These are some thoughts I scribbled down yesterday, and I wondered if anyone could comment or point me towards some reading matter on the subject.
Driving along today I began to reflect on the photographs I added to the Reside residency site http://resideresidency.weebly.com/reside-blog-susa…. I knew that, in the size the blog site dictated, they were not nearly as successful as the larger images on my computer, particularly that of the Methodist Church Hall , where all it’s idiosyncrasies were not visible in the smaller format.
I then began to reflect on the photographs themselves and how they couldn’t quite convey the feeling of being alone in this space and spending an hour in silence just looking at the scenes that were photographed. And so I began to wonder where the art actually was, where it resided, if you like.
When I looked at the ball resting against a chair leg with it’s pitted surface from years of boisterous play, did it become something else when photographed and presented on the website or was the art in the looking,in the selection of that image by myself as I looked around the hall and if so what was the moment when art entered the equation, could the art occur within me myself and what I chose to see or did it have to be documented and presented to others in order for it to take on the context of art. In other words, could art be a transaction that began and finished within myself, could it exist if there was no product as such to record that it had existed. Much writing on social practice and the movement away from the product in many artists practice emphasises the importance of the interaction with others, singling that out as the art happening if you like .
On a recent discussion listed in http://www.marketproject.org.uk/ where a curator was asked whether it was useful for an emerging artist to exhibit in a little-known space with a few viewers he likened that the analogy of the tree falling in the woods and if no one was here to hear it did to happen at all. I thought about this and my time in the Methodist hall and wondered whether art could begin and end in oneself without documentation and presentation to others, whether the capacity to transform a collection of items in space into art lay in the selective, subjective eye of the artist or whether even it existed before and after the transaction occurred with the artist’s gaze. Would the ball and the chair, which existed long before I chose to come along and photograph it, and will no doubt exist long after, have been or continue to be work of art all in it’s own right.
