barren

Monkey’s Fist

By throwing the monkey’s fist it creates a liminal space through drawing and movement established with spatial ideas concerning sculpture, installation and performance and ultimately deals with low key aspects of contemporary art which end up as curtailed wisps on the edge.

Peg Rawes would refer to these as Acts of construction espousing the relationship between aesthetic judgement, space and geometry and link the transcendental intuition of space with the constructive powers of geometry. It is this relationship that I am encircled by and one intrinsic to understanding the properties that the fist represents. Particularly as the fist itself is made up of the Borrmean Rings underlying both folk, knot lore and intrinsically linked to hyperbolic geometry. Ellipses rather than geometric perfect circles, the rings are not linked but only linked as an entirety. Therefore the spatial construct is both within the fist and surrounded in the momentum that could be provided by an act of construction which moves us from the transcendental to a thinking, embodied and sensing subject .

So basically I can catch a fist, throw it, entwine it and use it singly or in multiples. I prefer the latter, a mass of lines, volume and shifting at once. This is my response to Adam Cluely insitgator of this challenge – that is my choreographic/ installation proposal.

I have been drawn to the short narratives of Primo Levi’s character Faussone who works on a rig in ‘the Monkey’s Wrench’ a solid tool epitomizing the modern world of construction and straight lines. Whilst the fist may bend and make arcs in a throw, equally it draws tight once connected with it’s conjoining component. The balance between suspension to tension offers the flight before the fixing. The high rises of the 20’s recall suspended girders and workers working without harnesses at crazy heights and buldings are now erected from fused pieces to fit like a jigsaw. New developments with Hadid’s architecture bring in waves and curves along boulevards. Meanwhile the geometric rig echoes within stage sets and outdoor theatre. It has been drawn again in Ellen Gallagher’s climbing frame at Tate Modern and Sol Lewitt’s open structures recall the modernist approach to construction.

A suspended thrown and performed rig, whilst an imaginative act at the most, at this point twists round the knots of the modern built environments fixings and solidity, writhes against the blank faces of glass buildings, recalls the performance of space of labourers and artists and in its fall into some place – embodies the weight of our own bodies bound to the ground despite Icarus dreams. The final tension can offer the tension between our moving and bodily existence caught within the restrictions and freedoms our built environment offers us.

All at once there might exist, briefly, a rig in the air. But this seems unsatisfactory and merely decorative of the rope itself. The thing is the knot the thud, the wrap, the tension, the pull and the lever all of which need to be present. If this is done amongst a giving surface, the thud of the knot as it lands will leave a trace of this bridging and map of the temporary rig. The cracks and splits the drying, rendering and violence caused by each attempt to bridge a gap.

In many cultures pieces of paper, cloth are knotted to ropes. I have often wavered over the use of these and ultimately rejected them but they offer a symbolism to tentativeness which mark borders where there is conflict, borders of division and so since the Monkey’s Fist is the most basic of bridges, the most tentative similalry I see the ropes of the fist covered on fluttering cloth markers acting as buoys for this moving apparition.

In commenting on borders and edges the act of occupying one of these does not amount to a specific site but a specific type of site. I do not want the stage but a geometric space of a space constructed through this act to make a space clearly divided on the an edge.

Lobbing the Fist back to you Adam..

Monkey’s Fist

The throw has a start, it lands, it has an end but the space between, its momentum and arc is a liminal space. My shift is that in the sublime aspect of landscape voyeurism we use borders as an edge and the remote as a point of escape. We embark from fixed points, normally our abode, and leave for a time, temporarily to escape. Thus mythical and romantic relationships with our landscape is what keeps the distinction between urban and rural so delineated and one which I wish to breach. The monkey’s fist connects, pulls, intrudes, lands and marks out arcs in its velocity and weight. Only an idea orientated piece at this point, the arcs and throws are to be my drawing of reaching into space. A low key response an d in Lippard’s words ‘often resembling ruins, amalgams of past and future, remains of something ‘more’, vestiges of some unknown venture’ (Escape attempts;1997)

There is a ghost of content loosely embedded within the binds of the rope that forms the fist, reminding of past physical interaction with basic tools; reminders of heritage and sea now echoed on land; as a conquering device to board a vessel and the relationship with architecture of landscape. This is my start – ephemeral, unintimidating, reliant on performance and document the conceptual forms of contemporary art. In the vein of Adrian Piper and her series of mapping pieces and her interrogation of philosophical and spatial concepts I sit with this fist to punch a pocket of air at a random border.

Chunky Move first showed a piece called connected appropriating ropes as connectors, Kraus’s grid, wheels and knots. The stage set acting more as art installations but progresses with Gideon Orbarzanek’s Digital Moves. Both instances draw upon Reuben Margolin’s kinetic and geometric studies moving between technically engineered prop to digital moving visions connected to the movement of the body.

I once worked with Sophia Lycouris from Nottingham University improvising with a single white spot in order to respond to a kinetic robotic spine later animated in the space with me. This imaginative use of movement beyond the realms of dance or street performance occupies my practice but I have yet to resolve it in relation to the Monkey’s Fist. However the fist does offer a synergy of everyday, functional repetitive movement such as the rhythmic throb of producing our habitual lived experiences and distilling it to a moment.

In recently working with an artist’s group with Gustavo Ceirico at Yorkshire sculpture park on ‘Where The Horizon Moves’ we were working from Casper David Friederich and looked at the possibilities of locating and moving the horizon within the location of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The works derived were moveable in terms of site whilst some were more specific to the architecture and infrastructure of the park. Expecting to mostly install I found myself returning to choreographic moments attuned to my research on the horizon looking at promenade and procession to everyday gestures locating a distant unreachable horizon.

The proposals offered varying perspectives from nomadic benches and comedy to processional gazing in regency /contemporary modes over to running up and down hillsides exchanging horizontal perspectives. These were experiments and a culmination of investigations to develop a body of work for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. However clutching this monkeys fist I now see a wider possibility with this idea of drawing and sculpting space.

Recently I have become concerned with the torrent of concepts and ideas I have fumigating my research and blowing it to dust. They escape me and in my attempt to reach them I am employing my own device of monkey’s fist – proposals and sketches the artists blueprints except I am literally blueprinting them through the photopolymer process which stamps and embeds the glimpses of work standing on the edge of rationality and imagination. My primary concern combines the drawing potential of the fist in the thrust of the fist and the arcs of the rope and the catches with object and person. It rests on gesture, learnt movement and inhabited through function relating to its nautical heritage where edges between ships, land and sea exist.

Monkey’s Fist

In my fist a palm sized monkey’s fist, paw, claw gifted on a doorstep by Adam Cluely playful artist, manipulator of events and occupier of traversing territories. My task – a report which I am appropriating to the archives of barren in the hope this collaboration extends that far.

Christy Georg completed a large scale monkey’s fist as part of her work Nautical Body (2007-2008), its overarching title identifying its primary relationship as a sailors knot. Knots and the nautical have a beautiful aesthetic fascination recently found in an installation in Michael Schmidt’s installation at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs but this replication draws attention to the maritime and its heritage. I would like to ask how that informs what the heck I’m to do with this fist apart from lob it into a wide open space and hear it thud into some damp sod.

As a tool it is primarily a throwing device the fist acting as a weight which on connection to another object such as balustrade, other rope, tree etc. It will wrap around it much like a fist on which the thrower can yank and pull either himself nearer , bridge a gap or even use to attach something to pull into place. This sounds vague to me but on throwing it over a washing line it is easy to see the weight pull down and the rope twist around the line and itself with the momentum.

So as a mover and drawer my concerns are with its possibility as a drawing tool and how this can add and draw attention to the body in a movement act which is functional. I have an intrinsic response to rhythmic repetition and the seductive actions of fly fishing over to throwing a stone in at the waters edge which puncture moments beautifully in our everyday practice of the mundane and ordinary. From Allen Ruppersbberg’s ‘ Fifty helpful hints on the Art of Everyday’ there is this word ‘specific’ which we often associate with site however he comments on specific being the revealing of something passing, recognized, acknowledged and undefined – what is specific is that your view has been subtly made different by an act. The moment is just a tip and underneath the myriad. I often have trouble with wish wash tripe but the fact that this shift is part of our aesthetic everyday experience is capitalised upon and fragments and delineates our interaction with space, time and the day. Many artworks replicate and copy such things in order to draw attention to it and as Ruppersberg would say create a 50;50 basis by which to create something new. In other words by removing the copied from one space and designing in it in another, or dealing with it as fragment, it gives the viewer another window by which to see it.

This is my basis for what I will do with this monkey’s fist, shift its context and location and gravitate towards my own research borders to hopefully create a window into how distance, connection can be perceived at our transitions at borders. I think in terms of location between cities, regions and towns. It is this between, the non-space seen as transitory and passed through without touching it which I would like to permeate and occupy with this fist.

Differences on a small scale yet accumulating in potential distance as we shake our fists from within the interiors of cars – the doors acting as fences. This is only in a small sense but a faint rumble of the dissatisfaction voiced beteen communities, regions, countries. We stand in opposition and face one another, whom we don’t know but draw lines between. Rather than shaking a fist if we looked in the mirror and saw our own reflection would we be more inclined to offer a monkeys fist? Idealistic wonders do exist and should continue to if the extent of our differences can be but gently undermined by small acts.

I recently finished a book Tortilla Curtain on the prejudice growing between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ on the borders of Mexico; Mexicans finding a gap in the fence and the unrest that emerges. In fixing difference an extra 700 miles of fence are to be employed at Mexico’s borders and the comment is, that it does not unite – I would have thought that was obvious.