Not Yet There

Writing: The Affective City

2012-02-10T03:26:00.000-08:00

Image: from Movement in the City, Toronto, 2010

I am in the process of writing a new text, provisionally entitled 'Experiments Along the Brink of I', as part of a collaboration with artists Sara Wookey and Bianci Scliar Mancini. The writing draws on a sustained period of conversation with these artists, where I have both been witness to and participant in a series of workshops for exploring 'movement in the city' or even a form of 'social or everyday choreography', delivered by them in various international cities including Zagreb and Toronto (both within the context of PSi - Performance Studies International - events). I am envisaging that the text will echo the model of 'essaying' developed as part of my collaboration with Open City and within my pamphlet-manifesto The Yes of the No!. The chapter/sections deal with (as a provisional list) (1) the affective city; (2) body as force (following Spinoza); (3) testing limits (following Arakawa & Gins) ; (4) rehearsal; (5) warming/stirring; (6) fold/unfold (following Jose Gil); (7) speeds and slownesses; (8) collectivity/connectivity; (9) appropriate/appropriate; (10) befitting; (11) immersion & observation. The development of the text undoubtedly draws on my experience of collaboration with Open City (which I have previously interrogated through the prism of a specifically Spinozist/Deleuzian set of ideas in writing such as Performing Stillness). It also connects closely with ideas emerging as part of a text I am also writing on the work of Cezary Bodzianowski (called Squaring up to the Round Hole) and the concerns of the reading group around notions of affect (in collaboration with If I Can't Dance I Don;t Want to be Part of Your Revolution) that I am hosting shortly at Site Gallery in Sheffield. The full text will be posted shortly, but in the meantime here is a draft excerpt from the beginning sections.

"The city is a weave or web of flows and rhythms, the live entanglement of relations between bodies and spaces. To comprehend the choreography of the city requires looking beyond what is habitually seen, attending to the permissions and conditions that determine the very nature of its interactions. To conceive of the city in choreographic terms requires more than mapping the visible traces of movements scored, the notation of existing trajectories across and through a given place. Less concerned with the visual spectacle of how a city might appear as a dance of interlocking flows, focus must delve deeper. Invisible forces set the pace and pattern of relations and interrelations with(in) a particular situation. Conceiving of the city in choreographic terms is less the imagining of it as a stage upon which to dance, but rather to apprehend it as a field of forces and intensities, as choreography. This enquiry cannot be practiced at a distance or through mind alone. The rhythm of a city is merely watched from the stands, where what can be witnessed are only the effects of unknown forces, and not the forces themselves. To comprehend the true nature of a force requires that it is encountered and not just observed. Beyond observing how the rhythm of the city looks, the corporeal body registers how it feels, by experiencing it close up, in the flesh. Affect is measured through the pulse of the body, according to how a body moves and is moved. The body is a force among other forces, its course determined by its capacity to affect and be affected by other things. Choreography attends to these interdependencies, conceptualizing the city as the temporal unfolding of ever-changing relations.

Movement through any space is shaped as the desires of the individual body meet with the pressures of its surrounds; performed through the negotiation of different forces as the helmsman steers against the pressure of the water and the wind. At times, it seems that we have lost our grasp of helmsman’s knowledge, our capacity to harness the momentum of forces that are outside of our control. Sometimes perhaps, we give in too soon, surrendering too quickly and easily to the force of the situation in which we find ourselves. Too often, our bodies seem at the mercy of forces that cannot fully be discerned, our movements controlled by the beck and call of unspoken laws and a logic that we seem unable to resist. Here, the body is experienced only through the pressures acting upon it, seemingly unable to recognize its own internal force or agency, its capacity to withstand or tolerate as much as yield. Certain spaces push towards particular kinds of performance, direct the body to behave in a specific limited and scripted way. The possibilities of what a body could do shrink to fit the template of expectation, as options narrow to the standards of a pre-set score where the individual body can express itself only through the slightest embellishment of the norm. Over time, our navigation of certain spaces congeals towards a set pattern of routinized gestures, as day-after-day we dutifully repeat and repeat our chosen groove, rarely missing a beat. Pattern sediments towards protocol, an unspoken rulebook that tacitly moderates the limits of what is allowed. It is tempting to imagine that this rulebook is enforced from elsewhere; its laws cooked-up by faceless government hooked on curbing the enthusiasm of our wayward desires. And yet we author and enforce the rules that determine how we live our life; our complicity and obedience maintains their authority, preserves their hold. Then to be more discerning, for any rule is only good as long as it protects and affirms life, failing if it only limits and constrains. Take heed, for it is through our bodies that we might make this distinction; it is through our bodies that the difference may be felt."

Writing: Contradictory Words

2012-02-09T15:06:00.000-08:00

I am currently writing a review of the exhibitions by Hanne Darboven and Raphael Hefti for Frieze magazine. More to follow soon.

Book launch: Apeirophobia

2012-02-09T14:56:00.000-08:00

Apeirophobia – Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry

Book Launch at Motto Berlin, Friday February 17th, at 19.00 

Presented by the Reading Room

Apeirophobia by artists Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, designed and co-edited by James Langdon, includes texts by: Emma Cocker / Brian Dillon / Mladen Dolar / Eli Noé. Published by VIVID 2011.

Apeirophobia is a new publication by artists Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry exploring the processes of translating an artwork into book format, an extension of a theme in Kihlberg and Henry’s work of things changing form through processes such as memory and recall, documentation and revisiting histories and possible futures.

Publication: I AM NOT A POET: Assembling

2012-01-20T23:52:00.000-08:00

I AM NOT A POET: Assembling was assembled and distributed by David Berridge (very small kitchen) at the Totalkunst Gallery, Edinburgh on August 21st 2011, as the conclusion of I AM NOT A POET. Participants in the show - which took place from 7-21st August - were invited to contribute an A4 sheet to a loose leaf b/w assemblage, whatever they wished to appear under the title of I AM NOT A POET.

With contributions from Magdalen Chua, Emma Cocker, Peter Cant & Alex Eisenberg, Jennie Guy, Colin Herd, Mirja Koponen, Shandra Lamaute, Michelle Letowska, Jow Lindsay, nick-e melville, Iain Morrison, Marit Muenzberg, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, seekers of lice, Gerry Smith, Kim Walker, and Samantha Walton.

 My video Close Reading (C.O.P.V., 1950) has also been selected for inclusion in the Winter Issue of ONandOnScreen and can be viewed here. ONandOnScreen is poems + videos. Here videos are linked with poems and poems with videos in a shared space, widening the spectrum and essential strangeness of each. ONandOnScreen is a conversation between moving words and moving images,  on and on. ONandOnScreen is edited by poet and critic Thomas Devaney .

ONandONScreen’s fifth issue WINTER 2012 is now online.   Featuring work by Joanna Fuhrman, Jena Osman, Farid Matuk, Cara Baldwin, Wayne Kosetenbaum, Catherine Wagner, David Lehman, Kevin Killian, Matt Hart, Jared Stanley, Gabie Strong, Lytle Shaw, Leonard Gontarek, Adam Fitzgerald, Chris Girard, Mark So. With additional videos by Zoe Strauss, Emma Cocker, Brendan Lorber, and mIEKAL aND.

Video: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis

2012-01-18T04:50:00.001-08:00

Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker, Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, video still

Using processes of cross-reading and live drawing, Nikolaus Gansterer & Emma Cocker approach the publication Drawing a Hypothesis as a reader might thumb through the book; where certain sections appear to be lingered over, while others are skimmed in the search for key words and phrases, evocative fragments and extractions. Their reading suggests that books like Drawing a Hypothesis might not always need to be read in a linear or logical way, but rather are to be dipped into, allowing for detours and distractions within the event of diagrammatic reading itself. The lecture takes the figures of thought at the heart of Drawing a Hypothesis as points of departure for exploring and performing the correlations between thinking and drawing. Addressing the shifting and ambivalent properties of image, symbol and drawing within the publication, it asks, “how can these visual artefacts be comprehended?”

Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, Nikolaus Gansterer &Emma Cocker,

Documentation of a performance-lecture at M HKA, Antwerp

Video was commissioned and produced by M HKA

Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium

as part of the Graphology Project curated by Edwin Carels

Camera and editing:

Patrick Elliott

With text by A. Adam, Monika Bakke, Kerstin Bartels, Marc Boeckler, P. Brandlmayr, Emma Cocker, Gerhard Dirmoser, B. F. Fisher, Nikolaus Gansterer, Hanneke Grootenboer, Karin Harrasser, Helmut Leder, Katja Mayer, Ralo Mayer, Felix de Mendelssohn, M. L. Nardo, Christian Reder, Philippe Rekacewicz, Moira Roth, Andreas Schinner, Ferdinand Schmatz, section.a, Walter Seidl, Christina Stadlbauer, Axel Stockburger, Jane Tormey

Conversation: Uitwaaien

2012-01-13T08:20:00.000-08:00

I have been invited to participate in a dialogue with Alice, Annelies De Smet around our shared research interests in how public space is lived and performed, as part of her PhD at the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, Brussels. Annelies De Smet is interested in “the experience and mapping of transit in public space … in the transit, obstacles, incidents, small interruptions, anecdotes, goalless-ness [...] ”. She encountered my work as part of her project ‘uitwaaien’. Uitwaaien is a Dutch word that cannot be fully translated into English: it literally means 'to walk in the wind' but in the more figurative and commonly used sense it means to take a brief break in the countryside to clear one's head. Below are some stills from her video mapping ‘instance of tongues’ which is based on previous conversations on ‘uitwaaien’. More to follow.

Alice, Annelies De Smet, 'Instance of Tongues'.

Performance: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis (Part 4)

2012-01-12T10:53:00.000-08:00

On 2 February 2012, Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker presented the fourth iteration of their performance lecture Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis at (NGBK) New Society for Fine Arts, Berlin. Previous iterations of the lecture took place at (Part 1) M HKA, Antwerp; (Part 2) KNAW and (Part 3) Kunsthalle Project Space, Vienna. The performance lecture was in conjunction with a book launch of Drawing a Hypothesis : Figures of Thought (ed. Nikolaus Gansterer, Springer, 2011) and also On the Materiality of Diagrams (Materialität der Diagramme) by Berlin based scholar, Susanne Leeb (see below).

Images: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis, documentation from a performance-lecture at NGBK, Berlin,

Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker. Photography: Simona Koch.

About Materialität der Diagramme. Kunst und Theorie

The promise of diagrams to put via their abstract form an order to thinking is often subverted in the arts. Not only is the rationalism of diagrams directed towards its opposite or obsolescence. Furthermore, the materiality of relations is addressed within seemingly pure abstract connections. This concerns the erotics of the machine in the work of Duchamp or Picabia as well as the thinking of lines of flight in Deleuze and Guattari, the co-emergence of a »severality« in Bracha L. Ettinger, the infrastructure of money flows as an expression of power relations in the work of Bureau d’études. The book presents contributions which underline the ambivalence of diagrams as concrete abstractions throughout modern and contemporary art in a theoretical and artistic perspective.

With contributions by Ricardo Basbaum, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Bureau d’études, Bracha L. Ettinger with Birgit M. Kaiser & Kathrin Thiele, Susanne Leeb, Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Amy Sillman. ed. by Susanne Leeb, b_books: Berlin, PoLYpeN series (ed. by Sabeth Buchmann, Helmut Draxler, Clemens Krümmel, Susanne Leeb), Berlin 2012.

Event: What is Artistic Research?

2012-01-12T03:24:00.001-08:00

My proposed paper ‘Tactical Research - Practices for Thinking (Oneself) Differently’ has been provisionally accepted as part of the strand of enquiry, ‘What is Artistic Research?’, at the Cumulus conference, School of Art and Design, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland.

Conference Questions:

What is artistic research? What is the role of artworks in it? How is artistic research related to various traditions of combining art and research: a) Research for art, b) Research of art, c) Art for research, d) Art + theory = research? Why are (some) artists trying to combine art and research? What can be gained with it? What are the possible dangers or failures of it? What is it needed for? What is “artistic knowledge” or “art’s own knowledge”? What is included in it, what separates it from so called scientific knowledge? In what sense is art research? How should art and research be combined in the university context?

Abstract

Tactical Research - Practices for Thinking (Oneself) Differently

I propose to approach the (art) research process as an affirmative practice for thinking (oneself) differently, reframing artistic research as a ‘tactic’ or ‘way of operating’ (de Certeau) for producing a critical form of subjectivity, part of a wider process of subjectivization. Purposefully shifting from thinking of research as determined within and by the (narrow) terms of an academic ‘project’ (as defined by the more instrumentalized and commodified conceptualizations of research within academia) I develop an understanding of the research process as a live and lived enquiry, considering it in analogous terms to or as a manifestation of the philosophical project of ‘making life into a work of art’ (Foucault). My intent is to move from viewing research as the teleological pursuit of knowledge, a linear and outcome-driven process catalyzed by the identification of questions to which conclusions are subsequently sought. Instead, I consider research as an expression of ‘conatus’ (Spinoza) or of the ‘enquiring of the enquirer (Badiou) where the search or striving of its endeavor (rather than its outputs or contribution to knowledge) is recuperated critical value. Here, a subject is not what is studied at a distance but rather what is performed or enacted through the research itself.

Talk: Becoming Line

2012-01-06T01:24:00.000-08:00

I have been invited to give a lecture at UWE, Bristol for the Department of Drawing and Applied Arts in March. The lecture will draw on a series of texts that I have recently written that explore the speculative and constitutive potential of drawing including ‘Distancing the If and Then’ in Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, (ed.) (Springer, 2011) and ‘The Restless Line, Drawing’ in Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art (I. B. Tauris, 2012); as well as referring to ongoing research projects/enquiries such as Site (Sight) Lines (2010>) which explores the practice of throwing a glance as a form of performative drawing capable of constituting temporary collectivities or clusters of sociability.

Talk: Between Affect and Concept

2012-01-04T10:54:00.000-08:00

Between Affect and Concept: Dialogues between art and philosophy

6th February 2012

Nottingham Trent University

Drawing on examples from within her own research practice, Not Yet There, writer and artist Emma Cocker will discuss how she has brought art and philosophy into dialogue within her work. For Cocker, individual texts become used as testing spaces for bringing philosophy tentatively into the proximity of art practice: in Performing Stillness the act of collective stillness is explored through the prism of a Deleuzian-Spinozist philosophy; in Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild, Alain Badiou’s Being and Event shapes the vocabulary for discussing the criticality of the endeavour or 'enquiring' of art practice, whilst in her recent writing, Antonio Negri’s conceptualization of kairos forms the basis for considering the process of drawing in relation to the production and emergence of a critical subject.

Reading Group: Affect

2011-12-09T09:52:00.000-08:00

In partnership with If I Can't Dance I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution, I will be hosting a series of reading group discussions at Site Gallery in Sheffield, for exploring a number of texts relating to the notion of AFFECT. Often used interchangeably with the experience of feeling or emotion, this term can also describe an individual’s capacity to affect others and in turn to be affected by them. Affect was a key concern underpinning the citywide festival Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual. The reading group forms part of the wider programme of events relating to the forthcoming solo exhibition at Site by Jeremiah Day.

There will be more information about the reading groups here.

Background to the reading group.

If I Can’t Dance’s Reading Group is a gathering of artists, critical thinkers, writers and various other readers from in and outside the field of contemporary art, who come together once a month to discuss new topics and directions in performative art practice and their relation to social and political issues. If I Can’t Dance’s current field of research is the notion of affect, which can be read in the light of our continuing investigations into the construction of subjectivity and the politics of identity. It builds on those intellectual paradigms such as performativity, theatricality and feminism(s), all of which have emerged from the activity of If I Can’t Dance over the last years

If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution produces art works and thematic programmes. Departing from a spirit of open questioning and long term enquiry with artists, If I Can’t Dance is dedicated to exploring the evolution and typology of performance and performativity in contemporary art.

Project/Collaboration: Tacturiency

2011-11-30T12:17:00.003-08:00

Tacturiency - the desire of touching, to touch, to be touched [fr. L. tangere, to touch]. An unfurling collaboration with Clare Thornton for exploring touch, folding, fainting, falling, failing … more to follow.

Research: Be Prepared

2011-11-30T12:17:00.001-08:00

I am currently working on a number of conference papers that take as their point of departure the boy scout motto, be prepared; interrogating what it might mean to be prepared or to prepare oneself as a critical - rather than obedient and acquiescent - citizen or subject. For example, my paper, Be Prepared - Practices for Performing the Self Differently has been selected as part of the forthcoming PSi 18 conference on Performance, Culture, Industry, taking place at the University of Leeds from 27 June – 1 July. I will be presenting as part of a strand exploring training, labour and innovation.

Be Prepared - Practices for Performing the Self Differently

Short abstract: This paper considers the relation of training, labour and innovation against Michel Foucault’s imperative to ‘make life into a work of art’. It explores how various art and literary examples might present as a set of guidelines or principles for producing the self differently, as possible ‘techniques of the self’.

Full Abstract: Various philosophers have advocated the necessity of viewing life as a kind of project or mode of invention, suggesting that one’s ‘style of life’ or ‘ways of existing’ might be produced differently to habitual expectation. Positioned as a speculative proposition (drawing on my practice-based involvement in various art projects), this paper considers the relation of training, labour and innovation against Michel Foucault’s philosophical imperative towards the ‘making of life into a work of art’. In the Hermeneutics of the Subject and The Care of the Self Foucault turns to Ancient Greece to excavate and elaborate a programme of practices related to the precept ‘care of the self’ (epimelesthai sautou). For Foucault, the ‘techniques of the self’ or ‘arts of existence’ take the form of ‘those reflective and voluntary practices by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but seek to transform themselves, to change themselves’.¹ In Ancient Greek culture, such techniques formed a training manual or programme (for mind and body) through which a more critical, ethical formulation of subjectivity and citizenship could be prepared, practiced, performed. In the absence of the necessary cultural, ethical, even civic framework for resurrecting the specificity of this Ancient training, this paper (perhaps playfully) turns to various art, performance and literary examples, exploring how they might present as a set of guidelines or principles for producing the self differently, as possible techniques of the self. The paper purposefully travels an errant line, drawing the direct encounters of my own practice-based enquiry and collaborations into dialogue with diverse references (the art of techné, Montaigne’s Essays; Fluxus scores; Georges Perec’s guides; Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys). I explore how the act of transforming oneself as a critical subject requires the cultivation of self-initiated tests, trials and ‘tactics’ that encourage transition away from repressive social norms; where to produce or construct oneself differently involves performing one’s life in the subjunctive key of as if, the practicing or rehearsal of a life as otherwise.

^{1. Michel}^{Foucault, The Use of Pleasure. The History of Sexuality: Volume Two. Tr. R. Hurley. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1992/1984), pp. 10}^—^11.

Performance: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis (Part 3)

2011-11-24T02:30:00.000-08:00

On 23 November 2011, Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker presented the third iteration of their performance lecture Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis at the Kunsthalle Project Space in Vienna. Previous iterations of the lecture took place at (Part 1) M HKA, Antwerp and (Part 2) KNAW. A further iteration of the work will take place in Berlin (February 2012). Below are some images from the launch event and from the performance-lecture (Chapters I - VI).

Publication Launch: COPY/Unfold

2011-11-24T00:59:00.000-08:00

COPY/UNFOLD (a Critical Writing Collective publication) will be launched at S1 Studios Sheffield on 3 December 2011, with an introduction to the publication from Charlotte Morgan, Joanna Loveday and the designers Dust Collective, alongside contributors to the publication including myself, Daniel Fogarty, Joanna Loveday, JDA Winslow & Paul Wright.

As part of this event, I presented some ideas about close reading, performed against the context of my short video (C.O, P.V, 1950) from the Close Reading project.

"Through the practice of close reading, language can be made to stretch or pucker, ruche or fray. With experience, it can be pulled thin and sheer as delicate gauze or gathered up into thick and impenetrable creases. Under scrutiny, text can be pressured into its component parts (of ink and page), the sense or legibility of a word rendered nonsensical the closer it is attended to, as writing slips towards image, as meaning dissipates into pleats and folds. Close Reading investigates the practice of close reading or of explication de texte as a critical tool for destabilizing the linear unfolding of a text into discontinuous fragments. This series investigates how paying close attention to language does not always fix or clarify a single, stable meaning, but perhaps counter-intuitively produces further uncertainty, indeterminacy and formlessness. Here, the more something becomes scrutinized the less it becomes known. Like conventional forms of close reading, this work focuses on paying attention to individual words and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read or presented, drawing on the Latin origins of the word explicare which means to unfold, to fold out, to set forth. However, critical attention is not paid to the meaning of words themselves as signs, but to those other meanings produced by looking at the materiality of words ‘close up’, through processes of visual magnification or microscopic observation. Close Reading inhabits the space between page and screen, existing as a series of short video works and composite poems constructed (almost through chance) from screen-grabs gleaned from the video editing process. I am uncertain whether the video is a byproduct or residue of the production of the text or vice versa, or whether both produce and are produced by each other simultaneously. As a writer, I am increasingly interested in the discrepancy between the temporal and spatial dimensions of writing, where the time that it takes to write words is condensed into the space that they occupy once ordered into line. The wrestle of how the words got there will soon be forgotten. Close Reading takes the temporal event of a text unfolding before a camera, and collapses it into the spatial form of a page. The translation from moving image to still reveals an entirely different grammar to that encountered in the video. The movement or unfolding of the video is pushed back as though behind the surface of the page, perhaps still imaginable as a loop stitch whose content remains latent within the work, rather than a visible part. Through these close readings, the time of reading one text becomes folded into the space of making another".

Event: Process & Repetition - Hanne Darboven and Raphael Hefti

2011-11-05T03:45:00.000-07:00

Sunrise/Sunset (installation view), 1984 385 sheets of paper, felt pen, postcards.

Courtesy Camden Arts Centre and Konrad Fischer Galerie.

I have been invited to introduce the forthcoming exhibitions by Hanne Darboven and Raphael Hefti at Camden Arts Centre, 20 January 2012 - 18 March 2012. Involving a dialogue with Raphael Hefti, the introduction will explore connections and points of resonance between the two artists’ work (as well as drawing on some of the ideas underpinning my own research including texts such as Over and Over Again and Again). This will be the first solo exhibition by Darboven in the UK and will feature a number of her large scale serial works which focus on the passage and structuring of time. These vast installations are formed of hand drawn notations and numbers, musical scores and texts which are sometimes accompanied by images and objects. It will also be Hefti’s first solo show in the UK and in this new work he will approach his investigations from a specific tangent: discovering mistakes in industrial processes and pushing them to a limit where aesthetic transformations take place.

Writing: Cartographies of Escape

2011-10-31T08:45:00.000-07:00

Over the last year I have been working on a number of interrelated book chapters as part of a cluster of research which I am entitling Cartographies of Escape. This cluster of research investigates how artistic practice can offer a platform for practicing or rehearsing alternative ‘ways of operating’ to the increasingly limited, prescriptive templates of citizenship perpetuated by and within contemporary neoliberalism. Chapters include 'Towards an Emergent Knowledge of the Margins' which is going to be published in the forthcoming Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation, (ed.) Eugenie Shinkle, (Ashgate Publishing, 2012); 'Border Crossings: Practices for Beating the Bounds', which will be published in Liminal Landscapes (eds.) Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts, (Routledge, 2012) and 'Exit Strategies - Looking for Loopholes' which will be published in The Cartographical Necessity of Exile, (ed.) Karen Bishop. Below is a draft version of 'Exit Strategies', which attempts to conceive of a form of elective exile manifesting as a search for (temporal) loopholes or moments of porosity within a given system or structure. More on these publications soon.

Performance: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis (Part 2)

2011-10-31T06:59:00.000-07:00

On 27 October 2011, Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker presented the second iteration of their performance lecture Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis at KNAW in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Previous iterations of the lecture took place at (Part 1) M HKA, Antwerp. The performance lecture took place in the old meeting room of the Trippenhuis Building, home to the Royal Netherlands Society of Arts and Science. The event also included a short lecture by art-historian Susanne Leeb on the materiality of the diagram, extending ideas from within her chapter in the publication Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Research (ed.) Nikolaus Gansterer, (Springer, 2011). The next book launch and iteration of the performance-lecture will take place on 23 Nov at the Kunsthalle Project Space, Vienna. Below are a couple of images of the event at the Trippenhuis, Amsterdam.

Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis: Nikolaus Gansterer introducing the event

Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis: pre-performance

Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis: performance-lecture Emma Cocker and Nikolaus Gansterer

Drawing a Hypothesis: book launch in the Rembrandt Room, Trippenhuis, Amsterdam

Project: From Where I Stand I can See You

2011-10-24T09:54:00.000-07:00

I have been invited to be a ‘Seer-in-Residence’ as part of a project in development called From Where I Stand I can See You which brings together the practices of UK based artist Traci Kelly and Norway based Rita Marhaug. A number of Seers-in-Residence will be involved in responding to Kelly’s component within this project, addressing her work through the specific prism of his or her own practice and interests. An initial conversation with Kelly suggests potential for exploring ideas emerging from the terms ellipsis and eclipse. More to follow soon.

Project: Dumb Fixity

2011-10-24T09:42:00.000-07:00

Over the next year, I am planning to work with artists McCormack+Gent in relation to their ongoing project, Dumb Fixity, with the view to (hopefully) developing some new writing.

“Dumb Fixity arose from a desire to measure an abstract set of phenomena, working on the premise that things can speak and to find a means of hearing what they are telling us. The first question was how we could negate the subjective interpretations of our human perspective, if we could transcend our human desire to name, label, and categorise matter and meaning.   The answer was that it is impossible: there is no avoiding our disadvantaged position of being human; we cannot escape comprehending and defining the world through our language. How then do we hear a shared language of the mountain, the fox or the lamp? We had to take another tack. This investigation is a process of fixity, an attempt to plot the proximities, connections, and allegiances of things, and trace the associations of their auras.” McCormack+Gent

Research: Practices for Thinking (Oneself) Differently

2011-10-13T01:31:00.000-07:00

“You see, that’s why I really work like a dog, and I worked like a dog all my life. I am not interested in the academic status of what I am doing, because my problem is my own transformation […] This transformation of oneself by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to an aesthetic experience”. Michel Foucault, ‘An Interview by Stephen Riggins’, Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 1, (ed.) Paul Rabinow, (New York, The New Press, 1997), p.131.

Developing some of the ideas generated within recent projects and publications, I am currently working on a new phase of research which explores the triangulation of (A) certain philosophies of subjectivity (the concept of ‘making life into a work of art’); (B) various tactical practices (affective, embodied ‘ways of operating’ drawn largely from contemporary art contexts) and (C) reflections on the knowledge(s) produced therein (specifically an exploration of techné). I am interested in approaching the (art) research process as an affirmative practice for thinking (oneself) differently, thinking about certain forms of artistic research and practice as ‘tactics’ or ‘ways of operating’ for producing a critical form of subjectivity, part of a wider process of subjectivization. Purposefully shifting from thinking of research as determined within and by the (narrow) terms of an academic ‘project’ (perhaps as defined by the more instrumentalized and commodified conceptualizations of research within academia) I want to develop an understanding of the research process as a live and lived enquiry, considering it in analogous terms to or as a manifestation of the philosophical project of ‘making life into a work of art’ (Foucault). My intent is to move from viewing research as the teleological pursuit of knowledge, a linear and outcome-driven process catalyzed by the identification of questions to which conclusions are subsequently sought. Instead, I will consider research as an expression of ‘conatus’ (Spinoza) or of the ‘enquiring of the enquirer (Badiou) where the search or striving of its endeavor (rather than its outputs or contribution to knowledge) is recuperated critical value. Here, a subject is not what is studied at a distance but rather what is performed or enacted through the research itself.'

Over the next year or so, I will be exploring projects and collaborations which help to interrogate these concerns further. More on this to follow soon.

Seminar: Performing Space (Differently)

2011-09-30T07:31:00.000-07:00

I have been invited to deliver a seminar in the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield as part of their PhD research and design programme. Drawing on some of my recent projects and collaborations, I envisage this seminar will explore 2 clusters of activity within my current research which explore various 'tactics' for performing space differently (to expectation, convention or habit):

Image: Emma Cocker, Spatial (inter) relations proposition, Vienna, 2011

Performing Communities: interrogates how participatory performance-based interventions in the public realm can help cultivate models of social agency, sociability or temporary collectivity, in resistance to the increased experience of atomization/individualization within contemporary urban life. It investigates the capacity of participatory performance to intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated and navigated by producing ‘counter-publics’, new social formations for rehearsing and testing alternative – ethical, political, critical – forms of individual and collective subjectivity. Central to this area of enquiry are my own practice-based collaborations with other artists: including the project Open City; a dialogue between myself, Sara Wookey and Bianca Scliar Mancini following the projects (Un)folding Zagreb (2009) and Movement in the City (Toronto, 2010); and a recent project entitled Spatial (Inter) Relations in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer and students at the Institute for Transmedia Art, Vienna where sight-lines (or the practice of ‘throwing a glance’) were interrogated as forms of performative drawing for demarcating (even constituting) temporary forms of collectivity.

Cartographies of Escape: focuses on the relationship between how landscape is lived or performed to the emergence of a critical – resistant – form of subjectivity. It investigates how artistic practice can offer a platform for practicing or rehearsing alternative ‘ways of operating’ to the increasingly limited, prescriptive templates of citizenship perpetuated by and within contemporary neoliberalism. Central to this research cluster are the two prose poems The Yes of the No! (produced as part of the project Summer of Dissent) and Making Room for Manoeuvre; or, Ways of Operating Along the Margins, in Manual for Marginal Places.

Publication: occursus - Dis/con/sensus

2011-09-30T06:32:00.000-07:00

I am contributing a text to the forthcoming occursus publication – a collection of responses by artists, writers and researchers to certain themes which emerged in the course of the last series of occursus’ Reading Loop. The book will be divided into themes; these are: ‘Spandrels’, ‘Re-visiting’, ‘Dis/con/sensus’, ‘Copying’, ‘Foam’ and ‘Animality’. My text will be included in the section 'Dis/con/sensus’ edited by Amanda Crawley-Jackson.

Amanda's introduction to the section reads as follows:

“Politics is litigious. It is a deviation from the normal order of things. It is a denaturalising gesture, a rupture and an interruption. (See Jacques Rancière, Dissensus).

Politics is dissensus. Consensus is the loss of thought. It is politics understood as the affair of government. The futility of noisy protests that everyone agrees with…? (That leads to more consensus.) Art as a means of disclosing the ‘necessary’ and ‘inevitable’ as contingent? (See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, p. 16). The denaturalising function of art. What constitutes consensus and dissent today? In what forms are they practised? What kinds of sociality do they entail? Doing is a torrent against all enclosure. Our power to do things differently, our power to create a different world, is a flow that exerts a growing force against the walls that hem us in, a constant breaching of these walls. Capital runs around mending these breaches (granting land reforms, redefining the norms of sexuality, for example), but the flow of our power will not be contained, simply because our collective life depends on it. (John Holloway, Crack Capitalism, p. 261). What are the links between art and politics? Is art (and can it be) political? Does it do? What is the place of the university? Is the university a consenting or dissenting institution?

dissent (vb): early 15c., from L. dissentire ”differ in sentiments, disagree, be at odds, contradict, quarrel,” from dis- ”differently” (see dis-) + sentire ”to feel, think” (seesense). Related: Dissented; dissenting.

dissension (n): early 14c., from O.Fr. dissension (12c.) and directly from L. dissensionem (nom. dissensio) “disagreement, difference of opinion, discord, strife,” noun of action from pp. stem of dissentire ”disagree”

consensus (n): 1854 as a term in physiology; 1861 of persons; from L. consensus ”agreement, accord,” pp. of consentire (see consent). There is an isolated instance of the word from 1633.”

Event: Spike Associates

2011-09-29T13:00:00.000-07:00

Artist Katie Davies in her studio. Photograph: Stuart Whipps.

I have been invited by Spike Associates to lead a critical discussion around an exhibition of new work by artist Katie Davies, at Motorcade/Flashparade, an independently run gallery in Bristol. I have worked with Katie previously, as part of her residency at the town hall in Sheffield, which resulted in my production of the text, The Shimmering of the Tipping Point. Central to this text, and to Katie’s work more broadly, are ideas around liminality, the notion of the artist as initiate, and a focus on specific communities inhabiting particular kinds of threshold state or space.

Background to Katie’s practice: ‘Exploring observational documentary narrative, Katie Davies works by establishing professional associations to institutions and individuals in order to critique the relationship between the individual and the system within which they operate. Davies is at times part and not part of the groups featured in her work. Her practice often seems to point to or reflect upon the idea of a threshold, examining the nature of the indistinguishable zones and in-between states, or on spaces that are in some way betwixt.’ See http://www.katiedavies.com/

Publication: Power

2011-09-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

I have two texts in the forthcoming issue of DRAIN magazine on Power, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2011

Yoko Ono, Fly Piece, 1963.

Permission Granted: This text is a reflective meditation on the power of a form of invitational yes that can be witnessed at play within certain art practices; an interruptive and potentially dissident species of affirmation that has a specifically inceptive function, for provoking a form of thinking and being differently. Permission Granted extends the ideas of a short pamphlet, ‘The Yes of the No!’, that I produced following a writing residency at the artist-led project Plan 9 in Bristol, during their Summer of Dissent, 2009. The original text of ‘The Yes of the No!’ is also being published in this issue of Drain.

Power: This issue of Drain attempts to expose the cultural faciality of power, as well as manifestations of power as simulacra, which obfuscate traditional inquiries into its construction. If power connects the virtual and the actual, how does cultural creativity channel or destabilize this connectivity? The corporate-academic-entertainment-military-industrial complex and its front-end, the global information machine floods us with images, and images of images, to cause sensory overload, and yet at the same time, acute sensory deprivation. Most of all, power entrenches a visual literacy that allows us to see only its style, leaving us unable to access other ways of seeing and becoming. How can we parody this visual literacy, and the speed, cadence and grammar of this power and its affects? If the simulation of power is necessary and absolute, can creative acts and molecular politics slip through the surveillance and desensitizing of territorializing systems?

IN THIS ISSUE

Feature Essay
The Clutter Assemblage – Ian Buchanan

Essays
Permission Granted – Emma Cocker
CLEAN – Looking at War – Chris Revelle

Reviews/Interviews
Interview with Andy Roche, ‘On Psychedelia’ – Alexander Stewart
Interview with Blazo Kovacevic – Bertha Husband

Creative Writing
Paper Army – Camille Meyer
Power/Collaboration – BT Shaw and Elizabeth Lopeman
Great North – Vanessa Norton
The Yes of the No! – Emma Cocker
Cross Cultural Exchanges in Imperial and Global India – Morgan Campbell

Feature Artist
Necropolis – Roi Kuper

Art Projects
GWOTEM – Jamie Badoud
Duration – Diana Heise
Criminals (Rio de Janeiro) – Cyrico Lopes
Clean Battlefield – Bob Paris
The Gift of Giving – Oscar Perez

Performance: Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis (Part 1)

2011-09-24T00:02:00.001-07:00

DRAWING ON DRAWING A HYPOTHESIS

A performance lecture by Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker

M HKA, Antwerp, 22 September 2010

On the occasion of the launch of Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Research (Springer Verlag, 2011) Nikolaus Gansterer in collaboration with writer Emma Cocker present a performance lecture that draws on the publication. Using processes of cross-reading and live drawing, their performance lecture approaches the publication as a reader might thumb through a book; where certain sections appear to be lingered over, while others are skimmed in the search for key words and phrases, evocative fragments and extractions. Their reading suggests that books like Drawing a Hypothesis might not always need be read in a linear or logical way, but rather are to be dipped into, allowing for detours and distractions within the event of reading itself. The lecture takes the figures of thought at the heart of Drawing a Hypothesis as points of departure for exploring and performing the correlations between thinking and drawing. Addressing the shifting and ambivalent properties of image, symbol and drawing within the publication, it asks, ‘how can these visual artefacts be comprehended?’

More images can be found here. Forthcoming launches and performance lectures will be taking place in Amsterdam, Vienna and Berlin. A video document of the work is also in development.

Book Launch: The Event

2011-09-17T01:34:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from my essay, [...]

As part of THE EVENT in Birmingham, Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry will be launching their new publication alongside the opening of the group exhibition “which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together?”. The publication (developed in response to a series of evolving solo commissions by Kihlberg Henry, produced by VIVID in collaboration with Danielle Arnaud and Artsway) includes texts by Emma Cocker, Brian Dillon and Mladen Dolar.

Writing: Still Square to the Round Hole

2011-09-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

I will be visiting Spike Island in November with the view to writing something about the forthcoming exhibition, Tea Back, by Łódź based artist Cezary Bodzianowski. I hope that the encounter will enable me to revisit and develop some of the concerns developed within my recent texts, Over and Over, Again and Again, (where a specifically Sisyphean model of absurdity was explored); The Yes of the No! which explored affirmative forms of dissension and refusal (such as over-enthusiasm and play) and writing developed in collaboration with Open City within whose work everyday actions are often repeated, inverted, reversed in order to reveal the presence of habitual social expectations, conventions and protocol.

Cezary Bodzianowski: Tea Back
Saturday 22 October - Sunday 27 November

Spike Island presents the first UK solo show by Łódź based artist Cezary Bodzianowski. Initially trained as a sculptor in both his native Poland and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Bodzianowski has increasingly turned his practice to the creation of absurdist interventions into everyday settings. Such actions include camouflaging himself as foliage while standing beneath a tree or positioning himself, legs in the air, in the empty space below a staircase. In his 2010 essay 'O Lucky Man', art critic Jan Verwoert describes these studiedly deadpan performances as ‘characterised by a certain conspicuous inconspicuousness’, bringing to mind the era of silent comedy with their permanently out of place everyman hero. These actions result in photographs or short videos, mostly taken by his wife and artistic collaborator Monika Chojnicka. At the invitation of Spike Island, Bodzianowski and Chojnicka undertake a short residency during October 2011, responding to the sites and spaces of Bristol, including Spike Island’s own history as a former tea packing factory.

Cezary Bodzianowski, Step by Step (2010). Photo: Monika Chojnicka

Publication: COPY // unfold

2011-09-09T00:38:00.000-07:00

My text-work Close Reading (G.D.T.F, 1993) has been selected for inclusion in the forthcoming edition of COPY, a publication of experimental/art writing curated by Critical Writing Collective. COPY explores the boundaries of critical and experimental art writing through the publishing of writing as or within art practice, and page based works with a critical / textual element. COPY // unfold suggests a tension between the resolved and unresolved, drafted and rewritten, finished and unfinished through works which explore, respond to or enact in their own form a state of being ‘in process’. Contributors include Alain Ayers, David Berridge, Julia Calver, Paul Carr, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Laura Davidson, Joanna Loveday, Flatten the Mountain, Daniel Fogarty, Sarah Frydenlund, Derek Horton, Tamarin Norwood, Flora Robertson, Terry Slater, Richard Taylor, John Winslow, Paul Wright. COPY is designed in collaboration with Dust.

Emma Cocker, Close Reading (G.D. T.F. 1993), 2011

Through the practice of close reading, language can be made to stretch or pucker, ruche or fray. With experience, it can be pulled thin and sheer as delicate gauze or gathered up into thick and impenetrable creases. Close Reading (G.D. T.F. 1993) is part of an ongoing series that investigates the practice of close reading or of an ‘explication de texte’ as a critical tool for destabilizing language, for breaking up the linear unfolding of language into discontinuous fragments. Close Reading (G.D. T.F. 1993) performs a close reading of Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, 1993, in an attempt to render the text itself as an unfolding of pleats and stutters.

Publication: Art & Research

2011-09-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

My essay ‘Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild’ has now been published and can be read online here. The article belongs to a cluster of research entitled ‘The Enquiring of the Enquirer’ (within my broader research project, Not Yet There), which considers the specificity of thinking (‘knowing’) generated within certain forms of artistic practice, through the prism of philosopher Alain Badiou’s Being and Event. Central to Badiou’s thesis is an elaboration of the ‘event’ conceived as an encounter with that which cannot be comprehended by the terms of the existing ‘situation’; a moment of rupture wherein the ‘new’ might emerge. My article tests artists Dutton + Swindells’ practice against this theory (and vice versa), proposing their work as a manifestation of a ‘truth procedure’ performed in ‘fidelity’ (Badiou) to the transformative potential of the art encounter and possibility of the unexpected or ‘wildness’ therein. The article develops a new critical vocabulary for considering the process of artistic practice (and knowledge production therein), enhancing the burgeoning discourse around artistic research. It proposes a language for interrogating the criticality of the endeavour or enquiry of art practice, rather than resulting outcomes. A condensed version of the text was also published in ‘The Institute of Beasts’ (Site Gallery, 2011). A parallel investigation exploring drawing as an ‘evental site of practice’ (shifting from Badiou’s writing towards Antonio Negri’s conceptualization of ‘kairos’) is also developing within essays ‘The Restless Line’ in Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art (I.B.Tauris, 2012) and ‘Distancing the If and Then’, in Drawing a Hypothesis (Verlag Springer, 2011).

ART&RESEARCH

A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods

Volume 4. Number 1. Summer 2011

ISSN 1752-6388

This issue of Art and Research, focused upon ‘Art and Animality’, is co-edited by Ron Broglio (Arizona State University)

Contents include

Editorial: Art and the Animal Revolution

Giovanni Aloi, Different Becomings

Susan McHugh, Stains, Drains, and Automobiles: A Conversation with Steve Baker about Norfolk Roadkill, Mainly

Helen Bullard, Fostering Pidgins:(A conference report on Pidgin Language:(Animals, Birds and Us)

Emma Cocker, Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild

Roz Cran, Am I leopard?: Seeking Animation and Other Possibilities

Alan Currall, Cat Stuck in Organ

Maria Fusco, Fieldnotes from the Urban Pastoral

Ron Broglio and Frederick Young, The Coming Non-Human Community: A Conversation

Ingvild Kaldal and Nigel Rothfels, Reflections on the Vitrine
Carolee Schneemann, Approaching Animality

Kate Foster in conversation with Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson

Jan Verwoert, Animalisms

Performance: Drawing a Hypothesis Reading

2011-08-29T10:50:00.000-07:00

I am currently working on a performance reading of the publication Drawing a Hypothesis (above) in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer, which we are going to present in a number of contexts during the Autumn. The first performance reading will take place on 22 September 2011 within the context of the exhibition, Graphology Chapter 4 at M HKA, the museum of modern and contemporary art in Antwerp.

DRAWING A HYPOTHESIS

A performance lecture by Nikolaus Gansterer and Emma Cocker

Nikolaus Gansterer in collaboration with the UK based writer Emma Cocker will present a performance lecture based on the publication, Drawing a Hypothesis. Using processes of cross-reading and live drawing, their performance lecture approaches the publication as a reader might thumb through a book; where certain sections appear to be lingered over, while others are skimmed in the search for key words and phrases, evocative fragments and extractions. Their reading suggests that books like Drawing a Hypothesis might not always need be read in a linear or logical way, but rather are to be dipped into, allowing for detours and distractions within the event of reading itself. The lecture takes the figures of thought at the heart of Drawing a Hypothesis as points of departure for exploring and performing the correlations between thinking and drawing. Addressing the shifting and ambivalent properties of image, symbol and drawing within the publication, it asks, ‘how can these visual artefacts be comprehended?’

LONELY AT THE TOP

Graphology Chapter 4

(25.08.2011- 25.09.2011)

GRAPHOLOGY was initiated by Edwin Carels (researcher KASK/HoGent)

In four episodes, Graphology explores the automatisms that may show themselves in drawing. The human hand as a seismograph of the inner life, but also, conversely, the ‘mechanical unconsciousness’ of the machine that thrusts itself on the human eye. Printed reproduction techniques lead a life of their own, but how? A series of exhibitions set at the intersection of drawing, photography, printmaking, film and computer graphics. The fourth episode interprets the cinamätographe, as patented by the brothers Lumière, in the most literal sense: as a graphical method to re-produce, a writing of fragmented light images, a play of analysis and synthesis. Contributors include Juliana Borinski, Marcel Broodthaers, Morgan Fisher, Nikolaus Gansterer, Sandra Gibson / Luis Recoder, Wim Janssen, Louis Auguste Lumière, Jan Evangelista Purkynä, Man Ray, Dominique Somers.

Publication: Towards an Emergent Knowledge of the Margins

2011-08-29T10:42:00.000-07:00

Below is the draft version of my book chapter ‘Towards an Emergent Knowledge of the Margins’ which is going to be published in the forthcoming Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation, (ed.) Eugenie Shinkle, (Ashgate Publishing, 2012). The chapter draws on my involvement in the art project Urban Retreat and ideas initially generated within my prose-poem ‘Making Room for Manoeuvre; or, Ways of Operating Along the Margins’, in Manual for Marginal Places, (closeandremote, 2011).

Publication: Keeping Things Open

2011-08-13T03:03:00.000-07:00

I have been working on a text for a publication commissioned by NVA, as part of the dialogue surrounding their redevelopment of the St. Peter's seminary (see images above). The publication draws together discussions and writing coming out of NVA's presentation of the project at the XIIth International Architecture Exhibition at Venice Biennale. NVA were invited by the Scottish Government, in partnership with Creative Scotland and the British Council Scotland, to curate a distinctive Scottish presence at La Biennale di Venezia's 2010 International Architecture Exhibition. They presented public events responding to the themes of restoration and reuse of our build heritage, particularly on the potential restoration of St. Peter's Seminary near Cardross. The invitation to write a text (in relation to this intriguing context) has provided opportunity to explore a specifically propositional form of writing, which draws together a series of 'abstracts' as different 'ways in' or 'openings' for debating the ruin. Rather than conceiving the text as an essay, I have been exploring the possibility of proposing it as an event (whose details will be elaborated at some future point in time). My plan is to develop more work around some of these concerns in the future: an interest in artists' interventions in architecture or place at the cusp of it becoming ruin has been already tentatively considered within some recent writing (Reuben Henry and Karin Kihlberg's work in relation to the Birmingham Central Library, Sean Edwards interest in the Maelfa shopping centre, and Sophie Mellor's 'urban retreat' in the environs of Barrow-in-Furness.

On the Ruin’s Future: Keeping Things Open

A proposition: Located at and provoked by the site of the Grade A listed St Peter’s seminary, a modernist ruin in the heart of the Kilmahew Estate, On the Ruin’s Future: Keeping Things Open is conceived as a discursive event, bringing together different positions and perspectives to question and interrogate the potentiality—as well as the problematic—of the architectural ruin. This event explores the possibility of different openings (and notions of openness), to initiate and invite debate around the ruin and the proposed redevelopment of the St Peter’s site. Presentations will be situated in different geographical locations within St Peter’s (see map for location details); a peripatetic audience will engage with ideas simultaneously to a live encounter with the site. The event will begin as dawn breaks and continue as long as the light lasts and weather permits. Audience may come and go as they wish.

Proposed 'abstracts' include ➀ The Ruins Look Back; ➁ Being Left Open—Ruin as an Open Structure; ➂ Ruin—The Suspended Potentiality of Narrative Stalled; ⊗ Performing Ruin; ➃ No Longer and Not Yet; ➄ Becoming Cuckoo: How to Preoccupy Site; ➅ Twelve Categories: Classifying the Unclassified and Unclassifiable; ➆ Outside>Inside ➇ Beautiful Brutal: The Curious Lure of ‘Béton Brut’; ➈ The ‘She’ of Ruin; ➉ Open Poetics

To Have and To Hold launches at Edinburgh Book Festival 2011

In late November 2010 NVA curated “To Have and To Hold” at the 12th International Architectural Biennale in Venice. The discussions in Venice formed the basis of this new publication, which launches at Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

Creative Director Angus Farquhar will discuss NVA’s hopes for St Peter’s with the architectural historian Edward Hollis and the Glasgow-based architect Gordon Murray, all of whom have contributed to the book. “A Future for St Peter’s Seminary? Saving Scotland’s Masterpiece Of Modern Architecture”, takes place on 13th August, 7pm, RBS Corner Theatre in Charlotte Square Gardens, at the heart of Edinburgh’s New Town. Advanced copies of the book will be available to buy at the launch event while full distribution will be in September.

Project/Publication: Borderlands

2011-08-01T01:50:00.000-07:00

I am going to be working with photographer, Katja Hock, on a project that draws on our shared interest in border spaces. The project reflects specifically on Hock’s recent work around a series of woodland landscapes, based on her childhood memories of an area close to the border between Germany and Holland. It is possible that our collaboration will involve exploring the potentiality of verweilen, tarrying.

Below are some notes / images from from her recent exhibition, Stillness/Silence/Arrangements.

‘Walking through woodlands, returning to already photographed scenes, the photographs allow the viewer to linger, remain, and spend time creating a relationship between the photographs and their own imagination. The eye wanders between the scenes, acknowledging the reappearance of shapes, but they are slightly different than when seen before, reminding of time passed. It is the moments in-between, those voids between perceived time which cannot be shown that form and change memories and constitute the reading of the images. “For the important thing for the remembering author” as Benjamin remarks, “is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting? (1)” (1). Benjamin, W, The Image of Proust in Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt, Fontana Press, London, 1992, pp.197-210, p198

'Every site is haunted by countless ghosts that lurk there in silence, to be evoked or not. These absences stimulate the imagination, encouraging the viewer to fill in the blank spaces in the landscape.' Kraenzle, C., “Picturing Place: Travel, Photography, and the Imaginative”, in Searching for Sebald, ed. Patt. L, The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles, 2007, pp.126-145, p.138

'Memory encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance of a state of affairs nor its entire temporal course. Compared to photography, memory’s records are full of gaps. […] Memory does not pay much attention to dates – it skips years or stretches temporal distance. […] No matter which scenes an individual remembers, they all mean something relevant to that person, though he or she might not necessarily know what they mean. Thus, they are organized according to a principle which is essentially different from the organizing principle of photography. Photography grasps what is given as a spatial (or temporal) continuum; memory images retain what is given only insofar as it has significance. Since what is significant is not reducible to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory images are at odds with photographic representation.' Kracauer, S, “Photography” in The Mass Ornament, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1995, pp.46-63, p.50.

'When the moon came they set out, but they found no crumbs, for the many thousand of birds which fly about in the woods and fields had picked them all up. Hansel said to Gretel: “We shall soon find the way,” but they did not find it. They walked the whole night and all the next day too from morning till evening, but they did not get out of the forest, and were very hungry, for they had nothing to eat but two or three berries, which grew on the ground. And as they were so weary that their legs would carry them no longer, they lay down beneath a tree and fell asleep.’ Brothers Grimm, Complete Fairy Tales, Routledge, London, 2002, p.69

Screening: I AM NOT A POET

2011-07-31T13:18:00.000-07:00

My short video, Close Reading (C. O. P. V, 1950) is going to be screened as part of I AM NOT A POET: A FESTIVAL AT THE TOTALKUNST GALLERY, EDINBURGH (7-21st AUGUST 2011). It is also being screened online here.

VerySmallKitchen and theTotalkunst Gallery, Edinburgh, present I AM NOT A POET, a 2 week festival exploring connections of language, writing and art practice. Beginning with conversations and lectures as part of AN EDINBURGH ZINE & SMALL PRESS FAIR on 7th August, I AM NOT A POET presents a series of short one - three day exhibitions, alongside conversations, lectures, performances, publications, and screenings … Artists include: Pete Cant, Magdalen Chua, Patrick Coyle, Alex Eisenberg, Jennie Guy, Colin Herd, Shandra Lamaute, Michelle Letowska, Marit Muenzberg, nick e-melville, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, Gerry Smith, seekers of lice. Curated by David Berridge (VerySmallKitchen) and Mirja Koponen (Totalkunst Gallery)

Close Reading (C.O.P.V, 1950)

Close Reading (C.O.P.V, 1950) is part of an ongoing series which investigates the practice of close reading or of an ‘explication de texte’. Here, close reading is not understood as the critical attention paid to the meaning of words themselves as signs, but is instead interested in those meanings produced by looking at words ‘close up’, through a process of visual magnification or close visual attention. The work will also be screened online, but in the meantime can be viewed below.

Details: Emma Cocker, Close Reading (C.O.P.V, 1950)

Project: L’ultima Cena

2011-07-31T12:42:00.000-07:00

I have been invited to visit and respond to an exhibition/project entitled L’ultima cena, taking place at the Refettorio di San Michele in Pescia, Italy (3-4 September). L’ultima cena is a project initiated by an invitation issued to 13 artists (including Brigid McLeer with whom I have worked before) to make sited work in response to the little known and rarely seen ‘Last Supper’ fresco by Fieravante Sansoni (1625) located in the former convent refectory, the Refettorio di San Michele in Pescia. It is anticipated that this context will provide a foil against which to explore slippages of representation, time and reality occurring both within the fresco, through its relationship to an ‘original’, and also to the site itself. Starting points for exploration are likely to include ideas around 'being with' and empathy; relations between individual and collective identity; the affective potentiality of everyday situations; a collapsing of the binary relation of fidelity and betrayal. More to follow soon.

Project: Summer Lodge

2011-07-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

Over the last few weeks I have been involved in the Summer Lodge at Nottingham Trent University. For ten days in July the Fine Art studios and workshops of Nottingham Trent University played host to a gathering of thirty diverse artists. This group comprising of current staff, student interns, and artists working in the city of Nottingham and beyond, initiated new dialogues and critical exchange through engaging together in a period of sustained studio/workshop practice. The Summer Lodge was intended as an opportunity to think through making by being able to work for a while without many of the usual constraints and distractions. As part of the Summer Lodge I have been thinking more about the potential of residency-based approaches to making work which I hope to explore further over the coming years.

The Summer Lodge also involved a one-day symposium entitled, The Speculation. Outline: "In the current economic and political climate, the old cliché rings true: the only certainty is that there is no certainty. In such times, existing models and familiar territories can no longer be relied upon, a situation that is especially pressing within the fields of art practice and research, given government prioritization of STEM subjects within universities and the decrease in arts funding outside academia. Whilst it is all to easy to become despondent in such gloomy times, by contrast the Visual Arts research area will seek to speculate upon new directions and alternative possibilities, exploring a troubling grey area, a critical terrain vague which might disturb the smooth landscape of what is already named and known. This work develops out of an already extant research cluster in Visual Arts, which has hitherto focused upon ideas of irresolution, doubt, deferral, uncertainty to explore the potential of remaining ‘Still Unresolved’, but is intended to help us shape the future direction/s of Visual Arts research, and to further develop conversations, collaborations and other projects with colleagues across the School of Art and Design and beyond, as these ideas intersect with other disciplines."

Presenters: Will Bowden (Associate Professor of Roman Archaeology, Nottingham University), Emma Cocker (Artist, Writer and Senior Lecturer NTU), Dr. Nick Flynn (Programme Leader Applied Criminology, Community and Criminal Justice Division De Montfort University) Alice Gale-Feeny (Intern and 3rd Yr Fine Art student NTU), Rebecca Gamble (Artist and Research Student NTU) Dr. Jonathan Gilhooly (Brighton Based Artist and educator) Prof. Julian Henderson (Professor of Archaeological Science, University of Nottingham), Sally O’Reilly (Writer), John Plowman (Artist, Curator and Co-director Beacon Art Project), Tim Rundle (Design Trend Forecaster, Principal Lecturer, Programme Leader Fashion Marketing Management & Communication), Niki Russell (Nottingham based Artist/Producer and member of REACTOR), Nicola Streeten (Illustrator, co-director of Laydeez do Comics and co-director of Beacon Art Project)

Publication: Nature (Documents of Contemporary Art Series)

2011-07-19T10:36:00.001-07:00

Heather and Ivan Morison, installation shot from Earthwalker at Danielle Arnaud Gallery

My short reflection on the exhibition Earthwalker by Heather and Ivan Morison (from 2007, originally published on interface, a-n) has been selected for the forthcoming publication, Nature (Documents of Contemporary Art series, Whitechapel/MIT, 2012) edited by Jeffrey Kastner.

About the publication

Nature is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art. Nature, as both subject and object, has repeatedly been rejected and reclaimed by artists over the last half century. With the dislocation of disciplinary boundaries in visual culture, art that is engaged with nature has also forged connections with a new range of scientific, historical and philosophical ideas. Developing technologies make our interventions into natural systems both increasingly refined and profound. And advances in biological and telecommunication technology continually modify the way we ‘present’ ourselves. So too are artistic representations of nature (human and otherwise) being transformed.

This anthology addresses these issues by considering how the rise of transdisciplinary practices in the postwar era allowed for new kinds of artistic engagement with nature. These include the post-minimalist inscriptions associated with Land art; environmentally engaged practices designed to propose novel forms of stewardship; and more recent projects concerned with relationships between the most subtle and minute components of life and the large-scale appearance of the world. These problematize and unsettle the most basic operations of ‘natural’ personhood and identity.

Including a wide range of writings by and about artists, juxtaposed with influential texts from diverse theoretical bases, this collection provides an overview of the eclectic scientific and philosophical sources that inform contemporary art’s investigations of nature.  Writers and artists surveyed include: Giorgio Agamben, Jesse Ashlock, Michael Auping, Aziz + Cucher, Gaston Bachelard, Brandon Ballengée, Gregory Bateson, Jane Bennett, Henri Bergson, Joseph Beuys, Claire Bishop, Suzaan Boettger, Roger Caillois, Oron Catts, Mel Chin, Emma Cocker, Steven Connor, Lynne Cooke, Critical Art Ensemble, Walter De Maria, Jacques Derrida, herman de vries, Mark Dion, Vilém Flusser, George Gessert, Oliver Grau, Tim Griffin, Félix Guattari, Hans Haacke, Henrik Håkansson, Peter Halley, Donna Haraway, Helen & Newton Harrison, David Harvey, Pierre Huyghe, Eduardo Kac, Bruno Latour, Pamela M. Lee, Jean-François Lyotard, Tom McDonough, Denise Markonish, Mary Mattingly, Ana Mendieta, Laurent Mignonneau, Jacques Monod, Robert Morris, Arne Naess, Thomas Nagel, Trevor Paglen, Jane Prophet, Ingeborg Reichle, Alexis Rockman, Nikolas Rose, Andrew Ross, Tomás Saraceno, Mark Sheerin, Bonnie Sherk, Robert Smithson, Christa Sommerer, Alan Sonfist, Stelarc, Paul Tebbs, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Vladimir Vernadsky, Victoria Vesna, Carl Zimmer, Andrea Zittel and Ionat Zurr.

Jeffrey Kastner is a New York-based writer and critic, and senior editor of Cabinet. Formerly senior editor of ARTnews, he has written extensively on contemporary art in numerous catalogues and journals. His books include Land and Environmental Art (1998).

Event: Site / Sight Lines

2011-06-04T13:11:00.000-07:00

Images: Emma Cocker, Site / Sight Lines, 2011

Site / Sight Lines

Friday, 10th June, Institute for Transmedia Art, Vienna

Workshop/Seminar

Fusing practical and conceptual concerns, this one-day workshop with Emma Cocker and Nikolaus Gansterer investigates how the performative practices of wandering, waiting, drawing, writing and reading can operate as creative ‘tactics’ or methods for navigating or negotiating space differently to expectation, convention or habit. By mapping or diagramming how spatial relations are organized and orchestrated within various public spaces, workshop participants will be encouraged to devise ways through which to draw attention to or even interrupt these habitual social patterns or flows. The workshop will explore and test how invitations, instructions or even drawn scores can be used to activate different ways of navigating or traversing public space, producing temporary and experimental forms of connectivity and social interaction.  
Documentation and reflection from the workshop will be gathered here.

Image: Emma Cocker, Diagramming Relations, test propositions

Guest Lecture: Emma Cocker

The workshop 'Spatial (Inter) Relations' will be preceded by a guest lecture at the Institute for Transmedia, Vienna, on Thursday, 9th June

 UK based artist-writer Emma Cocker reflects on how public space is both produced by and productive of the ways in which it is inhabited or lived, how it can be reworked or re-conceptualized through the prism of both artistic representation and production. Referring to selected artists’ projects including her own collaboration with the performance-based collective Open City and the recent publication, Manual for Marginal Places, Cocker will explore how the performative practices of wandering, waiting, drawing, writing and reading can operate as creative ‘tactics’ or methods for navigating or negotiating space differently to expectation, convention or habit.

Events: Manual Reading

2011-05-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

During June, I will be presenting ideas at a number of forthcoming events where I propose to elaborate upon the invitational or instructional aspects of the ‘manual’, with reference to various examples of ‘manual’ including the recently published Manual for Marginal Places. Events include:

TRAVERSE

Traverse is the inaugural exhibition at new Bristol gallery, Geneva Stop. Traverse features new video work by Close & Remote and the book launch of ‘Manual For Marginal Places’, which includes text by Emma Cocker and images by Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter.

X Libris

Site Gallery play host to a series of book-based discussions around the themes: 'Public', 'Machines', 'Manuals' and 'Maps'. I will be involved in the session on 'Manuals' which will take place on 14 June.
X Libris Book Club 3 - Manuals

From Douglas Adams' 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy' to George Perec's 'Life: A User's Manual', we will explore the guide books, user's guides and manuals generously donated to X Libris. Artist Bob Levene will discuss her contribution, 'A User's Guide to the 21st Century' and Emma Cocker will introduce her book 'Manual for Marginal Places' created in collaboration with Close and Remote:

“To be useful, a manual often needs to give the user an overview of how a thing works and then more detailed information on its application and maintenance. In this case the manual format is extracted from the mechanical and re-directed towards the desire or yearning for authentic experience. Unlike the well-known Haynes automotive manuals, this book does not offer a complete strip down and rebuild of a location; it makes suggestions in the direction of raw experience. Away from how things work and toward how you might work.” (closeandremote.net)

Presentation: Close Reading / Open Reading

2011-05-17T07:26:00.001-07:00

I am in the process of testing out some new work, in preparation for my presentation Close Reading / Open Reading, which is part of the Writing (the) Space Event, Thursday 19 May at Wild Pansy Press Project Space.

Close Reading / Open Reading investigates the capacity of methods of close attention for producing uncertainty, indeterminacy and formlessness rather than fixing or clarifying any single, stable meaning, where paradoxically perhaps, the more something becomes scrutinized the less it becomes known. Within my practice, processes of extraction, fragmentation, listing, footnoting and cross-referencing become used for generating 'openings' rather than conclusions, for appearing purposeful whilst remaining without clear or discernible intent.

Close Reading of the following sentence by Charles Olson, which had been used as a starting point or point of provocation for Writing (the) Space: “If I hammer, if I recall in, and keep calling in, the breath, the breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause, it is to insist upon a part that breath plays in verse”, Charles Olson, Projective Verse, 1950.

My presentation will move from considering my recent collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham (Re -) towards introducing aspects of my more emergent research collaboration with artist Jim Boxall entitled, Close Readings. As part of this new research project we propose to explore the notion of close reading or of an ‘explication de texte’ as a tactic through which to interrogate the performative and spatial dimensions of written text. Here, close reading is not understood as the critical attention paid to the meaning of words themselves as signs, but is instead interested in those meanings produced by looking at the spatiality of words ‘close up’, through a process of visual magnification or close visual attention. Close Reading / Open Reading explores the threshold space where writing or text collapses into its component parts (ink and page), or the point where the sense or legibility of a word is rendered illegible or nonsensical the closer it is attended to, as writing slips towards image. I envisage future experiments emerging from this presentations exploring the relationship between the practices of flitting and lingering (over a text).

Event: RaRa & Manual for Marginal Places Launch

2011-05-15T22:18:00.000-07:00

On Saturday 14 May, S1 Studios hosted the RaRa symposium, Just Do(ing) It: Artist-led and self-organised cultural activity as resistance to Capitalism and the book launch for closeandremote's Manual for Marginal Places. Images from these events to follow here and also on S1 Studios forthcoming facebook pages.

Image: RaRa symposium, an S1 studios hosted event at S1 Artspace, 14 May 2011

Details about the event

Just Do(ing) It: Artist-led and self-organised cultural activity as resistance to Capitalism.

Building on previous RadicalAesthetics-RadicalArt (RaRa) events that have focused on the theoretical and socio-political landscape of a ‘radical (art) praxis’, this event in an artists-led space in Sheffield continues the exploration of strategies, tactics and work being carried out ‘on the ground’ by artists and cultural activists towards a better world. How might we begin to understand artist-led or self-organised art activity in this light? What examples of DIY, informal or purposefully marginal art practices exist which aim to imagine, create, or operate within new spheres for cultural activity? How do such practices resist and/or maintain a critical relationship with the dominant order and state capitalism? How does the empty but increasingly inescapable rhetoric of Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ effect or alter the stakes of such practice? What role do practices of subversion operating ‘within and against’ the system play in this struggle?

Image: R ebecca Gordon-Nesbitt's presentation

Speakers include:

- John Holloway (Professor of Sociology, Insituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico, and Leverhulme Visiting Professor, School of Geography, University of Leeds. Author of Change the World without taking Power (new ed. Pluto, London, 2010) and Crack Capitalism (Pluto, London, 2010).

- Leeds Creative Timebank (Alternative economy initiative http: //www.leedscreativetimebank.co.uk/)

- Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt (Sheffield-born writer and investigative researcher).

- Milena Placentile (Winnipeg based curator, writer, researcher)

- with special video contribution from Gregory Sholette (US-based artist/writer on informal art practice, author of Dark Matter, Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, 2011)

This one-day event – initiated by Andy Abbott (Black Dogs and University of Leeds), in collaboration with Jane Tormey/Gillian Whiteley (Loughborough University) and S1 (www.S1artspace.org) - aims to provide a space for discussion, critical reflection and evaluation of such questions and tactics through the example of current practice and writers on the subject.

RaRa is a Politicized Practice Research Group project.

EVENT: WRITING (the) SPACE

2011-05-08T14:31:00.000-07:00

19 May 10.45 - 8pm

Old Mining Building, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT

Contributors include David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Victoria Gray, Claire Hind, Mary Paterson

Charles Olson’s Projective Verse invites writing to be considered spatially, as OPEN, or as FIELD (of) composition in three dimensions. His proposition is one of text as space of action, of breath as punctuation, and of the bodily pressures of writing in which ‘form is never more than an extension of content’. Drawing together the practices of UK artists and writers, this day-long event attempts to further explore notions of physical and spatial writing, drawing on the installation Re – (WRITING (the) SPACE) and Olson’s notion of Projective Verse.

10.45 – 6pm: OPEN OLSON OPEN Laboratory 

A laboratory exploring practice-based examples of Olson’s Projective Verse. Presenting is David Berridge talking on PHRASE POETICS and Olson’s “field”, Rachel Lois Clapham on FINGER and three dimensional ‘diagramming’, Emma Cocker explores the 'spacing' of extraction, condensation and close reading, Victoria Gray unpicks her performance of Loop (2011), Claire Hind examines voice and breath in response to Olson’s insistence upon the author’s body and Mary Paterson uses her online text 'Navigation Through Unbound' as a case study for writing the unknown. Audience space is limited so booking essential, please email rachellois@opendialogues.com.

6-8pm : How is Art Writing?

 Dinner, drink and a live performance by Giles Bailey as part of the In a word…artists’ dinner series. Free but booking essential via rachellois@opendialogues.com or by clicking here.

This event has been developed in conjunction with the exhibition WRITING (the) SPACE, a presentation of the project Re – by Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker at the Wild Pansy Project Space.

Exhibition: Re - Writing [the] Space

2011-04-27T12:50:00.000-07:00

Writing (the) Space, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker at Wild Pansy Press Project Space, Leeds, including new Re- Reader designed by Marit Münzberg. More to follow soon.

Image: Re - Writing [the] Space, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, Wild Pansy Press Project Space, Leeds, 2011

Updates: Drawing a Hypothesis

2011-04-14T12:29:00.000-07:00

Image: Nikolaus Gansterer

I have been invited by artist Nikolaus Ganster to present a lecture/workshop for the Department of Transmedia Arts (University of Applied Arts in Vienna) in June. The lecture will be used as a space to specifically further ideas developed as part of my essay for Gansterer’s forthcoming publication, Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Research. Whilst in Vienna, we will also be developing ideas for a performative reading, which we intend to operate in conjunction with the launch of the publication (Autumn, 2011); and ideas around a possible international research project exploring expanded drawing practices.

More information about Drawing a Hypothesis

Drawing a Hypothesis is an exciting reader on the ontology of forms of visualizations and on the development of the diagrammatic view and its use in contemporary art, science and theory. In an intense process of exchange with artists and scientists, Nikolaus Gansterer reveals drawing as a media of research enabling the emergence of new narratives and ideas by tracing the speculative potential of diagrams. Based on a discursive analysis of found figures with the artists' own diagrammatic maps and models, the invited authors create unique correlations between thinking and drawing. Due to its ability to mediate between perception and reflection, drawing proves to be one of the most basic instruments of scientific and artistic practice, and plays an essential role in the production and communication of knowledge. The book is a rich compendium of figures of thought, which moves from scientific representation through artistic interpretation and vice versa.

Contents

Drawing a Hypothesis (Preface), Nikolaus Gansterer

I Must Be Seeing Things, Clemens Krümmel

A line with variable direction, which traces no contour, and delimits no form, Susanne Leeb.

Grapheus Was Here, Anthony Auerbach

Asynchronous Connections, Kirsten Matheus

Figures of Thoughts, Gerhard Dirmoser.

Collection of Figures of Thoughts, Gerhard Dirmoser

The Line of Thought, Hanneke Grootenboer

Dances of Space, Marc Boeckler

Distancing the If and Then, Emma Cocker

Processing the Routes of Thoughts, Kerstin Bartels

The Hand, the Creatures & The Singing Garden, Moira Roth

Drawing Interest / Recording Vitality, Karin Harasser

Hypotheses non Fingo or When Symbols Fail, Andreas Schinner

Three Elements, Axel Stockburger

A Fragmentary Collection of Emotions and Orientations, graphically recorded, Christian Reder

Radical Cartographies, Philippe Rekazewicz

Measuring the World, Katharina Bösch, Christine Haupt-Stummer, Andreas Kristof

Subjective Objectivities, Jörg Piringer

The Afterthought of Drawing: Six Hypotheses, Jane Tormey

Nonself compatibility in Plants – The Floral-Animal continuity, Monika Bakke.

On the importance of scientific research in relation to the humanities, Walter Seidl

Strong Evidence for telon-priming Cell Layers in the mammalian olfactory bulb, Nardo, M. L.; Adam, A.; Brandlmayr, P.; Fisher B. F.

Expected Anomalies caused by increased Radiation Activity, Christina Stadlbauer

On Pluto 86 Winter lasts 92 Years, Ralo Mayer

The Unthought Known, Felix de Mendelssohn

wiry fantasy or the electronic line is also a handwriting and itself effects the overcoming of its system, which it draws, constructs and leaves: into the poetical eye, too, which has dreamed its original state of pure perception and launches itself into the dialogue as source, Ferdinand Schmatz

During the Summer I will be developing a series of performance presentations in collaboration with Nikolaus Gansterer to launch Drawing a Hypothesis (which are scheduled for the Autumn at a number of venues including MUHKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; KNAW, The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam in collaboration with Jan van Eck Academy; and the Secession, Vienna in collaboration with the University of Applied Arts Vienna)

Publication: To Have and To Hold

2011-04-07T15:04:00.000-07:00

I have been invited to contribute a text to a forthcoming publication that expands on a project entitled To Have and to Hold, which was curated by NVA, a Scottish environmental arts organization, for the Venice Architectural Biennale, 2010. The Scottish Government & Creative Scotland in partnership with the British Council worked with NVA to represent Scotland at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. NVA’s contribution to the Biennale focused on a project that they are currently involved in at a site near Loch Lomond that includes a late-modernist ruin. Their involvement in the biennale was staged through a series of events aimed at provoking debate and discussion around the proposed redevelopment of this site.

More about the broader project here:

More about the the events in Venice here:

The proposed interdisciplinary publication will include invited contributions from architect Ed Hollis, geographer Hayden Lorimer, architect Henry McKeown, landscape designer Tilman Latz, Adam Sutherland from Grizedale Arts and myself. It is being organized and edited by Gerrie van Noord.

Book Launch: Manual for Marginal Places

2011-04-07T12:17:00.000-07:00

Manual for Marginal Places is the inaugural publication commissioned by closeandremote (Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter). The publication brings together my recent text, ‘Making Room for Manoeuvre; or Ways of Operating Along the Margins’, with text and images from artist, Sophie Mellor. Manual for Marginal Places was launched on 14 May 2011, as part of the event, Just Do(ing) It: Artist-led and self-organised cultural activity as resistance to Capitalism (see here). Manual for Marginal Places can be purchased on Amazon here.

Manual for Marginal Places is explored by David Berridge in his blog post ‘ART WRITING LANDSCAPE: WALKING (S)MILES THEREFORE AHM MARGINAL SOUND POET THEREFORE’. In this post Berridge proposed to interrogate, “Four art writing projects (that) unfold relationships and possibilities of, for and about landscape. Strategies for observing then recording the results, or maybe the other way around; scores for intervention; missives for those in the field right now or chair- bed- page confined explorers of type/ book/ screen (e)scapes. Handbooks for weaving together art as life life as art art and life, or as yet un-thought combinations of neither.”

Extract from Berridge's post:

“I’m still absorbed in MANUAL FOR MARGINAL PLACES, which I also presented as part of the ART CRITICISM NOW event in Dublin, and whose notion of manual has also been generative for this blog since. A source book, then, documenting (1) letters sent by Sophie Mellor to Emma Cocker whilst the former was spending a short time living without money in Cumbrian towns and countryside; (2) Cocker’s replies in the form of a series of prose texts/ poems on marginality. A dialogue, then, but one open to its breaches as much as its connections.

Initially, MANUAL reads as epistolary novel, with Emma and Sophie’s texts alternating, although Sophie’s soon disappear, and Emma unfolds her prose sequence solely in relation to (Sophies) images. This structure reflect’s how Sophie’s project (she was also a co-curator of the project) was itself a test to generate a set of ideas and practices for future work. It demonstrates the tricky status of such activities (briefly living rough as a funded artist), where art is both deprivation and privilege, the act itself both pretense and very real.

I wonder if these tensions – which are part of the project’s energy, not a critique of something it is unaware of – are also apparent in the text itself. Here is No.12 – Drift. I offer it here, out of context, as an example of a text that has drifted into this new context and location here, curious how in doing so it maintains or loses a sense of MANUAL:

Wandering operates tangentially; it detours, dallies, takes its time. To wander is to drift, becoming a little aimless or unanchored; it is a tactic for getting lost. Its disorientation subjects the commonplace or unnoticed elements of one’s familiar environment to the estrange scrutiny of a stranger’s glance. Navigational aids and maps might be misused for wilful disorientation; guidebooks become tools for defamiliarization and mis-direction as much for finding one’s way. Drifting is a mode of attention that lags behind the trajectory of more purposeful thought, yet other knowledge(s) become revealed in the slipstream of intention, in its shadows and asides. To catch the drift is to gauge the tenor of the subtext, to become attuned to what is left out or unspoken, to what is said in what remains unsaid. Become practiced in the art of wandering and of drifting thought. Follow in the footsteps of others who have wandered from the beaten track. Yet, remember too, that wandering necessarily wanders; its restlessness wills against the delimitation of any single genealogy or definitive theory of its dérive. To wander wills towards remaining unfixed, towards the condition of unbelonging. (40)

Sophie’s texts are reproduced handwritten notes sent from the field. Cocker’s are printed blocks of text on a white page, but their sense of removal is also evident in how their propositional nature removes particulars of person and place, even as it explores a landscape that is both a physical chronicle of nature’s edgelands and a conceptual territory indebted to certain histories of art practice and theory/ philosophy.

Some of Emma’s texts have the feel of a list turning towards litany. The absence of gender or identity for the speaker or addressee, but their simultaneous confidence and stridency, allows a phantom “we” and “us” – maybe “I-thou” – to form alongside the text, one which may also seem absurd and with which we may disagree.

In other sections this subject is not “he” or ”she” but “one”, a subjectivity that is everyone and no one, self and other, confession and avoidance, a deliberate anachronism. Part of the texts own frame and music, it moves uncertainly beyond it, another way these paragraphs fold back into themselves to better propose themselves as objects of use." David Berridge, 2011, http://verysmallkitchen.com

Publication: Towards an Emergent Knowledge of the Margins

2011-04-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

I will be contributing a book chapter entitled 'Towards an Emergent Knowledge of the Margins' to the forthcoming publication, Emerging Landscapes. Drawing on my experience of involvement in the recent art project, Urban Retreat (2010), in this chapter I explore the specificity of the marginal landscape as a space of emergence or even emergency, an uncertain or indeterminate territory always at the cusp of being redrawn or re-conceptualized through the prism of both representation and production. Reflecting on specific aspects of the project, Urban Retreat, I explore how the inhabitation of margins requires the development of creative tactics, a ‘productive knowledge’ necessary for operating critically within their unstable terms. This chapter reflects on what can be gleaned from the experiential encounter with a particular marginal place, examining how such tactics might constitute the basis of a manual for living a life in marginal times.

Emerging Landscapes Publication

At a time of environmental crisis, shifting geopolitical boundaries, and economic downturn, Emerging Landscapes ponders the state of landscape and its future, mapping those practices that creatively address the boundaries between possibility, opportunity and action in imagining and shaping our world. Drawing on the productive synergies that emerged from the recent Emerging Landscapes conference, this publication seeks to discuss the potential and limits of landscape studies as a cross-disciplinary field of research.  

Event: Temporary Association

2011-04-06T07:13:00.000-07:00

Charlotte Morgan and myself will be contributing to this event at One Thoresby Street, Nottingham (on behalf of S1 Artspace)

Temporary Association, Nottingham

Tuesday 19^th April, 2011 From midday

The Temporary Association is a concise introduction and update on the activity of four UK based organisations; Spike Island, Eastside Projects, S1 Artspace and One Thoresby Street.

Speakers Include:

Marie-Anne.McQuay, Helen Legg - Spike Island, Bristol

Ruth Claxton, Gavin Wade - East Side Projects, Birmingham

Emma Cocker and Charlotte Morgan - S1, Sheffield

Bruce Asbestos - One Thoresby Street / Stand Assembly, Nottingham

Publication: Cultural Borrowings

2011-03-24T03:51:00.000-07:00

The publication Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation (ed.) Iain Robert Smith is now available to buy as a hard copy here. The publication was previously only available as an online resource and e-book here. Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation includes my essay ‘Ethical Possession: Borrowing from the Archives’ which investigates the appropriation or 'borrowing' of existing found-footage and archival material within artists' film and video through the prism of the work of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi.

Event: Extra Curricular

2011-03-10T13:23:00.001-08:00

I have been invited as a guest writer/reader as part of the project Extra Curricular at Spike Island. For Extra Curricular selected writers/artists/curators have been invited to suggest a text that they are currently reading or, equally, one they have read many times and frequently reference in their practice – whether theory, fiction, manifesto or any other form of 'text' – which will be used as the basis for a reading group seminar. I am not yet sure what text to propose – maybe something by Victor Turner (whose writing on ritual and liminality I have been returning to as part of my research for a book chapter for the publication Liminal Landscapes), or perhaps something in relation to productive knowledge or techne (with its attendant form of timing <kairos> and cunning intelligence <metis>)?

New work: Close Readings

2011-03-10T01:56:00.000-08:00

I am in the process of developing a new project with artist Jim Boxall entitled Close Readings. Both Boxall and myself are interested in how fragments of textual language can be used within performance as oblique strategies, as points of provocation or evocation, instruction or interruption

image: Still from Origamibiro promo video, 2010

We propose to approach the notion of close reading or of an ‘explication de texte’ as a tactic through which to interrogate the performative dimensions of written text, for exploring and developing new strategies for presenting and interrogating language within the context of a performance based practice. Here, close reading is not understood as the critical attention paid to the meaning of words themselves as signs, but is instead interested in those meanings produced by looking at words ‘close up’, through a process of visual magnification or close visual attention. Like conventional forms of close reading, the project focuses on paying close attention to individual words, syntax and the order in which sentences and ideas unfold as they are read or presented, drawing on the Latin origins of the word explicare (as in explication de texte) which means to unfold, to fold out, set forth. The research is concerned with exploring the threshold space where writing or text collapses into its component parts (ink and page), or the point where the sense or legibility of a word is rendered illegible or nonsensical the closer it is attended to, as writing slips towards image. Our intent is to rethink the term ‘close reading’ as a specific visual research method, in which language becomes subjected to close microscopic scrutiny through the technologies of film recording and projection. Aspects of this research will be developed into performances in dialogue with Boxall through his collaboration with Origamibiro.

New work: Condensations

2011-03-06T13:00:00.000-08:00

I am currently working on a concept for a publication, which uses the notion(s) of condensation as the framing principle through which to draw together a body of recent and (forthcoming) writing.

I am developing the term condensations to describe a specific mode of writing, which includes the production of condensed prose ‘sections’ (often in serial form) alongside other models of writing constructed through the assemblage of fragments and extracts gleaned from extant work. The notion of condensations as a term to describe a mode of writing is developing through reflection on the methodological connections between a number of recent projects including Pay Attention to the Footnotes, The Yes of the No!, Making Room for Manoeuvre, Re- (Writing) as well as the ongoing project Field Proposals and 'texts' produced in collaboration with Rachel Lois Clapham as part of the iterative project, Re- . More to follow soon as this project develops.

I have been thinking about the term 'condensations' after reading a short extract by artist, Haegue Yang on research as 'condensation':

"It might sound absurd to bring up a scientific metaphor to address how I would like to construct my 'output', yet it seems proper to say that I strive for a kind of 'condensation'. I imagine metaphorically that I preserve cool air in me as long as I can, until the temperature difference is so great that water drops collect in the bottle ... I believe that in such 'blind' and 'silent' communication, which feels abstract, there is a negation of learned knowledge, obtained information and individual experience that opens people up to others in an unprotected way", Haegue Yang

Publication: [...]

2011-02-21T01:53:00.001-08:00

Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, Apeirophobic Framework (2011) production still from HD Video

A new publication by Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, featuring works from their current tour and texts by myself and Brian Dillon, published by VIVID and designed by James Langdon will be launched at ArtSway on 11 June 2011. The publication will be launched in conjunction with the exhibition, Apeirophobia, Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry (16 April - 12 June 2011).

‘Apeirophobia’ means a fear of the future - a phobia that compels sufferers to plan every element of their lives so that they know exactly what the future has in store for them. Apeirophobia is one part of an international touring programme of new work commissioned in collaboration with VIVID and Danielle Arnaud - with the exhibition at ArtSway featuring works from each stage of the tour. These works explore Kihlberg & Henry’s ongoing interest in the condition of the viewer in time and space.

I have been working on a structure for a non-linear or even woven text where the reader is not encouraged to follow a single written trajectory but rather explore overlapping and interrelated paragraphs. A footnoting system is proposed to run through the text, where each paragraph becomes the footnote for another which in turn becomes the footnote for another. Below is a draft version of the text with an indication of how it might be structured.

[...]

Project: WRITING (the) SPACE

2011-02-13T03:11:00.000-08:00

WRITING (the) SPACE

Wild Pansy Press Project Space

4 May - 19 May 2011 (Mon-Fri 9-6)

Old Mining Building, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT

‘If I hammer, if I recall in, and keep calling in, the breath, the breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause, it is to insist upon a part that breath plays in verse which has not (due, I think, to the smothering of the power of the line by too set a concept of foot) has not been sufficiently observed or practiced, but which has to be if verse is to advance to its proper force and place in the day, now, and ahead. I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath.’ Extract, Projective Verse, 1950.

Charles Olson’s Projective Verse invites writing to be considered spatially, as OPEN, or as FIELD (of) composition in three dimensions. His proposition is one of text as space of action, of breath as punctuation, and of the bodily pressures of writing in which ‘form is never more than an extension of content’.

WRITING (the) SPACE presses down on and around this unique poetics of writing in contemporary performance related practice - in particular, the possibilities of performance writing in spatial and physical terms. WRITING (the) SPACE is conceived as a period of action research within the Wild Pansy Press Project Space.

For WRITING (the) SPACE, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker present a new iteration of their ongoing collaborative project Re –, which essays the relationship between performance/document, live/recording, writing/written through the collision of spoken, textual and gestural languages. This iteration of the project addresses the emergent grammar of Re –, exploring the spatial and physical possibilities of writing through the installation of disparate performance documents. Extracted fragments from earlier conversations rub against mute utterances of a finger diagramming, nails pink; a spoken text of dislocated phrases; partial scores awaiting activation; punctuation, the space of breath. Re – (WRITING (the) SPACE) is open to the public from 4 - 19 May, 9-6pm Mon-Fri.

WRITING (the) SPACE Event, 19 May 10.30am – 8pm

Drawing together the practices of diverse artists and writers, this day-long event attempts to further explore notions of physical and spatial writing, drawing on the installation Re – (WRITING (the) SPACE) and Olson’s notion of Projective Verse.

10.30-6pm: > OPEN > < OLSON > < OPEN <. A laboratory exploring practice based examples of Olson’s OPEN text. Presenting: David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Victoria Gray and Claire Hind. Audience space is limited so booking is essential, please email rachellois@opendialogues.com.

6-8pm : How is Art Writing? Dinner, drink and conversation on the last day of the exhibition as part of the In a word…artists’ dinner series. All welcome but booking essential via In a word...

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WRITING (the) SPACE is developed by Rachel Lois Clapham (Open Dialogues) in partnership with New Work Yorkshire and supported by In a word…

 In a word... is a research programme profiling an ecology of radical writing practice in, around and from Yorkshire. http://writingencounters.squarespace.com/in-a-word/  Open Dialogues is a UK collaboration, founded by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, that produces writing on and as performance. www.opendialogues.com

New Work Yorkshire is a proactive, engaged and mutually supportive collection of individuals who aim to develop a vibrant and diverse New Work sector in Yorkshire.

Wild Pansy Press is an art collective, a small publishing outfit affiliated with Leeds University Fine Art and a public venue for experimental works which use the practices of reading, writing and publication as their medium and/or content. wildpansypress.com

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Images

1 The Company of Men" by Charles Olson, typewritten manuscript with handwritten notations, September 13, 1957, from the Charles Olson Research Collection.

2 Re- (Unfixed) Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, 2010. Courtesy the artists.

Review: Maelfa, Sean Edwards

2011-02-10T13:54:00.000-08:00

I will be reviewing Sean Edward’s current solo show, Maelfa, at Spike Island (Bristol), for a forthcoming issue of Frieze magazine. The Maelfa Shopping Centre, Llanedyern, situated on the outskirts of Cardiff, is the focus of Sean Edwards’ latest project. Built around a block of high-rise flats in a council estate in the mid 1970s, the Maelfa centre was once a thriving microcosm of the wider city but declined over the subsequent decades. Edwards undertook a residency in the centre ahead of its planned demolition, making a careful study of the still functioning yet near derelict space, creating a series of new works. Due to the recession, however, plans to develop Maelfa have now been put on hold with the centre still functioning day to day. The central piece of the exhibition is a slow paced, silent video that touches upon a sense of poignancy associated with disappearing communities and failed utopian aspirations. The video will be accompanied by an installation of photographs, prints, models and other ephemera relating to the project, specially commissioned for Spike Island's central galleries. Maelfa expands the artist’s interventions into everyday systems and is the artist's first major UK solo show in a public space.

Preview of Frieze review

Sean Edwards

Spike Island, Bristol

"Sean Edwards’ exhibition at Spike Island – his first major UK solo show in a public space – was named after the Maelfa shopping centre on the outskirts of Cardiff (close to where the young Abergavenny-based artist grew up, and where he undertook a residency in 2009). Like many other postwar building projects, Maelfa and its neighbouring estate never fulfilled its planners’ hopes; the shopping centre was never fully finished, falling into decline even whilst in development. Borrowing from the writing of Robert Smithson, Edwards describes it as ‘becoming a ruin’ or ‘a ruin in reverse’. Since its inception Maelfa has seemed somehow ‘out of time’; moreover, proposals to demolish it have also been put on hold – it has always been in limbo.

Visible traces of the place recurred throughout the exhibition: a series of large-scale giclée prints pasted to the gallery wall captured grainy fragments of Maelfa’s interior, their detail degrading towards abstraction. Barely discernible were the corner of a door in Tiles, the inscription of a hand-written sign in Note or the edges of aged graffiti bleached by white light in Daylight (all 2011). In one corner, Four Windows (2010-11), a group of precariously propped wooden ovals, visually echoed the elliptical motif of Maelfa’s shop unit windows; their visual simplicity belied the labour invested in their multi-layered construction. Edwards’ practice of oblique referencing was extended in a large plywood structure, The Reference (2011).

Sean Edwards , The Reference , 2011 . Photo: Jamie Woodley, Image courtesy the artist, Spike Island, Limoncello and Tanya Leighton Gallery

Suspended from the ceiling, its meticulously filled and sanded curves referred to the roof of a former reference library (here inverted and scaled down 5:1). Edwards skillfully inserted the architecture of one place into that of another; details from Maelfa’s locality lured the viewer towards the awkward corners of Spike Island’s notoriously challenging layout, its habitually underused or peripheral spaces activated through physical interventions or illuminating light. Central to the exhibition was Maelfa (2010) a silent and slow-paced video in which the glide of a tracking camera navigates a line through the shopping centre’s covered arcades, capturing the indeterminacy of its everyday life seen through, whilst also simultaneously reflected back, in the glass of shop-front windows. The slow flow of movement was disorientating, making it difficult to discern reflected shapes from physical forms, to locate the position of the camera in relation to what was being filmed.

It is tempting to view Edwards’ treatment of this site in nostalgic terms, as a melancholy lamentation reflecting upon the failure of Utopian dreams, or a product of the artist’s desire to reconnect with a place frequented in his youth. However, this privileges the contextual narratives surrounding Maelfa at the expense of other critical questions or concerns. The exhibition certainly extended Edwards’ interest in ways of seeing (sculpturally), where an acute form of observation emerges through the practice of cutting or slicing through a space or structure, revealing what is beneath the surface by effectively sanding back the layers or by exposing a cross-section. Here, the track of the camera operates akin to the sculptor taking a plane to wood, where skimming the surface of a place draws attention to unexpected grain and texture. Winter Light Between (2011) reflected a similarly sculptural imperative: two slide-projectors chart the passage of sunlight carving an illuminated shape across the curved surface of a wall. Edwards’ interest in the poetics of space is less concerned with the sensibility or quality of poetic representation, as in exploring how something physical can be constructed, de-constructed, re-constructed. Architectural theorist Jan Turnovský has noted how, ‘Poetics is related etymologically to the Greek term poiein, which means “to make”. This is the root of the term poiesis: fabrication, production.’ He adds that, ‘The maxim of the poetic is not to fix meaning but to offer a choice of possibilities – an indeterminate open-endedness.’ ‘Maelfa’ confused singular interpretation by demanding to be read in multiple ways. Counter-intuitively, the determinacy of Edwards’ reference to a place causes the work to fluctuate between the specific and generic, figurative and abstract, between formal and autobiographical concerns. To refer to the poetics of ‘Maelfa’ is thus not to describe its style (adjectivally, even pejoratively), but instead signals towards the critical nature of its open-endedness, the unresolved or unfixed relationship between its component parts."

Emma Cocker, 2011

Publication: Institute of Beasts

2011-01-30T08:11:00.000-08:00

A new publication by Dutton and Swindells (which includes my essay on their work) will be launched on 15^th February 2011 at PSL in Leeds, in conjunction with the artists’ current residency and exhibition at PSL, entitled ‘Stag and Hound’. More about the project can be found at the PSL website here. My essay 'Moves Towards the Incomprehensible Wild' is a version of a much longer essay which will shortly be published in the online journal artandresearch in Volume 4, Number 1, Art and Animality.

About 'Stag and Hound' - artists' statement

'Stag and Hound' is the latest installment of Dutton and Swindells', 'Institute of Beasts' project - a project designed to temporarily house what the artists' describe as their more errant or wild thoughts. The works in the exhibition include objects, texts, animations and sound works which form an installation, both elegant and disturbing, that encodes a wide range of references. Stemming from the idea of an institute being something ordered and organized whereas 'Beasts' are unknown, erratic and mythologized, Dutton and Swindells divide their institute into conceptual departments, imposing a kind of idiosyncratic order, a gesture perhaps toward taming the erratic. Animated geometric forms and texts sit alongside inverted flower photographs, wall-drawings refer to celestial alignments, sound and music works are built by graphically re-interpreting activist slogans, a computer reads a pathetic and confessional soliloquy and a wall text appropriates spam e-mails selling 'Viagra'. The project has evolved into a multi-layered collage in which inconclusiveness and doubt are prioritized over empirical certainties, forming the critical sentiment that lies at the heart of the project. 'The Institute of Beasts' creates its own strange, yet strategic world-view with its chaotic aesthetic and sceptical notions of knowledge or knowing. For this outing of the project 'The Stag and Hound' the artists will install the exhibition ready for the launch on 20th January and then from 20th January - 16th February will be 'in residence' altering and shifting the exhibition, creating new works and points of resonance between existing works. The title references a tapestry 'The Stag Hunt' housed at the Cluny Museum in Paris in which the stag represents everyman and is hounded by dogs which represent the pitfalls in life such as desire, age or illness. Following on from previous installments of the Institute project such as 'The Dog and Duck' at the Kookmin Art Gallery, Seoul, S.Korea, the title of the show at PSL could also be the name of a pub, suggesting a space of potential conviviality but also of unexpected encounters.

Publication: Contemporary Art and Classical Myth

2011-01-29T00:01:00.000-08:00

My essay 'Over and Over Again and Again, has been published in Contemporary Art and Classical Myth, which is out now and able to be purchased here. Contemporary Art and Classical Myth is edited by Isabelle Loring Wallace, Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, USA and Jennie Hirsh, Maryland Institute College of Art, USA

Contemporary art is deeply engaged with the subject of classical myth. Yet within the literature on contemporary art, little has been said about this provocative relationship. Composed of fourteen original essays, Contemporary Art and Classical Myth addresses this scholarly gap, exploring, and in large part establishing, the multifaceted intersection of contemporary art and classical myth.   Moving beyond the notion of art as illustration, the essays assembled here adopt a range of methodological frameworks, from iconography to deconstruction, and do so across an impressive range of artists and objects: Francis Alÿs, Ghada Amer, Wim Delvoye, Luciano Fabro, Joanna Frueh, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Duane Hanson, Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein, Kara Walker, and an iconic photograph by Richard Drew subsequently entitled “The Falling Man.” Arranged so as to highlight both thematic and structural affinities, these essays manifest various aspects of the link between contemporary art and classical myth, while offering novel insights into the artists and myths under consideration. Some essays concentrate on single works as they relate to specific myths, while others take a broader approach, calling on myth as a means of grappling with dominant trends in contemporary art.  

About the Editor: Isabelle Loring Wallace is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, USA. Jennie Hirsh is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, Maryland Institute College of Art, USA.

Reviews: '…a very timely volume, with a tight focus on a significant yet seriously understudied theme…addresses the almost complete neglect of the prospect that the decline of autonomous art portends not the rebirth of Christianity as the leading context for art interpretation but the re-emergence of older, more classical, hence more buried contexts of interpretation.'  Gregg M. Horowitz, author of Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful Life

  'As this compelling and revelatory volume proposes, classical mythology's rich territory and enduring stories of morality and the human condition provide a provocative lens through which to read and re-read the works of some of contemporary art's most celebrated artists.'  Irene Hofmann, SITE Santa Fe, USA

Details

Imprint: Ashgate

Illustrations: Includes 16 colour and 64 b&w illustrations

Published: February 2011

Format: 244 x 172 mm

Extent: 410 pages

Binding: Hardback

ISBN: 978-0-7546-6974-6

A full contents list can be found here.

The introduction can be read here.

Event: S1 Assembly

2011-01-27T14:28:00.000-08:00

I will be chairing this event at S1 Artspace on Saturday 5th February 2011.

S1 Artspace presents S1 Assembly on Saturday 5th February 2011, which concludes S1’s anniversary project FIFTEEN and launch of the new premises with a day of discussions, presentations, screenings and events that aim to reflect on the history, evolution and role of artist-led activity and the questions and issues facing artist-led activity today

S1 Assembly has been organised through dialogue amongst the S1 Studio Committee and will be based around four key areas of discussion: WHY/WHAT/HOW artist led activity, COMING OF AGE – how to move on without settling sown, TESTING SPACE and BEYOND SPACE – DIY, association and collectivity. Areas called into question include the history of artist led activity as dissent, resisting institututionalization, models and aims of artist-led activity, creative ecologies, the relation of artist led space to wider ecology of city, the significance of the studio within contemporary practices as spaces of risk and speculation and the role of sociality in networks.

The event will include contributions from Neil Mulholland, Rebecca Fortnum, James Shorthose, Candice Jacobs (MOOT), Jim Prevett (Space), Megan Wakefield, Andy Abbott, Julie Westerman, Haroon Mirza, Thom O’Nions (The Woodmill) Megan Wakefield, Niki Russell (Reactor), (Tether) and The Royal Standard plus other speakers to be confirmed, and will be chaired Emma Cocker, a writer, Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University and S1 Studio holder.

S1 Assembly aims to provide a platform for networking and will include a chance to view the FIFTEEN exhibition, look around S1’s studios and a temporary library made up of material contributed by artist-led groups and organisations across the country. A buffet lunch and cakes will be provided, followed by curry and drinks after the event, all contributed by S1 studio holders.

Publication: In Other Words In Other's Words And Other Words

2011-01-22T02:31:00.000-08:00

My text, Without Rhyme is Reason on the work of Vlatka Horvat has been published in In Other Words In Other's Words And Other Words, in conjunction with Vlatka Horvat’s solo show at Bergen Kunsthall, which opened 21st January 2011. With texts by Nuit Banai, Emma Cocker, Tim Etchells, Naomi Fry, Hugo Glendinning, Matt Keegan, Tevz Logar, Matthew Lyons, Solveig Ovstebo, Graham Parker, November Paynter, Christian Rattemeyer, Jovana Stokic, and WHW. Designed by Ben Cain.

Project: Fragile Materials

2011-01-18T02:30:00.000-08:00

I have been invited to participate in a conversation with artist Clare Thornton, as part of her research project Fragile Materials, which will form the basis of her 3 month residency at Aberystwyth Arts Centre May - July 2011. Clare’s research will feed into an artist bookwork that she is developing concerning the texture of conversation. I will be spending some time with Clare during her residency, walking and talking around these ideas. I have previously worked with Clare during The Summer of Dissent project at Plan 9 (Bristol, 2009) and as part of Urban Retreat, a project led by Sophie Mellor in Barrow-in-Furness resulting in the publication, Manual of Marginal Places. More as the project unfolds.

Project update (September 2011)

The 'conversation' involved an intense few days of discussion, focusing on our shared interest in the motif of the fold and various conceptualizations of folding. Some of the thoughts and ideas from the discussions will be posted here shortly, and will undoubtedly be developed within future writing.

UNFURL

Clare Thornton

Performance Installation

Saturday 3 September 2011, 1-4pm

Red Lodge Museum, Park Row, Bristol

Some of the ideas we talked about around folding relate to a forthcoming exhibition and performance installation that Clare is developing, entitled Unfurl, at the Red Lodge Museum, Bristol. A Tudor Lodge, the opulent setting for a tableau poised to unfurl. Pleats of delicate cloth, lengths of red ribbon, a model sits waiting for his painter. As the piece unfolds, the Artist’s material transforms the scene in our midst. The Audience are invited to come and go as they please, exploring the Red Lodge interiors and returning to the durational Performance as it unfolds over three hours. Unfurl is framed by the Artist's research into depictions of the Fold in paintings, historical interiors and in critical texts. Through the production of objects, garments and writing the Artist explores display, concealment and transformation.