18th October
We attended a dry point workshop at the school with some of the Czech students. I used the drawing I had done the day before in the prison. I liked the result much more than when I had tried it in level four. Instead of Perspex, we used a softer material which seemed much more receptive to the marks and indentations and I left a lot more ink on which worked well.
This made me think about how much an image changes each time it is reproduced, how it can look the same but it isn’t the same. How over time things change so slowly that we often don’t notice the change. I noticed how through drawing and the printing process, I had defamiliarised the corridor of the prison removing a lot of the context so it was now impossible to tell what sort of corridor it was. It was no longer the original drawing as it was first perceived in the context of its original place and time. It had lost its authenticity. As Walter Benjamin pointed out in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” (1936)
In Corps Etranger (1994) Mona Hatoum takes something familiar to us and by playing with scale and altering context, makes it unfamiliar. This also creates many layers to the work which plays with the viewer’s perceptions, experiences and beliefs.
This made me think about an idea for the exhibition at the end of the week, how I could use the images and filming that I had of the inside of the prison to somehow create the abstract concept of time passing, maybe a back projection through one of the spy holes in a prison door. I also liked the idea of creating physical layers by projecting through silk sheets.
Thought about ways to show time passing. Artist Maarten Baas real time Schiphol Clock (2016) recorded real time using a person as the mechanism for the timekeeping. He used this concept with both analogue and digital time. In Sweepers (2009), two handy men sweep two lines of rubbish in the form of a first and second hand on a clock to keep time for 12 hours. This real time film is then projected onto the wall in a living space above a table and chairs, where a clock might hang. I find this idea of the physical ‘making of time’ and spending time watching the making of time a really interesting concept.
I thought about time and how it can totally change how something is perceived. How do we know ‘when enough time has passed’ and why do things get ‘stuck in time’ and what is time?
I decided to just sit in the dark inside the arts building and try to experience time passing. I noticed shadows increasing and decreasing in size, car lights outside passing the windows and silhouettes of people passing by. I could also hear a clock ticking in one of the corridors so I made some sound recordings and filmed some of the lights and shadows.
Benjamin, W (1936), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Translated: by Harry Zohn. Available online: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm
