Monday, 5 December 2011
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.
Sunday, 4 December 2011
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
Thursday, 3 November 2011
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."
Monday, 24 October 2011
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 19th 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 19th 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.
