Reflections
Mapping my practice has been a really useful and insightful way of taking a measure of where my practice sits presently but it has also given me the opportunity to reflect on the past and start planning for the future. This I am doing not just by recording here on the web folio but also by having taken time to start actioning projects through whatever means necessary. For instance I have taken time and consideration to arrange meetings in order to start the ball rolling to create a viable, annual residency. This has taken time, patience and a lot of hard work to acheive and hopefully it will pay off. I have also looked to cast my net further afield by networking with artists external to my normal circle of peers. I am constantly looking to find opportunities to work with fellow artists in different locations and through different forums.
Flaneuse, The Urban Wanderer
Baudelaire’s writings coincided with the infamous Salon des in installment form in Figaro. The publication of the article coincided with the infamous Salon des Réfusés and the debut of Édouard Manet as an artist of scandal. Suddenly, what had been an indefinable concern, about content and technique in art making, became critical and current. Manet had presented a courtesan as a modern “Venus,” a prostitute as a modern “Nude,” and had quoted Renaissance artists, Raphael and Titian to do so. In addition, the painter had shunned “good” drawing and approved “finish” for a causal and notational manner of recording. The Painter of Modern Life made sense of what Manet had done to art—made painting “modern.”
There is a real question as to whether or not the “painter” of whom Baudelaire wrote was less important than the essay itself. Constantin Guys was crucial to the main point of the essay. Guys working methods were traditional in that he looked, he saw, he scribbled and then, using his memory, completed his thought later in a sketch-like record.
Baudelaire saw Guys as a bohemian hero, an outsider, the “observer, philosopher, flâneur” and as “the painter of the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity it contains.” Like Baudelaire, he, a “man of the crowd,” was a journalist who was trained to watch and look carefully, especially at the details. Baudelaire made the point, over and over, that the flâneur was someone who is traveling “incognito” or, in other words, the flâneur fades into the crowd, unnoticed.
I feel that this penultimate point of fading into a crowd is how I perceive my practice presently as I do not look to be noticeable.
The significant value of The Painter of Modern Life is what and whom Guys, the grown man, found interesting. “Modern Life,” for Baudelaire, appeared to be located among la bohème, which, in itself, was a creation of the modern world.
Charles Baudelaire
ThePainter of Modern Life
(Text)
Charles Baudelaire
Quote
Non Place & Relational Aesthetics
The term relational aesthetics was created by curator Nicholas Bourriaud in the 1990s to describe the tendency he noticed in fine art practice to make art based on, or inspired by, human relations and their social context. My work fits within these parameters.
The French curator Nicholas Bourriaud published a book called Relational Aesthetics in 1998 in which he defined the term as:
'A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space'
He saw artists as facilitators rather than makers and regarded art as information exchanged between the artist and the viewers. The artist, in this sense, gives audiences access to power and the means to change the world.
Bourriaud cited the art of Gillian Wearing, Philippe Parreno, Douglas Gordon and Liam Gillick as artists who work to this agenda.
I feel that the didactic from my work falls into the relational aesthetic hemisphere although the interactions I have to public spaces are personal and private thoughts.
Art of Interaction: A Theoretical Examination of Carsten Höller’s Test Site.
This is a paper which looks at the interactivity of Carsten Höller’s Test Site 2006, using Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998) and Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998).
Gillian Wearing OBE
'I'm desperate' 1992-
3Colour photograph on paper
Carsten Höller
Test Site
Tate Modern
Hi Vis -Low Vis
Baudelaire’s writings coincided with the infamous Salon des in installment form in Figaro. The publication of the article coincided with the infamous Salon des Réfusés and the debut of Édouard Manet as an artist of scandal. Suddenly, what had been an indefinable concern, about content and technique in art making, became critical and current. Manet had presented a courtesan as a modern “Venus,” a prostitute as a modern “Nude,” and had quoted Renaissance artists, Raphael and Titian to do so. In addition, the painter had shunned “good” drawing and approved “finish” for a causal and notational manner of recording. The Painter of Modern Life made sense of what Manet had done to art—made painting “modern.”
There is a real question as to whether or not the “painter” of whom Baudelaire wrote was less important than the essay itself. Constantin Guys was crucial to the main point of the essay. Guys working methods were traditional in that he looked, he saw, he scribbled and then, using his memory, completed his thought later in a sketch-like record.
Baudelaire saw Guys as a bohemian hero, an outsider, the “observer, philosopher, flâneur” and as “the painter of the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity it contains.” Like Baudelaire, he, a “man of the crowd,” was a journalist who was trained to watch and look carefully, especially at the details. Baudelaire made the point, over and over, that the flâneur was someone who is traveling “incognito” or, in other words, the flâneur fades into the crowd, unnoticed.
I feel that this penultimate point of fading into a crowd is how I perceive my practice presently as I do not look to be noticeable.
The significant value of The Painter of Modern Life is what and whom Guys, the grown man, found interesting. “Modern Life,” for Baudelaire, appeared to be located among la bohème, which, in itself, was a creation of the modern world.
Damien Meade
Peter McDonald
Under Construction
Under Construction here denotes a 'double entendre' referencing my studies of a construction site and the development of my practice.
As reflected in my Artist's Statement my work questions my inability to love a place, and my obsession with transience. It is driven by my rootlessness through a desire to understand the psychological implications: the psychogeography. Being in a state of constant flux, crossing boundaries and moving between emotional states is how I constantly feel.
The work I have produced started as an observation that became a repetitive process but I allowed each painting to evolve in its own unique way and I have edited out elements and created new elements. I created my own set of rules that were imposed on each piece. The filled space was as important as the unfilled space, the interstice. The paintings slowly become more complex and the structure created would be impossible to fabricate out of rebar, but they are all linked. Like a building everything needs to be connected or the structure will fail, as Bouriard suggested.
The imagery becomes dystopian with fluorescent accents to imply the hi-vis safety protection worn by construction site workers and the manmade marks that are visible. These fluorescent marks also reference post World War II and plastic modernity; it is an artificial pigment it reflects the fabricated nature of a construction site.
In my head the rebar itself has become a metaphor for people as they are present, yet absent, they glue the environment yet are invisible. Without the strength and support of the rebar there would be no environment. I have begun to paint portraits of sculptures and man-made places.
'Claiming...'
Contextualising and analysing my practice has thrown up some new and interesting territories. I have recently been considering how my practice relates to areas such as Psychogeography, Non place and the Interstice.
Looking at artists such as Alex Hartley whose latest works embroil thoughts of modernism and its legacy, as well as the ideas of ruins/relics. However there are also elements of narrative where the viewer arrives at a situation of ambiguous cause and uncertain outcome that I have chosen to embrace. I have used this language of ambiguity to reconsider how places I have passed through have a history of memories. I interrogate the moment I have recorded photographically and decide how that may work visually through my rendering in paint. Warily, I step away from using the figure as a focal point and invite the viewer to enter 'Somewhere only I know'. It is uncomfortable for me but the intention is a visually ambiguity for the viewer. Ideas of privacy and voyeurism are the objective with contradictions of modernist aspiration giving rise to the desire for boundaries of other kinds. I have started to render this almost with a dystopian lilt.
My practice has intentionally moved away from the overt narrative with the figure, where once I questioned whether my work sat on the peripheries of portraiture today I am looking more at a portrait of a place and how I site myself emotionally within that arena.
Ian McKeever
Matt's Gallery
Mark Wallinger
Video Still
Psychogeography
Psychogeography describes the effect of geographical location on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. How do different places make us feel and behave?
The term invented by Guy Debord in 1955 in order to explore this psychology.
Artists that I have looked at in relation to this terminology and practice include:
Patrick Keiller, Susan Philipsz, Alex Hartley, George Shaw, Mark Wallinger,
Robert Therrien, Gillian Wearing, Lois Wenberger, Richard Long, Graham Crowley, Peter Doig, Nathaniel Rackowe
Interstice
Bourriaud considered the relational form of artwork as social "," a place to learn to inhabit the world in a better way, where art "tightens the space of relations" between spectators so that art becomes a glue of social relations. This has become the foundation of my way of thinking a tackling my practice while interrogating the materials and structure of a construction site.
Bourriaud’s argument, highlights his theory and practice of ‘relational aesthetics.’ Although the ‘relational aesthetics’ movement constitutes a relatively recent development in contemporary art, Bourriaud has reflected effectively on a leading group of artists from the past decade and beyond producing a interconnected aesthetic structure to interpret these developments. This may have acted as a guide to contemporary art today, with Bourriaud describing carefully the way in which ‘relational aesthetics’ both rejects and incorporates the important themes modernity exercised upon art. Bourriard suggested “It is not modernity that is dead, but its idealistic and teleological version.” By this Bourriard meant that the modern hopes for rational certainty or political utopias that fuelled the artistic enterprise during the twentieth century have completely exhausted themselves. Art no longer draws its inspiration from optimistic visions and has turned its efforts to less grandiose projects. “Art was intended to prepare and announce a future world: today it is modeling possible universes,” microcosmic universes of authentic human sociability. ‘Relational aesthetics’ is much less a consequence of the ideological or philosophical dilemmas of modernity than merely a reaction to the practical concerns of human interaction in our present world.
Alison Hands
Birds 3
Arthouse1
Brad Lochore
Shadow No.52
Towner Gallery
Spatial & Visual Awareness
Doreen Massey manages to describe a certain way of perceiving movement in space which I have been - and still am - working with on different levels in my work: i.e. the idea that space is not something static and neutral, a frozen entity, but is something intertwined with time and thus ever changing . Doreen's descriptions of her journey through England for example are clear and precise accounts of this idea, and she very sharply characterizes the attempts not to recognize this idea as utopian and nostalgic.
Doreen Massey makes an impassioned argument for revitalising our imagination of space. She takes on some well-established assumptions from philosophy, and some familiar ways of characterising the 21st century world, and shows how they restrain our understanding of both the challenge and the potential of space.
The way we think about space matters. It inflects our understandings of the world, our attitudes to others, our politics. It affects, for instance, the way we understand globalisation, the way we approach cities, the way we develop, and practice, a sense of place. If time is the dimension of change then space is the dimension of the social: the contemporaneous co-existence of others. That is its challenge, and one that has been persistently evaded. For Space pursues its argument through philosophical and theoretical engagement, and through telling personal and political reflection. Doreen Massey asks questions such as how best to characterise these so-called spatial times, how it is that implicit spatial assumptions inflect our politics, and how we might develop a responsibility for place beyond place.
This book is 'for space' in that it argues for a reinvigoration of the spatiality of our implicit cosmologies. For Space is essential reading for anyone interested in space and the spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities. Serious, and sometimes irreverent, it is a compelling manifesto: for re-imagining spaces for these times and facing up to their challenge.
Doreen Massey
For Space (Text)
Fiona Robinson
Small Unstable Horizon
Ai Weiwei
Response to Current Migrant Crisis
Alex Hartley
A gentle Collapsing
Victoria Miro
Practice and Collaboration
A huge part of my practice over the course of the MFA has involved self- initiating and managing external projects such as staging and curating exhibitions as well as setting up and managing residencies.
During the last unit it became obvious that Antony Dixon and I had a number of areas, interests and objectives in common and were already working collaboratively. Over the summer we had room to discuss the future and possibilities. Together we have slowly been building up ideas both in terms of how our practices can progress working collaboratively and how we may, as practitioners, become sustainable.
Through Antony's unwavering support when I was setting up the Bank Street Residency, Canary Wharf, London, we realised that we were both looking at the future through the same lens and have been in constant discussions over how we may proceed collectively.
I have worked collaboratively with Antony during Park 16.
Antony has supported me in finalising the artists for the Intersections shows at the Kaleidoscope Gallery, Sevenoaks, Kent.
We have been attending monthly meetings at UAL Holborm with the careers and employability division and have been to various pertinent seminars and workshops in order to grow or knowledge and gain some new contacts.
Self Initiated Group Show Intersections
Self Initiated Artists Residency, London UK
'I don't know how to love a place...'
I have always struggled to understand how to love a place. To me a house is only a home when there are people you love in it. Do Ho Suh states that "When you think about the home, it’s permanent, always there." Despite the ubiquitous nature of homes, buildings and man made structures there is a strange fascination for me for this meagreness, the mediocrity, ordinary, tangible and transient nature of recognition of a man made structure, space or environment. I float around wondering if there is anywhere I can call home. I question what place draws my attention and why. Is it a sense of familiarity, voyuerism or is it the displacement I have felt all my life.
In order to consider, interrogate and attempt to love a place I have been studying construction sites which are transient places constantly evolving. I have discovered rebar. In my head I have found a parallel between rebar and people both of which fascinate me. The rebar glues the buildings together and the people glue the environment. The two co-exist feeding one another, yet in reality they are very present yet often very absent, remote yet connected. They come in a variety of sizes and physical states. This all feels so familiar. For me the rendering of my work has been honest and now starts to read as dystopian, ambiguous with vivid fluorescent marks denoting repetition.
Alison Hands
Arthouse1
Aime Segal
South London Gallery