baking bread film

wallpapering roses the movie

Nearly there Then.

So the shop commissions are finished I liked the fact we had to spend the day in Roses and chat and just be friends really I think this was an interesting thing to take forward but for this project the work came first. I suppose you could do a day in residence in a shop and see what you came up with a bit like our Cafe residencies. I agree with Kate in that the wall paper feels like the piece which sums up the project best - the idea to decorate came from Cath in the shop and the idea for the paper came from us and we had it printed and made locally. It also looked nice in the show at Yorkshire Arts Space as it's function was really clear - a bit "The medium is the message." people say this a lot and I read the article by Marshall Mcluhan the other day but I didn't really understand it - the titles the best thing about it.

It was good to have a nice day in Parson Cross hanging the paper it made things seem simpler again. The show at YAS was good in it's own way but it stirred me up a bit. It made me wonder if it was the right thing to do. I was pretty sure it was until we did it and I feel it brought things full circle and asked a question about context but I wonder if in-fact we already new the answer. In the context of cultural provision and what we had been asked to explore for Yorkshire artspace it was important but the question it raised about context and meaning doesn't carry back into Parson Cross and if it does I'm not sure it's relevant.

Anyway it was great to see the shop commissions finished and strangely for me doing the last two my brain switched so when stuff was in the show I could only see it in the shops but because we did the last two the other way around I could see the work in the show which might just be me but again it could be the start of some new ideas for developing work in future projects.

Eric at the butchers has moved the window around and used some of the stickers as part of his Christmas display which I really like as it's not just up it's become functional a bit like Pauls Stallions sign its been adopted and become useful. I thought it might be interesting to do something about which things look most like art in the different places a bit like our "Aura Scorer" building on Walter Benjamin. We could do a table with each object and each context and then have a column for "Art" and a column for "Function" score each object in the different context and then do a colour coded graph.

Kaths Wallpaper Day

ROSES HARDWARE - 43 Margetson Crescent, Sheffield, South Yorkshire. S5 9ND

At the above address on Wednesday last week, Steve and I hung the Rose Wallpaper for Kath at Roses Hardware! Cheap gag maybe, but you know what- Kath was happy, most of the customers were happy and Steve and I felt really happy and you know what we hung it ourselves! As an artwork its great, viewed by innumerable people, liked by its owner, truly collaborative, site responsive, purposeful and aesthetically pleasing - what more could you want?????? [Im hoping steves going to add some photos]
We spent from about 11 there, eating lunch from Erics, staying until about 4.30. We were, well i was a bit grumpy, Steve said he had post Venice malaize. Never the less we got started and within minutes i felt better. It was a really enjoyable day, we met really nice friendly people and their dogs, had a laugh, talked of gossip and enjoyed Kath's company and cups of tea. We took some film of the day and in the spirit of - "we dont know what to do with it but if we dont shoot it we wont have it". Lets hope it looks ok!. We managed to cover 3 large section of walls above the shelves. It looked particulary good against the balls of wool Kath sells. I hope the air bubbles have gone by now.

Its been interesting talking about this project to those who don't know what we've been doing. Exploring the question of purposeful art, notions of generosity/value and the role of practice. I suppose i thought about it the other day and wondered whats the difference between this and philanthropy. When i write it, it makes me sound a bit to do gooding, but its a serious question. If as steve and I have done, is give away large proportions of our fee to other artists, have work made at local businesses and provide community members with useful 'artworks' then the work as a whole is of course made greater by the sum of its parts. i feel like we've tried to ask whats possible through a practice within a social setting and along the way offered others opportunities to be nourished by the arts.

Im going to go away and think about the talk we re doing for the symposium day on the 13th dec at Knutton road - see link


http://artspace.org.uk/blog/permalink/2011-11/symposium-event-art-practice-in-a-social-context

Images from exhibition

Just looking at the pictures and thinking that the conversation was a good way to put in a layer of interpretation of the work. The show worked well for the opening. I also thought that it worked ok when I was invigilating as I did mini guided tours and told stories. I'm not sure how well it worked stand alone and worry that it may have seemed esoteric and obscure. Sort of became what it was commenting on which loads of art seems to do. There was a show on at the millennium galleries which was loads of work interfering with other pieces and if you read the bumph thats what the work was supposed to be about but it just was what it was critical of rather than creating a dialogue it closed it down. So if the work was about asking a question did it leave the answer desirable enough and open enough for people to bother to look for an answer. I'm not sure but its important to see the work holistically - even if we see the exhibition as a way of promoting the studios and Parson cross in a city centre space and raising the profile of the studios which was the original purpose of the commission. It felt like it went past this but as with the small commissions program once you start something off and have an open mind it's amazing where it can end up. I'm texting quotes to Rachael at the minute so I'm going to put my second favorite quote in here - Ernest Shakalton - "Doing anything is easy - the difficult thing is knowing what you want to do."

The forgoten rose and dead baby Dodo

Davids text- a rose and a dead Dodo

I think Davids texts need to go on the blog. Yes it was a good night and I think the conversation went really well. I have decided that to fully see the work people probably need to go to Parsons Cross in their own time and just see it in the Cafes and have a chat with people like Tim did. I don't think that you have to do this just this is probably the best way to see the whole thing. I don't think this could be a bus trip or a guided tour - perhaps just a personal decision - about 6 people said they would do this so that is probably a result. I didn't have any pictures from the show but here is a picture of a rose I took while walking on the estate the other day when Tessa Bunny was out taking photoes. I also found a dead baby Dodo or at least it looks like a dead baby Dodo.

Brian O’Doherty MADE a critical analysis of the idealogy of the white cube gallery space in his seminal essay Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space, published in Artforum in 1976. He gives us a history.

In the 19^th Century the frame is essential FOR the work of art; it must have the ability to separate the content of the picture from everything outside of the picture, (including the wall). YOU are made acutely aware of THE edge of the painting. Then during the 19^th Century paintings start to ‘put pressure on the frame’; rather than the picture being a window onto a world there is a new emphasis on flatness rather than depth, and some of these PIECES, says O’Doherty, read as pattern rather than view. Composition becomes more ambiguous, what is SHOWN or not shown seeming to be arbitrarily decided rather than consciously composed according to historic pictorial conventions.

The flattening of the image redirects the eye to the surface, to be looked at rather than looked into, ‘HERE’ rather than ‘there’. We ARE moving towards Modernism - the painting as autonomous object - where there is length and breadth but no thickness, where THE primary law was that the picture plane could not be violated.

With the dissolving of the edge, pictures needed to be separated in order to avoid them blending together, but the SECOND this was done it exposed the wall, creating the danger that the wall and painting become a single entity – a mural – but the stretcher, however shallow, was enough prevent this, allowing the late-modernist painting to assert its autonomy.

Hanging became vital; ‘How much space should a work of art have to "breathe?", and the wall became not just a support but a context for art. With this came an ideology that would brook no sEDITION, the flawless white walls conferring the status OF ‘artness’ onto the WORKS within it – so that anything INSTALLED in the gallery must, by (social/institutional) definition, be art. But what of artworks outside the gallery?

In the 1970s the Artists Placement Group took their work out of the gallery, re-engaging with the world, with the slogan ‘Context is half the work’, and IN making two of each work, and placing them in SHOPS ON BUCHANAN ROAD AND MARGETSON CRESCENT, Steve and Kate confirm that context does indeed construct meaning; PARSON CROSS is self-evidently not a gallery, but a different order of place. Each place is BOTH a context and a ‘situation’ (defined by Claire Doherty as ‘sets of conditions in time and place - a convergence of site, non-site, place, non-place, locality, public space, context and time’), but the pieces WORK in entirely different ways, in spite of there being apparently nO Fundamental difference between them. ThE QUALities of each situation define them and force us to consider whether they have intrinsic VALUE or whether their value is extrinsic. THE Yardstick by which we measure is different in each situation.

O’Doherty is best known for his essay of 1976, and few people are awARE that as an Irish born emigrant to New York his artistic practice has focussed on the multiplicity (rather than singularity) of the personality. For 36 years he had an alter-ego, an INDIVIDUAL named Patrick Ireland – a persona he created in 1972 after the Bloody Sunday shootings to OBJECT Strongly to the British military presence IN Northern Ireland, and for him this duality of persona mirrored THE Irreconcilable differences between Nationalist and Unionist communities. The suspension by the crOWN of the civil RIGHTs of the citizens of Northern Ireland was opposed by the adoption of a quintessentially Irish name, and all artworks he MADE for more than three decades were signed by Patrick Ireland, making them SPECIFICALLY political acts rather than solely artistic ones. In 2008 O’Doherty FORmally laid Patrick Ireland to rest in a funeral ceremony in the grounds of the National Gallery of Ireland in recognition that the North is now at peace. Dressed in a WHITE stocking mask he led a funeral procession carrying a pine coffin containing a death mask of his own face, which was ritually interred.

So O’Doherty’s creation of a second persona allowed him to construct the meaning of his work as a political action rather than an autonomous act of artistic creation – essentially changing the context of its production, in the same way as the SPACEs in which Steve and Kate locate THEIR two editions alter the MEANING of the apparently identical works, but just as twins are both individuals, easily mistaken for each other, these works are discrete, they are not simultaneously in two places, not both in and out of the gallery; in each case their meaning is SITUATED where the work is located.

We may question how each situation and each object jointly construct these distinct meanings, and ASK ourselves how they ought to be understood in relation to each other, and certainly Steve and Kate want you to make you THINK ABOUT the apparent process of ‘decontextualising’, or perhaps ‘recontextualising’ –WHATever we want to call it – that is occurring, and wheTHEr you are complicit with the GALLERY in constructing and imposing specific meaning on the work.

DO ESoteric critical theories deployed in the gallery context still apply to the objects in Parson Cross, or is the OBJECT Simply itself in that situation, removed from the possibly futile machinations of deCONSTRUCTion and other fashionable intellectual postures? Are the people in Parson Cross inDIFFERENT to theory, might they reject theory as the deMEANING Sophistry of the bourgeois dilettante? Is the ‘informed’ gallery-goer better able to divine the meaning of the work than the resident of Parson Cross? Are the works here in the gallery the same as the works in Parson Cross, or do they DIFFER ENTirely depending on their respective SITUATIONS?

In a gallery context it is hard withhold an aesthetic judgement on a work – to ask yourself ‘do I LIKE it?’ – whereas in Parson Cross this might seem an irrelevance. The works there have an apparently unequivocal USe value, whether functional or social, an alternate and more immediate measure of worth. IS functional or social use any more or less valid than aesthetic judgement in determining the value of an object (which becomes extremely problematic when the objects look identical), we may ask, or is the functional and social equally at WORK here in the gallery (Nicolas Bourriaud suggested in Relational Aesthetics that art was a game, and that, far from being autonomous, an artwork EXISTS in a social context) albeit IN a DIFFERENT guise, as a means of contructing meaning? Bourriaud suggests that in fact the two systems of valuing are coincident and mutually co-dependent. The balance between the two may vary, depending on the COMMUNITIES with which we identify ourselves at any given time, but it is a case of both/and rather than either/or.

just some images from installing the work at YAS gallery - MADE FOR YOU.
i feel proud of the work and happy we can create deeper meaning for this work through the conversation at the opening.

Hello

This is an introductory post to explain what I am doing.
The original idea was for me to produce some vinyl stickers related to Parson Cross. This has changed and has become a set of transparent coloured images that can be put somewhere for a while. The plan at the moment is to use house skyline images in repeating blocks these are adaptable and can be used in a number of different situations.

I hope to take more photographs of houses and the skyline of their roof tops get at least one of the different houses on the estate. I am also wondering if the simple box needs to be developed slightly in some way.

I was also looking at Google and Bing maps to see if Adlington Community Centre is still standing and if it still has the same sign that was painted sometime around 1987. The sign and the Centre seem to be there but as the map data is getting out of date. I shall have a look when I come up next.

Erics Produce

So we spent an interesting afternoon photographing and cutting out products on photoshop. They were all selected by Eric as big sellers I like the cornflake bun and the leg of lamb. I think we will need to print on clear window stickers and Photo-stickers and then stick them together. I am not 100% sure on this though so may play about with a few trails today. How many do you think we should do

Erics Floor

So we have started the commissions on the second row of shops. E. Sucks the butchers now sells all sorts. Eric has diversified as he says people don't really buy cuts of meet like they used to so he does sweets sandwiches and bakery stuff. Plus bacon and sausage - still has fresh tripe and some general corner shop stuff.

Again we went in with the idea of doing something useful. The floor looked like it needed a new lick of paint so we suggested this. I got really excited because I thought we could make an exact replica of the floor on MDF and have it in the Exhibition at persistence works - so we would have a Neon and a Carl Andre. I sort of fell in love a little with this idea as I love the way people have to really decide to walk on the Andre floor pieces and it's back to the idea of -function to meaning. The point at which you step onto holds all sorts of questions about the value of the art object. It was also a really good thing for Eric as he was going to do it anyway.

I was a bit worried that he may have thought that painting his floor was a really funny thing to suggest so we took in some designs and some colour sheets. Proper floor paint takes 8 days to cure so this was a bit of a problem. Anyway in the end Eric didn't go for it which I suppose is what the works about - we couldn't just race in and paint his floor if it wasn't what he wanted. This was good for the project as it made me think about the value structure and the layers of ideas we were working with. The fact that Eric was pleased with what he got was far more important to me than the daft reference to function to meaning and ironic Carl Andre reference in the show.

In the end he decided he would like some window stickers to advertise what he sells - This is a good idea because from the outside of the shop it's difficult to know all the stuff he stocks so it feels more practical. I'm just off down there now to photograph some items. I am not sure how these will look in the exhibition at Persistence works but I think they will probably work - maybe even reference Warhole.

SORRY

That last post was meant for my personal blog and not this one!!
Ignore it...
Paul

a lot to think about

Well, I got the Parson X gig and it is going very well. I love being back on my old estate.
A far cry from when I left 35 years ago.

I have been very busy trying to juggle Other Things, the Parson X work, GRAFT, work for the Institute for Lifelong Learning at Sheffield University, the Open University, counselling and we have a new Freeman College student staying with us from tomorrow - so all the many preparations for that.
I can be sure that I am nowhere near as busy as Tim Etchells though.
See you soon.

Roses Hardware.
Ive been playing with some photos of roses, i took, to turn them into wallpaper, potentially for Roses shop. I like that she said what she needed was for the shop to be decorated. It seems like a useful and good thing to do. Her shop doesnt need pictures but as she has said "just brightening up". I wonder if she will like our wallpaper designs, i will print out some of the designs and bring on wed so we can show her. Have been wondering if we could get it printed up we might be able to not only decorate the shop but also have the paper for sale - both in the shop and in the exhibition. This is just one example, have done lots of others with different coloured roses and bigger patterns - it gives an idea though

Hello

Well, I feel as if I have gone from being a semi-critic of the Parson Cross project to being not exactly the old guard yet!! Anyway, I had one of the best top 10 days of my life on Tuesday.
After a great, liberating meting with Kate and Steve, I found myself outside Remington Community Centre meeting the PCSO for the area Nigel. He was great and took me into the centre. Within about 2 minutes of being inside, after a short discussion with Lesley from the centre, whom I had just met, I was offered the use of a space (free!) for the 2 days I want to work with young people. Fanatastic! As an aside, I also ended up volunteering for the management committee for the centre but that's great too. I want to be involved in Parson Cross for a long time.

Then on for tea with the vicar at St Paul's Church! Ian is defintely someone who gets himself out into the community. After savouring some of his collection of paintings - which were very interesting - we had a good chat about the project and he gave me some very good contacts which I am currently following up.

I''d like to be working on the project the whole time but alas my day job gets in the way.
I'll post again soon with an update....
Paul

the whole

Just a quick one really and it's about process. I had a good meeting with Rachael on Monday and as I walked into town I was thinking that somehow we hadn't explained things well enough. How the product related to a broader process and today I have worked out that it's by talking about product and process as two different things we make them separate and distinct through language and somehow we need to get around this problem. In my mind and I suppose on the blog I've got a real disjointed clarity on how from walking through town with a rag and bone cart through to now the project is a single thing with nodes and point so just to remind us I'm going to re-post our diagram.


Kate Pahl was talking about spacial social justice today and it got me thinking again about agency and arts practice as a way of asking questions about social justice. For a long time and still to an extent I'm happy with asking questions but in the end it's important for things to have agency to enable change in some way. I think that we need to explain things better and this perhaps needs to be integral to the work. Like Paul says maybe we should set up a discussion group as part of the next bit of work. I've avoided this as it looks like Consultation which I'm not interested in been involved in but maybe we could use some of the money to pay Dennis to make some food and have a drop in. Just a thought one portion could serve 12.

I started off thinking I would try and sound posh and write something about Hegelian Dialectics and the notion of the whole as complete and indivisible - then I realised I know nothing about this but it sounds like something I should know something about.

For me the project changed on the way back on the train from the conference in liverpool and we as a group decided that the purpose of the work was to be active in trying to make SOAR works works to the best of our ability with the time and resources we have at hand. I use the word epiphany far to often but this time it sort of was one - like the meeting of the ways things began to make a lot more sense and the idea that our art could and should have a more direct social purpose and direction and still be art or maybe not be art but be something different and enabled by our position as artists.

I am really aware that this is a new skill and one of the first times that I've felt I've had a hold of the bigger and the smaller picture the meta Miso and Macro as david would say. It feels like we need to find a better way to explain this thinking with clarity - I will ask Kate to write more about the idea of been within the space I think this is what I think we need to do to occupy and dwell as artists and people in the space not as people delivering a project which is why the Ruskin idea makes sense on lots of levels

Kate Pahl thoughts

just tried to write on your blog but I got in a muddle about google accounts as I have two and one is owned by the University
So i will say what I was going to say which is the Parson cross work felt for me like a platform from which i could draw from as it was about being committed to the space and being in the space and then the ideas for the art work came from the people in the space . It is your best work I think. This is very much what was going on in East Herringthorpe.
You would love to see Liam's film will put it up now
I feel the meeting created a new shared space like the Parson Cross platform where we could move on from an understanding that the people in the space have a voice and that is valid
What i am concerned with is when voices are appopriated maybe I did this with the draws I don't know but I know the Parson Cross thing is very much what I want to do a

Thoughts

And Just on a practical level for anybody living up on Parson Cross here is an image of a breakfast from the English cafe -








I really enjoyed making and putting up the work in Parson Cross it felt ok to do it and it felt small scale and gentle and didn't aspire to change anything or engage anybody in something they didn't want to engage in it was just a small and nice thing to do, an intimate exchange. The work itself is like a picture in your house it may get changed around or go in the attic for a bit or get thrown away but in the end it's just what it is and we talked to people about it and that is that.

We could have worried about if it was enough and perhaps done something different or we could have perhaps done nothing at all and that is possibly a good question to ask - should we be there doing anything at all, should asda be there opening a massive shop should the library be moving, will any of this make anything better for anybody and does any of it matter. Possibly not in the grand scheme of things but we have chosen to try and be artists and we think that art and culture is for everybody and a need which people try and meet in all kinds of different ways and perhaps if our work is good enough we can help people to meet these needs in all kinds of different ways. I'm proud to be an artist in the world trying to make work which fits into places and has agency and draws attention to things and creates dialogues, sometimes small sometimes large sometimes personal sometimes political. I'm proud of the work in the shops and at least for this week that is enough - so as kate requested here are some more pictures.

Just a quick snap of deniz photos from when i was mounting - steve has all the photos , come on steve put some up. MADE FOR YOU.....
Was thinking about this work the other day and think that all in all this work on the estate is some of the best ive done - i dont mean as art objects necessarily, although i like them, but as the whole thing, the relationships, the conversations, the outcomes etc. good stuff.

ongoing conversation

Like we suggested at the very start exchange seems to be occuring. Maybe not directly out of the cart, but hey it was only a metaphor.

This is the conversation to date with Paul, i think its a good one for this blog, and perhaps enables to think deeply about our work and our intentions.

On 13 Jul 2011, at 16:00, paul allender wrote
Hi Kate and Steve,
Thanks for meeting me today - it was very gracious of you given that I was making some semi-critical comments on the blog!
I like what you are doing and I am inspired by the different works for each of the shops on Buchanan. I love the neon sign and the purple wig!

I've just spoken to my mum - they were thinking of going to the English cafe anyway and they'll definitely go now I've told them about it - they'll check out the pics and will be able to tell if the steel houses one is our old road. I also spoke to her about you going along to her Monday morning group. She is up for it! I'll tell you more about that later.

What I really want to say though is quite difficult to talk about - difficult to put into words that is. Its something like - the value of art is important and where art and the people of Parson X meet, exciting, disgruntling, possibly upsetting, creative things can happen and that dynamic is great. I personally love lots of art that my mum and dad would not. But that doesn't mean they are right anymore than it means I am right. Instead, a dialogue can take place which respects all. I think your idea of a discussion group is an excellent one - I would love to participate in it. Because as someone from that estate who was inspired by art and took a life trajectory that is built upon that initial inspiration, it would be beyond arrogant to think that I am one of a small number of people who did or can do this. So, I think that art is meaningful for people on the estate - and what artists do doesn't have to always be what 'the people' want.

What is coming to mind is what you said about Martin Parr, Kate. I haven't looked at his stuff for some time now - but I had never in a million years thought that the stuff I have seen was mocking working class people in any way. I have loved the stuff I've seen - it seems to celebrate the culture I come from. Talking of Martin Parr, he has worked with Graham Fellows (John Shuttleworth).
I wonder if you think he is mocking w.c. people? There is certainly an element of mocking in John Shuttleworth - but much more importantly there is a glorious celebration of Sheffield working class life. I love John Shuttleworth! Graham Fellows comes from a middle class background but his observation and empathy about white w.c. culture is fantastic!

So, cos I am going on a bit - i would never think what you are doing is 'mocking' or looking down on or anything like that. And I am not sre that you can have that much control about how other people choose to respind to stuff can you?

Just to say - I am writing this in a comradely spirit - not an oppositional one.
Gotta go now!
Hopefully speak soon....
Best,
Paulx

Thanks Paul I really enjoyed meeting you today - I have had a really good day today - it was nice seeing the work and really nice to have the very Sheffield slight smirk and "It's awright that" comment but most of all it was the kids looking at the pictures in the cafe and the guys having a laugth with Paul about his sign and just the fact that it was a bit of" somat and nowt "as my gran would say.
I'm with you on Martin Parr I've always liked his photographs - I'm not sure about John Shuttlworth however as "Two margarine's on the go - it's a nightmare scenario" and "Do you want a Nam nan" can not compare to "get the volvo vera" or the earlier classic" Gordon is a moron."
I'm sure our paths will cross and please put an application in for the small commissions
STEVE

> Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2011 20:25:51 +0100
> From: kate@kategenever.com
> To: spsheff@aol.com
> CC: paulallender@live.com
> Subject: Re: parson cross
>
> thanks paul for speaking to your mum and i would be really happy to
> meet her and her group. I hope she likes the photos.
> I suspect we are all trying to sing from the same hymn sheet [me,
> steve, you] re art, its position and its potential. I know in this
> case, meaning parson cross, i want to take people with me, i want to
> make collaboratively with them, i do not want to set myself apart -
> hence the work for the shops - something they want with a bit of us
> thrown into the mix.
> Re martin Parr - i think his work could be seen to celebrate/reveal
> the everyday life of all classes [think of those cocktail party ones
> aswell as the seaside stuff] Perhaps also like the work of Richard
> Billingham and Diane Arbus, there might have been a unmocking tone at
> the point of making - a document if you like [although im not sure of
> this and i do think they know what there doing for their own ends]-its
the final context that the work is shown in and who the
> audience the work is for that affects their meaning and therefore
> alters it. I suppose its the Gawp/Shock effect that i dont like for
> art/money ends. I think perhaps, like i said of the people laughing at
> the Mock Tudor wood on the council estate house photo, it doesnt sit
> well with me, i dont like the finger pointing, and the 'im better than
> you, what do you know' suggestions. It feels like the people are being
> used, for an artists own ends
> Anyway - perhaps we agree to disagree, its just not my cup of tea.
> No of course we cant have total control about how people respond, and
> thats what i continue to think about
> cheers and speak soon
> kate

Hi Kate,
It's great to hear from you - and I really like what you say here.
I guess it's not about Martin Parr as such - I think we have a good discussion going here and rather than agree to disagree, shall we carry on talking about it?
I would like to.
For me, I find it very difficult to write in a way that suggests potential conflict with others.
I don't want you to think I am being hostile in ANY way. I'm not.
And this is actually the first time I have had this type of discussion!
Your points raise some really important questions about the role of artists in societies - and in our case capitalist societies.
I started to think about these things when I was at art college in the second half of the 70's and it is only now that I have been able to properly talk about them!
I struggled at art college because it felt that what I was doing - and loved - had little relevance or 'usefulness' to the people on Parson Cross and indeed the people on the bus in Hull when
I travelled to college. It was difficult to love something and feel this. It felt like 'betrayal' of my class. I didn't invite anyone to my degree show - and I got into St Martin's College to do an MA in sculpture but I didn't go because I decided that art was too elitist. So I decided to study politics and sociology...

I can see this going on and on...so I'll stop now. Let me know what you would like to do. Do you want to carry on with a discussion in this way?
And YES - please put it on the blog - that would be great - I'd be happy to carry on on there.
If you have time and the inclination, it would be great to talk...!
I think you are right that we are all occupying similar terrain.

Oh and I asked my mum to say hello to you both the next time you are at the club on Tuesday night.

Best,
Paulx

Installation

Well a really nice day today although I think Like a snake who has eaten a small pig it will take me a month to fully digest my dinner. We keep saying we should write more on here but for today I think we should just have the pictures - not sure if Ruskin would approve or not.

Colley WMC

Just been looking on the internet to see if I could find any history about Colley Working Mens Club because I can't help thinking that it would be good to build on our regular pint and chat meetings there and try and build some connections with them - particularly as they are so close to the new studio site.

Anyway whilst browsing I came across Club Historians a group set up in 2008 to capture and document WMC's at a time when they are rapidly disappearing. I just had to share this amusing story which is on their website its well worth a read.

the 3 W's

I can't view David Sloan Wilson's film - apparently my computer is too old and I am working behind an administrative firewall - all of which could be mildly concerning except that the sun is shining.

I too have been thinking about the Whats, Whys and Wherefores of working in Parson Cross; the simple answer to The What might be because we, Yorkshire Artspace, are opening new artists studios bang in the middle of this neighbourhood. The Why is because we feel we should be open and accessible to the people who live there. And The Wherefores (apparently an old word used for asking why) is why would people want to be involved in what we do? Is it a bit presumptuous to think people will be interested? A lot of contemporary art turns me off and I want to know what might capture peoples interest enough to make them want to engage and do something out of their ordinary.

So this work is presenting a lot of questions but I suppose my reason for doing it is the possibility that someone might find it interesting and that it might bring a bit of something different to the ordinary...and if it we are 'capable of change [both selfishily and altruistically] depending on environment and interation with individuals' as David Sloan Wilson claims then even better.

david sloane wilson

http://fora.tv/2010/09/29/David_Sloan_Wilson_Evolving_the_City

This is a really excellent talk by a evolutionary biologist - and well worth a watch. he talks about alturism, religion and more explaining how we are of course affected by our upbringing and circumstance, but how as young adults we are plastic and capable of change [both selfishly and altruistically] depending on environment and interaction with individuals. Really interesting, if we consider the ideas in relation to any community with which we work.
I was particularly interested in the ideas about religion and religious groups and how people involved behave in relation to liberal and non religious groups. To a non religious Darwinist, brought up by people interested in science on a farm with animals and therefore in close proximity to the normal stuff like birth, life, sex and death I'm fascinated.

Ruskin

Well it's a step away from stallions - or maybe not? For some reason Ruskin is on my mind at the moment and I think I have a funny homogenized cornflake box understanding of Ruskin and in my mind it somehow connects to what we are trying to do with our work on Parson X and just my struggles with art generally. I think at heart I'm a hopeless romantic who without a god of any form looks for some sort of spirituality in the everyday. This gets wrapped up in the giant parcel of earning a living, art college training and the hope to do and be something different. So with no god I try and replace it with art - I was raised a good positivist, honed on the wheels of science and engineering taught to believe that everything was understandable if we only tried hard enough to understand it and gathered enough evidence to prove we understand it. But like a never quite believing lapsed catholic I find this world of facts and singular truths completely unsatisfying. The rock which was offered to me by my parents was always very small and was inevitably going to vanish in the floods and complexity of adulthood.

So Ruskin I will need to read more but what I feel now and before I read is that perhaps as a man who sits at the edge of enlightenment and the cusp of the false dawn of the new science offers us a way to explore whether things can mean more than they say and people can grow to be more than they are.