The Agony and the extesy

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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