PhDs by Public Output Pt2 – is collage a good way of thinking about this?
These reflections follow a piece published here in 2020 looking at four examples of other PhDs by Public Output.
I came to realise as I prepared for my Viva that my PhD by Public Output was in effect a curious exercise in collage. The PhD comprises a thesis (essay hereafter) and a portfolio. My portfolio is an assemblage of material, the earliest piece dating back to 2006. One constraint was that the portfolio had to comprise peer reviewed materials. There are 8 pieces in the portfolio I submitted, 5 referenced in the main essay and 3 in an appendix.
Since 2006. I have written perhaps 600 posts to my personal blog (here) and 735 to ecoartscotland. The latter includes guest posts for which I was editor. Across both it’s a mix of notes, announcements and essays. My ORCID profile includes 37 pieces of work which count as substantive academic publications. The essay focuses on the 8 pieces in the portfolio and references another 19 pieces (supplementary materials). I used a numbering system to ensure that the essay could be correlated with the portfolio and supplementary materials.
I think I got more out of participating in the Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities’ ‘Practice Research Assembly’ in 2020 than I contributed! In particular, Joyce Yee speaking about experimental formats prompted me to develop a timeline for my portfolio. The timeline enabled me to explore the links and connections between the various elements. The timeline included the portfolio and the supplementary materials (but not the material on the two blogs!). With the help of Dr Cara Broadley, a colleague and design researcher with a specific interest in timelines, this became a figure in the essay part of the submission. The timeline creates a sort of order, intended to help readers (and examiners) navigate and understand the density and patterns in the portfolio. What is only partially represented is the sense of selection from a larger pile of materials – none of the other unused material is in anyway visible (as it is at least by implication in the cutting out an image from a magazine).
I conceptualise the process as collage because, unlike a conventional PhD, the materials in the portfolio are ‘givens’ and the task is to write an essay including:
(b) a review of the current literature;
RGU Academic Regulations 2020
(c) a discussion of the contribution and impact made by the works submitted to the general advancement of the field of study and research concerned; a common theme must be demonstrated; and
(d) a demonstration that the work constitutes an independent and original contribution to knowledge.
It is the demonstration of the “common theme” that is critical and which drives the idea of collage as a way of thinking about the PhD. All the other requirements can be met by a list, but the requirement for a “common theme” means composing something coherent out of the portfolio – a new meta-narrative.
Constraints abound: not all of the works listed on ORCID are peer reviewed and RGU’s Academic Regulations specify minimum and maximum pieces for the portfolio.
The pieces themselves are a bit like found objects. Re-reading something written 15 years ago is, at the very least, rediscovering something. One piece felt very dated – writing about Web 2.0 and co-creativity without knowing how it would be co-opted by populist politicians to promote alternative facts. Equally a piece ‘in development’ at the outset of the process became vital to the portfolio and needed to be published in a peer reviewed Journal to become eligible.
Much of the portfolio is made up of co-authored pieces, an aspect which is critical to my “common theme”, but it also means securing permission from all the co-authors. Luckily a couple of massively co-authored pieces (one with 183 authors!) didn’t form part of the portfolio.*
I thought my “common theme” was ‘participation, collaboration and interdisciplinarity’ but I had a moment, whilst out riding my bicycle during lockdown in early 2021, which made me rethink the argument in terms of what it means to ‘think ecologically’. The relationality that underpins participation, collaboration and interdisciplinarity is still important, but it needs to be balanced with an understanding of difference. This reconfiguration meant that the portfolio had a better mix and the “common theme” was more interesting (and provocative?). I presented this to my supervisors with great excitement. They didn’t get it. I went away and wrote it up. That generated a lot of questions. I had to dig in on the literature to ground this reframing. It came together with their help. They also insisted on specificity. Every ‘it’ or ‘this’ was replaced with a named object for the avoidance of doubt.
Tim Ingold, talking about artists researching, suggests that, unlike in some other disciplines where a hypothesis is established and then tested, we behave more like dogs in a field – our process of research might seem like random movement but it follows its own logic and reaches its conclusion. This helps when we think about collage as an analogy – configuring the materials and reconfiguring them until a compelling composition is resolved. Selecting from a large pile, sometimes using a rule e.g. all with yellow elements, or in this case all peer reviewed.
The value of this has, without question, been the need to reflect on, re-read, and make sense of a body of work which assembled in response to opportunities, projects, calls for proposals, and the way that working in the gig economy of the arts plays out. As I was writing I came across Iain Biggs’ essay on ‘ensemble practices’** published in the Routledge Handbook on Art in Public Places alongside an essay Anne Douglas, Dave Pritchard and I wrote on the work of the Harrisons (Helen Mayer Harrison 1927-2018 and Newton Harrisons b. 1932) in the context of global environment policy (which also includes a timeline). Working as a producer for artists’ works in public places, Iain Biggs provides a useful de-centring, and introduces the conception of ‘mutual accompaniment’ which is very sympathetic to the pedagogy of the arts and the work of a producer. This deepened the notions of participation, collaboration and interdisciplinarity, and complemented the conceptualisation of ‘joining a conversation’ which I found in the Harrisons’ work.
You can read the essay ‘Working together on ecological thinking: relationality and difference’ here https://doi.org/10.48526/rgu-wt-1712793. I’ll be posting the elements of the portfolio (abstracts with links) to this blog over the next few weeks. It will all be shared on Twitter.
* It is worth noting that in assembling the ‘package’ for examination, the essay is a separate pdf from the portfolio. This is because the portfolio needed to contain published pieces covered by copyright, so on the institutional repository you will find the essay and links to all the cited pieces, but they aren’t packaged together. If you want the whole package contact me.
** Biggs, I., 2020. Ensemble Practices. In: C. CARTIERE and L. TAN, eds. The Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Taylor & Francis (Routledge).
Failspace Presentation
Presentation given at the Failspace Conference, Queen Margaret University, Musselburgh, 7 December 2022
Introduction
In terms of the earlier discussion about self-disclosure I am he/him, short, pale skinned, grey haired and dressed in grey and black
I’m also aware as a middle-aged middle class white male I have a form of privilege which makes it easier to talk about failure. This is particularly manifest in a certain form of confidence in the ability to work with dominant narratives and construct versions of reality.
Story telling is at the heart of the problem with failure. Storytelling and neoliberalism.
Storytelling because we find it very difficult to end stories with failure and on some levels storytelling is our business. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, the pioneering artists working with ecology, ecologies, watersheds, planning and the global environmental crises had a saying ‘every place is the story of its own becoming’ ie that the way things become is organised by the story it is telling itself (Harrison and Harrison 2007).
Neoliberalism because it has constructed a culture of competition – competition is one of the pillars of neoliberalism alongside privatisation, deregulation, globalisation and free trade.
So the work this contribution draws on started with a ‘research’ residency at Gray’s School of Art when I was still a freelancer (at that point having been made redundant twice). I was asked to work with a group of staff to establish a ‘research theme’ – as part of that process I interviewed 8 members of staff. In preparing for the interviews I added a question about failure on instinct. Otherwise all the questions were things like ‘what does making mean to you?’ – too comfortable.
When the research residency ended the ‘research theme’ stalled and never developed in any useful way. The book we discussed drawing on the interviews never got written.
A couple of years later I got hired onto Gray’s as staff (other things I had worked on at Gray’s had been more successful). I was asked to manage Design in Action, a research project, and there was already a Postdoc in place. Gemma Kearney was from the Business School with an interest in Entrepreneurship. We ended up discussing failure and used the interview material I had collected as the basis for a paper (Fremantle and Kearney 2015).
The heart of the paper is the sequence of observations made by the lecturers, artists and designers.
Questioning of the concept of failure, specifically, considering if failure is an end-point or part of an overall trajectory
‘Maybe they’re just experiments. Failure, perhaps, becomes a bit more strict about it.’
‘There are pieces that I’ve made over the years that I’ve not been pleased with, but they’ve always been ‘not a failure’ because they’ve stepped onto something else.’
I always juxtapose this with the story about Cezanne. According to Renoir Cezanne sometimes came, ‘…away disappointed, returning without his canvas, which he’d leave on a rock or on the grass, at the mercy of the wind or the rain or the sun, swallowed by the earth…’
So the stories we tell ourselves of failure as process need to be juxtaposed with the actual judgements of outright failure.
The potential to learn from failure
‘If I saw myself in the light of all the failures that I’ve made – I’m much more of a failure than a success – but then, I’ve learned much more from those failures than the successes.’
‘There is a quote from Dieter Roth. He reached the point in his practice where he deemed everything he did was of equal value; nothing as such was a success and nothing was a failure. Ever since I came across that, I’ve been fascinated by that notion because, again, it almost, in a sense, is the antitheses of teaching and especially assessment; we’re making value judgements on whether things are successes or failures.’
“It’s important to exhibit your mistakes. Man is not perfect. Neither are his creations. I’ve given up using sour milk. Instead I use music. I sometimes fasten a tape recorder onto paintings or objects and have the music pour over the spectator/listener. This creates as certain effect: those who look at the art don’t realize how bad it is when they hear the music. For the music is even worse. Two bad things make one good thing.” (1978)
The role of failure in assessment
‘…so, if you can have a discussion whereby you say that failure is OK and that it might even be a good thing, then the student is only going to say “Yes, but what will that mean if I actually fail? I can’t fail my assessment.”… It is really, really difficult. I think the whole assessment process makes it difficult to have a proper discussion about failure’.
What we realised was that when it comes to assessment there is this slippage
“Yes, but what will that mean if I actually fail? I can’t fail my assessment.”
If I fail my assessment I’ll fail my course and then I’ll be a failure.
I was co-present for the Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities together with Elizabeth Reeder who leads the Creative Writing Masters at Glasgow.
We developed a presentation and I think it was the second time we delivered the session someone asked about Mental Health and Creative Failure.
Since then I’ve given a mental health warning at the start of each session. When I had to record the session so it could be delivered during lockdown and I had to break it up into 4×15 minute chunks I had to put the mental health warning at the beginning of each – that still oddly resonates in my mind.
But the point is critical – all the talk of using failures creatively is fine except when the failure has led someone into some sort of depression or anxiety, at which point offering them “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” is actually dangerous.
However discussing failure carefully and opening it out as a subject which we can engage with does seem to be useful – I’ve used live polling a couple of times now asking students at the beginning of a session and at the end what words they associate and the anxiety words reduce in frequency. I’m not a psychologist and it isn’t a controlled trial, but it is an area that I want to explore further because in particular of the link with assessment – the double bind which has the affect in the end of making students cautious – “Yes, but what will that mean if I actually fail? I can’t fail my assessment.” The response to this is to be risk averse.
I’m not sure exactly how the processes of assessment in education and evaluation in organisational systems are related.
Being here today has helped me realise that my concerns with failure are from the perspective of practitioners much more than from the perspectives of policymakers or funders, or from the perspective of arts admin – but then I teach in the Art School, not in our School of Creative and Cultural Business… I don’t come at it from the issue of participation and the challenge that the research team set themselves – of the wider issue of who participates in arts and culture.
I’m also not regularly involved in evaluation per se, though sometime research papers reporting on projects are also playing an advocacy role.
However I was part of a team commissioned by Creative Carbon Scotland to evaluate a EU funded project on the relationship between culture and climate adaptation (Fremantle and Mabon 2021). The other member of the team – Leslie Mabon – is an urban climate adaptation specialist. It was a highly experimental project – climate adaptation has been the ‘poor cousin’ of climate mitigation, and it was only at the point the project was happening that the importance of public engagement in adaptation was beginning to be recognised at the strategic level – certainly only a few years before it was seen as a matter for infrastructure and technocrats.
Leslie and I from the outset agreed that we could only do a formative evaluation because there were really no comparable projects against which to evaluate Cultural Adaptations.
What was interesting was that one of the partner organisations TILLT, which has a very long track record of doing placements of artists in industry and public bodies brought up the issue of failure and had reflected on it organisationally (Cultural Adaptations 2020).
There examples are all to do with project management, expectations and communications, and they had as an organisation clearly reflected on the failure and developed effective responses.
The model is that TILLT organises for an artist to work on a placement in a non-arts organisation – sometimes the non-arts organisation is commercial, looking for ‘out of the box’ thinking and they fund the placement. Sometimes the organisation is public or third sector and TILLT does the fundraising.
The artist placement is supported by a TILLT member of staff, originally called a project manager, but for a long time now called a ‘process’ manager.
What TILLT told us about their experiences of failures focused on in the first instance on the gap between the person in the organisation who thinks bringing an artist in is a good idea and the people in the organisation who are expected to benefit from the artist’s input.
Since then TILLT have always had ‘project groups’ including staff as well as management, artist, and process manager.
Another example fundamentally changed TILLT’s approach – for the first ten years the underpinning assumption was that the artist’s role was to disrupt in some way. This approach came to a head when an unnamed artist in an unnamed organisation did a whole date of activity around the theme of ‘death’.
The Director of TILLT told us:
“I had no idea of what the artist and the process manager was planning, and when I on the Monday after found some papers in the printer about experiences and thoughts about death I contacted the client’s contact person to ask how it all went. I got some very hard feedback from her and also very personal. She explained that they all had a very distasteful feeling after the lab, and that she, who was taking a plane the day after the lab, had a panic attack during the flight…
Their conclusion was:
“Today we want to create relations to the participants instead of uncertainty. If you have trust between the artist and the group you can have them do anything and really expanding the comfort zone. If you have no trust nothing will change.”
In terms of the evaluation we delivered it included failure as an issue.
Adaptation requires trust and a willingness to understand and work with the issue of failure.
Exploring what success might mean and embracing shared ambition are both critical parts of learning from different expertise. Criteria for success in adaptation are difficult because success is the avoidance of disruption and collapse.
In the conclusions the term we used was ‘success criteria’.
Turning to some conclusions…
It is interesting that for TILLT it was only in a failure of something that had been working well, that a new model was developed. They had been using a disruptive model for 10 years, presumably effectively. Someone pushed it too far and that resulted in an opportunity for development. They offered it as an example of failure, but they also offered it as an example of development and innovation. Of course they were able to tell us these examples with hindsight. The examples weren’t fresh.
In the end we need to be really careful because the criteria against which we judge failure become normative, are intended to be habitual, and are disciplining – and here I’m channelling Foucault (Conway 2021).
I think for me the areas of future work are around how addressing failure as a subject might actually reduce anxiety. But how we equally need to be willing to deal with discomfort.
And secondly around the way failure might also be something to do with not knowing, and how this might be a form of resistance to neoliberalism and the dominance of competition as an organising principle.
References
Conway, Will. 2021. ‘Going Astray’. RevoltingBodies (blog). 13 December 2021. https://revoltingbodies.com/2021/12/13/going-astray/.
Cultural Adaptations. 2020. ‘Learning from Failure in Experimental Projects’. Cultural Adaptations. 23 January 2020. https://www.culturaladaptations.com/resources/learning-from-failure-in-experimental-projects/.
Fremantle, Chris, and Gemma Kearney. 2015. ‘Owning Failure: Insights Into the Perceptions and Understandings of Art Educators’. International Journal of Art & Design Education 34 (3): 309–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12083.
Fremantle, Chris, and Leslie Mabon. 2021. ‘Cultural Adaptations Evaluation Report’. Edinburgh: Creative Carbon Scotland. https://doi.org/10.48526/rgu-wt-1513437.
Harrison, Helen Mayer, and Newton Harrison. 2007. ‘Public Culture and Sustainable Practices: Peninsula Europe from an Ecodiversity Perspective, Posing Questions to Complexity Scientists’. Structure and Dynamics: EJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9hj3s753.
ecoartscotland library as bing
‘ecoartscotland library as bing’ will be included in the Staff Outing II exhibition of works by Gray’s School of Art Fine Art staff at LookAgain Project Space, Aberdeen
A colleague challenged me, suggesting that imagining the ecoartscotland library as a bing – a spoil heap of waste from an industrial process – is anti-intellectual.
The ‘ecoartscotland library as bing’ series of works explores the claim of British conceptual artist John Latham (1921-2006) that education can produce waste in the same way as other industries. Latham names certain forms of education as the ‘Mental Furniture Industry’. At the time the MFI chain in Britain supplied flat pack furniture. Latham proposed that the Mental Furniture Industry has produced three centuries of undetected tipping.
‘ecoartscotland library’ as bing is firstly an exploration of the materiality and aesthetic. The bings, defined as waste, have over time become sites of significant biodiversity – waste can support new lifewebs (see Barbra Harvie’s report). This provoked me to question how ecological thinking can lead to a healthier web of life. What sort of actual relationship is there between the ecoartscotland library and the web of life? What forms of understanding can the library create? Are some of them material? Aesthetic? We value relationality, but we also need to value difference. Conceiving of the ecoartscotland library as a bing is a way to experience it as a ‘strange stranger’ (in Tim Morton’s sense). It is not anti-intellectual, but rather an inversion of values to provoke an exploration of relationality and difference.
Staff Outing II is open from 15th October – 20th November 2022.
What art have I seen? Stories Real and Imagined, Research and Practice, OMOS
Sam Ainsley’s exploration of relations, body to world, micro to macro, pattern to image… One of the really important figures in Scottish art as artist, teacher and leader.
The exhibition resulting from RSA Residency Awards:
Victoria Clare Bernie – exploring an 18thCentury donation of three works by a woman artist whose biography was unknown
Samantha Clark’s ambient works on water and space
Joel Dixon’s experimental photography
Flore Gardner’s and Robert Powell’s variously quirky works
MV Brown’s snapshots queering and challenging our understanding of countryside, nircely complemented by the OMOS installation of video and photography taking drag into the Scottish landscape.
Contribution to TNoC’s Roundtable
Artists and scientists that co-create regenerative projects in cities? Yes, please. But how?
Honoured to be able to contribute along side a great group of people all working on regenerative approaches all over the world.
My contribution to The Nature of Cities Roundtable on co-creating regenerative projects in cities focuses on an approach to evaluation that works across arts, culture, science and environmental management. Based on work done by Laura Meagher, Catherine Lyall and Sandra Nutley and further developed with input from Dave Edwards, the framework draws attention to conceptual shifts, capacity building, instrumental impacts, attitudinal shifts and enduring connectivity. It is focused by the challenges and impacts of working across different ways of knowing and ways of working.
The whole round table is great with stimulating and informative perspectives from all sorts of different contexts.
Review for Climate Cultures: The Raven’s Nest by Sarah Thomas
Mark Goldthorpe very kindly asked me to do a review for Climate Cultures. It was fascinating to review Sarah Thomas’ The Raven’s Nest and to explore the inter relation between a great book and a PhD done in combination.
In The Raven’s Nest Sarah Thomas tells us a story of falling in love, moving to another culture and learning its ways. Many things have agency in the book, including all sorts of other living things as well as landscapes and even buildings. Daylight too is an actor. Nested within the book is a photo essay, a visual journey parallel to and intersecting with the words.
What art have I seen? In the eddy of the stream
Cooking Sections and Sakiya’s exhibition at Inverleith House in the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh is as good an example of putting the wellbeing of the web if life first – the challenge Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (1932-2022) set themeselves in the early 70s and which is now clearly the challenge for all of us.
Cooking Sections “is a practice that examines the systems that organise the world through food, and how food can be used to explore, trace and advance climate justice.” Sakiya “is an academy, a residency programme, a research hub, and a farm located in Ein Qiniya, a small agricultural village seven kilometres west of Ramallah, in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory… By grafting local traditions of self-sufficiency onto contemporary art and ecological practices, Sakiya seeks to create new narratives around relationships to land, knowledge-production, and commoning.” (Sakiya are also working with Arts Catalyst and have a residency opportunity at the moment.)
Cooking Sections have been working in Scotland and in particular on the Isle of Skye for some years now – Emma Nicolson first worked with them on the Climavore project when she was the Director of Atlas, and she has curated this in her role of Head of Creative Programmes for the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh. This enduring connection is significant.
The exhibition “…draws attention to the breakdown of ecosystems through the removal of plants and the ensuing long-term harm to people, communities, and other species.”
There is an important set of proposals around commoning which directly relate to Newton Harrison’s On the Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland. Where that work proposes understanding the soil, water, air and forests of Scotland as commons that we are dependent upon and asks for a ‘commons of mind’ to commit to putting back more than we take out, the proposals around commons in this exhibition include that the whole intertidal zone of Scotland should be established as a commons and that a Scottish Office for Commoning should be established. This proposal needs published as a full page pull out in the Highland Free Press or another widely distributed publication.
This forms one part of a series of installations focusing on salmon and forests, mussels and muscles, oysters and terrazzo. Each reveals an aspect of an ecology and a different way of imagining exchange and reuse rather than extraction. Some like the work on seaweeds and shellfish is being developed to a functional scale to offer alternatives to industrial fish farming which is destroying coastal waters in the Highlands.
Deborah Bird Rose talks about the two violences of colonialism – the violence to people and the violence to the environment. Sakiya’s installation focuses on the violence to the environment done by British colonial rule of Palestine even before the imposition of the state of Israel. The British colonial administration ruled that a large number of culturally significant plants were weeds to be exterminated. The main display is of botanical specimens of 33 plants, their cultural significance and their ecological role. Another remarkable creation in the exhibition is a carved wood frieze of these plants, reminiscent of a plaster cornice. Throughout Inverleith House we can hear singing. The installation in the final room echoes through the whole space, lamenting ecological and cultural loss.
In the eddy of the stream judiciously uses whimsical and suprising installations as well as scientific data (highlighting what we know as well as what we don’t know) and beautifully crafted elements – these works hold the challenging evidence of human ignorance of and violence to ecosystems in a way that draws us into careful attention through an experience that is rich and rewarding.
What art have I seen? Köln Skulpturen Park
Köln Skulpturen Park makes evident several key moves used by sculptors creating outdoor works
- Reflection – we have an Anish Kapoor mirrored disc, a Dan Graham pavilion and a Tom Burr work of black reflective panels
- Fairy tales – two of the pieces added to the collection recently (video here) evoke traditions and archetypes Mary Bauermeister’s arrangement of tree stump seats into a space for a different way of spending time in nature and Guan Xaio’s Old Eggs and the Catcher which seems to allude to folk stories
- Repurposing – Dane Mitchell’s Post Hoc, two fir tree mobile phone masts, take a piece of infrastructure and repurpose it to tell a different story, in this case of loss.
- Buildings – the focal point of the park is Suo Fujimoto‘s white concrete structure. The ‘building’ surrounds a tree. The act of looking in and looking out both create frames with which to appreciate the leafy environment. Of course, much like the Farnsworth House, you need a certain level of privilege to appreciate the views without being concerned about the functionality of the building.
Mies van der Röhe said
When one looks at Nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it takes on a deeper significance than when one stands outside. More of Nature is thus expressed – it becomes part of a greater whole.
Fujimoto’s piece is the sculptural version, framing and organising nature. It even has works installed in and on it.
Lois Weinberger‘s intervention made a few years ago is one of the more radical ‘pieces’. Very much in contrast with the formality of much of the work (di Suvero, even Fischli and Weiss), his trench, in reality a bulldozer driven in a straight line for 100m cutting through paths and leaving spoil heap at the end of the line, offers a different aesthetic. Related to Robert Smithson’s various experiments with entropic processes, and with Gordon Matta-Clark’s cuts, but this is negentropic – it is focused by emergence, its aesthetic is what happens when we stop controlling nature. Its counterpoint is Karin Sander‘s piece of plastic grass inserted into the equally managed grass.
The curatorial approach is in some respects more radical than some of the artists’ works. As I understand it each new exhibition, comprising some temporary works and some new permanent installations, is focused by a previous work. This year’s exhibition refers back to the Weinberger’s piece. This iterative accumulative approach forms a nice counterpoint to novelty as a curatorial approach.
What art have I seen? Nothing’s Guaranteed, Ecologies of Displacement, Balance
‘Nothing’s Guaranteed : Exhibition of Bosno-Futurism‘ curated by my colleague Jon Blackwood. Artists: Igor Bošnjak, Mladen Bundalo, Lana Čmajčanin, Lala Raščić, Saša Tatić, Maja Zećo.
‘Ecologies of Displacement’ curated by Sana Bilgrami, featuring Michele Marcoux and Farrukh Addnan
‘Balance’ works by Iain Patterson
All at Summerhall.
What art have I seen? We are Compost
We are Compost at the Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, part of the programme put together for the World Congress of Soil Science.
The exhibition features the first UK showing of Asad Raza’s work Absorption, in which cultivators create and nurture 60 tonnes of artificial soil created from recycled and other waste materials. This neosoil is then offered freely to visitors to use for their own domestic and community projects. Gaia Glossary, a research installation curated by Alexandra Toland and Lea Wittich brings together literature, resources, tools and objects encouraging a composting of knowledge into the soil for the growth of new ideas. Finally, Eating the Ancestors, is an interactive installation by artist Désirée Coral following her Colonial Seeds research with the Glasgow Seed Library, focusing on what we inherited from generations past to further understand what can be generated from what already exists and what we can do for the collective WE.
Over the week being an interpreter for Newton Harrison’s On the Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland, also had a chance to check out documentation of Soil and Soul, a project by Propagate across seven communities in Glasgow. This really sets a standard for engagement by a major international environment conference – very different from the usual ‘fly in fly out’. The team from Propagate working with the British Society of Soil Scientists engaged and connected with communities across Glasgow on the importance of soil, making compost, seed bombing, etc.
Newton Harrison’s On the Deep Wealth was really well received by the Congress attendees. The responded to the maps and the text often reading the whole work. Colin Campbell, Chief Executive of the James Hutton Institute, interviewed Newton in advance of the Congress and that recording plus more information on the work is available on The Barn’s website.
What art have I seen? Katie Paterson’s Requiem
At the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.
Brilliant evocation of time and existence. If as David Antin said,
The idea of an ecological art is the idea of an art that articulates dependencies, its own condition for existence or those of the world.
ANTIN, D., 1970. Art + Ecology. ArtNews.
This is surely a genuinely ecological work, drawn out beautifully in Zalazewisz’s accompanying notes.
It also speaks to changes of state – each small vessel is only able to represent a facet of the materiality of time because of the technoscientific processes of isolation, but what is fragmented must eventually come back together, and so it does. Robert Smithson would have told the story of this work through the idea of entropy. The end result, much like the final end of the solar system in billions of years is a bowl of mixed up dust, all the energy dissapated.
In Your Hands – Fruit Routes at Loughborough
I was invited to the celebration of 10 years of the Fruit Routes project at the University of Loughborough. Anne-Marie Culhane, artist, and Marsha Meskimmon, Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough, invited me to contribute a short presentation. The morning was spent discussing Fruit Routes, its development and its future. The afternoon was spent visiting the orchards and in more informal conversations. The event was the launch of the Fruit Routes Charter, the basis for it going on.
I was keen to travel and participate because this is one of several durational artist-led projects concerning orchards and foraging. Others include the current The Far Orchard project at The Barn in Aberdeenshire, Dundee Urban Orchard developed by Jonathan Baxter and Sarah Gittins, the work of Common Ground’s Save our Orchards, and Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison’s Portable Orchard Survival Piece #5 originally made in 1972 and remade several times since. This is by no means a comprehensive list of artists projects related to orchards, fruit and foraging.
The Fruit Routes Charter, launched at the event, is focused on setting out the basis for the continuation of Fruit Routes, moving beyond being a project. It highlights the permaculture principles underpinning Anne-Marie Culhane’s approach. Through highlighting patterns of events (principally planting and harvesting) and approaches to organising (ensuring a warm welcome for inhabitants of Loughborough as well as students whose first language might not be English). It highlights principles for foraging as well as for publicising. The Charter is intended to inform the steering committee responsible for the ongoing development of Fruit Routes. It might inform a lot of thinking about the relationship of art to life.
My presentation follows:
My colleague Anne Douglas and I are currently working on a book on the early works of the pioneering artists Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. Helen died in 2018 and Newton carries on. We are showing his work, On The Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland at the World Congress of Soil Science this summer, hopefully including a work that they started doing in 1970 and have made again several times.
This work is called Making Earth. According to Newton Harrison it takes 8-12 weeks and involves sewage, river loam, worms, and garden waste. Newton is clear that the reason for doing this work, and the reason they’ve done the work several times for different exhibitions, is that it is incredibly easy to destroy soil and very hard work to make it.
As we know our lives are dependent on soil – I expect you all read George Monbiot’s article on the secret world beneath our feet in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago – if not it is worth checking out.
So my title for today comes from an article by David Antin – he said in a review in 1970,
The idea of an ecological art is the idea of an art that articulates dependencies, its own condition for existence or those of the world.
ANTIN, D., 1970. Art + Ecology. ArtNews.
In terms of art practices that are concerned with ecology there are several common characteristics
- a focus on systems, rather than objects (Brian Eno “Art is not an object, but a trigger for experience”),
- learning through experience and in particular sensory place based experience,
- collaboration, participation and interdisciplinarity.
I find Gert Biesta’s phrase really valuable too.
…in the world without occupying the centre of the world.
BIESTA, G., 2017. Letting Art Teach: Art Education ‘After’ Joseph Beuys. Arnhem: ArtEZ Press.
But Antin’s articulation focusing on dependencies is a useful heuristic. I like his ‘its own condition for existence’ ie that the work’s very existence reveals dependencies, or that the work reveals dependencies in the world.
We might be more used to hearing the word ‘interdependency’ and I’m not offering dependency as an alternative – Isabelle Stengers, the Belgian philosopher of science and colleague of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, usefully says
Nor should the intertwining interdependencies be confused with a network of interlinking dependences. It is easy to understand why, without water or light, a plant dies. This fits the definition of ‘dependence’. But interdependence implies a way of being sensitive that is a form of venture.
STENGERS, I., 2020. The Earth Won’t Let Itself Be Watched. In: B. LATOUR and P. WEIBEL, eds. Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. pp. 228–235.
Interdependence implies a way of being sensitive. But dependence is dependence for life. The writing Anne Douglas and I are doing on the Harrisons focuses on how they developed a practice and ‘committed to doing no work that did not attend to the wellbeing of the lifeweb’.
David Antin was a colleague of their at the University of California San Diego.
Antin’s articulation is useful because it means that we can see Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ work in the Sanitation Department of New York City is clearly an ecological art. Her first project as artist in residence in the Sanitation Department was called Touch Sanitation. Over a period of about 11 months she travelled across NY City meeting all 8500 sanitation workers saying to each of them “Thank you for keeping New York City alive”
Her Manifesto of Maintenance Art asks
After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?
UKELES, M.L., KWON, M. and MOLESWORTH, H., 1997. Maintenance Art Activity (1973) Artist Project: Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Documents, 10, pp. 5–22.
I almost don’t need to highlight how Fruit Routes articulates dependency as well as interdependence, how its own condition for existence or those of the world.
I’m currently working with Prof Dee Heddon on one of the Research projects with the Future of UK Treescapes programme and amongst other things we are developing a set of case studies around artists working with treescapes (forests, woods, trees). One of the things that Dee has highlighted as becoming apparent is the importance of maintenance arrangements – for example Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks in Kassel, Agnes Denes’ Tree Mountain in Finland. These works have lifespans beyond the human and certainly beyond the artist – they exist as art but also as forestry (urban and otherwise).
The projects are dependent on care and maintenance, replacement of dead trees, etc, as well as in the case of orchards, use – we are dependent on them, and they are dependent on us in varying ways.
But the orchards also evidence the dependencies of the world. I work at a campus University and we still have swathes of mown grass. We are University as golf course. Our campus doesn’t remind us of the ongoing processes of life. It doesn’t attract insects and it isn’t made untidy by fruit dropping to the ground. Infact it is always tidy.
I want to end by reading a meditation by TJ Shin I found recently. It’s published in a magazine devoted euphemistically to those things we call ‘facilities’ otherwise known as toilets.
Notes from the event
The Fruit Routes initiative is built on principles of women’s leadership and indigenous ways of knowing. A number of key thinkers were cited including Rachel Carson, Val Plumwood, Vandana Shiva, Greta Gaard, Felix Guattari and Lorraine Code. Although Loughborough might be described as focused on technology, Fruit Routes is not a top down initiative, and it recognises that the challenges we face at a planetary scale require local action. Fruit Routes is focused by place, identity, materiality and history, and thinks in multi-scalar terms – it is specific in its place and relates to other edible locality (city, town, campus, etc) as well as addressing national, continental and global challenges of food and justice. It seeks to address what Amitav Ghosh calls the ‘crisis of the imagination’ in his key book The Great Derangement.
Fruit Routes was described in terms of ‘thinking the land’, recognising that trees have been in the landscape of Loughborough for much longer than the University. Fruit Routes also provides a different time-cycle to the academic. The Harvest Festival happens in the autumn. It acts as a focus for Architecture School’s Summer School providing a brief for an apple store. Planting happens in the winter and spring.
Fruit Routes has had a documented impact on the mental health of students, and has an alumni community of its own. It creates connections between the University and the Town, particularly with the annual Harvest festival, as well as engaging teams within the University such as Gardening and Security.
Fruit Routes has had to find space within the Campus and it has focused on ‘edge’ spaces so as to ensure it didn’t conflict with developments. It has addressed a number of University strategies and priorities including Biodiversity for Business, creating a place to meet between disciplines, offering challenges and also sharing. It enables intergenerational learning.
Exhibiting: Come Together 2022
Had two works in Come Together 2022 at the Arkade Gallery in the Anatomy Rooms in Aberdeen. Brilliantly curated, the exhibition included works from local and international artists, all in some way connected to collage. Fabulous work by former students, colleagues and artists from other parts of the world, totally new to me.
My two pieces arose from the problem of what to do with life study drawings that I did mostly at a class in Battersea in the early 1990s. I’ve been carrying them around for 30 years from place to place. Destruction in art and the process of ripping into a stack of drawings generates new unexpected configurations.
What art have I seen? The Rooted Sea: Halophytic Futures
Sonia Mehra Chawla’s exhibition, one of the outcomes of 3 years’ work in Scotland. I remember going to the marine research station in Aberdeen to hear a talk at the beginning of the process.
What art have I seen? lightly, tendrils
Annalee Davis and Amanda Thomson’s exhibition at CCA Glasgow.
What art have I seen? The Circle of a Square and The Effect of a Butterfly
Henrik Håkansson’s exhibition with The Modern Institute.
Strange exhibition including video of butterflies flying in Håkansson’s garden filmed using a very high speed camera. The huge structure holding the not very large screens is a curious installation. The wall-based works use historic Joseph Albers’ prints composed with butterflies captures and preserved by Håkansson as a young man. Donald Judd is also present in another wall based element.
I remember Håkansson’s piece in Radical Nature – a tree tipped over on its side. In the end whilst Håkansson engages with living things in different ways, it doesn’t feel like he draws attention to interdependence (other than perhaps ironically). As David Antin put it,
“The idea of an ecological art is the idea of an art that articulates dependencies, its own condition for existence or those of the world” (David Antin, ArtNews Nov. 1970 p. 90).
What art have I seen? Fluctuations in Elliptical Form
James Hugonin at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh. Had the good fortune to sit and talk with James in the gallery with his works. We discussed the pattern, the system and the hand. He mention that someone has just written about his work in relation to AI. We talked about Sol Lewitt and in particular Sentence 28
Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.
Sol Lewitt Sentences on Conceptual Art 1969
We discussed the propositional (ie not deterministic) character of this sentence in relation to the role of the hand, including in Lewitt’s wall drawings.
Now I’m discovering the work of Julius Eastman.
What art have I seen? Women’s Work
Maria Macavana’s exhibition, Women’s Work, comprising work developed during the pandemic with healthcare workers. It explores the relationship between women who have worked within the NHS and the tools that are important to them to deliver their work.
Two rooms comprised drawings, two with works made or contributed by people working in mental health and wellbeing – Cristina Logan, NHSCT Governance Lead Radiographer; Dr Lindsey Macleod, Independent Clinical Psychologist; Kasia Zych Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist; Angela Bialek Art Therapist; and Sarah McLean Social Worker.
Macavana’s drawings are captioned with texts explaining their significance to these women.
Macavana has been working in dialogue with Dr Macleod for a considerable period and this extends the work. It also links with work Macavana has done in Sri Lanka with craftswomen working with coir rope and palm leaf cocoons.
Macavana’s work, careful and subtle, evokes other women’s work, both physical and caring. It is based on conversations over long periods. It pays deep respect to these care workers with its care.
NSAIS Commission Courtyards (Gabbro)
Extended Deadline 17 January 2022
£50,000 excluding VAT
This commission addresses a key challenge at the heart of the ethos of Foxgrove (NSAIS): creating an empathetically designed environment that balances safety and therapy. We are looking for a designer/maker individual or team to design, fabricate, test and deliver modular units comprising planters, seating (and tables) for the Horticultural Courtyard and the Therapy Courtyard. The designer/maker will work closely with One Environments, Project Landscape Architect, to input into the overall layout, as well as surfaces, planting, lighting, and graphics/signage. The commission will need to contribute to the ethos and language of biophilic and therapeutic design throughout Foxgrove (NSAIS). Careful consideration will need to be taken with the choice of material and the design in order to meet the highest standards of safety and robustness.
What art have I seen? Dislocations
Group exhibition at the Hunterian Art Gallery Glasgow.
“Dislocations was developed in dialogue with The Hunterian’s online exhibition Old Ways New Roads which details the production of Scottish landscape through military, touristic and Romantic representations in the 18th and 19th centuries. Dislocations traces the contestation and revision of such canonical representations.”
Went with Gill and Aaron Ellison, currently on an international fellowship at St Andrews. Aaron was very struck by the relationship between Jade Montserrat and Webb-Ellis’ Peat and JWM Turner’s Peat Bog, Scotland.
NSAIS Commission Dividing Wall (Delta)
First Commission for NHS Ayrshire & Arran‘s new Foxgrove National Secure Adolescent Inpatient Service.
How do you use a wall to provide security but also contribute to a therapeutic environment?
We are looking for a designer/maker individual or team to develop and deliver a solution for a dividing wall required for safety separating the main dining space from the main living space. The wall should enhance safety and security within the facility but also enhance the therapeutic milieu of the facility, providing a feature which inspires confidence in the young people and pride in the staff group.
You will have:
• experience of collaborating with Project Architects
• track record of work for justice, education, or health/wellbeing
• engagement-focused practice
• delivered high quality integrated elements on time and to budget
Foxgrove, the National Secure Inpatient Adolescent Service (NSAIS) will provide support, education and rehabilitation for young people with mental health disorders where the risk of harm to others or themselves is beyond what can be provided by other mental health services.
Total budget £40,000 exc VAT
Deadline 13 December 2021
Full brief here
What art have I seen? Code Red and Forever Changes
Peter Kennard’s raging photocollages railing against oil and extractivism, pollution, nuclear weapons.
Hydro infrastructure juxtaposed with fabric covered glaciers.
Tim Collins reckoned this was the best of the exhibitions on during the Climate Talks.
Culture for Adaptation, Adaptation for Culture – New Report
Adaptation to climate breakdown has largely focused on infrastructure and strategy, aiming to secure resources and political priority. Recently both the European Union and the US National Academy of Sciences have published reports which highlight the need to co-create with inhabitants to achieve successful adaptation.
Leslie Mabon and I were the Robert Gordon University team appointed to evaluate the ‘Cultural Adaptations‘ project led by Creative Carbon Scotland. ‘Cultural Adaptations’ involved four Cities’ Sustainability teams and cultural organisations sharing expertise – expertise on adaptation needed by cultural organisations, and expertise on co-creative approaches needed by adaptation professionals.
We have summarised some key points in this piece for Yale Climate Connections which also links to the full report.
What art have I seen? The World’s Edge
Thomas Joshua Cooper’s exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery is of his emptiness and extremity works.
Over the course of the last three decades, the American-born photographer has travelled around the globe, making photographs of the most extreme points and locations surrounding the Atlantic Ocean.
The result is an episodic journey that covers five continents: Europe, Africa, North America, South America and Antarctica. Cooper has set foot on uncharted land masses through his work, contributing to cartography and earning him naming rights of previously unknown islands and archipelagos. The only artist to have ever made photographs of the two poles, Cooper refers to this body of work as The World’s Edge — The Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity.
The photographer, who was born in California but who has lived in Scotland for many years, having founded Glasgow School of Art’s Fine Art Photography Department in 1982, first exhibited The World’s Edge at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His first monographic exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland is based upon that presentation, with 35 pictures featuring i
Fascinating because Cooper mostly looks down to capture the edge of the land and the sea. The long exposures mean that the land, the rocks are crisp, whilst the sea is blurred, in motion, of a different visual quality. But curiously there is a sameness to the images, largely without human features. The extreme edge of land and sea isn’t made characterful as in tourist photography. The Carribean and the North most Scottish Isles are similar. Perhaps you can tell the colder places from the warmer. For a project about travel there is no touristic characterisation. The three walls of polar works, really mostly white with some revealed rock texture, are exquisite and meditative in a particular way.
What art have I seen? A Portrait Without Likeness
Alison Watt’s new body of work on show at Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Hot off the easel. All based on Allan Ramsay portraits of women. All details. I love the cabbages but they are slightly flat? The paintings of books channel Michael Craig Martin? The lace is a-maz-ing. Conceptually and curatorial rigorous.
What art have I seen? In Relation to Linum
Christine Borland’s exhibition at Climate House, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh
What art have I seen? The Glasgow Girls & Boys
At the new Art Gallery in Kirkcudbright.
Interesting to discover the multi-generational story as well as links to Arran, France and other places.
Working with Allan Kaprow
Audiences and and… pt8
PhDs by Public Output/ Published Work
I’m currently undertaking a PhD by Public Output (also known as a PhD by Published Work) through Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University (RGU). I’m a part-time member of staff – Research Fellow and Lecturer. I’ve been associated with On The Edge and Research at Gray’s for 20 years, in various capacities (Director of Partner Organisation, Member of Project Steering Group, Contracted Research Assistant, Research Resident, Co-Investigator on Projects).
A PhD by Public Output collects a selection of previous research (publications and projects) and frames the overarching enquiry, identifying the significance, originality and rigor of the contributions.
In summary, RGU takes the view that a completed PhD should provide material sufficient for 4 journal articles, and therefore if you have 4 peer reviewed journal articles all focused on a common theme, you can write a 10,000 word thesis which demonstrates the overall contribution and submit this along with the outputs. (Each institution will have its own regulations.)
Gray’s School of Art, RGU, has played a notable role in particular in supporting established practitioners to undertake practice-led doctoral research.* There are fewer examples of Practice-led PhDs by Public Output. I’ve identified four examples including one from Gray’s:
- Suzanne Lacy, 2013. Imperfect Art: Working in Public A Case Study of the Oakland Projects (1991-2001).
- Minty Donald, 2014. Exploring human/environment interdependencies through critical spatial practice.
- Ross Sinclair, 2016. Ross Sinclair: 20 Years of Real Life.
- Nicola Triscott, 2017. Art and Intervention in the Stewardship of the Planetary Commons: Towards a Curatorial Model of Co-inquiry.
Full References including links are below.
Before I unpack these I should say that Prof Emeritus Anne Douglas always draws attention to key artists’ writings which demonstrate Practice-led Research before it was an institutionalised process (e.g. Cage, Kaprow, Bernstein, Harrisons, Denes) and Anne’s essays on Practice-led are worth reading too (I’ll do a separate blog on that subject).
Suzanne Lacy
Lacy’s thesis is a reflection on a series of projects, the Oakland Projects, undertaken in collaboration with other artists, large numbers of participants, as well as with a range of institutional partners in Oakland California over 10 years. The thesis incorporates extensive description and discussion of the projects as well as two DVDs of video and TV. Lacy’s text broadly falls into three sections:
- methodology,
- description and reflection on the Oakland Projects,
- discussion of art and pedagogy.
The description and reflection of the projects comprises 110 pages of the 190 pages of the document. The Oakland Projects, whilst taking place in public, are not written up and reflected on elsewhere by the artist. Rather her contention is that the projects constitute arts-based research in and of themselves, not through exegesis or discrete academic texts.
Lacy’s PhD by Public Output therefore constitutes a major reflection on a body of work and the process which supported it, the Working in Public Seminars (2006-08), is an important aspect of methodology, if unusual. Prof Anne Douglas was Lacy’s Supervisor and proposed the seminars as part of the methodology (see https://ontheedgeresearch.org/working-in-public/ for full details).
The seminars, enabled by support from Creative Scotland, opened up reflection and interrogation of a key body of work by an internationally recognised artist. The programme included public events as well as a programme of seminars for a selected group of established practitioners based in Scotland. Lacy was able to engage in deep reflection, in particular with the group, on 10 years of work in one community. The focus of this reflection is captured in the titles of the three events: ‘aesthetics and ethics’, ‘representation and power’, ‘quality and imperfection’.
Lacy had previously published Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (1994), a collection of essays by key practitioners, and has published in Journals as well. One essay in Mapping the Terrain in particular, Allan Kaprow’s piece discussing Project Other Ways is referred to extensively. This too is a personal reflection by an artist on a work that confounds simple analysis as either art or pedagogy – a fundamental theme for Lacy.
In her thesis Lacy describes her methodology as three fold:
- review all the material associated with the Oakland Projects (20 boxes plus a considerable body of video and TV material)
- interview 40 individuals involved with the projects
- present this material as part of the Working in Public Seminars
Lacy describes her contribution in the following terms,
“Although in the last chapter I suggest a few directions for assessing the success or failure of this work as social action and the perfection or imperfection of it as art, I think the major contribution I can make here is curatorial, assembling some of the multiple narratives and, through interviews, multiple voices of the project. (Perhaps because early in my education I was trained in science, I realize that an “evaluation” from my vantage point would be extremely flawed in terms of any “truth” it might reveal, considering my inherent bias as one of the primary makers.)”
(Lacy, 2013, p. 5)
Lacy focuses in particular on the importance of ‘Building a Critical Position for the Artist’s Voice’, saying “…it is the practice, however, that remains fundamental to my analysis – what I know from what I have learnt while making art.” (Lacy, 2013, p. 13).
Lacy highlights a key example of the multi-vocal approach, as demonstrated by Americans for the Arts’ Animating Democracy Initiative and the Critical Perspectives Project. This involved groups of writers reflecting on civic projects from differing perspectives. Lacy highlights others who engaged with the Oakland Projects in depth, as well as her several roles: “…as one of the creators of the artwork, as a curator and recorder of the narratives, and, through writing it down, as contributor to the discourse in the field.” (Lacy, 2013, p. 17). She goes on to ask, “What is inside the practice that only the practitioner can articulate?” (Lacy, 2013, p.18).
Turning to the third section on art and pedagogy, pedagogy is intimately linked with public practice, particularly through the concept of ‘public pedagogy’. For Lacy this is the key intersection that she is concerned with and seeks to navigate. Lacy’s practice is fundamentally concerned with forms of representation, particularly in the media, starting with the invisibility of rape and in various works using this as a lens with which to explore questions of equity and exclusion. She identifies the development of feminist pedagogies and situates her practice within this story, articulating her concerns with class and race, and the emergence of ideas of intersectionality.
This in turn correlates with Lacy’s concern for the development of the ‘Artist’s Voice’. She quotes Arlene Raven saying “Our processes prefigured the emerging public art practices today that move fluidly among criticism, theory, art making and activism.” (Lacy, 2013, p. 145). She has previously articulated her multiple roles within the one dissertation (art maker, curator of multiple perspectives, and narrator).
The form of theorising is distinct, drawing on personal engagement with the emergence of feminist art practices and thinking amongst a community of which Lacy was a part. Her citation is often based on direct engagement with the authors. She particularly highlights Raven’s articulation of the ways that feminist attention to contextual social and political events in turn required nuanced ethical thinking on the role of this reconstituted artist in the public sphere. Lacy discusses her own underpinning engagement with questions of equity in multiple contexts.
Having established the context she turns to her argument for arts-based research (or as she calls it ‘Research as an Art Practice’). The first element of her argument focuses on her own question led approach, and the way that expands as she engages with others (in the Oakland Projects, youth specifically) to be a shared set of questions.
Lacy explores the idea of ‘curriculum’ in her expanded (public) pedagogy, highlighting five areas within the overall framework of the Oakland Projects. This highlights the complexity of the Oakland Projects but also the interweaving of multiple aspects – modalities, contexts, participants and audiences – in the media, in formal and informal sites of learning, in youth development and in elements more conventionally recognisable as ‘art’.
Lacy in following sections unpacks both aesthetics and ethics in relation to the Oakland Projects, including where these can come into conflict. In particular Lacy discusses the role of institutions as partners in these projects. She summarises seven key practices adopted within the projects. These are drawn from good practice in youth work and adapted to the circumstances that include large scale public performance, but are also in place to ensure that the projects are not co-opted by partners.
Lacy’s conclusion highlights two contributions. One focused the value and significance of the voice of the artist, and the second on the understanding of feminist art and pedagogy, particularly public pedagogy. She identifies areas for further work and also returns to Kaprow, and in particular his interest in ambiguity, and the way the Oakland Projects reveal the tension between aesthetics and ethics played out in works that have a fundamental public pedagogical character.
Other examples
The three other examples, Minty Donald (external supervisor for my PhD), Ross Sinclair, and Nicola Triscott, all offer different lessons.
Minty Donald’s thesis (2014) is supported by 3 Journal Articles and 1 Book Chapter which between them address two discrete projects, of which extensive documentation is supplied. The focus of the thesis is the development of practice-led approaches to critical spatial practice, particularly in the context of performance and increasingly engaging with a New Materialist conception of agency.
The focus of the framing essay is on the overarching principles Donald identifies in the exemplified practice concerned with the tension between the ways space, place and site carry meaning and embody histories, but are also fluid. The theoretical frame has several dimensions:
- a concern with context bringing together post-structuralist writing (Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre) with public art and site specific theorising (e.g. Rendell, from whom she takes the conceptualisation of critical spatial practice) and with de-colonial literatures (e.g. Massey).
- a concern with heritage and in particular the relationship between heritage and performance. A key concept for Donald is nostalgia and how this is understood.
- New Materialism (eg Bennett). This dimension is identified as the emergent focus within the practice.
It is interesting to note that, possibly because this is a PhD by Published Work, the range of theory highlighted is broad. The clear identification of the different dimensions is helpful.
In the context of practice-led research, the theoretical context is critical, as is the historical context – the precedents and significant peer and predecessor practices. Donald highlights her practice as a scenographer and unpacks how that informs her practice in the works under consideration in terms of scenography specifically and the wider context of issues within performance. Donald links aspects of scenography with New Materialism. She links the concerns in performance with practices in public art (Wodiczko, Alys, Starling), creating a clearly articulated territory for her practice.
Donald discusses her understanding of practice as research drawing on a range of literature. She draws out arguments for “…a persistent concern for those engaged in practice-as-research: the relationship between praxis and discursive reflection on, or exegesis of, that praxis.” (Donald, 2014, p.16). This approach allows the practitioner to reflect on their own intentions and the ways in which they had to adapt in relation the ‘resistances’ of the world.
Donald highlights the generative character of practice-as-research, drawing attention to the particular forms of ‘not knowing’ and ways of working with ‘not knowing’ to reveal new insights.
Donald touches on the collaborative aspects of several projects where she worked with others, sometimes in a role which organised others (directorial/curatorial).
These sections, setting up the theoretical, professional and methodological aspects are followed by description of the projects profiled leading into a discussion of the insights in the associated Journal Articles and Book Chapters.
In the work Glimmers in Limbo Donald is concerned with the binary of tangible/intangible in heritage, something she suggests as a false dichotomy. Donald is concerned with “…the potential of critical spatial practice to bring about what Nigel Thrift describes as an extension of ‘the imagination into matter’. (Donald, 2014, p. 26)
Donald’s articulation of her work Glimmers in Limbo in relation to New Materialism highlights the aspect of agency. Hauntology, the exploration of the ways that material histories of places remain present even after erasure, offers another frame for these concerns, it places less emphasis on agency in the materiality.
In The River Clyde Project Donald is focused on “…ideas of space/place as networked and always in-process.” (Donald, 2014, p. 30). Donald discusses Bridging, a work which opens up new issues for her practice. She explores Tim Ingold’s concept of meshwork in relation to the project because it enables us to ‘see’ the agency of the material, in this case the rope, within the performance. This in turn leads to opening up ecological concerns in ways that humans and materials are encompassed by wind and tide. The role of these encompassing elements in frustrating the artists’ intention is key, opening up new insights.
This section concludes with discussion of a work in progress, High-Slack-Low-Slack-High, for which there is no published corollary. She discusses the parallel research trajectories of herself and collaborators exploring tides, a development from the earlier Bridging project.
Donald identifies aspects of both projects that influenced policy – of the Merchant City Initiative’s understanding of the Britannia Panopticon and of the Velocity programme’s thinking about the regeneration of the Clyde.
In Donald’s conclusion she highlights the importance of experimentation to her research trajectory because it reveals, particularly in failures, the agency of materials and environments in ways that would not otherwise be apparent. Donald indicates the future direction of research particularly into ways of working that reveal forms of agency – quoting Bennett, ‘tactics […] to discern the vitality of matter’ (Donald, 2014, p. 47).
Ross Sinclair
Ross Sinclair’s thesis is different from the others reviewed in that he focuses on his Real Life Project, an ongoing ‘everyday life as a work of art’ process which he has been engaged with over 20 years.
In his abstract, Sinclair sums this up saying,
“This has built a 20-year durational performance project that connects with the public at a dynamic intersection of ideas, context, performance and art-practice. This project was initiated when the words REAL LIFE were tattooed in black ink across my back, at Terry’s Tattoo parlour in Glasgow in 1994.”
(Sinclair, 2016, p. 6)
The form and voice of the thesis are distinctive not least in being informal and personal in a way the others reviewed aren’t.
In practice the thesis is based on a series of 5 monographs (publications associated with solo exhibitions) plus two pieces in Journals. However Sinclair articulates another version of the ‘Prior Publication’ writing,
“…the published evidence of its public dissemination via diverse heterogeneous outputs: starting with the tattoo, then the photograph, the cover of a magazine, the performances, the multiples, the exhibitions, the interventions, the t-shirt paintings, the installations, the dialogue, the hybrid sculptures, the physical structures, the songs, the paintings, the live music, the diverse contexts, the cd’s, the neon signs, the galleries, the shops, the streets, the posters, the records, the billboards, the conversations, the arguments, the planning, the travelling, the meetings, the fund-raising, the talks, the teaching, the publications and finally this submission of Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Published Work.”
(Sinclair, 2016, p. 29)
Sinclair provides an overview of the context in which the Real Life Project emerged, including the significance of the Artist Placement Group manifesto and the rubric ‘The context is half the work’ to the Environmental Art course at Glasgow School of Art, as well as the strange status of Glasgow negotiating it’s post-industrial future. There is a self-reflexivity in this thesis that is sometimes complex to unpack. The historicization of the practice started as early as 1994 when Sinclair created the Museum of Despair in a shop on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh and offered the detritus of 5 years’ practice for sale. From artist as flea market to artist as Co-Investigator in an AHRC funded project investigating the context in which the artist emerged (The Glasgow Miracle, Materials for Alternative Histories, 2012-13).
Sinclair positions the tattoo as a key sign, needing to be, “…traversed along the critical ley lines of Debord / de Certeau / Baudrillard / Barthes / Borges / Eco…” (Sinclair, 2016, p. 33). It acts as the pivot of his analysis, raising a series of issues including the understanding of signs, the relationship between the art world and commerce, the relationship between the artist and the spectator.
He also positions it ‘spatially’ in relation to the concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones, suggesting that the works, in part because they are centred around his unstable presence, “My character is an active performer, everyman, an individual, confused living human presence, e Pluribus Unum: but a member of the public too.” (Sinclair, 2016, p. 35).
Sinclair juxtaposes his own articulation with a significant body of quotation, including key citations which speak to his thinking (in addition to those noted above, Lefebvre), but also texts by leading curators (Archer, Brown, Gillick, Mulholland, Richardson, Verwoert) that reference, interpret and position the Real Life Project. His use of de Certeau’s distinction between ‘strategy’ and ‘tactics’ both reminds us of the positioning of the individual and the positioning of the institution, providing Sinclair with the opportunity to explore the ways in which the Real Life Project is positioned adjacent to the audience (but perhaps still at the behest of the institution – not least as a teacher in Higher Education undertaking a PhD by Prior Publication). He highlights the changing relationship with audience as the individual outings for the Real Life Project increasingly open themselves up to participation by audiences. Sinclair turns to the discourse of socially engaged art (Bishop, Kester, et al), positioning his work in a Brechtian space of critical distance through presenting the audience with disruptive situations. In the end Sinclair is seeking to distinguish the Practice-led researcher from the critic and art historian, and claiming value in the artists’ voice (a theme in Lacy’s PhD too).
That being said, Sinclair is right to highlight the significance of the sequence of publications as a key part of the Real Life Project and a significant body of constructed (self) understanding and (self) construction. He concludes by suggesting that the Real Life Project demonstrates Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic mode of existence, “The publications reflect the rhizomatic evolution of the RLP and articulate the contribution made to contemporary art-practice in Scotland, UK, and internationally over two decades via the medium of a single-authored practice-led project that could be characterised as organic, research-led, horizontal, non hierarchical and dialogic.” (Sinclair, 2016, p. 61). The Rückenfigur of Caspar David Friedrich is central to the conception of the Real Life Project, and the modalities of Romanticism, particularly in terms of the authority of the individual, even if only to be tactical are inscribed throughout this thesis.
In relation to the concern to understand structure and approach, voice and positioning, the Real Life Project is distinctive, partly as the most carefully designed of all the examples, but also because of the particular self-referentiality, the curious Beuysian totality, even gestamkunstwerk, of the project. The lack of any reference to Beuys (or Kaprow whose Blurring of Art and Life should surely have featured as a key text) is curious.
Nicola Triscott
Triscott’s thesis addresses 5 projects from 2010 to 2016 across a range of contexts, including outer space. The portfolio supporting the thesis includes 5 exhibitions and a public monument; 3 books associated with various of these projects including 3 authored chapters; a chapter in a collection; and a conference paper. Triscott includes a detailed breakdown of outputs from each project. In this she identifies her various roles including curator, co-curator, editor, author. She highlights the role of writing in the formats noted above as well as in a blog (Triscott, 2017, p. 28).
The focus of Triscott’s thesis is three-fold:
- curatorial practice;
- interdisciplinary, interdisciplinary art, critical art;
- the global/planetary commons.
Her three research questions all raise issues in curatorial practice.
The second key term for Triscott is ‘interdisciplinary’ She briefly unpacks histories associated with the development of thinking and practice in response to specialisation in the sciences. She reflects on her own process of developing ‘multi-disciplinary expertise, listing what she describes as, “…basic knowledge of areas of science and technology (such as synthetic biology, genetic engineering, biodiversity studies, and climate change research), outer space systems and policy, as well as current debates in areas such as STS, cultural and political geography, and international governance.” (Triscott, 2017, p. 28).
The third key concept Triscott invokes is ‘planetary commons’. Here she is referring to not merely the legal definition of global commons (“…the high seas (including the frozen Arctic ocean), the atmosphere, Antarctica and outer space…” Triscott, 2017, p. 19). She seeks to focus on in her words,
“…the planetary turn in the arts and social humanities … to redirect the emphasis of inquiry from governance, with its systems of regulation, to stewardship, the notion of responsible use and protection, as well as allowing greater consideration of non-human actants (other species, objects).”
(Triscott, 2017, p. 19)
In this Triscott is not suggesting that the art needs to address the planetary scale but that art is increasingly engaged with issues which affect the planet in different ways in different places – that there are common concerns including outer space, the Arctic, biodiversity and scientific knowledge (all aspects of the projects discussed).
Triscott positions herself as contributing to the reconfiguring understanding of curating as a practice, and to the development of the understanding of research in curating from a practice-led perspective (as opposed to for instance as an art historical endeavour, a more traditional frame for research in curating). Triscott references Dewey (as does Lacy) in her argument for experience-based understandings of knowing and knowledge. She argues that, “This curatorial knowledge takes two main forms: curatorial knowledge from the projects and knowledge about broader curatorial methodologies and frameworks.” (Triscott, 2017, p. 20). She unpacks forms of knowledge (informational and transformational) and approaches to curatorial practice (active, dialogic, critical interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary, experimental institutional, experiential/ performative). Triscott brings Science and Technologies Studies (STS), drawing on Stengers and Latour, to bear on her curatorial practice involving artists with scientists and other disciplines. She provides a nuanced reading of concepts such as collaboration and cooperation. In doing this she is both articulating her practice and also articulating her understanding of research and method.
She carefully positions the challenges arising from the approach she has developed, saying, “The overarching aims of these inquiries are to co-create knowledge and foster new forms of cultural production. These transdisciplinary inquiries are not separate from the distribution and display aspects of art.” (Triscott, 2017, p. 25). This in turn raises challenges both in relation to curatorial practice, which is still largely understood as a monologic endeavour, and also in relation to academic research, where she points out that the ‘Principal Investigator’ is still the normative and institutionalised way of working. She draws on Heron and Reason’s articulation of co-inquiry to inform her curatorial and interdisciplinary practice and to clarify where her practice is different.
Section 2 provides a Contextual Review of her three key issues, exploring curatorship in relation to institutional developments in the UK and Europe from the 1990s leading into developments in curating interdisciplinarity including discussions of various configurations and constructions. This in turn leads into a discussion of art-science initiatives and the need for criticality, particularly in relation to assumptions or claims of the authoritative world view of science, or the universal applicability of its methods (again drawing on Latour, Stengers and Haraway). She then turns to ‘planetary commons’ and juxtaposes it with Anthropocene as a framing for addressing current challenges, arguing that the latter term, “…fails to orientate us towards the type of change that is needed to transform the political economies of extraction, consumption and inequality that underpin the catastrophe and that spread its impact unevenly.” (Triscott, 2017, p. 48). Triscott’s provides a detailed discussion of the modalities and significance of commons and its reemergence as a critical concept since the 1990s. Combined with planetarity (as opposed to globalisation), the concept of commons forms the grounds for the interdisciplinary curatorial practice under discussion.
In her conclusion Triscott argues that the model she has developed through her practice over 10 years can be understood through three concepts, all drawn from or related to STS thinking. She is focused on ‘matters of concern’ (Latour), seeks the co-production of knowledge, and this is achieved through ‘an ecology of practices’ (Stengers), which she further elaborates.
Discussion
Reflecting across the four examples, Ross Sinclair’s thesis (2016) is perhaps the most leftfield in part because the practice he has developed over 20 years, the Real Life Project, is from the outset historicised and self-reflexive in itself. ‘Real life’ is constantly in question and the thesis adds another layer of how ‘real life’ can be art (or in this case Practice-led research). The discussion of publication (even including the ‘REAL LIFE’ tattoo itself) and the attention Sinclair has given to publication within his practice is valuable.
All four comprise different combinations of journal articles and book chapters alongside projects captured through documentation (as noted above). Lacy and Sinclair in particular include materials such as video, and Triscott includes a public monument created by artists where her role was curator (i.e. not primary originator).
Each addresses theory (as noted above); the context and development of the practice; as well as methodology, both in the sense of the methods used in assembling the thesis, as well as the methods used in the practice and outputs.
All four specifically address the voice of the practitioner, and the value of practice-led research as a means of opening up the knowledge of the practitioner to others. The importance of knowing how to create, techne, alongside theory and knowledge of acting, of understanding other human beings, phronesis, is widely explored within the literature of practice-led research (cf Coessens, Crispin and Douglas, 2009, p. 76-8).
This approach allows the practitioner to reflect on their own intentions and the ways in which they had to adapt in relation to the ‘resistances’ of the world. If we accept Duchamp’s analysis in The Creative Act (Duchamp, 1957), in which he articulates the relationship between the artist’s intention and the spectators’ experience, then the practitioner cannot attempt to address the significance of the work to posterity. That is the realm of the spectator. However the practitioner can speak to their understanding of ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’
Douglas, reflecting as Supervisor on Lacy’s PhD, highlights this key purpose, “…Suzanne embarked on the research to deepen her own understanding of what it takes to practise well, with quality, in public life. She was seeing many poor examples of practice. She wanted to explore this work through the experience and voice of the artist because the artist had the deepest knowledge of what was involved in producing the work.” Douglas, 2016, p. 4). Douglas goes on to say, “Suzanne’s approach to critical reflection and analysis was simultaneously performative and pedagogical.” (2016, p. 5). She reflects, “In this PhD – and this is perhaps unusual – she was simultaneously ‘research student’ and mentor to us in learning what the practice could be along with figuring out an appropriate way of researching it.” (2016, p. 5). This opens up aspects of practice-led research which arise from the combination of reflection and theorisation, as well as the context and complexity of working with established practitioners.
Reviewing these theses in particular has informed the structure and voice I am adopting. Lacy, Donald and Triscott all raise issues of collaboration and multi-authorship in various relevant ways which are relevant to my own work. This review has enabled me to better understand how to contextualise the various contributions in my outputs as well as provided me with a sense of how my work sits in relation to others undertaking similar exercises.
Notes
* Prof Emeritus Anne Douglas oversaw a significant number of PhDs including by established practitioners (Goto-Collins, 2012; Chu, 2013; Smith, 2015; Gausden, 2016; Price, 2016).
References
COESSENS, K., CRISPIN, D., and DOUGLAS, A., 2009. The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto. Leuven: University of Leuven Press.
DOUGLAS, A. 2016. Practice-led research and improvisation in post modern culture. Presented as part of the docARTES: crossing borders programme, 26 February 2016, Ghent, Belgium. Available from: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/246562/practice-led-research-and-improvisation-in-post-modern-culture
DUCHAMP, M., 1957. The Creative Act. [online] available from: https://ubusound.memoryoftheworld.org/aspen/mp3/duchamp1.mp3
DONALD, M., 2014. Exploring human/environment interdependencies through critical spatial practice. PhD by Published Work, University of Glasgow. Available from: http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4932/
LACY, S. 2013. Imperfect art: working in public: a case study of the Oakland Projects (1991-2001). Robert Gordon University, PhD Thesis. Available from: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/240070/imperfect-art-working-in-public-a-case-study-of-the-oakland-projects-1991-2001
LACY, S., 1994. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press.
SINCLAIR, R., 2016. Ross Sinclair: 20 Years of Real Life. PhD by Published Work, The Glasgow School of Art. Available from: http://radar.gsa.ac.uk/4817/
TRISCOTT, N., 2017. Art and Intervention in the Stewardship of the Planetary Commons: Towards a Curatorial Model of Co-inquiry. PhD by Published Work, University of Westminster. Available from: https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/download/e987be50137cb09003ed3c4c525f7a6861a50d7373417d8fcb3c4633ef08e4eb/7743765/Triscott_Nicola_thesis.pdf
‘Failures in Cultural Participation’ new issue of Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation
“This special issue of Conjunctions is edited by Leila Jancovich and David Stevenson. It explores how cultural participation policies, projects, and practices could be improved through recognising the pervasiveness of past failures. The issue thereby attempts to challenge existing narratives of unqualified success by offering alternative narratives that consider failure from different perspectives and at different points in the design and implementation of cultural participation policies and projects. In doing so it highlights the extent to which success and failure coexist and the richness of insight that comes from considering both. This matters because it is only such open and honest critical reflection that has the potential to facilitate the social learning needed for those who can exert the most power in the cultural sector to acknowledge the extent of the structural change required for cultural participation to be supported more equitably.”
Published: 2020-10-02
Audiences and and pt. 7 … on ‘doing good’
Henry David Thoreau said,
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”
(Thoreau 1977 p.328).
James Fathers ended his presentation to the Does Design Care…? Symposium with the following,
“… statement by Lila Watson an Aboriginal elder, activist and educator from Queensland, Australia. “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
(Labonte, 1994 p.258).
RIP Siah Armajani
An inspirational artist architect who understood the possibility of philosophy and learning embodied in art.
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/siah-armajani-dead-1234569516/
Audiences and and pt.6 … the Community, the State & a specific kind of Headache
This essay explores the sharp issues around Cultural Democracy and tests this challenges with some key people working on the ground.
In particular the reflections on arts institutions and the temporariness of local action (discussed through the example of Showroom but could equally have been Tramway).
Also the exploration of the edge between ‘arts’ and ‘third sector’ is interesting. There are organisations which configure themselves straddling this boundary (see for instance Center for Urban Pedagogy, Project Row Houses, Glasgow Women’s Library). But the funders find this difficult to understand because the conventional ‘success criteria’ are apparently different.
“Honour thy error as a hidden intent”
Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies includes this and also ‘Tidy Up’.
Failures: Mental Furniture Industry Externalities
The following failed as a proposal for a Flattime House Delta Research Residency.
Statement of Interest
Latham offers a radical critique of ‘knowledge production’ linking the Mental Furniture Industry (MFI) with waste landscapes. During his Scottish Office Placement he reimagined the ‘bings’ (spoil heaps from the shale oil industry) which dominate the Lothian landscape as ‘monuments to our time’ and wrote to various authorities seeking their protection. In the ‘newspaper’ publication for his Fruitmarket exhibition of 1976 he explicitly links the bings with another of his key concerns – the MFI. The bings are an indication of his conception of the scale of the MFI, both in temporal as well as spatial terms.
Latham’s conception of MFI raises questions about production: about the waste produced, but also of caretaking, which is often overlooked. Care is a process, or in Latham’s terms an event. Care has two aspects. Firstly it requires attention to all forms and dimensions – mental, social, environmental. Secondly care is about extending life. Some have been legally protected. They do evolve over time. Latham’s reframing of them as ‘monuments to our time’ is apt as they have become biodiversity hotspots in monocultural landscapes.
ecoartscotland’s library, comprising books, DVDs, etc., is mobile in order to interact with practitioners and projects in specific contexts. It is related to the Martha Rosler Library and Nils Norman’s Geocruiser. However, if it is understood as a manifestation of the MFI, then it is necessary to test the relationship between the library and the bing. Is the library a form of waste from a process of accumulating cultural capital? Or, as with the bings, can it support the emergence of a diverse ecosystem?
The Delta Research Placement will provide a period of focused attention on the materiality of the MFI as manifest in the both analogue and digital forms. The Ligatus Archive will be mined as a resource, both for further understanding of the MFI and bings, but also as a visual material source. FTHo as a live/work space will be investigated with a particular focus on waste and care.
Latham’s methods of working, such as collage and stop motion animation, will be used to appropriate the results of research into new forms with the support of the digital producers. Further analogue and digital experiments with the materials of ecoartscotland and FTHo (and potentially the Tate and other sources) will be undertaken.
Two specific areas of investigation are currently envisaged. Experiments to date have taken the Moodiesburn bing, the simplest form (reverse and tip), as a model. The ‘Five Sisters’ offers a more complex formal model to investigate, and the ‘Niddrie Woman’ a massive improvised model. These experiments have resulted in temporary arrangements of books as well as collaged images. Secondly the time base of the Ligatus Archive will be taken as a starting point for investigation in juxtaposition with the ‘plan and elevation’ of the bings as objects. ‘Reverse and tip’ will be explored as a literal and metaphorical process.
The contribution to the new digital platform will consider the issue of waste and the emergence of diversity.
Artist’s Statement
I am an arts worker. I work as a producer, lecturer, researcher, writer and artist. In 2010
I established ecoartscotland as a platform for ongoing relational work, growing and connecting the community of people interested in this form of hybrid practice. ecoartscotland has various aspects: events, exhibitions and publishing. It includes the mobile library.
My practice involves a dynamic and iterative relationship between research and practice. A consistent theme is the reuse of visual and conceptual strategies.
I have an ongoing interest in exploring failure as part of a creative process. The development of ecoartscotland library as bing (2016) came from the rejection of a more conventional proposal to represent it in a compilation on artists’ libraries. Reading the catalogue essays from Mental Furniture Industry (2013) led to reconsidering the library as material through various analogue experiments and digital manifestations. This is in line with other in-progress projects including Calendar Variations, a drawing project which explores changes of state (wet to dry, living to dead).
Building on extensive research and producer work with the Harrisons (Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison) I, with colleagues, have recently presented readings from their works. This reuse-to-keep-alive raises questions regarding re-presentation and re-performance which are rarely explored in the visual arts.
I am employed part-time as a Research Fellow and Lecturer at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University. I am a contributor to the Mental Furniture Industry (MFI) through being an ‘active researcher’ with targets for publishing and impact.
I live in Ayr in South West Scotland. This opportunity to work remotely with FTHo and the Archive would provide invaluable time to develop experimental work.
Here is the announcement of what was selected http://flattimeho.org.uk/projects/ftho-news/delta-d-research-placement/
Abstract: The Hope of Something Different
Educational theorist Gert Biesta proposes that we need to be ‘in the world, without occupying the centre of the world’ (2017 3). This injunction provides a frame with which to interrogate the hybrid practice of ecoart. This practice can be characterised by a concern for the relations of living things to each other, and to their environments. Learning in order to be able to act is critical. One aspect is collaboration with experts (whether those are scientists and environmental managers or inhabitants, including more-than-human). Another is building ‘commons’ and shared understanding being more important than novelty. Grant Kester has argued that there is an underlying paradigm shift in ‘aesthetic autonomy’, underpinned by a ‘trans-disciplinary interest in collective knowledge production’. (2013 np). This goes beyond questions of interdisciplinarity and its variations to raise more fundamental questions of agency. Drawing on the work of key practitioner/researchers (eg Jackie Brookner (1945-2015); Collins and Goto Studio, Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (b 1932)) and theorists (Kester, Kagan) the meaning and implications of not ‘occupying the centre of the world’ will be explored as a motif for an art which can act in public space.
Biesta, G. 2017. Letting Art Teach: Art education ‘after’ Joseph Beuys. Arnhem: ArtEZ Press.
Fremantle, C., 2015. ‘The hope of something different’. In A restless art: thinking about community and participatory art [online] https://arestlessart.com/2015/12/17/chris-fremantle-the-hope-of-something-different/
Fremantle, C. 2015. ‘Art and Ecology’ in Interesting Times: Environmental Art Festival Scotland. Dumfries: EAFS.
Kagan, S., 2013. Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity. 2nd Edition. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.
Kagan, S., 2014. “The Practice of Ecological Art”, Plastik: Art & Science, http://art-science.univ-paris1.fr/plastik/document.php?id=866
Kester, G., 2013. “On Collaborative Art Practices”, Praktyka Teoretyczna, http://www.praktykateoretyczna.pl/granth-kester-on-collaborative-art-practices/ accessed 7.12. 2015
Published: ‘What if?’ Introduction for North Light Arts 10 Year exhibition
North Light Arts kindly asked me to write a short piece by way of an introduction to their 10 year exhibition.
Gert Biesta proposes that we need to be,
…in the world, without occupying the centre of the world.
Whilst Biesta credits this idea to a French Educational Philosopher, Philippe Meirieu, Meirieu’s comments seem to be in the context of the classroom, and Biesta certainly uses the phrase in a larger sense, as part of what it means to be educated (see in particular Letting Art Teach: Art education ‘after’ Joseph Beuys, ArtEZ Press, 2017).
But for me this phrase speaks to an ecological understanding, or even ‘becoming earthly’ (in Latour’s sense). Ecological approaches to art are distinctive – they ask us to re-imagine our relationship with the world, as part of it, with art being not simply a human commodity or communication. Rather art is potentially a way to experience and understand the livingness and agency of the world, to share experiences with the more-than-human.
North Light Arts, under Susie Goodwin’s leadership, have put myriad aspects of the environment of the East Coast town of Dunbar as the focus of artists’ residencies.
John Muir, mostly known for his key role in the creation of the National Parks in the USA (remember the 1903 picture of him with Theodore Roosevelt on the top of the world?), was born in Dunbar. He provides North Light Arts and Susie in particular with inspiration. Muir is remembered for saying,
Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
The power of imagination makes us infinite.
Published: Improvising as a method in the time of Covid-19
The Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance kindly published some thoughts on artists and improvisation, drawn from the writings of Professor Emeritus Anne Douglas and the work of Dr Chris Dooks.
This came out of a discussion during a meeting of arts and health networks (WAHWN (Wales), ArtsCare (Northern Ireland) and ACHWS (Scotland), as well as APPG AHW and CHWA (England). We were talking about how artists were adapting to continue to work with various communities, not only shifting online, but also finding new analogue ways.
Improvising provides a different way of thinking from statistics and modelling, which have dominated the news and discussions certainly since lockdown, but actually well before that, and in other discourses such as the climate crisis too. ‘Improvising’ can also be a critique of politicians, but where artists are doing it, the approaches are tested methods, not on-the-fly half-baked patches.
Thanks to Anne Douglas for her comments and Chris Dooks for allowing use of his work.
What art have I seen? #AIWW: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei
Hampstead Theatre Production of ‘#AIWW: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei‘ from 2013. Unfortunately I think today is the last day it will be available on YouTube for the moment.
Failure talks
A recurring theme has been failure. This has resulted in publications (paper in iJade written with Dr Gemma Kearney, Business School, Robert Gordon University) and talks (principally for the Scottish Graduate School in Arts and Humanities Summer School 2016-18 presented with Elizabeth Reeder, Creative Writing, University of Glasgow).
Recently I’ve prepared the talk in four segments which can be watched online.
Pt 1 focuses on the prescriptions and fables that surround failure. Pt 2 draws on the research Gemma Kearney and I did into Gray’s School of Art staff perceptions of failure in their own practices and teaching. Pt 3 draws on Elizabeth Reeder’s talk for the Summer School as well as on Gert Biesta’s art pedagogy to discuss methods and desires. Pt 4 highlights some of the references and discusses them briefly.
The Art of a Life Adapting, published in Leonardo
‘Drawing 2016’, pen (Sharpie), found object, sculptural object, 2016. (Photo: Fergus Connor)
Statement ‘The Art of a Life Adapting: Drawing and Healing’ just published in Leonardo Vol 53 No 1. You can find an earlier version here. Drawings are here.
There is a lot of talk about adaptation in relation to the climate crisis, but there is also an increasing recognition that cancer survival rates mean that a larger proportion of the population is and will be living with the long term consquences of cancer treatment. This has been highlighted by the EU Horizon programme, “The EU has already placed the needs of survivors as one of the key pillars of its Beating Cancer Plan and has now launched a consultation aimed at identifying where research is needed most.” (‘Treating cancer is only part of the journey’: the overlooked needs of cancer survivors, online.)
The role of arts and cultural practices, as well as approaches to understanding adaptation conceptually and practically, all need further consideration (see recent blog on climate adaptation). We know arts & culture has multiple contributions to make, including:
- offering forms of autonomy in palliative care, as explored in the ‘Tracing Autonomy’ project by Prof. Ben Colburn of University of Glasgow, Jeni Pearson and Kirsty Stansfield of the Art Room in the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow.
- playing a role in ’emotional regulation’ (Daisy Fancourt’s recent research provides significant evidence), but there are also issues around ‘uncertainty’ which also connect climate-related adaptation with cancer-related adaptation.
- opening up ways of ‘living with uncertainty’, which medics recognise as an important part of their professional practice, but is equally significant for patients.
What art have I seen? Ballet Rambert
Ballet Rambert at His Majesties in Aberdeen. Three pieces,
-
- PreSentient, Wayne McGregor’s arresting response to the music of Steve Reich
- Rouge, an original creation from rising star Marion Motin
- Hofesh Shechter’s powerful In your rooms
Three quite distinct pieces, formal, abstract, political. The last, the Shechter, shifted between the chaotic and the orderly – Anne also read some Deleuze & Guattari into it. The formalism of the McGregor piece set to Reich was stunning.
What art have I seen? Tendency Towards’ Haunted by the ghost of a flower
The resonating thought
Haunted by the ghost of a flower an exhibition by the collective Tendency Towards at The Barn. Tendency Towards are all graduates of Gray’s – an evening with students in discussion with the collective. The work is in the ongoing conversation with a curator, in the appropriation of materials (theatre flats) and in the composition of the space.
Making an exhibition as a collective, as another identity from all the individual identities, is a particular exercise in negotiation, and in working out how to speak with a single voice. Each personality in the collective is important, and the whole can be better than any individual if the collective draws out the best in each other.
Adaptation and failure
Greenhouse Britain installed at the Feldman Gallery in New York City
Ten years ago I was working with the Harrisons on Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom. They insistently focused on ‘adaptation’ although Defra, who were funding the work, wanted the focus on ‘mitigation’. Now public policy is addressing adaptation (cf Climate Ready Clyde) as well as the Cultural Adaptation project (which I’m helping to evaluate as part of my work as a Research Fellow at Gray’s School of Art).
Mitigation is easier to plan and measure. How much reduction in carbon dioxide emissions has this initiative achieved?
Adaptation might be based on strengthening infrastructure and systems, but the shape of the challenge is timescale for knowing whether it has worked or not – this might be a decade?
So understanding what failure means in this context is important. In particular the challenge is that methods and approaches with known outcomes can seem attractive (less likely to fail) but can only deliver what is already understood. Embracing change must mean also embracing failure as a possibility.
The voices speaking as the projection of sea-level rise onto the island of Britain plays out ask,
Will it be enough?
As the most extreme model suggests
to halt the juggernaut of the ocean
if carbon use is stopped
almost all at once
almost all over
in the next 10 years?
Later they ask,
Would it be enough?
To begin now
a transglobal discourse in which
the Global Domestic Output
is discussed
agreeing all efforts be directed to commit
1% of the Global Domestic Product
to the reduction of the carbon surge
to near zero
in order to reduce
the ocean rise?
And again later,
Would it be enough?
to transcend economic thinking
and begin creating
a domain
of ecological thinking
that regenerates
the great carbon-sequestering
world systems
that operate in the forests
and the oceans
while leaving
ancient carbon stored
as coal and oil
in their present inactive states?
This repeating pattern of ‘will it…?’ / ‘would it be enough?’ asks about how we imagine risk of the unknown, risk of failure.
The issue of failure and why it matters in experimental projects is explored in this blog from the Cultural Adaptations project (including more on failure from previous publications).
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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