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Tutorial 5: 04 October 2019. Gareth Polmeer

Alexis

Research Statement Tutorial

Earlier today, I was able to get feedback from Gareth regarding the RS. We had a very interesting conversation around some of the subject areas touched on in the paper.

I am happy that the paper has focus and am grateful to Gareth for the suggestions he made in the last tutorial, namely William Latham’s Mutator. The paper works better than the original drafts, in that it avoids many of the former complexities which were hard to resolve within the word count of the paper while still keeping some original elements.

One of the things I have to add is a line or two to say that some ideas presented are subject to current debate. This goes particularly for the first paragraph in Part 2 which deals with, yes you’ve guessed it, aesthetics. No single area of art causes more debate than aesthetics, or perhaps be more interesting. And that is perhaps why the Research Statement proposes a way of mitigating subjectivity when discussing more than one artistic practice at a time.

This does not mean I have found a universal and infallible modus operandi. It is more of a gateway to further discussion and debate, perhaps future research. In fact, there are many potential papers nested in the RS. All these side branches or spurs to other areas, can only be hinted at in a four thousand word paper. So this is another thing I should mention in the paper, the potential areas to be investigated. Areas such as the idea of whether AI can make art, final causality and autonomy of action.

I have one hundred and sixty four words left. This should be enough for any corrections and additions. One thing I was glad of was that I do not need any further citations. They just take up on the word count. This makes life so much easier. There is just one I could add in paragraph 1 of Part 2 where I could explain where the idea is coming from: the part that mentions not requiring teleological control. This paragraph is debatable which in the context a short paper can be moved through. These are things many books have been written on.

The first paragraph of Part 2 could go in many directions, and I am aware of this. The paper tests ideas and does not sit on its own. Gareth mentioned Paul Crowther who has written on the phenomenological theory of art, Phenomenology of Visual Arts which would be interesting to read in the future.

I have been concerned with the way the paper transitions from life simulation to looking at art practice as a life process, whether I have been clear enough. Gareth mentioned the Hegelian idea of Geist and in Hegel’s terms art practice is a form of sublation, in which something evolves and changes, and parts are negated to become something else.

Look at Heraclitus in the context of  process philosophy which predates and counters the Aristotelian and Platonic ideas of being, the four causes and the realm of the ideal.

All the ideas touched on are a rich field to take forward but most importantly they are never far from practice based work.

Palimpsest

Alexis

 

My initial project proposal was full of interrogatives and unknowns. I was looking for connective tissue, a means to create a whole, to move the making into a deep well of notions. This is perhaps what I have previously called the ineffable. I used to think that we are ruled by the tyranny of words. But words make up much of what we think and who we are. Today we live in a tyranny of image, graphic, moving, symbols and shortcuts to thought that like idioms, clichés and figures of speech. What is the difference? They all tug at one’s own reality.

I mean to inhabit multitudes and contain more than I can express. This is the conversation I seek with others…

 

Skype Chat 4.1: Unit 1 Assessment and Process & Ars Electronica

Alexis

 

We talked about the Unit 1 Assessment process and criteria. 

Jonathan also showed us some works being shown at the Linz  Ars Electronica 2019.

 

 

I found it interesting the correspondence Wu Juehui’s installation,  Bit Tower,  has with installations I made in 2010, 2013 and 2014 using sacred spaces and low frequency sounds. 

In 2010, I experimented with sculpture and sound during a residency at Nottingham Trent University. The result was Contingent Ceremony, an installation in a small redundant church looking at worship and the sacred in the light of mystery and magic.

I also showed a version of this at the Crypt Gallery St Pancras in the same year. Incidentally, the same show as Genetic Moo, graduates from this very same course long before I ever knew about it.

 

 

2013, the next installation was more ambitious in scale, in the large Chad Varah Chapel. Here I used a variety of sound sources enveloping the space and emanating from a central sculpture. I remember the highlight for me was when one of the festival organisers was brought to tears by the associations she made with the work. It is humbling when such things happen and also bring to mind the responsibility one has to others when doing something affecting. 

 

The next installation was in 2014 as part of the touring show Chaos Contained. The installation was in the Bell Tower of St John’s Church in Scunthorpe. This time I used the sounds of the tower clock together with low frequencies. 

For the project proposal I am thinking of using low frequencies but this time with a digital control mechanism which interacts with the audience. I worked with the Arduino earlier this Summer, learning how to use it and code. I shall continue this as soon as I get back to the studio. This period away has been useful for writing the Research Statement, thinking about the Project Proposal and curating the blog.

 

Adrien M and Claire B from Lyon are artists I was already familiar with through social media. Their work is interesting in the simplicity of use of technology. However, I do think that it is more style than content. The work at Ars Electronica I particularly liked. It is lovely to see when seen from the right place. But the fact that it is limited in its angle of view is a shame and seeing it is made with an ipad reflecting from glass at 45 degrees does give me the sense of a simple magic trick demystified and laid bare to disappointment. Nevertheless, I think that the simplicity itself is the trick and not what it shows. This sort of augmented reality is beguiling for a moment until I become habituated, then I want to seek something deeper. Despite my misgivings about the nature of this kind of work, it is entertaining and creates associations and gives me ideas. That certainly cannot be a bad thing. 

Akinori Goto’s work is a holographic zoetrope reminding me of Matt Collishaw’s Massacre of the Innocents. It is more ethereal and less theatre but I much prefer Collishaws’s subject matter. Goto’s dancing figure seems more of a demonstration of a technique and again lacks subject matter. At least, Adrien and Claire’s particulate bombardment of a block of crystal is cosmological, a dancing figure is too much like a computer generated film effect of a fairy dancing on a table. 

Despite all the things I say, hats off to these artists for their ingenuity and technical savvy, although in some cases I am sure there are some backroom boys, or girls, involved, who knows, they are hardly ever named, at least in the headline credits.

Memo Akten and his crew do some very impressive work in Istanbul. It is a little disturbing, especially with how beguiling it is. The work again seems a demonstration of technology. It makes me think that the artistic content of the work lies in one’s inference of its nature. The technology is the content itself rather than a means to express something else. That is how it seems to me very often. It is left for later generations to pick things up and take them further. 

And as for Luca Zanotto’s Eyes – emoticons on steroids.

 

Wolfgang Gil: Maleable Sound as Sculpture

Alexis

 

Resonant Body I – Wolfgang Gil

 

Gareth Jones, in his essay, describes the historical changes in the relationship between sculpture and sound. This dichotomous tension is straddled by Gil’s work in Sonic Plasticity proposes the use of sound as a malleable material – one that can be stretched in all dimensions, encompassing height, width, and depth, with curves, edges, and changing geometries. His Aural Fields and Resonant Bodies combine physical structures set to vibrate, creating geometric fields of sound perceivable in space with edges and form.

This is an interesting field I am currently investigating with respect to the final proposal with respect to sculptures. I am not proposing to do the same sort of thing but Gil’s work does have correspondence with how I see sound as creating a physical entity in itself.

My idea is to counterpoise the readability and sensuality of the solid pieces with the pure perception and sensuality in another modality of sound. I am concerned about the cancelling out of one another: should solid sculpture reside in silence, should sound be disembodied? These are questions I intend to explore and aim to resolve in some way. The use of digital interactive devices is something I have been working with enabling an element of audience interaction. But then again, the work in silence also speaks of itself. This is an interesting area of empirical research which needs a trial and error, or heuristic, approach.

 

https://medium.com/@wolfganggil_35573/sonic-plasticity-an-introduction-343ae7e22de5

 

Research Statement: Draft for Tutorial and Editing

Alexis

 
Today was the due date to hand in a draft of the RS for the second tutorial with Gareth. The paper has gone through numerous transformations and bears little resemblance to what I started out with. I started with something, although interesting, that did not have much bearing on contemporary art or my practice. It was more a case of extending one of my numerous hobby horses. 

It has not been easy to shed so many interesting ideas but the exercise has clarified a great many others. I have managed to talk about contemporary concerns, touched on the future and most importantly made a deeply relevant contribution to my project proposal and practice in general.

Subject matter and content are complete but I still have a number of things to do, namely:

  • Finalise the title;
  • finish correlating the abstract with the body’s content;
  • make sure introduction covers all the points needed;
  • tidy text for grammar, syntax, make sure it makes sense, and tighten up the text;
  • ensure points are sequential so that the narrative flows coherently;
  • add anything that helps clarity;
  • reflect on the conclusion;
  • elaborate and complete the diagrams from the sketches;
  • complete citations and bibliography.

 

Iterations or Something Different?

Alexis

 

 

A thread of thoughts is like a gut that extends from air to air travelling through a body grown and developed around it, nourished by the ingestion, digestion and assimilation of ideas. The alimentary canal, symbolic and figurative appears in my work as such a thread.

The constraints of the surface to volume barrier to growth are dissolved by the gut. From the genesis of complex life onwards, it is the single structure that has enabled all the physical attributes of animal life that we have come to recognise as active autonomy. Regardless of nervous networks and the evolution of the mind, without its capability to furnish the organism that we are with energy, motility and subsequent life strategies would not have been possible. When we are born, our prime priority to it nurture this function while we nurture and help develop our other faculties.

I have subconsciously worked with this idea since Chaos Contained which is now set free, as an overt symbol in my project; a vehicle for the exploration of language, evolution and myth, as though I were moving within a metaphorical underground cavern complex. It collects ideas, like organs, that adhere to this single thread as the Indian rasa come together to form the elements of artistic expression.

 

Amputation

Alexis

 

 

An amputation is not something one would want. Sculptures have suffered amputations throughout the ages, some repaired, others restored and yet others left as they were found, This Herakles, Venus de Milo, the Belvedere Torso and so on. Limbs at times distract from the sense of form, many artists have known this, others have incorporated the limbs so that it merges into the body.

I have had a problem in that I want to make large ceramic works but the kiln is only so large. I have a top loader 59 cm diameter and 69 cm high which needs to be wired in. This is not small but neither is it large enough. What to do?

I had thought of jointing the pieces much as I did with the works in Chaos Contained. But this is not in keeping with the informal, organic sense of the works I am currently engaged with. Chaos contained was about symmetrical growth from within, an outward radiation. Now the works are internally generated, handled in a completely different way.

 

 

So I looked at how I could make the pieces in parts to be put together later after firing. I came across the work of Giovanni Vetere who works with glazed ceramics. The pieces are much larger than would fit in a regular kiln. In addition they would be unstable and too fragile for firing in one piece. On closer inspection of his work I noticed that they are made in pieces using the glaze patterns to camouflage the joints.

 

 

I could try to hide the joints when installing but would there be a better way? To show the cut, a severance, a clean cut that must signify something. And it opens the way for future large works where the cut plays a part. It may even lead to being able to show a work in its pieces arranged meaningfully or at least aesthetically.

 

 

What this does for my ongoing work is to provide a formal solution to having a kiln smaller than the fluid forms I want to make: the parts can be fitted together after firing. It also solves the problem of how to insert and remove sound equipment.  Conceptually, this technique offers the opportunity for representing vulnerability, fragility and reformation; perhaps also creating compositions, of parts that relate to one another and reconstituting them in different configurations.

 

Evolutionary Space

Alexis

 

Images above: works by William Latham, John Horton Conway and Andrew Lord

 

Evolutionary Space: A way of looking at art practice as continual process in a disparate ecology.

 

Art practices have become widely divergent and disparate in recent years, particularly since the arrival of  digital means which have opened out previously unimagined possibilities. Different taxonomies representing a great variety of paradigms, methodologies, thematics, mediums and contexts have given rise to a heterogeneity of approaches when considering practices and the role of artists which can render problematic a holistic consideration of different ways of generating art. Using Conway’s “Life, Latham’s “Mutator”, and the work of ceramic sculptor Andrew Lord as subjects, this paper introduces an approach to discussing art practices, fostering a unified view in the midst of diversity, evolutionary space. Borrowing from the idea of fitness landscape in evolutionary theory, applying it to Olson’s analysis of computer generated life regarding the relationship between pure information and its physical interpretation, in the context of Whitehead’s process philosophy of becoming, and Dennett’s idea of algorithms, a picture is built of how different art practices can be viewed as dynamic information streams coded and implemented in material terms. 

The research paper has changed radically and become frighteningly simply because I have a tendency to complicate things. The above may seem complicated but it is in fact a straightforward synthesis of ideas from various fields to construct a different way of talking about art practices which goes some way to avoid value judgements and the need to describe things subjectively. Writing the paper is making me focus on an increasingly narrow narrative as an explication for a broad idea. It is frustrating at times because I want to explore a multiplicity of ideas but by considering a wide field and having to progressively select out is also liberating. It shows me that things can be simple without loosing depth. Implied ideas can be just as powerful in leaving the reader the possibility to uncover them or find new things and feel the sense of discovery rather than having them pointed out. The methodology I am constructing is also feeding into the project proposal: I no longer feel compelled to spell out every idea.

 

A Correspondence: Marguerite Humeau

Alexis

 

Betty brought Marguerite Humeau to my attention during her feedback to my Mid Point Review. The artist works with similar ideas I work with, organic life, sound, the past and myths. It is interesting but I do find her installations somewhat too clinical and the sculptures lacking in depth. What I mean by this is that they do not have scales of vision: they are large and smooth and had all their interest sanded off them. The slickness lacks humanity and looks rather plastic and artificial which does not seem quite in keeping with her ideas. They look like reproductions of Blender renders in fibreglass or some similar material. In any case, I like that she works with mediums and ideas that I can identify with and is one of very few artists that is in my direct sphere of interest.

 

Art Now: Marguerite Humeau, Echoes, Tate Britain, November 2017