CHRIS FREMANTLE

Working with Allan Kaprow

Posted in CV, Exhibitions, On The Edge, Research by chrisfremantle on January 23, 2021
Anne Douglas produced Calendar Variations as a project amongst a group of researcher artists including Reiko Goto, Georgina Barney, Fiona Hope, Jono Hope, Janet McEwan, Chu Chu Yuan and myself. Anne took Allan Kaprow’s Activity entitled ‘Calendar’ as a starting point, asking all the participants to respond individually to the text. We then came together for two days to negotiate a collective response. As a collective we explored what might be considered the minimum intervention – walking a square into long grass. We did this at The Barn in Banchory (above). My own work with ‘Calendar’ is documented here and below are a pair of works that resulted from an analysis. Other drawings explore wet and dry (proxies for life and death) in various ways.  I also did a curatorial exercise documented here.
Chris Fremantle, CV, Acrylic and Pencil (2015) installed as part of Staff Outing exhibition, Look Again Space, 2018.
Calendar Variations publication More recently I discovered that Jupiter Artland had also invited some artists (Andrea Büttner, James Hoff, Peter Liversidge, Cinzia Mutigli, members of ORBIT Youth Council and the Wilson family) to respond to Kaprow’s Scores and Activities. You can see their work here. Kaprow’s Scores and Activities are one of the inspirations for a book coming out of the ecoart network to be published in 2022 by New Village Press. The book, entitled Ecoart in Action, comprises contributions by 67 artists. The contributions are all exercises, recipes or instructions for activities; case studies of activities; or provocations towards developing activities. Some are more literal than Kaprow’s, with obvious pedagogical outcomes. Others are elliptical and open-ended like Kaprow’s, leaving those undertaking to work out what might be learnt or done for themselves. Kaprow continues to inspire.
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Audiences and… pt1

Posted in Audiences and, Uncategorized by chrisfremantle on December 10, 2018

I had an interesting conversation recently. Someone said to me. “I get irritated when I ask an artist how they think the viewer of the work will respond to something they are working on. They often say that they are making the work for themselves. When I ask them whether they want people to see the work, they say Of course. When I ask them who, they say People.” We are here talking about studio based work, work that is made and then shown, but this brings up larger issues.

And there is a truth that anyone making work in a studio in the end is making something to a personal agenda. And neither of us were thinking that making art was a form of marketing where a clear sense of the intended audience, segmented and analysed, was central to the process. Working in public places is almost always a negotiation.

So I’m going to be exploring this question, drawing attention to writing that I think helps address the question, “What is the relationship between the artist and the audience, participant, collaborator, co-creator, etc?” There will be a series of posts and they’ll all have the Title “Artists and…” Some may just be links to other pieces of writing – where relevant I’ll provide pdfs too.

The first is from Anne Douglas’ forthcoming publication in the Connected Communities Series for Policy Press.

Anne recently wrote, speaking of Allan Kaprow and John Cage,

…they shared the question of where creativity begins and ends – with the composer, with the performer and/or with the audience? This shift in the power of creative agency is poignantly evidenced at this early stage in Cage’s 4’33” (1952). The performer sits at the grand piano but does not play it. Instead the ritual of a classical performance frames ambient sound creating an environment that is sensory and, importantly, draws the audience, performer and composition together in a shared space connected through listening. The conventional hierarchy in which the (active) composer generates material that the performer (as mediator) realises to a (passive) audience gives way to new configuration. The listener, who could be composer or performer or a member of the audience, becomes the creator of his/her own singular experience of sound.

Douglas, A. 2019 Redistributing Power? A Poetics of Participation in Contemporary Arts. Bristol: Polity Press.

You can download the book from the Connected Communities website

(pdf Douglas Redistributing Power)

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