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Summer Issue June 2013

ISSN 2052-3521

Journal of Art Writing by Students

Contents

Robert Gadie / 4 - 5 : Editorial Dr Eleanor Bowen, Mastication Guest Piece 6 - 12 : Drawing and Longing: Proposal for Drawing as Paratext Blair Martin Cahill / 14 - 15 : The Halo Project Tianqi Yang / 16 - 23 : How can Craftsmanship Embrace New Technology to aid the Slow Movement?

Xiaoyang Li / 24 : Sketchbook of the British Museum Francesca Peschier / 25 - 29 : The Sketchbook Archive of Jocelyn Herbert: Visual Identity and Legacy Ruth Solomons / 30 : Hasty Sketches and Scribbled Thoughts Kataryna Leach / 31 - 35 : When the Artist Cannot Work. Addressing the Artist’s & Artist Researcher’s Block as a State of Temporary Psychoanalytical Castration.

Arthur Edward Prior / 36 - 43 : Various Incarnations of Shirley Fairooz Aniqa / 44 - 45 : The Devil Pays Nada: Subversive Protesting at London Fashion Week Jean Kim / 46 : What is Painting Doing?

Alejandro Salcedo / 47 - 49 : The Sphere and The Temple Kelly Akers / 50 - 51 : Schadenfreude: Here Comes Honey Boo Boo

Jennifer Hawkins / 52 - 55 : Whatever Happened to Feminism?

Mel Cole / 56 - 63 : Girl With Mask Alex Wood / 64 - 67 : Resonation and Amplification in Art and Noh Theatre Chara -Styliani Drandaki / 68 - 69 : (In) scription Mohammad Namazi / 70 - 71 : Meanings Without an End: A Response to Anne Lydiat’s Time and Tide Brooke Fitzsimons / 72 - 75 : A response to Stephen Scrivener’s Redactions Tamirys Araujo / 76 - 79 : Brushing Teeth Aliki Kylika / 80 - 87 : Performative Histori-city Cheryl Papasian / 88 - 89 : Desiring the Fake Nora Heidorn / 90 - 97 : An Ethical Consideration of Relational Aesthetics Based on Christoph Schlingensief’s Opera Village Africa

Editorial Robert Gadie, MRes Arts Practice Student, and Co-Editor of JAWS

‘All this happens, not in ideology, but well beneath it.’

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 1983 In this, the second issue of JAWS, we again bring together a selection of art writing from across UAL. Following on from the great response we received for the inaugural issue, we have increased the size of the journal, and increased our distribution. Sticking with the JAWS ethos, there was no prescribed theme for this issue, which is why it is interesting to see some thematics emerge. Perhaps this can be construed as yet another benefit of the journal: a means of addressing issues (of the London arts community), and asserting a zeitgeist. Before speculating on these thematics, I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who submitted, the JAWS team, the brilliant Dr. Eleanor Bowen for writing our Mastication section, and the editor-in-chief Francesca for her consistent hard work and effort.

In Eleanor’s piece, she chews over notions of presence and event, provoking a subtle commentary on how we figure subject, and object. Whilst our relation to materiality can be catalytic - opening up a new means of thinking - it is also, conversely, tied into various forms of mediation. Francesca makes an interesting expansion on this line of thinking, as she theorises how renowned designer Jocelyn Herbert’s sketchbooks exemplify more than just an articulation of thoughts. Concrete sketchbook examples are also given, to substantialise her argument: Xiao’s British Museum sketches show in-situ tacit expressionist responses, whereas Ruth’s fragmentary, almost ephemeral notes serve as partial objects, opening out onto networks of connotations. Kataryna brings the psychoanalytic castration complex into an art context, imaging the practitioner (and canvas) as site of desire-flows and blockages. This almost serves as an anti-thesis to the unforced sketchbook scenarios, questioning in contrast how much we must rely on the success of practice, and how much must be invested in effort and chance.

We see a turn away from these notions of practicing, in the attention Blair gives to the beholder in her ‘Halo project’, as she focuses on a seemingly quantifiable experiential factor, and likens art induced chemical states to the affect weather has on a populous.

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Indeed there is an interesting focus on how we understand the artwork, and how it exists in relation to larger systems. By presenting her latest painting with a quote, Jean asserts the relation between a material discourse and its socially constructed framework.

The notion of construction appears again in Aliki’s piece, as she posits the relation of the monument to a performative historicity. And Alejandro revisits the concept of the Platonic sphere, and speculates on its ramifications for painting as an intersubjective practice. In doing so, he evidences the benefits of re-figuring ancient philosophy in the Alta-modern era. We have also reprinted in this issue, two pieces of writing by Mohammad and Brooke, which recently served as written counterweights (and counter-dialogues) to two artworks exhibited in the Re-calculating exhibition at the Chelsea Triangle Space.

One loosely grouped thematic, could be that of representation. In her article, Mel focuses on a Diane Arbus photograph, and asserts its networks of representation, questioning how the photograph works in psychoanalytic, fetishistic, gender political, and surrealist systems. Alex draws contrasts and comparisons between a traditional Noh theatre play and one of his own artworks, using this relation to query the particulars of interpretation. Following this emphasis is Kelly, who takes ‘low’ culture subject matter for her paintings, as a means of creating dialectics between excess and leisure; and Cheryl, whose sculptures question notions of desire and commodity. In contrast to them is Tamirys, who uses the representation of consumerism as a subterfuge tactic, in an attack on normative sexual politics; and Chara, who challenges the very process of communication, taking letters as literal subject matter. And emphasising other forces is Arthur, who uses the ever-changing Kodak girl ‘Shirley’ to bring attention to the power relations of economics, consumerism and representation.

The last thematic I would like to bring attention to, is that of ethics. This is picked up by Fairooz, who has developed a design strategy to highlight the unjust intern workforce, which stands in stark contrast to big-business profit. Jennifer offers a look into the ongoing debate surrounding beauty and feminism. In critiquing the notion of positive representation, she advocates instead, a shift towards non-gendered aesthetics. Tianqi also presents an ongoing critique, in the shape of the Slow food movement, and its interdisciplinary repercussions for fashion and design. It is interesting to see how the disparity between production, (transcendent) values, and an aesthetic, has been dealt with by these writers, seemingly to shine a light on ethical practice. This is dealt with most discursively by Nora, who takes Christoph Schlingensief’s Operndorf Afrika, critiques it in light of its ethical and social flaws, and proposes a pragmatic model for ethical, relationalaesthetic practice.

So, as a platform for dissensus, dissemination and progressive critique, this issue of JAWS seems to coalesce around the ideas of practice (what can it do?), the ‘work’ (how does it work?), representation (what does it mean?), and ethics (should it work like this?). I’m sure these will be ongoing concerns in future issues, but some very poignant conclusions have been drawn by these writers, and could also be made in contrasting their articles. Happy reading!

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Drawing and Longing: Proposal for Drawing as Paratext Dr Eleanor Bowen

My practice explores, and seeks a way out of, the potentially solipsistic position of one who draws ‘from life’, as the indexical surface mark (a witness unlike the photograph) unequivocally belies its author.

Martin Buber characterises solipsism by distinguishing between two forms of existential relationship, the I/Thou and the I/It, the latter relation being ‘between oneself and the idea of a thing, an object, and therefore not really a relationship atall, but a kind of monologue’ (Buber 1970:54). Solipsism as antagonist in my practice forces its opposite, so I seek out positions of neutrality or tension between subject and object, attempting to break the monologue, the I/It approach, that which drives deconstruction. Taking subject/object I investigate the line between.

A ‘state of drawingness’ is proposed by Hélène Cixous in her essay ‘Without End, no, State of drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner’s taking off’, which reflects her notion that a subject can be drawn out through the inscription of marks and words that evoke the ‘living of life’ (Cixous 1998:25). She speaks of desiring the ‘before and after’ of a book, invoking the frustration that, for a subject to be legible and visible, it must be approached, bound and delimited through writing or drawing and therefore, paradoxically, taken from life and movement into stasis. Cixous seeks the event itself, or rather, the improvisational means by which, through an open-ended and tentative process of mark-making, erasure and placing, a person or event may be drawn out.

This proposal finds its form in the notion of paratext, originally (for me) a means of drawing out subject matter by presenting meta-material through pairings of text and image. The idea that a subject may be invoked by components beyond and around it is also reflected in literary theory.

Gerard Genette defines paratexts as components of the paraphernalia surrounding texts in publication (prefaces, illustrations, titles). For Genette, the paratext is ‘More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold… a zone between text and off-text, not only of transition but also of transaction ... an influence that ... is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it’ (Genette 1997:1-2).

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The following paratext cluster is drawn around the notion of parastasis (Frizot 1998:2), defined as ‘the act or action of abstracting an image or representation from the continuous flow of time, where the original and its replicant, for an instant, coexist within the same temporal and spatial dimension’ (Oxford Latin Dictionary 1850). The notion of parastasis evokes, as does Cixous through her analysis of drawing ‘from life’, the desire to capture and thereby defy time. These pieces (Bowen 2006/08) explore drawing’s relationship with photography, the inscription of the pencil of nature incorporating the idea of paper as a performance space.

1: Punctum

That she moves her leg (the blur) pins the moment.

I pan through Photoshop to Cis’s leg breaking the pose, although moving in is not what brings her closer or what animates her. It is a particular movement that animates the still, that which draws us.

Despite blurring, it is possible to see under scrutiny of enlargement the texture of machine-spun wool.

I view ribbing like an archaeological find lost in miniature. Moving in, the process of blow-up, as if an excavation in reverse, exposes the nearly imperceptible.

As we look, the photograph’s history (fused with her being unknown) becomes turbulent (Pearson & Shanks 2001:10). Like a small wave it throws up something salvaged, the tiny movement that is a narrative fragment, a real history. Punctuation, exposure, the blur in the frame seems to us now, as perhaps for her, a gesture of escape.

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‘When it’s not entirely clear what’s being felt or being thought in the body…that’s the moment [on which we] seek to draw… and drawing the ‘living of life’ is…exactly what none knows ... but it’s not impossible’ (Cixous 1998:25).

I’m looking for Cis MacLachlan, four years old in Glasgow being photographed by Alexander McNab for a calling card. I see her one more time, an undated teenager sitting for a studio portrait in Braintree, composed and still. Then I lose her.

Still blur draws me to the point, the punctum, the cut through space that creates the still (Barthes 1982:27). It is not that movement itself animates, because movement in a photograph emphasises arrest. We cannot see movement, the moment, but - held in tension with now - a gap opens between moments, hers and ours. The performance, the exploration, the not knowing becomes a double subject. Moment by moment, is this the measure of difference? Time is difference. One and one is now.

‘But where does one stand to look at the nature of time? No image can still time. However it is the frame of the still image that offers us a means to engage with time in its virtuality. The frame frees the image from reference to an actual time and place and offers us an opening for time travel – an opening that may well become a portal for our inner rhizome of experience. We are now changing places and admit that we are bound in time … all the stories we might invent are only attempts to look at the image anew…We are always looking for a place in order to see’ (Ross with Wegener 2000:57).

Between the viewer and the still lies an extension of images, forward from camera-time to now which runs backwards. In between, Cis moves out of the frame towards Braintree and beyond, and we plunge in to meet her, clutching the calling cards (they are the only ones with which we have to play, playing around Cis’s leg, all of us gathering momentum, moving around the point, the punctum).

Measuring the gap between her time and ours, we tell her story.

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2: Frame The Munby Box, kept in the Wren Library, Cambridge, contains Arthur Munby’s photographic archive. With his housemaid Hannah Cullwick, whom he eventually married, Munby collaborated on a documentation of Hannah’s life as a domestic servant in his household. In 1988 Carol Mavor’s excavation of the Munby Box (to prevent scandal locked at Munby’s request until 1950) uncovered a frame whose image had faded to invisibility (Mavor 1998:187).

This exists as surface only, beneath which a handwritten caption describes the moment of exposure:

Hannah, going to the public house for the kitchen beer as she does daily. Taken in the street about noon on Friday, the 2nd of February 1872.

Taken from (the context of) an excavational essay concerning the contents of the box, this image remains (out of context) a powerful drawing from life. Between the moment, the camera, the first viewer’s text and the movement towards it of others who (after 1950) see also, the event of Hannah herself has faded right away. But in the movement, the gesture of one towards another, that which is seen from a distance becomes something else.

‘Estranged from this itself, which is the image, we … re-call the event’ (Blanchot 1989:88).

3: Street Scene ‘Moving objects leave no impression on the sensitive surface’, Samuel Morse (Frizot 1998:28).

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Morse observes Daguerre’s slow image, the street seen through a camera obscura from the photographer’s Paris studio on 7 March 1839. Taken through Photoshop a hundred and fifty years on it is possible to detect, in the same image, traces of what Samuel Morse could not see, a street population present at the time but going too fast to show up. These (the ghosts of carriers, carts, pedestrians and dogs) manifest as constellations of pixels, barely visible galaxies.

4: Drawing and Longing The Third Person Archive, by the artist John Stezaker, is a collection of background figures found and cut out of nineteenth-century photographic travelogues and postcards. The notion of a third person refers primarily to the camera itself, mediating unseen between viewer and viewed. Re-framed from above, the ground is viewed obliquely. Shadows run from corner to corner so that each figure appears set diagonally across the ground as if in an oriental miniature. Here we see, between traceries of shadow thrown by flights of steps and lampposts, the ghosts of children moving too fast to be completely caught. A unilateral edit takes them from the larger ground upon which they are incidental figures, a rupture that (as if introducing another lens) refocuses and brings them into sight. The photographed figure, appearing as a surface mark, can be said to mark a movement, ecceity, the ‘here is’ (Note 1).

This is not chronology, but that which is between ourselves in time, so that the particular in photography, its predication of a body, a lamp post, a flight of steps, may take the measure of what is now and who is here. These are subjects imaged not in memoriam but in anticipation of being noticed, brought to bear upon, tenderly dislocated in order to be seen again. Exerting pressure, tracing the contours of that event, we find another present, the trace of a life reconstituted outside itself.

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5: tac The autonomous image cuts (and is cut from) movement (Bracewell 2005).

In a similar way (to illustrate) an imagined tac operates in the performance of mime. The inner tac makes thinking visible and visibly shifts perception. The palms or soles make contact - tac - and without a word the surface of a world appears (a wall, a glass of water, the handle on a door, a flight of stairs). Tac is a mental sound, a note for the body, a small explosion creating ‘some form of enlargement or exaggeration, not necessarily elaborate’ (Note 2).

The enlarging gesture (Note 2) can be almost imperceptibly slight. The act, mime’s embodiment of the world’s surface, can be imagined for all the world to see, ‘like a small tear in the surface of the world, as though we have been pulled through from our own to some vaster space’ (Weil cited in Scarry 1999:111), through a sort of death.

Postscript In her essay on reading and drawing, ‘Without end’, Cixous longs for ‘the beforehand of the book’ [Cixous:20]. Then we read, ‘I just wrote this sentence, but before this sentence I wrote hundreds of others which I've suppressed, because the moment for cutting short has arrived. It’s not me, it’s necessity which has cut the text we were on our way to writing, because the text and I, we would continue on our way’.

The practice of paratext proposed here in relation to drawing takes Genette’s term as a reference to both the material properties of text (the parameters that create visibility) and also to that ‘endlessness’ pursued by Cixous, the stream within which we have to negotiate a position from which to see. Through her reading of drawing, Cixous wants the living of [a] life in all its particularity, its very passing. In her reading, for example, of Picasso’s Woman Ironing she longs for ‘what passes between us’, for some can ‘portray passing’. The drawing is scrutinised and its contours followed with concentration. The emotion sought, she says, is ‘born at the angle of one state with another’ (Cixous: 26, 22).

The book’s binding tilts its text towards us. The covers (with preface, postscript and in-between) draw us in/on/through, as from here we can see.

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Bibliography Barthes R. (1982) Camera Lucida. London:Vintage Blanchot M. (1989) The Space of Literature (trans. by Smock A. from L’Espace litteraire 1955) Nebraska: UNP Bowen, E. (2008) ‘Where is the Space of Choreography’ in Performance Research Vol. 13:2, ‘On Choreography’, 30-32, 34 (‘Punctum’, ‘Street Scene’, ‘Drawing and Longing’); (2006) Performance Research Vol.11:3, ‘Lexicon’, 69, 71 (‘Frame’, ‘Tac’).

Versions of these pieces are reproduced here by kind permission of London: Routledge (Taylor & Francis Group).

Bracewell M. (2005 ) ‘Demand the Impossible’, John Stezaker interviewed in Frieze, March Issue 89.

Buber M. (1970) I and Thou (trans. by Kaufmann W.) New York: Scribner’s Sons from Buber M. (1923) Ich und Du (trans. 1937 by Smith R.G.) Cixous, H., (1998) ‘Without End, no, State of drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner’s taking off’ (trans. by MacGillivray C.A.F.) in Stigmata, Escaping Texts. London: Routledge Frizot M. (1998) (ed.) A New History of Photography. New York: Konemann Genette, G. (1997) Paratexts, Thresholds of Interpretation (trans. by Lewin J.E.) Cambridge: CUP from Genette, G. (1987) Seuils, Paris: Seuil Mavor C. (1998) ‘Touching Netherplaces, Invisibility in the Photographs of Hannah Cullwick’ in Exceptional Spaces, Essays in Performance and History (ed. Pollock G.) North Carolina: NCP Pearson M. & Shanks M. (2001) Theatre/Archaeology. London :Routledge Scarry E. (1999) On Beauty and Being Just. New Jersey:Princeton Stewart S. (1993) On Longing, Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. North Carolina: Duke University Press Stezaker J. (2000) ‘Redemption & the Irredeemable’ in Images of Thought (ed. Lomax Y.) Vol. 2, Salvo 007, Royal College of Art

Endnotes 1. Ecceity (Lat. haecceitas, ‘thisness’) is posited by Duns Scotus as not a thing but a spatio-temporal relationship, a determination, a predisposition of one towards another. Laura Mulvey suggests that the tense of a photograph might be thought of as the ‘this is that has been’ (Mulvey L. (2000) ‘The Index and the Uncanny’ in Gill C.B. (ed.) (2000) Time and the Image. Manchester & New York: MUP).

2. Notes transcribed from a talk by the mime artist Geoffrey Stevenson, University of Durham, 2004.

3. In her essay On Longing, Susan Stewart (1993) considers how, from the ‘enlargement of experience’ through language, emerge conventions of description by which the world may be understood. This is an imagistic means through which experience is (more than conveyed) instead re-made or transformed. Here, longing is an imaginative impulse to collect or re-scale the world.

Image references available from the author.

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The Halo Project: Blair Martin Cahill We as living beings cannot live without the presence of light.

It is essential to our very existence.

Art challenges our minds to see things in new ways.

It can be an inspiration and representation of the complexity of life and of our own existence. Art can help us to feel and think.

It is generally agreed that art relates to feeling in the way science relates to thinking. I believe that art can be made even more beneficial with the addition of the science of light.

I recently had the opportunity to attend The Light Show at the Hayward Gallery and experience in person light installations I have previously only seen in publications.

Being in the presence of the light itself was a profound experience. One can physically feel the light.

The air itself seems to be charged.

The James Turrell installation Wedgework V was presented in a purpose-built space. The queue for this piece is usually quite lengthy and the gallery patrons have time to talk, fidget and generally let their minds wander while they wait. Once inside the small room they are immediately drawn to the large soft dimensions of glowing light beams.

There is no more talking or fidgeting. The mind does not wander; it is led directly into the light. If we combine our living need for light and the stimulating properties of art and make the result accessible on a regular basis we enrich our minds while simultaneously fostering positive emotional responses.

This was the catalyst to incorporate phototherapy within my new work. Starting with The Halo Project, I hope to make art that gives rise to emotional effects on an evocative and tangible level.

The effect that light has on mood and the brain itself is enormous. A study led by Samer Hattar PhD at Johns Hopkins University found that in the absence of light the brain will increase corticosterone production, an important stress hormone that can cause depression-like symptoms 1. Light deprivation can lead to Seasonal Affected Disorder.

According to Medilexicon’s medical dictionary, Seasonal Affective Disorder is: ‘A depressive mood disorder that occurs at approximately the same time year after year and spontaneously remits at the same time each year. The most common type is winter depression and it is characterized by morning hypersomnia, low energy, increased appetite, weight gain, and a craving for carbohydrates, all of which remit in the spring’. 2 16

" The Halo Project" Blair Martin Cahill, 2013.

Light, Metal, wood and plastic. Booth: 1.82m H X 0.91 W. Bench: 0.76 L

Studying the effects of light on seasonal depression can help to develop a style of art that is not only pleasing to the eye but also emotionally and physically beneficial.

The amount of words and colours the average person processes daily can be overwhelming. The Halo project employs sources of full-spectrum SAD lights directed through blue and white. By sitting in close proximity to the lights placed in my piece the viewer can leave words behind and experience calm while bathed in light of a soothing blue colour.

The full spectrum photo-therapeutic lights installed in the large freestanding booth will trigger a calming response while at the same time helping to reset circadian rhythms. Just as gazing into a reflecting pool provides a doorway to self-reflection, this piece will change the viewer into a participant and will encourage a connection and greater assimilation of therapeutic light.

I hope to help people form the habit of emotional cycles in the absence of physical cycles with the aid of light and art. Using a lighted piece of art at the same time each day for a set amount of time, “muscle memory” can be applied to emotions so that eventually we will have greater control over our consciousness. The contribution of therapeutic art to the well being of individuals will be immeasurable.

Blair Martin Cahill, MA Fine Art Chelsea

Endnotes 1.Hattar, S., Lyons, L.C., Dryer, L., and Eskin, A. (2002). Circadian Regulation of the Transcription Factor, ApC/EBP in the Eye of Aplysia Californica. J Neurochem 83, 1401-11. [PDF] 2. http://www.medilexicon.com/medicaldictionary.php?t=26059

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How can Craftsmanship Embrace New Technology to Aid the Slow Movement?

Tianqi Yang

Mahatma Gandhi noted, ‘There must be more to life than increasing its speed.’

Honore, 2004, 37

Slow Food Movement Slow takes as its starting point the issues emerging from the Slow Food Movement, founded by Carlo Petrini in 1989, which has developed as a critique of the consequences of our unsustainable consumerist culture, and its increasingly fast lifestyle (Carnac, 2010). With the appearance of fast food and fast life, there is a disappearance of local food tradition and a dwindling interest in the food people eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choice affects the rest of the world.

Particularly, the Slow Food Movement can be understood as helping the public reflect on how their consumer choices cause human and ecological impacts.

Slow Movement The Slow Movement is a cultural shift aiming at slowing down the pace of human life. ‘Slow is a grassroots social movement, a new way of thinking and behaving. It is a small but growing force that is alternative to this current unsustainable culture and way of delivering products and services. It is about reviving tradition’(Vuletich, 2009). Clara Vuletich is a printed textile designer and a researcher in sustainable textile design exploring ideas of material reuse, digital craft technique and social design, who also works closely with Helen Carnac, a maker and curator in London, focusing on the connections between, material, process and maker, creating social and creative engagement and collaboration in an open-ended design process.

The notion of Slow can be applied to almost anything we do in life: Slow Cities, Slow Work, Slow Sex, Slow Technology, Slow Thinking, Slow Education, Slow Parenting, Slow Design, Slow Travel, Slow Fashion, Slow Science, Slow Art, Slow Consumption. The Slow Movement has shown how we may be able to develop new economies and social networks which are based around local production, setting a challenge for industry and enterprise.

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Mixed material handmade textiles exploring the relationship between craftmanship and new technologies through their construction, 2013, Tianqi Yang.

Faster is not always better, and slow living is not necessarily about living like a snail. It means doing everything at the right speed, fast, slow or whatever pace delivers the best results (Honore, 2004). In terms of Slow now, it is not the opposite of fast, there is no dualism; it is simply a different approach in which designers, buyers, retailers and consumers are more aware of the impacts of products on works, communities and ecosystems (Fletch, 2008, p173). For instance, the appearance of art from found material in order to transform found material into attractive design requires an emotional involvement, rather than simply making a statement, and an aesthetic judgment about the materials themselves. As Linda Florence mentions, ‘Craft is a process of thinking during the continuingly developing, not the final outcome’ during the event Taking Time Craft and the Slow Revolution 2009. It reflects a style of living with a positive engaged attitude to the world, which modern people seem to shirk in favor of consumerism.

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New Identity of Craft Craft represented power and secret knowledge from ancient civilization to modern sociality.

Contemporary craft is a practical philosophy, it is inevitably an activity of self-exploration in the sense that one learns about oneself through searching for excellence in work. Craft is a body of knowledge with a complex variety of values, and this knowledge is expanded and its values demonstrated and tested (Dromer, 1997, p219). The best example of contemporary craft presented by Slow philosophies was a major national touring exhibition of Craftspace at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2009. It was embedded with a sense of locality, through its treatment and use of local resources and its response to the environment, local market, and the communal status of the craft practitioner.

The word ‘craft’ has two distinct senses, the first being craft-as-skilful-labour (which suggests a great many activities), the second being craft-as-a-class-of-object (which is a restricted category with permeable boundaries) (Dormer, 1997, 69). With the culture shifting by various economical and political concerns, Craft becomes a way of doing thing rather than making things. Craft is no longer a ‘product’ or an ‘art object’, it edges towards emotional expression. During the interview with Helen Carnac on Making a Slow Revolution project 2010, Linda Sandino says the work of being an artist is never a product – because they are not an object themselves. The work of being an artist is never finished and in a way when thinking about someone working, it is unfinished issue and preoccupation that they are working through.

Craftsmanship in the Slow Movement ‘The Slow Movement shares a lot with craft, namely respect for tradition and heritage, an appreciation of where things are made, and an emphasis on social networks’ (Vuletich 2009) As the rhythm of life speeds up, Craftsmanship stays concerned with Slow traditional techniques, often passed down from one generation to another, focusing on detail, and tactility.

The new concept of Craftsmanship is no longer just to be considered by a set of age old skills, coveted by certain group of people, contemporary Craftsmanship is a way of thinking through practices of all kinds. It is a process of awareness, of environmental sustainability, and a disavowal of mass consumption. According to the philosophy of Secession ‘ To every age its art, To art its Freedom’ It is considered as the enjoyment of life’s attitude, it emphasizes uniqueness and individual identity. It is considered the beauty of the Craftsmanship under the Slow Movement. By the various collaborative activities, the slow movement is changing the way people see Craftmanship.

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Threads And Yarns, is a fascinating project led by Central Saint Martins digital projects director Jo Morrison and BA Textile course leader Anne Marr, in partnership with the V&A Museum and The Wellcome Trust. In this intergenerational textile project, senior citizens from north London and further afield worked with first-year students from Central Saint Martins BA Textile Design course in a series of craft workshops, during which they also discussed their personal experience of health and well-being. Art and craft therapy is an established practice in the mental health profession to help improve patients’ wellbeing; in this project, such art and craft practice also proved itself useful in informing how future textile design research can provide a response to social and community issues.

An example of engaged Craftsmanship can be seen in the work of Swedish fashion designer, activist and researcher, Otto Von Busch, who mixes fashion theory and philosophy with craftsmanship and activism. He creates new connections between high fashion and DIY craft, adopting a strong personal, and passionate style. Interestingly, in his Autumn/Winter 2007 collection of methods, he details eight different reform techniques for menswear, including the restyling of shirts, trousers and jackets. Moreover, for each method a photographic step-by-step process is provided, as is a list of items needed to make the transformation. In its original sense, craft means, ‘to care’, giving slow artistic practice an inimitable appeal. An increased number of artists and designers define an alternate view of contemporary design, with ubiquity and soullessness of mass-produced and branded products. In many instances, the work does not ignore technology but embraces it, employing it strategically with the handmade. It could echo Vuletich’s call for respect of tradition through social networks, as being answered by Von Busch, who uses digital photography and social media to document the step-by-step process.

Slow is not a new concept in craft production, interestingly; the current debate on the understanding of the nature of Craft and Craftsmanship is developing around ways that aspects of the Slow Movement are related. These aspects include the relationships of time and process, economy and material, production and consumption, community and society. Neil Brownsword, is a ceramic artist and practice-based researcher who lives and works in Stoke on Trent, UK. His creative practice continues to explore the social, cultural, and economic impact of the decline of British ceramic manufacture, as its North Staffordshire centre increasingly shifts production to the Far East. The steady closure of factories and the resulting disappearance of a unique artisanal culture are mediated via a formal language inspired by remnants of industrial archaeology. His work is a good example of defining and re-defining through generations of material and making experiences, conveying new experiences which are profound and enlightening in turn.

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Slow Fashion ‘In melding the slow movement’s idea with the global clothing industry, the idea is about combining a sense of nature’s time of regenerating cycles and evolution , culture’s time of the value of traditions and wisdom, as well as the more common timeframes of fashion and commerce.’ (Fletch, 2008, p173) The Industry Revolution in fashion textile industry begins in early 1790s, when Eli Whitney invented a machine to gin cotton using water powered mill wheels (Wilson, 1979, p200). This resulted in technological and social developments that affected both the production and consumption of fashion. These included the birth of the couture system, changes in the social system, and the growth of the ready-to-wear industry. Such developments paved the way for proliferation of fashionable goods and set the stage for the problem of overabundance (Welter, 2008, p7). During the postmodern era, in order to respond to the negative matter of fast fashion and mass production, as well as an increasing awareness of environment and the changing interests and tastes of consumer, ‘hightech’ fabric development occurred throughout the 1900s. This inspired fashion designers to create new styles using these fabrics. Meanwhile, a new link was made between conservation and the environment. Companies began researching renewable raw materials, such as soybeans and corn for fibres (Hethorn, 2008, p89).

Throughout the development of fashion textile in the postmodern era, there has been much more to sustainable fashion than the materials component. New concepts are needed that embrace a rethinking of the process of garment creation, use and disposal, re-creation or re-use with a focus on extending the life span of products and the meaning they bring. Fashion and technology are a perfect match and as such the fast-paced progress of technology complements fashion’s ever-evolving aesthetic. Each gives the other a wider frame of reference as well as scope to explore new horizons.

To a certain extent, fast fashion involves democratization of style. Every year worldwide fashion weeks present an abundance of ‘looks’ to the public from the catwalks. After the exciting camera flashing and mass publishing has passed, people start to question themselves, and the fashion industry, do we really need that much quantity of cloth? Moreover, what has fashion week left over to the public? Undoubtedly, the impact of fashion is huge and effective. However, overwhelming production has a serious negative impact on the social and ecological environment. Such sentiments echo the proposals by Vuletich for introducing Slow approaches within contemporary industry, which I believe the Textile and Fashion industry would benefit from adopting in order to achieve sustainability. Fashion has its roots in craft, both historically, and in the actual people employed in the factories. This is forgotten in the media circus and advertising aspects.

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Slow Fashion Value: Quality over Quantity The fashion industry contributes to today’s sustainability challenge in a number of ways. ‘Slow Fashion Value’ is recommended by a group of Swedish researchers, including Linda Worbin from Chalmers University of Technology Sweden and Jose Illegard from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Both from the Masters in Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability program. The idea is designed to guide the entire production cycle. It is about detailed consideration, quality and quantity control. However, the values are limited by various social and political statements; particularly that the whole operation is being affected by the economic situation. In my opinion the term ‘value’ refers to the significance and creative process of any product rather than a onesize fits all solution. Additionally, it will encourage involvement in the design process and build a more meaningful interface between retailer and consumer. Slow Fashion plays a major role in the sustainable ecological system as a whole; it represents all things ‘ethical’ and ‘green’ such as is also found in the Slow Movement. Combining the idea of Kate Fletcher and Carl Honore to sum up the concept of ‘Slow approach’ it intervenes as a revolutionary process in the contemporary world.

Moreover, it encourages taking time to ensure.

The Center of Sustainable Fashion at London College of Fashion which emerged in 2007, and The Source: The Global Platform for Sustainable Fashion founded in 2011, are two outstanding organizations in United Kingdom. Both strongly believe that co-operation is the key towards future sustainable fashion. They are acting as a bridge towards transforming solutions in crossover design industries with a common aim to balance ecology, society and culture. Thankfully these two organizations have created a huge impact on the fashion industry, through linking small businesses together, becoming involved with different projects, and promoting emerging creative design to the market. This is an encouraging development for the Slow Fashion movement. It is a truly live example which turns the design concept into a significant reality.

New Role of Designer The Slow Movement aims to encourage more designers who embrace these emerging Slow values, and take a step towards to declaring themselves as Slow designers. In order to serve the best of this part, designers are facing very arduous challenge, designers not only have to hold general connoisseur aesthetic, crossover industry knowledge and practical skills, but also the ability to run the co-operation from different parts of world. Particularly, the response to complex social political environment sensitively. The boundaries and responsibility among of artisan, craftsman, designer artist, engineer, architect, technician, scientists and inventor are getting blurred.

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Designers need to not only rethink the production system, but also to regenerate the cultural and social qualities of local communities and place. As a designer, the responsibility is not only to produce interesting design, but also wisely use the influence of fashion as a medium to best convey an attitude, and a lifestyle, in order to make a new social environment statement.

Conclusion The slow movement is not an attempt to drag the whole planet back to some pre-industrial era. On the contrary, the movement is made up of ordinary people like you and me, who want to live better in a fast-paced, modern world. That is why the Slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word: ‘balance’ (Honore, 2004). To achieve ‘balance’, we need a revolution in the way we live, work, travel, consume and think. This is particularly relevant for the design industry in the 21st century. Specially, the attitude of being creative (both for designers and consumers) is the key to enjoying a sustainable life. Modernizing of traditional craftsmanship is at the core of shaping the fashion of the future.

Interactive technologies not only offer ways to change the ways in which garments are designed and worn, but also they are radically reforming the way fashion is manufactured and sold. It is a unique and vital form of creative activism, delivering new values for design, and contributing to the shift towards sustainability. By incorporating advanced materials and techniques with craft traditions, their scope is enlarged, and new perceptions are created. As a designer myself. I agree with Sass Brown that coexistence of tradition and technology is the way forward (Brown, 2010). There is still some way to go in the standardization of accreditation across a range of textiles and production methods, with terms like ‘ecological’ and ‘natural’ relatively open to interpretation. Nevertheless, looking ahead to fashion’s legacy in a global and ethical context it is much clearer and more defined than before.

Tianqi Yang, MA Textiles Chelsea

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Bibliography Dormer, P (1997) The Culture of Craft Status and Future, Manchester University Press.UK. Manzini, E and Jegou, F (2003) Sustainable Everyday Scenarios of Urban Life.Edizioni Ambiente Srl. Milan Buszek, E, M (2011) Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. Duke University Press.UK Honore, C (2004) In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is challenging the Cult of Speed. Clay Ltd. Lodon.

Sennett, R (2008) The Craftsman. Penguin Books. London.

Frayling, C (2011) On craftsmanship towards a new Bauhaus. Oberon Book. London Sterner, G (1977) Art Nouveau. An Art of Transition – From individualism to Mass Society Lipson, H and Kurman, M (2013) Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing. John Wiley & Son.Inc. Canada.

Groover, P, M(2012) Fundamentals of modern manufacturing material, Processes, and Systems. McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Petry, M (2012)The Art of Not Making: The new Artist/Artisan Relationship.Thames & Hudson.UK Brown, S (2010) Eco Fashion. London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd. Escritt, S (2000) Art Nouveau. London: Phaidon Press Limited.

Hung, S and Magliaro, Joseph (2007) By Hand The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art

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Sketchbook of the British Museum Xiaoyang Li

Studies of Kouros pencil on paper, 21x50cm, 2013

Three goddesses composition, pencil and charcoal on paper, 42x60cm, 2013

Xiaoyang Li , MRes Arts Practice Chelsea

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The Sketchbook Archive of Jocelyn Herbert: Visual Identity and Legacy

Francesca Peschier

‘I wanted to see the scratched out drawings the shopping lists and the coffee stains. I wanted to see the smudges and the discarded ideas...I wanted to see the visual intimacy of how creative people think.’

(Brereton, 2009)

Before Jocelyn Herbert, theatre designers were predominantly referenced somewhere at the bottom of the programme as ‘decor by’. The difference between these titles goes some way to summarising her impact as an artist. To design a play is to amalgamate the designer’s vision within the dramaturgy. ‘Decor by’ suggests the set and costumes as purely decoration, that the play has been embellished an already finished work. Through Herbert’s work at the Royal Court with the English Stage Company to her work at The National Theatre’s from its inauguration, plus filmic and operatic creations, she became famed for her unique visual identity and her collaboration across the production team. Wimbledon College of Art houses the Jocelyn Herbert Archive which includes her sketchbooks and notebooks from throughout her career.

Sketchbooks informed and shaped Jocelyn Herbert’s visual identity and set precedents for the use of sketchbooks in modern practice and within an artistic education. My experiential research in the archive has given me cause to consider the responsibility of custodians, archivists and researchers when we reach esthetic conclusions from sketchbooks.

I have also been intrigued by the use of personal sketchbooks as a pedagogical device: examined alongside finished projects and therefore subject to much self-editing, tidied up one might say. Herbert expressed frustration at her inability to keep a consistent record of her work and process. Two years before her death she attempted to start a regular diary inspired by the journals of Delacroix: I have no idea what I will have to write about - except, hopefully thoughts and reflections.

(Herbert, 2001) 27

The resulting document of Herbert’s ‘forced’ diary is only two pages in a single notebook. In fact Hebert had already been journaling; mapping her personal and working life through her sketchbooks for the past almost fifty years. This collection of notebooks are not a consistent log but are, to the researcher, a chronological if disjointed memoir of Herbert’s professional and personal life. We have record of her life not only in London but her travels and productions in America and Greece. They are a collage of writing, drawings and occasional scrapbooking of photos and mementos. It appears Herbert had an understanding of the importance and contribution of her innovative work by the simple fact she kept everything, resulting in a comprehensive overview of her life in the arts, from her timetable as a student on the Motley Design course to the notebook she was working in on the day she died.

As Herbert moved through her complex process of thoughts and ideas the quality and style of her drawings would change. Her sketchbook was a tool for an inquisitive methodology, where sketching served, among other things, as observation, communication, research and occasional confessional.

The initial drafting and sketching seems to have allowed her to establish the tone and overall feel of a production which then allow her final drawings to be executed within a set of individually established ‘rules’. The influences of her research into the period, style and background of a piece gave Herbert a definite structure within which to work. There is a great deal of study and thought informing her free form lines and the drawings frequently appear to increase in intensity as they get closer to the finished article. The sketchbooks track this journey from experimentation to confident execution.

In arts criticism it is often felt that sketchbooks suffer from being given a lower standing than what is considered a finished work, e.g. a singular artistic effort that is presented for consideration or sale, or perhaps just a conclusion of the artists’ ongoing studies and research. There is a difference in the discipline of fine art and theatre design in that theatre design has been described as an art belonging to a floating world. The production it informs may be performed a thousand times but no two performances will ever be identical and there is often very little documentation (often limited to a programme and a few very actor focussed production photos). It is much harder to define the ‘finished work’. The exegesis of Herbert’s sketchbooks allows a researcher the invaluable opportunity to focus on her viewpoint.

Sketch, from the Greek scedios translates as ‘done extempore’, executed without planning and can be applied to image or text. The Italian word has an interesting interpretation in this case as well, sketching and drafting share a colloquial term in penseri: ‘thoughts’. Paul Ryan defines the term sketch as having the same linguistic roots as skate; with the reading or making of sketches having the same free and unsystematic pathways as to be ‘skating about’. This seems to me to be an accurate and beguiling metaphor for Herbert’s drafts. We may not be able to ever hear a vital dialogue between Herbert and a director but the evidence for it as a tipping point is there in a reminder, prompting her to meet him for a coffee.

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...a telephone number written in advance of a conversation, a list that becomes a meal, the first draft of a letter that is then typed and sent to the Prime Minister and a series of free thinking drawings made in a matter of minutes that develop, via more finished images, into ninety highly structured minutes of screen or stage. (Farthing, 2011) For my personal research objectives, I may not place much onus on Herbert’s recipe and dinner lists (although the repetitive patterns of veal, chicken and Mars Bars give the notebooks a certain esoteric rhythm) but they are part of the quilted factors that make up her state of mind - what she was reading, listening too, the exhibitions she was visiting. There is esthetic experience and visual knowledge behind every design decision. A melange of experiences and events, layered to become the anatomy of a production’s final design.

Theatre design is an art of representation. Staging elements are not required to be paradigms of naturalism. They can be substitutions that perform common factors, either semiological or through form and function (e.g. set pieces which also serve as ‘practicals’, a glass to be drunk from or lamp to be turned on). Those that perform semiological functions must have cultural readability to an audience, informing them about the play’s characters and the imagined world of the play-text.

These references must be contained within that culture’s accepted common experience.

Within a postmodern society Herbert and other designers/artists are constantly gathering information sources as wide as what we as beings can experience from everything that is not within us as sentient beings. Sketchbooks are vital to a researcher in revealing these sources and the skating from idea to idea.

What I appreciate about our current cultural pluralism is that it moves to end the tyranny of particular styles and fashions. It is invigorating to be free to find inspiration in all manner of things around you. Today I am happy looking out of the window. It is a constant performance.

(Saville, 2009) Sketchbooks are complex, woven documents; phenomenological in their combination of her physical and emotional experiences. To be able to visualise the entire workings of a final production is one of the chief demands of theatre design. The drawings become layers, superimposed on top of each other to show a material process of action. The director and actors could see how the set and costume would work in practice, her drawings are executed through interaction. As part of the English Stage Company movement and partner of George Devine, Herbert’s work was already heavily endowed with ‘the right to fail’ philosophy, that work should take risks and not be stifled by a need to be populist or profitable. When teaching, I have observed a preoccupation with students to get sketchbooks ‘right’, refining the rough product into a something pretty. This appears to have an effect on final designs, often theoretical and therefore free from the usual theatrical constraints (namely budgets) appearing quite ‘safe’.

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It is almost as if the final design is decided early on in the process and then a great deal of energy is placed into validating it through supporting material; making the methodology fit the result. A drawing should not precede its process and the endpoint, in learning theatre design, should not be the priority.

I personally feel that caution must be exercised in the encouraging of increasing perfectionism within future generations of students if we are not to be left with beautiful but indent-i-kit sketchbooks.

Creativity is at risk of suffocation through fear of somehow ‘getting it wrong’. Herbert’s sketchbooks often show corrections along with discarded ideas which serve as a valuable resource to researchers.

Shame and judgement must be taken out of the assessment of student sketchbooks so that they may be seen for what they are - personal workspaces where ideas and lines must be repeatedly tested to effective conclusions.

The sketchbook not only provides an unusually ideal place for a frequent, natural and free oscillation between form and expression while making, it also allows the maker to look back over that oscillation and sense its value for themselves as human, through knowing more about themselves.

(Ryan, 2009) The sketchbook allows students and artists to bring together all the elements of their phenomenological experience into documentation, or as a basis for further creative projects.

When the sketchbook is restricted to a role as supporting evidence for finished work, or something to be produced on command, it loses its natural spontaneity of instinctive notation and creation Controversially it may even be argued that if the suggestion to keep a sketchbook is not enough to convince an art student of its merit then they lack the natural inquisitiveness for practical artistic study.

[On fine art students creating sketchbooks and drawings] They were used to working very privately and secretly in their little cubicles. And then these works were brought out and this encourages the grand notion of exhibiting yourself. A spectacle. Art as spectacle. In old fashioned ways of painting, people painted communally and in a way they had to be more transparent about the methodology. And now days I think young students are very ashamed of the way they do things.

(Petherbridge, 2010) Petherbridge suggests that students may be ashamed of their process (potentially due to its rough quality or imperfect finish, e.g. a doodle in biro as opposed to a pencil drawing) but the erratic and unformed nature of Herbert’s sketchbooks show how as researchers, practitioners, teachers and custodians we need to learn to value spontaneous art. The primitive energy contained within the heart of sketching has not yet been refined by socially conditioned rhythms or constrictions, e.g.

Herbert’s initial design sketches are executed without budgetary or logistical concerns.

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To consider a sketchbook appropriately pedagogically is to examine creative mental process, rather than the ability to make pages look pretty.

The unrestrained and unrefined nature of Herbert’s sketchbooks should have a legacy beyond evidence of an incredible career. Across all design practices, they should demonstrate how we should value spontaneous art and sketchbooks as a method to piece together knowledge, experience and inspiration, to perceptive strategy and informed dramaturgy.

Francesca Peschier, MRes Arts Practice Chelsea

Bibliography Brereton, Richard : Sketchbooks: The Hidden Art of Designers, Illustrators and Creatives, (Laurence King Publishing) London, 2009 Courtney, Cathy: Jocelyn Herbert: A Theatre Workbook, (Art Books International) London, 1993 Courtney, Cathy (Ed.): Connecting Lines: Artists Talking about Drawing, (National Life Stories, The British Library) Audio CD, London, 2010 Courtney, Cathy: The Cathy Courtney Oral History Collection (British Library) Recorded Interviews Farthing, Stephen (Ed.): The Sketchbooks of Jocelyn Herbert (Royal Academy of the Arts) London, 2011 Howard, Pamela: What is Scenography? (Routledge) New York 2009 Kingston. Angela (Ed.) What is Drawing? (Black Dog Publishing) London 2003 Little, Ruth & McLaughlin, Emily: The Royal Court Theatre Inside Out, (Oberon Books) London, 2007 Marks, Claude: From the Sketchbooks of Great Artists, (Granada Publishing, )London,1972 Ryan, Paul: Paper Video:The Status and Function of the Sketchbook in a Sceptical Environment, (Wimbledon School of Art) MA Thesis 2005 Ryan, Paul: Peirce’s Semeiotic and the Implications for Æsthetics in the Visual Arts: a study of the sketchbook and its positions in the hierarchies of making, collecting and exhibiting, (Wimbledon School of Art) PhD Thesis 2009

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Hasty Sketches and Scribbled Thoughts Ruth Solomons

Takeaway tin lid, 2012

At the end of a day in the studio, a certain type of drawing occurs in order to bridge the impending gap in my thread of practice, until I am next there. Back of envelope drawings and rushed thoughtstatements scribbled on takeaway tin lids (takeaway tins being a highly convenient form of large volume paint-mixture storage), serve as reminders of a state of mind as well as of the functional signposts they were intended to be. Therefore, long after the thought has passed, these remain taped on the wall, and now have infiltrated my sketchbook, which I carry with me away from the studio. Whether on the back of an envelope, or in some other rushed form, such scribblings aim to capture a thought, prevent the loss of that moment of clarity. Consciousness of time seeps into my practice in such examples as these, evident in their diagrammatic, annotated forms, hasty messages to my future studio-self.

Ruth Solomons, MRes Arts Practice Chelsea

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When the Artist Cannot Work. Addressing the Artist’s & Artist Researcher’s Block as a State of Temporary Psychoanalytical Castration.

Kataryna Leach There are certain times when artists cannot work. Times separate to social, economic or physical constraints, in which the individual looks at the blank page, canvas or materials with the desire to create work, but they are completely unable to do so. There is a barrier, something unknown which blocks them and which again for unknown reasons, may suddenly resolve, allowing the work to move.

This essay aims to explore this state of artistic blocking from the psychoanalytical notion of castration and offer an interpretation of the process and its resolution.

The concept of castration occurs as a category of Freud’s Oedipus complex,1 where the Mother exists as her infant’s entire world and is the object ‘towards whom the obscure foreshadowings of his budding sexual wishes were aimed.’ (Freud, 1913. pg. 129). This state however is not reciprocal and at times she moves out of the infants’ sight. The child is aware of nothing other than the sensation that she is separating from him, inciting his anxiety and anger and the perception that this abandonment is the fault of the Father.2 In recounting his work on the case of Little Hans in Totem and Taboo, Freud attributes the role of the Father as the envied rival for the Mother’s affection.3 The Father is the one whom the child sees his Mother transfer her attention towards, the one who ‘steals’ her. In the Lacanian stance, the paternal individual is of no consequence; this role can be formed of anything or anyone who stands in this capacity, and it is to this object that we attribute a symbolic title of the Father or the Imaginary Father.4 The infant asks: what does Father have that draws her away from me? I should be the centre of Mother’s attention and desire. What does he have that I do not? The child imagines the Father has an object of power which he, the child, does not. This is the imaginary phallus.

The imaginary state of this object is the key to the distinction between Freud’s and Lacan’s positions. Lacanian theory locates the phallus as a symbolic object of power and authority with no basis in flesh.5

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The ownership of the phallus is constructed within the imagination of the projector. It is an object which is perceived by the external person, the individual themselves does not create the object. It is the imagination and phantasy of the infant, which in Freud’s concept, operates to prevent incest between the male child and his mother. The child’s small pull on the Mother’s attention cannot compete with this overwhelming magical object that the Father possesses to draw her away. The infant is powerless in the face of this greater force, he is diminished and castrated by it.

When the canvas is placed into this Freudo-Lacanian Oedipal structure a new premise begins to emerge. We can interpret that the artist desires the canvas or black page, hopes to possess it utterly and to create something new upon it. The artist, (Infant), wishes to be the paint, to spread the self over and unify with the skin of the canvas, (Mother). The paint plays its role as the representation of the artist, the fluid material as a mimetic seminal fluid. The artist wishes to be the object of the canvas’s desire, as the child desires the Mother, to be the sole recipient of its attention.

At times in art practice, something can occur which prevents the artist from working, something castrates them. The artist is frustrated, and as Lacan comments: ‘Something always goes limp when people talk to you about frustration.’ (Lacan, 1975. pg222).

Within the principle of castration, this action denotes the presence of the Father, or rather, the paternal metaphor who safeguards the child from the act of incest. However what of the Father in the situation of the artist and block? Where is he found?

This capacity of the Father may originate from the insistent presence of ‘potential’. The space for the work, the drive for it to be good, and the artists’ identification with ‘potential’ as an external reality.

The open space of this potential becomes a real and threatening thing in which the artist becomes ‘caught in the symbolic order’. (Zizek, 2006. pg34). This manifestation of potential looks back at the artist, who may perceive that in its gaze, they will never be good enough6. The artist experiences doubt and powerlessness resulting from the castration by this symbolic totem Father7. The potential as a symbolic object maims and paralyses the artist into block. Suddenly the artist cannot work. Zizek describes castration as ‘the gap between what I immediately am and the symbolic title that confers on me a certain status and authority’ (Zizek, 2006. pg34). He illustrates this with the image of the King and the castration that his symbols of monarchy, the sceptre and crown, impose on him. He links the objects of officialdom with the action of “introducing a gap between what I immediately am and the function that I exercise” (Zizek, 2006. pg34).

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The role and title of Artist is comparable to that of King within Zizek’s text or the Father of Freud’s.

It is both part of the self, both imaginary and real, yet remains within and continues to obey the principles Lacan’s order of the Other. The canvas and paint are the re-enacted symbols and the conferring of the status and title in accordance with Zizek’s argument.

Similarly the artist is castrated by the gap created by the potential of these object of power and the space they create. However artists and artist researchers do make work, they write, paint, print, sculpt and perform. They are not perpetually caught in creative impotence. From the perspective of protection from psychoanalytical incest, if the canvas does indeed symbolise the Mother, then artists do in fact possess and reproduce with the maternal objects frequently. Furthermore they do so without guilt because in reality, the artist unconsciously knows and distinguishes that the canvas is never really their actual Mother, it is only the manifestation of a theoretical idea.

Yet artists block is very real and the distress to the individual which is caused by it cannot be underestimated. In duration it may be momentary and fleeting or it may be significant and enduring, but it is rarely perpetual. Something occurs to break the impasse.

Within my capacity as an artist researcher and training scholar, the creation of this essay has been a personal example of suffering from block. I have spent considerable time staring at the blank white screen and note book page unable to write; employing every technique to start and continue the work, with no benefit. I have thrown it in the bin, paced the floor, changed my environment and perspective and even altered the colour of the page. To no avail. The potential of work and its insistent pressure became a disabling force. Deadlines came and went. It castrated me entirely. As I write these words, the essay is late, very late. Yet somehow at the last stage it has become a piece of work. The block has been overcome and the castration resolved as temporary. I have recovered my artists’ phallus.

There is an intervention in the state of the artist to break the deadlock. Something which I have also experienced in relation to this written piece. This process of intervention can be found and perceived on the level of the symbolic as an intrusion by the voice of authority. This new and redirecting force acts in the capacity of Lacan’s principle, the Name-of-the-Father, ‘the structure of desire with the structure of the law’ (Lacan, 1973. pg34). The artists’ castrated state is broken under the influence of the law and the disabling effect on the work is foreclosed. The artist is then enabled, via this process which is linked to the mediating master signifier, to think clearly and create. The artist is freed.

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The above symbolic equation is a formulaic representation of the progression of the artists’ temporary castration. It demonstrates the journey and movement of the process in a visually concise frame using both Lacan’s and my own symbols to bridge between the concepts of the image and text. Lacan represented his theoretical position of the Symbolic Mother, M, Imaginary Father, f, Castration,

, or

the minus phallus8, and the Name of the Father, F, while I introduce my basic expressions for the Block, B, and Work, W, which were not concepts explored by Lacan in his algebraic diagrams.

The formula demonstrates the equal balancing of the two aspects of the internal scale leading to the block and the movement to its solution, and highlights the internal nature of this process. In using this image, we can clearly see the resolution of the block through the supremacy of the new and intervening act. We can effectively follow the method in which the artist overcomes the loss of their power and finally triumphs.

Unfortunately the mapping and understanding of the process does not prevent artists and artist researchers from experiencing block, and does not address whether the experience is a necessary one for creative acts. This essay aims to explore but not provide answers. It hopes to frustrate.

Kataryna Leach, MRes Arts Practice Chelsea

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Endnotes 1 “The self-blinding of the mythical criminal, Oedipus, was simply a mitigated form of the punishment of castration.”

(Freud, 1919. pg. 352).

2 The use of capital letters for the Father and Mother within this essay is to distinguish the psychoanalytical concept as separate from the person.

3 “He regarded his father (as he made all too clear) as a competitor for the favours of his mother...” (Freud, 1913. pg. 129).

The child perceives that his presence is that which takes her away and it is he whom forms the face of competition.

4 Bailly discusses a variety of forms in today’s society which can also represent the father as a mechanism of the mother’s absences. (Bailly, 2009. pg. 75).

5 “The whole point of the word phallus is that it refers to an entirely imaginary object invested with an entirely imaginary and undefined power... Lacan appropriated the word to denote the imaginary object-of-power that the infant hypothesises draws Mother away, or that perhaps I have, which brings her back: it is an imagined perfect object.” (Bailly, 2009. pg76).

6 In reference to Winnicott’s principle of the good enough mother and the inadequacy that can be reproduced in creative beings in discourse with their creations or potential creations: “The good-enough ‘mother’ (not necessarily the infant’s own mother) is one who makes active adaptation to the infant’s needs, an active adaptation that gradually lessens, according to the infant’s growing ability to account for failure of adaptation and to tolerate the results of frustration.”

(Winnicott, 1971. pg13-14).

7 Freud discusses the relationship between the child, the totem and the Father in his essay, ‘The Return of Totemism in Childhood.’ (Freud, 1913. pg129).

8 Lacan introduces this symbol in his essay Anamorphosis as the ‘imaged embodiment of the minus-phi [(-ϕ)] of castration’. (Lacan, 1973. pg89).

Bibliography Bailly, L. (2009) Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oneworld Publications.

Freud, S. (1905-1931) The Penguin Freud Library: Volume 7. On Sexuality: Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality And Other Works. Penguin Books. 1991.

Freud, S. (1913) Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. trans.

J. Strachey. Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1983.

Freud, S. (1919) The Penguin Freud Library: Volume 14. Art and Literature: Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’, Leonardo Da Vinchi And Other Works. Penguin Books. 1990.

Lacan, J. (1959-60) The Seminars of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. ed. J-A Miller, trans. with notes

by D. Porter. Routledge Classics. 2008.

Lacan, J. (1966) Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. trans. B. Fink. W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. 2006.

Lacan, J. (1973) The Seminars of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. ed. J-A Miller, trans. A. Sheridan. W.W. Norton & Company Ltd. 1998.

Lacan, J. (1975) The Seminars of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud’s Papers on technique 1953 – 1954. ed. J-A Miller, trans. J. Forrester. Cambridge University Press. 1988.

Winnicott, D. (1971) Playing and Reality. Routledge Classics. 2005.

Zizek, S. (2006) How To Read Lacan. Granta Books.

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VARIOUS INCARNATIONS OF SHIRLEY Arthur Edward Prior

In 1888, George Eastman brought to the market a camera of unrivalled simplicity: “The Kodak Camera.

You press the button - we do the rest. The only camera that anybody can use without instructions.”1 For many Americans, photography had meant posed portraits in a professional photographer’s studio. The claim of the Kodak Camera was that it enabled anyone to take photographs of their families, their homes, their surroundings with relative ease. It inaugurated the snapshot era of do-it-yourself photography.

The “anywhere-everywhere”2 of Kodak’s enterprise made anthimeria of its products with such slogans as “Kodak As You Go”3; A photographer was a “Kodaker”; ‘Photography’, “Kodakery”.

The principle vehicle for advertising the Kodak was the ‘The Kodak Girl’. She made her first appearance in the 1893. The Kodak Girl was conceived as an independent and highly fashionable woman with an adventurous spirit, “The All-Outdoors Invites Your Kodak”4 . She is depicted on her own as an early travel photographer (in one advertisement she is shown taking a photograph from a pulled rickshaw in Japan5 ). Her signature outfit was a striped blue and white dress. Significantly, she was always depicted as the camera’s operator and was portrayed as being technically competent and knowledgeable about her methods. She led a fast paced lifestyle – “Kodak As You Go” – and embodied modern values of advancement through technology, travel, and leisure time, “Modern Girls Need A Modern Kodak.” Also: “For the smart modern girl, a smart modern Kodak, one that charmingly combines a gay new note with the never-ending pleasure of picture making.”

By the mid–40’s, Eastman Kodak Company had revised the image of The Kodak Girl. In her new role, she was responsible for keeping the family’s chronicle. New cameras were brought out specifically to facilitate this task, such as The Autographic Kodak, which allowed the operator to add notes directly on the film, “Keep a Kodak story of the children – With an Autographic Kodak you can date and title as you take.” The family album became ubiquitous in every household with The Kodak Girl as its administrator.

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In the late 1940’s and early 50’s Kodak advertised in magazines such as The Ladies Home Journal, Life, Look and Colliers. A gradual shift occurred whereby The Kodak Girl, once active, became the passive object of photography; she seemed much less interested in taking pictures than posing with her camera. George Eastman conceded that “A picture of a pretty girl sells more than a tree or a house”6 . To be sure, women were still encouraged to take pictures, however, The Kodak Girl became responsible to a nuclear family plus dog and limited the scope of her photographic practice to the home with the occasional family outing.

If I were to speculate about the presentation of The Kodak Girl, in her original form, as an emblem of female empowerment, I would suggest that Kodak led an advertising campaign which actively sought to co-opt the rhetoric of women’s suffrage. By appropriating the ideals of female emancipation, Kodak made available gender parity as a consumer product. During the First World War, George Creel – arch spin doctor – and his colleagues in The Committee on Public Information utilised techniques for altering public opinion via the printed press, staged conferences and media spectacles.

Creel would explain his activities not as propaganda, but as the “propagation of faith.”

As well as organising campaigns on behalf of Woodrow Wilson’s government, many of Creel’s staff serviced the expanding corporate world on a consultation basis. Most notably, Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud) offered services to the American Tobacco Company, Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) and Dixie Cup – to name but a few. Another, Carl W. Ackerman, offered his consultation services to none other than the Eastman Kodak Company.

In period psychoanalytic fashion, Bernays and Ackerman drew upon theories of ‘crowd psychology’ offered by writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud, Wilfred Trotter and Jean-Gabriel De Tarde and also Freud’s theories on psychosexual development in the formulation of their PR and marketing strategies. Bernays had already recuperated the cause of women’s suffrage in his notorious ‘torches of freedom’ campaign; Bernays organised for paid models to smoke during the Easter Sunday Parade of 1929. In effect, the American Tobacco Company won the custom of women, who had previously represented a gaping hole in their consumer base. A cigarette, Bernays reasoned, represented the phallus; and smoking, the championing of. Ackerman’s PR campaign for Kodak proceeded along similar lines. By taking up photography, women effectively usurped what had previously been a maledominated activity. One advertisement, which bears the caption, “A Kodak, Upon a Vacation, Is as essential as good congenial company”, depicts a group of women engaging with a camera, whilst an excluded husband looks on enviously.

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The Kodak Girls, during their short-lived existence, shone brightly, flickered and became extinguished as Kodak found more effective ways to market their products; sex sells. By the 1960’s, Kodak’s advertisements became entangled with pin-up culture. At approximately the same point in time, Shirley made her first appearance.

Shirley was the name of the original model employed by Eastman Kodak Company who featured on their colour calibration targets; “she is one subset of the ‘Kodak Girls’ who were used as models over the years.”7 The purpose of these calibration targets was to ensure accurate colour reproduction during the processing and printing of colour negatives. Shirley became iconic within the microcosmic culture of photo-labs. Her successor, ‘Trudy’, enjoyed a short spell, however, all subsequent models became known, colloquially, as Shirley. Innumerable versions of Shirley appeared as she traversed decades and continents. Each incarnation reflects the milieux in which she circulated and their respective ideals of beauty, or ‘normalcy’.

For the purpose of calibrating photographic equipment, the specific fashioning of Shirley seems quite superfluous. As Lorna Roth has noted, “men wearing coloured shirts with similar skin-tone ranges and hair colours to those of female Shirley’s could have worked as effectively as a reference standard— especially if they had had beards or moustaches.”8 Accordingly, the presentation of Shirley reflects the masculinist condition of the photographic industry since the 1960s. Upon a recent visit to the photo-lab I frequent, one of the technicians conceded, “there are two ways of pulling a crowd in the lab: pics of fast cars, and pics of fast women.” Shirley figured as part of the habitual sexism practiced by workaday lab-technicians in order to ‘get through the day’, so, “pass me Shirley and we’ll fuck the lamb.”9

In an interview10, photo-chemist Bill Camel articulates the extent of Shirley’s fame: “I have a cute story about master negatives you might like. The place I worked (not there anymore) owned some large ‘chain studios’ in the US, so we did tremendous processing volume. As I said, at some point we started to make our own master negs. We had a young lady working in our on-site chem.-lab who photographed well, and could be talked into posing (it’s a very tedious job, sitting still, same fixed smile, don’t blink during the shot, etc, for nearly a full day).

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For some years, we used a lot of Konica paper, and a great deal of testing was done on this, both in our own processing machines, and in Japan with our reference negatives, compared to our print results. So Konica Japan was familiar with our test negs.

One year, at the PMA convention (this was a big photo industry trade show in the US) our model got a chance to attend (she handled most of our effluent control issues, and such equipment was on view at the show). Konica had a very large booth there, with many of their technical people from Japan attending. Many recognized her from the test photos, and were all excited about posing for pictures with her. Of course she was embarrassed to be such a celebrity, but always posed; what else can you do?

Anyway, I can appreciate their excitement; I would probably have been the same way if one of the Kodak models ever showed up. You want something to take home and show your friends, “hey, look who I met at the convention!”.

Ron Mowrey – an ex-Kodak engineer – explained to me that “there were many [calibration targets] that were never used outside of Kodak”11 . He continued, “The internal versions used many ethnic groups to tweak skintones, and they often included people with skin blemishes to design for deemphasis of blemishes or enhancement as the case may be. Therefore they were almost always restricted to use within the company.” In her essay, Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity, Lorna Roth takes aim at the institutional racism practiced by the photographic and broadcast industry. The photographic apparatus itself, she claims, contains an “embedded” biased towards Caucasian skin tones. Some of the more recent calibration targets appear to address this shortcoming, often including a trio of racial types: Causasian, African and Asian.

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Besides the reproduction of skin tones, there are a whole host of reasons as to why colour calibration would be of paramount importance to the photographic industry. Establishing normalcy was crucial to corporations whose ‘company colour’ functioned as a vehicle for brand awareness; IMB’s “Big Blue”; UPS’s “What can Brown do for you”; light- teal for Korean Air, orange for Easy-Jet and of course, Kodak yellow. In an interview12 with black and white printer, Klaus Kalde, I was described the practice of one photographer he worked with, who would kick a can of Coca-Cola discreetly into shot for use as a reference target, “Coca-Cola Red is a red de facto.”

In more recent years, the dependence on large photographic companies for the supply of photographic equipment, materials and instruction has waned. Photo-labs have undertaken to produce their own in-house calibration targets to suit their own needs. The Shirley card has become a sort genre that many companies have taken to creative extremes. Ron Mowrey acknowledges this recent tendency, explaining that modern calibration targets often involve “quite creative sets with props and life like scenes and often included children. I remember one with a young girl holding balloons and another with a girl and boy sitting on a blanket in a park. Another was a woman sitting on a fancy couch with a stairwell behind her, and there were potted plants in the picture.”13 The calibration target, as a pictorial genre, has undergone significant evolution from Shirley’s debut appearance to the more recent examples of targets designed to calibrate scanners, monitors and large format, Inkjet and C Type printers. Shirley serves as an example of the way in which the photographic industry has consistently sought to standardise its products. Its institution of ‘normalcy’ throws up significant problems with regard to both ethnicity and also conventional notions of beauty, a problem which has all but subsided. Shirley is an embodiment of the technological apparatus, the institutional structures and mechanisms that manufacture representation itself.

Arthur Edward Prior, MA Fine Art, Chelsea

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Endnotes 1 The caption of an advertisement for ‘The Kodak Camera’ which appeared in the first issue of The Photographic Herald and Amateur Sportsman, November, 1889. After shooting a roll of film, the camera would be sent to Kodak’s factory in Rochester NY where the film was processed, printed and sent back the owner with a new roll of film pre-loaded.

2 A magazine advertisement from 1915, captioned, “If it isn’t an Eastman, it isn’t a Kodak – Anywhere-everywhere – Kodak”.

3 The Caption “Kodak As You Go” appeared in numerous of Kodak’s advertisements between 1900 and 1950.

Kodak – Kodak as you go (1916).

4 Caption from a Kodak poster printed in 1911.

5 1905 advertisement published in the Ladies’ Home Journal, illustrated by C. Allan Gilbert.

6 Quoted in Brayer E., George Eastman: A Biography, University Rochester Press, 2006, p. 135. Also, “This dainty, who carries in her hand like a purse one of our neat and inconspicuous Folding Pocket Kodaks, will be used extensively by us for our advertising purposes.” (ibid.)

7 Mowrey, R., 2012, Interviewed by Arthur Edward Prior, transcript in authors possession, November 05, 2012 08:40 AM (GMT).

8 Roth, L., Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity, Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol 34 (2009) 111-136, p. 116.

9 A colloquialism recounted to me by a print technician at a photo-lab in London, whose name and company shall go unmentioned. ‘Lamb’ refers to the Durst Lambda, a type of large format printer.

10 Camel, B., 2012, Interviewed by Arthur Edward Prior, transcript in authors possession, August 03, 2012 12:21 AM (GMT).

11 Mowrey, R., 2012, ibid.

12 Kalde, K., 2012, Interviewed by Arthur Edward Prior, transcript in authors possession, August 21, 2012 03:20 PM (GMT).

13 Mowrey, R., 2012, ibid.

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The Devil Pays Nada: Subversive Protesting at London Fashion Week Fairooz Aniqa

Any sort of campaigning with a message that runs deeper than how many ice cubes you need to eat to lose 2 stone (an actual tweet on the London Fashion Week feed) is usually met with upturned noses and a disconcerting huff, but wrap that message in a stylish cotton and brand it as ‘exclusive’, and suddenly ears prick up. We went along to infiltrate the event with our message, and in a matter of minutes, people were parading around in Somerset House donning ‘Pay Your Interns’ totes.

The tote bag, a staple freebie for events such as Fashion week, carried the simple message of ‘Pay your Interns’, echoing the campaign aims of groups across the world. The idea of the co-ordinated actions at Fashion Weeks came at a meeting of these minds in an online global summit, a gathering of campaigning groups which takes place monthly. Adopting more subtle methods of subversion seemed appropriate for this fickle industry, and it was rather pleasing to see people gushing over the bags. Not only a wearable statement, the bags also hold key information about intern rights and National minimum wage legislation. The power lies with interns to stand up and create a backlash against the industry, to simply say ‘no’. ‘No’ to being treated like they’re worthless, demoralised, and exploited for everything they have to give.

Fetch dry cleaning, pick up kids, flatten boxes, coffee runs, the list is endless. And don’t get in the way while doing it all, don’t dare make a fuss. As referred to by New York based Dissent Magazine, interns are indeed the compliant, happy housewife of the workplace1.

The whole sentiment of an internship is great. You go along for a couple of weeks, you learn about how it all works, get the experience and hey presto, you’re ready to take on a full position in that field, with a whole hoard of new skills to add to your already existing talents.

The difference between the intention and the reality is stark. Interns are in fact working for months (in some cases, a year or longer) and taking on tasks which do not relate to their professional or creative development in any way. All for no wages at all. Employers use internships to prey on the submissive, obedient nature of the young generation of graduates and students today, all the while hiding behind the tired old excuse of ‘the recession’. If anything, refusing to pay interns only fuels the economic crisis to increase levels of unemployment.

We at UAL are the very victims of this systematic exploitation: the responsibility lies with us to start shouting. The Devil Pays Nada, a campaign set up at the University of the Arts London Students’ Union to target the unfairness of unpaid internships through direct action and institutional lobbying,

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recently paid a visit to London Fashion week, a yearly ritual in the fashion world, which consists primarily of the top bods in the industry parading around in garments still drenched in the sweat and blood of unpaid interns while the interns themselves stand behind the scenes, their souls slowly disintegrating along the cobbled paths of Somerset House. The fashion industry is particularly heinous for using unpaid interns. Interns who have worked for large fashion houses and luxury brands have reported horror stories of working until 4am with no breaks, sleeping in the office overnight, and even working on Christmas/Boxing day. Welcome kids, to your dream career in fashion. The humanoids in the

Libby Page and Fairooz Aniqa, London Fashion Week, February 2013

industry however, still suffer equally from a well known condition called Embarrassment.

This gives us hope, in that if we shout loud enough, we may be able to shame the industry into paying up. Grace Coddington, editor of US Vogue was recently quoted at NY Fashion week saying: ‘I think there are a lot of interns that feel very entitled. They think we owe them something’1 Perhaps it is selfish of us to ask for electricity and a bite to eat while we make you your millions, our sincerest apologies Grace. However, these employers are being forced to take a u-turn on their exploitative ways, after paying out lump sums to interns who are threatening to take them to tribunal, this year IPC Media was forced to pay out £800 to an intern at NOW magazine2. The shame factor is key: these big guns don’t want their shiny masks being tarnished with the ugly truth of how they are actually run. There is a buzz generating around unpaid internships, and we hope to see more and more key industry players act now, because free labour should never be fashionable.

Fairooz Aniqa Fashion Journalism and Broadcasting BA at London College of Fashion; Culture and Diversity Officer Student Union UAL

1 http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/opportunity-costs-the-true-price-of-internships 2 http://nymag.com/thecut/2012/03/grace-coddington-thinks-interns-should-suck-it-up.html 3 http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/nov/04/internships-scandal-britain-unpaid-army

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What is Painting Doing?

Jean Kim

Lari Pittman: ‘Painting is a carcass right now – it has been picked clean of all its meat…painting has always been about death.’ ?

Dear my darling, oil on linen, 100 x 150cm, 2013

Jean Kim, MRes Arts Practice, Chelsea

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The Sphere and The Temple Alejandro Salcedo

The self is perceived as a sphere, and the articulation of the temple as a room or space related to this sphere, being designed as a communal place for ‘everybody’. In this context, I imagine painting as a window (Alberti, 1436) to the heavenly sphere. In the following texts, I find connections between Platonic ideas of the self in relation to architectural spaces such as the sphere.

Plato describes how God ‘… made the world in the form of a globe, round as from a lathe, having its extremes in every direction equidistant from the centre … and in the centre he put the soul, which he diffused throughout the body… and he made the universe a circle moving in a circle …’ (Plato, Timaeus).

Plato’s ideas were very important for interpreting the universe in antique Rome. The desire to put together the symbol for the earth, the cube, and the symbol for the sky, the sphere, produced various technical and architectural solutions, the most famous being, for centuries, the church ‘Hagia Sophia’. Here Anthemius of Tralles found the solution of architectural pendentives1, which are still used to put together a square within a dome (see Fletcher, 1905). John Hendrix says that Plato’s texts were already known in Europe in the Medieval ages (Hendrix, 2012). On the other hand, according to Pedro Azara (1993) Plato’s texts were lost in Western Europe until the Council of Florence (1431), that meant to reunite the Catholic and the Orthodox churches, when it is said that magicians from East Europe brought with them Plato`s texts2. Soon the texts ended up in hands of Cosimo de’ Medici who commissioned a translation from Greek to Latin from the friar Marsilio Ficino, with whom he founded the Academy of Florence. This represented a revival of the sphere as a subject for the conception of the temple (Ficino, 1475-6) (Azara, 1993).

This idea of the temple as a sphere represents the ‘genealogy’ of my idea of the self as a sphere, which I explained in my ongoing research practice on MRes: [In the context of my painting practice, my subject] is ‘the room of the self’ [or the self imagined as a room] where the room manifests as a sphere.’ This is a context in which I propose that painting creates, and operates as, an intersubjective space.

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The idea of the room as a motif for the self was developed in various ways, becoming a ‘cell’ of the archetypal room, the most basic interior, and potentially communal, space. In ‘Alberti`s Programme of the Ideal Church’ (Wittcover, 1949) Wittcover describes how the temple has in several periods been designed as a reflection or sublimation of the human body.

During a visit to the Victoria and Albert museum, looking at the museum’s cast of Trajan`s column1, I took a photograph of the ancient text cut into the surface of the column, and later made a painting of the letter ‘I’, from the word ‘TRAIANO’, based on that photograph. I saw the possibility for the letter ‘I’ to be an icon symbolising the individuality of the subject. As a sign, a letter is a minimal piece of meaning, an image or ‘icon’ that could represent ‘the self’. This upright line, cut or column, represents the first person in English, the number ‘1’ in Latin numerals, a unity within the alphabet, and it seems to me that it is a possible framing for the self, a kind of ‘architectural structure’, a drawing or design that can contain the self.

Trajan’s Column is known for being one of the main sources of fonts in Western Europe, and its famous inscription plays a role in the development of the concept of the alphabet in Europe. The inscription ‘is regarded as one of the best uses of Roman square capitals, or capitalis monumentalis, and most distinguished remaining examples of the Imperial Roman alphabet’,2 (Catich, 1961, 1968,3 and Perkins, 2000).

The origin of the alphabet is not certain (Rainey, 2010) (Goldwasser, 2010) (Hamilton, 2006). However, the Greeks developed the writing system in which symbols represent unities of sound, asigning separate letters to the vowels, and dividing for the first time in history the previous unity of the syllable (Coulmas, 2002). This structure is present in the manner in which we structure our thoughts in Western languages. ‘Romanising’4 in language is the process of transforming sounds that other cultures represent in different ways (e.g. Chinese characters are ideograms) to the Roman alphabeth.

I relate this to the ways in which reason has been structured, and how it operates in Western societies.

The fragmentation of the factors in their parts enables us to understand the function of each part.

When we distinguish the ‘self’ as a unit, in the context of the perception of the Platonic sphere, the alphabet relates to the development of the concept of individual sphere.

Alejandro Salcedo, MRes Arts Practice Chelsea

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Endnotes 1.Pendentive: In architecture, a triangular segment of a spherical surface, filling in the upper corners of a room, in order to form, at the top, a circular support for a dome. The challenge of supporting a dome over an enclosed square or polygonal space […]

2. Ficino, M. Sobre el furor divino y otros textos (Marsilio Ficino: ‘On the divine Furor’) (1993) Introduction by Pedro Azara. Barcelona: Anthropos.

3. Trajan’s Column, monument erected 106–113 AD by the Roman emperor Trajan. Encyclopedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com/.

4. Font. The Source Book, pages 304-305. Nadine Monem, Editor. Emma Gibson, Creative Consultant. Black Dog Publishing Limited, London 2008.

5. Eduard Catich. Letters Redraw from the Trajan Inscription in Rome. Davenport, Iowa. The Catfish Press, 1961.

Edward Catich. The Origin of the Sarif. Davenport, Iowa. The Catfish Press. 1968.

6. Romanize: put (text) into the Roman alphabet or into Roman type. Oxford Dictionaries. oxforddictionaries.com

Bibliography Alberti, L. B. (1436) On painting. 2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Catich, E. The origin of the serif. Davenport, Iowa: The Catfish Press, 1968.

Catich, E. Letters redrawn from the Trajan inscription in Rome. Davenport, Iowa: The Catfish Press, 1961.

Chevalier, J. & Gheerbrant, A. (2000) Originally Dictionnaire des symboles. Diccionario de Símbolos, (Symbols Dictionary.

Translated to Spanish by Manuel Silvar y Arturo Rodríguez. Barcelona: Editorial Herder.

Coulmas, F. Writing systems. An introduction to their linguistic analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge textboocks in linguistics.

Cambridge University Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (1980) Translation and Foreword by Brian Massumi. © 1987 University of Minnesota.. London, New York: Continuum Publishing Company 2004.

Encyclopædia Britannica Online:www.britannica.com Ficino, M. De religione christiana et fidei pietate (1475–6), dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici.

Ficino, M. Sobre el furor divino y otros textos (Marsilio Ficino: ‘On the divine Furor’) (1993) Introduction by Pedro Azara.

Barcelona: Anthropos.

Goldwasser, O. 2010. How the alphabet was born from hieroglyphs. BAS Library. http://members.bib-arch.org/publication.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=36&Issue=2&ArticleID=6 Hendrix, J. S. Alberti and Ficino. Roger Williams University. 2012.Masheck, J. “Alberti’s ‘window’: art-historiographic notes on an antimodernist misprision,” Art Journal 50, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 34-41.

Perkins, T. The Geometry of Roman Lettering. (2000) In Font: Sumner Stone, Calligraphy and Type Design in a Digital Age. Sussex: Edward Johnston Foundation.

Plato. Timaeus. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html.

Rainey, A. 2010. Who Really Invented the Alphabeth- Illiterate Miners or Educated Sophisticates? BAS Library. http://www. biblicalarchaeology.org/uncategorized/raineys-first-critique/ Salcedo, J. Memoria de la restauración del templo de Santo Domingo de Tunja (memory of the restauration of the temple of santo Domingo de Tunja). 1(976) Revista Apuntes No. 12. Bogotá: Universidad Javeriana.

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Schadenfreude: Here Comes Honey Boo Boo Kelly Akers

I am influenced by popular culture especially film and television. I am intrigued by the idea of a sinister nostalgia and the notion of observing and scrutinizing scenes of the American grotesque as in movies such as Ang Lee’s Ice Storm or David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks, where everything seems fine on the surface to the outside, meanwhile surreal drama is happening in private.

Glamour Shot, Oil on canvas: 18” x 20.”

Examining the idea of excess in our culture and my fascination with slice of life and kitchen sink narrative has influenced my current portrait series into this particular sub culture of the American grotesque, the child pageant world.

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Here Comes Honey Boo Boo: Oil on paper 18” x 26.”

The subject of my current series of portraits is seven year old Alana Thompson, child star of American reality show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. The show is an addictive train wreck questioning stereotypes of bigotry in the U.S. south, the quest for fame, ideals of beauty and feeds our current cultures need to witness displays of shocking and over the top behaviour. Perhaps we find solace in watching reality television shows, reading tabloids and scanning YouTube to provide some escape and detraction from our own frustrations by focusing on other people’s excess.

Kelly Akers, MA fine art Chelsea

Bibliography The Ice Storm (1997), Ang Lee. USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Twin Peaks. (08-04-1990) David Lynch: ABC. Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, (08-08-2012): TLC.

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Whatever Happened to Feminism?

Jennifer Hawkins

As a practising artist I am fully aware of the importance of research and critical thinking towards contemporary art. Recently, on my Masters course I have been exploring the relation of woman to the image of female beauty as a female contemporary artist. Can I make work about beauty, specifically beautiful women, which are not tied up in all its existing political issues ?

The starting point has been my relationship to publicity images of women spread throughout our everyday image-ridden lives. These impossibly glossy unsustainable, unobtainable images trap our attention and our gaze. In the past feminist writers have concentrated on these images in an attempt to demystify or completely reject them, instead presenting us with positive representations of women. Often the problem with these images has been reduced to the opposition between the dominant ‘male’ gaze and the repressed passive ‘woman’. Francette Pacteau discusses this in her book The Symptom of Beauty’.

‘I too turned my attention on the ‘male’ gaze, but in the hope of showing the complexity of the physical processes at work in the man’s repeated attempts to negotiate his relation to sexual differences through images – a complexity of structure that the singular and strident term ‘oppression’ collapses into a simple, inexplicable, fact.’ (Pacteau, 1994, p.182) However I feel that the ‘male’ gaze or ‘male’ look is complex and problematic in its attribution of beauty to a woman, I feel that the gaze is not just simply ‘male’ it is universal not specific to either gender. As women are just as captivated with desire for these images but they are the culprit for our problematic relationship with them. This image of female beauty offers us a coherence and unity that is foreign to the existential body Pacteau discusses this, ‘The fascination with this embodied ideality is contingent upon the disavowal of one’s own corporeality in the real a disavowal which supports the anticipation that we insistently strive towards a corporeal ideality, in the face of the slow but certain degradation of what Laura Mulvey has termed ‘entropic body’.(Pacteau, 1994, p.189) 54

She goes on to state that there is something in the nature of beauty that has to be unattainable, not just out of reach but recognisable as lost. She proposes that if desire is inseparable from the other, we may entertain the possibility that man-made images of female beauty are, at least in part, a product of man’s attempt to meet the desire of the woman. She states that this is doomed to fail as man knows nothing more of her desire than she knows herself. This leaves the assumption that the other does not know the answer to the desire, except that it is a force that is equal on both sides.

In the past feminist writers have attempted to present us with ‘positive’ representations of women such as the feminist magazine Spare Rib. This magazine attempted to resist the oppressive agency of the ‘male’ gaze and implicitly passive woman, it offered positive representations of women. However where are magazines like Spare Rib today? Spare Rib went out of circulation twenty years ago but we still have magazines such as Elle and Vogue in mass production and circulation. Were the images they presented not desirable enough? They showed images of the ‘real’ woman, which is definitely not the case in the images from magazines such as Elle; this is because there is an absence of the ‘real’ woman which is a necessary support for the attribution of beauty.

Griselda Pollock’s Woman as Sign: Psychoanalytic Readings deconstructs the image of female beauty. After a long and intimate acquaintance with images of cosmetic advertisements, which remained as wallpaper in her office after a students’ performance, she wrote: ‘with the serried ranks of female faces that I saw through the powerful illusions the photographic representation sustained.

Gradually perceived the systematic disproportions of the faces, the absence of volume and of the remotest suggestion of three-dimensional bone structure [...]

Often there was only a blank, airbrushed expanse of colour in which eyes freely floated above undulations of shocking and moistly shiny red lips. These were not faces, not portraits but fantasy.’ (Pollock, 1988, p.167) Through images of female beauty we motivate this fantasy and visual perfection through our captivation and desire.

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I believe that not only do womens’ relations to images of female beauty need to be re-addressed and considered more fully, but so do discussions on feminism. The seemingly masculine uniform of militant 70s feminism represented the will to reject beauty from the womens’ world, in turn rejecting the oppressive male gaze. ‘Women must reclaim beauty, somehow, as something that is their choice and their judgement – not in the eye of the beholder, but in the mind of beauty.’

(Lackoff & Scherr, 1984, p.284) Robin T Lackoff and Raquel L.Scherr present an inspirational statement in Face Value - The Politics of Beauty (1984) however we still have a problem with beauty and the representation of women throughout popular culture.

Women have reached unprecedented positions of influence within the art world but gender inequality is still rife throughout institutions even though we apparently are in a ‘post-feminist’ art world. This is evident in the latest outburst from Georg Baselitz where he dismisses centuries of female artists in his claim that they lack the basic character to become great painters. (Clark, 2013) It is more evident now that the practical issues of equality have not been put to rest. Griselda Pollock defines gender difference as ‘the public discourse of what men and women are/ought to be’ (Pollock, 1988, p.168). Baselitz expresses the absolute difference of what makes men great painters and women not, as the fact of the difference between masculinity and femininity. Of course his claims are ridiculous as Griselda Pollock recently expressed in The Independent, women were held back by several factors but principally the: ‘myth of the painter. The image in the West of a lonely, tortured white man. I could run rings around you with great women artists but there isn’t space in the cultural imagination.’

(Clark, 2013) In the visual image of woman, man strives to negotiate his relation to sexual difference and ‘the other’ through images of female beauty. However Nancy Freedman takes the position in Beauty Bound – Why Women Strive for Physical Perfection that we need to make the beauty of women gender neutral in order to break the cycle of idealised representations ‘as women gain access to the institutions that control society, they gain the means to shift beauty off the back of femininity and onto the gender neutral position where it belongs.’ (Freedman, 1988, p.240) By doing this we may be able to break this regime of representing women as image - beautiful to look at, merely defined by her ‘looks’ and make it gender neutral.

Jennifer Hawkins, MA Fine Art Chelsea

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Bibliography Beech, D (2009) Beauty. Hitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited Clark, N (2013) What’s the biggest problem with women artists? None of them can actually paint, says Georg Baselitz.

The Independent. 6th February 2013.

Danto, A C (2003) The Abuse of Beauty ; Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago : Open Court.

Freedman, N (1988) Beauty Bound- Why Women Strive for Physical Perfection. London Hickey, D (1993) The Invisible Dragon : Four Essays on Beauty. Los Angeles : Art Issues Press Higgins, K M (1996) The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol.54, no.3. Wiley-Blackwell Lacan, J (1977) Écrits. Great Britain Tavistock Publications Limited Lakoff, R T and Scherr, R L(1984) Face Value; The Politics of Beauty. Routledge and Kegan Paul plc Pacteau, F (1994) The Symtom of Beauty. London : Reaktion Books Pollock, G (1988) Woman as Sign; Psychoanalytic Readings , Vision an Difference. London and New York: Routledge Scarry, E (1999) Part Two, ‘On Beauty and Being Fair’ On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton University Press Steiner, W (2001) Venus in Exile : The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art. The University of Chicago Press

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Girl With Mask Mel Cole

I came across the photo Girl with Mask whilst researching artists who used children in their work, in relation to my own practice. The photo particularly stuck with me and is even pinned up in my workspace. For some this photo may be seen as benign or innocent, yet Arbus’ previous works have a disturbing element to them. She categorised her images into two groups that she labled ‘freaks’ and ‘normals’.

Diane Arbus, was born in New York city 1923 to a wealthy family, who owned a department store ‘Russeks’ on Fith Avenue. After marrying her husband, Allan Arbus, at age 18 they set up a commercial photography business, ‘Diane & Allen Arbus’, Diane’s main role was the stylist and Allan, the photographer. Together they produced photos for advertising agents and fashion magazines such as Esquire, Harper’s Bazar and Vogue. From this she went on to study photography and start working as a photographer in her own right. She became a respected, award winning photographer creating powerful and controversial images. Arbus had her first major exhibition in 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art, yet it was not until after her death in 1971 that her work achieved iconic status.

The image of the girl in Arbus photo has become commonly classed as ‘uncanny’ and dismantles innocent ideals of a wholesome childhood. The gender stereotype seen in the photo has also become abstracted, through the girl’s use of the doll and mask; turning the photo into something that is disturbing and grotesque. Within the photo Arbus references the Surrealists in multiple ways, most obviously their technique of doubling. To put this photo into the context of the Surrealists I will refer to artists Hans Bellmer and Louise Bourgeois who both made dolls with disturbing and unsettling results.

Many Arbus photos have become iconic and therefore instantly recognisable, such as Identical Twins, 1976, A Jewish Giant at Home with his Parents in the Bronx, 1970. and Exasperated Boy with Toy Hand Grenade. However Girl with Mask has gone virtually unnoticed. To look at Arbus’s work made before Girl with Mask we can see that in her photos of ‘freaks’ she allows us to see with sincerity the humanity of people that were at the time socially marginalised, vulnerable people such as the female impersonators, strippers or the physically disabled. Conversely from her photos of ‘normals’, where Arbus looks at them with a mocking tone, revealing the absurdity and hypocrisy of people who perhaps thought of themselves as aspirational or living socially conventional lives.

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Girl with Mask, 1961. Arbus, D. (1990), Diane Arbus. London: Bloomsbury

However in this photo there is nether mocking or affection, which adds to the haunting ambiguity of the girl in the photo. Arbus talks about the ‘freaks’, she has photographed for her work, with affection. ‘Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot. It was one of the first things I photographed and it had a terrific kind of excitement for me. I just used to adore them. I still do adore some of them. I don’t quite mean they’re my best friends but they made me feel a 59

mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life.

They’re aristocrats.’ (Arbus, 1990, p3) Girl with Mask was taken back stage of ‘Hubert’s Freak Show’ that occupied a basement in Times Square, New York. When the photo was taken in 1961 the ‘Freak Show’ had long since passed out of fashion. There was a strip club above and further down town was Club 82, a nightclub for female impersonators. These were all places that Arbus found her subject, some of these photos went on to be some of her most iconic, examples from the freak show include Jewish Giant, The Sword Swallower, Jack Dracula, and Snake Dancer.

For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.

(Arbus, 1990, p50) Girl with Mask comes from a series of photos Arbus took of a travelling freak show. The photo appears to be un-staged and of a chance encounter, with a girl who is playing outside. The young girl is unkempt, sitting on a stone step, in front of a neglected doorway, wearing shorts and a sleeveless cropped blouse that reveals her midriff.. Both the girl and the doll are centrally placed in the photo directly facing the photographer/viewer. The direct height and angle of the photo being the same as the girl perhaps as a leveller or has put us in a position of confrontation. We are unable to see her face as it’s hidden by the mask, there is an invitation to see what is beyond the mask coming from the black holes where her eyes should be.

‘I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.’ (Arbus, 1990, p6) Girl with Mask does not conform to our traditional expectations of femininity or childhood, the aggression within the photo serves to dismantle the traditional idea of young girls as meek and mild.

This has been done through the viewers understanding that the girl playing has become real. In Freud’s essay The Uncanny he reminds us that children:

‘make no sharp distinction between the animate and inanimate, and that they are especially fond of treating their dolls as if they were alive.’ (Freud, 2003, p141)

Despite the artificiality and morbid lifelessness of the plastic doll, it becomes alive through thoughts projected on to it from the girl. What was initially internal playing, has been expelled with the taking of the photo and results in our complicity as an audience to also believe that the doll is real. It has become a baby and the girl is really its mother, and the old woman of the mask. This transference of human relationship with a material object has made the doll become fetishized. As the audience, despite the artificiality, we are drawn into this fantasy.

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For us also this is no longer just playing, but real, becoming what Hans Bellmer said with regard to his doll, as being: ‘the virtual, actual and the possible’. (Taylor, 2000, p 38) Within the photo there is the sense that there is something disturbing, and rouses our instinct to protect the vulnerable. The underlying psychological reading is unnerving. Freud, whose theories were often used by Surrealist artists, said : ‘Primitive convictions are closely linked with childhood complexes, indeed rooted in them.’ (Freud, 2003, p155) Complying with these theories the implied potential for violence embodied in her mask has become unsettling, undermining the belief of the innocent childhood, which in turn addresses our social anxiety and morality, believing that: ‘the uncanny awakens a repressed fear’ (Freud, 2003, p147).

One of his fundamental theories was the importance of childhood and its formation of our psyche.

Within problems of the psyche that people encounter as adults, it is common to go back to their childhood to examine where the origin is believed to be, and therefore will reveal or suggest what the answer could be to resolve the issue that has manifested. Therefore: ‘The prevalent parental belief is that a child must be diverted from what troubles him most: his formless, nameless anxieties and his chaotic angry and even violent fantasies.’

(Bettelheim, 1991, P97) Dolls and other children’s toys commonly have a naivety, yet this is not seen in Girl with Mask.

The face of this doll has the same appearance as the mask, both frozen plastic faces with dark threatening shadows around the eyes. Something that we would consider to be banal has now become sinister, the confrontational position of the doll is vulnerable in its naked state. There is lack of warmth or affection shown towards the doll or any sentimentality, the girl holds the doll by its arms above its head as though it were a puppet recalling Surrealist puppets of Hannah Hoch, Lotte Pritzel, and Emmy Hennings.

The mute doll acts as a replica of the human figure, which mimics and stresses the implied threat we see from the girl. As the viewer we understand that when a mask is worn the person underneath wants to remain anonymous, they can take on a substitute persona.

In Arbus’s photo we can see the dichotomy of a young child wearing an old woman’s mask, We can think of the lengths women go to, to look younger, yet the girl pretends to look and be older. The girl, she has taken on the multiple characters in this photo, we have the girl who is herself, the girl as old woman, girl as mother to the doll, and the doll which all seem to become one. Freud wrote about the use of the doubling in images ‘This relationship is intensified by the spontaneous transmission of mental processes from one of these persons to the other – what we would call telepathy – so that the one becomes co-owner of the other’s knowledge, emotions and experience.’ (Freud, 2003, p142) 61

Girl with Mask has many layers of doubling and repetition, the mask of an old woman’s face and the girl’s face, the plastic mask and the plastic doll, the figure of the girl and the figure of the doll, the young girl and the old woman. Surrealists such as Man Ray , Claude Cahun and Hans Bellmer explored the doubling of images especially in photography. In relation to the doubling found in this image and that which is found in the Surrealists Freud thought: ‘A person may identify himself with another and so become unsure of his true self; or he may substitute the other’s self for his own. The self may thus be duplicated, divided and interchanged.’

(Freud, 2003, p142) Much later on Baudrillard also said: ‘The schizophrenic can no longer produce the limits of his own being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror. He is now only a pure screen, a switching centre for all the networks of influence’ (cited in Sobiezek, 1999, p133).

The view of childhood in Girl with Mask is not benign; the use of doubling has distorted and made us fearful, the viewer can be made to feel disturbed, and uncertain as a result of this image.

‘This uncanny quality can surely derive only from the fact that the double is a creation that belongs to a primitive phase in our mental development, a phase that we have surmounted, in which it admittedly had a more benign significance…the double has become an object of terror.’

(Freud, 2003, p143) Girl with Mask perhaps reminds us of the potential horrors that lurk; the image shows hostility and no pleasure in childhood. We may become anxious when looking at this Arbus’s image because it does not fit into a safe cannon, it has no fixed boundaries that make us feel comfortable, its content is grotesque in its unpredictability and instability.

The image fluctuates from almost fitting a stereotype that is a socially acceptable impossible ideal, to something that appears to be an undisguised reality. Girl with Mask shows a human dysfunction and an inevitable failure, as individuals and therefore as a part of wider society. Photography suggests that there has been a real encounter. The image does not suggest a happy ever after.

To continue with the internal and external theories of self, D.W. Winnicott went on to suggest that there is a middle ground where both inner reality and external life unite, which he calls the Transitional Object, as cited in Winnicott, 1971. However with the girl’s mask over her face, the mask has become the literal middle ground that has been placed in between us the viewer and the girl, which is literally stopping us from seeing her internal self on her external features. The girl now projects her internal self onto the doll; in this case we can see the transitional object to be the doll that the girl is playing with.

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Hans Bellmer, La Poupee, 1936/38.

‘The thing about playing is always the precariousness of the interplay of personal psychic reality and the experience of control of actual objects.’ (Winnicott, 1971, p41) As a photographer Arbus would have known of the photographic work produced by the Surrealists. The German Surrealist, Hans Bellmer took photos of almost life sized dolls he built, of young girls that were made from wood metal and plaster, that could be taken apart and reassembled, as he wanted. His first doll had a more traditional appearance with an almost full body.

However as he made more, and developed them, they became more deformed, explicitly sexual and more disturbing, perhaps satisfying a desire to see what should not be seen.

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As we can see in the photo La Poupee 1936, the photos that he took of the doll were of staged scenarios as though they were real and alive. His later dolls became headless, and only made up of multiple pelvises, sometimes with legs and others with stumps. His figures are brutal, the doll with stumps for legs suggest multiple amputations. Within the composition the doll has been positioned to suggest a coquettish knowing sexuality or just deliberately confrontationally sexual. It is possible to see the multiple legs and pelvises in Arbus’s photo Girl with Mask, we have the legs and pelvis of the girl and in between her legs we have the legs of the girl’s doll.

Much later, artist Louise Bourgeois, who was also associated with the Surrealists, made female doll like figures. However these dolls look like women not girls and a lot of them have pregnant stomachs with large breasts, yet like Bellmer’s dolls, some have limbs missing, and have an unsettling quality. Bourgeois made her dolls from soft fabric that had the appearance to being roughly stitched together; the crude seams are on the outside showing how the sections were put together. The external stitches are like cut flesh that has been sewn closed, or repaired evoking images of a female Frankenstein’s monster. Her figures like Arbus’s Girl with Mask and the dolls that Bellmer made, are sinister and have a repressed violence about them. In the book Modern Art and the Grotesque Marsha Mes Kimman talks about the femininity of the grotesque.

‘A misshapen birth, an abortion, the result of bestiality or a woman’s union with a dream, the product of some trauma delivered to a pregnant woman’ (Morris, 2007, p196) As a viewer looking at this photo we become responsible, we are looking and therefore partaking in this dysfunction. We are not innocent when these violations of morality have been suggested, we can only subvert the ideals and pervert them. In this photo of Girl With Mask we also become culpable.

Mel Cole, MA Fine Art, Chelsea

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Bibliography Archer, M. and Rosenthal, N. (2000), Apocalypse; Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art. London: Royal Academy Publications Arbus, D. (1990), Diane Arbus. London: Bloomsbury Publishing LTD Aebus, D. (2003), Revilations, New York; Random House Benjamin, A. (1991) Abjection, Melancholia and Love: the Work of Julia Kristeva. London: Routledge Bettelheim, B. (1991), The Uses of Enchantment, The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London; Penguin Connelly, F. (2003), Modern Art and the Grotesque. New York: Cambridge University Press Freud, S. (2003), The Uncanny. London: Penguin Eco, U. (2007), On Ugliness. London: MacLehose Press Jennifer, H. (2007), Artists Joke. London Whitechapel; Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press Gibson, G (2008), Hubert’s Freaks. United States; Harcourt Pulishers Lee, A. and Pultz, J. (2003) Diane Arbus: Family Albums. London: Yale University Press Lichtenstein, T. (2001), Behind Closed Doors; The Art of Hans Bellmer. California: University of California Press Morris, F. (2007), Louise Bourgeois. New York: Rizzoli Short, R. and Webb, P. (1985) Hans Bellmer. London: Quartet Sobiezek. (1999), Ghost in the Shell. Cabridge: MIT Press Spira, A and Semff, M. (2006), Hans Bellmer. Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlang Taylor, S. (2000) Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press Winnicott, D, W. (1971) Playing and Reality. New York: Routtledge

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Resonation and Amplification in Art and Noh Theatre Alex Wood

‘The Noh is unquestionably one of the great arts of the world, and it is quite possibly one of the most recondite’ (Pound, E & Fenollosa, E. 1979)

As part of the CCW exchange, I went on a three-week trip to Japan and stayed at the Tokyo Wonder Site. Whilst there were distinct cultural contrasts between east and west, I also found many parallels between Tokyo’s people and places, and my own art practice. In this article, I am going to assert some of these similarities, by engaging with Zenchiku’s Chikubu-Shima; performed at the National Noh Theatre in Shibuya, Tokyo, during my stay.

In researching Noh beforehand, I found out that the floor is polished to enable better ‘gliding’ of actors, and that giant pots are buried underneath the stage, enabling sounds to resonate in the theatre space. These are components that I may have never been aware of during my own viewing, as they serve to amplify experience, rather than signify in-themselves. Through the actions that take place, Noh becomes more than purely theatre, and lends itself closer to a piece of performance art.

The gliding actions, could unnerve the audience with its ghostly appearance.

Narratives feature in my own practice, for instance the sculpture Slick combines low-fi and high-fi materials; a fifteen kg bronze and 1:200 Airfix style cardboard kit of the Titanic. The elements of my sculpture combine together very simply; the unsinkable Titanic is perched precariously at a jaunty angle on top of the bronze, defying the inevitable. The masks the performers wear create varied meanings and show alternating facial expressions at different angles as well. The severe angle that the Titanic is presented at suggests it may split in half at any moment; a reminder of its own fate.

The Titanic’s precariousness instills a feeling of anxiety amongst the audience, which is precisely the effect that Noh seeks to achieve with its continual resonating sounds. Narratives are lost though as well, from a Western point of view with Noh as there are no subtitles, and likewise for an audience that doesn’t know the history of Titanic the meaning and narrative is lost, and the poignancy within the work. Slick is a snapshot of a moment, similar to the film Titanic where the moment of disaster is recreated in film.

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Noh Mask that through the tilting of the head different facial expressions are created. (Wikimedia Commons, Author: Wmpearl, 2009.

Noh begins with very slow graceful movements, similar in many ways to the graceful elegance that was the Titanic. Chanting and most careful precision in the placing of the props which include overly simplified boats (The Warrior Michimori) and small pagodas. The props reference my practice both directly with the boat and Titanic, and the Noh stage floor being overly polished compares to the lush surface of bronze in sculpture. The actors and the props are the only mise-en-scene. The props are overly simple and minimalist in their appearance, similar to a white cube gallery space. The bronze base that forms Slick could be a prop in Noh for it is also very specific with the positioning and height of the legs, especially as one leg doesn’t touch the ground.

The masks that some of the performers were wearing are very frightening and the costumes seem very opulent and make strange shapes; the trousers almost become square. All Noh performances are performed in front of a pine tree, known as the ‘Kagami-ita’. The ‘Kagami-ita’ is painted at the back of the stage and features in every performance. Sitting in the front row, I noticed that some of the performers even detach and attach different parts of the costumes mid way through the performance.

I found it very different to Western theatre as the majority of the audience, the ladies for example were dressed in Kimonos and were meticulously smart too which gave an impression of wealth.

Ideas of social classes are brought into question, for instance the vast social class divide that was on the Titanic. Still today bronze is seen as ‘high art’.

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The theatre features a stage with a full size pagoda morphing into the wall, totally different to our theatre. Also the way performers ‘slide’ out from a curtain to the left of the pagoda is reminiscent of the walkways that I’ve noticed connect lots of the temples and shrines to the other parts of the buildings, maybe living quarters. Also, so far all the performers have been men, again very different to our theatre and most probably more contemporary Japanese theatre. The main ‘characters’ seem young ‘actors’. Architecturally I find the theatre odd as the outside is very new looking and almost brutalist in its construction and aesthetic, similar to the Hayward Gallery or Royal Festival Hall. I was expecting the theatre to look very old and traditional. Inside it is a modern pagoda surrounded by stones but yet seems dated in its appearance.

The flute playing and drumming as well as the chanting starts to reach a climax and then concealed behind a curtain an emperor type person is unveiled. He or she was hidden when they were carried on to the stage earlier in the performance.

Minutes after this from the left hand side a tall vivid red haired, rather threatening performer dashes onto the stage. It makes a juxtaposition to the rest of the play to suddenly see forceful and fast movements.

‘Slick ’ (Definition: Smooth, Glossy and Slippery like Ice), Bronze and card 1:200 ‘Titanic’, Alex Wood, 2013

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The skull type mask he wears is also rather eerie, almost like a witch or dragon? This was the climax as the play reached a sort of crescendo in both action and sounds; ready for the next play.

The masks are very significant in that their facial expressions can be altered just through the tilting of the head. They are also carved from one piece of wood, Japanese Cypress. The mask that the dragon wears is very creepy, in parts of the performance I felt it staring into me and did feel unnerved. Slick recreates the moment of failure and disaster, and for the audience it seeks to invoke a feeling of apprehension, similar to the suspense in Noh.

The audience’s interpretation of the movement and perceived expression completes the work and becomes integral to the play. The audience becomes crucial to the work. Eeriness enters Slick because of the unforgettable horrors when the Titanic sunk, the perishing cold water bears a relationship to the surface of the bronze, which I polished and incorporated droplets into to appear as if it is like ice. Ice being a surface as smooth as oil. Ultimately an audience’s experience of Slick is heightened by the knowledge of what happened.

Alex Wood, MA Fine Art Chelsea

Bibliography Pound, E & Fenollosa, E. 1979., The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan (New Directions Paperbook). 2nd Edition.

New Directions Publishing, NYC, USA.

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(IN)SCRIPTION Chara -Styliani Drandaki

Using language as my primal artistic material, relationships between words, letters and the surrounding space are investigated with references to site-specificity and the anthropometric scale. The act of writing is incorporated to the process of object making: with sharp cutting tools and soft-clay, that is later heated, an object-like clay alphabet is created, manually ‘rewriting’ narratives. In that process of visualizing information through tearing soft clay slabs, writing appears as a digging gesture. ‘Writing comes from the Latin scribere, meaning “to scratch” and the greek graphein means “to dig”. (Flusser, 2012, V.) In my work (In)scription, the narrative is associated to Millbank where the work is located and its memories: its past as a prison in the 19th Century. In the form of personal story telling in a diary, a prisoner narrates his daily routine. 'The diarist story is built upon an assertion of individuality, the form itself conveys a universal longing for self-recognition that, by its very nature, it is fated to achieve only incompletely' (Gilman, 2011: 3).

A structural palimpsest is produced through the successive layering of clay-letters, creating an interweaving of texts in space. An inverse transformation emerges, from digital information to object-like texts, while the density of words and letters does not enable decipherments.

'Language is not something to be broken down, taken apart, moved around and rebuilt, or at least not primarily. It is above all something painstakingly rendered' (Gilman, 2011, p.1).

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Through this process of alteration, from digital to manual, the essential purpose of language; communication, is challenged.

The signs that appear, without enabling decipherments, oscillate between the limits of legible and illegible. Cryptography is revealed as a key component of the work, giving rise to a cryptic alphabet, a galaxy of impenetrable signs and traces, revealing both the materiality of language and the opacity at its core. The time-

consuming process of creation merges with the viewer’s time spent , viewing/ reading the work.

(In)scription, Chara-Styliani Drandaki.

The former is of vital importance, especially when: 'Writing in the sense of placing letters and other marks one after another, appears to have little or no future. Information is now more effectively transmitted by codes other than those of written signs' (Flusser, V. ). The work embodies the time that was spent for its completion. The rigorous and long time activity of transcription echoes that of 'scriptoria', a text preservation activity that took place in the monastic copying workshops of the Middle ages. Tina Pandi, referring to scriptoria, refers to the relationship between text memory and body: 'The text as a mnemonic tool, which fullfills the mnemonic function of writing, gives its place to an accumulation of signs, symbols and traces, the remains of a bodily process' (Pandi, 2011: p5).

Chara - Styliani Drandaki, MA Fine Art Chelsea

Bibliography: Flusser, V. (2011) Does Writing have a Future? Translated from Czech by Nancy Ann Roth, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press Gilman, C. (2011) Instead of Writing. Athens: National Museum of Contemporary ArtPandi, T. (2011) Instead of Writing.

Athens: National Museum of Contemporary Art

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Meanings Without an End: A Response to Anne Lydiat’s Time and Tide Mohammad Namazi

We often find ourselves stepping inside and outside the visual metaphors we create during the act of making.

While inside, we tend to forget the outside. Our innermost vocabulary of thought keeps on budding into apparently irrational forms that ultimately aim at unity - an entirety that aspires to disclosure and reinvention.

Provided that objective determination of its constitutive, disparate elements, which are part of the syntax of immanent discourse is present, the artwork enters the wide world as a result of experiential logics.

The ludic, heuristic inclination of the act of creation seems to generate what I would call a free spirited artwork; an outcome that contains its own material possibilities and so, one that “creates its own presence�.

Time and Tide, 2009, archival gel pen on water color paper, 30x28 inches

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Time and Tide, 2012, archival gel pen on water color paper, 30x28 inches

Is the reflection the only means to recreate a whole that includes both real and virtual at the same time? Could this reflection act as a suggestion that somewhere else there is a mirror version of the world?

Pseudo-infinity, the inability to close, become freely chosen principles of method and expression.

Beckett’s play written in the attic next to his faithful Suzanne, which, rather than stopping repeats itself word for word, is a reaction to this urge to subscribe to a never ending loop.

Does this repetition, controlled only by the technical premises I conceive in my studio, knock on the door of the absurd? Or is it just a sign of mimesis, a symbol of imperfect imitation, a critique to reproduction?

Mohammad Namazi, MRes Arts Practice, Chelsea

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A response to Stephen Scrivener’s Redactions Brooke Fitzsimons

Redactions 1:1 is an A1 poster made up of multiple images - photographic portraits of convicted criminals in Newcastle Gaol, taken between 1871 and 1873. There are 9 columns of photos butted together like postage stamps. In each of the nine rows there is a distribution of one of each of the nine different men photographed, and the running order changes for each of the nine strips of images the length and breadth of the poster. Nine times nine makes eighty one. The viewer looks for repetition or pattern; tries to find a reason for this distribution, or an answer, or even a puzzle to be answered.

En masse these men lose their individuality, we are less able to keep all the identifying features present when they are so small. As ID shots they lose their potency. Details are lost - the way one man holds his lapel slightly defensively, the arrogant stare of another with his crumpled corduroy coat, the prominent brow, the spotty chin, the sparse beard of a blurred face. In this way we see them as part of a multitude; not as individuals, but as numbers or statistics. There is the sense that this selection, or redaction, is just part of a bigger picture, or a continuum of crime statistics.

In Redactions 1:2 we find the same nine men again. But this time the men appear alone, one per page, in an A5 book, with excerpts of text sitting next to them. We are able to see them as individuals at this size. Again there is the urge to contextualise them. But the photos and texts do not seem to match. The texts have been attributed to Arthur G. F. Griffiths’ book Memorials of Millbank and Chapters in Prison History, published in 1875. So the texts fit the time, but they do not fit the men, or the men do not fit the descriptions.

At the time of viewing, there was only one man not marked by a ‘post-it note’ in Redactions 1:1 – it is the photo of George Talmage. His text describes him as a ‘short, stout man, of immense strength, with a large head and a thick neck like a bull’s, and his grip was not to be got away from easily. Still he declared that he had never murdered any one; that is to say, he had never beaten out anybody’s brains. But he had choked four - by accident, of course.’

The Griffith’s ‘memorial’ texts are sensational and the language adjectival – the convicts are described as ‘gloomy’, ‘ill-tempered’, ‘contemptuous’ and ‘maniacal’. I retrieved another caption for this man, from the Tyne and Wear Archive. This caption describes him as a petty thief, not a murderer: ‘John Richards was convicted of the crime - stealing money from person (sic) and was sentenced to 3 months at Newcastle City Gaol.’ We are given little other imformation. His height was 5’ 5½”, he had 74

Redactions 1:1, 2013. Stephen Scrivener. A1 poster.Redactions

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Redactions 1:2, 2013. Stephen Scrivener. A5 book.

brown hair and blue eyes, he was born in Plymouth, was single and worked as a hatter and was 25 on discharge from gaol. The text for John Richards is spare, but tells us what he is not. He is not George Talmage. But as convicts and criminals commonly change their names, this is not particularly significant. Names do not equate to identity here. This caption gives us a description that does seem to fit his physical appearance. Though he does have a prominent brow, and an intense stare, he looks slight, even slightly apprehensive. He does seem to be a young man with a quiet profession. He looks like a hatter, his hands are delicate, almost soft, hardly capable of choking four people.

The bare Tyne and Wear archive descriptions state basic facts - height, eye and hair colour, birthplace and conviction. These prompt an equivalent affect as the rows of images in Redactions 1:1. There is little to give a sense of the individuality of these people - from these descriptions they become statistics. So once again the image dominates our perception of the men, we are thrown back to scanning their faces to try to find meaning, because the texts sit uncomfortably with their subjects.

I am suspended between the two readings. Either caption, true or false, prompts another response from me: though he was clearly caught for his crime, John Richards had a lucky escape.

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By being born later in the 19th Century, he avoided being transported to the penal colonies of Australia. Transportation, for similar convictions, ended in 1868, three or maybe four years before this photo was taken. If John Richards had been convicted before 1867, he may have ended up at Millbank Prison before being sent off to Australia, as one of around 162,000 transported convicts. And if that had been the case he would have embarked on his journey not 200 paces from this exhibition space, from the river steps on the Thames, never to return to England.1

Brooke Fitzsimons, MRes Arts Practice Chelsea.

1. When the last shipment of convicts disembarked in Western Australia in 1868, the total number of transported convicts stood at around 162,000 men and women. They were transported there on 806 ships between 1788 and 1868. http:// australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/convicts-and-the-british-colonies 2. Information, including a text written by Scrivener about these artworks, may be accessed at the blog set up to document the Recalculating exhibition at Chelsea College of Art, 2013. It was part of an ongoing collaboration between CCW Graduate School, University of the Arts London, and the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Doctorate School. http://thamesdanube.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/redactions-11-12.html

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Brushing Teeth Tamirys Araujo

The human being is a social being: the social environment which surrounds him is key to understanding his behaviours and thoughts. Such relationships between people and architecture are important to my work.

Specifically, I am interested in ephemeral architectural structures. As an example of this ephemerality, one could think about markets installed on a city street. In a few hours it changes the whole organisation of the place and the way people relate to the space. Or for instance a circus, which can travel from one city to the other, carrying the whole structure to put itself together. Again, once it is installed, it establishes a whole different relationship with the society around it, breaking the established pattern and transforming it.

What does an image of a woman brushing her teeth have to do with a street market or a circus? What is the connection to ephemeral architecture and social relationships? If we could zoom in on the private life of those people in such ephemeral spaces as the market or the circus, we might observe the codes instituted by their society. If we could see the whole city from outside, and among all the people within it, we might pick up one individual and analyse how does he behave by himself in the private space of his house: by himself, in the safety of his home, the rules and codes are changed as there is no one there to judge it.

In answer to the questions of the previous paragraphs, I will take a characteristic of eroticism, as described by George Bataille in his book Death and Sensuality: ‘Eroticism always entails a breaking down of established patterns, the patterns, I repeat, of the regulated social order basic to our discontinuous mode of existence as defined and separate individuals.’ (Bataille, 1986, 1962)

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Brushing Teeth, Tamirys Araujo, Pastel on paper, 210x297mm

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This breaking down of established social patterns is what I am interested in, not only when I am exploring the city as a whole, but also when I am exploring the individual. The market and the circus establish a new pattern in the city for a temporary space of time, while eroticism does the same with the individual .

Bataille talks about eroticism as a transition from a discontinuous mode of existence into a profound feeling of continuity: ‘We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity’. (Bataille, 1986, 1962)

Sexuality enables the self-contained individual to fulfil his obsession with continuity through the breaking down of the stablished social patterns. It is this moment of breaking down of the stablished social pattern that I try to capture on my work. When naked, one has already lost its sense of self-contained, along with part of its discontinuity, in order to try through sexuality to achieve the lost continuity. Stripping naked is a decisive action which activates the possibility to a continuos mode, the channel which the bodies can communicate or where one can communicate with its one body.

Bataille does not talk about the sexual stimulation of one’s own genitals, he is mainly analysing sexual relation between two individuals, as a way of breaking down the discontinuity of life. However, in my work I am not only interested in such pursuits of continuity, and the breaking down of social codes through sexuality, but also the way an individual turns inside their own body. The flexion of the body and the reflexion of the soul, come together to achieve evanesce through masturbation. Through masturbation, the individual is totally dislocated from their social environment, as opposed to sexual relations where there is a need for a partner, on the pursuit of our lost continuity. Regarding the visual aspect of my work I believe that crudeness of the image is important, as then the drawing has nothing to hide. However the intention behind the title is to add a sense of irony and humour to the work, to contrast between what is being confirmed and what it is being shown by the image.

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For example, in ‘Woman brushing her teeth’ there is no woman brushing her teeth. This is apparent.

But as we are fulfilled with the codes and patterns of society, we first try to see what is being said to us and interpret the image in a polite and socially acceptable way, instead of looking at it with fresh eyes. It may be hard to believe that the colourful pastel drawing is a woman in the bathroom masturbating. The crudeness of the image intends to confront the viewer with this reality.

Tamirys Araujo, Fine Artist on the Chelsea Study Abroad Program (Rio de Janeiro State University)

Bibliography Bataille, G. (1986, 1962) Eroticism: Death & Sexuality. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

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Performative Histori-city Aliki Kylika This article was originally presented as part of a performative lecture on 27-02-2012 by at Central Saint Martins College

Do you remember the name of the first friend you made the very first day at school? Do you remember your name? Do you remember the pin of your cash card? Do I remind you of someone you know? Do you know the name of the government during the miners’ strikes in the 70s?

Remembering is an act achieved through the repetition of an event enough times to become part of our consciousness. It is because of the act of remembering that people, ‘things’ and events may evoke feelings of deja-vu. On the other hand, some events are so striking that, even if they happen only once (and for what seems a moment in our life), they leave a trace in our memory becoming part of our consciousness. Such events can alter our being in the world so rapidly and importantly that it seems as if they happen within a condensed period of time.

Events that are shared in the company of others form our mutual memory, become common references, a form of collective consciousness that binds us together as a group. Through the recollection of our memories we become aware of our being in the world and can communicate with the others who constitute society. The fact that all our experiences happen within society means that all our memories are built and shared within it as well. Therefore, according to Halbwachs and Riccoeur, our memory is actually our own personal viewpoint to the collective memory of the members of our community. (Halbwachs 1992; Ricoeur 2004) Collective memory is the foundation of the community’s identity. It forces awareness and responsibility on behalf of the community and the individual, towards each other and towards the present, future and past. Keeping the collective memory alive is achieved through rituals and traditions that embody the past and re-enact its events in the present everyday life. Oral memory is an important part of the collective memory, but it must be dealt with care and caution, as ideology and imagination are very much entangled with the individual’s memory of history.

‘To live means to leave traces’ (Benjamin 1935) The community evolves into space; the everyday life, the habits, even extraordinary events can be presented in images of the surrounding environment where they happened, shaping the spatial consciousness of the community. The community adapts into the environment, builds its space and becomes enclosed within its very framework.

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Space is imprinted into the collective consciousness and vice versa is marked by its everyday actions and events. Certain events serve as landmarks within the framework of collective memory. The position of such landmarks in space form the topography of memory, providing a solid framework of the past. The memory of an event contains the memory of the place and the actions that happened at that past temporal moment. In space, the impetus of memories from the past can be experienced in the present thus evoking a consciousness of the space and its past events. Tracking the traces of past actions in space allows the past to become a living memory, embodied and activated. It is in space that the collective memory is placed and allows the community to remain united.

History is the memory of the nation, therefore it is the collective memory of society; formed, structured and documented to be officially taught and memorised. Within the context of history past events and memories fall into the realm of affairs, are considered as facts and become part of the common knowledge. Through the process of memorisation the framework of society’s common existence (within infinite time) is created, its common history and identity.

The need for social unity and continuity, makes it necessary for the society to renounce from the collective history the frameworks of memory of limited groups within it (religious groups, racial groups and social classes, to mention but a few). The nation as the official and active narrator of the past, constructs its ideology from the variations of history. Customary commemorations, monuments and anthems are part of the act of memorisation and embody the national ideology.

National history is therefore superimposed on the collective memory of repressed communities, a memory to be soon lost in the realms of myth and legend. Communities as such should preserve the sites of their memory and remain conscious of the acts and dealings, past and present, that bond them. There is a responsibility to history and the sites that bear it.

We can understand how we recapture the past only by understanding how it is, in effect, preserved by our physical surroundings. It is to space - the space we occupy, traverse, have continual access to, or can at any time reconstruct in thought and imagination that we must turn our attention. Our thought must focus on it if this or that category of remembrances is to reappear. […] the image of a place conjures up thoughts about an activity of the group associated with that place. (Halbwachs, 1950 p.52)

It is generally agreed between phenomenologists of space such as O.F. Bollnow, H. Lefebvre and others, that human existence is spatial. Space determines human existence and, most importantly, the human actions. On the other hand, human actions transform the space through their infinite interaction within the temporal time. Space ‘is the abode of human consciousness’ (Ockman, 1998), which is built through memories of events. Entering the space we are overwhelmed by the experience of past memories; and it is this act of recollection precisely, that certain spaces allow to happen more strongly than others, as a result of the weight of memories they bring for people. This ‘allowing’ and ‘bringing’ that space does, within the context of temporality, is its performative aspect.

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On the other hand, events, celebrations and ritual observances have been part of the transformations of the architectural space through time, proving that: ‘The performative is […] inherent [in architecture], native and elemental’ (Kunze 2010).

These forms of cultural expression are anthropologically considered as performances; expressive of the way humans live. The performance deals with the everyday bodily actions, the interactivity of individuals and society, the temporariness of human existence, the social construction of the real, rather than its representation, the creation of presence. (Schieffelin 1998) In short, human beings exist in space and constantly perform. Performance is constitutive of the social identity, culture and consciousness.

Performance is the embodiment of culture through symbols, theatrical tools, aesthetic images and technical media. Its crucial characteristic is time, which is the present, and the raw reality of actions that happen in its duration within space. It is therefore comprehensible, that in a performance piece the human body is the elemental medium, the channel through which the artists and the audience-society interact. Within the duration of a performance a certain amount of significant actions take place. The temporariness of the event loads it with emotions of urgency and demands the responsibility of those present. It is as if time expands in the perception of the people who experience it, knowing that afterwards it will only exist in their memory. Their community serves as the messenger, the means of documentation of the piece. For this reason, the memory and collective experience of those present in a performance piece claims an important part of the actual process.

‘The body, the alterations of which are my alterations- this body is my body; and the place of that body is at the same time my place.’ (Kant 1900) Performative architecture shares a vital role in the formation of identity, culture and society. It can awaken an individual and social awareness of how active participation can transform the space around us, the reality of our existence and the community in which we belong. The concept of performativity engrafts into space a dimension of interactivity; in other words, ‘the relationship between the social and the spatial is an interactive one, in which people make places and places make people’ (Borden, Rendell, Pivaro, 2002). This interaction is related to the ephemeral nature of human actions and informs the space with a temporal character. It emphasizes the action or function of space at any moment in time rather than its infinite existence. Architecture constantly transforms, in the way society perceives it and in the way it adapts to accommodate any change of the society’s needs. Especially today, with the application of technology and the demand for efficacy, space becomes flexible, in its form, function and design process.

The performative in architecture is used to manifest not what a building ‘is’, but what a building ‘does’. A performative building can be the result of a functional approach to its design based on its performance and with the use of computer design tools and high-tech engineering. A performative plane can be an interactive or communicative surface that responds to a certain public by transforming its shape and appearance.

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Performative architecture has managed to overthrow its static role and open up to becoming an amorphous architecture of movement that effectively responds to the needs of its user, its audience. Performative architecture is more dynamically related to and dependent on the temporal time and the subject, their action, body and desire- than ever before.

‘Architecture must produce places where the desire can recognize itself, where it can live’ (Lyotard 1991) The demand for social space and interactivity is at the core of the work of many artists, as well as of several artist-led protest actions that have emerged in the past decades since the late 1950s or even earlier. The relative examples vary in their form, aims, context or audience, but all of them share the common ground of performance. From the experimental group of ‘Fluxus’ , who first appeared in1961 in New York including artists John Cage, George Maciunas and Joseph Beyes and who performed the first happenings, to the work of artists like Joan Jonas. From the collective ‘The Diggers’ in 1960s’ San Francisco to protest actions like ‘Reclaim the streets’ in 1990s’ London, performance has been feeding their acts as a demonstration of the freedom of expression in the public space.

The space of a performance event differs from one artist to the other. Many are presented in galleries and museums, where the space is rather understood as neutral and uncharged, a void to be filled with activity and be documented by the curators of the institution.

An example of the latter is Marina Abramovich’s ‘The Artist is Present’ exhibition of at MOMA in 2010, where she would accept numerous visitors to share with each one of them individually precious time looking at each other. This piece manifests the idea of the artist as an exhibit, of the precious bond of the artist with the audience and vice versa; it loudly exemplifies the idea of the act of visiting a gallery space, since it’s only for a few moments of solemn gaze with the artist; a few moments to be remembered.

The public space has been widely used for performance art practices to manifest the freedom of expression in the urban landscape, the openness of art outside of institutions and artistic elites and moreover, to allow for wider experimentation with everyday life in space and the interactivity with the public. From numerous examples of this kind I will refer to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark around the 1970s in New York City and elsewhere.

Matta-Clark worked extensively with derelict buildings within public space, where he experimented with cuts in the elements of the structure and the form of the buildings, thus creating openings and offering different perspectives to their architectural space. Those who visited the place were integrated in those large, architectural-scale installations completing in the act of walking around, gazing on the work. At his piece ‘Conical Intersect’ in 1975 in Paris he created a cut that allowed a view from the very depths of within the house to the life in the street of the city outside and vice versa. This cut presented a view in history, an excavation cut through the 17th century building to the bustling and hustling of the 1975 life in Paris.

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Gordon Matta-Clark, 1970

It also revealed the secrecy of one’s house to the community of those passing by, posing questions on the relationship between the individual and the community, between private and public space; a cut that could only be experienced by the presence of the visitor on the spot, at that moment and never again, as the building was soon to be demolished. The space of the city is a charged space, either historically or by the present activities of public life in it, it is the space where the community dwells, where the political is demonstrated. As earlier theories have demostrated, public space is where the collective memory is placed, where past events and present overlap and can be revealed through their traces to the careful observer. Encountering those traces we dive into our memories or knowledge of certain events of the past and place them in the present reality; we feel the absolute truth of history, the effacing power of time, the historical weight of our existence. Following the previous statement of what performativity is I call the spaces that bear traces as such performative; a ‘Performative Space’ is therefore one that evokes memory and emotion and provides ground for action or contains profound traces of past action.

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Historical sites are places within public space that are associated with events and accounts of the national history. Historical sites form the topography of the national memory; they are the spaces where national consciousness dwells. To formalise historical sites, monuments and other signs are installed on site, reminding and displaying the past that bonds the society together. Their role is therefore as much didactic, as compelling national identity. As a result of this, monuments are often the target of the aggressive public or are being mocked by radical groups, such as street artists.

Site-specific art is also occupied with the memory of space and its spatial and visual characteristics, aiming to stir emotion and activity rather than ideology. It places memory within the context of present time, to enlighten the many layers of past actions and connect them with the present ones.

It uses the space intelligently, grasping on the traces and other details that characterise it. Sitespecific art, be it an installation or a live performance, is an excavation act to the impetus of the layers of collective memory, dynamically linking them to the present and the ephemeral.

At this point, I will refer to two very different examples of site-specific art that use space in its performative sense stated above: The Kabakovs are artists who during the 1980s created numerous installations in the West and called them ‘total installations’. Although they were not placed on sites of history, they did indeed depict the collective memory of everyday life in Soviet Union.

Their installations were in the form of saturated spaces that narrated, documented and commented on the very soul of the Socialist regime, on Utopia. The Kabakovs created hermetic sites of the memory of socialist being, to be juxtaposed to their surroundings of the Western world. Their numerous public projects, such as ‘The Man who fell into Space from his Apartment’ (1968-1996) and ‘The Toilet’ (1992), were adapting to the specificity of their actual sites. They depicted in playful and imaginative manners the voices, the senses and the historical and cultural depths of those places. They created ‘performative spaces’, where the viewer should sense the narratives and read the multiple layers of the memories of the space. Visiting an installation or a project of the Kabakovs is an event in itself, where the presence, the spirit and the action of the viewer are of vital importance. Artists such as Geraldine Pilgrim work in the locality of each site, depicting the desires, memories and oral histories of the communities of the place. Her work is highly emotional, even more so for the use of live performers in the heavily loaded spaces she creates.

Pilgrim is also concerned with the depiction of everyday life in space and does so in respect to the actual sites. She creates narrative environments by the display of objects and human figures in frozen moments. Just like with the paintings of the Surrealists, the visitors are led to dive into visual images of the unconscious, thus awaking their own memories and gaining a new understanding of the site.

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The recollection of memories is a romantic act that allows us to daydream of the past from our ambiguous position in the present. Besides being a safe place for daydreaming, the accounts of history offer a powerful tool for social awareness and collective consciousness, through which we can understand and thus criticise both the past and the present. The critique of the present is the central aim of public art projects, that interfere with everyday life in the city. Public art is inherent to an urban fabric, to reveal spatial stories of the present and inscribing new meanings in space about society. Such meanings are produced from the collision of politics, events and ideas and extracted from objects through their displacement in space and time. Being placed within the public space they are connected with movement and passage, provoking the participation of the unaware citizen.

This dynamic character of public art associates it with radical practices in the urban space, such as street art that seek to provoke the irruption of novelty into the everyday life of the community, whilst criticising the present, and society and supporting collective awareness and action.

Kabakovs, The Toilet, 1992

Kabakovs, The Man who fell into Space from his Apartment, 1968 - 1996

‘This time is given to us today, tomorrow not yet, and yesterday no longer. Today is now and perhaps never again. Today is already declining or just dawning. All this, however, is precious, even with the risk of tomorrow.’ (Perone, 2010) Groups, such as the ‘Nike Ground’ combine performance practices with guerilla installations to question our consumerist society and the issues of place, history and public space. Through absurd, and yet possible events they engage the public into the games of an elusive, exaggerated reality.

“Ψωμί, Παιδεία, Ελευθερία”1

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In 1999 performance artist Georgia Sagri placed her naked body, wrapped up in white bandages, in a glass box outside the gates of Polytechnio building in Athens. The Polytechnio is the National Technical University of Greece, where on the 17th of November 1973 students were killed in an uprising against the military dictatorship of that period in Greece. For many years now, a demonstration has taken place, annually on this day, around the centre of Athens beginning from the University.

Sagri’s performance meant to criticise the transformation of a historical revolutionary act into the tradition of a meaningless stroll around the city. The remembrance of a once reactive past has been used as an excuse for the current passivity of the community to the faulty use of power by the government in Greece. The symbol of Polytechnio, and the historical memory of those defensive acts against repression, should instead remind the community to take a critical and reactive stance against any form of power abuse.

How do we keep an active memory of our community’s acts of demand for justice, democracy and equality?

Aliki Kylika, MA Performance Design and Practice, Central Saint Martins

Bibliography Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Boston : Beacon Press Bollnow, O.F. (2011) Human Space. London: Hyphen Press Borden,I., Rendell J., Pivaro A. (2002) The Uknown City; Contesting Architecture and Social Space.

London: MIT Press ed.

Cassiman, B. (1993) The Sublime Void: on the memory of imagination. Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Halbwachs, M. (1980) The Collective Memory, New York: Harper & Row Colophon Books ed.

Kolarevic, B. & Malkawi, A.M. (2005) Performative Architecture Beyond Instrumentality. first edition.

New York & London: Spoon Press Ricoeur,P. (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago&London: University of Chicago Press

Endnotes 1. ‘Bread, Education, Freedom’, slogan used during the 1973 uprising against the military dictatorship in Greece

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Desiring the Fake Cheryl Papasian

Materials are integral to my practice and synthetic ones such as plastic, vinyl, and perspex are used to suggest low priced materials such as those used in manufacturing. While plastic is thought of as inexpensive, it is also “the ultimate ‘designer’ material in that it can be precisely engineered to meet specific performance requirements” (Wilhide, 2003). Bronze and ceramics are combined with plastic to create such diverse objects as bullets, gems or toys.

My sculptures and installations reference consumerism today and the overabundance of objects that are being accumulated and disposed of worldwide. I use materials that are directly associated with consumer culture.

‘Parakeet’, Ceramics, tin parakeet, toy truck, wax, metallic powders, gold beads, acrylic gems, W 20cm x D 18cm x H 9cm

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Using materials from building yards, manufacturers and local shops is a way to connect with the consumer culture in the artworks. Shopping in these places, not usually associated with fine art practice, echoes the current cultural condition of abundance and overload. “Finished products are the newest raw materials in today’s art, craft and design realms. Because the products are produced in such profound abundance, they can be acquired in vast quantities with the relative ease of getting one groceries’”. (Skov Holt, 2008) I am interested in ‘fake-ness’ in materials and finishes that fool the eye, like glazes that imitate gold or bronze in ceramics, or plastics that imitate natural products.

Cheryl Papasian, MA Fine Art, Chelsea

‘Desert’, Ceramics, plaster, plastic motel, wax, metallic powders, W 19cm x D 6cm x H 12cm

Bibliography Skov Holt, Steven, 2008. Manufactured: The Conspicuous Transformation of Everyday Objects. Chronicle Books.

Wilhide, Elizabeth, 2003. Materials. Quadrille Publishing.

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An Ethical Consideration of Relational Aesthetics Based on Christoph Schlingensief’s Opera Village Africa Nora Heidorn This article investigates Christoph Schlingsief’s Operndorf Afrika project, which was also discussed in a separate article (focusing on the notions of distance and proximity) in the inaugural JAWS Spring Issue. In contrast, this article will focus on the ethical questions which particular to relational aesthetics, which the Operndorf Afrika brings up.

The case study of this article, Christoph Schlingensief’s Operndorf Afrika, is an ongoing project to build an opera village in rural Burkina Faso. The artist’s objective is to build a village comprising housing, a school, an infirmary and a festival hall—the opera—at its centre. The opera is to be used by locals and visitors for different cultural purposes. Understanding the Operndorf Afrika as a work of art that acts in the realm of the social, this article places the project in the context of relational aesthetics, which describes practices that rely on the collaboration with ‘non-art’ participants, for the completion of artistic endeavours. The Operndorf Afrika as an especially ambitious and complex example of relational practice, proves the discourse to be lacking in one central point: evaluation.

This article tests how this social organism as a work of art can be evaluated. Is the artist free in the name of experimentation, or does the proposition of an ethical autonomy of art become arbitrary when art merges with the social?

If the Operndorf Afrika was presented as an educational art institution, it would be simpler to understand and assess, but its totality as a social sculpture renders its evaluation complicated. Erik Hagoort argues that the immediate activity of the initiating artist, the ‘performance’, is where the art of the encounter lies (Hagoort, 2005; 53), which supports the claim that the invention of the Operndorf Afrika is a work of art.

Schlingensief cannot be held fully responsible for the quality of artistic productions in the Operndorf Afrika, as he only creates their context. He will neither create works with the villagers nor teach in the school. He cannot be merited by the success of the creation of a functioning community, as relationships necessarily depend on mutual dedication. Although the responsibility for the management of the project has been transferred to the Festspielhaus GMBH (chaired by his wife Laberenz, and German and Burkinabe advisory boards) since Schlingensief’s death in August 2010, Schlingensief remains posthumously responsible for the initial artistic concept. Laberenz clarifies that although the artist always worked in teams, ‘...he decided the direction. He was the author.’

(Laberenz, 2012; 32) Thus, Schlingensief must be accountable for the cultural value of his brainchild, the Operndorf Afrika, to the extent of its conception. But how can such an artistic concept be merited?

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Grant Kester dismisses the common method to deem relational works successful, to the extent that they attempt to resolve a pressing social problem. He insists that ‘these projects simply cannot be grasped as relevant by conventional art critical methodologies,’ concluding that these works are assessed with inappropriate criteria, and therefore misunderstood and misjudged. (Kester, 2012; 146) So what alternative criteria can be suggested? Claire Bishop insists on the evaluation of the work's conceptual, and therefore aesthetical, significance. According to her, resolving the dilemma of the opera village as a work of art or a community project is irrelevant, as the contradiction between art's autonomy, and its potential for social change, is itself productive. (Bishop, 2006)

The Operndorf Afrika presents a prime example for this paradox, but rendering its representation the standard for success would effectively reduce the villagers to mere performers of this contradiction. Bishop fails to address the artists' responsibility for their activities in this field of tension between art and life. A sustainable project like the Operndorf Afrika, which shapes participant's lives in the most elementary manner, can therefore not be judged solely by its aesthetics. Bishop's promotion of aesthetic critiques over political efficacy in relational art is in fact patronising, as the critic privileges her own field of interest (the paradoxical relationship of art and life) over the artist's intentions for their work. If the relational practitioner states the creation of relationships (or even social improvement) as the intended outcome of their work, it is condescending to dismiss these and judge the work only aesthetically, simply because the practitioner is an artist.

Eric Hagoort's consideration of a new approach to judging collaborative practices proves more useful. He recognises the importance of the artists' expression of their intentions for the project: if the artist orchestrates a communal activity without mention of artistic intentions, it may not be recognised as art. (Hagoort, 2005; 69) Art exists in a public sphere as soon as it communicates with the public; and the artist is held accountable to the intentions he/she states. Hagoort reflects that due to the organic nature of collaborative working processes, ‘these artists anticipate an objective that cannot be determined... it is a matter of good intentions.’ The practitioners rely on the belief that good intentions will elicit good outcomes. (Ibid) Although this line of thought may at first seem naive, it is correct that when entering a personal or a working relationship, one cannot provide any pledge for its success other than one's good intentions.

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Hagoort recalls the insecurity of an artist, who asked, ‘why occupy yourself with people who haven’t asked for your interference, under the pretext of art?’1 (Ibid) She adapted her approach after recognising that there was a lack of trust, proving that she had learnt about the people she aimed to collaborate with. (Ibid; 25) Could a judgement criteria for collaborative practice thus be that the artist internalises the social skills gained, compromising their initial plans to adapt to the needs of participants? Hagoort dares art critics to try this approach: to judge dispositions. The positive and negative ‘ethical qualifications’ which can be applied include ‘sensible or naive, courageous or cowardly, careful or careless, openminded or bigoted, concerned or inattentive...’ (Ibid; 55) His argument is based on virtue ethics, a philosophy concerned with intentions, their consequences on action, and their judgement. (Ibid) Hagoort describes virtue ethics as ‘evolving virtues’, accommodating the review and adjustment of dispositions, as in the case mentioned above. (Ibid; 63) Virtue ethics are a constructive approach to judgment, universal to various relational projects. This philosophy can be applied to Schlingensief’s work to evaluate detectable moral dispositions, as well as his outspoken intentions for the Operndorf Afrika.

The intentions of the artist are crucial to the evaluation of the work. Schlingensief causes confusion— characteristic for his practice2—about his intentions at the most initial stage of his project: through his naming of the opera village. He sought to clarify his intentions, positing them as averse to introducing a Western elitist culture to Africa. However, the term ‘opera’ evokes high art in wealthy European cities, with restricted accessibility. Can Schlingensief's use of ‘opera’ be explained through an etymological reading?

'Opera' stems from the Latin opera, meaning work of effort, which developed to signify a work or composition in Italian. (Harper, 2013) Akin to its etymological signification, Schlingensief uses the word to indicate a generic creative effort. Opera, a total form of art,3 functions here as an umbrella term for different creative activities in the Operndorf Afrika. However, Schlingensief's use of the term shows that he has not considered its connotations to European elite culture, when recontextualised to the African continent.

Christoph Schlingensiefs Operndorf Afrika (Christoph Schlingensief's Opera Village Africa), the full official project title, is used in the German language on the project's English and French websites alike. This eponymous naming of a place and a community in Africa in the language of its founding father is uncomfortably reminiscent of the naming of African sites by colonial powers. To add to the confusion, Schlingensief plays with associations with the figure of Fitzcarraldo,4 who risks the lives of locals to realise his pompous vision of an opera on the Amazon. Although it has been argued that Schlingensief tried to overcome the narcissism embodied by the film character through his own project,5 the artist veils himself in troubling contradictions.

In summary, Schlingensief aimed to convey neither ideas of elitism, nor allusions to imperialism, but titled his project ‘opera’, and named the village, and community, in his native language and with his own name as its auteur. Moreover, he plays on allusions to the vain and excessive character 94

Fitzcarraldo. It becomes clear that Schlingensief employs the same ambiguity and inconsistency, which characterise his films and theatre productions, in the communication of his ideas for the opera village. The intention of this argument is not to promote a stifling political correctness in the arts, but to point out that Schlingensief's contradicting communication becomes dangerous when it describes a project involving 'real' people, who do not determine their own representation as part of the opera village. The application of virtue ethics at this point must deem Schlingensief's communication careless, insensitive and ignorant.

Schlingensief's Opera Village and his happening Please Love Austria represent an opposition between social and artistic critiques. For Please Love Austria, Schlingensief set up containers to house asylum seekers on Vienna's central square during the arts festival Wiener Festwochen in 2000.

Austrians and tourists were encouraged to watch the Big Brother inspired 24 hour surveillance of the asylum seekers during seven days. Each evening, one asylum seeker was removed as the result of a public vote on the internet. The winner was rewarded a cash prize under a banner stating Ausländer Raus! (Foreigners out!) and granted asylum on the condition that an Austrian volunteer could be found for marriage. Schlingensief devised this happening in reaction to the inclusion of the right-wing party ÖFP in the Austrian parliament that year. The controversial spectacle was supported by leftist teenagers as well as by uniformed elderly veterans; it caused an angry discussion confused and fuelled by contradictory paroles that Schlingensief, in the role of ringmaster, shouted from atop the containers. The artwork would not change any opinions; as the artist recognised, ‘art doesn't change anything.’ (Poet, 2002) Rather, the happening acted as a symbolic critique through representation: members of the arguably tranquil Austrian public felt provoked to the point that they noisily performed their own ideologies in the public realm.

It is argued here that the comparison between Please Love Austria and the Operndorf Afrika proves a shift in Schlingensief's practice, which illustrates Bishop's paradigm of social or artistic critiques.

Both projects rely on 'real' people to participate (the asylum seekers and the Austrian public, and the Burkinabe villagers and schoolchildren), but Please Love Austria is about ‘the exposure of controversial social truths’ and throwing ‘established systems of value into question’ without aiming to elicit social change. (Bishop, 2012; 276) The opera village, on the other hand, is a benevolent development project comprising a school, infirmary and possibly solar panels: an ethically motivated project aimed at real social change. Bishop points out that, ‘either social conscience dominates, or the rights of the individual to question social conscience. Art's relationship to the social is either underpinned by morality or it is underpinned by freedom.’ (Ibid) In Please Love Austria, Schlingensief arguably crosses ethical lines by asking the asylum seekers to become objects of public pity or contempt. He purposely questions social conscience, believing in art’s freedom. His Operndorf Afrika, however, was conceived from his own social conscience: his morality. Whether benevolence or controversy suit the former enfant terrible better will remain subject to taste. According to Bishop, the tension between life and art ‘indicates that social and artistic judgments’... demand different criteria.’ (Ibid) She concludes that ‘transversal’ practices are most instructive to the art critic, requiring ‘adequate new languages and criteria.’ (Ibid; 274) 95

Schlingensief's role as the auteur of the Operndorf Afrika has been neglected in the reception of the project. Discussing authorship, it could be argued that the artist working in collaborations with non-art participants must be expected to abide to certain ethical principles in this relationship. The criterion of self-reflexivity can be established as a self- regulating mechanism, in regards to the authorial role. Schlingensief presents himself as the romantic stereotype of the charismatic artist with a unique vision. His working method can be characterised as typically artistic: it is subjective, experimental and open-ended. While these are productive strategies in the arts, they may not suffice in the realm of the social.

A compromise between artistic and scientific methods–between experimentation and control– could have prevented foundational errors in Schlingensief's conception of the village. Schlingensief recognised and performed the danger of an uneven cultural exchange in the Operndorf Afrika in his staging of Via Intolleranza II.6 Regrettably, the artist's self-reflexivity extended only to the level of recognition, but he was not able to transfer this insight into a revision of his project.

Collaboration between artists and non-art participants forms the basis of relational aesthetics.

Schlingensief's foundational concept for the creation of a social organism as art, is the artistic invention subject to evaluation in this article. This concept is based upon his perceptions of Africa, which can be understood as distorted by stereotypes of regenerative energy, spirituality, and authenticity. Schlingensief projects on the exotic Other what he deems lacking in his native country, Germany. But if authenticity is a notion originating from Western culture, does this ideal, upon which Schlingensief founded his village, have any importance in Africa? Alarmingly, it is Schlingensief's pre-determined ideals that he aims to 'learn' and extract from Africa.

Hagoort’s employment of virtue ethics for the moral judgment of dispositions has proven the only feasible suggestion for the evaluation of art acting specifically in the social realm. The criteria of a self-reflexive consideration of the artist’s role and his method, thoughtful and appropriate communication, and the creation of universal cultural value, may prove useful for the evaluation of the Operndorf Afrika and other relational projects.

In regarding evaluation from the perspective of the artist and meriting him by what he set out to do, the expectations of the Burkinabe for this project have not been fully accounted for.

Local reporting on the Operndorf Afrika affirms the local and national Burkinabe politicians’ optimism in regards to the project.7 However these are only news reports, not opinionated journalism or local blogs, which are not readily available. In regards to the positive outlook of Burkinabe politicians on the opera village, it is argued here that the prospect of a state-ofthe-art school and health facility, where these were previously lacking, endowed with media attention due to its exceptionality, will reflect positively on the politicians in charge. If local authorities recognised any flaws in the project, this argument proposes to doubt that they would voice their criticisms, as the opera village promises a comparably large investment into education and culture in their county.

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From his successful application of virtue ethics to relational practices, Hagoort concludes that ‘judging itself is dominated by the pursuit of further quality’, appealing to art criticism to develop with new artistic practices. (2005; 71) He recognises correctly that if virtue ethics are applied to the artist, they must also apply to the critic or academic. Hagoort continues, ‘judgment is focused more on a search for and less on a measurement of quality.’ (Ibid) To Hagoort, this expansion renders ‘the will to pass judgment’, on which he believes ‘we have already expended unnecessary time and energy,’ superfluous. (Ibid) Hagoort, who provides virtue ethics as the most thoughtful and practicable approach to the question, how can the art of encounter be judged adequately by art criticism?, thus renounces the very activity of evaluation for the 'search for quality.' (Ibid) Regrettably, his final argument is logically erroneous, as quality can only be distinguished through the application of judgment criteria. A seeking of quality necessarily relies on its measurement. It seems that even some art critics see the activity of evaluation as negative or destructive. Contrarily, it can be argued that evaluation can be not only constructive to the individual project, but is elementary to a mature discourse and practice of relational aesthetics—on the condition that adequate and thoughtful criteria are established. The demand for self-reflexivity of artists practicing relational aesthetics equally creates expectations for the art critic. Thus, self-reflexivity must be employed at the very beginning of any analysis, to explore what criteria or expectations judgment can be based on.

What must be expected from art criticism is a thoughtful consideration of the act of meriting itself.

This article has been composed, because it is deemed important to counter the manifold romanticised and unreflected opinions of the Operndorf Afrika, and in extension, of relational aesthetics. Evaluation must however not be mistaken for blame. Although this study argues that the flaws identified in the foundation of the project will resonate in its realisation, it also recognises that the project is no longer determined solely by Schlingensief's authorship. Laberenz and her team are now in charge, steering the project in their own way.8

The intentions and decisions of those presently in charge will have a significant impact on the future of the Operndorf Afrika and will have to be evaluated separately from Schlingensief’s foundational concept. Criticism in this instance can have the constructive function to accompany the complex and demanding process to realise the Operndorf Afrika. If received by open ears, it has the potential to be of positive influence by pointing out dangers resulting from erroneous perceptions and intentions. This position proves a belief in the good intentions of those in charge, as these imply self-reflexivity and the adaptation of actions to the reality of the people involved.

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Chris Dercon, the director of Tate Modern, speaks fondly of the Operndorf Afrika, projecting that ‘museums will become different–they will become community centres and art schools.’ He believes that ‘you have to... rethink the notion of the museum... as a social organization.’ (Dercon, 2012) His views are exemplary for a wider trend toward the social in the art world. In conclusion, it can be said that benevolent aims for collaboration, do not automatically entail a successful project. Dangers and errors in Schlingensief’s project, which have been pointed out in this article, can inform ethical dimensions for other relational projects in the future. Most importantly, it has been argued that the move of art toward the social must be shaped in a constructive way, by establishing an adequate evaluation process for projects acting simultaneously in the realms of art and life.

Nora Heidorn, BA Communication, Curation and Criticism, Central Saint Martins

Endnotes

1 Artist Kirsten Leenars setup a portrait studio in an apartment block in order to foster relationships with the inhabitants.

2 Cornish remarks that Schlingensief ‘engulfs the audience in more ideas and images than they can process’, in Via Intolleranza II. (Cornish, 2012; 191-197) 3 Opera is often seen as a total form of art as it includes music, performance, design, literature, costume and visual arts.

4 Werner Herzog's classic film Fitzcarraldo portrays the power of one man's (named Fitzcarraldo) destructive yet creative vision to bring Western high art, embodied by the opera, to an exotic and 'primitive' faraway place.

5 Eva Meyer-Hermann, who documented Schlingensief's production of the Flying Dutchman in Manaus, Brazil 2007, comments that Schlingensief associated his role in this project with the figure of Fitzcarraldo. (In Gasenheimer, 2010; 289) 6 Schlingensief’s production references Luigi Nono's opera Intolleranza 1960, a political statement against racism and intolerance. It was staged as a charity event to profit the opera village at several European festivals and theatres in 2010.

Schlingensief, C. “Via Intolleranza II”. Videorecording. At: Learning from Africa: Christoph Schlingensief's Opera Village Africa. Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in London. 5 May to 15 June 2012. [DVD] 7 These views were found in various articles, such as J.E. ‘Loango : Le dodo prend possession de L’Opéra.’ (2011), and Kaboré, D: ‘Burkina Faso: Village-Opéra de Laongo - L'originalité d'un joyau architectural.’ (2012) 8 Laberenz reflects that Schlingensief ‘would have worked on the Opera Village in a totally different way.’ (Laberenz, 2012; 34)

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Bibliography

Bishop, C. "The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents." Artforum. 44. no. 6 (2006): 178-183.

Hagoort, E. (2005) Good Intentions: Judging the Art of Encounter. Transl. Weeda, C. Amsterdam: Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.

Kaboré, D. (2012) Burkina Faso: Village-Opéra de Laongo - L'originalité d'un joyau architectural. allAfrica. Available from: http://fr.allafrica.com/stories/201201131508.html [online]. Accessed December 21, 2012.

Kester, G. H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.

Opera Village Africa. (2011) Festspielhaus Afrika gemeinnützige GmbH. Available from: http://www.operndorf-afrika.com/en/the-project.html [online]. Accessed May 3, 2012.

Poet, P. (2002) Ausländer Raus! Schlingensiefs Container. Der Österreichische Film #32. Edition der Standard.

Bonus Film GmbH. [DVD].

Schlingensief's Opera Village Africa. Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in London. 5 May to 15 June 2012. [DVD]

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JAWS JOURNAL TEAM

Editor Francesca Peschier Frankie is balancing studying collaboration in scenography and maintaining her silly hair. She likes Derrida and Dita Von Teese but not on the same plate. She suspects that Judith Butler may be a global conspiracy and is hoping future editions of JAWS will be able to prove this.

Co-Editor Robert Gadie Having escaped a devilish ploy to extract his brain for the enrichment of humanity, Rob instead continues to use his knowledge to research moving-image art, and our relationship to it, using the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.

Particularly Guattari. Never forget Guattari.

Art Director Mohammad Namazi A practicing artist, Mohammad explores attributes of participatory behavior specially related to timing & motion.

He is also busy with curatorial projects as part of the Open Work project.

He grows a particularly wonderful beard as well.

Assistant Art Director Brooke Fitzsimons With a past in graphics and Australia, practicing painter Brooke is building on her undergraduate research on beauty, affect and neuroscience. Do not ask her if she thus 'thinks this is pretty', she will smite you with Freud.

Sub Editor and Treasurer Ruth Solomons Ruth is rather unique in possessing a perfectly balanced left and right brain, being a practicing painter, reviewer, and curator, and still able to add up with serious aplomb. Through the MRes she seeks to define ‘work ethic’ in terms of arts practice. Don’t call her a Marxist though, all that pattern making has given her a mean left hook.

Exhibitions Jean Kim Jean examines the ethics between nude and naked in painting whilst managing to gleefully skip over feminist pot holes down less explored avenues, bringing some diversity to what sometimes seems a lot of dead french men.

Picture Editor Kataryna Leach Kat is a book lover to the point of turning it into a new philia. Through Lacanian theory she examines this obsession with her objects of desire. She also, like an exceedingly clever Kipling, bakes excellent cakes.

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JAWS is the Journal of Art Writing by Students of UAL, produced by the MRes Arts Practice course at Chelsea College of Art and Design. The journal serves as a platform for peer review and as a documentation of contemporary research in art and design across the University of the Arts London.

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