Process, Practice, Play

1st year PhD Exhibition CCW / 2013-17 4th - 8th March 2014 Triangle Space Chelsea College of Art & Design

Contents

Dr Mo Throp Practicing Research

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Stephanie Cheung

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Anna Gialdini

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Altea Grau

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Bridget Harvey Jina Lee

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Keun Hye Lee Lana Locke

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Mohammad Namazi

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Vanessa Saraceno Hiroki Yamamoto

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Joshua Y’Barbo

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Communal Essay

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Credits

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Practicing Research

As a teacher of Fine Art, the discussion in the studio with the student and their works-in-progress demands a quite different response than the one that takes place in the encounter with the completed artwork in its intended final location (traditionally, the white cube). In the studio our dialogue shifts back and forth between the intention for the work and the often more uncertain possibilities for the ‘stuff’ in front of us: this work-in-process.

To practice is to make and to do; it demands decision making, not only about what one has intended for the work but for the way it could to be received and understood by the one who encounters it. To practice is to put something into the world which can resonate and communicate with others. Artworks are powerful ‘things’ that produce affective, moving, propositions. It is always my assertion as a teacher of fine art practitioners that the artwork can be an analytical and critical proposition in itself.

To begin a practice led PhD project demands that this practice itself be understood and articulated as research. This first year cohort of PhD candidates have been meeting several times each term in a series of Practice Presentations where they are able to share this experience. The group itself – with it’s commitment to each other – becomes a vehicle for this urgency to articulate and negotiate their various and differing projects within the framework of a research question. In these seminars we intend 6

to foreground the making of the artwork as research in its own right and so make more explicit the possible connections between the actual activity of making art and the knowledges which that activity necessarily produces. The typical tendency on beginning a PhD project might be to bring theoretical frameworks to the practice; in the seminars we try to think through the possibilities of using practice itself as a tool, to move beyond the more direct usual mode of approach to research in fine art of employing critical tools in order to fix and place the work of art. The seminars are spaces therefore where the student shares with like-minded researchers their processes, their experimentations and open possibilities for their project – a process enabling the of production of new knowledges And this is the impulse for this exhibition; the students are intent on opening up the process of production - presenting the experience of bringing an artwork to fruition, unconstrained by dialogue. This process may indeed be playful in the sense that it might involve leaps of faith and decisions being made which have no known outcome. It may involve losing the intention for the work, of allowing the work to lead. It is to be in a continuous renegotiation with the unfinished ‘thing’ a process of knowing and un-knowing, of doing and un-doing, of pulling it back again; a process of negotiation which might produce the new and the unforeseen of making, of allowing something other than our intended outcomes to take shape

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and open up other possibilities. To redirect this process of making necessitates openness and fluidity; a process of bringing something into language.

The works in this exhibition: objects, images, texts, some finished, some unresolved – still in process, invite us, the viewer, to enter into a more open relation with practice before its resolution and its coming into meaning. This is a space of an open-ended continuous present, an in-between of meaning where the conceptual and physical workings of ‘stuff’ are constantly being re-negotiated. We are in a relation to a resisting of knowing but one in which there is a potential for new knowledges to be produced. For making is to be in a continuous process of decision-making, of opening up to what might be possible, the unfixed, the not yet determined. It is a space of possibilities to come, the opening up of new pathways - open to the unexpected, without the necessity of conveying meaning.

It questions what motivates us to make the new; a more risky enterprise than the production of the fetishized art commodity.

Here, we have evidence of this thinking through materials (text, image…), the process of coming into meaning. It is experimental yet investigative; it poses open questions, re-telling and redescribing a fresh account. To be in process is to be constantly mutating. To be making is to be constantly in flux. Being in this state of flux though is always to be in a negotiation with the act of making – of making sense of the materiality and the stuff of meaning and language. Process is forever ongoing, it’s finality 8

suspended before the moment of being put out into the world for critical evaluation.

Freud describes the first creative act with his famous account of his young grandson’s ‘Fort/Da’ game. More than merely the attempt to come to terms with the loss of the mother, it is the invention of a game which propels us into language; a necessary process of invention and experimentation with the stuff of the world. To be in the process of bringing something into language is then to be in a space of where you are not just in meaning but also at the very limits of meaning at the same time. It is the propensity of the artwork to be at the limits of language, to be in-between as both subject and object in this space of making. To be practicing as an artist is to be in a process of inventing – of overcoming what we don’t know and of encountering the new; it is what philosophy and psychoanalysis have been attempting to articulate.

A research project is the articulation of new knowledge; a proposition for the negotiation of new possibilities which are not pre-determined as outcomes. This necessitates the inhabiting of unknown territories. Being invited into this enterprise we become participants in a community of creative potential; it’s what gives being creative it’s politics.

Dr Mo Throp 9

Stephanie Cheung My research is on participatory practice in multiple Chinese contexts – Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. In addition to contributing a Chinese angle to the global discourse on participatory art, the research also examines participation as a form on intervention, opening up dissensual dialogues vis-à -vis the monolithic and monovocal.

I see this research as a historical survey, a translation project, a parallel to my practice as a curator, and an inquiry to the forms, in plural, of knowledge generated in processes of participatory interlocutions. If to curate is to care, to participate is to take part, to research is to re-search, how do I navigate the many levels of human dynamics that drive through this kind of practice?

Caption for illustration: Work-in-progress of Etudes of the Everyday Co-conceptualized by Kingsley Ng and Stephanie Cheung In collaboration with 109 art and cultural practitioners in Hong Kong

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Anna Gialdini In my theory-based, historical research I investigate how the structural, aesthetic and functional patterns of Byzantine bookbinding were interpreted in Renaissance Venice and Padua. I combine first-hand analysis of surviving bindings in libraries across Europe with research on archival sources in order to assess the cultural and social implications of the crafting of Greek-style and hybrid bindings in the city Cardinal Bessarion called “a second Byzantiumâ€?; the cultural and political ĂŠlites had, in fact, reinforced the myth of Venice as the recipient of Byzantine heritage after the fall of Constantinople.

By analyzing the book as the cultural object par excellence, my ultimate goal is to cast light upon the cultural identity of personalities involved in the trade with different roles, be it that of binders, printers, booksellers, book owners, scribes, merchants, as well of the geography of a trade that had its foci in Venice, Padua and possibly Crete.

The study of the original materials and documentation through the frameworks of cultural history, anthropology, material culture and microhistory will give insight into the ateliers that received the commissions for bookbindings, estimate to what extent their craftsmen were Greek refugees fleeing from the Turkish invasion, and determine whether any differences come to light in the binding of printed books and manuscripts.

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Altea Grau

My practice and research centres in the re evaluation and the exploration of the limits of the book arts. Through the development of a poetic and intimate language, using minimal elements and manual processes, I try to expand the margins of the page creating installations and conforming visual sequences. I investigate how the practice of the book arts is changing the parameters of the page and extending its boundaries.

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Bridget Harvey Visibly and symbolically I explore mending as a key word in my making practice, examining our engagement with consumption and (dis)use. Historically, mending appears to have been unrecognised as a space, skill and craft of its own. It now appears that mending as everyday practice nears extinction.

Using visible acts of textile mending and (re)making as a starting point I explore further potential meanings of mending through material and technique. The practical act of mending may seem straightforward; a theoretical exploration of the act through my making reveals many different levels. Objects, ideas and notations map my practice, playfully exploring commonalities and differences, making links, iteratively feeding my research with material and intangible data.

Underpinned by philosophies of the slow movement and Bergsonian ideas of duration or appropriate time taking, inspired by the maintenance art of Ukeles, I propose hand mending as a method of making connections, outcomes and experiences, readable acts protesting against obsolescence and alienation through their very visibility. Where broken is seen as end, visibly mending and making are strong questioners, statements of empowerment through choice by ability.

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Jina Lee As an artist-cartographer, my research aims to deconstruct the notion of territorial borders by drawing ‘new maps’. Through studying Critical Cartography, I consider the border as a form of social activity, political action and cultural production, which helps me to envisage the making of ‘new maps’. Map-drawings examine how particular social, political and cultural movements can be referenced in order to analyse the existing borders on a map, and how such movements have implications for cartographic practice.

It is to re-examine the role of drawing in maps as an analytical/ creative language in order develop mapmaking.

Currently, I have designed ‘Joseonjok Mapping’ map-drawing project. Joseonjok are Northeast Chinese people, originally Korean.

Northeast China and North Korea are therefore shared by the same diaspora ethnicity, regardless of political border. By studying an ethnographic analysis of Joseonjok immigrants in London, I can create new maps that powerfully demonstrate social change.

Within this framework, two distinct approaches are apparent: a theoretical enquiry that seeks to examine the understanding of territorial borders, and a practical enquiry that opens up a space for creative mapping practice. It is to make an empirical exploration, re-introducing the role of drawing to contemporary maps and mapping processes.

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Keun Hye Lee Ritual Repetition The space can be powerfully affected by increasing patterns of repetitive practice. How does everyday repetition reflects on space design within a Korean contemporary context?

My practice is to investigate the relationship between trace and routine activity in terms of the rituals of ‘everyday life’, focusing upon a Korean cultural context. The aim is to develop a critical spatial practice that reveals ritual repetition through the use of interactive technology and ‘smart’ materials. Utilising such ‘smart’ materials can produce immediate changes responding to body or environment in a reversible way, instead of other materials that change over time such as steel, which rusts. The ‘floor’ is taken as an architectural problem with particular relevance to a Koran definition of space, but which is often disregarded in contemporary interior design.

Drawing upon a body of theoretical writing about everyday life and the relation of repetitive activity to ritual, this practice is focused on how the traditional raised floor informs house typologies and culturally specific social practices of space use in this exhibition.

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Lana Locke My research title is The agonistic struggle of the art object against the space in which it is installed.

I aim to question through my practice how an installed art object or set of art objects can create agonism within the space: “According to the agonistic approach, critical art is art that foments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate�. (Chantal Mouffe, Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces, Art and Research, Summer 2007) I make sculpture by putting together appropriated objects and materials that do not normally belong together: cast iron and florist foam bricks; latex and snail shells; hair and parcel tape. Within the sculpture an internal relationship is created between these disparate constitutive elements, which is agonistic by virtue of their physical difference and lack of sympathy with one another, brought out through the violent techniques in which they are forced together to become a whole, if precarious, art object.

The sculpture crosses into installation when the environment in which the objects are installed becomes sculpted by them, setting up an agonistic relationship with the space, and potentially the wider institute, extending to text protest signs and placement of unauthorised objects in contentious spaces.

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Mohammad Namazi

How could the notion of temporality or non-durability in artworks add value and enhance the experience of the spectators? What is the nature of the encounter when an artwork shifts from static to dynamic state?

This practice-led research reflects on the temporality nature of an artwork and the coexistence of static & dynamic features in it.

In this study kineticism in art is considered as the starting point in thoughts and ideas on temporal and non-durable artworks; a form of art that is not primarily based on objective values.

Tinguely brings to attention the importance of change as the main concern in his “Manifesto for Statics” (1959) and invites us to accept the dynamic structure of this planet and live in the present moment without any attempt of preservation. (Lee: 2006) Tinguely’s concern with dynamic structure and non-preservation of an artwork formed the basic foundation of many other artists’ practice not necessarily in sculpture medium, but through a number of other media such as installation, land art, performance art, computer art, digital art, internet art, etc.

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Vanessa Saraceno My curatorial practice investigates the possibility to stimulate an alternative knowledge capable to overcome the dualism between art and life, as between nature and culture, and thus finds its poetic force in the humble and in the ordinary, addressing contested matters through a collaborative, networked and interactive approach. Using curation as a catalyst for alternative thinking, my research examines whether an expanded notion of sustainability may offer a viable route in the understanding of contemporary art and curatorial thought, questioning which sorts of knowledge may help us become more sustainable in our relations to ‘nature’ and among ourselves, what art can do to stimulate this awareness, and what is the role of the curator in this new cultural scenario.

Specifically, the research examines how curating contemporary art to engage different audiences in public spaces may contribute to a sensuous and playful understanding on what ‘sustainable’ means in everyday life. Nurtured by the constantly changing relationships it stimulates with the surroundings, my practice addresses the public space as the place where antagonism becomes manifest. Staging moments of patient observation in the accelerated route of everyday transits, the public, curated interventions confront the contested concept of sustainability, and use it as a cultural force in order to generate and sustain experiences that are simultaneously collective and personal, playful and poetic, pleasurable and responsive.

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Daria Irincheeva, Almost Aqua, Installation view at Wilson Project Space, 2013

Daria Irincheeva, Upon a Time, 2011 27

Hiroki Yamamoto My concern has been to explore the potential for art to contribute to societal amelioration. My PhD research is about art’s possibility to offer a socially inclusive platform for the discussion of various socio-political issues. I am now focusing on socially engaged practice in East Asian countries, such as Japan, South Korea and China, addressing the post-colonial issues of ‘internal others’ (e.g., the issue related to Okinawa in Japan and the problem of Korean-Japanese).

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Joshua Y’Barbo Site-specific Intervention within Art Education Institutions My practice and research combine socially engaged art practice, critical pedagogy and institutional critique in an investigation of the structural changes within art institutions of education due to deep funding cuts. My investigation includes site-specific interventions into relationships within art education institutions and organisations outside of the institution of art.

The interventions are informed by site-specificity in institutional critique and will explore Pablo Helguera’s concepts of transpedagogy, which refers to ‘projects by artists and collectives where pedagogical process is the core of the artwork’(Helguera, 2011, p.77).

Site-specific intervention in my research challenges the framework of art education institutions through methods developed within institutional critique. According to Fraser (2005), the site of intervention within the institution includes ‘our relations to that site and the social conditions of those relations’.

Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of first and second generation institutional critique art practices, I re-examine and extend institutional critique by focusing on art institutions of pedagogy, rather than its institutions of display.

Examples of artists’ work I use to explore these concepts are as follows: Andrea Fraser, who enacts internalised discourse through

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lectures, Daniel Buren, who critiques the role of the studio in the production and dissemination of art practice, Hans Haacke, who conveys social and economic relationships through image and text and Michael Asher, who intervenes borders and rejects the production of art objects (Fraser, 2005). These practices inform my practice as an artist by providing a framework of experimentation and dialogue that is indebted to institutional critique and relational aesthetics.

Bibliography Fraser, A., 2005. “From Critique of Institutions to Institution of Critique�.

Artforum International, 44 (7), p.278-283.

Helguera, P., 2011. Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook. New York: Jorge Pinto Books.

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Communal Essay

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This experimental document traveled anonymously through the chain of exhibitors and curator, each reflecting and writing on the theme of Process Practice Play.

The resulting essay is a series of responses and reflections.

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>>>>>>

‘Our worlds are populated by objects as well as people - objects with their own roles, histories and allotted spaces within the social order’ (LeichterSaxby, 2009) Through the creation of physical and non-physical stuff we create markers in the duration of our lives. The things in this exhibition, be they objects, writings, ideas or other, mark stages in our own research; finished and unfinished investigations into the thingness of our ideas.

The book can be explored as a material, cultural object (material, cultural space) through bindings.

Their language reveals the codes to which craftsmen have felt personal bond or professional obligation, the owners’ cultural identity, and their interplay with the written word. The book therefore becomes a tool of self fashioning, where one is free to build their own persona through the language of figure and craft, stretching the limits imposed by functionality, politics, resource availability. The aesthetics involved are full of intention: they speak the tongue of cultural reinvention.

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‘To live is to leave traces.’ (Benjamin, 1999) The traces that people leave on the daily objects or places are through repetition and time which can be defined as a translation of experiences/identity.

The space can be powerfully affected by increasing patterns of repetitive practice. Drawing upon a body of theoretical concept about trace and the relation of repetitive activity to ritual, the exhibition is to develop ways of mapping everyday ritual use of space.

Leafing through pages. Fingerprints. Dust on the soles.

How do we take in our corpus -- if we use that fancy word? Do we put the accent on the “how”, the “we”, or the “it” -- yet to be defined? Is the journey about finding directions, clearing paths, or getting lost in the untrodden? Why hasn’t anyone gone there? Was it overlooked, ignored or deliberately avoided? Why do you go there?

What do you do when your corpus is people? What they do is not “work”. They breathe, walk, fall… They confide to you. You participate in their citations.

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Time is linear. Time, mathematics, science.

What then of research? Is that linear? Is that not also logical, trackable, definable within a predicted, clearly mapped path?

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To quantify each paint splash, measure each scratch of the pencil, and risk-assess each event that will occur.

Or does art deviate from the linear path?

The historical mark catching up with the future one.

The scratch deviating sideways.

Events sprawling and rebelling against their designated confines.

To question is to question the premise.

Is there a boundary between research and practice?

It seems to me that art is somehow related to de-boundary any borders.

Borders between visible/invisible, audible/ inaudible, sensible/insensible, active/passive, subjectivity/objectivity etc etc.

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Here you are going back to this very basic, almost surrealistic concept of what art might do, which is to let the rational mind go into abeyance, and the unknown to come into play. (Gooding, M. 1991) Why did you stop making objects?

(Roberts, R. 1981) I needed to change the framework in which I was working to coincide with certain developing political ideas I had about my position as an artist.

(Brisley, S. 1981) What was this? (Roberts, J. 1981) It was to do with the use of art in the market; my feelings about being with a private gallery.

I was under the impression that this was the most realistic way of operating as an artist. I was unhappy with the limitations of the gallery system, the fact that commercial galleries can only deal with material formed in such a way

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that it is amenable for sale. […] I believe that what constitutes art is like a kind of unspecified consensus. With any individual, whatever ideas he has and whatever he might want to do as an artist, it is only his assumption that he is an artist. So it is an individual concern. Art is always a speculation which deals with social conditions. For an activity to be considered as art it has to fall within that unspecified consensus. It’s useless for me to say ‘this is art’ if in fact it is not related to a broader notion of what art might be. (Brisley, S. 1981) Somebody recently asked me if I keep work and I said no, because it is the investigation that is of interest to me. To see if I can do something, to see what’s on my mind. So in one way I have some a priori ideas and in another way I don’t. it’s like that answer sometimes given to why people take photographs, ‘So that they can see what they’re looking at’. You are firing retro-rockets, correcting your course all the time. (Baldessari, J. 1995) I think I am working among a group of artists who have often referred to certain ideas that you have played around with. Time is one of the issues.

(Gillick, W. 1995)

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I could address this by saying that at the start, when I was a painter, time was an issue in the sense that I didn’t have enough of it to give to painting. Working on canvas takes up a lot of time and I realised that photography was faster.

It’s even faster if you get someone else to do your own work. It might be that you could make a whole argument for Conceptual Art occurring because people sort of ran out of time. They had to find ways to do the same things more quickly.

You revert to a shorthand in order to get to the essentials. (Baldessari, J. 1995)

Be Drunk You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it--it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish.

But be drunk. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, 40

drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.�

Charles Baudelaire

Highlighting the role of play in the discourse of art and research through this exhibition, it is to analyse play as a tool of creative process; where I believe artist researcher’s position should be engaged in free debate without formality and constraint and also should be communicated across multiple levels, from the intimate/local to the national/geo-political.

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Playing being drunk, being curious, listening the waves, the stars, the birds, the wind. That attitude that all creative minds adopt sometimes, that moment of ‘serious play’, that time that swings until it resolves, to approach the query, to resolve a craving answer, a desire to squeeze a vague idea…

Fighting between the idea, the object, the viewerreader. But then ... to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs and infinitum!

Either when I am writing, or when I am in the studio drawing, filming, making.., I run after an idea, an expression, trying to build, to materialize a thinking. I play to fill a gap in the communication process. Theodor Adorno pointed a particular idea about that procedure: ‘the injunction to practise intellectual honesty usually amounts to sabotage of thought’ (Adorno, 1951: 80). There is a distance amongst what we think and what we actually are able to say, a difficult void to bridge between idea and word-object, between the viewer-reader and us. This infinite interval is the freedom that we have to generate a positioning. I understand that this gap is the space that we try to fill by art in this exhibition.

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“Gratitude pours forth continually, as if the unexpected had just happened—the gratitude of a convalescent—for convalescence was unexpected.

“Gay Science”: that signifies the saturnalia of a spirit who has patiently resisted a terrible, long pressure—patiently, severely, coldly, without submitting, but also without hope—and who is now all at once attacked by hope, the hope for health, and the intoxication of convalescence” F. W. NIetzsche, The Gay Science Pleasurable, sensuous, provocative and intimate, the artistic research makes its way by going further. No logic is available to guide its steps. It moves erratically, following a vague ideal of its final destination.

Always eager to keep going, it takes advantage from getting lost, this way opening new paths for new ideas to come. A ludic form of awareness arises from the material contingency of the process of making, nurtured by the here-and-now that makes the present by leading to the future.

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In this peculiar laboratory of ideas, every object, document or image, even the humblest, becomes full of new meanings as encountered by the investigative gesture of the artist. The approach is speculative, but the attitude is not. Everything that looked unreasonable and foolish at first gaze suddenly starts shining a new light, and a new sensibility spreads from the small details that texture the narratives of our lives.

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition: Process, Practice, Play 4th – 8th March 2014 Triangle Space Chelsea College of Art 16 John Islip St London SW1P 4JU Contributions by Stephanie Cheung, Anna Gialdini, Altea Grau, Bridget Harvey, Jina Lee, Keun Hye Lee, Lana Locke, Mohammad Namazi, Vanessa Saraceno, Dr Mo Throp, Hiroki Yamamoto, Joshua Y’Barbo.

Edited by Bridget Harvey Curated by Vanessa Saraceno Designed by Mohammad Namazi Printed by Hato Press 2014 Published in London

by CCW Research department ISBN 978-1-908339-09-6

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