ARTISTS TALKING

# 69 [2 November 2008]

For an introduction to this post see introduction to entry 64.

What I am currently thinking about most in relation to Hirschhorn’s banner is the psycho-sexual dimension within looking that relates to the connection between desire and violence. From thinking about this work over time and going through a range of responses I now feel drawn into asking a set of troubling yet, I think, hugely important questions concerning the impulse for violence itself. It comes across to me very clearly from Hirschhorn’s piece that he is addressing these questions. He talks about this himself in the interview he gave to Fiacre Gibbons in the summer, a recording of which is playing in Fabrica. He talks about the eye looking for the red. He doesn’t explain this he just comments on it as something that he has observed when watching viewers looking at other works he had made which contained images like those in the Incommensurable Banner. What I really like about the banner is how it forces the viewer to interrogate themselves. It puts the viewer in the position of victim (by identifying with the dead) and of perpetrator (by finding oneself in the place of the photographer who may have been someone responsible for the violence done to the victim shown). In a sense it forces us to take a stand, to claim or declare our own position. I use the word ‘force’ advisably because really there is no escape from the work, except, perhaps in not looking at it at all.
   
Interestingly, I have not used my blog as a way to record these various stages of my response to Hirschhorn’s piece. Instead I think I have had more a tendency to write about developments in my practice directly. It is only now that I am asked the specific question about my own responses that I have given myself the opportunity to record and reflect upon these. I am reminded with this of a talk I went to yesterday by Julian Stallabrass, the curator of the Photo Biennial. Expecting some kind of declaration of a position on his part I came away disappointed by his descriptive approach to talking about the contents of the various exhibitions that make up the Biennial. This, in conjunction with his repeated encouragements to the audience to record their responses on the biennial blog highlighted to me rather sharply a similar approach in myself: to withhold my own opinion whilst urging others to give theirs*. Cushioned within the diversity of opinions of others one can retain a kind of neutral stance as relayer of what other people think without ever having to acknowledge one’s own standpoint.

* Of course, his very curation of the Biennial exhibitions is, in itself,  a declaration of a position in that they are based on his choices and selection.

# 68 [2 November 2008]

Around this Bachmann phase of my response to the Hirschhorn banner I think some kind of shift happened in my understanding of my own relationship to looking. This, I have often thought, has been rather troubled. I do not have the kind of confident relationship to looking that Hirschhorn demonstrates when he stresses for example the fact that he is a visual artist. I have sometimes made sound pieces or found ways to avoid the visual even while attempting to make ‘visual art’. As if the ‘visual’ part of ‘visual art’ to me is more to do with the viewer looking than about the object itself being particularly visible. But lately I think I have been looking more, perhaps because I have talked myself through the doubts I have had about looking at the images on the banner and accepted that there is a desire in me just to look. Wherever that desire comes from, whether it is part of an animal instinct for survival that makes us want to look at pictures of dead and destroyed bodies in order to try to understand what has happened to these people (so as, perhaps, to avoid something similar happening to ourselves) or whether it is purer than that, less instrumental and more for its own sake, as desire per se, I think I have become more willing and accepting of that. This is very exciting for my own practice where I have been concentrating on what it means to put flat, photographic images on fabric backgrounds, to what effect and with whichever consequences for image and ground.

# 67 [2 November 2008]

For an introduction to this post see introduction to entry 64.

For a while I felt myself identifying very strongly with my femaleness in relation to the work. I got interested in thinking again about the work of the Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann, whose incredible writing and ability to articulate the experience of being on the receiving end of oppression as a woman, made her into something of a heroine to feminists. She is also (furthermore) one of the (few) women whose name Hirschhorn cites amongst his roll call of writers and philosophers whom he admires. Specifically, I made a new piece of work which was a scanned image of the front of her novel, Malina, which incorporates a smiling photo of Bachmann herself on it, transferred onto a white pocket handkerchief. This is currently on show hanging on the wall outside my studio at APEC as part of our Open Studios exhibition for the Brighton Photo Biennial Photofringe. I also wrote some entries for my blog which were suggestive of the link between masculinity and violence, as evidenced, for example, in some observations I had made about the behaviour of young boys in the streets around where I live. Even whilst indulging in this position alongside some kind of female imaginary victim, I knew I was sidestepping my own complicity in the perpetration of the violence for which we are all responsible, by the very fact of us belonging to a nation that wages illegal wars using dishonest reasons as excuses for them. Somehow making the handkerchief/Bachmann piece, which I called I.B. (for Ingeborg Bachmann, but which also co-incidentally stands for ‘Incommensurable Banner’) freed me from the need to take up the victim role. Not that Bachmann was a victim, you understand, rather that the main, female, character in the novel ‘Malina’ disappears at the end of the novel into a crack in the wall and leaves you, the reader, not knowing whether she has ever existed at all or whether she has perhaps been murdered.

# 66 [2 November 2008]

For an introduction to this post see post no. 64

Another day, which was one of my timetabled gallery sessions, I noticed that I had not gone anywhere near the work or even so much as looked at it and had spent the whole afternoon with my back to it. I remember this quite clearly. I just didn’t want to think about it – about war, about death, about the awfulness of it all. It was a lovely sunny Brighton day outside and I wanted to be out there, with the throng, enjoying the sunshine – we had so little this summer, who can blame me? – so instead of engaging in any way with the work directly I realised that I was chatting happily to the Fabrica volunteers who were there. And then of course, having that feeling, that so many have talked about in relation to this work, that one’s cheerfulness is inappropriate in the vicinity of the work. But of course, even this was a form of engagement with the work. Even wanting not to see is a response. It is all valid. I have learnt to understand much more about one’s response to an artwork over time: that it shifts and changes depending on so many factors. I read recently about a new book by T.J.Clark about his viewing of two works by Poussin: “Clark's 'experiment' is essentially a diary that tells the story of his engagement with two masterpieces by Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake and Landscape with a Calm, that hang face-to-face in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The resulting book is unusual in that it treats the act of looking as a process that occurs in time.” (London Review of Books)
I might have thought this change of response over time to be an obvious way of describing how one’s looking develops were it not for the use of the word ‘unusual’ in this blurb about Clark’s book.

# 65 [2 November 2008]

For introduction to this post see previous post:

So there are these two parallel areas of activity for this residency: considering Hirschhorn’s Incommensurable Banner and reconsidering my own engagement with protest through, or via, visual imagery on a banner.
Between April of this year and September when Hirschhorn’s banner was finally unrolled and installed in Fabrica I knew the work only through photographs of it. Although the photographic documentation of it I was given included several close-up detailed shots of the individual images on the banner, when I first saw the piece for real I experienced a reaction that I have understood, from observing other people looking at the work, to be fairly typical of a first viewing of it. I felt physically shaken and sick in the stomach. However, I did want to look at the images. That fascination has been there from the start and it is something I continue to reflect upon.
I would say that since that first viewing I have been through a range of responses. Quite near the start of the residency proper I had a period of quite strong doubt about my involvement with the work at all. It was a kind of moral objection. I suppose I was anticipating, or trying to anticipate, the responses of visitors to the exhibition and trying to place myself in relation to the work – as if I had to have a very clear take on it. I remember seriously fantasising about withdrawing from the project, without any intention whatsoever of actually wanting to. As if to try out in my mind what kind of position it would signify if I were to declare that I were dissociating myself from the work. But I found the notion of this kind of withdrawal unsatisfactory because I hadn’t yet tested myself against the work in relation to other people. I have found myself agreeing with people who find the images degrading to the dead people on show. I think many of the images are degrading to them especially if you consider that some of them will have been taken by the perpetrators of the crimes represented. But whether the work is degrading? I don’t think so. I remember coming into the gallery space one day when it was quite empty and standing in front of the banner and I suddenly had a very strong sense of how the piece is a very true memorial to all those who are represented on it. They all appeared extremely dignified in their death and I felt the piece was honouring each and every single one of them. 

# 64 [2 November 2008]

I am in touch with someone from The Forum, which describes itself as "an innovative weblog featuring reviews, previews, opinion pieces and interviews from independent arts writers." She has sent me four questions which have actually been very timely in prompting me to write about aspects of my own responses to Hirschhorn's Incommensurable Banner. I have decided to post these (rather lengthy) entries in this and the following posts. 

1. What kind of responses have you had to the work and how have your reactions changed during this time, if they have? If so, in what ways?

I have been thinking about ‘The Incommensurable Banner’ by Hirschhorn since April of this year. This was on the basis of my already existing strong interest in Hirschhorn’s practice, specifically how he works with other people, sometimes with communities of people, whilst still maintaining a strong sense of the identity of his own practice as an artist. When I was first offered the chance to be artist animateur at Fabrica, in residence alongside the banner, I was extremely pleased because I was invited to do so on the basis of what Liz and Matthew, the two directors of Fabrica, knew about my practice, without either of them knowing that I had this strong interest in Hirschhorn. So, it seemed to me, and this is still the case, that there it is a very good match for me to be engaging with Hirschhorn’s work in this way. The very first response to the work that I noted, upon being told what the work consisted of, was a sense of relief. I heard myself say inside my head: “At last we are going to be shown the images that demonstrate what war is actually about” and this reaction came about against a background of recognition that the wars we are involved in as aggressors are highly sanitised in their representation by the media. I was also excited by the idea of making some kind of comparison in intent and effect of Hirschhorn’s Incommensurable Banner with my own attempt to make an anti-war banner. In 2003 I made a peace banner to take with me to the demonstrations in London against the war on Iraq. At the time I remember being utterly lost when trying to picture what sort of imagery I might put on my banner. In the end I opted for what I considered, at the time, to be ‘positive’ imagery, though when I look back at this now I can see that the imagery, of verdant countryside, flowers and rainbows, is extremely clichéd and really rather ‘cheesy’. So, this residency has been a good opportunity to get this banner of mine out of storage, have another look at it and reconsider the relationship of art to politics at this stage, five years after the worldwide opposition on the streets to the war against Iraq.

# 63 [31 October 2008]

Blog entries to write:

Conversation with David Constantine yesterday about Brecht's 'Kriegsfibel' and relationship of poetry to photographic images of war - transcribe recording of conversation and select parts for blog.

Impromptu discussion today at Fabrica with students from Greenwich University.

On speechlessness.

Reading of Islam & the West - conversation between Derrida and Mustapha Chérif - when I've read more of it.

Rancière on translation and communication.

Replace Branson image with something - anything - else.     - done

# 62 [30 October 2008]

I am in a North London library. Mum is sitting on a sofa in the children's area. I think she's nodding off. We've just had lunch together in a cafe. She's 81, though, for some reason, I keep thinking she's 82. Her eyesight is poor as she suffers from age-related macular degeneration and she is becoming increasingly unable to look after herself. I come and see her when I can but the job of looking after her falls mainly to my sister who lives near to her.

I noticed this morning having spent yesterday evening and last night in my old family home that something strange had happened to time and space and that I felt as if I had been there forever and that my life in Brighton felt like a million miles away.

I'd better not keep her waiting too long but it's nice and warm in here, much warmer than at her house where there seems to be something wrong with the heating.

It's political. Me being here. Her sitting over there. Me trying to take care of her but failing mostly. The job is much larger than I can manage, short of giving up my life and living with her. Maybe that's what I ought to do? You only have one mum after all. But I know I can't - or rather won't.

I miss her. She used to be such a lively spirit. So vivacious. Now she sits mainly motionless and seems rather tuned out a lot of the time, cocooned in her dulled senses. But she's still there.

I feel sad but keep cheerful because that's the least I can do.

What this has got to do with Hirschhorn I really don't know. Except that if he is really trying to reach for the human in us all, as Julian Stallabrass said during his talk about him, then that is what I am trying to do too.

In her. And in myself.

# 61 [29 October 2008]

Having spent the past week bemoaning the fact that I have had no internet access at home for the past week (due to technical problems with my ISP) and so have had my late nightly blogging habit interrupted I now feel that I have turned a corner.

I have now realised that I am a nomad blogger.

I am having to write and blog posts here and there wherever I can. Ah, such freedom! Such liberation from the domestic realm!

Not as easy to download, crop, optimise and post images but it needn't stop me writing and I can catch up with images at the weekend.

So, if you're reading this, Richard Branson, please do keep trying to fix the problem but be assured that my outlook is looking somewhat brighter.

# 60 [26 October 2008]

White Night debate continued
Imagining a world without war.

For those who wanted to take part, a lie-down collaborative imagining came next. I led this, inviting people to lie down, close their eyes and to start imagining a world without war. I asked people to speak out loud any aspect of this new world that came to mind and to resist the urge to destroy any part of the picture that was constructed as a result.

The world that came about temporarily for those fifteen or so minutes was green, lush, filled with chocolate, had no locked doors, was relaxing and had a university where people of any age could come and use the facilities to accomplish ideas they had without having to pass any exams or prove their competence. The people who lived there felt no need to be led by anyone else.