ARTISTS TALKING

# 21 [2 October 2008]

And this evening I put her back together again.

# 22 [2 October 2008]

Had a conversation where I realised that I make assumptions about there existing an area of common ground about what is meant by 'political'. The person I was talking to clearly thought that by 'political' I meant 'party political'. This was a thunderbolt to me. To realise that a lot of what I take for granted, have always taken for granted, actually doesn't exist (any more? did it ever?). There was a time in the 70s and 80s when if you talked about politics then it was sort of assumed that what you were talking about was something to do with power relations, identity, gender, race, class, in short, the underlying dynamics of any situation. Everything could be understood politically. This didn't make life any easier. In fact it often made it seem a lot harder, but there was a language (or at least we liked to think there was) for what went on amongst people. Then there was a time when you had to talk about 'politics with a small 'p' to denote the same kind of analysis and to make clear that you were not talking about party politics. Now, if you talk about politics, people turn their noses up and look displeased, or they assume you have some personal chip on your shoulder, or that you're just plain mad.

Yesterday on Radio 4 there was a programme about anger. Apparently, in the States now they are calling anger 'intermittent explosive outburst syndrome' or something like that, I can't remember exactly what they called it. And of course there is a pill for it. To cure it. To stop it. 

So in these placated times where does justified outrage go? Where do we put it? How can we channel it into action?

'The personal is political' was a rallying cry of feminism. It meant that what went on between people, in their relationships, in everyday life, was significant, that it mattered, that it was the world in microcosm. But is the personal being squeezed out along with the political? Are the only spaces left for the personal: the confessional art of autobiographical artists providing vicarious experience as commodified art products for the over-busy super-rich? Or the safe and hidden, intimate spaces we create in our own, very private, private lives?

# 23 [2 October 2008]

Last Chance to see 'For Those Killed in Ambush' at Hold & Freight, Bradwell St, London E1. Finishes Sunday 5th at 6pm.

I am showing one piece:

2003 Peace Banner  -  2008 Pea Spanner

Geddit?

http://www.holdandfreight.org

# 24 [4 October 2008]

I was in Polegate today, which is a town near Eastbourne, in Sussex. I found this completely flattened and very rusty tin can on the grass verge by the side of the road.

It set me thinking about flatness and three-dimensionality. And about bodies I suppose. And their transposition into images.

Photography.

What an alien concept to me.

The visual.

What does that mean?

And why if we inhabit fleshed out, rounded bodies, would we ever think of making flat images? I know, it's something to do with the retina and all.

Flat Stanley.

A children's book about a boy whose noticeboard falls onto him in the night and he wakes up with as a two dimensional person. And then he has adventures as a 2-D person in a 3-D world.

How can the images that Hirschhorn has chosen for his banner have the visceral impact on us that they do have? What is the process whereby animal fear is generated by looking at pictures of dead and mutilated people? I'm not really interested in the neurological answers to these questions. But rather in the part that imagination plays in that process.

Imag(e) in a(c)tion.

# 25 [6 October 2008]

Blog block

A lot has happened over the past couple of days. I have done my first two residency sessions in the gallery talking to visitors about the Thomas Hirschhorn exhibition.

I need to digest it all a bit before adding another blog posting.

# 26 [7 October 2008]

A view of the tin can from the side. To prove that it really is flat.

# 27 [7 October 2008]

Someone's response emailed to me. They wish to remain anonymous.

"I looked at your blog and the Fabrica site about Hirschhorn.
It must be difficult to keep an objective position on this work.
Quite honestly I think his work is such butch male piffle.
I suppose if we live in a landscape of rubbish and people are 
brutally turned into rubbish and then photographed like landfill sites,
we will get an ‘art’ that is an equivalent of MRM.
What is the point of this kind of visual / philosophical appropriation.
It colludes with the visual landscape of excess, nihilism and amorality - its really about his celebrity, about violence and political philosophy being sexy.
He’s producing a commodity - ‘find prices on artnet’."

# 28 [7 October 2008]

Some text I have written to accompany my contribution to our open studios exhibition 'Around Photography' 25 and 26 October and 1 and 2 November 12 - 6pm:

Thinking Still

Photography is to my practice what something is to something else, but I don’t know what those things are.

I don’t know what the relationship is or the things that it connects. I don’t know that I need to articulate this any more clearly to myself at the moment.

I use photography just as most artists do. I use it for the following:

•    To document work I have made and exhibitions I am in.
•    To record visual ideas I think of so that I don’t forget them.
•    To record an arrangement of objects in my studio before I move it around or put it away, so that the connections may be recalled at a later date.

But mostly I don’t go back to look at these saved images.

I can’t get round the power involved in photography. Behind the lens I am a god creating worlds. In front of the camera I am always a victim. Maybe because I am female and I can’t get through, round, over or past porn.

My first camera was a really old paper concertina job that my Dad gave me. I took it to London on a school trip and took a picture of Tower Bridge. It was magic.

During the Brighton Photobiennial 2008 I am artist in residence at Fabrica, engaging with and thinking (a lot) about the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, specifically his use of appropriated images in his Incommensurable Banner. The images are graphic depictions of bodies damaged and destroyed by munitions. People so far are displaying a range of reactions to this work. I am a lightning conductor for them.

I am thinking still.

# 29 [8 October 2008]

Just some things I've observed over the past few days:

I heard a loud banging and when I looked down onto the street from a top floor window I saw a young lad, perhaps 12 years old, hitting a flint wall repeatedly with a long stick. Standing next to him was a much younger boy, perhaps about 6 years old, watching, motionless. The older boy was putting all his effort into attacking the wall although there was nothing to be seen on or around the wall that might have been his target other than the wall itself. When he had done enough hitting with the stick they both walked up the road a bit until the older lad stopped near a grass verge and with great concentration ground the toe of one of his shoes into the ground flattening the grass. He did this calmly several times on the same small patch of ground until he felt he had stopped the growing.

A tiny boy about 5 years old dressed in an immaculately pressed bright white karate suit flew by me silently on a scooter near the seafront road. Several times he measured out the breadth of the car salesroom forecourt with his two small wheels. The words 'avenging' and 'angel' came to mind.

Outside the Londis shop a cluster of adults laughing happily after their meal out in the Italian restaurant next door kept an amused eye on the two boys. Imitating computer game fighting these two were extremely skilfully raising clenched fists and pointed toes to each others chins without ever as much as touching each other and equally skilfully ducking to avoid the acted out blows. The sounds coming from their mouths were aping simulated explosion noises and imagined gasping reactions to violent hitting. "Ah", the adults' faces said, "look at the boys enjoying themselves".

In the park earlier this evening, three boys, around 8 or 9 years old walking conspiratorially close to each other. As I overtook them one was twirling a gun around his middle finger. Presumably a replica, but by the evident weight of its metal in his small hand, definitely not a toy. I stared long and hard at it in his hand as I passed them, as if to say "I can see what you've got, I've noticed you" but didn't say anything to them. A bit further on up the path I turned to look back at them. Looking slightly more agitated now, the one in possession of the weapon was stuffing it into his little backpack whilst his friend was saying something in a raised voice about his big sister.

# 30 [9 October 2008]

I couldn't bear that picture of the gun being on my blog for longer than about an hour, so I've put a new picture up.

A visitor to the gallery on Saturday offered to bring in a picture of a fluffy kitten to stick onto the collective protest banner that visitors to the exhibition can contribute to. (This image was not donated by her but found by me online).

In amidst all of this experience I am finding that my ability to judge the tone of people's comments is weak. Did she really mean that a fluffy kitten would be a suitable counterbalance to the images on show on Hirschhorn's banner or was she being entirely facetious. It may seem obvious to you but at the moment I really can't tell.

It's the same with 'Max Loader' and his/her posts about the tin can (see below). To use a word like 'transfixed' to describe an interest in my discussion of 2- and 3-Dimensions appears to me to be rather exaggerated.

A gap has opened up in my interactions with others between their intentions and my receptiveness to those intentions. A widening which includes a muddying and mixing of friendliness and hostility.

But I can work with that. It's at the core.