ARTISTS TALKING

# 89 [24 March 2009]

coming soon

# 88 [4 January 2009]

a link sent to me by a friend for a video of Hirschhorn talking about making art politically: 

http://www.artreview.com/video/video/show?id=1474022%3AVideo%3A595858

# 87 [9 December 2008]

I'm overwhelmed with work at the moment. The money-earning kind.

I just got some pictures back that were taken on disposable cameras at the White Night debate, that seems such a long time ago now.

I've chosen this one because of the incongruity of the silly pose, my cheesy smile and the word 'revolt'. 

What is the difference between taking a stand and taking a stance? Striking a pose? 

I am lost somewhere between the blog that was about my Hirschhorn residency -  which is now over - and the need/(desire?) for a blog anyway. 

Before I can move from one to the other I have to define for myself what I mean by 'making art politically'. I am amazed that I haven't done that yet - and that you have let me get away with it.

I'll try. 

# 86 [4 December 2008]

I'm back in Fabrica today holding one to one sessions with artists for the arc scheme. It's good to be back here and in a different guise. I see that my blog has slipped to the third page of Projects Unedited and my last entry was on 19 November.

Where did the second half of November go?

Of course, Hirschhorn's banner has long been taken down. The war is over. But of course, it's not.

War is over.

I just fancied saying that again.

The artist I have just seen showed me work about protest. She had made contact with me during the residency so it was good to meet her in person and see more of her work. We talked a bit about Greenham Common and the legacy of feminism. I talked to her about my undergraduates and about how much the teaching of feminism now so often means starting from scratch and how The F Word is such a dirty one now among younger generations. We spoke excitedly about collecting the memories and the insights learned from earlier forms of activism.

I never went to Greenham. (That's a good title for a book). But I had some friends who did. I was too chicken. Scared of policemen and 'perimeter fences' and of what I might realise about the world. But it was, it is, an example of successful protest. And we need those examples.

I need to reflect on the residency and on everything I learnt. And I need to carry on writing, every day, or as often as I can. 

# 85 [19 November 2008]

Although the residency at Fabrica has officially finished and the exhibition has been taken down I anticipate that I shall continue to keep this blog going since I have a backlog of material, images and responses that deserve to be uploaded.

I will keep this going until it becomes about something else at which point it will be time to draw it to a close and maybe start a different sort of blog.

The residency has been good for me in a number of ways. It has given me the opportunity to investigate another artist's work over a sustained period in an environment of interested and committed support. I have worked with a range of people had many interesting conversations and almost like an extra bonus, I have made new work which might take me in even more new directions yet.

At times the subject matter of the banner and of the Photo Biennial has got me down and I have wanted not to think about it. At those times I have been prompted to think about those people who live directly in war zones and I have wondered how on earth they cope. We are at war but they are wars over there involving Other People and we get other Other People to go there and fight them for us. 

We cannot even begin to imagine...

At the weekend I attended the Conference of the Photo Biennial the best part of which was a visit to Anthony Lam's public event at Jubilee square involving young and older people. There was a soap box for anyone to speak their mind from, a stall where you could make a banner. 

Here is mine. As powerless as I often feel in the face of human idiocy I like to think that at least I can challenge hostile thoughts within myself and not pay them attention.  I'm talking about hostility towards other people. We all have it in different forms and flavours. It's a bit like hearing voices, though not the kind of voices that won't shut up (they're something else entirely). Voices that come from within and would have us act less than humanly towards others.

It's not surprising in this challenging and competitive society that this hostility arises. I wonder where it goes when we refuse to give it voice?

# 84 [19 November 2008]

An evening with Hirschhorn continued:

Afterwards we went for dinner: Liz, Matthew, John, Helen, Thomas and I.

It was relaxed and enjoyable. We talked about football, running, England, philosophy, a bit about art. I wanted to spend the whole evening telling him about what I have been doing but I held back not wanting to take over the entire conversation. Why am I so polite? It's really annoying.

Helen (Cadwallader) the Director of the Photo Biennial took a much nicer picture than the one I show here of me and Thomas together (it's still on her camera and she's said I can have it after January). For the photo I put my arm around his shoulders and then asked if he minded. He smiled and said 'no'. 

After nine months engaging so closely with his work I felt close to him. But of course that goes through the work. 

It's the work that brings The Other closer.

# 83 [19 November 2008]

An evening with Hirschhorn

With this, one of the worst photos I have ever taken on my mobile phone, I am announcing the end of my residency at Fabrica engaging with the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, specifically with 'The Incommensurable Banner'.

The picture, though you wouldn't know it, is of Hirschhorn himself, or Thomas as we like to call him.

On the evening of 13 November, last Thursday, he gave a talk at Fabrica about his practice.

I was over the moon to see that he called his presentation, which was accompanied by a powerpoint slideshow, 'Doing Art Politically'. I called this blog 'Making Art Politically' which I took from an interview I read with Hirschhorn where he is asked if he makes political art. His reply is that he does not make political art but that he makes art politically, a phrase that he borrowed from Jean-Luc Godard who talked about making films politically. I was pleased that I had picked out of all the articles I read about Hirschhorn, this one phrase to sum up my approach to the blog and my residency and that Hirschhorn too had felt this phrase to be significant enough to make it the title of his presentation.

I enjoyed musing over the differences between 'making' and 'doing'. In German 'machen' means both to make and to do. In a sense I suppose 'doing' is broader than 'making' in that it might encompass many aspects of the processes of doing art: thinking, editing, collating, talking, collaborating etc. etc. as well as making.

Hirschhorn outlined his 'doing' of art politically under a number of key words which were:

Form

Creation

Decisions

Tool

Platform

Material

Guidelines

The Other

Warrior

Collage

and Market

He spoke passionately and with great conviction. His enthusiasm was infectious and his way of elucidating his ideas was concrete and graphic. For example: "I want to work for the Other, the Other in myself, that I don't know that I don't control, to include it in the work."

He also made one or two nice mistranslations from the French or the German, such as speaking about blesséd bodies on the banner, which I guessed came from the french blessé meaning 'wounded' but the notion of them being blessed was just as apt. 

He concentrated in his talk mainly on the work he made for the Viennese Secession called 'The Eye' and showed many images of it. About the eye and about the colour red it is a room-sized sculptural collage of mannequins, soft toys, text and chairs with imagery and ideas taken straight from street protesters and their homemade props. 

There is a lot more I could say about this. If you have any questions post them here and I'll answer.

# 82 [15 November 2008]

It's been a very busy and stimulating week. On Wednesday night there was a panel discussion about ethics and the use of public images at Fabrica and then on Thursday Thomas Hirschhorn came to Brighton and delivered a talk about his work. And today was the closing conference of the Brighton Photo Biennial at Brighton University.

I'm thinking about the fact that my residency is going to end soon (tomorrow!) and what that means. I am aware that I've got a backlog of material to put on this blog and I don't want to 'lose' it by letting it slip by without writing it up and thinking about it in the considered way that the blog encourages.

So I think I will continue to keep the blog for a while longer and see how it develops outside the official space of the term of the residency.

There are lots of loose ends to tie up and many questions still to be posed. The ends won't get tied up. I kind of hope they don't, because they are all threads that might lead somewhere. And the questions seem to give rise to further questions. Answers seem like illusions.

Having not had internet access from home for nearly three weeks for the second half of the residency was, I feel, very detrimental to this blog. It was so unfortunate. I lost the rhythm I had got into of late night blogging: that quiet, night-time space of darkness and the expansion of thought. I had to adapt and post items up hastily from my work venues which created a different kind of mood to the postings; less reflective and considered, less well-edited and ultimately rather unsatisfactory. I tried to make the most of it calling myself a 'nomad blogger' but really I was not happy.

Tomorrow is my last session in the gallery at Fabrica. I've sent an email out to all at Fabrica thanking them for making my residency such a good one. And tomorrow I'm taking in some cake for anyone who is there. It was an odd email I sent out. It was right from the heart but after I'd sent it I worried that it was too euphoric and too revealing. I made a connection at the end of it between aspects of my parental grandparents' lives and my precarious sense of being in the world. I started off this blog mentioning parts of their lives and it feels as if I have come full circle in some ways to have got to this point but with a greater understanding and some new insights.

I know this sounds rather cryptic and unexplained so I will attempt to unpack some of what I am talking about in the posts that follow this. And I will do this, I promise (myself), in order to make the connections apparent, through writing. 

# 81 [12 November 2008]

Emailed to me by a friend on Monday:

"A couple of images from the Menzel book because when I saw them I thought about you and the Hirschhorn banner.
My thoughts about them are not very original - more emotional really.
The drawing is of dead soldiers in a barn during the war between Prussia and Austria in 1860s when Menzel spent time behind the battle lines to document the war.
The other drawing is of the Prussian commander Moltke's binoculars, which is interesting in a different way.
...
[there were over 6000 drawings when Menzel died in 1904] engagement with interpreting reality.
I know we can't turn back time or deny the camera as a tool - that gives another truth - but one not filtered through the draughtsman's body.
Adorno said there could be no art after Auschwitz ....then more recently someone, I cant remember who, said there could only be art [ to make sense of experience] after Auschwitz.
But the celebration of the 'abject' .... with the elevation of the 'artist'.... and the experience so dematerialized.......
I always thought that the function of the 'artist' was in some way to be to transform experience.... [actually the word 'experience' is devalued now, as in the Imperial War Museum's 'First World War Experience' I saw recently]"

# 80 [9 November 2008]

On 6 and 7 November the Engage national conference was held in Brighton around the Brighton Photo Biennial. I attended on 7 November and ran a breakout session about my residency in Fabrica.

I found the session difficult in that it turned out differently from how I had planned it but actually that can often prove to be fruitful and I came away thinking about quite specific and thought-provoking matters.

The main thought centres around the institutionalised ways of being that we develop from performing certain activities repeatedly in similar contexts. I talked about this quite a lot in the breakout session and about how, with this residency, I have quite explicitly tried to avoid allowing those pre-determined patterns of behaviour to colour my interactions with others.

It was difficult to speak about, I lost my thread and almost entirely forgot to show the images I had prepared to structure my talk with. I know I grew slightly defensive and a bit hectoring.

I decided to abandon my talk and take questions, not liking the way everyone was looking at me expectantly and that I seemed to be lecturing them. This worked quite well but something inside me had grown very vulnerable and I was sweating and felt open to attack.

I think the whole session would have gone better if I had decided at the planning stage just to speak about my experiences of the residency and how it had affected my practice rather than trying to address  "how [I]  set about encouraging visitors to engage with the ethical and philosophical complexities of Hirschhorn’s work" , which is what I had promised on the conference programme. 

This experience has taught me something about the extent to which I bend to what I perceive to be the expectations that others have of what I will do rather than really stopping to think about what it is that I want to say.

On a broader level this tells me something about how one’s perceptions of an event based on previous experience detract from being in the present moment or, put otherwise, how stasis within each step of a process risks altering or distorting a voice in the present. This has implications for the progress of democracy.

I was reading a passage this morning about democracy from a conversation between Derrida and Mustapha Chérif. I found it helpful in soothing a certain soreness from some degree of breakage within my perception of my own  sense of integrity subsequent to this uncomfortable experience:

"To exist in a democracy is to agree to challenge, to be challenged, to challenge the status quo, which is called democratic, in the name of a democracy to come. This is why I always speak of a democracy to come. Democracy is always to come, it is a promise, and it is in the name of that promise that one can always criticise, question that which is proposed as de facto democracy." (Derrida)