage in both the city and other systems; and creating opportunities for others to create their own spaces, gaps and pauses. Drawing on our different positions of ‘investigation led research’ we would like to present ideas and examples relating to this phase of research where slowness, stillness, obstruction and blockage have been used critically as a means through which to create points of anchor and location, or in order to affect a psychological shift in the way that space is encountered and understood

We want to explore the use of i-pod technology in order to create collective synchronised actions relating to slowness, stillness, obstruction and blockage. We are interested in how a synchronised group action in the public realm not only creates a moment of rupture or public spectacle that becomes witnessed by other publics, but how it might be possible to interrogate specific and at times conflicting ideas within the action itself – which become experienced by the individual participant. This specific work/research proposes to explore the threshold between the physically experienced and conceptually imagined; between what is publicly witnessed and what is individually felt. We want to test how spoken word and instruction 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 want to explore notions of agency, authority and intention within the act of stillness. Through the use of the i-pods and spoken text, we propose to interrogate how the act of ‘being still’ can shift in meaning as it moves from or between different positions.

The Hidden City

I will be presenting a paper with Andrew Brown from the project Open City as part of The Hidden City: Mythogeography, Writing, & Site-Specific Performance conference at the University of Plymouth, 4th October, 2008. Click here for more information about the conference

Pay Attention to the Footnotes: Interrogating the Hidden itineraries of wandering and writing in the Open City project. In this paper Andrew and I will both speculatively reflect on the use and possibility of text within the Open City, from the perspective of our own involvement in the project. In previous work by Open City, I was commissioned to produce serialized essay for a series of postcards were also used to presented specific time based invitations for collective actions. Produced over six cards where the tone shifted from critical or contextual to instructional and performative. Additionally a hidden layer of writing was accessed as online footnotes, an archaeological level to the essay whose location was only revealed on the final card. Here, footnotes were used to narrate the intellectual journey of the text; its lost itinerary that could be literarily followed. The postcards were intended as textual interruptions that functioned in contrast or as an antidote to the routine and ubiquitous instructional or informational signage that punctures public space, defining or in turn denying ways in which the streets are inhabited. More recently I have working with Open City as part of a presentation and research undertaken as part of the dislocate festival in Japan.

 

Images: Documentation of publicly sited postcard essay produced

The postcard texts formed part of a performative process, where they were publicly distributed and operated as invitations or provocations that could be approached either physically or imaginatively. The instructions or invitations ranged from the prosaic to the political or poetic, inviting the public to both to act and imagine. In this presentation I want to explore both the provenance and potential of different modes of writing within the Open City project by making references to a range of practices including the textual documentation of wandering (errance) within Surrealist writing; instructional practices within contemporary art, and architectural theorist Jane Rendell’s concept of Site Writing, which explores the situated practice of the critic-writer and a form of “active writing that constructs as well as traces the sites of relation between critic and work”.

Image: Documentation of publicly sited postcard essay produced

Context:
Arranged to coincide with Part Exchange’s week-long Hidden City Festival of site specific performance and new writing in Plymouth, this symposium will interrogate the varieties of, and possibilities for, writing in a site-specific performance practice that addresses the multiple narratives and trajectories of the city.

Mythogeography is the theorisation of an experimental approach to the site of performance as a space of multiple layers. This approach might include numerous influences and strategies, perhaps including the atmospheres and effects of psychogeography, and the deployment (both analogical and direct) of geological, archaeological and historiographical ideas and methods. It is self-reflexive in the sense that it would regard the performer as a similarly multiplicitous site.

Mythogeography is not a finished model, neither in its theoretical nor practical forms. It is a general approach which emphasises hybridity, but does not attempt to determine what combination of elements might be in that hybrid. The intention of the symposium is not to interrogate any one mythogeographical approach, nor even to engage with the concept (which, intentionally, offers nothing unique or original), but rather to discuss general principles and actual practices of multiple layering and hybridic assemblage of site and performer in relation to the act of writing site-specific performance.

While the everyday “performing” of the city is a widely accepted discourse in urban geography, so performance makers have increasingly engaged with urbanist ideas – from the Situationists, through de Certeau to Doreen Massey’s theories of urban space. “The Hidden City” symposium will review this relationship through performance writing, exploring what other discourses are available to the writer in the contemporary city. It will draw on a continuum of urban site-based performance writing: from site-inspired play texts and site-specific theatre, through the re-writing of the everyday, to delicate, de-materialised interventions. Questions to be addressed might include:
* How does the performance writer address the city’s invisible, marginalised and esoteric sites?


* What are the possibilities for writing sited in urban site-specific performance right now?
* Is there a continuum on which both urban new theatre writing and site-specific practice both sit?


* How does the performance writer address the screens and stages of the image-drenched city?


Wandering and the Public Realm

Commissioned essay/article for forthcoming special issue of a-n magazine focusing on art and the public realm. A version of the article can be read by clicking here

Image: Jiří Kovanda

"Wandering could be understood as part of a broader set of strategies within contemporary art that draw attention to the unnoticed, uneventful or overlooked aspects of lived experience. The ‘blurring of art and life’ is not a new concept, but what is perhaps interesting about the current turn towards the quotidian and pedestrian, is that it has been mirrored (even anticipated) by a wider engagement with the writing of theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau in other disciplinary contexts [...] (However) It seems counter-intuitive to view wandering according to such a chronologically linear trajectory of ideas, and an alternative genealogy that rescues and critically recuperates earlier models of ambulant digression or deviance somehow feels more appropriate to the range of approaches within contemporary art practice, which are more idiosyncratic and conceptually meandering than we might be led to believe. These other points of reference might include the genre of picaresque literature; the practice of ‘sauntering’ adopted by medieval ‘vagabonds and idlers’; the Romantic or even quixotic quest; the disinterested stroll of the flaneur; the surrealist practice of errance; as well as various conceptual strategies and propositions witnessed in the work of artists such as Vito Acconci, Stanley Brouwn or even Jiří Kovanda. For the gesture of wandering to have any critical longevity within contemporary art, it is crucial that we continue to attend to the nuances and differences between these divergent and eclectic practices, as well as interrogating them according to shared concerns and commonalities. Equally, in the attempt to ‘make sense’ of the current resurgence of interest in wandering, it is perhaps necessary to also acknowledge the worth of straying from or drifting between specific ‘interpretative’ frames of reference, alongside the value of the physical act of spatial digression or navigational detour".

While You Wait, Anachron-Gen

Review of the exhibition 'While You Wait’, by artist collective Anachron-Gen at twenty+3 projects in Manchester.
Read review here



"The exhibition 'While you Wait' by the artists group Anachron-Gen attempted to communicate the experience of the city from the position of the visitor, that of an outsider. The group were clear that this was not about the experience of the tourist visitor, the mediated encounter with a city determined and directed by various authorities, whose guidance on the ‘places you should see’ and ‘no-go areas’ inevitably maps out only a sanitised experience of a given place. To the tourist visitor, the city remains a polite host, but one that refuses to give away too many of its secrets; it forever remains at a distance however close you think you are. Anachron-gen were more interested in the perspective of the regular visitor, the liminal experience of someone who inhabits the charged threshold of being both inside and outside of a city or system, of being within and yet also remaining without. Here, the laws of polite hosting become relaxed, and the city begins to yield, drop its guard. The regular visitor occupies the same state as an initiand or novice - they have been given partial access to the unspoken codes and customs of a place, but do not yet have the status or knowledge (or responsibility) of a full inhabitant. They operate in a space in-between one order and another – their experiences hover at the point between the familiar and the strange, as certain zones within the city become repeatedly navigated, emotionally and psychologically mapped out and inhabited. Being a visitor in a city is like having only a partial grasp of a language, where certain meanings might indeed make it across the gulf of translation in one piece, whilst others remain incomprehensible; blank signs that remain opaque, incommunicable."

Read more click here

Object Action Object: Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci

Commissioned article for Dance Theatre Journal responding the work of Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci who are showing at Site Gallery Sheffield from 3 May – 14 June, 2008

Image: Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci

All Noble Pursuits

'All Noble Pursuits' is a developing list of impossible, improbable, abstract or absurd quests and searches. Drawing together the factual and fictional, the searches in the list operate at the point where ‘legitimate research activity’ collapses into the quest for rather more indefinable or speculative (or alternatively Romantic or even quixotic) objectives: the search for everything; final meaning; the real self; love; a third way; extraterrestrial intelligence; individualized therapies; a shared moral order; the perfect drug; hope, faith, and a six-second ride; the origins of his evil; the best strain of bees; the real and right; the missing science of consciousness; distant relatives; a patriarchal ideal; common ground; selective interventions; labour-saving inventions; treasure on a desert island; the Cheddar Man.

Image: still/slide from 'All Noble Pursuits'

This is an ongoing multi-format project which attempts to decontextualise and release the process of exploration from its teleological goal, by liberating existing searches from a sense of definite purpose, enabling them to remain irresolvable or unattainable.

Contradictory words seem a little crazy

I am increasingly interested in returning to exploring text as a site of practice or at least as a space for testing out some of the ideas I am interrogating within a range more conventionally 'academic' texts. There is the danger that I had begun to forget how important this (usually hidden and invariably sporadic) activity is as part of my practice. I had been thinking about the role of these 'other' forms of writing/text during the 'Host Observatory' project, when I had been writing semi-publicly in a different manner to how I might habitually present text. Below is a rendition of a rather old work, which I think operates in this hybrid space between a form of practice and a visual 'thinking through of ideas' which have become central to some of my more recent work.

Images: 'Contradictory words seem a little crazy', installation diagrams, 1997

Here, practice is part of a research methodology for other writing or thinking, rather than an end in itself (again rather like that produced during the Host project). It functions a little like the role of the Macguffin (discussed in other pieces of writing) as a vehicle which essentially kick starts the plot but then perhaps disappears from the centre stage. This particular piece draws on a quote from Luce Irigaray from 'This Sex which is not one', and was exhibited as part of Site and Sound in 1997 (Site Gallery and various off-site locations), and later as part of the Islington International Festival, London, 1998. Different coloured light unscrambles different parts and patterns in a grid of letters, allowing different meanings, hidden messages to be read. Manipulating and breaking patterns of communication, language begins to operate within a different set of rules. No longer carrier of meaning its lines of communication can be broken down, transgressed or somehow rendered void. The actual work was a shop window based text installation which could be viewed from the street after dusk.

Perform Every Day

Book review of Perform Every Day, Joshua Sofaer
This artist's book seeks to establish a relationship between everyday actions and performance. It encourages us to go about our daily routine, as if it were a work of art.

"At times, the line between the critical and the cathartic gesture becomes blurred. There is sometimes little to distinguish the self-consciously resistant or creative action from a form of involuntary survival strategy or ‘coping’ mechanism. Certain actions are wilfully staged whilst others are performed compulsively in order to simply get through the day, where they are used to create individual ‘meaning’ in otherwise meaningless situations. Imaginative projections and daydreaming arguably present one of the more viable options through which one can try to escape or subvert a given reality. Here, dreams of utopia might reflect the measure of an individual’s present dissatisfaction, frustration and discontent. Small acts of resistance are also a way through which to protest against the increasingly controlled and legislated conditions of existence, where they function as slight or quiet performative acts of societal rebellion that - though predominantly impotent, ineffective or insignificant - remind us still that we have some agency and might not always need to wholly and passively acquiesce [...] The book, Perform Every Day, increasingly made me think about the difference between instructions and invitations, between obligations and provocations, and about the difference between telling someone to act and asking them to imagine. Instructions can be nurturing or protective; pedagogical or didactic; authoritative or legislative. Too often there is a sense that they are offered by a ‘knowing’ authority where they are seen as something you should do for your own good (thus containing both a sense of threat and promise). I guess that the ‘invitation’ is hopeful rather than assured. Rather than abandoning responsibility by being told what to do, the possibility of acceptance or rejection reaffirms a sense of individual agency by allowing the individual to choose whether, in fact, they are interested or perceive any value in the experience being offered. The invitation that is to be imaginatively performed is particularly resonant because there is never any real way of truly telling whether (and how) it has been realised."

Read more here

Borrowed Itineraries and Retraced Steps

NIRVC RESEARCH SEMINAR
University of Nottingham, 30 April 2008, 4.30pm

Image: Stanley Brouwn. This Way Brouwn

In this presentation I am proposing to reflect on diverse practices which, in different ways, explore the performative model of wandering by following another (either in the present or from the past) or by following another’s instructions. I am interested in how such practices operate at a curious interstice between the conceptual paradigm of rule-based or instructional activity on the one hand or alternatively can be read through rather more psychologically inflected ideas around disorientation, depaysément and the desire for getting lost. I am interested in the tension as the ‘loss of responsibility’ or anti-subjective possibilities of working to a rule or an order also have the capacity to increase chance and uncertainty within an action, whilst the gesture of presenting a challenge to individual agency might paradoxically result in a reinforced awareness of individual embodiment and selfhood. Referring to a range of artists including Stanley Brouwn, Vito Acconci, Sophie Calle, Heather and Ivan Morison, Lucy Harrison, Tacita Dean ... my aim is to sketch out possible connections between surrealist practices and more recent interest in acts of wandering - in artistic practices from the late 1950s onwards and especially in connection to contemporary art. The presentation draws on a number of recently published essays which have explored some of these ideas including 'The Art of Misdirection' (2007), 'Desiring to be Led Astray' (2007) and the forthcoming 'Not Yet There: Endless searches and irresolvable quests' which will be published as part of Telling Stories (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008/9)

Further information about the NIRVC programme click here


Recent presentations include:
* March 5, Anna Lovatt, (University of Nottingham), 'Self-Portraiture and De-Facement in Conceptual Art'
* April 23 : Ed Krcma, (University College, London), "Liquidity: Beuys, Drawing and 'Material Imagination'."
* April 30, Emma Cocker (Nottingham Trent University), 'The Art of Misdirection: Borrowed Itineraries and Retraced Steps'
* May 7 : Mark Godfrey, (Tate Gallery, London), 'Roni Horn's Icelandic Encyclopaedia'

Over and Over, Again and Again

Forthcoming Essay for anthology on Contemporary Art / Classical Myth 2008: A collaboration between Department of Art History, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore and Department of Art History, Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, Greece
Image: Marcel Broodthaers, La Pluie (Projet pour un text) (1969)

Endless actions. Irresolvable quests. Repeated tasks that are inevitably doomed to fail or that are recursively performed – over and over, again and again. In this essay, I explore how the myth of Sisyphus can be used as an interpretive frame through which to reflect upon examples of artistic practice that play out according to a model of purposeless reiteration, through a form of non-teleological performativity, or in relentless obligation to a rule or order that seems absurd, arbitrary or somehow undeclared. According to many accounts within Classical mythology, Sisyphus was punished for his impudence and lack of respect for the gods, and assigned the task of rolling a rock to the top of a mountain only for it to then roll back down again. His interminable sentence was that he would remain locked into the repetition of this forever failing action for all eternity. Though the term Sisyphean is often used to describe a sense of indeterminable or purposeless labour, it actually refers to a tripartite structure whereby a task is performed in response to a particular rule or requirement, fails to reach its proposed goal and is then repeated. More than a model of endless or uninterrupted continuation of action, a Sisyphean practice operates according to a cycle of failure and repetition, of non-attainment and replay; it is a punctuated performance. A rule is drawn. An action is required. An attempt is made. Over and over, again and again - a task is set, the task fails, and the task is repeated. Ad infinitum.

In diverse examples of conceptual and post-conceptual art practice from the 1960s onwards, an artist appears locked into some hapless or hopeless Sisyphean endeavour - the blind or misguided following of another’s footfall, the foolhardy attempt to write in the rain, hide-and-seek games using the most infelicitous form of camouflage, the never-ending pursuit of an impossible or undeclared goal. Rather than an endless reiteration of the myth’s logic - where meaning remains somehow constant - the repeated occurrence of the Sisyphean gesture has the potential to be inflected with cultural specificity at particular historical junctures. Within the various practices discussed in this essay, the myth of Sisyphus is invoked in different ways where its meaning can be seen to shift, moving from (and also between) a sense of futility and of an individual’s resignation to the rules or restrictions of a given system or structure, through resistance, towards a playful refusal of the system’s authority. Here, the myth’s logic becomes pleasurably adopted as the rules of a game or as a way of revealing porosity and flexibility within even the most rigid framework of inhabitation. Whilst an interest in failure and repetition is evident at various historical and cultural moments, I want to focus on specific practices in order to stage and then shift between the possibilities of different readings, moving from a model of resignation or even resistance towards one of critical refusal, in an attempt to move beyond purely absurdist readings of the Sisyphean paradigm. My aim is to work towards an affirmative reading of the myth’s logic by drawing attention to selected examples of artists’ practice from the 1960s onwards, where the Sisyphean loop of repeated failure is actively performed within the work itself as part of a generative or productive force, where it functions as a device for deferring closure or completion, or can be understood as a mode of resistance through which to challenge or even refuse the pressures of dominant goal-oriented doctrines." extract from Over and Over, Emma Cocker, 2008


Image: Mel Bochner, Thesaurus Painting

Context - background to anthology: Ancient myth has always provided fertile ground for Western artists and theorists of the visual. Yet art historians tend to associate classical mythology with historical styles and only rarely with the art of the present. Indeed, current writing on contemporary art is, with few exceptions, curiously devoid of mythological content, despite demonstrable interest in myth on the part of several contemporary artists, ranging from earlier figures such as Louise Bourgeois and Cy Twombly to more recent arrivals such as Gregory Crewdson, Fred Wilson, Bill Viola, Ann Hamilton, and John Currin. While some artists’ work invokes the power of classical mythology explicitly, as in an expressly narcissistic video of by Patty Chang (Fountain, 1999) or an Orpheus-inspired installation by Felix Gonzales-Torres (Untitled (Orpheus, Twice), 1991), others gesture toward myth in more subtle ways, as do, for example, in Gerhard Richter’s mirrored installations and paintings.

Also of note is the preoccupation with myth on the part of several twentieth-century theorists and philosophers, all of whom have made a significant mark on the discipline of art history: Theodore Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Hélène Cixous, Sigmund Freud, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man, Louis Marin, Gayatri Spivak, et al. In light of these and other connections, this anthology aims to explore (and to some extent establish) the multifaceted intersection of contemporary art and classical myth. Essays addressing this topic may concentrate on a single work or series as it relates to a specific myth or on a single artist whose work seems driven by an overarching agenda, for which a certain myth makes a particularly apt metaphor. Essays that employ myth for the purpose of grappling with dominant trends in contemporary art are also welcome, as are mythologically inflected meditations on the concept of the visual art object as theorized, deployed, and constructed within contemporary art and culture.

In a sense, the essay returns to ideas touched upon in a review of On Kawara's Eternal Return at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham from 7 July 2006 to 9 September 2006.
"Undoubtedly, the decision to indefinitely repeat an action is no slight matter; and waiting to begin the infinite task must register with uncertain gravitas. The voluntary move to repeat a rather banal, or inherently meaningless gesture, as such is not one that should be taken lightly. Would Sisyphus have begun to roll the rock had he not been under orders? Even with the myth’s promise of the kind of transcendental happiness brought about only through such actions of eternal recurrence; a doubt persists. Would he have wavered, might he not have ventured forth? At some stage, the repetitious act will become ritualised or occupy the status of a habit but for some time it must feel at odds with the body, akin to the pain of trying to wear in new shoes. Even in this project there might have remained a hiatus between concept and action; a moment of pause or waiting; of human anticipation before the cogs of the conceptual ‘machine’ began to roll. Perhaps it is this, which registers in the slightly hesitant, uncertain strokes of ‘JANUARY 30, 1966’. For whilst the production or execution of a conceptual work might well operate with the systematic and impersonal precision of a machine, the decision to begin will perhaps always be marked by a sense of human, all too human deliberation."

Read full review at http://sites.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/368072

What is critical writing?

Invited contributor to an essay on critical writing by Chris Brown (Reviews Editor at a-n). Other contributors included John Beagles, Neil Mulholland, John Slyce, Joshua Sofaer and Peter Suchin.

"There is a deceptively complex relationship between the artist’s intentions in her work, the curator’s interpretation of that work, and the writer’s response to that presentation. Writers’ approaches to this relationship vary enormously, from careful negotiation to absolute autonomy. And, as writer and lecturer Emma Cocker points out, the context influences this relationship too: “Is the writing intended as criticism, as a form of critique or qualitative judgement; or an interpretation or contextual construct? Is it dialogic or responsive; academic or theoretical; performative or propositional; experimental or speculative, playful or simply a form of reportage that documents or describes a piece of work? ... Cocker's writing is often informed by conversations or interviews with artists. She states, "This kind of dialogue between artists and writers is not a way of simply clarifying the intentions of the artist that are then articulated by the writer, but is rather a space where meanings are proposed, negotiated and contested ... Cocker's interest lies in developing and examining critical contexts to frame an artist's practice, as opposed to passing a critical judgment of the work itself or "trying to rigidly locate its meaning or deny the work its inherent instability".

Read more on the Interface Section of the a-n website @ http://interface.a-n.co.uk/articles/single/379627

Dutton & Swindells - forthcoming essay

I have been commissioned to write an essay for Steve Dutton and Steve Swindells for a publication developed from their current International Residency at Ssamzie Space, Seoul South Korea


Steve Dutton and Steve Swindells have worked together on projects since 1998. Recent collaborative projects include “The Dog and Duck” at Kookmin Art Gallery, Seoul, ‘Emergency 2’ at Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth U.K, ‘Folklore’ at APT, London U.K. and ‘Txtrapolis’ at NAFA Gallery, Singapore. They have produced a number of books and publications, most recently, ‘Misleading Epiphenomena’, co-written with Dr. Barbara Penner, which was published in 2005 by Artwords Press.
"Our practice is self-consciously contradictory. Contradictions are a means to an end; they force a loop , which is neither open nor closed but united by a sense of expectation and delay of resolution. In turn, this delay allows something to be understood differently, indeed, it allows the very concept of understanding to be understood differently. We are tactical artists, frequently doubling, collaging, reversing and inverting found images, objects and texts with no restrictions on media. By consciously working through varied rhetorical devices and tropes, modes of production and strategic interventions we create installations and works which are both critical yet, necessarily, playful. Our aim is to disarm; to render an image, form, space or text, momentarily impotent and open (or indeed, vulnerable). In turn, this impotency opens up a reflective space in the experience of the thing which is implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, critical of power relations and expectations invested in it. The work is marked by tensions and lesions created within the conflation of faltering subjectivity and attempts toward a self -reflexive critical rigour" Duttton and Swindells. See http://www.steve-dutton.co.uk

Performing Space

I will be chairing and undertaking specific research in relation to this event, organised by my colleague, Frank Abbott
For more information Click Here
Performing Space
Friday 22 February 2008
Nottingham Trent University School of Art and Design
Throughout the world new types of communication networks based on wireless interactive ICT technology are transforming our understanding of contemporary public and private space.
They are increasingly being explored by live media artist projects through events like the Radiator Festival (Nottingham), First Play Berlin and Dis-locate (Tokyo). Within other humanities subjects like geography, architecture and social urban planning new insights into the changing nature of public space are being addressed . The research aim of this hybrid workshop is to bring together a range of humanities researchers and artists to examine how the common ground between these disciplines can be developed through examining ICT wireless network strategies borrowed from the work of artists; and conversely how the development of research, particularly in the areas of geography and architecture, can inform the artists` research and development. Arising from the hybrid event will be an account of where related disciplines of geography, architecture and potentially others can collaborate with live media artists and community cultural agencies in ICT led projects. The event will investigate how the outcomes of artist practice can pioneer new areas of engagement. This will specifically be in relation to understanding the technological changes affecting the nature of space in the contemporary environment and the value of engaging in such ICT led research activities.

I am hoping to develop ideas from the symposium into a paper which explores the practice of artists against the foil of the myth of Hermes. See posting on PSi 14: Interregnum: States in Between here

‘Still Unresolved’

Provisional Statement
I am involved in developing a research cluster at Nottingham Trent University, whose working title is ‘Still Unresolved’. The group is concerned with exploring the relationship between uncertainty, irresolution and failure to contemporary art practice. It seeks to examine how artistic practice might be framed as a temporal site of rehearsal and potentiality or alternatively as space for irresolution and doubt; by asserting a critical value for moments of provisionality or contingency within art practice and by placing emphasis on the forms of knowledge and research located at the level of process or the performative within the act of making. Whilst accepting the integral presence of these concerns as an implicit part of making work within most creative practices, in this context they become foregrounded as the focus of research, scholarly activity and practice itself, where they become strategically emphasised or explored at a level of subject, methodology and form. We envisage that research may take the form of network development, publications, curated exhibitions and symposia

Current members: Derek Sprawson; Emma Cocker; John Newling; Andrew Brown; Rob Flint; Frank Abbott; Terry Shave; Joanne Lee; Ben Judd; Craig Fisher

Telling Stories: forthcoming publication

My essay 'Not Yet There: Endless Searches and Irresolvable Quests' is going to be published by Cambridge Scholars Press as part of an edited book of papers selected from the three symposia, Telling Stories: Theories and Criticism/Cinematic Essay/Objects and Narrative (2009). The series of symposia Telling Stories was held at Loughborough University in February, April and September 2007. It included papers, screenings and performances, addressing the challenge to conventional expectations of meaning and objectivity emerging in modes of both critical writing and the visual arts. The resulting book (now in process) will address this trend, investigating the manner of narrative/counter-narrative, authorial presence, style, language and rhetoric across a range of contemporary practice and theory. Telling Stories will examine the manner and structure of narration across a range of contemporary practices (e.g. art object, film, photography, criticism) by scrutinising three aspects - the very specific form of the Cinematic Essay , experimental forms of Theory and Criticism and the Object and Narrative . It will aim to reflect the nature of contemporary art practice and theories that set out to encounter the world, its social conditions, its global perspectives and the nature of aesthetic discussion that no longer confines itself to form.


Image: Heather and Ivan Morison, Chinese Arboretum

ESSAY: Looking towards examples within artistic practice, I am interested in how the notion of an irresolvable quest might be reclaimed from the vaults of Romanticism; and redeployed as a strategic research methodology or framework for critical enquiry. Using the practice of artists, Heather and Ivan Morison as a point of reference, the intent then is to explore the irresolvable quest as a form of non-rationalist knowledge construction and meaning making: to assert a critical context or value for this method of enquiry where the possibility of irresolution and contingency; subjectivity and transitivity, partial truths and telling stories are redeemed alongside more empiricist methods of exploration.

The contents of the publication are as follows
Part One: Theories and Criticism
1. The Setting: Paradise Lost (And Regained) - Jane Rendell
2. Not Yet There: Endless Searches and Irresolvable Quests - Emma Cocker
3. Don’t Say Yes – Say Maybe! Fiction Writing and Art Writing - Maria Fusco
4. Talking Theory - Yve Lomax
5. Talk: Turbulence - Sissu Tarka
6. The Methodology of Mailmen: On Delivering Theory - Craig Martin
7. Never Work with Animals, Children and Digital Characters - Mary Oliver

Part Two: Objects and Narrative
8. Intercontinental Drift, or Frances Alÿs and the Saint of the Replica - Martha Buskirk
9. Curating the City - Robert Knifton
10. Appropriated Imagery, Material Affects and Narrative Outcomes - Marie Shurkus
11. Connecting the Unconnected - Lisa Stansbie
12. Text: Provisional: Performance - Stuart Brisley
13. Blossom keepers - Åsa Andersson
14. Narratives of Mastery in the zisha Ceramics Tradition of China - Geoffrey Gowlland
15. Unpacking my Father’s Library - Polly Gould

Part Three: The Cinematic Essay
16. The Melancholy Image: Chris Marker’s Cine-essays and the Ontology of the Photographic Image - Jon Kear
17. Playing with Death. The Aesthetics of Gleaning in Agnès Varda’s - Les Glaneurs - Jakob Hesler
18. Retro-Modular Cinematic Narrative: Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin féminin in the Digital Age - Alex Munt
19. Transcript - Stephen Connolly
20. Who in the World: Essay Film, Transculture and Globality - Catherine Lupton
21. On Fog and Snow: Thought as Movement, or the Journey of the Essay Film - Laura Rascaroli
22. The Film is in Front of Us - Steven Eastwood

More information on the launch to follow soon.

Cultural Borrowings/Ethical Possession:

Cultural Borrowings: A Study Day on Appropriation, Reworking and Transformation
University of Nottingham, UK, Wednesday March 19th, 2008


Throughout history, artists have appropriated, sampled or borrowed elements from pre-existing work for use in new cultural texts. This one day conference, in association with the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, seeks to interrogate the nature of such cultural borrowings, looking at how we can draw together insights from across the disciplines in order to further develop academic models of appropriation, reworking and transformation. Plenary Speakers will include Professor Christine Geraghty (University of Glasgow) and Professor David Hesmondhalgh (University of Leeds).

Emma Cocker: Abstract
Ethical Possession: Artists and the Archives
The prolific usage or ‘borrowing’ of found amateur film footage and archival material within artists’ film and video, perhaps indicates a post-millennial climate of change in which artists are searching for and testing out more experiential or empathetic modes of engaging with both the past and present. Focusing on artistic and filmic practices that recoup or re-activate archival material by dislocating it from its original purpose, transforming and reworking it in pursuit of new readings, meanings and questions, the aim is to move beyond an analysis of the specific material and aesthetic properties of the archival experience to speculate upon wider theories and practices in relation to the connection between appropriation, technology, and the notion of ‘prosthetic memory’. Referring to writing by film theorists such as Andreas Huyssen and Alison Landsberg, it possible to suggest that the current use and (re)presentation of archival film material using technology, presents a unique context through which to explore a model of appropriation where it becomes possible to propose dialogic relationships with others, and a more engaged, politically motivated or empathetic recuperation of the past and of the present. The resurgence and urgency of such practices might be seen to reflect a conceptual shift in which 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. Representing a paradigm shift in the way that the past is encountered, it is possible to assert that contemporary practices have perhaps abandoned hollow borrowing or what might be described as temporal tourism in favour of a more dialogic or experiential encounter through the process of reciprocal or ethical possession.

More information about the conference here

A developed version of this paper has also been accepted as part of The Visible Memories Conference at Syracuse University, In New York in October

Conference Theme: The Visible Memories Conference at Syracuse University. The conference will explore the intersections between visual culture and memory studies with particular focus on the ways in which memories are manifested and experienced in visible, material, or spatial form. Examples of especially relevant and desirable research topics include: local sites of memory; memorials and archives; environmentalism and representations of nature; regional, national, or global tourism; discursive work on photography or cinema, digital media, and art installations.

Wandering: Straying from the disciplinary path

Download full text http://www.interrogations.org.uk/papers/e_cocker_wandering.doc">here


In this presentation I am proposing to draw on my interest in the practice of wandering as a means through which to explore selected ideas in relation to interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary approaches to research. Referring to other theorists and writers, the practice of wandering and the geographical, spatial or navigational readings it conjures, will allow me to touch upon the potentiality or possibility, but also the problematic of interdisciplinarity. I hope that the motif or metaphor of wandering might bring to mind a diverse range of issues against which to think about interdisciplinarity including perhaps ideas around defamiliarisation and distance; disorientation and uncertainty; curiosity; translation and tourism; trespass and piracy; borders, boundaries and threshold zones; rights of access, belonging and homelessness; reclamation and regeneration; territory and power; invasion and control; even the migration or the diaspora of ideas and practices. Performed according to an ephemeral, unfolding logic; wandering is a model of enquiry whose findings emerge through constant (r)evolution, where observations remain in transitional flux or interminable disarray. It is a framework for encountering and understanding the world and our place within it that retains rather than eradicates the potential for uncertainty and disorientation; that emphasises rather than disables the interplay between facts and fictions, reality and the imagination, theories and anecdotes. The motif of wandering might thus enable reflection on the potential role of the positional and subjective, or the partial and provisional within research practice, re-inscribing them a value within the process of meaning making and the construction of knowledge.

CONTEXT: Interrogations Workshop organised by De Montfort University Faculty of Art and Design and Loughborough University School of Art and Design (supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council).
Speakers Emma Cocker, Nottingham Trent University; Professor Gen Doy, De Montfort University Faculty of Art and Design; Dr. Jane Tormey, Loughborough University School of Art and Design

For more information see http://www.interrogations.org.uk

Hidden Narratives

Hidden Narratives
19 Jan until 19 Apr
GRAVES ART GALLERY

Susan Hiller, J- Street Project.

I have been commissioned by Dialogue to write a review of 'Hidden Narratives', an exhibition which reveals the narrative urge in contemporary art, exploring how artists create scenarios, characters or scenes in which the viewer is encouraged to construct their own reading. Hidden Narratives features work in different media by artists including Simon Le Ruez, Zarina Bhimji, Susan Hiller and Shizuka Yokomizo, and specially commissioned pieces by Kate Allen and Sophie Lascelles. The review will feature in 'A tricky business: the art of politics, the politics of art', an issue of Dialogue (March 2008 to May 2008) which addresses the idea of art as a site of protest and testimony. This issue of Dialogue examines what it means to be a politically engaged artist. What, if any, are the criteria in the first place – and who sets them? How do artists balance the competing factors of retaining a political edge and being free to pursue their own ideas, with the agendas of art institutions, funding bodies and commercial galleries?

"... A number of artists in the exhibition present domestic spaces or places of inhabitation as the location of these contradictory tensions. In their work they allude to relationships brokered or broken; to lives lived or imagined, to specific and at times ambiguous conditions of existence played out and negotiated between observers and those observed; between the powerful and the powerless. These strange proximities invite closer scrutiny as to the nature of the narrative played out in each context; further interrogation of the way that each narrative has been hidden or concealed. The gesture of hiding can function as an act of both repression and protection; of care and cruelty; of safekeeping and survival, but also one of guilt. Meanings might become lost to moments of individual forgetfulness, whilst selected histories are strategically denied – carefully eradicated by the slow creep of collective amnesia. Hidden narratives can speak then of both poetic and political motivation, where on the one hand they might defer fixed meanings in favour of the potentiality of fluid interpretation; or else signal the mute testimony of voices that have been wilfully silenced and existences that have been methodically cancelled out."

Read more in Dialogue here

Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship

The Berwick Gymnasium Fellowships: An Archival Record
Commissioned essays for forthcoming publication (Spring 2008)

Celebrating twelve years of operation, The Berwick Gymnasium Fellowships- an archival record, recently published, is the first English Heritage publication to feature work from their contemporary arts programme. Delivered in partnership with Art Editions North, the 160-page publication is rich with images from the original artists’ exhibitions along with essays by commissioned writers and interviews with the artists.
Image: Fiona Crisp

Extending from research that questions how the gallery space might be framed as a space of transitivity and contingency, I have been commissioned to write three essays (on Annie Cattrell, Fiona Crisp and Justin Carter) for the Art Editions North/ English Heritage publication on artists who have undertaken one of the Berwick Gymnasium Fellowships that are open to international artists. The publication intends to examine the outcomes and impact of the Fellowship, based on interviews with the artists. The writing specifically relates to the artist’s experience of the Fellowship and the work produced, but also in relation to how the gallery space or commissioning process might respond to or support practices which are open-ended or developmental, or which examine the thematic notions of the threshold and liminality. Each essay refers obliquely to the indeterminate border status of Berwick and also discusses how the practices articulate threshold or transitional perspectives on their subject matter. This writing extends ideas developed in other earlier essays and papers which have examined practice which explore the notion of the threshold; as well as the idea of practice as a performative process and the contingent nature of the gallery

Publisher: Art Editions North
ISBN-10: 0955747813
ISBN-13: 978-0955747816

Yes/No/Other Options

Host Artists’ Group
‘Host 8: Observatory’ *
Millennium Galleries



During February and March I will be participating in a project developed by Host Artists Group (HAG) as part of the city wide festival Art Sheffield 08: Yes/No/Other Options. Host Artists Group (HAG) is an artist’s group based in Sheffield with an interest in curating and producing art in alternative spaces and distributable formats. The project that HAG are developing for the festival ART SHEFFIELD 08 is different to previous Host projects. The theme of the festival, Yes/No/Other Options, addresses ideas of overload, burn-out, performativity and latency, and HAG have decided to work with the last two of these in this project. Rather than inviting artists to submit actual work for exhibition, this project seeks to make visible the act of production in the absence of the product, visualising the latency or activity involved in the practice of art making.

I am interested in how this 'experiment' might be used to explore other modes of writing and to allow me to reflect on my own practice as a writer, especially in monitoring the subjective or emotionally felt, or attempting to 'account for' my activity when so often this remains an invisible gesture. I am planning on archiving my 'reports' at http://it-is-not-that-easy.blogspot.com/

1. I have not been all that productive today. Today has simply passed by.
2. I have an ache in my left shoulder blade which is often an indication of production, or at least of writing something.
3. I think I may be deleting more words than I am writing. I will try and monitor the production output of this destructive process more efficiently in future.
4. Only eight emails sent yesterday which was disproportionately small against the number of times email had been checked. I am concerned about such moments of compulsive non-productivity and time-wasting. They do not feel especially resistant gestures
5. I am not at or in work tomorrow so perhaps I will make or do work instead. I must try and remember this distinction for at times this nuance becomes blurred.
6. I don't think I will be doing much work today. I am sorry. Production has been stopped for essential maintenance.
7. It is not that easy. There are certain things that I have forgotten to do. Certain things that cannot wait until tomorrow
8. I am feeling resentful as looming deadlines determine today’s actions. I know that it is too late to back track on commitments made at quieter times. Guilt and obligation have become the hardest task-masters.
9. I am wishing I had not been so eager. I am wishing I had said no.
10. I am afraid I am letting you down. I am finding that things are falling out of sync I am concerned that the efficiency of my own production has been compromised by the facilitation of other's actions. I know what I should do but I am unable to say no

More about the project
Host Artists Group’s project focuses on the process, location and politics of artistic production. Their piece is an installation of models and sound broadcasts which reflect on the activities of 21 invited artists. The ‘Host 8: Observatory’ comprises 21 semi-transparent perspex models, made to scaled down plans of each represented artist’s workspace. Each model contains a light, the intensity of which will be set to a level that corresponds to the artist’s own perception of their current productivity. If the artist is running at full power, then so will the light; if in a period of latency, then the light will be dimmed. In addition, the participating artists compose bulletins on the state of their current activities that will be automatically relayed and played back intermittently in the space. The project provokes questions concerning the visibility and evaluation of artistic productivity. The trouble with artistic labour has always been that, while the inner and outer pressure to perform and be creative is always on, standards for assessing this creativity are impossible to determine. How do you measure the degree of dedication, the quality of ideas or the intensity of inspired moments that define the creative process? While, for good reasons, artistic labour then resists objective evaluation, its conditions are not entirely subjective either – because they are shared. A lot of people make art, work under comparable precarious conditions and face similar pressures. It is precisely this ambivalence between the personal and the collective perception of artistic labour that the ‘Host 8: Observatory’ highlights (literally, and with tongue firmly in cheek) and politicises.

Host 8: Observatory is part of Art Sheffield 08, Yes No and Other Options



More about Art Sheffield 08 can be found at here, along with the contextual essay by Jan Verwoert

More about HOST

'Desiring to be Led Astray' in 'Papers of Surrealism'

Published Essay 'Desiring to be Led Astray'
'Papers of Surrealism'; Issue 6, Autumn 2007
Editorial Board: Dawn Ades, David Lomas and Jennifer Mundy
Associate Editors: Anna Dezeuze and Julia Kelly
Find essay at http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal6/index.htm

Image: Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne

The essay proposes to explore the practice of ‘following’ as a tactical legacy of surrealist errance, by examining a range of contemporary art practices in relation to their surrealist precursors. The essay reflects on work by Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Tacita Dean, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Effie Paleologou, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, before using the critical connections between André Breton’s text Nadja and Sophie Calle’s project Suite Vénitienne, as a point of conceptual departure, to suggest that the act of following has the capacity to draw together a number of divergent concerns or theoretical positions in relation to the notions of doubling or mirroring; mimicry, simulation and camouflage. The notion of ‘following’ or being led is interrogated as the location or conceptual site where a host of surrealist ideas are buried, and whose ghosts persist to haunt.

Image: Bas Jan Ader, In Search of the Miraculous - One night in Los Angeles, 1973.

Papers of Surrealism, Issue 6: Contents
Tyler Cann, ‘Surreal Sight Seer: Len Lye and Surrealism’
Emma Cocker, ‘Desiring to be Led Astray’
Barbara Creed, ‘The Unheimlich Pacific of Popular Film: Surreal Geography and the Darwinian Sublime’
David Lomas, ‘James Gleeson’s Desiring Production’
Anne Marsh, ‘A Surrealist Impulse in Contemporary Australian Photography’
Stephen Mould, ‘Dusan Marek, a Land-locked Czech Surrealist in the Antipodes’
Ken Wach, ‘Ivor Francis’s Schizophrenia of 1943’
Anthony White, ‘Graeme Doyle, The Cunningham Dax Collection and Surrealist Discourse’
Anthony White, ‘Terra Incognita: Surrealism and the Pacific Region’

Project: Open City Postcards

A series of commissioned postcards that were publicly distributed as part of the project, Open City, Nott Dance, October 2007. A further online text at http://pay-attention-to-the-footnotes.blogspot explores the analogy between footnotes and acts of wandering, and provides a critical subtext to the postcards that might remain (without anchor) long after the original texts themselves have disappeared. The essays could be read on postcards distributed publicly across Nottingham during October 2007.

Open City is an ongoing project developed by Andrew Brown, Katie Doubleday and Simone Kenyon exploring how we live in, journey through and experience the human and built environment. Intervening in the space between the conscious and the habitual; the planned and the impromptu, the solitary and the mass, audiences are invited to readdress their position within their city and enter a space where new encounters can take place. Artists Brown, Doubleday and Kenyon have been working with members of the public over the course of the year creating discreet interventions within the public realm. Over the course of the Nott Dance festival in Autumn 2007 the artists invited audiences to contribute to Open City by participating in mass choreographed events, creating a series of invisible performances throughout the city which are captured on camera and beamed back live to festival venues. Everyday movement and gestures become part of a larger choreography where the line between performer and audience are blurred and everyone present becomes included in the work. Postcards were handed out following Nott Dance performances with instructions for audience members to carry out at points over the festival, with texts commissioned by writer Emma Cocker.

Conference: PSi #13 Happening/Performance/Event

Conference Paper - See http://www.psi-web.org/psi13/main.html
See full text at http://desiring-to-be-led-astray.blogspot.com/
PSi #13 Happening/Performance/Event
8th – 11th November 2007
New York University, New York, NY

Image: Sophie Calle, Suite Venitienne

Returning to New York University, where the first PSi conference was held in 1990, PSi #13: Happening/Performance/Event will ask questions of performance studies’ history and futurity. The invocation of the happening gestures to practices that emerged in the 1950’s as a mode of Avant-Garde performance as well as the critical approach developed by Michael Kirby for describing it, which are key terms for Performance Studies. The event has been theorized as an interruption that represents the not-yet-imagined new. This conference will comprise plenary sessions, panels, and presentations, in which contributors will engage the happening and the event and their key relationship to the history of the field. Scholars, artists, activists, and writers will come together to discuss, debate, and perform different incarnations of its history and to consider the horizon of its future. Performances will happen on campus, in the Department of Performance Studies’ Happenings Lounge as well as throughout the city in association with PERFORMA ’07. Over 400 participants from a range of countries will be attending this event.

Abstact
In this paper I want to explore how the notion of errance – a form of Surrealist automatic drifting or wandering that emerged in the early 1920s - can be resurrected, and recuperated as a critical precursor of performative practices from the late 1950s onwards. At a formal level the practice of errance can be positioned as a part of a tradition of politically resistant spatial navigation or urban geography – where the Surrealist events of the early 1920s can be seen to anticipate the Situationists’ deployment of the dérive as a means to reflect the pedestrians’ experience of the city. Alternatively the notion of collective wandering or the search for the ‘everyday marvellous’ re-emerges as part of the vocabulary of Happenings and early conceptual work; where for example, it is evoked in Allan Kaprow’s description of the ‘Guided Tour or Pied Piper Happening’. However rather than conceptualising a trajectory of practices that share a ‘likeness’ with Surrealist errance, my intent is to approach it from a different perspective that resonates more with the ideas of this conference. More than simply a form of Surrealist automatism; a precursor of Andre Breton’s objective chance, or a symptom of psychologically driven compulsion-repetition, I want to present a case where errance can be understood as a form of proto-conceptual practice or pre-Happening: the moment where innumerable contemporary motifs and critical strategies emerge. In one sense, Surrealist errance operates as a model of purposeless repetition, according to the relentless obligation to a rule or system that is absurd, arbitrary or somehow undeclared. Errance thus presents an early paradigm of non-teleological performativity, for its searches are forever unrewarded, its goals always deferred. Alternatively it could be understood as a tactical process of declassification; where at times the relationship between self and other; body and environment, or between art and life becomes blurred through the performative possibilities of ludic role-play or the tactic of following another. Focusing on the nature of the categorical slippage created by the gesture of following within both Surrealist and contemporary practices, I am interested in how this ‘blurring’ can be read as a form of camouflage, rather than as true dissolution or non-differentiation: where it can be understood in both critical and compulsive terms as either a moment of existential crisis or as an experiment performed according to predetermined rules of the game.

Participating writers, artists and activists will include, but are not limited to:Fred Moten, Jerome Bel, Isaac Julien, RoseLee Goldberg, Laurie Simmons, Christian Marclay, Diana Taylor , Sadiya Hartman, Hannah Higgins, Karen Finley, Midori Yoshimoto, Carol Becker, Laurie Beth Clark, Karen Tongson, Alan Read, Rebecca Schneider, Branislav Jakovljevic, Hanifah Walidah, Richard Schechner, Jen Harvie, Marianne Hirsch, Gavin Butt, Jennifer Doyle, Karen Shimakawa, Philip Auslander, André Lepecki, Sudipto Chatterjee, Lois Weaver, Geraldine Harris, Peta Tait, Meiling Cheng, Shannon Jackson, Judith Halberstam, Freddie Rokem, José Esteban Muñoz, Nao Bustamante, Peggy Shaw, Una Chaudhuri, Miguel Fernandez, Joe Kelleher, Deborah Kapchan, Xavier Le Roy, Oliver Feltham, David Román, Jill Dolan, Tim Etchells, Amelia Jones, Ann Pellegrini, Carolee Schneemann, Michal Kobialka, Adrian Kear, Tavia Nyong’o, Marvin Carlson, W.B. Worthen, Judith Rodenbeck, Sue Broadhurst, Steve Dixon, Dynasty Handbag, Holly Hughes, Andrew Quick, Kalup Linzy, Elin Diamond, Ed Scheer, My Barbarian, Tracy Davis, Nicholas Ridout, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Joseph Roach, Yvonne Rainer, Jon McKenzie, Adrian Heathfield, Jane Blocker, Emily Coates ...

Writing: Are We There Yet?

Commissioned essay which interrogates the potential of boredom and anti-climax in relation to artistic practice and the programme at Bloc gallery in Sheffield; and which recuperates a value for the provisional and unresolved. The text explores how the act of waiting and hesitation - and how moments of indecision and disappointment - not only form part of or underpin the process of certain artistic practices; but also how they might wilfully remain in the exhibition of the work itself. Read the full text here.


Images: (left) Graeme Stonehouse; (right) Chris Clarke

" ...Waiting is an episode of time in which the quickening pulse of adrenalin and slow rhythm of boredom struggle to conduct the pace of passing hours. Witness the bored thrill of the anticipatory queue gathering force; or the restless lethargy that seeps into spaces where waiting occurs - the languid non-place of the airport lounge or the back seat of cars, child-filled and travelling along incessant motorways. Waiting is a threshold across which the future is conjured; the interminable limbo of all adolescent dreams; a chasm of pleasure and irritation into which the unspoken fantasies of the everyday might fall or take flight.iii Situational or abstract, it is performed along a spectrum of expectation that ranges from awaiting the familiar or repeated, to anticipating the not yet known. The duration of waiting is equally ambiguous, for it is inevitably too long and yet somehow never enough. Think of those involuntary moments of indecision when the unfulfilled wait is finally abandoned.

The nature of unresolved waiting, when an end or destination remains at a distance, creates the liminal experience of being not-yet-there; a period of restlessness or temporal vacuum in which a range of random, repetitious or equally resourceful practices might develop to occupy the void. Within the recent curatorial programme at Bloc, a number of artists have appeared to evoke the feeling of being not-yet-there by reflecting upon the more disquieting durational processes that underpin the making of work. They seem to draw attention to the habitually unseen or hidden experience of practice - the hours of inaction or hanging around; the doubt, indecision or disappointment; the relentless searching and waiting for something tangible to emerge or for ‘the art to happen’.iv Arguably there are stages of both intermission and inefficient labour in even the most prolific practice, however in this context such episodes are not only an implicit part of making work, but rather creep in from the periphery to be put to use at the heart of the work itself, where they become strategically emphasised or indulged; deliberately extended or prolonged. The act of waiting becomes the site of practice...."

Read more at the 'Discourse' section of the Bloc website here.

Site Platform: Into the fray

Image: Hester Reeve, 'The Applause', 2006.

See http://www.sitegallery.org//content_repository/Platform_2006_text.pdf.
Commissioned essay in response to work by Evangelia Basdekis, Michael Graham, Duncan Higgins, Hester Reeve, who exhibited as part of Site Platform at Site Gallery, 2006, where the gallery space was used to undertake performative, durational, cumulative, experimental, in progress or interactive work. The essay proposes the metaphor of ‘fray’ as a loose construct through which to discuss the series of events and exhibitions presented as part of Site Platform (2006). Fray is a gesture of unravelling and undoing the already known; a situation of stress or rupture through which to break the illusory surface of a given reality; an act of disruption that causes the breakdown of substances or situations to reveal their constituent elements and hidden structures. A fray signals the indeterminate threshold where one thing collapses and another begins: it is a moment of instability, transition or flux. I am interested in the frayed edge of practice where the art stops and starts; in the idea of fray as an analogy for irresolution or open-endedness within practice; and in the sense of practices both responding to and affecting a fray/glitch in the way that world is encountered. The notion of ‘fray’ is adopted as a construct or model through which to connect the separate projects by the artists in Platform: Duncan Higgins, Michael Graham, Hester Reeve, and Evangelia Basdekis.

"Language can be irredeemably imprecise. In the realm of artistic practice the same word can signal both a spatial form and a temporal event, describing a process of creation or construction and yet also the material nature of the resulting artefact. Picture … Stitch … Stage … Frame … Film … Trace … Map … Crease. Other terms conjure multiple connotations, serving more like double agents or saboteurs that perpetually undercut the possibility of one potential meaning with the presence of another. Object for example suggests something concrete that can be seen or touched, and yet equally sounds out as the rally cry of dissent, the motivation to fuel all insurgent provocation. Meaning is thus never still, nor ever wholly certain. Within Georges Bataille’s Critical Dictionary there is always a double use for language, such that the term formless for instance not only works as an adjective pertaining to ambiguity or shapelessness, but can also be performed as an operation that declassifies or ‘brings things down’. Fray is perhaps another such term. At a material level it is used to indicate a tear or worn area of fabric: the point at which a garment begins to collapse and become useless or the moment where the continuity of a textile surface is broken or put under strain. Fray is also a site of skirmish, a sign of contestation or crisis. Emotionally or psychologically it speaks of nerves jangling; tensions rising; of patience stretched and of the endured action pushed to the limit.

A fray can metaphorically signal instability of the conceptual as well as physical kind where analogous to the Greek notion of aporia it might describe a zone of working doubt or of irresolution. Akin to the garment cast aside mid-stitch, logic might become frayed, relinquishing its temporary shape to fall formless to the floor in abject tangles. However whilst seemingly undesirable, the fray remains an irresistible tease - a site of seduction and delinquency that demands attention. For who hasn’t at some point succumbed to the curious temptation of the loose thread; felt the moment of simultaneous violence and pleasure as the weave irreversibly unravels. Or else might have worried at the incomplete and fuzzy edges of a narrative until the hidden secret is finally disclosed. A fray can thus be seen as a gesture of undoing or spoiling the habitual or already known; a period of stress which breaks through the illusory surface of a given reality; an act of disruption that causes the breakdown of substances or situations to reveal their constituent elements, their hidden order"

Read the full essay http://www.sitegallery.org//content_repository/Platform_2006_text.pdf

The essay extends or responds to ideas explored in an earlier article in a-n magazine. Read the full review at http://sites.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/335623

In conversation with Clio Barnard

The Art Book
Volume 14 Issue 4 Page 73-74, November 2007

Image: Clio Barnard, Dark Glass

Clio Barnard is an artist/filmmaker whose work deals with the fluid relationship between imagination and reality, documentary and fiction. Her recent installation Road Race focuses on the usually unseen gypsy traveller tradition of horse racing on motorways; whilst her short film Dark Glass - constructed around a session of hypnosis - interrogates the instability of memory and the subjectivity of recollection, and is currently touring the UK as part of Single Shot (www.single-shot.co.uk) She was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2005, and a large scale commission through the Jerwood/Artangel Open in 2006 (www.thejerwoodartangelopen.org.uk)

Find a pdf of the interview by following this link:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/action/showPdf?submitPDF=Full+Text+PDF+%28907+KB%29&doi=10.1111%2Fj.1467-8357.2007.00890.x

The interview was also included in a catalogue for Barnard's exhibition at the Herbert Read Gallery (2007), alongside essays by Sarah Wood and ELizabeth Cowie.