University Campus Suffolk

I made this video for the purpose of showing my creative process and the actions I perform when working with these materials. Richard Serra’s list of process words has highlighted the significance of my working process. In order for me to create work I become very involved in the material, and working with its physical properties I begin working in a very repetitive motion. This is a continuous use and is reflective of Serra’s list of actions. ‘To Twist, To Curl, To bend’ are a few actions that I incessantly go through the motion of doing, and this physical handling of the material (in particular to the rope) brings me closer to fulfilling my intention to experience a material.

This process is not apparent to the viewer and the act of experiencing a material is only visual. I do believe that visual interaction is as important as physical interaction, but in order to do this with the viewer I would have to create a largely interactive piece. I have had reservations about doing this as it invites the temptation to create work purely for interactive purposes, and I did not want to detract from the focus of the work. By keeping it simple and reductive I intended to give all focus to material, and an interactive piece gives a large amount of focus to interaction itself.

An example of this would be Robert Morris’s ‘Bodyspacemotionthings’ exhibited at the Tate modern in 2009 (a re-exhibition from 1971)[1], featuring a number of different pieces all intended to be climbed, pulled, balanced and pushed, inherently giving the viewer the ability to experience the processes of ‘to push, to pull, to lift’, giving focus to the actions. However I feel that the fun and excitement of being able to ‘play’ with the work detracts from the physicality of the work itself. In comment on his own work Newman stated;

‘It’s an opportunity for people to involve themselves with the work, become aware of their own bodies, gravity, effort, fatigue, their bodies under different conditions. I want to provide a situation where people can become more aware of themselves and their own experience rather than more aware of some version of my experience.’[2]

Importantly, Newman’s piece was intended to give focus to process and thus the piece works well in achieving this, but personally for my own work I want to give focus to material over process. Although the process of creating is important to me in understanding material, if I attempt to convey this to the viewer I risk making a piece purely about process rather than physical material.

Although the final visual piece appears simple in appearance, the actual process of making and setting up the piece is time consuming and also involves a lot of making and re-making, ravelling and un-ravelling. I believe that like a lot of minimalistic or reductive work such as the work of the Minimalists or the Ready-mades, there is often more to be seen in a piece of work that just a simplicity. Donald Judd stated;

‘It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyse one by one, to contemplate. The thing as awhile, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful …. In the new work the shape, image, colour and surface are single and not partial and scattered.’ [3]

Donald Judd is stating here that a piece of work doesn’t require many parts, to over complicate and dilute a piece. Having too many parts detracts from what is already there, and to have less parts and less aspects to evaluate gives the viewer the ability to focus on singular aspects of the work. This gives the work a specific emphasis on its wholeness and physical materiality in the case of my own piece. Often the simplest visual piece has a considerable amount of time given to its creation, and I believe that the creation of something made of few parts requires much more focus and depth of inquiry into its parts.

[1] Robert Morris: Bodyspacemotionthings Tate Modern: Exhibition: 22 May – 14 June 2009 http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibi…

[2] This Is Tomorrow website: http://www.thisistomorrow.info/viewArticle.aspx?artId=56&Title=Robert%20Morris,%20Bodyspacemotionthings

[3] Donald Judd, Specific Objects, (1965) p.5

Richard Serra in 1967–68 produced a piece of work entitled ‘Verb List’ and as the name suggests it is indeed a list of verbs. It is a decisive list of process words associated with Serra’s process of producing work and the actions he implements. Made up of 84 verbs —to roll, to crease, to fold, to store, etc.—and 24 possible contexts—of gravity, of entropy, of nature, this list provided Serra with an important list of actions integral and apparent in his work. Looking as his large steel pieces mentioned in a previous post several of these verbs highlight his intentions and focus, such as to bend, to twist and to curl, and they show his early intention to interact with material, space and process.

Richard Serra said in comment about the list, ‘I really just worked out pieces in relation to the verb list physically in a space.’ As this is evident in his own work, I feel that it is evident in my own. Working with the rope in particular and curling the rope around continually and in repetitive motions my action is ‘to curl’, and physically acting out the verb in my studio space gives the rope a purpose, a means of becoming a visual and physical item of work, and to become a piece of process art.

Here are several photographs of my latest work. At the moment I am exploring the patterns possible with the rope, and different ways of laying it out. I’m both exploring the best visual composition and the most efficient way to use the space.
I’m finding it hard to fill in space between two circles and finding a way to join them. Having two circular shapes on the floor leaves me with the problem of the space in between and around them, and rope, although workable, is difficult to put into a space of that shape. I wanted to fill a floor area with rope but I can’t find a suitable method of doing so, and if I can’t find one I will have to consider having areas of floor space unused.

One advantage of these pieces and of using wooden objects adjacent to rope is that they become a single piece of multiple components. There are no individual pieces of work meaning that the work can be applied to almost any space. Also the layout of the work and the process of joining parts become much more flexible. However the flexibility of rope is still impeded by the circular shapes. Rope curls with ease into these circular shapes, but the negative space and corners created by touching circles is not suitably shaped to be filled with rope….

Visually I feel that the piece does not necessarily convey a powerful visual, but I definitely feel that work has a calming sense of reduction. The lack of colour and the reduction of material to two similar parts give the work a unity and a simple visual. The repetitive motion of the rope provides a calming feeling. As with repetition the viewer is aware of the whole object viewing the work in its entirety from any viewing position. Much to the similarity of Donald Judd’s concept of the whole, the repetition of the rope and material the viewer is instantly aware of the recurrence and begins to duplicate their visualisation of the repetition (Knowing and visualising the areas they cannot see), Thus creating a calming visual piece.

Mono-ha

After looking at the work of Susumu Koshimizu and Kishio Suga and their past work more I discovered that they are both part of an art group called Mono-ha. Although there is little written about Mono-ha I did find out a little about the group, the artists involved, and their work.

Mono-ha refers to a Japanese post-war art group primarily active in the sixties and early seventies, using raw materials in their artwork. Their aim was to bring together and combine these raw materials in a simple way, maintaining their natural ‘unaltered’ form and allowing the materials and their relationships together and the space around them to speak for themselves. The aim of the group was to use new materials and challenge the pre-existing perceptions of these materials, viewing them on a new level.

There are eight main artists associated with this loosely knit group – Nobuo Sekine, Lee Ufan, Katsuro Yoshida, Susumu Koshimizu, Koji Enokura, Kishio Suga, Noboru Takayama and Katsuhiko Naria.

Very little of the Mono-ha work has been seen since it was made, but in 2012 a large amount of their work was exhibited at the Blum & Poe in Los Angeles which was organised and curated by Mika Yoshitake.[1]The exhibition entitled ‘Requiem for the Sun’ displayed a large amount of their work, giving a fresh look at Mono-ha and its work.

Aside from Koshimiu and Suga, whose work at the Tate Modern led me to Mono-ha, there is chiefly one piece from the Blum & Poe exhibition that need mentioning. (It would be too lengthy to go through every artist). Lee Ufan exhibited work which was entitled ‘Relatum III’ (a place within a certain situation) (1970). Relatum III consists four large wooden blocks placed around the four sides of one of the steel support beams in the gallery. The four wooden blocks are tied to the beam with thick rope wrapped around the beam, holding them in place. Visually Ufan’s use of material is exactly alike to my own intentions, which was the initial allure to this piece, but it is Ufan’s concept of the work that sustained my interest.

A second piece by Ufan from the same series, entitled ‘Relatum’ consists of a large stone resting on the top of a large piece of glass that has cracked and broken under the pressure of the stone. Ufan comments on this pies stating as follows,

‘If a heavy stone happens to hit glass, the glass breaks. But if an artist’s ability to act as a mediator is weak, there will be more to see than a trivial physical accident…. Something has to come out of the relationship of tension represented by the artist, the glass, and the stone. It is only when a fissure results from the cross-permeation of the three elements in this triangular relationship that, for the first time, the glass becomes an object of art.’[2]

My interpretation of this is that Lee Ufan is stating that the artist’s interaction and deliberate exploration of these materials, and their properties and physicality, proposes a reaction between the contrasting materials. It is within the artists action of deliberately making these reactions that it becomes a reaction of art, and not just a natural consequence of materials. With my own work, the pairing of materials creates juxtaposition between the materials and the space they are displayed in. I feel that it is this deliberate intention to create material combinations and joining that warrants the final object to be art. By having involvement in the material in this way, whether as the artist of the viewer, the work becomes something more than simply materials and becomes a deliberate examination of their properties.

[1] Blum & Poe
REQUIEM FOR THE SUN: THE ART OF MONO-HA
http://www.blumandpoe.com/exhibitions/requiem-sun-…

[2] Munroe, A, (1994) p.265, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, exh. Cat. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

Continuing with my visit to the Tate Modern, there were two works in particular that I wanted to talk about. The first piece is by the artist Seung-Taek Lee and the work is entitled ‘godret stone’. The work consists of multiple stones suspended on cord at differing heights from a long plank of wood. Both visually and ideologically this piece is similar to my own work and firstly in the visual sense, the use of materials and his method of combining them resemble my early work form last year. The use of rustic, imperfect materials and combining them in a non-clinical manner, to create an almost organic piece.

Also Lee was interested in the way the physical materiality of the stones changed by suspending them from the cord. He explored the nature of the materials he used, taking a stone that is heavy and suspending it from the cord in order to give the stone the illusion of floating, taking away its natural physical properties.

Kishio Suga is the second artist whose work I particularly took notice of, having a large stone based piece placed in the centre of the room. Entitled Ren-Shiki-Tai the piece consists of stone planks constructed into a square, balancing the stones on top of each other and tied together with wire so that it is unclear what is supporting and what is supported. Suga’s main concern is in the exploration of space, with the square layout having a small opening on one side, showing a joining of the ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ and the boundary and interaction between them .
His use of space and exploration of it through material is something that I also have considered, using the rope in my work to use a space or surface. By filling an area I draw attention to it, and if the viewer is to walk around, inside or over that area to engage with the space, they will also engage with the materials too. Using a space within a piece of work gives the space a different physicality, interacting with the work and changing its atmosphere.