analysis

Andrew Lord: A Case of Phusis

Alexis

 

 

I mentioned in a recent post that I am now ready to look into a contemporary context for my work. This is not altogether easy as what I do is not centred on one idea or medium alone. I know that many artists today are cross disciplinary and work in various mediums; this makes contextual correspondences all the harder to find. I have to be careful not to mention every one and sundry that I like or identify with in some way. This sort of openness would only confuse and lead to a lack of direction. What would making a long list do, help in the project development, show my wide taste in things?

No, what I am looking for is work that directly contextualises mine in terms of contemporary ideas and environments. Andrew Lord, ten years my senior is one such practitioner. Although he would not like to be called a potter, his body of work very much centres on the idea of vessels and clay, something I also work with.

Lord’s central notion is an interesting one. It is an idea that many working in clay have followed for some time, that of ‘rescuing’ pottery from still life painting. As Mark del Vecchio lucidly points out in his book, Postmodern Ceramics:

From Pablo Picasso to Giorgio Morandi, Vincent Van Gogh, and George Braque, pottery has tended to be the visual anchor of most still-life compositions. Contemporary ceramists have begun to reverse the compliment and draw inspiration from the paintings in which these pots appear, returning them to the three-dimensional realm, but retaining some painterly associations. 

Looking for what is common between two and three dimensions is a process which also requires an awareness of what is lost in translation. Only in this way can an essence of the object be made manifest. 

 

Andrew Lord displays his work in such a way as to allude to the still life genre by placing objects on tables and plinths, carefully arranged in terms of light, time of day, space and so on. The arrangements often remind me of Morandi’s still lifes, treated as emerging from the material becoming objects felt in the making. He leaves overt traces of how the object is formed often to the point of caricatured.

 

This work is consonant with elements of some of my work, playful and ‘rough modelled’ caressed into being aimed at a sense of Platonic idealism imperfectly fashion in and on (E)arth. 

It also interest for me to note that in some cases, vases are displayed just off the floor in a similar way to how I plan to show  H’s Play Things in the final show… with one twist. 

 

Much of this approach is consonant with what Heidegger says in his essay, The Origin of the Work of Art:

  1. The material (clay) is central and clearly evident in the work. 
  2. The clay is subservient to what is being portrayed yet it ‘shines forth’ 1.
  3. There is a struggle between the nature of the material and what it tries to portray, what it is formed into or as Heidegger would say, between the Earth and the World.
  4. The vessels are not the product of craft yet he uses, techne or mode of knowing, to bring out hidden Aletheia, or being.
  5. The being of the thing is not just made, it is brought forth and made evident. It is generated from within through phusis as though through natural law.

But what is the role of craft in this act of phusis? Heidegger does become confusing, or more likely confused unable to articulate a distinction between craft and art: he descends into subjective ideas of the mystical and the sublime and sacred to support his thesis. Perhaps a simple, if still elusive reply is that the impetus for a work of art comes from within an internal process of natural growth, whereas craft’s impetus is external to its growth. It is clear to me that this categorisation is false in many cases and can only be considered from piece to piece and not generically.

Having said all this, Heidegger does provide a useful way of thinking about art as a spontaneous act of emergence in the making also raising interesting questions regarding the relationship between what is ‘being creative’ and artistic practice. 

  1. Heidegger[↩]

On Materiality

Alexis

 

 

My works are based on a strong sense of materiality as a means of grasping abstract ideas. To translate these from objects of the mind to ones that occupy three dimensional space is to rescue them from ephemerality. This in itself changes their nature as they arise in the making, capturing feeling in the material, moving away from the imagined to the physical. Concrete as they are, they probe into what is ephemeral and evanescent. Is it the phenomenon of being or the idea of being that is being represented here?

Clay is a material that can be shaped according to one’s own senses. Its inertness permits me to freeze moments of feeling and embed them in its corporeality. It is ideal for my approach, not to represent in some way thematic notions but to reify them. What emerges from these thoughts is that cycling and continuity are the abstract processes that underlie the thematics of time and life; and that in the work, space becomes actual material and that material defines the work, its thingliness, alongside its theoretical and contextual characteristics and qualities. 

Albeit I see the work as the thing itself, it is also a vessel holding allegorical content. It brings forth into reality the very notions that led to its making. However, in all probability these might well remain hidden if not layered with or disclosed by context. Context can wrap around the work in many ways, through text, juxta-positioning, placement, images, sound and so on. It is an area that I must work on diligently.. 

To make the object of the mind otherwise, digitally printed, commissioned or projected in another (more resistant) material, would not be the same. I need the direct contact between hand, eye, mind and material that makes it what it is and nothing else. The directness of touch as a principle conduit for embedding feeling in what otherwise might be materially impersonal. It is a synthesis of the untouchability of an idea and the inability to express that ideal form physically. It is as direct as stroking an animal or smelling a flower yet one can not be an animal or a flower. This creates a bridge between maker and receiver that subverts the continual increase in faux intimacy engendered by the current use of technology in today’s society, as in social media and infinite multiples of the same thing.

The human haptic mode encodes a complexity of information transmitted from in-the-making and passes on to experiencing. They come close to being one and the same thing. The object becomes more than something that can be seen and touched: it is a vehicle for subtle empathy. Not the sentimentality we attach to cherished, used objects of mass production. 

This subtle empathy which, placed in a human context, links me to the themes of the work relating to natural forces. I no longer am an observer but a participator in creating and remaking the world. The work is overtly human but also non-anthropic. It reminds me that we are part of nature but not necessarily central to it. We only make it so for existential reasons as do all other plants and animals. It is this survival, cycle, continuity that is again at the root of my ideas. But unlike an animal or a plant I can see beyond my immediate world, give form to other worlds and times. This gives me a special privilege and responsibility.

As to the basic form of the vessel that appears in much of my work? The vessel is a plane, folded on itself to become a container. We all were born as balls of cells that began their journey into the world as simple dimpled  spheres from which a vessel was formed. This form defines the boundary between the physical inner and outer environment. It defines the limit of our corporeal existence. We can only project out of it through our senses and the mind. However complex the vessel might become, its fundamental property of containment remains.

I see the vessel as inviting exploration of what is within and without and more importantly what it is that connects the two. My particular area of interest is not only located in the now but in the connections with the past and how this is part of what the future might become. The present is the vessel for all things yet it is elusive, an idea ever changing. It is an elusive membrane whose allusion becomes object in much of what I do. The membrane of the present, the inside and outside, the self and other.  

 

Mythopoeia IV

Alexis

 

I have been very busy of late and my current work is in a state of incompletion, so I am glad to have just completed a video to accompany a small sculptural work for the interim Summer show at Camberwell. Its simplicity has given me the space to think about a deep level aspect of what I am doing. The narrative in the words of the scrolling text are deliberately anachronistic. I worked on the few words in various versions: directed in the you and I form, playing with tenses, making the content more or less personal. Finally I ended in the place where my instincts had led me to start; with the intention to distance myself from the subject whilst bringing it into direct contact with me in the present as I reflect on its future set in the past. Bringing together the deep past, present and future is very much what my research statement is about albeit taking a narrow field of view. It is interesting how this synchronicity occurs from time to time.

 

Impromptu: Emperor at 2 Girls Gallery

Alexis

 

 

Four digital prints I submitted to the 2 Girls Gallery ‘Impromptu’ show. They are mouse drawings. That means I drew them using an old mouse. I like this technique because of the difficulty of controlling the mouse as opposed to the ease of use of a pad and stylus. This friction creates a tension between what I want to draw and what is possible. The space that lies between the two tells me something of how striving for perfection is conditional to the means and circumstances. The analysis required is in contrast with the poietic maelstrom involved in working with sodden earth. It is where I can stand back and consider a different aspect of the source of what I do.

The technique of drawing with a mouse I see as embodying that continual striving for perfection by imperfect means that characterises humanity: by necessity flaws become the paradigm. And it is this process of turning one’s shortcomings into something of real affecting power where the magic of process lies.

I originally thought of presenting photographs which had been digitally altered, coloured. However, I was dissatisfied with the results. I have often found that combining digital marks with photographs whether analogue or not, does not give me a good sense. I am not talking about manipulating a photographic image or set of images in which case the material sources are of the same kind. This is exemplified in the work of an artist that Jonathan suggested I look at. Emily Allchurch creates imaginary landscapes based on old master paintings using a library of photographs she has compiled. She works with source material of the same kind and treats it in the same way: there is an inherent coherency here. I am rather referring to adding, superimposing, layering digital marks to photographic images: sources of a different kind. There is always something to be said for breaking rules and mish-mashing but I have found that this approach only works for me when what I am doing has a graphic design This I find only works when the sought after outcome is primarily one that resides in the area of graphic design… and then not always. This is something I would ordinarily leave to someone else who has affinity and experience in this domain. 

 

Sight and Touch: Molyneux’s Problem

Alexis

 

 

I came across an article about the 300 year old Molyneux’s Problem regarding the relationship between sight and touch as it concerns internal world building. This is something that has come to my mind many times in terms of the aesthetics of three dimensional objects and my approaches in making something tangible. 

What was once taken as purely a thought experiment due to the impossibility of giving sight to someone congenitally blind has now been presented with an empirically verifiable solution. 

In 2011 Richard Held and Dr. Pawan Sinha leading a team at Project Prakash (Prakash mean light in Sanskrit) demonstrated that which Locke had intuited. That the cognitive association between touch and sight have to be learnt and are not hard wired in our brains.

The experience of shape in each sense is independent of the other and they are not associated from birth. A congenitally blind person being given sight would not recognise a cube, say, on seeing it for the first time even if they were offered an identical one for comparison. However, they would soon learn to relate what they experience through touch with what they see. This seems self evident enough but it was not verifiable until recently with advances in eye surgery and indeed many thinkers thought otherwise. Look up dear old Bishop Berkeley: yes the one that thought if you turned your back on something it disappeared.  

How does this affect my ideas about making? I work a great deal with touch through my hands. I have been aware that if I were not able to see the composition of a work it would be very different using touch alone. The aesthetic qualities that would arise out of working blind would pertain to another world; one in which light is alien and the mind would navigate and construct form in quite a different way. 

 

 

I have often referred to navigating form in my mind with an inner eye, moving around the object in question in a virtual world. Although I am not using my eyes this ‘sighted’ world relies on having experienced sight. How different this would be had I been congenitally blind. So imagining being able to create in the absence of light experience would be well nigh impossible.

 

Research Statement: Preliminary Title

Alexis

 

 

A preliminary title is an uneasy mapping out of a journey towards an idea without necessarily knowing the best route. This preliminary title is somewhat long winded but it does contain the elements of subject area, context and argument which may well serve as a condensed abstract. The fact that it will need pruning goes without saying but a kernel of an idea does reside in its immature state.

Composite body plans and their proliferation: A comparative examination of the algorithmic increase and propagation of hybrid creatures in the Cambrian, Early Bronze Age, Late Medieval Period and the Digital Environment in the context of D. C. Dennett’s definition of algorithm and D. Wengrow’s archeo-anthropological hypothesis ‘the origin of monsters’.

This is basically looking at how analogous outcomes can arise from disparate cultural and biological substrates and what this might say about ongoing contemporary developments. I see the Late Medieval element, seen through the optics of Hieronymous  Bosch, as a bridge from the ancient to the modern. However, I need to think about the length of the RS and it may prove too much to weave Bosch’s particular narrative into the whole: his hermeneutic influences may be too mono-cultural relative to the other areas under examination providing an antithesis to the general thesis of the cultural and biological emergence of composite creatures or so called monsters which, it could be argued, depend on more complex environmental conditions. Nevertheless, as a counter argument it creates an interesting dialectic which unfortunately may be beyond the constraints of 3000 to 4000 words.

 

Why “Fine” in Art?

Alexis

 

What is it that puts the ‘fine’ in fine art? In the past fine denoted something different to the applied arts and crafts, the artisanal element of making. Fine was meant to raise the level of thinking away from the primarily functional and the folk art of the general population. It was meant to educate and impress. Today, this attitude is no longer relevant and neither is it desirable. Artists have often relied on artisans for their initial training and preparations. They have been inspired by the folk, ethnic, primitive, call it what you will, throughout history. Beethoven and folk music, Brancusi and folk art and Renoir started as a ceramics decorator. 

Art today is seen within a spectrum of activity from the rawest of expression to the most worked and polished making. The ‘fine’ today is something different. I see it as the polishing of an idea, honing an argument, refining the making. Any one of these processes transforms poietic activity into an agent of change, stimulating the imagination, engendering empathy and raising curiosity amongst many other things. The constant refining, selecting, filtering, distilling are all part of what might be called fine art. 

The above study in its original form was enough as a place marker of an idea and initial exploration, in short a study. However, I decided to take it further, to refine it. I wanted to take the making process further, to extend its limits in a continual process. By doing so, the idea itself is transformed, maybe slightly but nonetheless altered. The sketch may hold its own dynamic vigor, something to hold on to but not always. A case in hand is Rembrandt’s etching of the crucifixion, which as many of his etchings, underwent through many states, each complete in itself and also a phase towards a transformed more refined end point but no less powerful.

I feel that the sketched beginning possess more life imbued in its making. This is the difficulty in refining, not to loose that freshness. But there are also crudities that distract. It is a balancing act. Moreover, refinement is a way of exploring the capabilities of a medium hand in hand with the notions that underlie it: meditating on the idea, reflecting in action. Neither does the above image indicate an end to refinement nor is it a completed transformation as a study in preparation for further work.

 

For One and for the Other

Alexis

 

I welded this simple frame for another project, Logos, intended for working with its maquettes. Yesterday I took hold of it to photograph the latest zoan-like model. I wanted to isolate the work from surfaces in order to minimise cleaning up in photoshop. This worked on the level of convenience but there was also an unintended outcome.

Repurposing something I had made, led to a meaningful  solution for display as I mentioned in Between two Worlds. This way of working at times results in the surfacing of underlying ways of thinking and working which in turn can lead to new thoughts and ideas whilst maintaining a focused continuity of source.

Although this is a relatively small piece of metalwork, it is easily scaled up for an installation where there are no means of suspension from an architectural structure. In such a case, it could be, would need to be shaped into the idea/philosophy of the work itself.

 

Between Two Worlds

Alexis

 

What is this, I ask myself? As I made it I felt an unease as it extended its reach physically and formally. The other models in porcelain are clearly zoan but this is different, a hybrid perhaps between animal and artefact, biology and ritual.

And the way I photographed it, suspended by fine cords, gives me an idea for presenting that moves away from the wall, pedestal, plinth, stand, case, cabinet, table top, floor. Fragility, underlined by the immersion in a field of tension, defined by the slender threads, a psychological state between the din of kinetic energy and the repressed quiet of potential energy. 

The above series of images is a reminder regarding a recent idea to create 3D animations. I have thought about photogrammetry too which, however, seems to yield imprecise renderings far too often for me to give it the time. In any case , it is all about photographing what I have already made in the flesh, so to speak. I prefer to invent and for this I turn to Blender which is convincingly versatile with high specifications, offering tight control… and it is free.

 

Can Rhythm be a thing in “Static” Visual Arts?

Alexis

 

Immediately I think, are not all things perceived in time and since rhythm is a function of periodic patterns in time, is static a valid adjective? With sound and even moving images the question is self evidently answered with a yes. But when it comes to things which do not perceptively change in time such as paintings and non kinetic sculptures, how can this question be approached?

This came up with Janet and Florian yesterday in a conversation about audio illusions and how tone and rhythm are dual aspects of frequency. Janet has been reading Jason Gaiger’s paper, Can a Painting Have Rhythm? This brought together considerations of sound and visual experience in an interesting way. When I look at a painting, I cannot focus on all elements at the same time. I move over the picture surface, labelling each element in some way in my mind over time. If there is repetition in the composition, the successive recognition of these similar elements will constitute a rhythm or periodic pattern hence rhythm. This is something that is intuitively used in design and composition and brings the idea of rhythm into the visual sphere. As with music, rhythm is a fundamental element of visual art. Its harmonious use or disruption can be used to create a multiplicity of experiences and meanings such as recession-proximity, reinforcement, continuity, surprise and so on.