Tutorial with Pete

Meeting with Pete to discuss my critique gave me a one-to-one opportunity to really go through the work produced this term. arriving with some already made reflective notes really helped to thrash-out where this project could go and gave Pete an opportunity to understand what happened during the crit. The project needs me to go back a few steps and really try to focus on identifying the context, what have I been interested in throughout this MA and how could I turn this project around. I have a limited amount of time left, with the Gagosian gallery closing soon for an exhibition changeover. The next few weeks over independent study and the Easter break are going to be crucial. I also have my critical research paper deadline, although this is only a draft I do not want to position the paper and write about practice that is then scrapped.

I do prefer at this stage of my MA to have one-to-one tutorials. I feel the group tutorials no longer work, some peers are just not interested in sharing feedback or wanting to get involved. It often leads to just Pete discussing his understanding and judgements. It is disappointing as my tutorial group has halved to seven students since the introduction of an additional group.

POA

So the weekend has passed, it is back to the studio and time to read back over my notes from the verbal feedback I received. With no schedule it is a nice quiet day in the studio to scratch the brain, open my eyes and make another f**king plan of action.

• Re-visit Gargosian [project to now focus on Britannia Street]

• Research into Richard Serra, get a greater contextual understanding of work and relationship to space

• Research into Caruso st John [site architects] 

Research: The architecture of Art Museums: A decade of design 2000-2010, Ronnie Self

"How to critique space: look at a building and write like an architect. A mesh of theory and technical involving unrelated issues"

"Museums are a prominent and important building type. They are places for collecting, exhibiting, conserving, for research, education, contemplation, introspection [observation or examination of one's own mental and emotional state]  and enlightenment [impart knowledge]. They are public forums, places for social interaction and an outreach for creation. They are scared spaces. Museums are the preservation of memory"

• Create my own narrative [potential to juxtapose with de Certeau?]
• Map the space from multiple views [the space, the body, the sounds etc]
• Try to gain access to Gargosian Archives

Do Ho Suh: Passages

I had heard nothing but great reviews from both peers who had been to see this exhibition and the reviews from Time Out London. The Victoria Miro put on some great shows and it is a great venue partnered up with the accompanying Parasol gallery next door.

Do Ho Suh meticulously constructs proportionally exact replicas of dwelling places, architectural features, or household appliances from stitched planes of translucent, coloured polyester fabric. Constructed much like items of clothing, Suh's portable modules of space were designed to be packed in his suitcase as he travelled between continents. Transitory, connecting spaces – corridors, staircases, bridges, gateways – feature often in the artist's work: rather than borders, Suh is fascinated with the linking spaces through which the body travels

It is ironic when you start to think about all of those transient passage type spaces that we encounter on a day to day basis getting from A-B, those that are embedded in the everyday fabric of our routine and those that we sometimes stumble upon. The exhibition exceeded my expectations, there is an emotional overwhelming feeling once  once situated within the work. Photographs of any kind do not do this justice. The construction of such a narrative through the connecting spaces. It is as though for the first time that Gastons' Poetics of space has come alive.

Critique #2

So the critique aka progress review didn't go to plan . . . in fact it went in the completely opposite way to what I was expecting. I was presenting to Ken & Emma, both who are not my personal tutor, Ken who is the lead theory tutor [but was involved in the assessment of unit 01] and Emma, who has only recently joint the course and who didn't know any of my previous practice. Both tutors felt that the work that was discussed was too disconnected. Ken mentioned that he liked the process of analyzing the text and both of them briefly looked at the completed manifesto. The felt that the furniture had arrived at an end outcome and that this was too soon [I hadn't mentioned that this was the end result, but at some point once the trajectory lines were extruded and given a scale, they had to be given some form of notion/identify]. They wasn't interested in the ideas behind the video work and if I am honest I didn't feel that they really looked and read through my presentation sheets in much detail.

I was given references that started a discussion about the exhibition space, discussing the work of Simon Startling and his VR walk through [a which point I highlighted that I am not interested in using nor exploring VR [virtual reality]. They spoke about the observation process and that I had been walking around these spaces, and at this point it very much felt like I was talking about my unit 01 work [of which Ken assessed and Emma was non the wiser of]. If I am honest to my frustration [and of no fault of Emma's but she was giving me suggestions about what would be interested which was identical to what I had submitted for Unit 01, and Ken wasn't supporting me in mentioning that I had already done this type of work. They mentioned that the project needed to become more complex and that I should re-look back over the observation process and direct the project more towards creating an architectural type intervention that is an extension of the current body of work [a series of sculptures by Richard Serra].

Critiques where you don't get the feedback you were hoping for, I am fine with. I am fine with tutors not fully understanding my ideas and if I need to go a few steps back then so be it. I think what bothered me [and I will not be disclosing too much out of respect for both myself and my peers] is that throughout the day it felt as if there were moments of conflicting information. The less you actually presented, the better the feedback seem to appear? and others outcomes that seemed very removed from research were considered "good". I do not want this to be taken in anyway as myself being bitter, but at this level I just expected there to be a more professional and rigor response to the way we should be presenting and the volume of work, considering this is the only critique for unit 2 that is in theory a presentation of almost 3 months worth of work.

Defeated at this current moment in time is an understatement and it is back to the drawing board to consider what elements will be taken forward. I am going to give myself a few days removed from the studio and the work as I may approach it from a negative point of view.

Critique preparation

Despite this weeks critique being re titled and branded as a progress review, this is an essential time for me to reflect on all that has been going on with my practice and attempt to clarify and clearly communicate my intended direction. A few weeks back I had a seminar that focused on reviewing our current critical research paper. Due to the changes in the project and how "in my opinion" expansive it has become, looking at the development of different bodes of work I felt lost with what to currently write about from a summative and executive point of view. 

I suppose after many weeks of being encouraged to "just run with it" and "it's good to let go" I have questioned the overall target of the project. That said I feel I have produced a good amount of work that is in tangent with my research and I am always making sure that I reflect and generate endless documentation of lists, brains storms and questions. A weakness of mine, generally seems to be that I finish work with further questions and not answers . . . yet to have decided if this is a good/bad thing or a thing at all. 

My presentation sheets would be an opportunity to place the processes explored into a sequence of events and would start with the analysis of Michel de Certeau's text and end with a diagrammatic proposition of where I think I currently am.

 

Practice of everyday life

Michel de Certeaus' text is becoming ever evident and increasingly important in the development of my work. What's great and encouraging to find is that it is being mentioned, disclosed and evidenced in other research that I am finding. It is clear that his ideas and theories have influenced other practitioners and so this gives me a good indication about the relevance of my research.

"Theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life. Everyday life s distinctive due to it's repetition, making it unconscious. It is not the story of popular culture nor is it the study of resistances within power and control. it draws on a distinction made between strategy and tactics. "

Strategy: Institutions and structures of power who are producers. Individuals are consumers, acting in environments defined by strategies. Individuals, despite strategies imposed take on their own process.

Art & Language: Joseph Kosuth

It has been made very clear through my discussions and presentations that my work very much deals with language as a tool, media and instrument to develop both ideas and work. While reading "Art & Language" the work of Joseph Kosuth [who has been mentioned previously] was discussed for his involvement in the period of conceptual art and his relationship to the use of text within his own ideas as a means of communication in replacement so often of the image as a chosen media.

The following notes have all been taken from:  Essays on Art & Language [Charles Townsend Harrison]

Artists activity claimed primary attention, although a product or art object was presented it was the artistic content that was key. From the view of the spectator, artist processes and conditions of production were speculation bounded by actual or hypothetical identity of the presented aesthetic object. This was part of the Art & Language movement.

Kosuth Pioneered the use of words in place of visual imagery and explored the relationship between ideas and images and words to convey them. Meaning was ultimately conveyed through language.

Since the 1970's Jospeh Kosuth worked predominately on site specific installations that continue to explore how we explore, comprehend and respond to language. 

"Artistic skill and craft should be eliminated and ideas should be conveyed both directly, immediately and purely"

Equivalences between visual and linguistic were influenced by Ludwig Wittgensteins ideas on language. Kosuth uses language as a form of presentation, to make the audience contemplate the issues. He relies on the writings of others and goes through a process of appropriation. Texts are usually chosen on their non-literal and descriptive basis [texts that do nor portray direct images or per-determined visuals once read]

Relational Aethetics

After a brief discussion with my personal tutor Pete, I was swiftly directed towards reading "Relational Aesthetics" by Nicolas Bourriaud. This term had be flagged up alongside "Situational Aesthetics" And it was important for me to understand, comprehend and differentiate the two in order to place where my practice lies. Pete had raised some important questions [although at the time, first thing on a Monday, it did feel like a slight blow to the head]. I have been struggling with a question and sentence that really sums up what my project intentions are and what the project is. I feel I have been forever making work in turn and out of reading and uncovering new information, but that all important why was raised to the surface. Although my practice and project is not a "problem-solution' type project, I do have to consider what I am attempting to question or communicate. 

The French curator Nicholas Bourriaud published a book called Relational Aesthetics in 1998 in which he defined the term as:

A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space

He saw artists as facilitators rather than makers and regarded art as information exchanged between the artist and the viewers. The artist, in this sense, gives audiences access to power and the means to change the world.

The following notes are all from the above source:

Relational aesthetics: Nicolas Bourriaud

Space enveloping the beholder in an ambience or constructed environment. Any point in space is both the memory of time and the reflection of a space. Meaning and sense are the outcome of an interaction between artist and beholder.

 

Interlocutors: A person who takes part in a dialogue. A person who questions/interrogates

Reality is nothing other than the passing result of what we do together [Marx]

Argument against relational aesthetics is it is a watered down form of the social critique

The transposition into the experience of spaces constructed and represented.

Interstice: a small narrow space or interval between things or parts/series of alternating uniform spaces – spatial organisation

Relational aesthetics and constructed situations. situantionists concepts of experimental realities of everyday settings. Guy Debord.

Deals with forms of human relation [social relationship between people and go between]

Felix Guattari: Obscure language / syntactical clarity blend of English and German words, deceptive shortcuts.

Creating and staging devices of existence, including working methods. Instead of concrete object. Time is the material. Aesthetics must become a poetic function that goes hand in hand with social.

Co-existence criterion: art producing sociability does the work permit me to enter a dialogue do I exist and how in the space does it defines.

Relational aesthetics: artworks on the same basis of inter-human relations they represent and promote relational art. human relations and social contexts

Fred Sandback - Artist Research

I was introduced to the work Fred Sandback during one of the drawing spaces lectures a few weeks back. and had considered the aesthetics and way his work becomes a alternating extension the space vital in my current practice research. With my trajectory lines extruded and my latter assemblage work also taking a 3-dimensional direction, I wanted to get a thorough understanding of what Sandback's work from both a contextual and process point of view to ensure that my work, however visual similar it may start to appear had very different reasons.

The below notes were taken from the Fred Sandback Archives: http://fredsandbackarchive.org/

Use of acrylic thread – compared to a pencil line. Drawing a line that represents space [referenced Giacometti]. To see a denser space an emptier space around him. The line is not about representing figure/ground. It Phys with architectural space. Original ideas and work related to the spatial object. Illusions are real and reality is allusive. Not an installation artist. The exhibition space becomes part of the work in creating new boundaries. The space isn’t interrupted in a conceptually guided way and the work doesn’t act as a narrative device about the space.

The work is a diffuse interface between myself, my environment and others environments. Built of thin lines that leave enough room to move through and around. Still sculpture but an ambivalence between exterior and interior. A drawing that is inhabitable. It is not the art of trying to stretch a line between two points.

The sculptures are not discrete objects but constitute a material relationship with the environment. The sculpture address the particular space and time they were built in. The work is now site specific and executed for particular place.

Pedestrian space: literal, flat-footed and everyday term

A line of string isn’t a line it’s a thing. It doesn’t define a plane but everything outside its own boundaries. Its an aggregate of experiences. Equally a conceptualization to make something which can be purchased in enough different ways its identity becomes apparent to the name and perception employed. Work now is less structural significant and a relationship to the space. They are not there to teach you about the space the work isn’t environmental, its presents in pedestrian space is not to obscure its context. Co-existent with the environment.

Drawing Spaces Lecture 08: Ludic Space

Ludic Space

Adjective: playful in an aimless way

It can refer to architecture that is playful, narrative that is humorous and even satirical, and literature that is light. "Ludic" is ultimately from the Latin noun ludus, which refers to a whole range of fun things - stage shows, games, sports, even jokes.

Representation at play [What are you playing with?]

Nigel Henderson: recording a dialogue between architecture - representing space through photography

Charles Sheeler: American paintings that were abstract representation of space. How one lives in space & a story of space. Landscape paintings of industrial factories.

Clara Porset: White on White relational paintings. Objects waiting for human occupation. The work captures the relationship between material/texture and the human body.

Osbert Lancaster: Home Sweet Home

Communicating how one lives, occupies and views space. A critique of society and how one expresses themselves trough their interior. Each painting depicts a class system or era and showcases a strong narrative about the users. The work is a political statement

Saul Steinberg: Drawing of spaces combined with the process of applying stamp marks. The frame within the work depicts movement where the work and stamps are almost cut out, once beyond the frame. The same approach to his interior work is applied by using a frame and the use of framed views.

Printed stories was an exhibition curated through text and stroy telling. The artists were inspired by text, responding to it and using it to inform the title of each works. The use of extended text allowed the audience to feel empowered within the exhibition to create and control their own story.

Pablo Bronstein: Wall-Pomp

The use and application of scaled architectural images to compliment a collection of chairs. Real time vs the imaginative. Shift and play in scale. A juxtaposition of interior and exterior is applied with the adoption of language from other periods of time.

Blane Drimmond: Real spaces

Using stories and a real life colour palette to construct narrative spaces. The insertion of thread to create a play in light on the work.

Do Ho Suh: Passages

The space between and circulation spaces. Fabric structures that are an extension of the drawing. Passages, users, time, memory and the artists relationship to those spaces.

Our role as spatial designers: Within a scheme, what do you envisage as the function? How does the interior space work with users? and how do you communicate that?

Assemblage work

Collage: noun

1. A technique of composing a work of art by pasting on a single surface various materials not normally associated with one another, as newspaper clippings, parts of photographs, theater tickets, and fragments of an envelope.

2. A work of art produced by this technique. [Compare Assemblage]

3. An assemblage or occurrence of diverse elements or fragments in unlikely or unexpected juxtaposition:

Assemblage: noun

1. A group of persons or things gathered or collected; an assembly; collection; aggregate.

2. The act of assembling; state of being assembled.

3. Fine Arts:

1. A sculptural technique of organizing or composing into a unified whole a group of unrelated and often fragmentary or discarded objects.
2. A work of art produced by this technique.
   [Compare Collage]

After discussing in my tutorial ideas surrounding language, fragmentation and these trajectory lines, I took the opportunity to reflect on the idea of producing a body of collage based work that was potentially the first piece of work in the collection. These individual pieces would structure both text [taken form de Certeau's 'walking in cities' ] and various papers and cards, [using both materiel from the galleries visited and a reduced colour palette of that used within the gallery]. There is something extremely therapeutic yet requires a high level of concentration when constructing this images. I wanted to juxtapose both the text with fragmented forms that would on one level start to visualize what the text said and on another level have a visual link to the forms that have arrived form my trajectory work. 

I have started with ten although depending on how these start to shift my view and the impact they create it would be interesting to move into a larger amount. If I am to consider these as pieces of work that would introduce the project and be placed in one of the galleries [hypothetically] then i need to consider how many I would require to fill that space.

Text taken from 'Cut & Paste: 21st Century Collage'

Collage is a medium that connects the past with the present, sometimes offering a glimpse of what may be the future. Contemporary collage has become a significant part of our visual landscape. the fusion between disparate and juxtaposed assemblage images provokes questions, ambiguous questions that we may not be able to answer.

CRP - update

This week in replace of our studio practice tutorials, we had the chance to meet with a tutor and review our CRP progress. We were asked to increase our CRP [critical research paper] to 1000 words, however I just didn't have the time nor did I want to put anything down that hadn't had the appropriate time given to it. That said, and ti avoid the tutorial becoming useless [partially by my own fault] I arrived with a set of questions relating to the structure of my witting. I have been recently reading two essential books, one that focuses on past critiques of architecture and analyzes articles and their structure, shape and content. the other is a student guide to research methodologies in architecture and there was a dedicated chapter that outlined the writing, in particular at postgraduate level. For me I need an aim and POA of what I see the final submission containing. The CRP needs to provide a balance of practice and theory intertwined with reinfection, arguments, debates and precedents being used to shape the opinion and influence the practice.  I now want to set myself a target on writing a vast amount of the CRP over the Easter break whilst I am away from the studio. the expected submission for unit 02: is 2000 words but it would be great to push that further.

The writing style must be academic and must construct an argument and opinion. Because my project consists of several elements, I am going to structure my CRP in a way that addresses each body of work individually, with their own precedent that is in constant dialogue with the context surrounding the museum/gallery. The following is the proposed plan of structure:

01. Introduction: address aims, address sections [do not call them chapters] discuss in light the gallery and surrounding issues

02. Context: A critique of the gallery/museum with reference to theory and text. move into the discussion of the main key text [walking in cities] and link in with narratives, trajectories.

03. body of work 1: Include precedents and the relationship between them, you and the gallery

04. body of work 2: Include precedents and the relationship between them, you and the gallery

05. body of work 3: Include precedents and the relationship between them, you and the gallery

06. Conclusion: Argument and impact of studio work

07. Summary: Each chapter ? I have seen this within academic texts before but do not want to find myself repeating section 06