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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
Enrolled as a p/t student for PhD by Public Output
Abstract
There is increasing interest in the contribution that the arts can make to the major challenges facing researchers, policy makers and societies more generally. Artists are included within multi-disciplinary teams addressing environmental research subjects (amongst others). Hybrid practices such as art and ecology (‘ecoart’) have established themselves at the intersection of disciplines, adopting approaches from the environmental sciences into arts practices. These practices are often situated within the broad category of Environmental Humanities, however there are distinctive aspects, particularly around the orientation towards collaboration which means that ecoart has a specific contribution to make.
The research, in opening up the specific contribution artists can make to public life, as well as their development of hybrid practices through collaborations with other disciplines, addresses a number of important challenges identified by policy makers. These can be broadly characterised as ‘wicked problems’, problems beyond the scope of any single discipline. This includes in particular global warming: sea level rise, heatwave and biodiversity loss. Other ‘wicked problems’ include healthcare (and specific conditions including cancer and dementia), social injustice, and natural hazards.
The articulation of the contribution, approaches and effects of artists to and within multi-disciplinary teams is key to growing an interdisciplinary culture to address ‘wicked problems’. Clear articulation of how artists’ work works both in terms of the process of development, particularly when it involves collaboration with other disciplines, and well as how it works with audiences and participants, is critical to the realisation of a meaningful contribution.
Practice-led approaches, including live projects as well as reflecting on exemplary practices, provide means to open up and discuss both the contribution made by artists as well as the interactions with other disciplines – the forms of inter- and transdisciplinarity that artists ‘bring to the table’.
Drawing on more than 10 years of work, this PhD brings together outputs including Chapters and Papers on the work of pioneers of the art and ecology movement, Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018) and Newton Harrison (b. 1932); live project work as Producer on their key project ‘Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom’ (2006-09) and currently as Associate Producer on ‘The Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland’. In addition to opening up the approaches of the artists to creating the works and their approaches to collaboration with other disciplines, the research discusses the utilisation of key questions that shape the design process in other contexts including public art in healthcare settings. The discussion of collaboration and inter- and trans-disciplinary work is informed by Chapters and Papers addressing another live project, the Land Art Generator Glasgow initiative, as well as reflections on issues of participation and collaboration.
‘Disciplinarity and Peripheries’ at Gray’s Research Conference
‘Peripheries’, Gray’s Research Conference, takes place on Friday 4th October. I’ll be presenting on disciplinarity and it’s edges.
Abstract:
By analogy disciplines are a form of ‘centre’ and work across disciplines involves focusing on edges. Some people conceptualise disciplines to have ‘near’ and ‘far’ relations i.e. visual art is ‘near’ art history and ‘far’ from environmental modelling. Gavin Little talks about radical and moderate saying,
“The radical variant involves scholars working across major discipline boundaries—such as theatre and environmental science—while the moderate one takes place between scholars in intellectually cognate disciplines such as law and policy, philosophy and religious studies, politics and history, or visual arts and media.” (Little 2017, 6).
Murdo Macdonald quotes George Davie’s The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect saying,
“…the most important side of any department of knowledge is the side on which it comes into contact with every other department. To insist on this is the true function of humanism.” (Macdonald nd, np)
Disciplines certainly don’t sit tightly next to each other and there are definitely gaps between them – we only need to think about the rationale for ‘multi-disciplinary teams’ in ensuring that these gaps are addressed and acknowledged in for example healthcare between clinical, nursing and other health professionals. Nicolescu goes further and argues that the ‘space’ between disciplines is full with an “information flux” (much as geographical peripheries are full). (Nicolescu 1993, 6)
This conceptualisation also raises interesting analogies in the other direction, including the possibility that attention to linking two ‘centres’ can produce, in the ‘periphery’, a new centre. The interdisciplinary developments between biology and chemistry resulted in due course in the emergence of bio-chemistry as a new discipline (and thus a new ‘centre’).
One of the abiding ‘disciplinary’ debates is whether the objective is synthesis and holism – is the objective to produce centres or even one totalising centre? Or is it as Murdo Macdonald, following George Davie, suggests about specialisations (centres),
“But it also creates blindspots, eddies of ignorance in epistemological space, which can only be perceived from another perspective. This is interesting from our perspective here because it shifts the emphasis of interdisciplinarity from the purloining of other disciplines’ methods in the hope that you can apply them within your own discipline, to illuminating, by the methods of one’s own discipline, what those other disciplines may be methodologically unable to access.” (Macdonald nd, np)
This presentation will be a meditation on the issues of disciplinarity as a spending time with edges and differences, drawing on the writings of Basarab Nicolescu (multi-, inter- trans-disciplinarity), Gavin Little (proximity and distance), and Murdo Macdonald & George Davie (the Scottish tradition of the Democratic Intellect).
References
Little, G. 2017. ‘Connecting Environmental Humanities: Developing Interdisciplinary Collaborative Method’. Humanities, 6(4), 91; https://doi.org/10.3390/h6040091
Macdonald, M. 2007. A Note on Interdisciplinarity. https://www.academia.edu/39621092/A_Note_on_Interdisciplinarity.1
Nicolescu, B. 1993. Towards Transdisciplinary Education. Invited talk at the International Conference Education of the Future, Memorial da America Latina, Parlamento Latinoamericano, Sao Paulo, Brazil, October 4-8.
Nicolescu, B. 1997. The Transdisciplinary Evolution of the University Condition for Sustainable Development. Talk at the International Congress Universities’ Responsibilities to Society, International Association of Universities, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, November 12-14, http://ciret-transdisciplinarity.org/bulletin/b12c8.php
Transformations 2017
Abstract for the Transformations 2017 conference in Dundee. Accepted.
ecoart as a practice of understanding the world
In 2007 the artist Eve Mosher drew a line on the streets of New York based on current science indicating the impact of a major storm surge – a hundred-year flood. The line followed the contour 10 feet above sea level. Mosher used a ‘heavy hitter,’ the wheelbarrow-like device used to mark the lines on sports fields. Mosher worked on High Water Line, as she titled the project, on and off for six months, photographing the line as she made it. The context was the noted total lack of discussion of climate change in the City and National elections.
Not long after Hurricane Sandy struck New York in 2012 The New Yorker magazine carried a story (Kolbert) about High Water Line. In the article Mosher is quoted saying, “I wanted to leave this visually interesting mark, to open up a space for conversation…” and goes on to say, “The other part of the project was to try to prod some kind of conversation on a government level.”
Some artists describe what they do as ‘eco-art’ (and themselves as ‘ecoartists’). This neologism is a contraction of “art (or arts) and ecology”. It represents a still emergent form of practice (albeit with a history back to the late 1960s) which is distinctive in several aspects, not least in seeking to ‘do good in the world’.
Key elements of ecoart include a focus on context and a concern with human interaction with ecological systems; the frequency of interdisciplinarity between artists and scientists (natural and social) drawing out the complexity of these ecological interactions; the embedding of dialogue leading to wider learning by others living and working in the context.
These elements, along with more formal considerations of making art, combine to form the aesthetic, the tangible and experiential quality of the work, the focus of judgement by the artists concerned.
Mosher’s High Water Line demonstrates all of these characteristics. The context, New York, is where Mosher lives and the work explores the relationship between the artist, other inhabitants and the immediate ecological systems. The context is also the issue of climate change, and in particular the issue of public discourse at the community and civic levels. Mosher drew on readily available science modelling the increase frequency of storm surges. Mosher was doing a field study of published science, exploring what it ‘looks like on the ground’ and what it means to inhabitants. In terms of formal considerations the work, the use of everyday, non-art equipment and materials, the temporal intervention where ‘the work’ exists in documentation, and the performative and social character situate the work in relation to other artists’ practices. Critiques of this work might ask whether it is a work in its own right, or simply and illustration of existing science? Is it merely an exercise in climate change communications, or an artwork in its own right? A key question is the status of learning, Mosher’s own and her intended audiences, within the work – does if form an essential aspect of the aesthetic of the work?
There has been considerable focus on developing our understanding of the aesthetics of social and participatory practices (Bourriaud 1998, Helguera 2011, Jackson 2011, Kester 2004, 2011), but less attention has been paid to ecoart practice. Specific attempts (Kagan 2011) to explore ecoart as an art engaged with sustainability have drawn on thinking about auto-poesis as well as Gregory Bateson’s writings. Others (Douglas and Fremantle 2016a, 2016b) have focused on the formal aspects that are rooted in what might be called core art practices such as composition and improvisation.
The purpose of this paper will be to propose an understanding of education and learning within the practices of selected ecoartists.
Bourriaud, N. 1998. Relational Aesthetics. Les Presse du Reel
Douglas, A. and Fremantle, C. 2016. ‘What Poetry Does Best: The Harrisons’ Poetics of Being and Acting in the World’ in Harrison, H.M. and Harrison, N. The Time of the Force Majeure: After 45 Years Counterforce Is on the Horizon. Prestel, pp 455-460
Douglas, A. and Fremantle, C. 2016. ‘Inconsistency and Contradiction: Lessons in Improvisation in the work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison’. In Elemental: an Arts and Ecology Reader. The Gaia Project, pp 153-181.
Helguera, P., 2011. Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook. Jorge Pinto Books
Jackson, S., 2011. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. London and New York: Routledge
Kagan, S. 2011. Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity. Transcript Verlag
Kester, G. H., 2011. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Duke University Press
Kester, G. H., 2004. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. University of California Press
Kolbert, E., Crossing the Line, The New Yorker, November 12, 2012 accessed at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/11/12/crossing-the-line-3, 31 October 2016
Imagining the Mediterranean
This abstract was submitted to the Imagining The Mediterranean Congress scheduled for September. Unfortunately it wasn’t accepted.
Science and Cultural Heritage: Transdisciplinary Practices and Artists
Current socio-political contexts are shaped in increasingly complex ways by environmental issues which in turn are informed on the one hand by natural sciences and on the other by cultural factors. There are considerable challenges in adequately integrating specialist scientific perspectives with those from the humanities: yet policies (particularly for change adaptation and resilience) are likely to be much more successful if they take on more holistic approaches.
The intergovernmental Convention on Wetlands, the Ramsar Convention, established to protect the values and functions of wetlands, addresses this challenge through the Ramsar Culture Network. The Network includes interest groups and specialist experts in thematic areas ranging from indigenous knowledge and spiritual values to agriculture and food, youth, tourism, art and architecture.
This paper will focus on the role of artists (a term which will be explained as embracing contemporary practices that may surprise some readers by the variety of scientific and socio-political roles that are played), highlighting key examples of artists involved in wetland biodiversity and related cultural heritage. Some artists choose to engage with non-arts contexts, including projects with scientists, planners, landowners and local communities.
In the immediate Spanish context, artists have been drawn to record and represent Las Tablas de Daimiel, one of the first Ramsar designated wetlands in Spain. In particular Ignacio de Meco whose paintings document the landscape and form an important record of a changing environment (2010).
Lillian Ball’s GO Doñana (2008) project, part of an on-going series based on the game of Go, was an invited part of the International Bienal of Sevilla. As the audience interacted with the projected Go board, each move activated the video/sound viewpoints of scientists, farmers, environmentalists, landowners, and park guides.
In a wider Mediterranean context the artist, biologist and environmental activist Brandon Ballengée has worked with the Parco Arte Vivente in Turin (2011). His ongoing project Malamp, focusing on mutations in amphibians, is pursued throughscientific enquiry, art installations and “eco-actions” involving varied communities in field work.
Further examples include Liz Nicol’s on-going work in the Venice Lagoon and Shai Zakai’s work Concrete Creek (1999-2002) in Israel as well as Jane Ingram Allen’s ongoing Cheng Long Wetlands International Environmental Art Project.
Some of the strongest impetus for attention to these matters in the Ramsar context has come from initiatives pioneered in the Mediterranean region, and global leadership continues to be provided from this part of the world. The paper will draw out the transdisciplinary characteristics of artists’ practices which address both the cultural and scientific aspects of environmental contexts and policies.
Bibliography
Allen, Jane Ingram. Cheng-Long Wetlands International Environmental Art Project. https://artproject4wetland.wordpress.com/about/
Alvarez-Cobelas, M., Cirujano, S. and Meco, A. ‘The Man and Las Tablas de Daimiel’ in Ecology of Threatened Semi-Arid Wetlands: Long-Term Research in Las Tablas de Daimiel. Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York: Springer. 2010
Cravero, Claudio. Praeter Naturam: Brandon Ballengée. Parco Arte Vivente, Centro D’Arte Contemporanea, Torino. 2011.
Culture and Wetlands: A Ramsar Guidance Document. Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar, 1971) Culture Working Group. Gland. 2008. http://www.ramsar.org/sites/default/files/documents/library/cop10_culture_group_e.pdf accessed 26 April 2017
Zakai, S. Concrete Creek: Artist’s Statement 1999. http://www.shaizakai.com/text.php?NID=256 accessed 30 April 2017
Yes, Everyone Can Be Stupid for a Minute – NYTimes.com
This Corner Office interview with a silicon valley tech CEO has stayed with me for a long time. Basically he reckons everyone says something stupid in a meeting occasionally and this guy has a rule that you can say – That thing I just said was stupid. Let’s move on. Otherwise politics kicks in, people defend their positions, etc. He’s also good on teams. Worth having a look at some of the other Corner Office interviews too.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/business/08corner.html?referrer=
imagivation – drewwylie.net
Andrew Ormston recently blogged on the two types of innovation and the need for a theory of innovation that is more than just positivistic is very provocative. It resonates with Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold’s observation that innovation can only be identified in retrospect, and that in the ‘now’ we are actually improvising. It also resonates with the work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, who for 50 years have been making works about places. They say,
We hold that every place is telling the story of its own becoming, which is another way of saying that it is continually creating its own history and we join that conversation of place.
All of this requires at least a concept of ‘responsible innovation’ if not a much deeper discussion of the stories we want to tell of our futures. Andrew’s blog is here: imagivation – drewwylie.net.
Thinking about failure
Slides of a paper on failure co-authored with Dr Gemma Kearney and presented at the NSEAD/iJade conference in Liverpool.
London LASER reflections
The two other speakers at the London LASER took us on a tour of the edge of two different human experiences.
Los Ferronautas, who are currently working with Arts Catalyst, took us on a journey of exploration of the railroads of Mexico, largely abandoned post the neoliberal-driven privatisation in the mid 90s. An extensive passenger network now lies in ruins because it was not ‘financially viable’. It only provided a means for Mexicans to get around their large and mountainous country. Somehow you know that the automotive industry had something to do with this. Los Ferronautas built a hybrid vehicle (SEFT1), an “abandoned railway exploration probe” that could travel on road and rail, and used this to explore what remains of the network. They found that it also acted as a “transmitter of stories.” In parallel they explored the visual representation of the network including early 20th Century paintings celebrating the engineering (initially exported from Britain and Ireland).
Cristina Miranda de Almeida took us on a journey around our increasing hybridity as the internet of things emerges. She explored the emerging interval space between ‘here and there’, ‘you and me’, the past, present and future, different scales and durations. She started with the beautiful analogy of data emerging from under water (behind a screen) to become part of our everyday lives, quoting Manuel Castells saying that soon computing will be paint on the walls.
For me the real moment of joy was when she show an image of a CAD rendering of a building entitled ‘spam architecture.’ As I’m sure we all have, I’ve notices the ‘flows’ of subject lines in my spam folder and wondered what could be done by exploring the patterns that lie in amongst this waste material. The way Alex Dragulescu has worked with this aspect of ‘big data,’ turning it into a proposal for architecture, put a big smile on my face.
We also had a good, if too short, discussion on multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinarity which I found really helpful in pushing my thinking further, so thanks to those who asked really good questions. My presentation is below. Thanks again to Heather Barnett for putting the programme together and continuing to make the London LASERs well worth the trip.
What have I read?
Townley and Bradby’s publication for the Turf Twinning Project (2012-2013)
I met Townley and Bradby at a Collaborate Creatively seminar at firstsite in Colchester, part of a-n’s Granted! programme. They were Associate Artists with firstsite working on social practice projects. One of the projects they presented was Turf Twinning, and they just sent me the publication. Jonathan P Watts’ excellent essay, Six Cuts, takes us on a journey that encompasses Durer and Haacke as well as Nash to position Turf Twinning in a longer field of practice. The publication should be available from firstsite.
Presenting at Enhancing Lives Through Arts & Health, Houston, TX
My proposal for a paper “Scottish artists bring nature into healthcare” has been accepted for the Global Alliance for Arts & Health 25th Conference in Houston, Texas in April.
The abstract is,
Scotland has a strong portfolio of arts and health projects including both public art installations within healthcare buildings and participatory programmes, in particular with people with long term conditions. This presentation will focus on public art installations by artists and designers which use biophilic and other design approaches to bringing nature into buildings. It addresses the conference themes of Patient Care, Healing Environments and Caring for Caregivers.
It is well known thanks to the work of Robert Ulrich that views of nature contribute to patient recover, and it is clear from the work of Stephen Kaplan that views of nature can play a role in restoring our ability to give our attention. OPENspace Research at Edinburgh College of Art (http://openspace.eca.ac.uk/ ) has further substantiated the connections between nature and wellbeing focusing on inclusive access to the outdoors.
In Scotland there have been a number of projects in the context of Healthcare where artists and designers have specifically sought to use art and design to bring nature into buildings in addition to what the architects and landscape designers are able to achieve.
Four key examples are:
Thomas A Clark’s (http://thomasaclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/) project with the architects Reiach & Hall, ‘A Grove of Larch in a Forest of Birch,’ for the New Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow integrated poetry and visual arts into what the architects described as the architecture of waiting. The Aim was to create spaces in which users of the hospital could wait for appointments in “a place apart having the brightness and stillness of a woodland glade.”
Alexander Hamilton’s (http://www.alexanderhamilton.co.uk/) Designing for Dignity (http://designingfordignity.co.uk/Inspired-by-Nature) is an approach that draws on a deep understanding of the Victorian poet and artist John Ruskin and of the more recent Biophilia Hypothesis. Hamilton is currently developing designs including furniture and art for the Quiet or Family rooms in the New South Glasgow Hospitals based on an extensive programme of creative engagement. Hamilton is also working on the design of a healthcentre in Glasgow.
Dalziel + Scullion’s (http://www.dalzielscullion.com/) practice is increasingly focused on addressing nature deficit disorder. Their work encompasses exhibitions and public art. Their scheme for the wards of the New South Glasgow Hospitals will bring the whole landscape of Scotland into one building. Their project Rosnes Benches, currently being installed in the landscape of Dumfries and Galloway, they have also contributed work to the Vale of Leven Health Centre (http://www.wide-open.net/index.php?page=vale-of-leven)
Donald Urquhart has completed public art projects for four mental health hospitals including most recently Midpark Acute Mental Health Hospital (http://www.wide-open.net/index.php?page=healing-spaces) and developed Sanctuary spaces for both hospitals and universities. His award winning design for the Sanctuary at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary has become a benchmark (http://www.ginkgoprojects.co.uk/projects/royal-infirmary-edinburgh).
These artists and others demonstrate key aspects of the role of art in bringing nature into healthcare contexts including focus on characteristics of nature such as colour, pattern and movement. As artists they use attention, framing and synthesis.
In addition to sharing these developments with the conference audience I hope to identify other artists exploring similar issues.
I’m very much hoping to find other artists and designers working along these lines with the depth of thinking as well as the quality of work.
HANGING OUT WITH TIM ROLLINS AND K.O.S. – The Brooklyn Rail
One of the earliest entries in this blog, back in 2004, resulted from reading a text by Tim Rollins that formed part of the Civil Arts Enquiry at the City Arts Centre in Dublin.
I had the privilege of attending a workshop at the Talbot Rice in Edinburgh with Tim Rollins and some of the Kids of Survival in August 2012.
Now Brooklyn Rail has published an excellent article, Two Days in the Lives of Art as Social Action, which name checks the event in Edinburgh.
Practising Equality
Over the past year I’ve been working with Prof Paul Harris and Prof Anne Douglas to explore common issues across art, design, architecture and media/Web 2.0 focusing on issues of co-creativity and participation. This short video made for a presentation at the Moving Targets Conference earlier this month highlights a few key thoughts and the paper will be published imminently in Participations Journal. I’ll post a link in due course.
Postscript
I just finish posting up this link to work we’ve been doing on participation and co-creativity, go back into my email and there is an Art&Education announcement of a major conference in Montreal entitled The Participatory Condition http://www.pcond.ca/ . Interestingly they have in their blurb aligned participation with democracy, something which we seek to question in our paper, and although they use the term relational, they don’t raise questions of the aesthetic of participation, questions which are critical within the art discourse but have not impacted on the discourse in design, architecture let alone media/Web 2.0.
Deep Routes: research, scale and indigeneity
The Financial Times at the end of 2012 carried a review of an exhibition by Zeng Fanzhi at the Gagosian Gallery. The review opens with the following couple of sentences,
It has finally happened – a solo exhibition of a Chinese artist whose power and interest does not depend on Chinese themes or subject matter. Since the 1990s, China has been the promised land of the global arts scene, but not one of the numerous group shows staged in the past decade – at Tate Liverpool, the Saatchi Gallery, the Hayward – has been able to make a case that artists from the region are of more than local concern.
The image that accompanied the review is of one of Zeng’s paintings, a reworking of Durer’s ubiquitous Hare some 4m square, the surface appearing to be deeply cracked. Whether this was an ironic statement on the import of the canonical tradition of Western Art from the perspective of the East, or an aesthetic judgement, or the quality of the reproduction on pink paper, I don’t know. I didn’t see the exhibition and I haven’t read the press release.
It may be that in the ambit of art criticism published in the FT and moving elegantly between the transnational art fairs and galleries that construct value through those environments, this artist is significant. It may be that because this artist reworks iconic images from canonical western art that they are therefore of ‘power and interest.’ Their ‘power and interest’ might perhaps lie in the exquisite development of the surface of the canvas through brilliant brushwork, or their use of colour, seeming to soak the hare in the night-time neon lights of Shanghai, Hong Kong, New York or LA.
This painting, and the others in the exhibition, and in fact all the work for sale in Gagosian, or in any of the other key galleries and art fairs, only exists at the global level. As the review rightly states what is important at this level is that the work cannot be of local concern, it must speak to The Universal, the abstracted, deterritorialised. It will exist in no-place because thanks to the hard work of the FT reviewer and the hard work of the Gagosian curatorial team ensuring that their merch is only seen in the right places, it’s value has nothing to do with an specific locality, any personal intimate space, any town or region. It might hang in a domestic interior for a period, but it is more likely to go into storage in a warehouse somewhere as an investment: value stored for future exchange.
The reviewer wouldn’t have to highlight this point reviewing a Richard Serra exhibition (such as the one that opened Gagosian’s London space). It would be taken for granted that Serra was of global interest and power, an important element moving in the circuits of value of the international art world. A Chinese artist has now been allowed into this club.
↔
Claire Pentecost, in her essay (pdf: Pentecost Notes on Continental Drift) Notes on the Project Called Continental Drift offers an alternative structure for thinking about art. Her structure, and the wider structure of the book Deep Routes: The Midwest In All Directions (Compass Collaborators, 2012 see bottom for ways to get a copy), precisely values an analysis which is interested in multiple levels (p.17),
We aim to explore the five scales of contemporary existence: the intimate, the local, the national, the continental and the global. Within the mesh of scales, we want to understand the extent of our interdependence, how any action we may take has effects on and is shaped by all these scales at once. We attempt to understand these dynamics so that we can understand the meaning of our own actions, the basis for an ethical life.
But for Pentecost, global is not the exclusive realm of ‘power and interest’. Rather her global is a scale at which it is necessary to look to see the entwined flows that articulate our everyday lives. She wants to look at the food on our table (perhaps the jugged hare) and through following the lines of connection to see that we are connected to the workers making ceramics in China for sale in IKEA in Long Island City (cf Ai WeiWei perhaps). And through that examination to see the Phillippino crews of container ships continuously circumnavigating the planet (cf for instance Allan Sekula). For her the global simply cannot exist in isolation. No artist’s interest and power should be divorced from local themes and subject matters. It is simply not possible – those elements can be ignored, but they still exist – practically speaking iron ore is mined, corten steel is produced in foundries, barges, trucks and planes move sculptures. There are social and environmental interactions. A sculpture can be a sign separated from all the realities that are involved in it’s production and presentation – deracinated – separated from all considerations except value to enable it to circulate freely in this global space.
And where the exhibition at Gagosian and the review in the FT are elements in the urgent construction of capital, Pentecost takes us on a detour into a mis-remembered quote trying to latch onto an articulation of a different way of dealing with signs and the value they convey, or actually deferring dealing with signs and value (p.23),
… to the point where many of us aspire to practice an intricate, processual, and research-motivated version of art that resists evaluation by the prescriptive teams of institutions and markets.
Where for the critic and the gallery the essential acts are focused on the carefully orchestrated production and affirmation of the sign as value, Pentecost following the French artist Francois Deck, suggests that the most important act is to operate at the point before the sign is ‘finalised’ and value is conferred. So the artwork is always unfinished, it is always a project, precisely because at the point we confer value, that thing, whatever it is, whether food or art, moves into warehouses and other structures designed to enable and enhance the mobility of capital.
Pentecost’s essay is one of two that open up Deep Routes. Pentecost establishes some key points in a landscape characterised by the financial crisis and the occupy movement. The themes and contexts of the book are focused by the specificity of the midwest of the United States of America. Reading the book we get to know particular places such as Beardstown, IL, exploring through Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross’ glossary of terms the ‘vertical integration’ of a small town into global commodities markets through ‘the cold chain,’ ‘engineered tiling,’ GMO, chemical fertilizers and GPS mapping. Matthias Regan’s narrative offers a different trajectory, of a Greyhound bus journey from Chicago to Detroit. This is a gentle, reflective meditation on breakdown in which (p.188),
The future does not emerge from amongst the technocratic elite; it will not be driven by new inventions in digital media. We should seek it instead in what is meager and humble, tentative and transitioning. Not rushing away from breakdown, but opening ourselves to its after effects.
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The other key trajectory established from the outset in Deep Routes takes us into indigenous experience, practice, pedagogy and critique. Alongside the spatial, economic and experiential journeys of the other authors, Dylan AT Miner’s interviews with First People’s organisers punctuate the book. Miner has been pursuing a project of imagining that we can all be indigenous – it’s not a condition restricted by genealogy, but rather a practice and a philosophy – a way of making sense of the world.
Near the end of the book, in the last interview, Jill Doerfler and Miner discuss tribalography, a methodology developed by by LeAnne Howe. Jill studied with LeAnne and explains the emergence of tribalography (p.228),
LeAnne has explained that tribalography grew out of the Native propensity to connect things together. It is the idea that Native writers often tell stories that combine autobiography, history, and fiction; we tell stories that include all these elements and also work in collaboration with the past, present, and future. …
Jill goes on to say,
These stories are not generally about finding out what really happened but are meant to teach us something and show us our place within our families, communities, nations, and the world. I found that in addition to serving as a critical lens for literary study and as a theoretical framework for cultural analysis, tribalography can also serve as an abundantly fruitful methodological approach relevant across the interdisciplinary field of American Indian studies.
I happened across Deep Routes staying with Sarah Ross and Ryan Griffis in Chicago in the autumn of 2012 (I was introduced to them by Brett Bloom when I asked him for help finding somewhere to stay in Chicago). They had just received delivery of a number of boxes from the printers. There was one on the coffee table. I picked it up and started reading. I realised it was the sequel to MidWest Radical Culture Corridor: A Call to Farms, which I had come across a few years ago. I was in Chicago for the International Sculpture Conference, but in many respects this book is better art than much of what I saw in the conference presentations. Not only did I meet Sarah and Ryan, but also Claire and Brian Holmes who came up with the concept of Continental Drift, and is the ’embedded’ critical theorist.
We ate preserved pears from the tree in their back garden and Sarah articulated some of the stress of working as a volunteer artist in a maximum security prison on her days off from teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
For me the description of tribalography tallies with my experience as an associate of a practice-led research programme. Practice-led research in the arts is autobiography. It is often history (contextualising practices in relation to precedents). It moves across the past, present and future (it has been said that practice-led PhDs are ways for artists to reinvent their practices). Truth in the sense of replicable experiment is not at the heart of practice-led research. But most provocatively fiction is sometimes there too (Sophie Hope’s work Participating in the Wrong Way certainly brings ‘fictionalising’ to bear on research).
Methods, whether Pentecost’s revisiting of the Modern School movement of the early part of the last century or tribalography, positively radiate out of this volume. It is built on the experience of a creative community that exists in a particular territory. Their art is research motivated, processual and intricately interwoven at different scales and with different collaborators. Ironically this work is of global power and interest even if it is all about the Midwest.
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You can order a copy here, or if you are in Scotland and we can meet, then I’ll lend you one.
New Economics for Artists
Harry Giles’ excellent twenty (?) questions on the cultural economy in relation to its own inconsistencies and in relation to certain other economics that we all might have experienced (4 months working for London Electricity in their call centre in Victoria in about 1990-1; 6 months working as an outdoor clerk for a firm of solicitors; 4 years working as an amanuensis for a paraplegic philosophy professor whilst at University; 10 weeks as an unpaid intern at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York one summer during University).
I wrote this brain-dump for Andy Field, who was asked to prepare a presentation on “how artists can think about new financial models for themselves and for audiences”. He collected 150 bits of advice, sold them for £1 each, and used the proceeds to pay a violinist to play music for the length of the presentation: hurrah for the meeting of form and content! I keep attempting to write something long and thoughtful on art and money and how it all fits together, or maybe organise a conference about it, or a piece of action-research, or… well, none of that has happened yet. Maybe it will. In the mean time, two very nice people recently reminded me that I’d written this, so I reread it, and it turns out I’d already said most of the things I’ve been thinking about. So here it is. it’s a start, anyway.
“New…
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I woz here
Susan T Grant asked me to do a bit of writing for one of the publications following her residency in Dalkeith and the associated exhibition at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.
My text is on the I woz here project website here. I didn’t put footnotes in, but if you are interested in participatory practices and town artists, you might like to read David Harding’s piece on Town Artists here, and the Artworks Scotland programme here.
Provocation for ArtWorks blog
You have in front of you a typewritten text. It could be poetry. It is an invitation to action, but not exactly an instruction. It reads:
planting a square of turf
amid grass like it
planting another
amid grass a little less green
planting four more squares
in places progressively drier
planting a square of dry turf
amid grass like it
planting another
amid grass a little less dry
planting four more squares
in places progressively greener
This is an artwork by Allan Kaprow, a score in his terminology. Kaprow wasn’t a musician, and in using the term score he was borrowing the terminology of music.
Reading the ArtWorks’ programme’s International Next Practice Review by Chrissie Tiller and in particular the Participation Spectrum proposed by the James Irvine Foundation, it strikes us that this work could operate at any point along the passive to active audience spectrum proposed. It could simply be read by an audience, or at the other end of the spectrum, made by them. A group of artists and researchers from Gray’s School of Art took this score as a starting point to make new work. We called that Calendar Variations. Were we artists or audience? Were we performing Kaprow’s score?
But what was Kaprow doing? Would he have defined his practice as participatory?
We’d like to suggest that Kaprow is breaking out of the norms of being an artist. The score was a prototype for a co-creative relationship. Kaprow authored the score, but other people played it.
Perhaps Kaprow simply thought that music benefited from having three different roles of composer, performer and audience, where in visual art there might be understood to be only artist and audience. Of course the performer could be many things: composer; professional performer, hired to perform the work; or member of the audience who goes home and performs the work themselves. Is the person who whistles the melody also more than passive audience?
But it could also be another composer who creates new work in response to the original, or a painter who makes something in another form. The more improvisational you get, the more that the role of the composer recedes and the role of the performer comes forward. Kaprow’s Calendar Activity is something with which to improvise. As soon as you set out to perform it, you realise that you have to interpret it.
Having done a series of projects on social practices, we have recently been working on improvisation, looking to understand the aesthetics of social practice.
Currently we are exploring participatory and co-creative practices across art, design and architecture.
Professor Paul Harris, Professor Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle
Gray’s School of Art
This was just published as a provocation on the ArtWorks blog and is an element of a wider programme of work on participation and co-creation across art, design and architecture.
My responses to Calendar can be found here.
What have I been reading?
Tim Etchells’ piece Moon Story for the Arnolfini is a beautiful call to arms for performance.
Imagining Possibilities Conference | Public Art Scotland
This piece just went out on Public Art Scotland,
This Participation was the focus of the Imagining Possibilities conference at the University of the West of Scotland, but the conference is only a manifestation of a wider concern. The conference is part of the Remaking Communities project funded as part of Connected Communities. The Connected Communities programme embraces all the Research Funding Councils in a broad alliance to engage communities and thus increase impact. The Paul Hamlyn Foundation is currently funding four strands of the ArtWorks programme, including one in Scotland. The Scottish Government is currently working its way through a new bill on Community Empowerment and Renewal and the Westminster Government has already legislated on ‘localism’. All of these programmes put community participation at the heart of, respectively, academic research, arts practice and local democracy.
The Essential Monument Pt. 1 | Public Art Scotland
First part of a report on The Essential Conference in Edinburgh,
“I feel uncomfortable with the term public art, because I’m not sure what it means. If it means what I think it does, then I don’t do it. I’m not crazy about categories.” Barbara Kruger
Working artists and curators don’t tend to talk about monuments as part of the contemporary public art. Not sure they’d be considered essential. The recent conference, The Essential Monument, held at the Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh (8th February 2013), proved everyone wrong. The provocation clearly worked.
Before talking about the conference I need to say that the new monument to Patrick Geddes installed in the Garden of Sandeman House is one of the finest pieces of sculpture I’ve seen in a long time.
Who is he?
Cullen House 16th Century tempura painted ceiling (detail of Mercury)
I use this image (or an even smaller crop) , rather than a photograph of myself, when asked for one by websites.
It is the figure of Mercury from the Scottish Renaissance tempura painted ceiling in Cullen House, Aberdeenshire. Sadly it was destroyed by fire in the late 80s. If you are looking for more information on the Cullen House ceiling get hold of a copy of ‘Celestial Ceiling’, the publication of the On The Edge Research project. The book documents the process of remaking the lost ceiling as a digital projection, and commissioning Robert Orchardson to make a new painted ceiling for the house.
What am I reading?
Hackerspaces and DIYbio in Asia: connecting science and community with open data, kits and protocols in Journal of Peer Production.
Frederick Huth Jackson’s Diary
Frederick Huth Jackson (1863-1921)
Frederick Huth Jackson kept a diary of his visit to New Zealand in 1883-84. Frederick Huth Jackson Diary 1883 lo res.
He was aged 20 at the time.
The first half survives, and was transcribed by Richard Fremantle in the early 70s. This covers his own journey to New Zealand on the SS Ionic and his travels through the North and South Islands. The second half, describing his time escorting Baron Hübner, is sadly missing.
Occupy Museums: MoMA
Occupy Museums meeting beneath Sanja Iveković's "Lady Rosa of Luxembourg" -
Professors, Artists, Workers, and Activists Rally Inside MoMA.
So the question is, are museums part of the problem? What is the problem?
The problem is social and environmental justice. The problem is massively complex and multi-facetted. The problem is multi- trans- and inter-disciplinary. The problem is simple: it’s the financialisation of everything from the value of bees to the value of education, from culture as gentrification to the environmental externalties (the unquantified impacts, ironically the one thing that needs financialised). It’s so complex that it cannot be summarised into one or two sound-bites.
As Brian Holmes’ said in his post ‘Culture Beyond Oil‘,
The secret is out: less than 1 percent of our planet’s population is destroying our world for their profit.
So why are museums part of the problem? and for museums read major arts and cultural organisations.
There are at least a couple of issues:
One is about the ‘career structure’ of the artworld where a lot of people work for free or minimum wage (in their studios or communities or wherever) and a few people become incredibly rich (sometimes the artists, always the dealers). The Scottish Artists Union worked with the Scottish Arts Council and the resulting report showed that a very significant proportion of visual artists make almost no money from their work and have to support their practice from other work. The economy of the visual arts is very challenging and individual artists have always been some of the most precarious workers.
Another is the increasing corporate involvement in the arts – this has always been a factor in the US and the Art Workers Coalition campaigned on this issue forty years ago. In the UK it was significantly encouraged under the Thatcher government. One of the effective lines of critique is offered by PLATFORM with their challenge to BP’s funding of the Tate (as well as other cultural ‘majors’). They argue that this is a form of social license to operate. They need many different forms of legal licenses to operate, but they also need social permission. Cultural organisations, especially the large ones like Tate Britain and the Portrait Awards, are very effective means to demonstrate good corporate citizenship. Good corporate citizenship is not just judged on the funding of cultural majors, it is also a question of actual citizenship across the world.
Art and Occupation
The Arts of Occupation | The Nation. Intelligent analysis of arts in Occupy Wall Street addressing the complexity of the issue, including art interventions, the aesthetic tactics of the movement, alliances with radical arts practices, and the work on art and labor that forms part of the occupy ‘enquiry’ into the relationship between the 1% and the 99%.
Art is not simply at the service of occupy, illustrating demands, but it is also not autonomous and ambiguous in relation to occupy. Rather it forms part of the tactics and challenge.
What art have I seen? AHM State of Play
Ruth Ewan’s Brank & Heckle at Dundee Contemporary Arts.
There for the AHM State of Play symposium. Ross Sinclair’s rant by audio/powerpoint was very refreshing, Jean Urquhart MSP deserved a standing ovation and perhaps hit the nail on the head. The Manifestos were really good, especially Tara Beall’s.
Once again, and precisely because there was no policy agenda being promoted, one must think hard to understand the point. Most conferences are organised by bureaucracies seeking to promulgate their policy initiatives and secure adoption by practitioners. Conferences organised by practitioners tend to complicate and agitate.
So what were AHM attempting to complicate and agitate? The simple answer might be in Jean Urquhart MSP’s talk which ended with an invitation or a challenge for the artists to engage more directly with the political – get stuck in, get into the Parliament, get political, stop talking the talk and start walking the walk.
And this is probably true, although perhaps the ambition for AHM was more subtle and demonstrated through the one-minute manifestos. These were a platform for artists (in the broad sense) to articulate something, frankly anything, that they felt it was important to say. Over the three events, some were political, some humorous, some dadaist, some demonstrated their point through their form.
My manifesto was intended to set out what I think is important in doing what I do. I was glad to be able to be part of another two manifestos (in the end). I was part of Tim Collins Anthropocene Evolution Alliance and on the day I found myself being part of Tara Beall’s multivocal performance.
We all have stuff to say and we all believe that it matters.
AHM’s State of Play, Dundee
AHM‘s final State of Play event takes place in Dundee on Saturday 1 October.
As with previous events it will include a number of ‘One Minute Manifestos’. One of these has emerged through a collective process of writing initiated by Tim Collins and contributed to by a number of participants in the Values of Environmental Writing programme at Glasgow University.
Tim has asked me to post the manifesto and authorship, and to encourage anyone who broadly supports the manifesto, and is at the State of Play symposium, to come forward and share in the speaking of the manifesto.
“Who are we? Though the origins of this manifesto are the Values of Environmental Research Network conversations, this document is inclusive of all those who feel that the arts and humanities have a vital role in the effort to mitigate and prevent environmental damage.”
The Anthropo-scene Evolution
2011 saw the culmination of avarice that necessitates naming the human impact on all earthly things. In response we wish to reject humanity’s supposed dominion over nature and to take responsibility for wilful and excessive impact. Our intention is to constitute greater empathy between the world’s free-living things. As creative pragmatists committed to producing practical wisdom, we recognise a loss of humility and seek to reengage the aesthetic and the sublime, which provide interface and witness to spirit on earth. Cultural responses to the anthropo-scene realize that there are opportunities embedded in new constraints; but more importantly there is generative force amongst living things that must be engaged anew. We experiment with a new materialism and aim for new metaphysical purpose for the arts and humanities within the public domain.
Background
Draft1 scribed by Tim Collins (TC) with Reiko Goto, 18 June 2011, subsequently edited by Tom Bristow and Chris Maughan, with comments and encouragement from Aaron Franks and Chris Fremantle (CF). The AHM ‘State of Play in Scotland’ submission was initiated by CF. TC offered the first rough draft with proper word editing by Aaron Franks and Rachel Harkness, followed by strategic refinement by Rhian Williams, Kate Foster, Alistair McIntosh and Owain Jones. The full manifesto is a result of discussion that occurred on 17 June, 2011 with Aaron Franks, Owain Jones, Chris Maughan, Mike Robinson and Karen Syse. Tom Bristow and the ‘frog team’ were present in spirit if not in material form. The work was inspired and energized by presentations and dialogue with Alistair McIntosh and Gareth Evans all set within the wider context of the AHRC supported Values of Environmental Writing Network, organized by Hayden Lorimer, Alex Benchimol and Rhian Williams (2011).
IN CASE SOMETHING DIFFERENT HAPPENS
Fascinating rumination and art historical contextualisation by David Levi-Strauss published in The Brooklyn Rail on the relationship between Joseph Beuys and the Twin Towers drawing out the meanings of his remaking in the postcard (below).
Levi-Strauss shows how Beuys transforms the architecture from the symbol of global capital into something quite different by transmuting steel and glass into butter and by applying the names of two healing saints (Cosmas and Damian) he superimposes a different mythology.
Thanks to Linda Weintraub for highlighting this really provocative piece.
Blue
Rebecca Solnit writes about blue the way that Donald Urquhart paints blue.
Rebecca Solnit has been doing a residency at Roni Horn’s Library of Water at Stykkishólmur, Iceland. One of the published pieces, The Blue of Distance, is all about mountains, Renaissance painting, distance.
Donald Urquhart talks about the blue of a perfectly clear day. He makes it into art: paintings, sculptures, places.
Donald Urquhart, Sea Beams, Oak and paint, 2007
Fear and Loathing in the West Highlands Pt 2
The Water of Life, a Spirit Not to be Exorcised, Lonely Piper, 2006
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”
This is the infamous advice contained in Fear and Loathing at the Superbowl, and this seems to be another very apt quote to attach to some further thoughts on Nemeton by Norman Shaw, awarded his PhD in 2003.
What is Nemeton? There is a lot of psycho-geography around at the moment (Sinclair, Self, Sebald) and a lot of nature writing (MacFarlane, Mabey and perhaps also Monbiot and McKibben). Nemeton isn’t either exactly. Psycho-geography is usually defined as the exploring the emotional and psychological impacts of geography, about ways of exploring the urban landscape, about rediscovering somewhere and introducing its idiosyncrasies to others. Nemeton is not in the mode of rediscovery, although the knowledge is in some respects lost. Nor is Nemeton concerned with the urban. Rather this is a landscape that is known and inhabited, even if Shaw is transgressing what might be regarded as the perceived norms of communities in the Highlands (although Scotland has regularly been a place where transgressive communities can find refuge under the radar, on the periphery). But Nemeton does explore the emotional and psychological, in particular in relation to the spiritual. Nor is Nemeton nature writing exactly. It’s not a celebration of nature. Rather its a celebration of the specific spiritual dimension of the West Highland landscape.
“It was dangerous lunacy, but it was also the kind of thing a real connoisseur of edge-work could make an argument for.” (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p.80)
Edge-work is a term coined in Fear and Loathing. It captures the spirit of transgression that applies equally to both texts. The edge in question isn’t just the edge of consciousness, it’s also the edge of art, the edge of social acceptability, the edge of sanity, as well as working along the edge of what most people have experienced and then diving into spaces that they haven’t. Many people have been to Calanais, not many to the other stone circles, let alone carrying an electric guitar, modified amplifier, etc. seeking to capture the energies in the stones.
Just as Raoul Duke is searching for the American Dream in the hotels and conferences of Las Vegas,
“Let me explain it to you, let me run it down just briefly if I can… Well, we’re looking for the American Dream, and we were told it was somewhere in this area…. Well, we’re here looking for it, ’cause they sent us out here all the way from San Francisco to look for it. That’s why they gave us this white Cadillac, they figure that we could catch up with it in that…” (ibid, 164).
The Lonely Piper is looking for the Dreamworld or Otherworld of the West Highlands, the strange alternate universe of the faeries, of the mother….
The tour involved visits to selected nemetons in the Highlands, the fruits of which constitute the material gathered together in this publication. … As the project developed through accumulated visits and collaborations, a range of sub-themes emerged. Chance encounters during particular collaborations resulted in unforeseen iconoclasms and subversions, the direct result of unplanned happenstances and contingencies. These tangential developments were welcomed, and expanded upon, looping back into the main themes. (Nemeton, p.8)
Nemeton starts with an argument that magic mushrooms must have been used by the Celtic bardic culture to access the dreamworld and enter the faerie land under the faerie hills,
In my mind I was right back there in the doctor’s garden. Not on the surface, but underneath – poking up through that finely cultivated earth like some kind of mutant mushroom.” (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p.65)
Talk about a trip… this is gonzo research.
Fear and Loathing in the West Highlands
Norman Shaw’s Nemeton lives up to Alastair McIntosh’s stated approach to writing, “In the absence of 300 micrograms of LSD, how can I trip them out?”
This is gonzo academic writing at its best: faeries, faerie hills (a nemeton is a sacred space in the ancient Celtic religion), second sight, Ossian, standing stones (Callanish in particular), Masons, shit socks, Psilocybin (magic) mushrooms, hazel nuts, the nuts of knowledge, salmon, poaching, patrols for poachers, Christianity, damnation, the second coming, the Jacobites, superquarries, peat, and of course Beuys.
Shaw documents visually and in text a series of journeys to explore specific nemetons, sites in the West Highlands where our world and the dream- or otherworld are connected. These journeys are deeper explorations of previous experiences: Shaw, a son of the Manse, grew up in Lewis and Dingwall amongst other Highland communities. Revisiting sites with the specific objective of researching their existence as meeting points brings him into contact with everyday Highland life as well as with the other world. Cycling, driving and walking through the Highlands in the heat and the rain, in fog and on clear days, sometimes in company and sometimes alone, the journeys are psychological as well as physical explorations.
Nemeton is a rumination on the nature of reality, West Highland reality, which is distinct from other realities, just as Hunter S Thompson’s West Coast reality is an alternate reality. Just imagine three cycles dumped outside a café in a community hall on Harris.
“My bike has a crucifix for handlebars, with a wooden Christ having from it. His legs form the two forks holding the front wheel. Thus Jesus forms a kind of figurehead for the trip. Roineval will be our Holy Mountain, our Calvary. The bike becomes our cross to bear, dragging it round the roads of Harris, whilst simultaneously being steered by Christ, whose humiliation haunts the moors and glens of the Hebrides – a voice crying in the wilderness. A fine twelve-pointed pair of red deer stag’s antlers form Eddie’s handlebars. The deer is a symbol of time and a symbol of love. Time the deer is in the wood… It also symbolises the surplus of deer that roam the sporting estates of the post-clearance highlands; or the horned god Cerrunos, hermes trismegistus – often depicted as Moses with horns (as in Roslin chapel, for instance). Lee’s bicycle is steered by the skull and jawbones of a basking shark. His bike is an appeal to the maritime history of this place, of fish-based economies and a hearkening back to old Atlantis or even Tir Nan Og.” (p.100).
Shaw makes a compelling argument that our post-modern imaginary, breaking down assumptions about cause and effect, disrupting the linear narrative, exploring the circular, is fundamentally more suited to developing an understanding of dimensions beyond those accessible to the sciences of physics and imperial(ist) histories.
There are contributions from others including Murdo Macdonald, the Professor of History of Scottish Art at the University of Dundee as well as the artists Eddie Summerton, Lee O’Connor and Tommy Crooks.
At the heart of this book is a rumination on nature and the spiritual. Shaw belongs in the long lineage of researchers into the otherworld or dreamworld of the Scottish Highlands. What is distinctive about this research, done in the context of contemporary visual arts (as broad as that method can be), is the acceptance of the participation of the researcher in the world. Other texts describe things learnt or things found. This text shares experiences of the research. In this text the spiritual is not other, studied objectively, but rather immanent, studied subjectively. The altered states of this text confront head on the haptic, the liminal, and the full complexity of the Highlands: damnation at the second coming, the schadenfreude of village life where failure eviscerates incomers. Fear is visceral.
Why this book is self-published I cannot for the life of me understand, but you can get a copy direct from the author email nshaw777@gmail.com or write to 2 Inzievar Courtyard, Inzievar Woods, Dunfermline, Fife, KY12 8HB.
Dr Norman Shaw
Born in 1970, grew up in the Highlands.
MA (Hons) in Fine Art, University of Edinburgh (1993)
MPhil in Art History, Edinburgh College of Art (1994)
MFA in painting, Edinburgh College of Art (1996).
PhD in Fine Art, University of Dundee (2004)
Taught Art History and Fine Art at Edinburgh College of Art and the University of Edinburgh, before lecturing at the University of Dundee.
Exhibits widely in group and solo exhibitions, nationally and internationally. Outputs include drawing and painting, printmaking, writing, sound, video.
Exhibitions include ‘Window to the West’ (City Art Centre, 2010), ‘Prints of Darkness’ (Edinburgh Printmakers, 2010 (touring)), ‘Highland’ (RSA, 2007), ‘The Great Book of Gaelic’ (An Lanntair, Stornoway, 2002 (touring)), ‘Calanais’ (An Lanntair,1996 (touring)).
Research and practice is multi-disciplinary and polymorphic. Major source is the Scottish Highland landscape; its natural and unnatural histories, mythologies, mysticisms and psychogeologies; tempered by a unique visionary iconography which draws on an expansive range of influences.
Visual research ranges from drawing and painting to printmaking and installation. Influences and obsessions range from prehistoric megalithic culture and Pictish art to early medieval British insular art; and from the early northern renaissance to the northern romantic tradition; William Blake, the Celtic revival, surrealism, neo-romanticism, psychedelia, and occult, subversive and ‘outsider’ art, marginal, alternative and hidden histories. Draws heavily on music-related artforms such as record covers and paraphernalia.
Gil Scott-Heron / Graham’s post
Graham Jeffrey also posted in response to the news that Gil Scott-Heron had died – he found some great film, which as he says, demonstrates the man’s greatness.
Creativity, leadership, wellbeing
Catherine Czerkawska‘s provocative piece in the Scottish Review highlights the increasing distance between the experiences of being a painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer, maker, writer, poet, playwright, actor, musician, composer, dancer, choreographer, storyteller, and the languages used to articulate the value of creativity.
Even the listing of all the things that might be done in being an artist helps to question the narrative of artist = creativity = wellbeing. She highlights the important gaps between the reality of being an artist, and the language of creativity, between the act of making art and the process of being creative. The latter, the process of being creative, is currently being developed and defined, having been identified as an important aspect of economic success (Cox Review of Creativity in Business, 2005).
But what is interesting is that 15 years ago some people in the arts were arguing to be taken more seriously, not just by the cultural elite, but as as a relevant part of everyday life for all. Perhaps unfortunately the argument has been made successfully, the value of creativity has been acknowledged and some characteristics have been attached to it: “Questioning, innovating, problem-solving and reflecting critically”. Teamwork and leadership have been added to the mix (and I worked on the research project The Artist as Leader, which re-focused the discussion on the role of the artist and their ability to develop critical positions).
When Joseph Beuys declared in 1975 “Jeder mensch ein kunstler” or “everyone an artist” did he mean everyone can make works of art or that everyone could be creative?
Czerkawska, although she does not push the distinction between artist and creative person, does characterise the artist as a person involved in an emotional journey, “It can involve extremes of depression and elation, can be at once fulfilling and frustrating, energising and exhausting. Perhaps most problematic of all, from the point of view of potential employers, a significant percentage of creative people are not, in any sense, ‘joiners’.”
If the ambition for the arts to have a wider role in society is still on the table, then perhaps its time for artists to challenge the values that are being ascribed to creativity, to articulate, as Czerkawska does, some of the realities of creating art, and to help sharpen the distinction between creating art and being creative, rather than eliding this distinction in the process of attempting to secure greater economic relevance and power.
Sometimes it takes a little while
or, How has Scotland changed?
AHM‘s second State of Play Symposium (2 April 2011) was a very different affair from the first. Held in Edinburgh in the Hawthornden Lecture Theatre of the National Galleries of Scotland, it was comfortable, elegant, sophisticated and at the heart of the establishment.
In November when we first met at the invitation of AHM to discuss the state of play, it was in the lecture theatre at Gilmorehill in the University of Glasgow. It felt edgy, not least because the technical staff had just been handed redundancy notices, but also because it was a week before Westminster’s “budget of cuts.” There was talk of organising. Philip Schlesinger outlined the cultural policy context for the formation of Creative Scotland, describing clearly the increasing economism that has resulted in the arts being transformed into the creative industries, with all the entailed lack of criticality. Peter McCaughey told everyone to join the Scottish Artists Union (and this still applies).
For the second event AHM had invited ex-pat Scots to speak. The event started with a virtually broadcast quality presentation by Neal Ascherson on the history of the Scots overseas. He focused on the Scots in the Baltics, Poland in particular, and how that forms part of a wider European history, developing themes he explored in Stone Voices: The search for Scotland. Rather than list all the excellent speakers, and it was a powerhouse of a day in terms of the line-up of speakers (see AHM blog for videos), I want to reflect on why the question and answer sessions never seemed to get into a groove.
The underlying recurring story was of extremely talented, successful and interesting artists graduating from Scottish art schools in the 70s and high-tailing it out of Scotland as quickly as possible. I am sure that the word stultifying was used. The fact that it took until the early 80s for Scotland to decriminalise same-sex relationships was also mentioned. Whilst we might look back on the period as one of radical actions (Demarco, Beuys, Hamilton Finlay, APG), the reality for young artists was an oppressive environment where according to one speaker it took years to un-learn the house style of Edinburgh College of Art’s Painting Department. There was almost no contemporary art (apart from the Scottish Arts Council’s Gallery), and very few artist-led or run spaces (in Edinburgh there were The New 57 Gallery and the Printmakers).
And now? Artist-led spaces abound and contemporary art is everywhere. The major cultural institutions have bought into contemporary art big time: it’s projects in schools, strategies in healthcare, instrumental to regeneration projects. So contemporary visual arts are out there, visible and challenging.
Probably a quarter of the audience were from other parts of the world (myself included) choosing to live and work in Scotland because Scotland is now an interesting place to be, and whilst globalisation has made mobility something taken for granted and artists are always coming and going, it is still a decision, sometimes made for love rather than professional returns, to be in Scotland rather than London, LA, Sydney, New York, Berlin or anywhere else.
So the audience for the AHM event, who are choosing to live and work in Scotland now, were faced with people who all left ages ago and made their lives (very successfully) elsewhere: difficult to have that conversation.
But as a way to focus the ‘state of play’, to make it clear that ‘now’ is not the same as ‘before’, and to prepare us to think about the future when we meet again in September in Dundee for the third and final event, AHM placed this symposium right on the mark. Verdict: troubling and requiring thought.
The questions that should have been asked are:
To the speakers: “If you were young again and here now would you still leave and if not, why not?”
To the audience: “How do we work out what’s really important and how do we fight for it?”
If the visual arts in Scotland are vital, alive, vibrant, then what makes them vital and how do we tell that story? Perhaps the story starts,
“In the 70s the best and brightest talent felt compelled to leave Scotland for other parts of the world. It’s striking the extent to which that situation has changed. Now people from other parts of the world choose to make Scotland the base for their practices. The most talented Scottish artists stay in Scotland and work internationally. We need to build on this transformation.”
AHM remind us to “Work as if you live in the early days of a better society.” It seems to me that at this Symposium they demonstrated one of the ways in which we do live in the early days of a better society.
Ayrshire Poetry Slam 16th Feb, 8pm
Su Casa coffee house, The Lorne Arcade, (off the High Street) Ayr … Entrance £4 (£3)
The contest to find this year’s Ayrshire Slam Champ is on. Rhymers, rappers and rhapsodists welcome. Purveyors of verse blank, verse blue or verse bleezin – all are welcome to take part.
Everyone will go up to the mic twice. For three minutes each time. Judges will score for poem, for performance and for audience reaction. The three highest scorers go into the final on the night. There they will have three more minuutes to perform the poem that will win them the glory, the fame, the laurels of the victor … and a small amount of money!
Under 18s welcome tho we can’t edit content or language content!
The winner will also qualify to take part in the Scottish Slam Championships at The Mitchell Theatre on March 4.
If you’d like to take part please contact robin.cairns@btconnect.com
or you can call rosie on 01292 520543
Sunny Dunny
Well not exactly, but it wasn’t sunny leaving another Scottish seaside holiday town this morning either. I was invited by Polarcap (Liz Adamson and Graeme Todd) to see their current exhibition, Vegetable Loves, at West Barns Studios.
Adamson and Todd curate projects as Polarcap, and are also, with another colleague, the organisers of West Barns Studios, a project space and six studios outside Dunbar on the East coast.
Derrick Guild, root crop, oil on resin with cz diamonds, 2006
Drawing inspiration from Andrew Marvell’s most famous poem To His Coy Mistress and hinting at the ecological interests of the curators, Vegetable Loves includes a range of work, from Jonathan Owen‘s obsessively recarved figure which started as Don Quixote and is now a surrealist fantasy of the bondage of books, to Jacqui Irvine’s ‘painting’ made by the snails in her garden working for her in exchange for the nacotic joys of envelope adhesive. Having just been reading Boris Groys’ essay in the e-flux Journal Marx After Duchamp, or The Artist’s Two Bodies, I wonder what sort of alienated labour that represents?
The melody in the background, part of the video by Soland Goose found by following the sound down a corridor to a small alcove, alludes to agriculture. Furrow patterns in a field caught in the low sunlight of the Scottish winter are animated by, organ-grinder-like, C-A-B-B-A-G-E.
The sound of running water takes over as guide to the inquisitive, leading to a projection with a fountain. Images of anonymous, un-peopled, spaces in a modern city, curiously new and yet bereft of life, as if abandoned, are projected on the wall. In front stands a red plastic stool with a bucket on it, but the roof is not leaking. Instead a small garden water fountain mechanism is in the bucket, and a spout of water arcs into another bucket on the floor. Where the images are of modern topiary perfection (nothing like a garden in the Italianate style), the fountain is an improvised icon of a Shanghai market, offered by an artist Rania Ho to Todd in remembrance of a visit (as I understood).
But going back to Groys, underneath the skin of this exhibition we find precisely the problems of labour in contemporary art. Adamson and Todd collaborate on curatorial projects, whilst Todd maintains a formal painting practice. Both also lecture at Edinburgh College of Art (and are probably being expected to evidence ‘impact’ for the REF). Talking about the exhibition they commented on the arrival of Hayley Tompkins elegantly simple and modest work from her gallery, the Modern Institute, and the importance of good packaging in signalling the significance of the artist. Todd described with loving detail the layers of foam rubber and the precision with which they had been packed. Whilst Groys is right that there has been a shift from ‘artistic mass consumption’ to ‘artistic mass production’ brought on by the high bandwidth communications which mean that,
“Contemporary means of communication and social networks such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter offer global populations the ability to present their photos, videos, and texts in ways that cannot be distinguished from any post-Conceptualist artwork. And contemporary design offers the same populations a means of shaping and experiencing their apartments or workplaces as artistic installations.”
And he is right that institutional critique has been focused on the purposes and powers of art institutions rather than their practicalities,
“Especially within the framework of “institutional critique,” art institutions are mostly considered to be power structures defining what is included or excluded from public view. Thus art institutions are analyzed mostly in “idealist,” non-materialist terms, whereas, in materialist terms, art institutions present themselves rather as buildings, spaces, storage facilities, and so forth, requiring an amount of manual work in order to be built, maintained, and used.”
The grassroots of contemporary art brings all the systemic elements (curatorship, organisational development, fundraising, creating work, installing work, marketing through social media) into the hands of individuals and small collectives where they are still personal bodily activity, and where the results have the touch of the individual. Often, like Polarcap and West Barns Studios, these are also seeking to challenge centre-periphery dynamics, whilst simultaneously allowing Todd to exhibit in London and undertake research visits to China.
What emerges is a new construction challenging the VALS (highlighted in another e-flux journal paper, this time by Martha Rosler) analysis which aligns ‘experiencers’ to the highest value and ‘makers’ with the lowest value. Innovation is making, making work and making things happen, and yes the experiencers can feel creative through high bandwidth, but they are not changing the world.
Ruth Barker’s Big Questions, No Answers
Ruth Barker’s blog post Big Questions, No Answers on the PAR+RS website asks some very important questions which turn the question of skill and expertise. Taking off at a tangent, these questions are fundamentally to do with inter-disciplinarity, skill, competence and, as Ruth says, responsibility.
One of the sharpest critiques I’ve read draws on Psychology and applies Attachment Theory to recent trends within the arts and culture, i.e. if culture or the arts attaches itself to health to gain access to resources then it is forced to adopt the valuation methods used in health. (Gray, C., Local Government and the Arts. Local Government Studies. Jan 2002.)
The danger is of course that the arts have attached themselves to health, environment, education (primary, secondary, further, higher and informal), social work, youth justice, criminal justice, etc… each bringing its own formulation and methodology for valuation. Hence there is an under acknowledged process of specialisation particularly in the field of public art, where successful practitioners have indepth knowledge of very specific policy areas and are able to engage with managers, politicians and policy makers on their own terms.
I would cite for example Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison who can sit down with very senior environmental scientists, policy makers and politicians and engage in detailed discussion of watershed management strategies. If you take a look at their publication Peninsula Europe you will find an analysis of the financial value of reforesting the high ground of Europe in terms of the amount of clean water produced. This is only one example. There are many others: Suzanne Lacy talking about the issues around rape or teen pregnancy. In Scotland Jackie Donnachie has a relationship with medical researchers of this same quality, but I digress.
The question is whether in this process the artist also persuades these sectors that creative methods (of valuation) are relevant to them. Whose terms is success judged by?
CHRIS FREMANTLE 
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