ARTISTS TALKING

# 11 [13 August 2009]

Will post some drawing soon. This time management this is getting difficult! I'd be interested to know how other people/artists sort out how much time to spend on different activities.

I interviewed an articulate artist on Monday morning who is putting a lot of energy into having a successful and high-profile career at the moment - he has a sculpture on show at the Royal Festival Hall at the moment. We were talking about the romantic idea of a studio artist and how fun, energising, excellent it is to actually have time in the studio to make things, but that often there just isn't time. With researching and applying for funding, making professional contacts and doing the administration and educational work that often surrounds exhibition-making (or in my case working, studying/researching and interviewing/writing), we both found there's just not the time for much art-making. While this proportion of admin/working might lead to a more productive/successful career than mere studio work it does make me wonder whether we've got our priorities wrong. Shouldn't there be more time spent actually making things?

On another note, while I'm thinking about how to organise my life and my way of writing about my artistic life, I really like the way Emily Speed's a-n blog is layed out. Writing about different elements of life/art under different headings really seems to work as a way of differentiating/integrating activites and thoughts in this blog format.

Anyway, will post some drawing when I have time.

# 12 [14 August 2009]

Thinking some more about time management. I read a nice bullet-pointed blog post on http://unclutterer.com making the most of your time. Intend now to put some of those points into practice, including...

- purge clutter

- order saves time and energy

- streamlined routine for mundane tasks

- determine what matters most to you and learn to say no

- enjoy your work (!), take risks

- sleep

As I'm currently trying to figure out if I have time to take a day off this week, I think some new structures - and more selectivity - are in order.

# 13 [25 August 2009]

Have been thinking and making things in the past ten days, even though I haven't posted anything on here... Actually have made a sort of cube form out of cardboard and am in the process of wrapping all the different bits in woolen thread, I'm pretty excited about it!

By the weekend I will post some new images, I promise. Have been feeling really angry over the past few days about the way I've let my artistic activities slide over the past few years, and even in art school I didn't get to the level of achievement or passion that I hoped to. It would be great as time goes on and I make more things and develop more respect for myself and for my practice that I will write excitedly about art and theory and writing on these posts, rather than writing about not doing enough of these things and about being afraid. But we'll see...

On another note, I also made a website for a musician friend. Even doing that felt somewhat creative so I think I'm beginning to get on the right track! It took about a day to do, so now I'm motivated to make my online portfolio look a bit more professional and beautiful! Will post the link when I get that done and updated. I think taking care of my portfolio (this is for writing as well as art), updating it regularly and making sure that people know about it is part of this process of gaining more respect for myself and for my artistic practice.

OK... next post will be less whiney!

# 14 [25 August 2009]

Forgot to say earlier in my despair... I have an article on the front page of excellent online art magazine White Hot Magazine.

Click here for the permalink to the article - it's a review of Koon's current Serpentine show.

# 15 [27 August 2009]

Some images from when I still made art regularly... Thought I'd upload some older images while I'm working on some new things... I still will definitely post some new stuff this weekend.

# 16 [28 August 2009]

Some more images that I'm quite happy with... I did quite a lot of this type of thing back in college and hopefully it will resurface now in what I'm making... more on that soon...

Also... my new portfolio is up and running and looks a bit more grown up than my previous one. Just have to remember to update it with each new article/piece now.

# 17 [29 August 2009]

Yesterday I took my cardboard grid out for a walk through the nature reserve near my flat. I took digital photographs of the flimsy white geometric thing flapping in the wind; I also took a 30 second video. It was a fascinating experience, watching a grid, approaching it from various angles - with a diagonal approach from a fair distance the grid looked curved, foreshortened like a crescent moon. I hung it on a prickly bush with bright lilac and magenta flowers. 

Click here to see the video of the grid.

# 18 [29 August 2009]

Grids are informing my practice as both an artist- and an art historian-in-training. This week I've been getting to grips with Griselda Pollock's and Rosalind Krauss's analyses of Martin's grid paintings/drawings. I have one main question springing up out of this dense reading. If anyone has an interest or expertise in this area and would like to comment I'd be more than grateful to discuss:

Both Krauss and Pollock find in Martin's work (viewed at mid-distance) an experience of the formless. Krauss has written elsewhere on the formless or informe, derived from Georges Bataille's use of the term to mean a breaking down of fixed categories. She uses this to challenge the feminist interpretation of surrealism as a masculine imaginary realm, in which women have no true voice (and are subjected to violence), pointing out that both female and male artists have used similar category-blurring strategies in a surrealist vein. However, I'm not sure yet whether the formless (as in openness or atmosphere) in Martin's grids is intended by Krauss to be identified with the informe, or whether it's a case of the same word having multiple art-theoretical meanings. By placing her essay on Martin in Bachelors, a book in which more than half of the essays deal directly with the surrealist informe in contemporary/modern art, Krauss seems to be suggesting that it is relevant to Martin...

Pollock calls upon 'formless' to describe an experience of openness, connection, movement, potentiality in the viewing of Martin's grids - something that she relates to Irigaray's concept of pre-subjectivity: when as a baby we didn't have the ordering structure of language and we were more like one with our mother. The grid is then a sort of visual analogue for the arrival of thought itself, language-based structure in a sensory/sensual world. The problem is that although this open, pre-language, pre-subject 'formless' sounds rather like Bataille's category-destroying informe, Pollock explicitly states that it is not. My thought so far is that she doesn't want her feminist, interpretative work sullied with misogynistic, base materialism, but also that Pollock sees some kind of category of 'feminine' worth preserving. Any suggestions much appreciated!

The grid in my current work with visual/material stuff is way more playful (images to come tomorrow!); taking time out to think about that structure in my non-theory time (which is pretty scarce at present) seems to be making it easier for me to find the necessary connections in my hard reading and writing hours. Could it be that physically handling a forever collapsing wonky cardboard grid could help my mind to turn the grid concept over and over, letting it fall apart and figuring out what makes sense about it, and in what other theorists have made of it?

If the finished essay itself makes any sense, I'll upload it to my portfolio and post a link.

# 19 [31 August 2009]

Are there any artists living in or near York? I'm going to be moving there in October to do a year-long History of Art MA and would like to meet other artists, with the potential to meet regularly to discuss work and maybe arrange some sort of exhibition together if things seem to gel together. 

Please contact me or leave a comment if you live in the York area, or if you know of any existing groups in the area. Thanks!

# 20 [3 September 2009]

More images of the grid in nature...

(See 29th August post for previous images and a film)