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Category Archives: artists’ books
Under the Wire
Under the Wire
Twelve O’ Clock Wood
Twelve O’ Clock Wood
assignment 3
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Key Texts (Research Methods Assignment 3)
Presenting a limited number of texts has forced me to hinge my arguments on just a few core ideas. This ‘stripping-down’ introduces a certain amount of mental mobility into my understanding of and presentation of my ideas, in the same way that speaking from basic notes rather than from a prepared statement makes for more lively presentation. Having a smaller range of tools to set up makes me think about what to do with them a bit more clearly.
Assignment 6
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Assignment Six: Prepare a Case Study
Helen Douglas
In devising these notes I want to set out a number of the themes I have picked out in Douglas’ work. Rather than looking at the visual aspect of her books exclusively, I have decided to quote extensively from the artist’s writings on her practice, since they are unusually lucid and helpful. Since my research will bring me into contact with Douglas, I have looked on this case study as preparatory research to inform a critical position to her work which I can use in an interview situation.
I have set out my study under a number of related headings that express important themes in Douglas’ work, proceeding very often from the ways in which the artists herself has described her practice.
On Inside and Outside
"Nature, landscape and the book surround me.
They are out there and they are all absolutely within me too.
Inside and out. I Live them." 1
The subjects of Douglas’ practice also inscribe points in her artistic hermenuetic. The inside and outside are part of her metaphorical gear for drawing material into her practice. The concepts of inside and outside are mediated by the book, which makes concrete the work of enclosure and release that Douglasā investigation is involved with. The inside and outside involved here are very particular, though: āI live themā the artist tells us, so her involvement is not merely with space in an abstract sense, but with place. The relationship that her practice engineers is between her environment in the Scottish Borders, and the places poetically constituted in her books.
" I have decided to speak from the book, the place of my making, the place where my expression is made concrete and where all three Nature, Landscape and the Book come together."2
The book is the external site of the process, of the hermeneutic, of all that thought and action. The visual hermeneutic, working on ‘nature, landscape and the book’ , shows itself as
- questioning spaces, presentation
- the book as an arena for spatial understanding. In its metaphorical enclosure place is transformed into identity and vice-versa.
- as connecting spaces and times in ‘woven’/gathering movements.
- punning on ‘bookness’= investigating, ironising and metaphorising its forms through narrative.
Assignment 5
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Assignment 5: curate virtual exhibition of five artists including me.
Borders of Identity
In creating this exhibition I have employed criteria that have come
from my ongoing critical engagement with my practice. I’m always asking
questions of it: What am I doing? What is its place in the world? What
are the characteristics of the artworks? This is an ongoing process
that takes place all the time, in every decision I make, to a more, or
less-conscious extent. It is a hermeneutic process that continuously
informs my sense of myself as an artist. It can take a more formal turn
when I write about my work as I am doing here, and elsewhere in my
studio journal, but I’m conscious of its place in the way I approach
individual pieces of work, individual drawings. That critical
judgement, and the interpretive bias that emerges as a result of my
concentrating on the things I find useful and informative to my
practice exists equally in the things I choose to look at, and in the
things that I read. What strikes me other’s work is that which strikes
a chord in my own practice, in sympathy or in contrast. The ongoing gap
between what I respond to and what I do
is the gap of the hermeneutic process of working-through-practice. It’s
why I keep doing it: there is always something un-done to respond to.
What I have done to create this virtual exhibition, with its
intention of providing a basis for a comparative analysis in the form
of a catalogue entry, is produce a number of statements about how I
currently characterise my work. I’ve used these to select artists whose
work I think reflects on some of these same criteria, either
sympathetically or critically.
The criteria I have employed are:
-
historical/literary sources- there is a use of historical/literary material or background
-
interpretive- there is a conscious effort being made to interpret the found and historical imagery and situations
-
gamespaces- there is a sense in which the work establishes a place of operation within which the play of the interpretation works out
-
identity- the work deals with questions of identity: postcolonial, gender and sexuality, etc
- narrativity- the works use character and plot to allow meaning to unfold with the effect of narrative
The artists whose work I have chosen to explore these critera with are:
-
Helen Douglas: Illiers Combray
-
Roni Horn: Doubt by Water
-
Peter Greenaway: Luper at Compton Verney
- Isaac Julien: Vagabondia
Finally, I have chosen my own book The Remembrancer as a representative piece of my work for comparative analysis.
Before discussing how these criteria or themes work across
the exhibition, I will take the works one by one, saying how they
feature some of the criteria, and exploring some of the links between
them. The sections below are my ‘catalogue entry’.
Meeting notes
Work done on creating questions and shortlists was time well spent.
ā¢ structured the methodology
ā¢ showed complexity of thought going into subject
ā¢ sets the stage for prog exam
ā¢ criticisms arising are constructive: mostly about couching terms/sensitive interviewing
ā¢ will knit well with assignment materials
As regards assignments:
ā¢ Iain will get hold of the new, simpler set of instructions for me.
ā¢ It’s expected that some work I have done will fit in quite well (in particular, my assumptions about the taxonomy of terms exercise seem to have been more or less corresct)
ā¢ It’s important that my advisors can say that I will have this work done, but it may not be essential that it is done now, though clearly I’d like to get it sorted out anyway.
ā¢ There seems to be more leeway about providing work that obviously fits the intention of the assignments without adhering to the letter of the law. This is good news because I’ve done a lot of work on the relevent areas: maybe just not the specified work.
On the artwork:
ā¢ General agreement with my self-criticism. Work has lacked material and expressive richness of late because of time constraints and production capabilities. My stated aim of spending more studio time doing autographic work (versus digital production chipped away at inbetween my research studies) seems well received as a proposed remedy. I just need to make that work! However, no complaints about my work. Quality could be better, but I’m obviously doing what I can under the production circumstances.
Some points not covered:
ā¢ joining art practice to my case stufy methodology: I’ve a pretty decent idea of how my writing and researching is going to perform self-reflexive/hermeneutic research, but as yet, I’ve only pencilled-in how I intend to examine issues in the research in my artwork. Although I’m clearly relating my own work and its’ accompanying propositions (my understanding of what book arts are and my work’s place in it), to the work of others, and stating an aim to scurry backwards and forwards between my assumptions and what I glean from other folks’ practice, this is more about comparing theory. I’m not really comparing the work itself that clearly here. So it’s not comparative analysis, this reflexive process that the work is supposed to take up. It’s more, I think, going to be about finding understandings of issues raised through art means… Obviously I’m unclear here. How can I make work that forms part of my investigation. Do I have to wait and see what I start finding out?
ā¢ I also want to figure out how I am going to construct my thesis. I was reading about Ricoeur this morning, about how the studies in the Rule of Metaphor gradually unfold the different levels of R’s theory of metaphor. From a stylistic point of view, I think I’d like to take up something similar, I think. I haven’t read the Rule of Metaphor yet, so I can’t say what this unfolding means in terms of R’s methodology (one presumes, in setting out to writew, that he already knows what his theory is, and is using these ‘layers’ as illustrations rather than as hermeneutic experimentation) Nonetheless, my existing metaphor of ‘back and forth’ or of ‘repetition’ could easily make for dull reading if there is no ‘dramatic structure’ to how my understanding unfolds. The problem is, that I don’t know what I’m portraying. So I can’t decide in advance what to unfold, what bits will unfold in different case studies, etc. Perhaps it won’t be possible to do this. Or, perhaps, I will discover a story in the course of my research which I will later be able to edit into something readable. A hermeneutics of continuous repetition or fractious back-and-forth could be very trying, and I aspire to something less dull. Fingers crossed for a good story! This would be an interesting point to discuss another time.
tangled
Today is going to be all about setting down some of my ideas into the structures already in place for the progression exam writing I’m doing. There are plenty of ideas and sufficient theoretical framework in the background, even though the more I see of it, the better I would like to delve into it more fully. In particular the theoretical articulation of how studio parctice is a form of research. I’m reading Graeme Sullivan’s book on this just now, which is ever-so-slowly peeling away layers of theoretical grounding: I’m waiting for the chapter where he begins his exposition of the theoretical heuristics that allow the richness of research within artistic practice to be examined critically. As I say, I’d rather know more about my application of this at the moment. Beyond a certain hermeneutic program of interrogating and instigatingmy work through the selfsame questioning matrix that I will be bringing to my case-study data, I’m not too specific about how cog ‘a’ will mesh with gear ‘c’. I suspect it’s something that by definition will work itself out in the hermeneutic process.
Be that as it may, I’m now writing so as to have a locus to edit, to add ideas to. At the moment, I’m conscious of having many different vectors of thought on and around my research interests and in tandem with several interpretations of the web of theoretical and other ‘outside’ references.
The Amber Room
A question on, of all things, University Challenge, last night, was about The Amber Room, the famously lost treasure-room made of gilt-backed amber. It was a present to the Russians from the Prussians, and disappeared following WWII during which it was looted by the invading Germans. Various theories exist claiming that the work does or does not any longer exist.
It seemed to me that it might make a fine starting point for a book. Given my recent reading on hermeneutic analysis and the ways in which hermeneutics approaches objectivity, I thought something examining the history and possible continued existence of an object seemingly ‘lost in time’ (a thing I see in a lot of Stephen Poliakoff‘s films) would be an interesting way of exploring issues of being in an artwork. I propose not to produce something documentary so much as a poetic exploration. This would sit alongside my current projects; the ‘windmill’ project, ‘Whistling Copse’ and the version of ‘The Three Ravens"
Holden’s silence
a slideshow of the images used in my book Hoden’s Silence.