Artists, art and artefacts

othering

2008-04-23T13:29:00.000-07:00

well, we came we saw we presented and were regulary othered.
were back and we had a good if not a hard work time. Thank you lou and kate for input, you were voices and quotes within our talk.
steve will no doubt say that i was negative about our performance but as always in hindsight all things can be improved upon.
However i think we made [or should i say steve more than me] our mark and as such are thinking of turning to radical cartography as a response to the neo liberals!

above is photo of a small section of a collection of botanically correct 3D glass flower and cross sections contained in the Boston Natural History Museum which believe it or not rendered us both speech less for a good 10 minutes!!!

shift from function to meaning

2008-04-07T09:47:00.001-07:00

Well it's apparently the most influencial piece of art ever made. Old Duchamps fountain function to meaning in all it's glorious simplisity. Kate Pahl comments on Boston talk so good I need to publish them and final comment very interesting - can we reverse it for the achedemics to make things more interesting are you bringing the Comtempory socially engaged arts practise into the ethnographic project - we must have a new project in here somewhere just need a funder

STEVE

Systems of objects – linking back to the abstract- our worlds are shaped by our interaction with made objects. Kate P explores objects and meaning and objects as collective texts and looks through an ethnographic material culture lens. We explore objects and their personal resonances and meanings through practical making and juxtaposition. This paper presents the notion that through collaboration Artist and ethnographer can work side by side to explore the same area of study and use their distinct approaches to enhance and triangulate research to produce outcomes which have value within both the artistic and academic context. Presenting the idea of validation for art practise within the academy but also the validation and visability of ethnographic research within the sites and communities explored.

Quote Baudrillaud

So perhaps talk about the fact that we are interested in the same thing and open to sharing insights rather than looking for a tool or a resource or something to study.

Set the scene:
Artemis – the background to residency, why academics
Background to our practice, what as artists do we do.

Conversation bit:
Kate we want you in this conversation – we intend to flash up paragraphs on a power point, so you become part of the conversation. In red is our questions
Kate’s bit:

Kate Pahl – where am I coming from:

· My work had been looking at ‘sedimented identities in texts’ (Rowsell and Pahl 2007) how far could this theory be applied to artists?
· I had increasingly been looking at ways of creating material cultural displays in museums that reflected home objects – Ferham families grew out of that (www.ferhamfamilies.com) and more recently a project developing a family learning resource pack called Every Object Tells a Story (www.everyobjecttellsastory.org)
· I wanted to work across homes, schools and museums to look at how artefacts open up learning and literacy.
· This project, with its focus on the role of a collection of artefacts, Artemis, in opening up learning, plus with a focus on two artists and their work, was therefore ideal for me.

I see the role of artist as a kind of ‘fast academic’ (in conversation Steve Pool 2006) and wanted to work with artists for the following reasons:

· Steve and Kate were working on themes that I was interested, in particular how ways of being could be described in their art,
· They were also working across domains of communities, schools and museums in a way I wanted to learn from
· I saw their work as a kind of intellectual visual space I could both learn from and contribute to

The role of Artist - seeing the value in the difference – frame of reference and lens
We are interested in systems, community, people and objects therefore the collboration is affective, reference art and anthropologly book. Please comment
Relationship to the field – do we /can we have a different relationship to ‘field”

Process of doing the project – artists and academics together:

· Collaborative, dialogic meaning making in project team meetings.
· Process of learning from each other, not seeing ‘academic as expert’ or ‘visual artist as expert’ but looking at cross-over.
· Ethnography seemed important site for this generative collaborative intellectual work
· Making the familiar strange (Agar 1996) important for project

We think that the AAA will like the fact that we are both practising artists and we want to sort of let the work do a bit of the talking for us so this bit is the meat of the presentation and we want to make the dialogue about the pieses why and how they work their agency the ability for a piece to make thinking visiable and be about very complex things but in fact be very simple. We also want to feel confident about what we are talking about and felt we could address the main points in our abstract submission by talking about the work rather than abstract ideas which seems
Steve bit – breakfasts - altering system and meaning
Kate bit – dwelling, we all have to dwell, function and meaning and how that says everything. Value.

Value, summing up, ideas for future
Kate / Lou please say something about the items in red
Where is the value in this kind of work? Where do we want to go?
Validation – do we and can this be about validating each others work, rather than the artist being the resource to open up academies. Not make work about people but with people.
Revelations – what does this collaboration offer for new ways of working and thinking for future. –

Kate’s bit

Kate Pahl found it useful to go back to the origins of British Social Anthropology to think through Kate G’s work. Her work, in focusing on the everyday usefulness of tools on her family farm, reminded Kate of the shift in British Social Anthropology from Function to Meaning (Pocock 1985) and the way in which the cargoes in Malinowski’s fieldwork in his seminal 1023 book, Cargoes of the Western Pacific, were analysed in relation to their function, whereas Mary Douglas in her book Purity and Danger (1950’s) focused on wider issues of symbolism and meaning in her study of Leviticus. The work of British Social Anthropology enabled there to be a connection across the project Kate was engaged in to a reflection on an academic tradition and to understand more clearly the role of anthropology in looking at the relationships between objects and people.

The project team saw these ideas as generative when looking at a collection of objects as vast and randomly assembled as the Leeds Artemis collection, which was a collection of objects derived from museums, with their own logic of practice.
The artists’ use of the Aura Scorer, deriving from Walter Benjamin, while light-hearted, pointed to a more serious discussion the team had about value, identities and objects.
Objects had their own Auras, that could be graded and assessed and these gradings were tied to identity narratives that could be summonsed with particular objects.

Joint phd’s artist and academis working in same ‘field’ to explore same subject

I would like to see this continue with a kind of interrogation of some key domains of academic knowledge eg social anthropology with you and Kate doing a test site of this eg ethnography, doing tools etc and me and Lou discussing the moving of ideas from academic to artistic domain through that.

We are quite confident speaking about our thing and the theory around it. Our concerns are we don’t want to sound thick or ill informed. Yet we want it to be accessable and personal.
Please advise
Do we need to frame it more in an academic context. Shall we talk about praxis. What about material culture stuff do you think we need

I think you could mention the Pocock stuff – move from Function to Meaning in your work (Kate G could do that bit)
I also like the focus on Benjamin and how you adapted his ideas for your own. (both of you)
What I think is interesting is your TAKE on academic ideas. Academics are very solemn and alsways cite stuff. You have a more playful approach. (both of you)
Therefore the shift from function to meaning becomes both re-vitalised and re-contextualised.

There! I have it!
This project had been about re-contextualising academic ideas in the artistic domain.
This is so interesting.
Will write later as am in Dorset and it is very far away.

our idea for boston - planning stage

2008-04-04T12:20:00.000-07:00

Systems of objects – linking back to the abstract- our worlds are shaped by our interaction with made objects. Kate P explores objects and meaning and objects as collective texts and looks through an ethnographic material culture lens. We explore objects and their personal resonances and meanings through practical making and juxtaposition. This paper presents the notion that through collaboration Artist and ethnographer can work side by side to explore the same area of study and use their distinct approaches to enhance and triangulate research to produce outcomes which have value within both the artistic and academic context. Presenting the idea of validation for art practise within the academy but also the validation and visability of ethnographic research within the sites and communities explored.

Quote Baudrillaud
So perhaps talk about the fact that we are interested in the same thing and open to sharing insights rather than looking for a tool or a resource or something to study.

Set the scene:
Artemis – the background to residency, why academics
Background to our practice, what as artists do we do.

Conversation bit:
Kate we want you in this conversation – we intend to flash up paragraphs on a power point, so you become part of the conversation. In red is our questions
Role of artist? role of academic?
The role of Artist - seeing the value in the difference – frame of reference and lens
We are interested in systems, community, people and objects therefore the collboration is affective, reference art and anthropologly book. Please comment
Relationship to the field – do we /can we have a different relationship to ‘field”
We are thinking to introduce that people are participants in the project,and not subjects of a study and we are not sure academics do that, are we right?

We think that the AAA will like the fact that we are both practising artists and we want to sort of let the work do a bit of the talking for us so this bit is the meat of the presentation and we want to make the dialogue about the pieses why and how they work their agency the ability for a piece to make thinking visiable and be about very complex things but in fact be very simple. We also want to feel confident about what we are talking about and felt we could address the main points in our abstract submission by talking about the work rather than abstract ideas which seems
Steve bit – breakfasts - altering system and meaning
Kate bit – dwelling, we all have to dwell, function and meaning and how that says everything. Value.

Value, summing up, ideas for future
Kate / Lou please say something about the items in red
Where is the value in this kind of work? Where do we want to go?
Validation – do we and can this be about validating each others work, rather than the artist being the resource to open up academies. Not make work about people but with people.
Revelations – what does this collaboration offer for new ways of working and thinking for future. -Joint phd’s artist and academis working in same ‘field’ to explore same subject

We are quite confident speaking about our thing and the theory around it. Our concerns are we don’t want to sound thick or ill informed. Yet we want it to be accessable and personal.
Please advise
Do we need to frame it more in an academic context. Shall we talk about praxis. What about material culture stuff do you think we need

Getting to the point

2008-04-02T00:07:00.000-07:00

I've pulled these two questions from the abstract. I think these can form the context for the Paper in Boston - me and Kate G can talk about how we approach these ideas - I would say something about informing the system I'm working within shaping it's function through meaning adding to the world of objects and questioning meaning by making an object which challenges function within a system or value structure- which is the English breakfast piece - I'm really clear on how all this fits in - Kate G could do something perhaps around ideas of a collection (Rather than just collecting) Kate P and Lou can you think of your slant/ approach on this and we could all perhaps look for points of synergy or where collaberation has helped us to see things from a new perspective - perhaps this idea of creative triangulation has some milage in it. Also I like Kims idea that because an object is there it must have a provenance it asserts itself through it's thingness (Is this Phenomology) "This is this this isn't something else" So an object never really looses it's provenance because this always sits external to it - it's the human part of the equation the thing which allows us to connect to the past and the future - do we need to have somesort of material culture studies input I think it's here we may look a bit thick - I can talk to my archeologist friends - I know a flint expert working at stonehenge and he may be able to give an interesting slant as he is a real focussed specialist or perhaps we just need to focuss in on ethnography and not worry about material culture.

How do objects move in meaning, or move from function to meaning?Does it matter if an object has no provenance?What happens if there is a narrative and no object (the case of the disappearing object)Are objects merely taking their menaing from their form and function or do they acquire new identities as new resonsances and echoes take hold of them?

a bit from me

2008-03-25T03:06:00.000-07:00

well , i am also reading the baudrillard system of objects which i concur is very interesting,
I like the bit about handicrafts and by what has been created by someones hand, and how we are fascinated because the moment of their creation can not be reproduced.......all of this part i like..... Intersting perhaps in reference to steves breakfasts and doorstops, and my subject and 3D digital prints, beceause if im right they become functional objects but also mythological....

But what i wanted to say was, i am reading alongside this book - A journey around my room by Xavier de Maistre, I love the echo from each, I hope you know it. But what i like about reading the two together is the Baudrillard one is like the kate and Lou bit of this project and the Xavier one is like me and steve, both deal with the same thing, they just approach it very differently. The first has decided and theorised until he has the answer, the second is pondering, undecided and practical. But both try to find an answer in reference to objects.

This is this

2008-03-19T02:44:00.000-07:00

This is This All my thinking started of from this bit in the dear Hunter. So I thought I should put it in. I'm not that interested in warn things in terms of this project only to the extent that we pretend that objects carry with them more traces or signs of their history in the marks or scraches on them - which is funny as when we collect antiques condition is everything - reading or rather dipping into (It's next to the toilet. ) Jean Baudrillards Systems of objects really interesting [Video]

Thanks Steve

2008-03-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

For getting us back to the blog.
I do value this space, just been sitting in St Thomas's hospital for 2 weeks, with my father in law, he died last Tuesday.
BUT I have also done some thinking about this project
Thought 1 I shared with Kate which is this:
1. As artists you focus on the thing itself, the object, Kate looks at traces of sheep on grass, Steve looks at worn objects then makes replicas.
This is a sort of phenomenological (ie the thing like aspect of objects) approach, one that looks without the academic 'gaze' but a different kind of gaze.
Focus on sensory nature of objects.
This is why I have steered Kate in the direction of functionalism and away from symbolism and Implicit Meanings - the Mary Douglas take on life.
Sarah Pink writes about this in her book on the sensory home when she talks about sensory ethnography and accessing insider views of the objects.
You two are insiders on your own objects.
here is a response to Steve's point just now:
2. I like the focus on practices, and think you both reside in the realm of practice. This is like Bourdieu's notion of a set of dispositions that guide the way you do things.
this is called the habitus.
Steve is focused on worn objects, the use over time.
Kate is obsessed with intergenenerational objects, with the way they are used on the farm, over genersations.
This is very Kabyle house - here is a quote from Bourdieu:
Whether in verbal products such as poverbs, sayings, gnomic poems, songs or riddles or in objects such as tools, the house or the village, or in practices such as games, contexts of honour, gift exchange or rites, the material that the Kabyle House child ahs to learn is the produce of the systematic applciaiton of a small number of principles conherent in practice (Bourdieu 1990:74)

Boston Steve Austen

2008-03-08T01:37:00.000-08:00

We need to start talking papers and presentations. I want to start off simple. Me and Kate think we would like to talk about the Artist as researcher. Something about positioning yourself in relationship to the field. The artists as something you are-rather than something you do. an individual perpective and voice which explores theory in a very practical way. Perhaps something about activily interacting with and trying to change and inform systems rather than understand them - but steering slightly away from Praxis. So celebrate the differences tie this to the practical exploration of the systems of objects through the artemis project but round up by clearly highlighting through example that we are all looking to a greater or lesser extent at the same world (Perhaps)

Please try and keep a theme going I'm going to email you to chivy everbody along - feel like we should do this on the blog so we have a record - comments good but posts would be better

linkage exhinitoin statement

2008-02-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

steve and i have now selected all the artwrks from artemis, and have some linkage photos left to get, but we need to write a statement for the entrance way, i have started this and steve suggested blogging it, so here it is, we would like comments please. or additions. cheers

LINKAGE
This exhibition includes 35 examples of artwork from the collection at Artemis, interlinked with images Kate and Steve have taken on their mobile phones.
The mobile phone is omnipresent in contemporary life and used to record: passing moments; significant discoveries or random stumblings. These digital files are often never downloaded, forwarded, or printed out, remaining within the device, building into an archive of captured moments. We accumulate this temporary collection, often discarding it as we change phones, all without significant consideration.
As artists, Kate and Steve are interested in collections and as such have utilised their mobile phones to enable a journey through the Artemis collection and provide an insight into their practice. Like a game of Chinese whispers, we can move from one image to the next observing the lateral ponderings.

Artists Art and Artefacts sees artists Steve Pool and Kate Genever working on a year long, Arts Council England funded, project at Artemis: Education Leeds artefact loan service. Working both individually and collaboratively the artists are researching, exploring and responding to Artemis’ collection of over 10,000 artefacts.

Abstract

2008-02-06T01:44:00.000-08:00

I like this abstract bit because it concerns what our collabertion is really about which seems to be exploring a theme in different ways and how each of our approaches if valued in the correct context helps everybody to progress thinking. This is slightly different from the original bid where Kate P and Lou are written in more to support the artists CPD and reflection on practise. So for me it's become far more collaberative which makes the AAA conference thing seem more relevant. Perhaps we could unpick some of this and use it as narrative entry points to our paper - Also I'd like to suggest that we make the trip to Boston part of the work (Artististic concept based) which gives us licence to shake things up a bit.

So I think I've written about this before but on our first trip to Artermis for the very first meeting Kate Pahl started to tell me how she really didn't want to steer the artists and wanted to position herself with enough distance from the project so she wouldn't influence the ideas too much. It seems to me that this is her constant personal battle to find a position in relation to the field which allows her to activly engage with people , reflect, and observe without impacting. Due to excessive enthusiasm Kate is very bad at this but perhaps this is why we want to work with her.

So after deciding on her epistomology she suggests that the project is about canoes and Cargo. This comes from nowhere and is supported by a story of the change in british ethonography over thge last 50 years. I brush this off don't think about it much and suddenly find myself 6 months later asking if an object is a canou or Cargo and strangly understanding what this means. So Kate provides another lens to veiw the work/world through and I get a lot from this - she also provides a different context for ideas. as Artists we try and grow all our ideas ourselves - Like my disfuntional allotment my ideas are all strange shapes don't really look like what they are supposed to but taste really nice as long as you don't try and keep them too long. I don't want to grow veg for a supermarket but sometimes I like to know how it's done. This is a strange metaphor but the phones ringing and I need to go - it reminds me of that film Being there with Peter Sellers in it.

2008-01-31T07:56:00.000-08:00

It is me Lou the Pants Blogger making a posting to kick off a discussion about the Boston paper. Ideas so far include exploring collaboration between artists and academics incl. the blurring of roles and how the work has fed into our individual practices - am I right in thinking this? Do we need to revisit the stuff in the abstract if this has been submitted (as abstract text block may already have been sent to print). So here we go:

How do objects get transformed by narratives and how do they become divested of narratives? This presentation will interrogate what we call ‘the systems around the object’ drawing on a year-long research project, funded by the Arts Council UK, involving 2 artists and 2 researchers, and a collection of artefacts for schools in Leeds. It aims to develop theory around how objects can sit within systems, stories and places. Drawing on auto-ethnographic discussion about the relationship between artefacts and their context, this paper seeks to uncover and unsettle this relationship. In particular it will ask the following questions:How do objects move in meaning, or move from function to meaning?Does it matter if an object has no provenance?What happens if there is a narrative and no object (the case of the disappearing object)Are objects merely taking their menaing from their form and function or do they acquire new identities as new resonsances and echoes take hold of them?

what the hell does this mean again?

Lou

im still with it

2008-01-27T09:23:00.000-08:00

yes i have been absent but have returned, i do read this, but do not always want to comment or have something to say
i am planning in my next visit to artemis to begin to explore the relationship between objects when displayed - juxtaposed etc. But also currently thinking and trying to work out displaying my work , my archive as it were. Im intrested in the relation of the index to the bulk of work, the potential of selection and choice it offers , does it make us too removed or just offer false possibitly. I am trying to write my index, and will post up picture of it later in the week.
Also have introduced the aura scorer pro forma to college, were upon i was laughed at and told it was a travisty to do that to a benjamin text - i said, bollocks lets not get caught up in the heirarchy of a 'revered' text over a functional practical way to understand. I now have to demonstrate it at a seminar!!!!!!!! im thinking i will borrow the box of things steve and i scored one afternoon.

Doorstops and Heidegger

2008-01-21T11:27:00.000-08:00

Well I made it out into my workshop to make Kate a Birthday present. I stole a doorstop from somewhere last week and I'm wondering if it's art or just grand theft doorstop. Thing is I like doorstops as they are handmade often for a specific purpose and their funtion is only really noticed in their absence. Had a big row with Kim as I found her using my Ethno doorstop to prop open the door the other day - I don't know and with her museum background and all. So taking a made real thing out of the world and making it just "in the world" and not "at hand in the world" and then replacing the made thing with a replica or fake of the real thing is why I mentioned Heidegger I wonder if he had doorstops - the danger with this little mini project as we can now call them is people will read lots of metaphors into the actual function of a doorstop rather than get the point about function fake and the real world.

Rolling on

2008-01-21T09:25:00.000-08:00

We have an event at the Burngreave community learning campaign, Forum House on the 17th March - do all please come it is a mini project with MLA Yorkshire and 2 family learning practitioners called Every object tells a Story from 10 - 12 and a free lunch after.
The reason I am excited is that I am beginning to see patterns and shapes in my work working with you lot and also doing this project and maybe not getting Translating Objects was good as now I have time to work on all the other things.
I am worried I am not doing my Function to Meaning quotes for Kate - Kate can you tell me what I should do as I tend to work on your project in Dorset and I want to start getting the quotes and ideas together?
I plan to work on it in Dorset over half term which is the 18th Feb week, I intend to be using Malinowski Cargoes and Durkheim and Mauss and Mary Douglas Implicit Meanings.
I am a bit scared as it is raining again and Zahir couldn't come to the meeting we had today because of floods in Mexborough.

Nothing to Say

2008-01-21T08:15:00.000-08:00

Funny thing Blogs when you have nothing to say. They are a bit like Kate P vanishing objects a bit lacking in function. I've had a busy distracted couple of weeks and it doesn't seem to be getting much better. It's supposed to be the most depressing day of the year with the worst reported rates of illness at work. It is a bit grey and as my workshop is very cold and large drips of water tend to drop onto the back of my head through gaps between broken floorboards and dislodged slates I think it's ok to catch up with the paperwork.

I have this time now which is real rather than imagined I really am going to clear my dairey for a month and make work for Artemis. To do this I'm trying to earn some money to have in the bank which is why I'm busy. The thing I like about this is it will give me chance to reflect on what work is and through discussion with Kate I think we have both decided that all our work when we are commisioned as artists (apart from some bits) is proper work but it is clearly different and this project is driven by more personal goals and aspirations rather than a direct relationship with a specific audience.

Linkages

2008-01-15T03:51:00.000-08:00

Here are our first selection of images for the linkages exhibition it's a bit of a game of finding connections - shape colour politics, context style - a bit of what takes your fancy - each picture will be linked by a picture taken on our phines in the "real" world - came together really well and is a nice examples of how good ideas simply realised can work.

Understanding things

2008-01-07T10:17:00.001-08:00

It seems to me that we move towards understanding things in a very simple way - even very complicated things and relationships. it's really easy to set up a smoke screen of complicated things which stop us realising and ultimately understanding that most of the important things we are interested in are quite simple and straightforward to understand but knowing what it is we want to understand is the difficult thing. Arts practice can present a way for us to experiment in a very unscientific way, to search for understanding through active engagement rather than through observation. I think that we should revisit the idea of methodology rather than method for our collaboration - I could dig out the AHRC application to revisit and see if we have any starting points for thinking about doing something in the new year.

I'm amazed that lots of teachers don't seem to want to understand what education is for and that lots of curators don't really question what collections are for and that lots of academics don't really question what their research is for and lots of artists don't think about what their work is for so perhaps this question of social responsibility is also one of agency.

Happy new Year

2008-01-07T08:19:00.000-08:00

To everyone
Just to update you we didn't get our grant but somehow I feel relieved in that now I have space and time to think about this project.
I am also interested in where Steve and Kate are going, and their focus on social responsibility.
I like the idea of working on another project, something around the interface between artists and the world and using the object project as a case study.
I am in a writing mode and will happily write about stuff - am thinking about the move fromfunction to meanign and wishing I could go back to the heady days of functionalism.
ALso we have offered and had our offer accepted on a house right on the peaks on the edge of Sheffield.
Hurrah.

A New Year

2008-01-02T06:49:00.000-08:00

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.

doors stored for later

2007-12-10T10:38:00.001-08:00

this made me smile so thought i'd post it up.
Anyway, was just thinking about drawing this and other things like it to add to my now growing library, i think photos arent quite art yet, although quite like the idea of snaps or something similiar, anyway ......
Also after someone suggested ive looked at foucault - the order of things. i like the bit the preface which is from an old chinese encylopedia where he orders animals my favourite from the list - animals that from a distance the look like flies.
Anyway, other suggested index, lists, systems, greatly appreciated.
was looking at artemis index last week - went in on thursday was good, spent the morning with the kitchen shelves, the index is standard in some sense but also completley unique, and arranged around nigels logic. Even shirley the admin and filing lady thinks its a mad system but knows how it works so wont change it! Love it
I think theressomething in this to add to our training activites , need to think on that.........................

doors str]

2007-12-10T10:38:00.000-08:00

Library

2007-12-03T07:32:00.000-08:00

So Kate I've being thinking about what a library is as opposed to a collection. Libraries do not have to be complete but they are repositories of information. This information does not have to be of interest or of real use but perhaps it needs to have potential use. I've just read this book about the man that made the first geological map of britain. He was involved in digging the canal system and collected samples from all the different strata and catalouged and recorded everything and found out loads of amazing stuff but he could only work this stuff out when his collection got to a certain size - a critical mass of information. The correlation I picked up between his and your library was that he didn't know what he was looking for when he started collecting he was just gathering evidence that he had a hunch would lead to something.

So I think that your friend was right and you need to just get stuck into collecting your library and it will become something and demonstrate potential use.

The Empire state Building

2007-11-29T09:44:00.000-08:00

Kim red faced in a yellow Cab admits to her first doorstop crime. "Steve I've stolen you something " "What a doorstop? does it say the empire states building on it?" No it says the 86th Floor" Did you get a photo of it in situe" "No it was too busy for that" "Perhaps I like doorstops because I'm reading Hiedegger and the doorstop is always at hand in the world not just in the world - they are reflections of the notion of dazine often hand made and always warn through use and function - a metaphor for an open avenue of thought a gate propped open - a thing with potential agency in the world " Kim "Shut up you wanker"

But she still took the doorstop.

Sorry I havent blogged for a while

2007-11-16T07:24:00.000-08:00

and now I have to go and get Molly from school but just wanted to say I have been writing articles on disappearing objects and museum collections and fake objects including elephants sprayed gold and things you pick up at jumble sales that look valuable but aren't.
I am also writing about bling and gold and how gold is both a core valuable thing and something that is very ephemeral.
Here are some pictures.
Other things I did this week:
I finished Evocative Objects and read Walter Benjamin Art in the Age of Illusion.
It was quite hard.
Is that where the aura scorer idea comes from?
YOu should patent it.

lost ?

2007-11-05T12:10:00.000-08:00

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

Healthy breakfast

2007-11-03T04:03:00.000-07:00

This reminded me of Barth and the rhetoric of the image it's ideal for an undergraduate media studies essay. But it really made me think obout how ideas become a lens which we see the world through - like photographers who start to see the whole world through a viewfinder and Kate P who sees the whole world through Narratives I've started to see the world in terms of English breakfast. Reading about Spinoza in my Idiots guide to begginers philosphy for Dummies I think he would have suggested that English breakfasts have souls - perhaps this picture represents Body Breakfast duality.

stolen objects

2007-10-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

ive been burgled and am now in a phase of considering lost objects - specifically my large maglite torch in metalillic, limited edition, green. But you know whats ironic? they used a cow stick to break the security light, the first act in the burglary. Yet again a stick features as a fundamental object. Funny because only this week i was accused of fetishising a stick , which steve, in supportive mode, said to take as a completement as thats quite a difficult thing to do i.e fetishise a stick. So the cow stick has a new narrative layer, and im going to add it to my collection.

My dads breakfast story

2007-10-21T12:13:00.000-07:00

I like my dads story it is my equivalent of a wheelbarrow. It makes me think that the idea of sending trainee enginners to work with the men who will later entrust their lives to them was a good thing and probably reduced the number of switching errors. It a made me think of the relationship we have to the land and how because we can manipulate it so much with machinary we think we are more incharge than we are - like the floods in Sheffield in this day and age. it makes 1958 seem like a long time ago. I wish I was good with an axe I'd like to be good with an axe and able to draw so if I ever got the opportunity to do these activities in front of other people who could do them they would say "Boy that bloke is good with an axe" or "He has a good hand look at the way he holds a pencil he is clearly very good at drawing" alas I will never be very good with a pencil or an axe I will just have to become good at living with this fact.

The breakfast

It must have been in late October or early November 1958, I was a student apprentice working for Yorkshire Electricity based at Goole. The student apprenticeship trained its candidates to be electrical engineers for the power industry. They believed that, for an overall knowledge, the apprentice had to work in each discipline within the company.

I had already worked with the electricians on housing and industrial wiring and on appliance repairs. I had also spent the summer working at Ferrybridge power station, (the old little one on the river edge).
So it was me for the overhead line section. The staff had a cowboy attitude; ‘the mail has to get through’ spirit. They were tough no-nonsense men. They constantly bantered with anyone who in their eyes didn’t come up to scratch. As a new boy I had to absorb some of this. I mixed in with the best of them and won respect because I would do anything they had to do and was better than anyone with an axe. This was due to me being a lumberjack for nine months prior to working at YEB.

I loved the work - it was extremely variable; marking out routes, erecting poles, fixing steelwork and pulling out conductors and erecting them. It is strange that all this activity took place without mechanical aids but by manpower. By the time I became an engineer all this was replaced with JCBs, Land Rovers and Simon lifts - now only 4 linesmen are needed in a gang.

So back to the old days: a gang had a ‘Ganger’ who was in overall control and a driver, who did nothing but drive a big lorry that transported men sitting on planks across the lorry and all materials to site. The lorry had a lift-off canvas cover which, when off the wagon, was called ‘a Bivvy’. There were four linesmen who did the climbing and two mates who assisted in the climbing, with three labourers lifting, carrying and digging post holes and stay holes. The oldest labourer was in charge of the Bivvy and the fire and messing facilities.

So, on the first day we drove to site and lifted off the Bivvy to the Ganger’s instructions. He was a man of about 58 years at this time called Raith Penistone and it’s his breakfast. ‘Right lads’, he said, ‘Let’s get to it. Les, get the fire going well - we’re gonna supp’ at 1000 –ish’. Everyone set off to perform different tasks over a three to four hundred yard area of open fields. Les Asp was in charge of the fire. This was known as a ‘Fire Devil’ - it was the size of a five gallon oil drum with holes in it to let in the air. Les chopped firewood from scrap poles and lit it in the Fire Devil. We were supplied with coke which was then put in and the whole devil glowed with raw heat until we left site at 1500. Raith blew a whistle at 1000, ‘Get yer arses here’, he shouted, ‘We’ve only got fifteen minutes’.

Raith, being head man, was first to the fire. He carried a shovel which they all used called a ‘Grafter’, designed originally for draining. All the shovels were bright from use. He went into his snap box and took out a large parcel then looked at me grinned and said, ‘This’ll do, they belly good but tha int havin any’. He wiped his shovel on his coat-sleeve, removing most of the mud but not all. ‘What’s tha looking at lad?’ he said to me, ‘It’ll be sterilized in a minute’. He put the shovel on top of the fire. Steam came off after a couple of minutes, the blade was very hot. He opened his snap box, took out a large lump of ham and tossed it onto the plate. He then removed an egg and smashed it, shell and all, onto the ham. It sizzled away merrily. He removed two large slices of white thick bread, placed the ham and egg with shell between the slices and began eating. ‘He’s a real gourmet cook is our Raith, an no mistake’, one of the men said.

After about fifteen to twenty minutes Raith stood up shouted back to work, ‘You lazy buggers’, and peed onto the fire. A cloud of fumes was emitted and everyone dived for the outside. ‘Was that for my benefit?’, I asked someone. ‘It’s for no bugger’s benefit’, was the reply, ‘The daft bugger does it every day’. And he did. He was still doing it in 1965 when I, by then an engineer, shook his hand as he retired. He said to me then, ‘You want ser bad lad but we’ve had some shite doing yer job’.

Gordon Pool
October 2007

i ate it and now i feel a bit sick

2007-10-21T10:07:00.000-07:00

Here you are steve, photo really a bit duff but you get the idea, the top one is from memory/ imagination, i deliberately didnt cook one first to inform my visual memory, so its proper true. The bottom one is as i ate, outlines of food and plate as it changed - the activity recorded, no rubbing out, just line overlay. Hope you like them or at least it does what you want .
Just want to say i dont eat fry ups, well hardly ever and so i feel a but sick, also though this is my perfect fry up combination, crispy bacon, fried egg no runny bits, on fried bread and beans. The beans i eat first as their my least fav and then i combine the bacon egg and bread, which is odd for me because i normally eat in order of least fav to best so obviously cant decide between the bacon, egg and bread.
oh my god i can feel im slipping into this......................

Becoming Sausage

2007-10-19T06:43:00.000-07:00

Not put off by fear of OCD I post a becoming sausage. But you must take this with a pinch of salt. So Kate - engagement - if we define something or even bring it into existence by measuring it does your idea of the body as scale represent a sort of soft measurement system? If this is the case is this an exploration of space and our personal relationship to it through scale. Is there a connection between the personal relationship to a site and the a bit of what you fancy methodological approach to creating or perhaps defining a library of measures. On a higher level is the project saying something about the personal and the external and giving back control of measurment to it's funtion rather than an external established set of rules.

An imagined breakfast

2007-10-18T10:24:00.001-07:00

I. Imagining the full English breakfast

Sausages –
so long since I’ve eaten real sausages that I can’t remember how they taste and all I think of is the plate heaped high at my sister’s house, succulent and freckled black and brown, steaming and sweating fat; or cartoon sausages in Beano comics, slightly curved and strangely phallic, tucked into a bed of mashed potato and slathered in thick brown gravy, whose viscous meaty bitterness I can still remember from Aunty Dolly’s house after all these years.

Nowadays sausages means
veggie sausages, thin pink frankfurters plumping up in the boiling water, their smooth, rounded sides pockmarked as they overboil, their smoky taste turning to sawdust held together with salty glue once they are anything less than piping hot; or the herby, peppery heft of vegetarian Lincolnshire sausages, not quite fatty enough, but succulent and spicy; or the gritty textured sos-mix cooked in tetrahedrons because that’s the only shape I can roll them into, burnt on the outside and tender inside, textured like couscous; sausages dipped in grainy beery mustard, snuggled up on the plate next to the fried egg, ballerina-frilly skirt bubbled and browned around the edges, plump yellow bodice ready to burst open at the slightest touch of the fork and spread glimmering trails over the bacon, stiff and straight with artificial fat slightly browned and the tasteless cardboard texture of the wound-red veggie rasher.

But the mushrooms –
it’s worth the whole meal just for the mushrooms: pale grey flesh flecked with the black of freshly ground pepper, smelling earthy and oily and glistening with juices, as succulent and flavoursome as their aroma suggests, the perfect complement to a thick slice of white bread, soft and doughy, soaking up the thin dark juice, salty fresh and earthy, and the streaky yellow of the egg, the sharp juice of the tomato that nestles almost under the sausages, soft and yielding and slightly burnt on top.

2007-10-18T10:23:00.001-07:00

la la la la America

2007-10-15T07:16:00.000-07:00

Well paper got excepted for Boston so we have to do something now - I'm concerned about my Carbon footprint if we end up flying. I think they will like the English breakfast thing in notions of the other. Spent today carving a breakfast - it's made from Geleton a grainless wood traditionally used to cut patterns for sandcasting - felt more like prop making than carving but I like it and it made me look closer. It's good to have Tim making comments he clearly thinks about it - or perhaps he just needs some egg and bacon round at our house rather than all them french croissants.

2007-10-10T00:29:00.001-07:00

painted breakfast

2007-10-10T00:14:00.000-07:00

Liked Kates comments about funtion - takes me back to right tool for the right Job as my dad would always say. All the things people have to make because the job is so specific the tool doesn't exist - like Tesco direct or the wheelbarrow. Spades and forks are interesting because if you have to use them a lot tiny differences make a massive difference to how effective they are. So we have a rifinement of tool as a job gets more specific. This also reminds me of Damian Hirst chemists cabint - where it looked pretty accurate but was organised in authentically as the drugs were plced in it by the artist who did not consider the practicalities of dispensing drugs. Kim is clear she collects real objects for the museum - the Narrative is important but she thinks the object exists without it - we know it has a narrative because it's there so we have no need of a specific narrative or a real story to make it real -

lead in my shoes

2007-10-09T09:31:00.000-07:00

Reading this book about Socrates today and one of his followers got so stressed by the question "This statement is a lie" that he lost loads of weight and had to put lead in his shoes to stop himself blowing over in the wind. At least I got so stocked up on fried breakfast last week I won't have to do this if I get over concerned about the third breakfast. Thinking about funny measure I remembered those people who jump over things on moter bikes like double deckers
Evel Knievel Stunt Set

Just had a chat with

2007-10-09T09:08:00.000-07:00

Rachel Reynolds at Clifton Park.
She thinks that the object is less important than the narrative and while you can have narratives without objects, you cannot have objects without narratives.
Just stirring.
She thinks objects are 'props' to keep narratives alive.
Is the blog an electronic object?
Bruno Latour would say that this blog has a 'thing-like' status' that is separate from the separate traces that encircle it like spiders' webs.
This reminds me of Clifford Geertz who famously said that
'man[sic] is an animal encased within webs of signifiance'.
The Interpretation of Cultures (1993).
Fab book.
Your mind will be blown by Notes on a Balinese Cockfight which is in that book.
If you have not yet read it RUSH to Amazon.
Have booked 8.08 in the Education building for our meeting on the 17th.

Look at me mam I'm king of the blog

2007-10-07T10:21:00.000-07:00

The standard Kilogram is apparently getting lighter but as it is the standard the kilogram is getting lighter. When you fish a lot you get to be able to guess the wieght of fish - this allowed me to get to within a few pounds on all my babies. When you do a lot of plumding your wrists become more like a tork wrench and you learn how tight to do up compression fittings so they don't leak. The body learns how to measure things finer through experience so how much salt to put on food or how much marmite to put on toast. Is it the body as a frame of reference rather than an imposed scale - like the rulers and pecks and chains - do these seem more human as they are based on an older archaic system? Do you want me to dig out the measurments makes things real artical from ne scientist? As I'm now self elected king of the Blog I include the cast white breakfast for discussion.

The Agony and the extesy

2007-10-06T02:33:00.000-07:00

When I said that thing about not talking about the measurement idea I meant on the Blog not in real life. So the post was a change of use of this space which is a development. Sorry not to be of more help. Perhaps we need to set up a period of postings which are more focused on the work and the ideas behind them and less broad - which is why my tree picture didn't feel right - just takes us off at to many tangents. The thing is I'd have to talk about breakfast again as I'm an obsesive.

if it succesful what does it do?

2007-10-05T14:17:00.000-07:00

tonight i mostly hate art, thinking and talking
and steve i think your wrong about being able to post up ponderings and no im not keeping ideas to myself, i am considering quietly. Why are my questions different to yours?
Again i reitterate, i find art hard, 99% of the time i am frustrated and disappointed with my abilty to make some thing that means the title to this small post is not asked.

Funny thing this

2007-10-05T10:57:00.000-07:00

I've done this thing for the last few years with every piece of work I've produced to try and illicet peoples stories. In the "what were you doing when "exhibition at Rotherham I did the Sep 11th postcards. A woman had written that at the time of the twin towers her daughter was in a coma after giving birth to twins and she was visiting her - high up -in the wards of the Hallamshire hospital next to this card her daughters card read -" I was in a coma- wish I hadn't woken up."

In Pigeon Stories the son a missionaries who had grown up in post war Kenya talked of his affection for the birds which kept hunger at bay and gave him something to do as he hunted in the landscape of his youth.

Which brings me back to breakfast. It seems like everybody has a story about everything like in my seminal piece "Thermos stories" the woman who had broken her fathers treasured thermos and instead of owning up had placed the broken thermos on the edge of a table where she new it would get knocked off and had avoided punishment but learnt about guilt.

Anyway I'm not sure if I can write my dads breakfast story -which is brilliant and involves braziers and shovals and spit and shirt sleeves and broken eggs and gammon and calcium incase Kate uses exclamation marks (I told Kim about this and she said she would like to say to kate"Welcome to my world") but this strand is interesting as provinence is becoming narative and the materiality perhaps is the connection of people to things and this can only happen through lived experience which becomes narrative and we are exploring this- which is good mostly.

Hymes

2007-10-05T08:43:00.001-07:00

I like this post and you and Kate's insistence on the thing itself, un-adorned by narrative.
This reminds me of Del Hymes, one of the world's great ethnographers. He was obsessed with ways in which life can become narrative:
The view of narrative as an iterative form, I take from Hymes, who described an incident from his personal life where,

…one often saw a bit of experience becoming an event to be told, being told and being retold until it took shape as a narrative, one that might become a narrative told by others. (Hymes 1996:118)

Hymes developed his concept of narrative using his experiences of living amongst a group of Native Americans where he had a house. He produced this passage to describe what he learnt from them. He linked narrative to wider and more fundamental forms of life,

There is a current movement to go beyond collection and analysis of texts to observation and analysis of performance. That is essential, but perhaps only the second moment of three…Continuous with the others, this third is the process in which performance and text live, the inner substance to which performance is the cambium, as it were, and the crystallized text the bark. It is the grounding of performance and text in a narrative view of life – that is to say, a view of life as a source of narrative. (Hymes 1996:118)

The fourth breakfast

2007-10-05T04:10:00.000-07:00

Not happy with the third breakfast discourse I push the boundaries further into the realms of OCD and suggest that perhaps we should shift focus to the highly contentious Fourth breakfast which only exists in the fifth space. Only kidding. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The body as a measure stuff sounds like a really strong idea but you have until now been a little reticent to discus it as a concept (I don't think this can be put down solely to my breakfast obsesion). I think this may be because you have a feeling about something - an idea that this is interesting - it's a very strong and simple focus which has a lot of connections to all the stuff we talk about but I wonder if you think by saying it out loud as words or text you will lesson it. It feels like a seed you need to water and let grow. I think we have both decided that we have to bring things into the world - that this is why we do what we do - I'm not comfortable talking directly about ideas so I wrap them up in irony this is how I've always worked and lived. I don't think you do this but in a way we are both looking for an honesty and a freedom of expression. I don't think I can help you with the work until you make it real I do however think that lots of the stuff which feels like secondary practise like the Aura scoring ' and the picture hanging ideas are free and liberating and quite good. We both have a lot of angst when it comes to making personal practise - I always have had - is this a bit newer for you? - didn't you have a similar thing in Japan? So I don't think we can get very far using the BLOGG to help discuss the actual work it's more about leaving a record - maybe we should do the crit thing at the gallery - both get some stuff to show and then build on the idea of a mid point crit to help us push the thinking a bit further. And I think the etching of the T bag at least it's digital representation looks fantastic and can you run me one off for crimbo. This said maybe Kate could talk about the idea from her perpective as an ethnographer.

2007-10-05T03:34:00.000-07:00

hey have started making new work and yesterday made this etching - its the contents of one pg tips tea bag - ie a measure of tea for one person. I am interested in the idea of man as a measure but dont want to think in terms of fixed offical measures. So i dont think the the tea bag works because its not personal, also i know a metre on me so i can measure fabric , but better ones are : me dad knows the height barbed wire fence needs to be against himself, his belly button. Or my friend allison knows if the the choke chain fits her head it fits her dog when buying a new one. Does a pinch of salt work ? What am i trying to say or do? spatial maps - man as the measure? How does all this fit my representing the landscape? or the farm. Yes i know it fits in terms of how it looks the dividing of space but what else? DOes it fit as a record of ephemeral things a collection of the unoffical?
Also i was thinking of documenting all the sticks we use on the faarm - the walnutting stick, the cows sticks as seen earlier, the planting things straight stick, So then i suppose why not all the string or rope we use?
I feel confused please post me a comment all we do is talk about bloody steves breakfast!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We the dead

2007-10-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

This has no place on our Blog really but we foound this tree in the woods and it made us think about sedemented layers of meaning and growing history

2007-09-29T11:33:00.000-07:00

me dad is currently making new cattle barriers for over wintering of said cattle and he has done this drawing to plan them
its a thought proccess, a great thing and a representation of the finished barriers
I just wondered about this in reference to steves third breakfast.
Also was wondering about how when we play, imaginative games, make believe stuff in the fields or where ever,
we use what ever is around to represent what we need.For example a bent over twisted opened up willow tree in the field opposite our yard , was for days over a summer a house we climbed in it had a bed , a table and all the other stuff we needed, twigs were knives and forks and grass our food. It grew out of our heads, we built imaginatively in response to dwelling

the third breakfast

2007-09-28T10:33:00.000-07:00

So spent the day making and discussing breakfast with Barney. It was all very philosophical we discussed the nature of reality a lot but this was underpinned by lots of practical stuff about making. I recorded our conversations which sound vaguely ironic as if we couldn't take ourselves seriously enough but this somehow allowed us to be very serious. I have 4 hours of sound which I'm thinking of getting transcribed. I suggested that we were the only people at that point in time trying to cast a Hyper real English breakfast at which point Barney put a plate on his head and said he could guarantee that we were the only people casting an English breakfast with one person with a plate on his head. He then told me a story about his dad putting a realistic plastic chicken on his head and telling him that at that moment he was the only person in the world with a synthetic chicken on his head (I think his dad should of stood on one leg just to be on the safe side) so it was deep man and it was good to make breakfast and discuss the archetypal sausage and cast an egg and start to grow a thing and see it change and realise that I need to cast the plate and worry about the third breakfast -
draft
by Steve
08:47:00

2007-09-25T10:27:00.000-07:00

well this was my photo in response to the image we chose from the archive, although i was planning a trip to get another tommorow , but for now this is it, i went to Burghley House at the weekend and these were in the shop, a memento of a stately home like the first reproduced image which is of gawthorpe leeds. I have been thinking lots about the landscape and how we represent it and what that means and does, .........

Phone link Exhibition

2007-09-25T02:56:00.000-07:00

As this blog has just got a bit more public I thought I should stop writing in such a coded way so I'm going to explain a strand of the work at Artemis. Me and Kate felt a bit sad that lots of the paintings in the picture store never get out. This is because of loads of issues around hanging and PFI schools and stuff like that. When I first started going into schools and saw the kids doing work around Lowery, Wharhole or Kandinsky I thought this was great as they are all great artists and their work provides fantastic starting points. 8 years later I realised that schools actually only do work around these three artists and consequently their status is raised to amazing heights - the only three artist who ever lived. Anyway there is some great stuff stacked in the racking at Artemis and we thought it would be good to get some of it up on the wall at Westpark.

We had an idea to link pictures to the outside world by taking pictures on our mobile phones - quite random things inspired by a motif or colour or idea - this picture would then link to our next selected picture which would send us back out into the world to find the next link. We decided that the show should have no written interpretation and we would print our phone pictures up phone size and have them hung between the pictures. This idea came quickly and was easy and we didn't argue about it and it evolved from both of us - just like when we work on a joint community or education project - it is a collaboration and may need tweaking here and there but is strong clean and doable. This is interesting for the project as it demonstrates another way of working for us and helps us to reflect on the personal and the shared.

Anyway the first picture was chosen as it reminded me of Kates dissertation I'd just read about growing the countryside and it was about imposing order - which is what we do. My phone picture is from a Map found in the house of a friend who is a dry stone Waller the bit in read is the section he is repairing next week - it made me think about maps and the way we can interact with the landscape.

Drip Catcher

2007-09-24T02:24:00.000-07:00

Found this in the gents at a conference it's a drip catcher made from a water bottle chopped in half - funnel and drip tray combined - big enough for water to evaporate so ne need to empty allowing it to remain fixed - TOPS

resonances and echoes

2007-09-19T09:01:00.000-07:00

Just talked to Steve and realised how all of us are theorising what surrounds the objects, the resonances and echoes, whether they are with or without provenance. Their aura is what we are looking at. Perhaps we should make this the focus for our proposal for the Boston event?
here are some quotes to get you thinking:
…

I could mention the chapter of 'Mimesis' entitled, “The Brown Stocking” in which Eric Auerbach (1953) evokes a passage of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, and the representations or, better, the repercussions that a minor external event triggers in Mrs Ramsay's consciousness. This event, trying on a stocking, is but a point of departure which, though it is not wholly fortuitous, takes value only through the indirect reactions it sets off. One sees well, in this case, that knowledge of stimuli does not enable us to understand much of the resonances and echoes they elicit unless one has some of the idea of the habitus that selects and amplifies them with the whole history with which it is itself pregnant.’

(Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 124)

Basically what this means is that we need to understand the way of being and doing in the world, the habitus, in order to understand the object and its reactions.
Habitus is a set of structuring structures, it is the way you live your life in a house. Objects and their meanings are all subject to the logic of the habitus.

I read the concept of habitus as a heuristic, as a point of departure and reflection. In The Practice of Everyday Life de Certeau’s argued that habitus is a metaphoric chimera, a dwelling pace (like Kate's dwelling) which nevertheless, is generative of research (de Certeau 1984).
Anyway, what do you think?

here is the draft proposal as it stands:

How do objects get transformed by narratives and how do they become divested of narratives? This presentation will interrogate what we call ‘the systems around the object’ drawing on a year-long research project, funded by the Arts Council UK, involving 2 artists and 2 researchers, and a collection of artefacts for schools in Leeds. It aims to develop theory around how objects can sit within systems, stories and places. Drawing on auto-ethnographic discussion about the relationship between artefacts and their context, this paper seeks to uncover and unsettle this relationship. In particular it will ask the following questions:
How do objects move in meaning, or move from function to meaning?
Does it matter if an object has no provenance?
What happens if there is a narrative and no object (the case of the disappearing object)
Are objects merely taking their menaing from their form and function or do they acquire new identities as new resonsances and echoes take hold of them?
What does everyone think?

floaters

2007-09-16T08:48:00.000-07:00

Was thinking about Steves writing / ideas and was going to comment in the comment section, but then it got too long.
i have also found the objects difficult in the collection, partly because im not connected to them, in a dwelling sense [ so will spend more time there] and also because of the lack of provinence. Part of me wants to stop them floating, but im also interested in how ive come to try and get them to be more than "just stuff" [raymond delivery mans quote. He is right they are just stuff serving a function as objects -thats it, i wonder is that interesting to make work about]. I want to fix them, or is it value them more? I feel i have tried to do this to some by finding out the artemis peoples favourite and why. Which gives them gives them a kinda provinence if only from their artemis lives.
In terms of becoming pseudo scientists, im not sure, how can we seperate out or disregard the emotional response? This is central to how i work, intuitive connections, like the fraction apple story. If not it becomes like the idea of pretend collecting at leeds fest -horrid and not authentic.
I collect stuff to remember my moment, an act of continuity. But also to remember someone elses moment, skills etc. But also they might be usefull.

2007-09-14T08:58:00.000-07:00

These apples are in the artemiss collection. I decided after yesterday that I've not really looked or interacted with the stuff in the collection its more the idea of the stuff being there rather than what it is- it's meta -stuff. So if I deconstruct my thinking and feelings about objects as becomings perhaps all the objects in the Artemiss collection are lost as they have no recorded provinence - perhaps this is what Benjamin means bv ritual. When we scored the stuff on the aura pro-forma it seemed to be about the point where the object meets the self the moment of interaction the material and the mental or as me and Kate now call it in honour of plane language the thoughts and the stuff. I spent many nights cutting up apples to try and teach my daughter about fractions. I once cut an apple into 56 equal pieces these apples have more aura for me because they remind me of this so I give them more value - do we have to make ourselves into psudo scietist and disregard the emotional or is this work about plotting the space between the personal and the outside. The inner and outer spaces and our relationship to the physical world through physical stuff. I collect stuff which I think may come in handy in the hope this will make me usefull.

sticks for moving cows

2007-09-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

hello , i have just returned from leeds and a day with steve, which was good, we discussed many things and looked at aura scoring, which made me glad i dont do science and stats and maths properly and all the time. Although in a doing it under the guise of a "bit of what you fancy" as steve and i have now unoffically called the project, it seems ok. I really enjoyed thinking and talking about this and feel that its helped me, although i cant tell you how just yet, as i cant put it into words.
Steve accused me of being cagey of talking about my work -which is not true, i think, more its a case of not quite knowing how to say it, and also until its further on than it is at the moment, i cant tell you.
What i am trying to do though is listen properly when steve is talking about his work, think and then respond , but maybe not at that moment but later, on here or wherever. I like to listen to others this helps alot in my thinking, although i realise it could mean i do alot of listening and not much saying, so i have to watch for that.
But anyway i have put up a new photo. I was reading the blog and realised kate and steve had said what they like and are interested in regard to objects so i thought i would say what i am interested in; both in a non cagey and a this is my thing kinda way. so here goes - i like objects where the narrative does not drive the object. Where the meaning , form , function, are all equal, nothing is more important than the other. Which allows for the viewer to place his thing on it and read / take whatever. Which then is kinda what kate was saying about it being just stuff. Although obvioulsy i make a selection and put together a collection so i do manipulate this also. Its also in the ambiguity, the potential, the possibleness that the object offers through the three fold form, function, meaning being equal together. i also like the ingenious objects that have grown out of a implicated relationship, out of dwelling. i could go on but maybe for another time.

Also currently still thinking about measuring and man as measure. although got to get my head around him not being the dominant elemant in the relationship to the outcome of his measuring, so in fact its an implicated act blaaaaaaaaaaaaaah....................stopping .

wheel barrow

2007-09-06T09:27:00.000-07:00

Tim wants a wheelbarrow. at leeds fest people dragged their belongings around on blankets they were like wheeless wheelbarrows or perhaps just barrows. Done a lot of thinking over the past few days mostly about images and objects and I keep going back to an earlier idea about strippping away physical context and provenance. I am going to spend next week experimenting and try and produce something with the leeds fest stuff for discussion next week.

Our Blog

2007-09-04T11:58:00.000-07:00

Just looked back over the Blog and really like it. I have had a day clearing out all my shelves and emptying files of long dead projects. It sort of makes you feel happy to be rid of the junk but sad that you made such a good job of recording every aspect of everything because at some point someone suggested doing a case study but really all they wanted was a couple of soundbites saying how the arts had changed their lives and how everybody had really enjoyed it.

Anyway can't afford to be cynical so early in the year. I'm on the brink of deciding to revise my sausage egg chips and beans to a full English breakfast. this is triggered partly by the fact that Barney suggests we will have to cast individual beans but mainly by the idea of a full English breakfast been a thing people only eat in artificial situations like hotels or greasy spoons also it's the only breakfast which you can get "All Day" which is so directly link to breakfast as a meal that it can't become lunch or tea - the medium is the message it's a signifier which is not changed by temperol shift even late night after eight pints a breakfast bap from greasy vera's still remains breakfast. Actually I think it was about 4 am when I ate that so I suppose it was breakfast. So an iconic meal for an icon plus the fact it will be much easier to make which links to what I was saying about actually having to make something and when your directly involved in the materialisation of the materiality the judgements you make are affected by a different set of value choices.

Following on from

2007-09-04T05:40:00.001-07:00

Kate's father's wheelbarrow, here is my grandfather's wheelbarrow.
He must have made it in the 1950's, and he painted it marroon which was his colour for everything he made.
I am interested in Kate's post about objects being 'the thing itself, just stuff' but am puzzled as to how she removes the stories from the artefacts.

Back to work

2007-08-30T01:48:00.000-07:00

Had an interesting weekend at leeds fest. I collected loads of stuff and took around 300 pictures with my new wide format camera which is like a normal camera with extra bits on the side. The whole experience made me think about praxis as so many things came up around the individual objects or artefacts I chose to pick up in the field which I wouldn't hjave thought about in theory. I questioned methodology a lot but decided that the main thing was that I didn't try and do psudo comtemporary archeology or material culture study or contempory collecting so stuff like lables and dates and times and specemen bags didn't seem right but I did start to photograph everything in situe at the moment of it's collection which seems really obvious now but felt like a revelation at the time. So I have a box of things a chunk of memories and loads of photoes - all visual no interveiws no sound no personal reflection - I'm going to think about the space between all this stuff and the positioning of the artist and individual experience in the re-presentation of the event in a form which could be used within the artemis collection and possibly ask if this could evolve into a stand alone piece of work outside the structure of the artemis remit.

just stuff

2007-08-09T02:38:00.000-07:00

was at artemis this week , looking and taking photos it was fab, empty and they are so nice and helpful.
i like how there is sucha detachment from these objects, no romance or fetish-ising [sic?] its "just a load of stuff', they have a practical relationship with the items, just like us on the farm, the value is in the use for schools and therefore job or related use with regard to past jobs such as delivery drivers previous life as engineer. im interested in this, when do we begin the romance, how does it start? Was listening to interesting program on radio 4 about value and how we could / neeed to use differetnt rational and criteria for valueing things -they were comparing the thames estuary with stonehenge - in the end stonehenge won, !!!!! but i was wondering that is it just because we know its man made a monument a symbol of continuiuty and we are connected somehow to it that it becomes more imortant, than something we had a hand in but really it does its own thing?

Rainbow at the tip

2007-07-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

Just went to the tip with Tim to dump half his house before he goes to France to study the Welsh for a year. Looked after their little one today remonded me of been a house dad when life was much simpler and much fuller and I didn't have to think as much but was busy doing something straightforward and useful (like growing things on the farm) anyway thought this was a nice image to leave on - taken on my phone and proving that one mans land fill is another mans pot of gold

Anderloucia

2007-07-26T06:34:00.000-07:00

Seems to be working OK from this end Kate it sometimes takes a bit of time to load up - Put a comment on your pictures things but not sure if it will help. Time space compression is interesting as it's very current and again some thing we can measure using external and personal scales. The fact that time is relative to speed is really hard to get our heads around but irefutably true although Kim won't believe it or chooses not to. I must lend you my flat earth society book which is called earth not a globe? the writer Parralax suggest that we should only make judgements on things which are within our experience hence the world is flat.

The Shrodingers cat annalogy is interesting because non scientist think it's philosphical like the tree in the forest falling when nobody hears or sees it. Infact it's not at all it decribes a real situation of quantum and classical physics and is the meeting of two different scietific descriptions of the world rather than philosphy meeting science - the cat is actually alive and dead at the same time and the exceptance of this gives us a window on the quantum world.

Hope this posting is oblique and at a tangent enough to be of no use at all I suppose I'm thinking about the idea of representation to post something back to give a slightly different perspective but doing this in such a way that it doesn't change the state of the original thing - which might be your drawings of objects because they are representations of the original things - maybe you should play with the idea of space and represetation - put your work back into the context of the farm and see what sense it makes and observe what happens as it crosses into a different domain and how to make the effects these crossing have weak so they don't change the states of the original. Sorry to be so complicated and around the houses - you could read a little bit about uncertaincy theory then again it would be better to ignore this posting alltogether as I think I've gone off on one and can't be arsed to rework it because I quite like the rambling nuttyness of it.

I'm off now for 2 weeks with no intention of thinking about work as I need a break and will be reading sci fi shite but will look at blog eagerly on my return.

STEVE

trying to blog

2007-07-26T00:14:00.001-07:00

trying to see if it works

input required

2007-07-25T00:43:00.000-07:00

another photo of stones please compare to the next photo i will post up
i would like peoples thourghts ina compare and contrast thinking kinda of way
this is of the stones on the mantlepiece and we find them in the field when working or walking
This is for a smalle section in my dissertation i am talking about geology, transformation of landscape and time
anyway dont want to say much tell me what you think .........please and thanks

sorry they wouldnt load up -please help

2007-07-24T12:50:00.000-07:00

please help

2007-07-24T12:49:00.001-07:00

these 2 images are part of a section in my bloody dissertation!
the round stones as you know are from the farm the other image is of a section of geological samples from artemis - i liked it firstly because it made me think of a landscape all boxed - like a section of the earths crust, but that it looks like a kinda landscape to. The samples are all british and labeled as such. I want to compare/ contrast the two photos, i want to know what people think of these two images - in that what does it make you think in regard to landscape , representation, meaning etc etc but remember and its important you know im from a farm and the first image is things found there. The section is about geology, the transformation of earth, time and growth
Would be good to know what people think , you will be properly referenced! thanks in advance

2007-07-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

comments needed please

2007-07-24T12:33:00.000-07:00

Saying it all and saying nothing

2007-07-22T13:22:00.000-07:00

Had a good meeting with Kate G on friday. We caught up on the project and decided we should spend some time at Artemis working at the site and with the people there. I'd been to a seminar on socially engaged arts practise and it had made me cross. I think I get annoyed by artists talking up their role and people making a fuss about the fact they have actually talked to a person as though this is something new. I do see a lot of value in the work and the way it can inform systems and change practises but I struggle with the idea of the arts as a social good and cultural entitlement as it all seems very class driven and paternalistic.

Anyway the chat with Kate seemed to be about focussing down - both Kates MA dissertation and the work at artemiss. Kate said I should get some sausage beans eggs and chips deadlines set and also fix the meal as I keep changing it - adding ketchup and sometimes even Bacon. It feels like an important thing to do - to map a plan and build a piece of work within a timescale so we move things on and a divergent stage comes convergent through practise.

The materialities stuff is interesting and the thing that makes this project art is that we will be making new stuff and I think we have come to a point where we should do this so we can move forward.

Just to say

2007-07-22T12:10:00.000-07:00

I am off to New Jersey, going to talk to some teachers in Princeton about artefacts and identity - here is my friend Jennifer's account of her work;
Drawing on a longitudinal study that follows twenty high school students struggling with literacy in a secondary school in central New Jersey, I will consider student portfolios of texts as artifacts of identity (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain, 1998). Photographs, digital spaces, written work, artwork, family artifacts have been gathered, archived and reflected upon and the study builds on a recognition that the materiality of these artifacts have deep consequences and significance for these students’ senses of self.

Back on 31st July

mams mantle piece

2007-07-18T11:14:00.000-07:00

thought kate and well others too might be interested to see this section of the mantle piece at the farm - just round stones and fossilised sea urchins, . The round stones we pick up off the fields, we think they are whats left behind after the ice age [where we live the ice was approx a mile thick] -me dad calls them 'ball bearings for glaciers'.

Threads and themes

2007-07-17T02:02:00.001-07:00

I think what I am doing is following a thread.
Brian Street gave me that quote about the turtle and the fish and the thread started with Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Function) and then to meaning which Brian now says is in Pocock's Introduction to Social Anthropology which describes the shift in British Social Anthropology from the functional focus of Malinowski on the cargoes just as cargoes carrying stuff nothing more (Kate's just sheep pens) to the focus of people like Mary Douglas on pollution in Purtiy and Danger which is on the meanings generated by household objects (Steve's focus on flooded artefacts maybe).

I suppose I am trying to encourage a thread in the project which is about the ethnographic project, what it is and what it means for artists.
The turtle and the fish is the ethnographic space - it is really a thinking tool which is what Kate wanted.
It is about saying we are in this water, swimming around, what if we went on dry land?
Hope it helps. Don't want to confuse you all.

turtles and fish

2007-07-16T07:57:00.000-07:00

are you asking me to consider either _ sometimes we cant be clear about what we want to say because we are just putting stuff out there , because if thats it, i meant not that we have to put up total considered clear ideas but more that we should not just expect everyone to know everything about each others area of expertise. like the fish or the turtle
or did you mean i have to embrace new things and not look at what im missing or whats not there? - because if thats it i do do that i hope pretty much all the time.

Sorry also because i find the blogs hard because i cant hear the intonation in the texts like in spoken word so cant grasp wether steves just on a tangent or being serious and on a tangent!

But now im moving on.xxxxxx

ok im back

2007-07-16T07:48:00.000-07:00

so steve , i havent talked to kim, i just knew the wanker bit anyway - only joking!!!!!
here is the photo i thought about the other day, its of Holme Fen Post it was sunk into the ground in 1841 and shows the amount the soil has shrunk and eroded since then,- its on part of the fen where once was a lake and is now farm land, The lake was drained and the owners wanted to record the amount the land went down -currently its 13 foot, 6/7ft below see level, although the fields either side are about another metre lower [its near trees which have reduced the erosion rate]. I like it because its a measure of time and space [a bit like the kids getting bigger marks on door frames], but also the fact it was made specifically for this job, its unique - from and function united - i think, well not quite because it looks like a roman column, but nearly.

ok im bakc

2007-07-16T07:33:00.001-07:00

Don't go just do it once a week

2007-07-16T02:19:00.010-07:00

Don't leave perhaps we should each just post once a week and keep it more specific to the Artemis project - I may have put you off by posting to often and making it seem more important than it is and dominating the thing a bit with my babble. I will stop now and just post every friday with very specific stuff if you think this would make the platform more usefull for us and the project. I have a cold today and fell over while climbing over a wall in my sandles at four in the morning after poker and twisted my Knee so I'm feeling sorry for myself.

ummmmm2

2007-07-15T14:26:00.000-07:00

i'm finding blogging hard, seem to have lost my way, might not be back for a bit, going to go and think about it all.

The Turtle and the Fish

2007-07-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

Meanings of Ethnography
The Turtle and the Fish

To illustrate the error of ethnocentrism Buddhists relate the story of the turtle and the fish. There was once a turtle who lived in a lake with a group of fish. One day the turtle went for a walk on dry land. He was away from the lake for a few weeks. When he returned he met some of the fish. The fish asked him, "Mister turtle, hello! How are you? We have not seen you for a few weeks. Where have you been? The turtle said, "I was up on the land, I have been spending some time on dry land." The fish were a little puzzled and they said, "Up on dry land? What are you talking about? What is this dry land? Is it wet?" The turtle said "No, it is not," "Is it cool and refreshing?" "No it is not", "Does it have waves and ripples?" "No, it does not have waves and ripples." "Can you swim in it?" "No you can't" So the fish said, "it is not wet, it is not cool there are no waves, you cant swim in it. So this dry land of yours must be completely non-existent, just an imaginary thing, nothing real at all." The turtle said that "Well may be so" and he left the fish and went for another walk on dry land.
In another version the fish said ‘Don’t tell us what it isn’t, tell us what it is’. ‘I can’t’ said the turtle, ‘I don’t have any language to describe it’.

This is the version that can help us understand what is involved in ethnography. If we go to another place, our first inclination is to describe it in terms of what it does not have that we are used to – wet land, waves, for the fish; maybe science, or coca cola for westerners travelling in the East; religion or rice for Easterners travelling in Europe; etc. An Ethnographic perspective shifts us out of this mind set and helps us firstly to ‘imagine’ things that do not exist in our own world and then to understand them in their own terms rather than to see them, in our terms, just as ‘deficits’.

I think this is helpful for thinking.
Next time I will give you the social anthropology family tree.

The Shoulders of Giants

2007-07-15T04:29:00.000-07:00

Newton said he could only see so far as he stood on the shoulders of Giants but he said this ironically as he thought he was much more clever than any of his peers but he was also mad as he had boiled mercury in a pan and poisoned himself as he tried to make gold. I think that the search for clarity of meaning and context is important on the blog but also it's interesting to drop things in from a tangent - We all have different areas of knowledge and thinking to share. At the moment I like to think around making theory physical. So stuff which seems really complex and deep can be made really clear by making an example of it. Fine art departments seem to be a bit locked in positioning practise in the context of art history rather than social function so I think that your struggles with your dissertation are about placing your work in a theorectical framework and your reading is drawing from a massive field of theory which often contradicts itself. Anyway I think Paul Nash landscapes are the most empty and desolate paintings I've scene but they do romantisize this desolation. So I like the idea that we should be talking more about our own thinking than referencing others especily if this is not helpfull and a bit obscure but if it's helpfull we maybe need to talk about it more and how it relates to the project.

shorthand

2007-07-14T08:28:00.000-07:00

well had an interesting end of week conversation with a guy who i met at an opening and he was telling me about a course he went on in hungary hungary thats aim was to explore and develop your critical thinking and talking. Basically they get torn down in week long series of crits, not sure thats always helpful i said, but he did say what was good was they were not allowed to use shorthand to describe a point, for example couldnt just name an artist to explain an idea or for us talk about auras and expect people to know what that meant. They all had to be clear, and fully expand the thoughts, he said that they achieved equally succint points and they reached total considered clarity and it excluded no one.
Could this be a plan?, i sometimes get confused with whats being said!

Family resemblance

2007-07-13T00:04:00.001-07:00

I thought we should mention Wittgenstien and family resemblance as it sort of fits in and I thought we could all collect a little family of things which is a bit like the encounters shop which can be seen here (Kate tell me how to do a Hyperlink) Google encounters and Sharrow) I took a picture of my dog the other day and it reminded me of Kate P picture on her Blog - I am going to call it "avoiding the Canine Gaze" it may be the start of a family

Floods and mearsures

2007-07-12T01:47:00.000-07:00

Synergy and lenses I thought as I'd talked about floods and rulers I should but a picture of my Pitch Pine game keepers flood measure stick. It's interesting but I'll stand corrected by Kate G who comes from a long line of Dutch Dam builders who reclaimed the land of lincolnshire only to loose it 100 years later to the rising waters. But it appears to be marked in a relative scale and it's decimal from a time of feet and inchs - the local production of a measure to be used localy and by an individual seems to fit with the idea of specific use tied to specific individual. I'm going to make some egg beans and chips lottery cards. Asked a sound artist to make a soundscape about eggs beans sausage and chips and he said no - it was my first failure but I did learn that I need to present things differently to different people.

Items from the Flood

2007-07-11T09:50:00.000-07:00

Kim has collected a World War Two German Bomb fin washed from the sediment of the River Don and found by a man from Record Collector. A Star A-frame poster - saying "Priceless Treasures Damaged in City Flood". Photographs and stories. She has also collected a Kilner jar which came from Burton's butchers shop in Attercliffe which got filled with water by the flood so it's kind of protogenisised itself. (I made that word up) A Sylvester the cat soft toy with no nose washed up in the street. Half the city's social history collection has some sort of flood damage - they will make a decision on a few key items which will not be conserved: A silk satin embroidered Victorian screen with a serious tide mark will not be fully restored and there will be a few other items too.

the first use of the term Clagnut is attributed to VIZ comic circa 1986

My quote is from today which was in many ways horrible and hard work but I was trying to get a group of kids to think of a superhero with animal powers a year 1 student came up with androgenously named

"Pigeon Person who's super power was to poo and peoples shoulder" why is it always the shoulder.

some quotes

2007-07-11T03:58:00.000-07:00

as my role in this project is to be the academic, here are some quotes for the day:

Contemporary urban geographies have worked extensively with conceptualisations of space and place and their importance for both identifications and identity formation. Thus place and identity are powerfully connected, but often in ways which involve active processes of exclusion. (Reay and Lucey 2000)

Pam's Bakery, his mum used to work at Pam's Bakery. I remember when I was at Junior School I would go there for a bottle of pop, they were really nice people, I mean they got to know you, Mr [name of informant] my dad was really well known around here. The lady at the shop, you know right at the top of Ferham Road, on the corner, there's a shop that sells all stuff there. If you go in there and ask about my dad she goes "oh yes Mr K***" of course because he used to go in there all the time and she has fond recollections of him still. (Informant, Ferham Families project)

No one lives in the world in general (Geertz 1996:262)

To live is to live locally and to know is first of all to know the place one is in. (Casey 1996: 18).

They’ve got great memories of sort of how they were living, even right down to er you know where Braggatt Park is now, they’ve knocked all the houses down as you go down the dual carriageway, that is where used to live, just over there, as you go down take a right into Kimberworth road there, go down there and the houses back off and the toilets would be at the rear, and they went to Kimberworth school. (Informant, Ferham Families project).

Places form a reservoir of meanings which people can draw upon to tell stories about and thereby define themselves. (Thrift 1997: 160)

Helen Sharmen

2007-07-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

Helen Sharman is interesting as she is from Sheffield and was the first British astronaut - I thought she should be a cosmonaut because she went up with the Russians but because she was a westerner they called her an astronaut which, if we are talking about word meanings and values , is very interesting.

I'm really interested in personal connections with history - growing up in a small village I have few but I'm sort of connected to the war through my dad and it was interesting seeing the model of the R100 airship at Artemis as my grandad helped to drag it from it's hanger at Howden and we have a postcard from America from one of my gran's friends who burnt on the way back.

We all connect with history but few of us connect with authorised historical narratives and the points we connect have increased power or perhaps aura.

Anyway Helen Sharman loaned her flame retardent space underwhere to an exhibition about underwear Kim did back in the day. Michael Palin donated a pair of pouch fronts from an indian Dow when he got deli belly in Pole to Pole but not many other celebrities coughed up their briefs. So to add substance to the exhibition I manufactured a pair of electically heated briefs which most people assumed were real.

Now I would realise that the reason people thought they were real was nothing to do with the fact I'd made them look real but that they were in a museum exhibition and had entered the Authorised Heritage Discourse.

Helen Sharman tripped while lighting the olympic flame at the World Student Games in Sheffield - you need to come from Sheffield to understand the significance of this, but context and often retrospective context is 92% of meaning.

ummmmmmmm

2007-07-10T06:56:00.000-07:00

well to catch up, steve suggested a weekly photo of the farm to gain a sense of place so here is a photo of tesco direct, made from parts of a tesco lorry, with added extras.Its used behind a quad bike to fetch sheep in from feild so we dont have to walk, hence - direct from field to pen. Wanted also to point out the floor is slatted for wee to escape through and to make washing out easier, however the back door when down is steep and so sheep find it a bit difficult , so some time is wasted in the loading!

kate can you direct me to something writen about the canoes and the cargo, i am reading a great book currently - perceptions of the environment - essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. T Ingold and in this he also talks about similiar things - anyway would be good to see source.

lou very excitied about tape - address is 79 main road, uffington, stamford, pe9 4sn 0771 364 7715 i promise to look after and safe return, maybe payment in a print will surfice? Also I concur with commets re value etc

steve re sheep who cant be bothered to stand to eat and kneel, its to do with them having bad front feet - foot rot normally and so they kneel out of pain! - just to set you straight. Anymore farming questions will obviously be answered forth with !!!!
Also what about chicken tikka masalla, as its now the nations favourite dish ? where does that fit?

Well for me this blog is interesting to read and hard to post to, steve i know likes to talk and finds it easier to put out there the thinking, i find it hard, it comes back to the "im stupid hangup" but i will try. Please dont respond with a "your not thick" comment , i was not fishing for compliments.!!!!or even reassurances
With regard to objects in collection, i was reading about the weaving of a basket this morning and how the writer considered the basket to be grown, not made and then linked this to the landscapre and how this is grown not made and i am now considering this. I like the fact he thinks that the distinction between living things and and artefacts is soft and that these things are not that different.
Also was reading about other stuff for dissertation and came across something that made me think about the peck, and other measuring devises in artemis - they set the parameters of the process but do not prefigure the form, thought this was interesting also in thinking about feilds and the activity that happens in them etc etc....... so still thinking about the cargo!!

well there you go, make of that what you will

tesco direct = 1 sheep and between 1 and 3 lambs

2007-07-09T05:55:00.000-07:00

Blogs

2007-07-09T02:20:00.000-07:00

I like Blogging. At the Social Anthropologists national conference I got really interested in the fact that lots of the ethnographers wrote field notes in a different language and then wrote them up in their first langauge and sometimes put them into English for their PHD or journal entries. There was a big discussion on how the language changed the lens and the perspective. I got really interested in the idea of field notes and had a look about for some information - methods of gathering them. This was why I thought I'd keep a journal written in long hand as I've not really picked up a pen to write in joined up since I did my a levels. My Physio says that when I hold a pen my first rib pops out of alinement and this is an anchor for the pelvis - my Pelvis and sacreal joints give me annual problems so writing does actually make me ill.

Anyway a lifetime of avoiding writting long hand could not be shifted and although i baught a nice new book with lines on one side and graph paper on the other I could not bring myself to write much in it. My Ethnographer friend Tim has started doing Audio recorded field notes perhaps I'll try this but I think I'd never bother to listen to them - sound as a medium is sometimes very dense and linier.

I just read a transcript of an interview with Helen Sharman the first british person in space who came from sheffield. It was left on my desk and I was just about to put it in the Bin. Transcripts of spoken words are like copies they are a literal transfer of spoken word to paper and occupy a funny modle space - we read them with our text brain but they are infact not written text but words used as a camera to present a conversation - people use this re-presentation in Verbatum theatre but it feels to me that some of the conversations about authenticity and representation could be explored through thinking about transcripts - Might have to revisit Barthes on this. Anyway Helen has just left the earths atomosphere and says.

'When I was in space, the gulf war was happening and the ground war had recently started and I could look down and actually see the fires. Now seeing fires from space is quite rare, usually you see the smoke because the wind blows smoke in straight lines, your eye sort of follows these rather unnatural lines on the earths surface, but to actually see the golden glow of fire is very rare because it has to be extremely big and we could see those fires, that was scary.'

So I like the blog for now as I feel like I can keep it up so I'm going to ditch the long hand journal as I don't seem to be able to get out of the Dyslecsics habit of a lifetime of avoiding writing longhand and it didn't give me a lens or a new way of reflecting or ordering thoughts it just made me guilty for not doing it

Perhaps we should do one to one interviews at 2 points across the project and get them transcribed so we can see if this brings out a different type of information?

New commision

2007-07-06T12:47:00.000-07:00

So beans sausage and egg and chips have now become political. Somebody raised the issue that unless the sausage was Halal the meal may not be appropriate for use with Muslim families. You can buy Halal Battered sausage from our chippy they are made of turkey and lamb,cooked in Palm oil so vegeterians can eat the cheese risoles. Spicy bean burgers at burger king are cooked in chicken fat and they have converted their delivery trucks to run on the old oil so their chicken burgers are delivered by chicken power but at least it's carbon neutral.

Everything especially food is political. I've asked an author I know to do an exersise where she rights a descriptive passage about eggs chips sausage and beans and then re-writes it while eating a plate full to see if multysensory proximity allows a closer rendition through words of objects .she is veggie but not Vegan (Like the rapper who can only ethically rap about chips and beans) So I talked to her about foods which tried to look and taste like meat and if this related to ideas of motif or symbol she is christian but not catholic. It made me remember transsubstanciation from when I did the reformation at school and I wondered if its just the fact I've started to frame my thinking through the lens of sausage, chips egg and beans but tonight the kids Dinasaur burgers took on a semiotic meaning which related to canoes and cargo and funtion and extintion and things which were made of meat trying to look like dinosours covered in breadcrumbs and things which were made of reconstituted fungal mould look like meat. I'm now going to watch the synthetic chiken scene from erasorhead I've not seen it for a while and it's a cracker - we must all watch the this is this scene from the dear hunter and the synthetic chicken scene from erasure head and if we are in the country the way sheep walk about the fields and leave traces - I like them lazy bastard sheep who sort of collapse their front legs to eat grass so they don't need to keep bending other. More wine - I wonder why those two London artists buggered off and set up their own blog last time - perhaps I was too much.

Beans sausage and chips

2007-07-05T08:30:00.000-07:00

Well made it to the blog third time lucky. I too enjoyed yesterday and the day is now mythologised. Louise you should not have role envy we all travel different paths and yesterday as I'm sure you realise is not a normal day for us most days we bash our heads against numerous educational projects which slip through our fingers like dust.

I've had a very busy day today and developed a conceptual piece of work which I will now unfold. It came to me last night while eating my tea and I'm really happy with it as it traverses hi art ontology and rhizomatic practices. I will call it three fakes and an authentic. So building on the idea of the motif which evolved from the "This is This bullet statement made by Robert denero in the dear hunter I have combined this with something kate said about the tautological nature of drawing and developed a piece of work around Egg and chips and beans and sausages which of cause is the modern archetypical meal.

So in simple terms inspired by the plated tudor meal in the box which was in the kitchen at artemis I started thinking about presenting a modern meal to bring the collection up to date. Clearly this had to be eggs sausage chips and beans. I'd been drawn to these items because they are clearly in many ways very realistic but do not look real. so in terms of semiotics they are symbols of the things they represent but they don't look like symbols they look like an attempt at realism David would use a big word which begins with an M which means copying nature but I cant remember it or what comes after m so I can't look it up - David if you look at this remind me what it is.

So I started thinking about what the boxes were used for - disruption and habitous - freezing defrosting and refreezing in a cycle and thought about Kate p s Canoes which she kept refering to in a fragment- like a 2 sentance history of british anthropology which made lots of sense and no sense. And I decided that if I could make a loan box which had three representations of eggs chips beans and sausages it would be the modern meal but could be used in schools to talk about notions of the real and the copy and possibly the hyperreal as a concept but as a materiality not as an idea which I think would be a new funtion and a new use for the artemis collection changing the habitous to create a new object in a new context which would have authenticity linked to funtion rather than meaning.

So this morning I rang my friend who makes film props and we are going to speak to special effects people and together fashion a Hyper real plate of eggs chips and beans and sausages and chips - this is the key to the work - I then thought I'd buy a jokeshop plated breakfast and a seaside rock breakfast. I'd commision artemis to make a lones box which would bring the item into the collection and thats as far as I got.

To extend the idea of crossing domains I've commisioned an MC to rite and record a rap about Sausage egg and beans but he is Vegan so says he will have to do Veg sausage and no egg. I've also commisioned a photographer to capture the most realistic picture he can of the above meal.

So I think I was spured into action yesterday I'm happy with this as a concept but welcome suggestions it hinges on our ability to make a hyper real meal which will not be easy but perhaps it may be about the journey - STEVE

2007-07-05T06:18:00.000-07:00

I thought yesterday was stimulating on lots of levels. I guess a theme for me is how we facilitate 'a giving permission' to allow our slightly-less-to-the-fore-selves (or identities, as we are all multiply identitied) some fresh air, myself included. As an ex-art student and not-practising-at-the-moment practitioner, it was really great to re-engage with that aspect of myself and - yes I was swamped by role-envy! - but I loved looking at the work and truely enjoyed the dialogue we were having - the sort that I used to have a lot but not so much now - and what it made me think about when I got home. Its also made me introduce parts of the dialogue here at my work - with interesting take up - so now I am having that dialogue more even as we speak - result!

If 'perceiving the practical need' or worrying about what we should be doing (according to....?) boxes us into a default way of responding to the context, yet pushing ourselves to explore alternative values (thereby questioning whether the practical and operational has always got to come top of the hierarchy) proves fruitful (even if it feels a bit counter-intuitive and selfish compared with habitual ways of being) are we modelling a freedom, that, in the long term, actually serves the social good of freeing us all up?

Wouldn't it be great if the project incidentally resulted in teachers being inspired to use the loans collection in a different way than to support the teaching of history because the work gave them that permission? and even greater if we have no control over how they do that or that we discover that they do it in totally unanticipated ways. Wouldn't it be great if the academic community recognised that this work is, in fact, lifelong education in action, for the artists and researchers, and for anyone subsequently touched by the work, and that lifelong education isn't just mature students having HE done to them, that CPD can be many things in many different informal contexts -

anyway the most important thing being we have a green light for the pig tape measure and it is in the post to me and will send on to Kate G when UI get an address

so long, Lou

Welcome to our blog!

2007-07-05T05:24:00.000-07:00

I thought we would get going by thinking about what Louise raised about the relationship between value and need.
In the gold case, for the Rotherham project, we realised that gold had a different value than we, as Westerners, associated with it.
In this project, what is valued seems to be at the heart of the project - is it a Papyrus from the time of Moses or Kate's father's wheelbarrow?
Answers on a postcard please.