- So a new year dawns and my attempt to look sexy in a PVC Santa suit purchased from a sexy super store in the post Christmas sale begins to loose it's gloss. If we can only truly understand things in the past perhaps I need a little more distance from this impulsive purchase. If Walter Benjamin could see that suit crumpled on my bedroom floor he would be overcome by it's immense shadow.
Anyway I've had a nice break over Christmas and done lots of thinking around Artemis and the project. I'm 90 percent happy with the way things have gone so far as I think I've learnt a lot about my work and how I want it to develop These are now so clear in my head I can almost write them as bullet points which I think I should do as I am often accused of going around the houses.
1. I think I have a much bigger social responsability than I realised and feel funny about been paid to produce my own work or have cpd opportunities ( This was unexpected)
2. I am really interested in sites and how I can influence them through practise.
3. Both me and Kate work very differently but we are both trying to engage people to look at things differently.
4. I've become really interested in the Agency of objects and ideas and I'm not sure where this has come from but it feels like the start of something - Doorstops spring to mind.
5. I find it hard to make space to make - something always comes up and gets in the way - I feel like Kate has much more focus than me and this is something about the discipline of drawing - I don't think I have a discipline and need to work on this - if my discipline is shifting systems and thought I need to understand this better.
6. I really want to collaborate more with other artists I think this will move my practise on as it will encourage me to communicate better.
So these are things I think I'm beginning to understand a bit better. I am going to take the pressure off and put it on again by not been too focused on producing a new body of work but giving myself a big chunk of time to work just on this project in April through to June so I can better define what my work might look like and how it will have Agency.
Working with lots of Artists on CP projects who feel like they are losing site of their own practise because they are doing too much work in schools I think I have had a good handle on this for a while but this project makes me question this as it is so much more personal but this also makes it feel a bit like a student project - a bit indulgent which goes back to bullet point 1 I think I will tackle this head on so I understand what my problem is. I think I need to become more positive about the role of artists within society and a bit more confident about my role and then it will not be as big an issue it will also be good for me professionally as I have noticed myself putting myself down a bit to much lately and this is very bad if your self employed and want to get people to engage with your work as if I think it's a bit pants everybody else will. Perhaps this is the result of a little two much navel gazing and not giving the project enough dedicated time which I always promise to do but never quite manage. So the Artemis project is becoming phased into introduction, exploration, and production and maybe this pattern could be something I carry into future work.
3 comments:
have been thinking in a post flu head not real together haze about your doorstops and agency stuff. Part os me thinks that their agancy is in there function, like the sticks of mine, but then when they are written on they change. Surely it works best with the ethno room one because of all the other ideas and assoc it brings , the object expands and we are challenged to read the multiple ,layers. Do we read the 98th floor [or whatever floor it is] one as just from any tall building or do we start to consider the possibilites of where it might have come from..... im not sure unless the presentation like the fried breakfasts start to lend a hand. Intereested to know whats your thinking and how do they go beyind a bixarre collection eg, the mans ratioon books i saw in the paper this morning. -is it about a few select ones?
Yes i see the metaphor of the stolen door stop / closed/ open door thing, and i like the fact someone has now had to find / makje
another stop . i like to think of these things it makes me smile,
if the work is to be succesful what is it to do?
hey also thinking now about your changing thinking and systems practice and your social responsibility..............that while its internalised it does nothing, other than for you and the few who are involved in the thoughts, but is this enough ?
You talk about a responsibilty yet this practice could be seen as self indulgent, what do you think? Is the closed and conceptual effective if not disipated to a larger audience? I like to think about your work and ideas i like what they do, i think the idea that you need to show this work off and expand the audience interactioon may do something positive, and start to answer alsort of connundrums
I am interested in the agency of objects too and also in objects that lose agency as the narrative supercedes it.
I think this idea of useful ness is very interesting.
I spent New year with 5 people I had never met before and surrounded myself with books about British Social Anthropology.
What was interesting was how important they thought they were but really they were doing what we have all been doing on this project.
My interest this year is in ways of creating taxonomies, grids and patterns with objects.
More anon
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