well, currently fighting with function and insinuated function within the work im making.
How to represent measurements in a way that means i do not just remake tools for the job, but also do not just make boring objects that are dead, clean, new looknig and a bit boring. How to make a library look like a library and not like a faux library.
i can collect through drawing but how does this make them not just fetishised canoes? yes the object is valued, celebrated and invested with time, looking and thought, but its not real.
If i make the measurements as objects they look like country pub items.
But it seems that the chain me dad and i used yesterday, that he made for various jobs- sums up the everyday, the violence, the creative, the reality of the farm. So how do i show it, its function, the meaning, its narrative and its value in an authentic way?
Sorry steve, more questions that no one has to answer specifically
Also photo of my plate post breakfast, interesting in a lost, imagine it memory way
8 comments:
Hi Kate,
Maybe you can't show function, meaning and narrative in an authentic way. Maybe you can only do it if that makes sense. It's like the walking stick that I once found in a bush in southern Italy (I've got it at home). I was so pleased and I knew it had been abandoned by one of the Shepherds because I'd seen him with his new one the same day with the same design. I took it with me on a walk feeling so proud until I realized it was about to break and that was why it had been abandoned. So I brought it home and can't use it but only look at it.
yes but its interesting to you because of the story, for other it looks like a broken old stick, and therefore an aesthetic comes into play, yet we as a viewer build a narrative of it and you etc, . So i suppose instead i should ask how do i stop the objects just being aesthetic , or stopped by giving the audience too much info, - for example now i know the story of your stick , when i see it it will only ever be a stick you found in a bush etc, where as before the story it can be anything.
I suppose by authentic i mean straight forward and with out fetishisation , but a represenatation that also allows the viewers head to go places , to build a story to be provoked etc. but not literally directed and told.
OH i dont know, but yes your right in that you can only be true to the object and story you personally know, and thanks for that response, just waffling this reply has made me think about my drawings differently.
Hi Kate,
Not to be too oblique and I know I Joke a lot about mind body duality but I wonder if you need to refine your struggle. We all have a relationship to the objects which surround us and objects which evolve personal meaning (Through sedemented layer of lived experience and extented narratives.) So it's sort of accepted that the people who veiw your work will draw from it a different set of meanings or perhaps values depending on their own lived experience. Tim is interested in the stick as it represents a way of life which he may of romantisied he fetishiese the stick because he keeps it as a trophy- and withouit drawing or representing it in any way it becomes an object of meaning. This meaning is tied fundemntally to it's function - like the search for the perfect Kattypult stick as a child or the piece of Shim just the right thickness to pack out the bearing on the big end of a moterbike cylender the objects have different meaning and value in different sites - sorry to state the obvious. The sticks which become measures are funtional and when they become broken they loose their use but to the people who used or found them perhaps not their meaning as this is sedemented into our individual realities in different ways.
So I'm waffling a bit but what I'm trying to say is perhaps like my fear at being seduced by the intrinsic qualities of the object and wanting to make something new bring a new thing into the world is also an issue for you as the qualities of the original objects seem more potent than the items you can make which goes back to perhaps producing slick artwork which pushes all the write buttons but is infact by it's own definition Kitch.
To hopefully simplyfy what I'm trying to say is - Are you trying to transfer the value, honesty, and meaning of an individual object within a very specific context into another domain and try to maintain it's essential qualities? If so perhaps the strongest idea you have is the inspiration of dicordent shelving - the bugbear of your interim show and the thing you seem to be drawn to in the farm- Artemis and shops selling stuff. Do you think that the feeling of this chaotic funtional organisation fits a installation based approach which does not seem to be where you want to go - Have you thought about widening the context of the work in terms of exhibiting- Web cam link to the farm to objects in situe may be one of those naff ideas again which may be too literal but perhaps somewhere down this chain of thinking - linking the library more directly to it's funtion in the display a clearer piece of work may develop.
of course i agree with what you said about the meaning in objects and our own built narratives, So i suppose im intertested in what happens when you put those items together, what narrative is suggested, what does it give the viewer.etc. The personal stories are mine and not released, so it allows the viewer to make up their own story. So the collection of these are fascinating, in the home - made russian book way. But through the act of representing fundamental items, i subvert them through scale and visual scrutiny, so yes the originals objects are more potent perhaps, but through the act of altered represenataion, not just photogrpahy they are converted to become i hope their own selves in the drawings, so i hope not kitsch, as i want them to do more than just be beautiful drawings, but in fact also let the drawing technique itself allow the viewer to grasp the origin of the object as well as pass on its nature .
The shelves are of course the most fascinating because like the objects they are real, built up through function, time and dwelling, as you say i need to find a way to represent them, but not through rebuilds, or installation awful ness. The boxes on everyones desks at artemis are the same, functional, overlooked, yet so revealing. So my library needs to be the same, built up over time, real and functioning and as the woman at the conference said peculiar to me. but its how to collect these measures to begin the library, are they lines on a piece of paper, a piece of string, a photo / video of the real thing in use, or just the stories recounted.who knows, perhaps its different for each thing, but only when i start the library will it become real and like those shelves. I think then i worry about how you present it.
Sorry could go on but wont
other than to say i accept i am the selector of the potent objects and i just need to decided what it is i am trying to say, what do i want it to do and how does it look - not too much then?
Also really worried i will end up with a show that looks like those shows, that are the studio moved into a gallery space.or just pictures for sale.
Hi Kate.
Think we should talk about your show as this may be an interesting contrast in the reasons for making work and the idea of audience. ASlso check out Plato on measuremnets and lines and geometry - there is a platonic paradox to the idea of measurement and function. Agree about installation or studio in gallery - it doesn't have to be one or the other - perhaps you should make the show for the context it enters which is very specific but show the work somewhere else and reference this somehow at the royal college.
Don't know if you'll read this as you may have moved on Kate. I guess that my problems with this discussion is that I love the drawing that you posted on this site. Really love it. Would like to own it and have it on a wall. There for me an immense value in doing that alone. Like Steve said at the time (or something related to this) the skill of drawing is a very real and authentic thing that 'does' everything you want of it without you having to 'do' anything else.
I agree with Tim but maybe not just skill maybe process and the way to the work lies in making this visable and integral.
yep.
what was it we are told "actions speak louder than words" and "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me".
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