JAWS Issue 1

Spring Issue March 2013

ISSN 2052-3521

Journal of Academic Writing by Students

Contents

Francesca Peschier 04 / Editorial Dr Paul Ryan 06 / Reasons for Combining Image and Text

Mohammad Namazi 12 / Correspondence: Successful Errors and Serendipity Keivan Sarrafan 16 / Consciousness, Transcendence and the Contemporary Sublime Jenny Morgan & Ruth Solomons 24 / The Video Art of Jenny Morgan & Reflections on Printed Images of Perfomance Ellen Angus 28 / Crème De Co Nora Isabelle Heidorn 30 / Distance and Proximity: Christoph Schlingensief’s Opera Village Africa Vanessa Hodgkinson & James Bridle 36 / The Inkhorn and The Last 2012 Xiao yang Li 40 / London Art Fair Review Gin Dunscombe 46 / Full Colour Post Card

Kataryna Leach 48 / The Gift: Bringing your PhD To Work Day: A Critical Psychoanalytical Reflection on the Post-Graduate Student - Tutor 52 / Alejandro Salcedo & María José Chica Katie Elliot 54 / The Signification of Costumed Dancers in the Tanztheater Wuppertal Gin Dunscombe 56 / Mike Kelley at the Stedelijk Museum Shabnam Ranjbar 60 / Light and The Implied Lens Jean Kim 62 / What Lines Can Do: On the representation of the naked in Painting Ruth Solomons 64 / Magazine-printed artworks: How does the legacy of art’s ‘dematerialization’ in 1960s discourse inform the contemporary magazine-printed artwork?

Lillian Wilkie 70 / Atomic Semiotics Cadi Froehlich 72 / Can the Artist Help Counter the Delusion of a Wireless Communications Network?

Francesca Peschier Student on MRes Arts Practice and Editor of Jaws

Ideas Begetting Ideas...

Kandinsky on the objective of arts education at the Bauhaus 1 The research culture of UAL is the embodiment of the great Bauhaus teacher’s personal philosophy, from the undergraduate uncovering the context of their artwork to the PhD student forming entirely new models of analysis. In this, the inaugural issue of Jaws, we present illustrations of a burgeoning network, from the beautiful drawings of Katie Elliot (PhD), used to engage with the signification of costumed dancers, to the questioning of engendered roles through documented performance art by BA student Jenny Morgan. We have tried to reflect the diversity that comes from researching in an art school environment: research, practice, interests and ideas; in a manner befitting the transparency required of complex thought: academic writing.

As such, the manifesto for JAWS journal was simple; 1. Publicise research being carried out by students across UAL 2. Provide a platform for peer review and academic engagement 3. Create a fun and accessible publication whilst maintaining a high academic standard 4. Remove the restriction of submission themes; instead making our agenda to simply present that UAL students felt was worthwhile to them, what they felt they wanted to share.

That final stipulation has led to the creation of a journal that covers a wide range of subject areas; however it has also allowed us to establish seeming zeitgeists for research at UAL. As reflected in our guest article by Dr Paul Ryan (Reasons for Combining Image and Text) many of the articles reflect the relationship between the image (or art-work) and the written word.

Kataryna Leach reflects on the relationship between tutor, student, embodied academia, and artistic authority ; whilst James Bridle and Vanessa Hodgkins collaborative image and text artwork explores the shifting terminology of digital language. Further, Ruth Solomons considers how we treat the printing of performance art stills and artworks as whole in a magazine/ journals context and Alejandro Salcedo goes so far as to deride the notion of descriptive text, allowing a focus instead on the relation between materiality, context and ‘intersubjectivity’.

We have actively sought to utilise the form of the journal, welcoming page based artworks as evidenced by Alejandro, and Cadi Froehlich.

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The handmade artwork, and its place in this journal, is itself representative of Cadi’s approach to practice-led research. The strength (and paradoxically weakness) of JAWS’s peer to peer review is no one is claiming to be experts (..yet!). In the vein of Ranciere’s ignorant schoolmaster,2 I feel that I have learnt so much from this perspective (not just the meaning of sans serif from our formidable graphics team...). I have had the privilege of reading every submission, engaging with topics I would never have come across in my own research; such as Nora Heidorn’s critical examination of Christoph Schlingensief’s Opera Village or Lillian Wilkies’ exploration of Atomic Semiotics and the legacy of philosopher John Dalton. This has helped me, as I hope it will assist many of our readers, in developing structures and methodologies for my own research. As Stephen King wisely once suggested: If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot (Stephen King 2000)3 JAWS came into being fulfilling a requirement for a publication that promoted an autodidactic attitude and instigates a curiosity, to explore fields beyond our own research bubbles. The idea was first raised by myself in a course representative meeting as it seemed strange to me that UAL had so many strong sports and social societies yet nothing that reflected UALs main out put: new knowledge and innovative artistic inquiry. I am so proud to have seen the hard work of our editorial team, art department and writers come to fruition.

I believe we have achieved our main objective of our first edition, to take UAL research away from the regimentation of assessment and student hall shelf bending, instead developing a cognitive, research network spanning the colleges of UAL and further still across London.

And I for one have not only enjoyed the process, I adored reading it.

Endnotes 1. [Quoted in] Kandinsky W, Eds. P. Vergo & K, Lindsay (1994) Complete Writings on Art. Boston: Da Capo Press 2. The idea that in pedagogy it is possible to teach or have opinions on subjects you are not an authority on (or are even completely ignorant of). That there could be such a thing as a collective educational system.

Ranciere, J (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. California: Stanford University Press 3. King, S (2000) Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. London: Simon & Schuster

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Reasons for Combining Image and Text Dr Paul Jonathan Ryan Course Director MRes Arts Practice

Why do we write about images; and why do we illustrate texts with images?

Written labels, information panels, pamphlets and Acoustiguides, are routinely ‘added’ to exhibitions of art. Books and journals on art, exhibition catalogues and pamphlets are generally ‘illustrated’. Artists also mix the two within single artworks. Why are we inclined to mix these two formats?

Before discussing these issues, what do we mean by the words ‘image’ and ‘text’? They both appear within the title of this essay as words that we read visually; so they themselves can be considered as either text or as images. For example, they could be in a different typeface but this would not change their dictionary definition. However, it is possible that someone is reading this essay to you, and that they do not come to you visually at all, but as two sounds: ‘image’ and ‘text’. Someone could understand both those terms through touch if they are punched out as Braille; if they have learned Braille. Let us refer to the words ‘image’ and text’ as ‘terms’ that stand for different ways of conveying meaning. Is there a way of being more precise about those differences?

Of the two terms, ‘text’ and ‘image’, we usually choose the word ‘text’ when speaking about words; whereas when referring to pictures, most people would choose the word ‘image’. However, there are occasions when we might want to speak technically, to emphasise more precisely what we are doing. For example, paintings can be deconstructed through applied linguistics; then the paintings themselves would also be referred to as texts. This use of the word ‘texts’ in this way indicates to readers familiar with the methods of linguistic deconstruction that the image is being reinterpreted as a text. This is a specialised and acquired use of language that follows the conventions of postmodern theory. This essay is not written in relation to those discourses. It is written in relation to the discourse around signs, signification and semiotics. Semiotics is the study of how meaning is conveyed, through signs.

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In American semeiotic1 (from now on referred to as semiotics), a distinction is maintained between these types of meaning conveyed by what are usually called images and texts.

However this distinction is maintained more specifically than whether an object is, for example, either a word or a painting. Remember the clarification made earlier, concerning Braille, where it was specified that the meaning could be understood ‘if they have learned’ Braille. This would apply to words in any particular language. So we will only understand English sentences if we have learnt that language and its conventions. However we can understand most paintings, more especially photographs, because they do not usually rely on that kind of language of conventions; they may mimic something we see, or otherwise experience – in other words they convey meaning via resemblances. The semiotic term that specifies the conveyance of meaning by convention is ‘Symbol’; and the term for the conveyance of meaning by resemblance is ‘Icon’. Icon and Symbol are types of sign.2 In almost all cases meaning is conveyed by both Icon and Symbol together (as well as with other types of sign). There are also coincidental examples like the word ‘bed’, in lower-case English which also looks a bit like (resembles) the object it represents! Similarly, onomatopoeic words like ‘clock’ also resemble their object’s sound (or at least it does when clocks have pendulums, or make a ‘tick-tock’ sound). Sounds can mimic words Iconically, without containing the Symbolic meaning we would expect.3 Meaning is not always re-enforced or added to in the combination of sign types; meaning can be completely altered by the combination of Icons and Symbols, through the very way texts are presented; for example typefaces or expressiveness of voice may radically alter what meaning is interpreted. It is the work of semiotic analysis that can analyse meaning into its component sign types. However, that is not the task here.

Does an understanding of Icon & Symbol assist in answering the initial question about the human preponderance for adding words to images (or images to words)? Why do we do it so much? Do words make images better? Do images improve words? In terms of types of meaning, semiotics would indicate a ‘supplementation’ occurring. Symbols and Icons convey different types of meaning, so they have the potential to convey a broader range of meaning together than when they are apart; although as already stated those meanings may be contrasting rather than accumulative.4 Is that all? Do we just want more meaning? Is that what drives us to illustrate texts, and say something about pictures? Do we just get stuck for words?

Wittgenstein’s famous last line in his ‘Tractatus’, first published in German in 1921, is ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ (Wittgenstein 2001). He later questioned this conclusion.5

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Fig. 1 Sketchbook 77 page 13. An observational drawing (Icon) of three books, whose titles (Symbols) are written opposite. Paul Ryan 2008, A6 Sketchbook.

An alternative suggestion was made by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), the founder of American semeiotic (Peirce 1982 Vol. 1 pp. 10-12). It is a claim for a particular Aesthetic theory that he derived from Friedrich Schiller’s classic 1795 essay, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller 2004). Peirce proposes that by continually contrasting texts with images we begin to appreciate the limits of both. We realise that we cannot always experience the meaning we are looking for in only one type of sign; we want and need to contrast it with another type of meaning concerning the same object. In the theory Peirce developed from Schiller, this is meant to be liberating aesthetically6, bringing about creative playfulness in our oscillation between Symbols and Icons.

In other words, we learn when it is time to put down our paintbrushes and take up our keyboard; and vice-versa, when it is time to put away our books and get expressive. The to-and-fro between Symbol and Icon often occurs in portfolios, notebooks, sketchbooks and blogs.

Having developed our ‘aesthetic power’ by rehearsing these playful comparisons we can present the most inventive and playful juxtapositions to audiences. This can then be appreciated by those other people. This is evidenced by measures of popularity or critical esteem of the work of individual editors and curators of journals, books, websites, exhibitions. The theory maintains that artists, writers, scientists and researchers can only add something new (creative) if they have developed this aesthetic power. Of course we do not need to know the theories to do this; indeed the theory claims to be describing something intrinsically human that already occurs, somewhat naturally. However, people who do understand this process of oscillation may then gain added reflexivity; they can then improve their aesthetic power through a more self-conscious alternation between Icon and Symbol.

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I have suggested previously that the sketchbook may be an ideal format for reflexive oscillation between Icon and Symbol when researching (Ryan 2010). Note, image, text, visual observation, description, and expressive experimentation are all, to some extent ‘expected’ within the sketchbook. Its format allows for a backward or jumbled appreciation of its contents afterwards; new insights and connections may be reached in these ways. However, for this to occur, it must remain ‘playful’, as Schiller puts it. The sketchbook’s inclusion into assessment or a prescribed format for its use is, I believe, counterproductive. I highlight these last claims as pedagogical issues for further research.

Keywords: Symbol, Icon, Word, Image, Peirce, Schiller, Aesthetics, Semiotics, Sketchbook

Glossary Icons: these convey meaning by resemblance. For example the letter ‘O’ is Iconically closer to an apple than the letter ‘T’; because as a round letter it resembles the roundness of the apple.

Letters are not generally considered in their Iconic meaning in this way. They are generally used to stand for a sound (see Symbol). Icons are not restricted to visual meaning. The sound from repeatedly striking a large drum can resemble thunder more readily than blowing through a small whistle. Sketchbooks can resemble diaries, and a page can have a drawing upon it that resembles a tree, or a diagram can resemble a sequence of thoughts.

Symbols: these convey meaning by convention. Letters are usually used as symbols to stand for sounds, which when grouped together give the sound of a word. Words are also agreed on between users of spoken and written languages. Symbols are not confined to words. For example, in England the symbol ‘x’ after a name at the end of a letter symbolises a kiss from the sender of the letter to its recipient. The letter ‘x’ has no resemblance to, or material connection with a kiss, it is something we have culturally agreed upon. If we turn this symbol around its axis by 45° we have a symbol with a very different meaning. ‘+’ is widely used to mean ‘plus’ in the mathematical procedure called addition, e.g. 2+2=4. Worn around the neck this symbol may have Christian connotations, although in such instances the lower section is usually longer than the other three in order to also make it an Icon of a scaffold for crucifixion as much as a Symbol of Christianity, (see Icon).

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Endnotes 1. Note the extra ‘e’ in the spelling sometimes used for American Semeiotic, in contrast with the spelling of European Semiology. Both are different approaches to Semiotics: the study of how meaning is conveyed, by signs. For further detail on these differences, and other semiotic approaches in specific disciplines, see Nöth (1990).

2. Signs and their various types can not be discussed further here. See Glossary; also T. L. Short (2007).

3. The surprise of hearing sounds imitating words, but not as Symbols, was deployed to great effect by Kurt Shwitters in Ursonate of 1925; included in the Tate Britain exhibition Schwitters In Britain 2013.

4. For example, La trahison des images, 1928–29 by René Magritte, with its caption on the canvas ‘Ceci n’est pas un pipe’.

5. From 1928 onwards Wittgenstein relented on the ‘hardline’ approach of the Tractatus; becoming influenced by Piero Sraffa, and his interest in gestured propositions that did not have any apparent logical form. (Heaton & Groves 1999 p.68) 6. This essay is referring to Peirce’s Aesthetics (a normative science alongside ethics and logic). It is something we learn to do and can improve. Peirce used an alternative spelling, Esthetic: the normative science which considers those things whose ends are to embody qualities of feeling (Peirce EP2:200). Or, Esthetic is the study of what conceivable goals we can begin to agree on (normative), and be prepared to deliberately adopt, for embodying qualities of feeling and experiencing them. Or, Esthetics is the study, as one of Peirce’s normative sciences, of the method of acquiring the freedom, power, or agency, to consider admirable goals for interpreting and embodying qualities.

Bibliography: Barnouw, J. (1988). ‘ “Aesthetic” for Schiller and Peirce: A Neglected Origin of Pragmatism’. Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc. Beiser, F. (2005). Schiller as Philosopher. Oxford: Oxford University Press Heaton, J. & Groves, J. (1999). Introducing Wittgenstein. Cambridge: Totem Books Lyotard, J. F. (1999). The Post Modern Condition. Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press Nöth, W. (1990). Handbook of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press Parker, K. (2002). Charles S. Peirce on Esthetics and Ethics: A Bibliography. Available from http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/ CSP_Bibliography/ [Accessed 1 June 2009] Peirce, C. S. (1982 - ). Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. (8 of predicted 36 volumes published to date).

Bloomington: Indiana University Press Peirce, C. S. (eds: Houser, N. and Kloesel, C.). (1992). The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings Volume 1 (1867 – 1893).

Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press Peirce, C. S. (eds: Houser, N. et al.). (1998). The Essential Peirce. Selected Philosophical Writings Volume 2 (1893 – 1913).

Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press Ryan, P. (2009). 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. Unpublished PhD. London: UAL Schiller, F. (2004). On the Aesthetic Education of Man. New York: Dover Publications Short, T.L. (2007). Peirce’s Theory of Signs. New York: Cambridge University Press Wittgenstein, L. (2001). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge.

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Correspondence: Successful Errors and Serendipity * Mohammad Namazi

There are different ways of coming-to-presence, but what becomes present in my artwork is always the same: the gesture - a form of communication that works as a zero degree signifier. By that, I understand a signifier without a signified, an action, and a process of becoming.

When we run or sleep, face the wall or look back, breakthrough or kneel down, speak of disasters or simply perish, we create the subject of a narrative. In my practice, I see myself as a material that lets itself be moulded by the vagaries of times, people and places, to produce a gesture open to the other.

Integral over the body, Fig 1. browses the space we are not aware of being inhabited by ourselves. It came as a result of the anguish experienced in front of a living world in a state of distress. It is an integral, as a sum of the unseen overlapping the differential, the change of the substance characteristics of time. Each frame that makes the movie leafs through the otherwise impenetrable depths of a medium in continuous motion, a medium whose building blocks are regenerating, yet ultimately destined to perish.

The succession of frames recomposes the trajectory of the ‘invasive’ throughout the pixelated matter. Organically shaped curves advance steadfastly, with the confidence of an industrious procedure of surveillance. The sound accompanying the images penetrates the ‘organic’ mechanically, by advancing the cracks, by allowing the flow.

Pivotal to the development of kinetic art, Len Lye’s Free Radicals (animation film made in 1953) brings forth a stroboscopic sequence of realities extracted as “pure figures of motion”. In his film projects he focused on “physical sensation and non-rational experience”. While producing this video I connected “the making and seeing” directly to the internal changes occurring within ourselves.

* This letter had been sent to Stephen Wilson in July 2012 following a conversation we had about a collection of my works.

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Some distinctive aspects pertaining to Integral Over the Body and Free Radicals are the invasiveness and the raw flow present in the former as opposed to the intermittent flashes of light and obscurity in the latter. On the other hand, I see these raw and minimally processed moving images as a state of gradual awakening.

The word ‘serendipity’ was coined and defined on 28 January 1754 by Horace Walpole, the ‘genial dilettant’. Merton (1957) described serendipity as an observation of a surprising fact followed by a correct ‘abduction’ (a suggestion that something may be). Pek van Andel (1994) defined serendipity as “the art of making an unsought finding”.

It is by means of a similar serendipitous journey that Customized Belief, Fig 2. came to presence from an origin that initially was an in depth research on the presence of television, as an object that enframes collected realities and brings them within a pseudo-closeness from afar. Its birth name was TV Follow-Me and it was a metaphor of a mass produced television set.

At the time, ICA staged Remote Control – an exhibition that “surveyed the enormous impact that television has had upon contemporary culture through a range of artistic engagement with the medium and offered a look at how the next generation are responding to digital convergence. [...] The exhibition mapped the continued influence and diverse potential of TV as a social tool and new art form.” (ICA London, 2012)

Figure 1, Integral over the body, 1 min 26 second, moving image & sound, 2012

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A kind of inner-twist occurred such that I ended up with a work whose aesthetical elements were not convincing enough to contain the established body of reasoning and research to date. I was faced with a ‘conflict’ between the content of research and the form I reached. For about two months I turned into the viewer of an undesired work, whose subject was unknown. TV-Follow Me entered a passive stage. Its faith and subject were uncertain.

I recall how Kandinsky saw one of his works in 1910: “The painting had no subject at all, did not show any recognizable subject and consisted only out of clear fields of colour. At last F came nearer and recognized it, for what it was — my own painting standing on its side on the easel... One thing became clear to me — that objectivity, the depicting of objects, was not necessary in my paintings and could indeed even harm them.” (Andel P, 1994)

Once turned upside down, the work emerged into a mysterious reflective box sided on top by a black patterned panel. Its constant presence on the floor made it just a presence at hand, an object in expectation of being re-evaluated, re-discovered.

“One day Picasso had only blue, no other colours. This inspired him to use only blue. The specific effect intrigued him enough to continue with what is now called his ‘blue period’. Picasso described his own way of painting as: ‘Je ne cherche pas, je trouve.’ (‘I am not searching, I just find’)” (Andel P, 1994) - The box was for me Picasso’s blue.

Its presence introduced a narrative of an “unsought finding” resting inaccessible inside it. The fine openings one could only peep through worked as an enemy of promise. The concealed enigmatic ‘inside’, and the reflective surfaces of the ‘outside’ resembled the characteristics of an object of worship. I believed that by endowing this object with a touch of incense the essence ‘inside’ can be brought forth to the ‘outside’.

This process of transference could establish a new medium whereby dialogue can occur. You were positive about this too! I came to realize that the whole process that led to Customized Belief evolved as a series of ‘successful errors’.

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Figure 2, “Customized Belief�, Stainless Steel, Black MDF, Textile, 2012

If the non-strictly rational, chronological or searched components which have led to these results, are underestimated and sometimes even banned from the theatre, hidden behind the decor - if rationality becomes the norm, not only regarding the results, but also regarding everything that has led to these results: should we totally deny the adventure in the making?

Bibliography: Andel, P. (1994) Anatomy of the Unsought Finding, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 45, No. 2 Institute of Contemporary Art, London, Remote Control, (2012) Last accessed February 2013

http://www.ica.org.uk/?lid=32389

Lye, L. (1953) Free Radicals, Animation film, You Tube, Last accessed February 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGyVYDseGc4

Mohammad Namazi, MRes Arts Practice at Chelsea

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Consciousness, Transcendence and the Contemporary Sublime Keivan Sarrafan

The aesthetic sublime appears to be once again entering the contemporary artist’s consciousness, judging by the collection of essays and articles in such recent books as The Sublime Now (Morley, 2010) and The Sublime (White & Pajaczkowska, 2009).

Etymologically, the sublime relates to limen, a threshold, where something is about to undergo a phase transition (Quasha & Stein, 2010) ranging from the mundane (from waking to sleep) to ontological (life to death). Conceptually, such states are difficult to comprehend, as even fundamental distinctions like time and space come into question. ‘Where are we and when are we in the in-between?’ question Quasha and Stein (2010), quoting T.S. Elliot (1968): ‘To be conscious is not to be in time’. This state is similar to the traditional sublime, which according to Edmund Burke, fills the mind ‘so entirely…with its object that it cannot entertain any other’ (Forsey, 2007, p. 381), a suspension of all motion, a feeling of loss of identity.

Although the source of such feelings were traditionally ascribed externally to nature and the divine, contemporary theories of the aesthetic sublime suggest that they can also be generated by such works of art as Barnett Newman’s, where he aims to achieve an ‘art that embodies selfunderstanding in the face of the unknown’ (Crowther, 1985, p. 56).

In this context the role of the artist becomes one of ‘unveiling the invisible, similar to an alchemist’ (Houshiyari, 2010) or someone who can ‘accompany people on the true adventure, the journey into the inner self’ (Abramovic, 2010).

By investigating the concepts of sublime and transcendence in a contemporary setting and critiquing artworks accordingly, I want to question the ability of certain artists and their works to invoke the sublime and transcendence and the conditions under which they attempt to do so (Burke, 1796).

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The Mirror of Judgement, Michelangelo Pistoletto

The Sublime

The sublime is a complex and multifaceted aesthetic concept with a rich history dating back to Edmund Burke’s (1796) seminal work (White & Pajaczkowska, 2009). The sublime is in ‘fashion’, but a kind of fashion that persisted from beginning of modernity till now because it marks the ‘limit of discourse’ that it ‘cannot achieve’ (Nancy, 1993). Consistent with its semantic definition, the sublime, according to White (2009) defines our contemporary culture’s need to pass beyond the boundaries of the ‘knowable and sayable’, suggesting it cannot simply be established in art, yet ‘nor can art let go of it’. The sublime refers to experiences that may otherwise be regarded as ‘irrational’, ‘spiritual’ or ‘bizarre’.

Pajaczkowska (2009) connects the religious-sublime to today’s secularism as a function of culture expressing itself in depths of experiences in fundamentalism and to psychoanalysis in terms of the id and ego uniting in sublimation to create something new. She regards this sublimation as the essential ‘quality of the real, actual, present, eventfulness and “now” that characterize the sublime’. What differentiates the sublime from the merely beautiful, she explains, is the experience of the abject along with greatness in our subjective encounter with the limits of cultural convention.

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Given the range of manifestations of the sublime, to apply it to a contemporary discourse requires focusing on a particular context. In relation to the artists and their works discussed in this essay, I appropriate the sublime in its philosophical context, based on Kant’s seminal work, Analytic of the Sublime (Kant & McCanless, 1995). Whereas Burke’s account describes sublimity as intensity, Kant conceives it as elevation and places the ‘human at the centre of the experience of the sublime’ (White, 2009, p. 108).

The sublime has become a ‘signifier of cutting-edge observation and cultural production’ (Reiber, 2009), allowing us to consider meaning in our lives, overcoming postmodern nihilism. Reiber considers how meaning is manifested in our decision, avoiding self-contradictory decisions that ‘threaten our identity’, quoting Heidegger (1962) who regards this orientation towards meaning as ‘part of a human being’s being alive’ (1962, p. 35). Despite this, Reiber expresses surprise in how the question of meaning is bracketed from contemporary academic discourse.

The challenge for the sublime is to fulfil this promise of meaning which postmodernism denies through its views of modernism - espoused by Lyotard (Reiber, 2009) - that meta-narratives cannot claim objective validity, nor provide meaning.

Reiber is optimistic in regarding the sublime as the solution to the impossible situation we find ourselves in, whereby modernism’s meta-narrative and its meaning has been lost in postmodernism and hence we are forced to make decisions in life which are potentially meaningless.

Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgement contends that aesthetic judgement, although different from rational judgements of knowledge, is nonetheless connected to reason and therefore ‘entitles us to demand everyone’s assent’ although we have no power to force that assent by way of proof (Reiber, 2008, p. 75).

Kant’s aesthetic judgement, which includes the sublime, is therefore universal and it is this universality that qualifies it as providing certainty and meaning through a connection of the subjectivity of the individual to universality. This connection is key to Kant’s experiences of the sublime, which he classifies as the mathematical sublime and the dynamic sublime (Reiber, 2009). The former occurs when we understand infinity of space with our reason, which our imagination cannot grasp.

Man with Yellow Pants, Michelangelo Pistoletto

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The latter occurs when our reason conquers our feelings of fear in the face of awe-inspiring nature. Kant qualifies these as subjective validity, an oscillating feeling of pleasure and displeasure, manifesting the power and superiority of reason over imagination or feelings.

The Sublime In The Art Of Pistoletto Pistoletto leads the viewer through walls of man-made corrugated cardboard to ‘sacred spaces’ that question the collusion of masses in churches, mosques or Buddhist temples as being sacred. Despite the fact that postmodernism does not allow an objectively valid metanarrative, religions have defied the extinction that postmodernism has rightly predicted for modernist meta-narratives.

The Mirror of Judgement simulates feelings of sublime by guiding the viewer towards these sacred spaces, their ephemeral physicality unveiling their vulnerability, so unlike the architectures they imitate. The man-made cardboard walls and the mirrors engage the viewer in selfreflection (visually and cerebrally), the multiplicity of passages (religions) suggest divisiveness, while their interconnectedness bring about a sense of unity among them, pointing beyond to an infinity, suggestive of Kant’s mathematical sublime.Pistoletto’s mirror paintings made 50 years earlier also evoke the mathematical sublime, perceived not in terms of spatial vastness, but as boundaries separating the real and the virtual, and the past and present. The viewer’s reflection, positioned on the other side of the mirror facing the painted full scale figure of the man, questions the true identity of the viewer as the virtual space appears more real than the real; similarly the past, captured by the man’s unseen face in an apparent visual dialogue with the viewer’s reflection, and the present, seem to coalesce. These spatial and temporal compressions reinforce one another to create the conditions of sublimity as one loses the sense of space and time.

In both instances, the viewer perceives something beyond the self, triggered by a sense of infinity, a momentary transcendence with ‘subjective validity’ (Reiber, 2009). The former however overly engages the intellect and the body in traversing the installation’s physical and conceptual maze, thereby preventing the actual feeling of the sublime, instead merely imitating it.

Nonetheless, the sublimity alluded to by The Mirror of Judgement, suspends the viewer between total acceptance of postmodern rationality and its demands for proof, which leads to ‘loss of meaning’ and ‘nihilism’ (Reiber, 2009, p. 79) and its total rejection, which leads to irrationality, dogmatism or fundamentalism. Kant demonstrates that there ‘cannot be an objectively true meaning’ (Reiber, 2009, p. 88) and conversely that to search for meaning in the objective world is futile. The contemporary sublime is therefore our only hope of recovering the loss of meaning, demonstrating that the loss of meta-narrative and its associated objectivity resulting from the postmodern nihilism does not equate to a loss of meaning.

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Two questions arise: Does the sublime actually provide the meaning that Reiber suggests we crave? And if so under what conditions can art fulfil that promise of meaning by invoking the sublime? Kant’s view of natural sciences as mechanism deprives nature of purposiveness - in other words, science’s ‘theoretical reason cannot reach beyond matter’ (Klinger, 2009, p. 93) leaving us in our ‘ontological solitude of modernity’ to deal with our ‘condition of contingency’ in the here and now (Klinger, 2009, p. 93). Hence, Klinger (2009) hypothesizes that sublimity compensated for the loss of transcendent dimension in Western thought previously ascribed to nature’s teleological aim. The sublime therefore marks the transition from transcendence (provided by Christianity and Greek/Aristotelian metaphysics) to immanence of science and art’s worldview of contingency and hence an instrument to cope with the perceived loss of transcendence (Klinger, 2009, p. 94).

Klinger further ascribes to the sublime the role of ‘sublimating’ the mind-matter duality 1 through the elevating feeling of the sublime and highlights the connection between sublime and solitude (Klinger, 2009, p. 94). Klinger shows that we use our reason to transcend beyond our physical limitations, replacing God with reason as the transcendent force to anchor our existence. In experiencing the sublime we realise that the feeling of elevation is not a quality of nature but of our ‘power of reason’, our subjectivity. The ‘eternal transcendent order’ is replaced by the concept of sublimation of the mind-matter duality (Klinger, 2009, p. 100).

The conditions of contingency result from the loss of faith and purpose previously ascribed to religion. Here the contemporary sublime comes to the rescue as an ‘immanent transcendence’ (as opposed to religious transcendence), a ‘transformative experience in the here and now’ towards an ‘unmediated awareness of life’ (Morley, 2010, p. 3). This aspect of the contemporary sublime counters the contingency due to compression of time and space.

This is what Pistoletto’s mirror seeks as it artificially creates these compressions through the use of visual strategies and viewers’ imagination. The resulting feeling is one of artificial sublimity rather than real sublimity. It imitates the effect of transcendence without the actual experience of transcendence as the cause.

Rather than facilitating the causal experience of transcendence, Pistoletto’s mirror fabricates its effect of loss of time and space through artificial means. Can the effect, reversibly, induce the cause? It is nothing more than a spatial metaphor for the concept of transcendence that it alludes to, but fails to achieve beyond a superficial level.

It allows us to live an experience in the spatial and temporal safety of our imagination.This suggests that perhaps the purpose of this category of art is to artificially and mechanically induce transcendence and the sublime through the faculty of imagination. The traditional sublime was about ‘conceiving of nature as art’ (Klinger, 2009), but the contemporary sublime is about simulating that experience through art.

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Void Field, Anish Kapoor

Pistoletto’s The Mirror of Judgement is similarly simulating the traditional sublime, in the contemporary setting of an art gallery, as an aesthetic sublime, and only to this extent does it achieve its purpose. But whereas the contemporary sublime is about actual transformation in the here and now (Morley, 2010, p. 3), Pistoletto’s aesthetic sublime is therefore limited to the power of imagination, ironically suggestive of aspects of religion today whereby image and visual symbol are objectified instead of triggering subjective self-reflection. In order for art to deliver the experience of the contemporary sublime it must facilitate the viewer’s transcendence of his or her dualistic emotional / intellectual responses, leading to a transformative experience, rather than emphasising a predominantly one-dimensional response.

Conclusion In the context of contemporary art, I have explored the work of an influential contemporary artist who has (in their art) realised ideas about the human condition and identity, characterized by their desire to engage with the viewer in a way that facilitates the transformational power of the sublime.

One way of explaining this is through the concept of transcendence whereby the viewer transcends, albeit momentarily, in the here and now, his/her multiple superficial identities, cultural, national, gender, professional. This I suggest is a potentially transformational experience in which the subject and the object can merge, where the liminal state enables the viewer to undergo change as a result of the apparent dissolution of the boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity.

Pistoletto’s mirror painting compresses time and space thereby creating the conditions where we may ask ‘and when are we in the in-between?’ (Quasha & Stein, 2010, p. 214). His Mirror of Judgement installation, by contrast, artificially mimics the sacred spaces where the traditional sublime may have been experienced. This separation creates a dialogue between the space of the installation and the sacred spaces it references, which in my view prevents a feeling of the sublime. Instead it predominantly engages the viewer intellectually with the socio-political 23

aspects of the religious meta-narrative. Pistoletto suggests a utopian ideal aiming to repair the fractures amongst religions and cultural differences by alluding to their transcendent common denominator, and in so doing uses objective superficial representations of the transcendent instead of facilitating the real experience of the transcendent.

Keivan Sarrafan, MA Fine Art at Chelsea. His current research interests include consciousness as subjectivity involved in the process of production and reception of artwork, sublimity within contemporary art and the transformational qualities of art in these contexts.

Endnote 1.It is interesting to compare this transcendence-immanence dualism to the abstract-concrete or mind-body dualism, which can be regarded as only expository rather than real, and hence position the sublime at the boundary between these oppositions (Culp, 2009).

Bibliography Abramovic, M. (2010). Statements. In S. Morley, The Sublime (p. 212). London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

Burke, E. (1796). On the sublime and beautiful. BiblioBytes.

Crowther, P. (1985). Barnett Newman and the Sublime. The Oxford Art Journal , 52-59.

Darwent, C. (2011, July 24). Michelangelo Pistoletto, Serpentine Gallery, London. Retrieved November 03, 2012 from The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/michelangelo-pistoletto-serpentine-gallerylondon-2319356.html Elliot, T. S. (1968). Four quartets. London: Mariner Books.

Forsey, J. (2007). Is a Theory of the Sublime Possible? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Fall, 381.

Frawley, D. D. Ayurveda and the Mind. London.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Houshiyari, S. (2010). Interview with Stella Santacatterina. In S. Morlet, The Sublime (pp. 93-94). London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

Kant, I., & McCanless, K. (1995). The analytic of the sublime. . Shinola Press.

Klinger, C. (2009). The Sublime, A Discourse of Crisis and of Power Or: “A Gamble on Transcendence”. In L. White, & C. Pajaczkowska, The Sublime Now (pp. 92-112). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

LeVitte Harten, D. (2010). Creating Heaven. In S. Morley, The Sublime: Documents of Contemporary Art (pp. 73-77). London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

Lyotard, J.-F. (2004). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (G. Bennington, & B. Massumi, Trans.) Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Morley, S. (2010). Staring into the Contemporary Abyss. Tate Etc. , Autumn (20), pp. 70-77.

Morley, S. (2010). The Sublime. London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

Nancy, J.-L. (1993). The Sublime Offering. In J.-F. Courtine, Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (p. 25). New York: SUNY Press.

Picard, C. (2008). I haven’t done much at all: interview with Anish Kapoor. Art Newspaper , 17, 48.

Prager, B. (2002). Kant in Caspar David Friedrich’s Frames . Art History , 25 (1), 68-86.

Quasha, G., & Stein, C. (2010). HanD HearD / Liminal Objects. In S. Morley, The Sublime (pp. 214-216). London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

Reiber, B. (2008). Psyche, Imagination and Art. In S. Rowland, Psyche and the Arts: Jungian Approaches to Music, Architecture, Literature, Painting and Film (pp. 66-76). Hove.

Reiber, B. (2009). The Sublime and the Possibility of Meaning. In L. White, & C. Pajaczkowska, The Sublime Now (p. 77). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

White, L. (2009). The Sublime After Kant. In L. White, & C. Pajaczkowska, The Sublime Now (p. 72). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

White, L., & Pajaczkowska, C. (2009). The Sublime Now. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Researching Gender in Relation to Space Jenny Morgan

Hey Cutie Give Us a Smile, Still from Video, Duration 1:03 minutes.

My practice explores how women are represented in contemporary British Society, and how the female body is constantly subjected to the judgemental gaze. Through performance, sound and video pieces I have focused on documenting personal experiences, placing great emphasis on the process as opposed to a finished piece. More recently I have become interested in recreating male performances as a female artist. I have focused on endurance, time-based performances and how the context within which a performance is shown may have different effects.

A performance whereby I documented everything a man would shout at me as I walked past his kebab van over the duration of a few months, before reversing the role and relaying everything he had said back to him.

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Reflections on ‘Printed Images of Performance Art’ Ruth Solomons

Self-awareness implied by the selection of a still containing an image of herself, lends a confessional tone, and also refers to a feminist consciousness beneath the work’s surface.

This reproduced image of a still of a moving-image-recording of a performance of a text, presents a richly layered resource, in this journal’s context, through which to access Morgan’s performance art practice. Self-awareness implied by the selection of a still containing an image of herself, lends a confessional tone, and also refers to a feminist consciousness beneath the work’s surface. In Francesca Woodman’s self-portraits, vulnerable black and white photographs served to document her performances. Captured moments imply performance: even if the performance does not exist in a moving-image form.

How do we differentiate the still as artwork from the documentation of performance, especially when the still image becomes expedient for publication in a physical, paper format? The answer perhaps lies in the content of that image, how it refers outward to other recognisable images, from our own experience, from the stance of the figures within it, and also, perhaps, informed by previously distributed still images of performance art. Morgan’s awareness of the history of performance art through still images, is made apparent through the assertive composition of the figure performing insults back at her perpetrator: a subtle revisitation of feminist-action imagery.

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Walking around the perimeter of a square in an Exaggerated Manner, Still from video, Duration: 85.21 minutes.

Jenny Morgan:

This image still is from a performance and features myself as the subject. With an interest in looking at gender roles within different contexts, the film is a product of my engagement with the surroundings. The documentation of my performance references Bruce Nauman’s original piece Walking Around the perimeter a Square in an Exaggerated Manner 1967. It examines the subject in relation to the space, as well as the unaware spectator that in effect becomes part of the performance. With an emphasis on process, the mundane activity of walking becomes a struggle and the duration of the performance is dependent on how long the subject can walk in a controlled manner around the perimeter of square.

Jenny Morgan, BA Fine Art

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Ruth Solomons:

The re-creation of Bruce Nauman’s film Walking in an exaggerated manner around the perimeter of a square (1967-8), exchanges the original, carefully modulated male swagger, for a controlled feminine parade around the perimeter of a square in the Parade Ground at Chelsea College of Art & Design. Minimal requirements for a studio formed the backdrop for Nauman’s film, but here in Morgan’s reconstruction grand academic buildings fill the frame.

Morgan performs this seemingly perfunctory task with precision, not so much aping the original, as paying a form of tribute. The minimal staging of Nauman’s original film is reflected in Morgan’s precise re-enactment of the performance itself: her referencing of his performance is where her tribute to his minimalism lies.

Thus the artwork, here reproduced as a still, might denote the original performance through its reassertion of the performative act. There is potential for the video itself to be perceived beyond the still image of the page, not only through implied action in its content, but also through contemporary pervasiveness of the still image as visual legacy of performance art, in terms of its documentation. This shift from the masculine, clicking film camera of Nauman’s performance, to Morgan’s more feminine, pragmatic black and white stills, echoes Woodman’s long exposures of actions that failed to imprint themselves durably. Their legacy instead lies in their indexing of a multitude of layers, external to the immediate physical document.

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Crème De Co Ellen Angus

This video looks at the female form with its orifices and boundaries and considers the physical transition of bodily fluids from inside the body, to its margins and beyond. I wanted to explore how the transgression of the body’s borders might correspond to society’s borders of acceptability.

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The concept of using the body as a metaphor to survey our own societal ideas about obscenity and taboo is of particular poignancy because of the continuous and unprecedented use of the idealized female body in popular culture. The plucked, pruned, pickled, sealed and finished form which looks incapable of pissing, shitting, passing wind, menstruating, is an unavoidable presence.

These two states, the hermetically sealed looking woman and her very real and actual bodily functions are engaged with one another. The easy consumption of her body is disrupted. Is actual body is then capable of polluting the ideal? The secretions and other bodily functions are integral to the living female, her ‘femininity’, her sexuality. The work seeks to examine the tension between idealised forms of sexuality and female bodily functions, its relationship to pornography, aswell the ‘male gaze’, the ‘female gaze’, feminist essentialisms and female narcissism.

Ellen Angus, MA Fine Art at Chelsea

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Distance and Proximity: Christoph Schlingensief’s Opera Village Africa

Nora Isabelle Heidorn

This essay seeks to critically examine the German artist Christoph Schlingensief’s project to build an opera village, the Operndorf Afrika, in rural Burkina Faso. The Operndorf Afrika was conceived by Schlingensief in 2008, and construction on the 14-hectare site in Laongo (about an hour’s drive from the capital Ouagadougou) began in February 2010 and is still ongoing. The objective of the project is to build a village comprising of housing, a school, an infirmary, a cafeteria, guest houses, sports grounds and a festival hall, the opera, at the centre. The festival hall is to be used for different cultural purposes, not solely for opera productions. The ambition is to ‘put in place working and living conditions which will facilitate education, dialogue, and art production in one of the poorest countries in the world’ (Opera Village Africa, 2011).

The school offering local children an arts-focused education opened in October 2011, as the first phase of the project.

Schlingensief presents the Operndorf Afrika as an aspect of his practice, hence his strategy for its conception and realisation are of artistic nature: ‘it is to be an independent organism that grows when it wants to, and how it can, and which develops its idiosyncrasies from within and creates unlikely constellations’ (Opera Village Africa, 2011). Schlingensief, who initiated and chaperoned the project, died in August 2010 after a bout of cancer. He was one of Germany’s most prolific, innovative and controversial artists; his oeuvre spanned films, installation art, and theatre, and his final work was the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2011. The context of Africa, and colonialism, were a recurring theme in Schlingensief’s work.

The Operndorf Afrika is now run by his partner and a committee of friends and advisors. It is a non-profit project that is funded mainly by large German funding bodies such as the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Goethe-Institut.

On the project’s website, the organisation advertises for donations from private individuals (Opera Village Africa, 2011).

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There are issues of geographical and cultural distance inherent to the project. These can be understood as a ‘re-territorialisation’ of western art forms, heterogeneous to the African cultural landscape. This search for a new context (for the Operndorf Afrika) intensifies innovation and creativity, becoming woven into the very fabric of the project. It is these notions that can be explored, and understood, with the help of the Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (Deleuzeoguattarian) philosophical analysis of, the circumstances under which Franz Kafka constructed innovative literature. Deleuzeoguattarian philosophy uses the categories ‘major language’ and ‘minor language’, which can be converted into the spatial analogy of ‘centre’ and ‘edge’: ‘A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 p. 16). The ‘minor literature’ is characterised by a high degree of ‘de-territorialisation’, as it is distanced from, and yet intensely aware of its roots and usual context (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 p. 16). The social, economic, political and linguistic pressures that Kafka dealt with at the periphery allowed him ‘the possibility of invention’, the creation of a ‘minor literature’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 p. 20).

In the case of the Operndorf Afrika, the western-dominated art world, and artistic production within its canon, represents the ‘major’. Schlingensief moves to the periphery of this art world, to the periphery of the local arts scene of Ouagadougou, in search of the ‘minor’. His creation of a site for artistic production at the ‘edge’, can be understood as a purposeful ‘de-territorialisation’, through which creation and innovation can be intensified; hence, the potential of ‘re-territorialisation’. By choosing to create a geographically isolated small community - a ‘cramped space’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 p. 17) - for artistic production, the pressures and constraints of a geographical, social and economic nature were inherent. In Kafkaesque language, the ‘marks of poverty’ show up but ‘have been taken over by a creative utilization for the purposes of [...] a new expressivity, [...] a new intensity’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 p. 23). As such, Schlingensief’s Operndorf Afrika represents an intentional ‘de-territorialisation’ from ‘centre’, to periphery/’edge’, in search of this expressivity and intensity in art-making.

It seems as though, one of the motivations for Schlingensief’s ‘re-territorialisation’ of the opera, and artistic production, to the periphery of western-dominated high art, has to do with an assumption regarding the mutual inspiration of people from different cultures.

Schlingensief seems to believe in the likelihood of inspiration though the cultural other, through a ‘re-territorialisation’ of the ‘minor’.

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His Operndorf Afrika could therefore be an instance of a purposeful creation of cultural distance, in order to heighten creativity. Such inspiration could then feed back into the world of western ‘high art’, instigating a ‘becoming minor’ of the major: Schlingensief calls the Operndorf Afrika ‘a Gesamtkunstwerk that will connect African and European cultures and lead to a renewal of the opera that has been played to death’ (Eckstein and Schönhuth, 2012).

Schlingensief and his collaborators have explained that their project leans on Joseph Beuys’ concept of ‘social sculpture’. In Beuys manifesto for his Free International School for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research, he states that ‘the founders of the school look for creative stimulation from foreigners working here. This is not to say that it is a prerequisite that we learn from them or that they learn from us. Their cultural traditions and way of life call forth an exchange of creativity that must go beyond preoccupation with varying art forms to a comparison of the structures, formulations and verbal expressions of the material pillars of social life...’ (Beuys, 1974 p.50) Beuys and Schlingensief’s projects can be related on their assumption that the simple fact of cultural distance will heighten inspiration. Foster observes one of the ambitions behind the artists’ search for ‘foreignness’ in his paradigm of the artist as ethnographer: ‘the cultural other, the oppressed postcolonial, subaltern, subcultural - this elsewhere, this outside, is the Archimedean point from which the dominant culture will be transformed or at least subverted.’ (Foster, 1996 p. 173) The intention is to renew and transform the dominant culture, the embodiment of western high art: the opera. After having staged his works at the most renowned theatres and festivals in Berlin, Munich, Bayreuth and Vienna, Schlingensief initiates a move to the outside, a geographical move away in order to achieve a context of cultural otherness.

Schlingensief intended to stimulate artistic production at the centre, in the original (‘major’) territory of the opera houses of wealthy western European cities. However, the perception of cultural otherness underpinning the Operndorf Afrika, may be more complex and more contemporary than the understanding that a simple contrast between western and foreign (or African and European) may create a fruitful opposition. The activities of people from rural Burkina Faso, from the capital, from Europe and the international art world, are to overlap in this remote village. Foster comments that art practice and theory have been pushed from ‘binary structures of otherness [...] to mixed border zones’ (Foster, 1996 p. 178).

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In his project, Schlingensief was trying to create such a ‘mixed border zone’, on a social and artistic level. Schlingensief was hoping for traditional western ‘high art’ to be reinvigorated through the influences and overlapping of cultural others. 1 By ‘re-territorialising’ his own practice from the ‘centre’ to the ‘edge’, he becomes ‘a sort of stranger within his own language’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 p. 26) - like Kafka was - hoping to create art within a new context.

The concept of foreignness is crucial to the creation of distance as well as to Schlingensief’s strife for a heightened creativity and reinvigoration at the centre. However, Schlingensief’s motivation to search for the foreigner, in order to improve the self, - in a project that is often advertised as development aid - is problematic. He claims that, ‘I want to finally be able to give money to something without receiving anything in return. I want to learn from Africa, I do not want to dictate anything any more. [...]

We’ll stop doing that and instead we will send money over and say, do as you see fit with it’ (Schlingensief, 2011)

Schlingensief’s statement expresses general dissatisfaction with development aid work and its aims, which he perceives as egoistic and hypocritical. However, his own project’s integrity is oxymoronic: while he states that he wants the West to give without expecting anything in return, he also clearly states his intent to stimulate artistic production in the West through his project. The cultural hybridity created in the Operndorf Afrika and the ‘de-territorialisation’ of the opera, have been motivated by a western man’s ambitions to reinvigorate western culture.

The integrity of Schlingensief’s motivations is debatable, yet what is apparent is his ability to innovate. Deleuzeoguattarian thought, understands that

‘if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community...’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 p. 17)

The creation of such ‘another possible community’ is precisely Schlingensief’s purpose, and for this he moves to the margins of his home territory, at the centre of the art world. Schlingensief had explained that his conception of the Operndorf Afrika was inspired by Joseph Beuys’ concept of social sculpture, the idea ‘to build a social organism as a work of art’ (Beuys, 1974 p. 48). In order for the social organism to work, every living person has to become an active creative part of the social organism (Beuys, 1974 p. 48).

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The artist who conceives or facilitates the social sculpture becomes ‘a conductor, a vehicle, an insulator, a pioneer of new ideas’ (Devolder, 1990 p. 50): Schlingensief develops his activity from creating a work of art, to creating a context (geographical, architectural, social, conceptual) - for creative activity. Foster describes this course of shifts of the sites for art, ‘from the surface of the medium to the space of them museum, from institutional frames to discursive networks, to [...] conditions like desire or disease […and concludes that] an ethnographic mapping of an institution or a community is a primary form of site- specific art today’ (Foster, 1996 p. 184 &185) Schlingensief, always highly innovative, takes his practice further than the mere engagement with, an institution or community. His site for art is constitutive of the very creation of a new community and institution: a village in which creative activity is catalysed. Eddie Devolder reflects that Beuys’ concept of social sculpture from the seventies ‘arouses unease because it radically questions the artistic world in which it sits at the centre’ (Devolder, 1990 p. 50). Schlingensief too questions the boundaries of artistic production through his Operndorf Afrika. The creation of a geographical, architectural and social situation at this scale, not as a temporary installation but as a place for a community to live, learn and work, is exceptional. If this project is regarded as part of Schlingensief’s interdisciplinary practice (and it is suggested here that it ought to be) then this has important implications for discourse regarding uses of medium and site in contemporary art.

When asked in a recent interview what the most exciting cultural institution was, Chris Dercon, (Director at Tate Modern) replied that his favourite project was the Operndorf Afrika. He explains the innovation, embodied in Schlingensief’s project: ‘Museums will become different – they will become community centers and art schools. You have to be radically different and to rethink the notion of the museum, not just in its physical substance but as a social organization.’ (Dercon, 2012) Dercon’s enthusiasm about Schlingensief’s innovation is a first instance of how Schlingensief’s activity at the ‘edge’ has the potential to reinvigorate and transform the ‘centre’ of the art world.

The comparison between Kafka and Schlingensief’s position at the periphery raises a final question: How does an intentional move to the edge influence the extent to which innovation will be intensified?

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As Deleuze and Guattari conclude in their analysis of Kafka’s ‘minor literature’, there is a tendency for the strife of styles, genres or movements in literature ‘to assume a major function in language’. Having proven in their argument the creative potential of lack, of being in minority, of pressures at the edge; they conclude that to ‘create the opposite dream: [you must] know how to create a becoming-minor’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 p. 23).

This suggestion, of the possibility of an intentional move to the ‘edge’, is a ‘becoming-minor’ that Schlingensief initiated. As such, even before the completion of the project, the Operndorf Afrika has been successful in the sense that it has achieved the potential, to transform the ‘centre’ of the art world. However, its development as a place for artistic activity, and as a home for a community, must be given critical attention; as it is not yet clear whether the Operndorf Afrika can live up to its responsibility toward its innovative essence, its community.

Endnotes 1. The Operndorf Afrika ‘should be a place where what Europe threatens to lose can be regained:

unprejudiced access to art’ (Opera Village Africa, 2011).

Bibliography Opera Village Africa. (2011) OPERA VILLAGE AFRICA – The Project. Available from: http://www.operndorf-afrika.com/en/the-project.html [online]. Accessed 21/02/2013.

Beuys, J. (1974) MANIFESTO on the foundation of a “Free International School for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research”.

Art into society, society into art: seven German artists. Edited by Christos M. Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal.

London: Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Dercon, C. Frieze Magazine | Archive | Chris Dercon: Interview. Available from: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/chris-dercon-interview/ [online] Accessed 21/02/13.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1986) Kafka: toward a Minor Literature. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Devolder, E. (1990) Joseph Beuys in Conversation with Eddie Devolder. Social Sculpture, Invisible Sculpture, Alternative Society, Free International University. Gerpinnes, Belguim: Editions Tandem.

Foster, H. The return of the real: the avant-garde at the end of the century. London: MIT Press, 1996, p. 173 Schlingensief, C. quoted in Eckstein, K. & Schönhuth, M. (2012) Wenn es nichts mit uns zu tun hat, geht es uns auch nichts an. Webfehler in Schlingensiefs Operndorf Afrika. Universität Trier. Available from: http://www.uni-trier.de/index.php?id=14018 [online]. Accessed 21/02/2013.

Nora Isabelle Heidorn, BA Communication, Curation and Criticism at CSM. Recent research has focused on German artist Christoph Schlingensief’s project to build an opera village in Africa

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The Inkhorn and The Last 2012 Vanessa Hodgkinson (Image) & James Bridle (Text)

The word calibrate enters the English language in 1864, during the American Civil War: the verb form of caliber, the diameter of a gun barrel. The word most often used now in conjunction with desktop printers and computer monitors emerges from the mouth of a cannon, much like many of of our contemporary technologies.

The Second World War and ballistics gave us the digital computer; the Cold War and the threat of nuclear bombardment gave us the internet. In turn, caliber comes from the old French calibre, which flows from the Arabic qalib, meaning a mould or last, the model of a human foot used by shoemakers. Further back, the Arabic follows the Greek καλάπους, literally little wooden foot. Words shift and wander, they contain multitudes.

In 1989, the Science Fiction writer Poul Anderson released a short text entitled 'Uncleftish Beholding': an outline of the basic tenets of atomic theory, written almost exclusively with words of Germanic origin, and replacing loanwords from French, Latin and Greek with new compounds and coinages.

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess," wrote Anderson. "With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life. (Anderson, 1989) Poul breaks down the firststuffs (elements), from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest - Ymir being the Norse god closest to Uranus, eponym of uranium. Having broken down the natural world, fusion and fission, Poul concludes: Soothly, we live in mighty years!

Anderson was exploring a well-worn path, a discipline sometimes called Anglish, or Roots English, which goes back at least to the Sixteenth Century, as Middle English matured into Early Modern.

At the time, English was replacing Latin as the main language of science and academia, and so calling into being, or borrowed from elsewhere, a huge number of words that had not been spoken by the English before. Detractors called these borrowings inkhorn terms: pretentious coinages where no such obfuscation was needed. The poet William Barnes (1862) created his own “pure English”, including terms like starlore for astronomy, wortlore for botany, and sun-print for photograph—what language might have been, as the title of a recent book puts it, “if the English had won in 1066”.

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The Inkhorn and The Last , Three panels, Watercolour on paper mounted on ply wood, 15cm x 20cm x 1cm

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It's no accident that many of these terms are scientific, chemical, and practical, because language follows thought and practice, it flows into the spaces made by new inventions and technologies, and, like those technologies, it both articulates something new, and reveals something which has always been the case. 'Wanderwort' is an English term from a German root, meaning, literally, wandering word. Language reveals that people and ideas are wanderworts too: spread among and moving between languages and cultures.

The appropriateness of 'calibre', of an Arabic root to a technological, scientific word, cannot be overstated. Alchemy (and thus 'chemistry'), algebra, alkalis and elixirs, benzene and borax, azimuth and zenith, all derive from Arabic and antiquity. One of the greatest mathematicians in history, Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who toiled in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad in the Ninth Century, gave his name to the process at the heart of the networked world today, the algorithm.

The origins of technological language remind us of who is doing the work here, where we have come from. “Computers” used to be people, with pen and paper and slide rule. There is nothing alien about the computer, or the algorithm: it’s a fozrmalisation and acceleration of what any of us could do, given enough time. (Although, ‘enough time’ is a perennial problem.

In computational complexity theory, NP-complete problems are those for which solutions are verifiable, but the time to find that solution may exceed the lifetime of the Universe.)

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Technical language, like all jargon (an Old French word meaning chatter of birds), works as much to obscure as to illuminate. In an increasingly complex world, where our networked culture takes on the qualities of a macroscope—a field of view too large for any single person to grasp the whole of it—language may become a tool not of understanding but of obfuscation. When people cannot describe a system, they are more easily victims of it, whether that system is technological, social, cultural, or political. George Orwell, in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, takes vague and meaningless political language to task for its tendency to mask deeper horrors: When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. (Orwell, 1946) It is the inkhorn argument all over again: why this word and not that one; what is wrong with the words we have?

The epistemologist Condillac observed in 1782 that Every science requires a special language because every science has its own ideas (Braudel, 1979). Science is a language-producing machine, and language, like science and technology, is a continuous process of discovery. Encoded within all languages, and flowing freely from one to another, is all human experience and history, a story we keep telling ourselves. A language without loanwords and wanderworts, without borrowings and adaptations, calcifies; stuck in the past and unable to articulate, and thus shape and advance, the present. When the traveller returns from the mountain, wrote Rilke, he brings not a handful of earth, not the thing itself, but that far rarer and more powerful thing, shining in the mouth: a new and hard won word.

Vanessa Hodgkinson, MA Fine Art at Chelsea. James Bridle, Artist, Writer and Technologist

Bibliography Poul Anderson, “Uncleftish Beholding", Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, volume 109, no. 13, pages 132–135, mid-December 1989, Davis Publications David Cowley, How We'd Talk If The English Had Won in 1066, Authors Online Ltd, 2009 William Barnes, Tiw: or, a View of the Roots and Stems of the English as a Teutonic Tongue, 1862, Smith, London Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, 1553 George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, Horizon, 1946 Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, vol. II of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, 1979:234.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, 1923

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Review of London Art Fair 16 – 20th Jan, 2013 Xiao-yang Li

This year’s winter seems unusually long and sombre - an epic snow started in early January and lingered through as long as it concerns to freeze every inch of the air. In the middle of all this comes the London Art Fair, staging its 25th show at the Business Design Centre in Islington.

I, in my chubby overcoat with a partially wrecked umbrella, found beauty in both snow and art, the first swept me off my feet and I landed on the second…

There is something a bit more down-to-earth about a fair like the LAF1 - compared with the frenzies of art fair giants such as Frieze, one suddenly assumes an eased state of mind: at last, a fair where one could breathe.

The ground floor hosts many young galleries representing contemporary works. I walked across endless partitions and business suits and arrived at the stand of Charlie Smith2, an east London based gallery. There, next to the odd-looking doll-sculptures, hung the paintings of John Stark.

Stark is an artist with accomplished skills and knowledge of art history: demonstrated in the meticulously composed landscapes of a Bosch-like fictional world filled with rather bizarre and disconnected characters.

John Stark, Back to apiculture, Oil on wood, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie Smith Gallery

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John Bellany, Woman with fancy hat, 1993, oil on canvas, 102x76cm.

Image courtesy of the artist and Beaux Arts

If scenic spectacle was the ultimate pictorial goal here, then in my view the artist achieved that with his creation of a seemingly dark territory where the ancient, the cursed, the absurd and the saint meet. It was not difficult to observe all this - monstrously deformed mountains, twisting whirling trees, little stone houses with animal like human figures – their direct link to Northern Renaissance landscape recalls painters such as Patinir, Bruegel the elder or Grunewald.

In this particular work, however, the central figures seemed rather forcefully put together, and they lack a coherent relationship to one another which, although eye-catching, reminds me more of the sci-fi section of London’s Forbidden Planet3.

While I admired Stark’s technical skills and the extensive labour he put into each work (according to Zavier Ellis, director of Charlie Smith, the artist takes months to complete one painting) I realized it was time to move on and enjoy the rest of the fair. 131 galleries participated this year, with at least 8 works each, this would mean over 1000 artworks are on display over two floors – impossible to view in a few hours of a snowy afternoon!

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I was delighted to learn that some established commercial galleries specializing in 20th century British art were located on the upper floor, so from that moment on it was goodbye contemporary art and hello 20th century masters!

It was the first time I would see physical works by John Bellany, Scottish painter of such tremendous energy and originality, whose works I encountered previously only in forms of reproduction. On show here at London’s Beaux Arts was a portrait of a woman with still life ‘Woman with fancy hat’.

It was the sensuous red that first caught my eye at a distance, when close up my senses were further stimulated by the passionate brushwork and bold use of color. It is quite unusual to find a British painter who pays such homage to the excessiveness of German expressionism, indeed - John McEwen, in ‘John Bellany’ a catalogue published by Beaux Arts London4, marveled at this kind of work ‘There is certainly no British figurative artist who has taken expressionism to more passionate extremes.’ Being an admirer of German/Northern European painters such as Emil Nolde, Paul Klee and Per Kirkeby myself, I find endless joy in Bellany’s work – his brush strokes unveil a universe where paint itself transforms into metaphorical story lines through each object, standing or sitting along, through the triumphantly painted ‘hat’ that touches the edge of a delightful green eye brow, through each dash of thick lively colour that screams for the world’s attention with a youthful naivety which few could master: this is life. Yes, compared to Stark’s carefully devised and slightly oppressed spectacle – Bellany is about life and joy: being alive!

I felt I could breathe again.

There are two different types of states, two different ways of approaching life, one paints miserably the harsh reality, the other celebrates instead the timeless, the internal and the eternal.

Imagine: one cries in agony at the sight of a gloomy monster, while the other laughs and sings in joy in front of a devil in hell – which one would you rather become? Bellany, I believe, chose the latter, and as far as intoxicated happiness could go, he survived several big operations and a poor health despite being an excessive drinker. He survived long enough to arrive at a ‘full flowering of his art’, thanks to modern technology - according to McEwen.

The woman with fancy hat certainly lightened my day: there was a recurrent theme that afternoon that my senses kept being enticed by all forms of women – or rather, woman-like figures in paint. At a corner of the stand of the west London gallery Piano Nobile, I found some small charming paintings of women’s faces with large eyes. The artist in question was Thomas Newbolt, a current teacher at the Prince’s Drawing School5 in Shoreditch.

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A peculiar feeling arose when encountering these paintings. I felt myself being pushed and sucked into the frame - that I was experiencing someone unknown to me and yet intimately close. The heads in these paintings usually start from the blurred eyebrow, and then down to the edges of the big black eyes, what then lies in those dense dark matters of the gaze, is perhaps an unknown mystery.

Thomas Newbolt, Head I, 2010, oil on canvas, 45.7x35.6cm.

Courtesy of the artist and Piano Nobile Gallery London

I suppose this is where I was ‘sucked in’ – the absence of forehead in these paintings recalls a state of experience when one looks at one’s own reflection in a small mirror – this moment of a sudden self-encountering with another self, quietly strange and yet otherworldly familiar.

Newbolt didn’t break some important formal structures and thus we still have the clearly defined contours of the face, the nose in both its shadow and lightness, the deliciously sketched out lips, the discreet pointy chins. Sometimes half of the face was buried in shadow and the only saturated point would be the lips.

In one of the paintings, the face seemed to emerge into a landscape, its nose becoming small hills, its eyes the brooding cloud and the sun… The works are small and delicate, but they have these enigmatic powers over me that I feel they open up an immense field before my eyes.

An apparent historical influence one could conclude is of course Auerbach, I however couldn’t think of these painting without linking them to an Emil Nolde self-portrait. In it he looks directly at the viewer - or directly at himself. Through paint these forms come into the awakening – the awakening of the self as an existence perhaps?

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There were of course plenty of other exciting works around in the fair, among them - a superb drawing of what seemed to be a classical Greek sculpture and a David Price painting at Art First, Marcus Rees Roberts’ Baselitz-like human figures and the seductive mistresses by Ana Maria Pacheco at Pratt Contemporary, etc. etc.

It was dark by the time I left the fair, small groups of people hastened to enter the gate with an attempt to catch a last glimpse of the drama, I felt a breeze of the freeze they brought from the outside – snow still, and it’s quite nice to experience London’s biggest snow this winter right after an intense afternoon of visual stimulation, I wondered what would Newbolt or Bellany think, walking on a small winding path, one snowy day, and a broken umbrella.

Xiao-yang Li: MRes Arts Practice at Chelsea

Endnotes 1. LAF: London Art Fair 2. Charlie Smith Gallery, 366 Old Street, London 3. Forbidden Planet: Sci-fi, cult entertainment retailer based in central London, specializing in comic books, graphic novels, toys etc.

4.John Bellany, 2008, published by Bueax Arts London, essay by John McEwen 5.Prince’s Drawing School: Educational institution in Hackney, London, funded by HRH Prince of Wales. www.princesdrawingschool.org

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Artists and links: London Art Fair: www.londonartfair.co.uk John Bellany retrospective exhibition - Epic journey through life. 06 March – 06 April 2013 Beaux Arts Gallery London, 22 Cork Street, London, W1S 3NA Thomas Newbolt: www.thomasnewbolt.com/ John Stark: http://johnstarkgallery.co.uk Beaux Arts Gallery London: http://www.beauxartslondon.co.uk Piano Nobile Gallery: www.piano-nobile.com/ Charlie Smith Gallery www.charliesmithlondon.com Art First Gallery: www.artfirst.co.uk/ Pratt Contemporary: www.prattcontemporaryart.co.uk/ Prince’s Drawing School: www.princesdrawingschool.org/ Forbidden Planet: http://forbiddenplanet.com/

Bibliography McEwen, John. (2008) John Bellany, exhibition catalogue published by Beaux Arts London London Art Fair (2013), London Art Fair [Online], Available from http://www.londonartfair.co.uk [Accessed: 2nd January 2013] Charlie Smith gallery (2013), Charlie Smith London [Online], Available from http://www.charliesmithlondon.com[Accessed: 1st February 2013] Thomas Newbolt (2013), Thomas Newbolt [Online], Available from http//www.thomasnewbolt.com/ [Accessed: 1st January 2013] John Stark (2013), John Stark [Online], Available from http://johnstarkgallery.co.uk/ [Accessed: 1st January 2013]

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Gin Dunscombe

Full Colour Postcard consists of fifty-two images, randomly selected from several hundred made on a recent trip to Berlin, all linked by the common theme of colour which I had set as my selection principle and my impetus to look, and keep looking.

The city glowed, danced and shouted, the autumnal colours of nature resonating with the preponderance of yellows, oranges and reds which were everywhere in the urban landscape. As an assemblage the piece provides a perfect snapshot of a unique event, a short though productive residency with other artists in a Kreuzberg studio.

Full Colour Postcard : 2013 colour photograph 1100 x 590mm.

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MA Fine Art, Chelsea. A conceptual artist who works in a wide range of media, including archive and installation. Currently on the MA Fine Art programme at Chelsea College of Art and Design, her work explores and challenges the role of artefacts in representations of history. Following a recent residency in Berlin, she is researching metafiction and developing her approach to colour.

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The Gift: Bring your PhD to Work Day Kataryna Leach

A Critical Psychoanalytical Reflection on the Post-Graduate Student - Tutor It is safe to say I have been given a gift. I am fortunate to have a rare tutor, one who possesses the ability to make everyone in the room feel that they are the only occupier, and that every word is being spoken to them individually. I have only ever known one other orator to have this ability, and he likewise, was a Fine Art Academic. No doubt some of my experience is subjective opinion, but I believe that at least in part, my view is shared. Why? Because looking around the room, every other student seemed to mirror my reaction.

I am referring here to the day I held my tutor’s PhD thesis in my hands. He brought it in as an act of generosity, to demystify the class and reduce our anxiety about PhD research: its form; its expectations: and our concerns about our own incompetence. This effect was immediately apparent, but the why was not. The why is something that will be addressed later, but is based in a psychological reaction, one that our tutor clearly understood as our need, either unconsciously or consciously.

The act of bringing, and giving this object was a brave one as arts based theses differ from other disciplines due to their personal quality. To give this to ten people you know only briefly, takes courage; how many of us would so readily expose their work and invite such intimacy?

The thesis itself, as an object, is a practice-led PhD, bound by Collis Bird & Withey bookbinders in Holloway, London. It is hard bound with a rounded spine, and hand-sewn to University specification. Bound in royal blue cloth with silver lettering on both the spine and front cover, it was quite beautiful.

The object was treated with reverence, evoking strong reactions in the group, and myself. The underlying psychological components for this response were already present, however it took the effect of that object to bring them to the conscious mind for analysing and processing. Did we simply sit in awe, as privileged students to the Master Artist; a position comparable to traditional Academy teaching hierarchies; or was there more occurring here? Was there an emerging parallel with Lacan’s dialogue on the psychological Master-Slave relationship?1 (Lacan, 1973. pg219, 255).

This event was the catalyst to begin my questioning of the entire relationship between the postgraduate student and the tutor.

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Paulo Freire’s, “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (1972) is a canon of pedagogic style and practice. In it, Freire deals with power relationships, roles and modes that both students and tutors exhibit, and internalise. He situates this within social and political contexts, relevant to current debates regarding university education. However to better define the actual relationship between student and tutor, it is necessary to adopt a psychoanalytic lens. Using this method, the student-teacher relation can be understood from the perspective of the following three theoretical positions: In Teaching, Classroom Authority, and the Psychology of Transference (2000), James Baumlin & Margaret Weave theorise the relation as an erotic reproductive state. In this the tutor constitutes the erect phallus, (full of knowledge), and the student becomes an empty fertile receptacle, with a desire to receive teaching (hence, conceive of new ideas and reproduce new knowledge)2. This theory takes into account the inherent two-way process of psychological transference. The transferred desire and seduction by the student as one aspect; and the tutor’s counter transference, expectation and narcissistic desire (to destroy and recreate the student in their own image), as the second aspect.3The article points out the tendency of teachers to take a student essay and re-write it in the correct way that they would have done it. Of course academically this does not include the student’s need to be corrected on missed academic conventions or terminology. If we follow Baumlin & Weaver’s argument to its natural conclusion the implication is that it is the student’s job to seduce the tutor and the tutor’s job to resist.4 In this game of unconscious foreplay, the research, knowledge and learning will grow in the fertile ground of academic potential.

Another possibility is to see the relationship as the re-working of the early childhood oral development phase (Freud, 1905. pg96, 145). The drive to research, the drive to know and the drive of never knowing enough can be interpreted as insatiability, created by a defect in the oral stage of development. We hunger and our tutor feeds us; hence we develop a relationship of the nurturing feeding breast as both “good” and “bad” object, and the demanding hungry infant (Klein, 1956. pg212). This is one explanation as to the dependence and parenting position that can result. The warning exists that too much dependence can create students fanatically loyal to their tutors, with huge separation anxiety if the relationship ceases.

I have analysed this in myself, in my own negative reaction to the “threat” that our tutor may have been replaced; and the relief at its resolution. I could say that I did not want to risk my work and education suffering from the loss of a tutor (who has provided me with the best opportunities for furthering my career), but if I take my motivations to the point of uncomfortable honesty, it is evident that I had, at that point, become unconsciously engaged in a psychoanalytical situation.

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Yet how does one avoid this when every situation, response, and interaction, has a psychologically motivated and dictated nature? Baumlin & Weaver suggest, that to prevent and break situations of dependence within teaching, the tutor must not be seen as the all-knowing authority. (Baumlin & Weaver, 2000. pg82)5 This gives rise to our third theoretical position: a neutral teaching circle where the tutor provides direction to academic conventions,6 and the students are expected to provide knowledge of their subject whilst also developing their own answers, questions and strategies. This forms a collaborative teaching partnership, creating an environment in which “transference and countertransference are virtually non-existent”, (Baumlin & Weaver, 2000. pg84). However my criticism of this position is that this method ignores the inherent benefits that transference can provide. Furthermore, it does not take into account that the postgraduate teaching relationship differs significantly from the undergraduate and masterslave Lacanian dialogue, because of the level of enquiry. Postgraduate students do not expect tutors to be the all-knowing expert in their chosen field; as such, the prerequisite of PhD level research is newness (new knowledge) and self-authorship.

Each of these suggested theoretical positions have both advantages and disadvantages; however they do not take into account the purpose of psychoanalysis and its practical application in the clinical setting. In therapeutic terms, the transference relationship relies on the principle of the analysand realising their unconscious desires within the conscious mind, and recognising these as the source of behaviours; that their phantasies and relationship to the analyst is part of the projected self.7 The ambition of the tutor therefore, is for the student to realise their own unconscious desires, and that the phantasies of the tutor are merely aspects of our projected, or mirrored, self.8 (Bailly, 2009. pg185). However the question arises as to what a student does if they are already self-aware and in possession of this level of understanding? Perhaps it is at this point where the real relationship can begin, or where the student begins to become the tutor? The slave envisages himself as the master. Not as the usurper but as the colleague.

Kataryna Leach: MRes Arts Practice

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Endnotes 1. Lacan discusses Hegel’s master-slave relationship, the dynamics of power, prestige and the processes of this relationship in his essays, Aphanisis, and continued in, From Interpretation To The Transference, in his book The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. (Lacan, 1973).

2. Baumlin & Weaver discuss that teaching can become “…a form of reproduction, because the teacher assumes that the students do not know what is right (that is, do not know what the teacher knows), but they do have the ability to learn what the teacher knows and, thus to become equal to the teacher…. By becoming equal to the teacher, the student reproduces the teacher / master.” (Baumlin & Weaver, 2000. pg 80).

3. “The analyst thus enters into the game of a more radical connivance in which the shaping of the subject by the analyst’s ego serves merely as an excuse for the analyst’s narcissism.” Lacan, (1966: 347. Pg288)

4. “[Transference] is most effective only so long as teachers remain themselves unseduced…” (Baumlin & Weaver. 2000. pg82).

5. Baumlin & Weaver paraphrase Lacan’s discussion on the analysand’s perception of power and the position of the analyst as “the subject who is supposed to know…” (Lacan, 1973. pg225).

6. “It would be naïve to suggest that furniture and its placement in a classroom…is at issue here; what is at issue, really, is the placement of individuals within the structures of authority, and the illusions… that these structures sustain.”

(Baumlin & Weaver. 2000. pg85).

7. To project and to introject are seen by some people as reciprocal terms. Yet I pointed out long ago –perhaps this fact should be realized- that one of these terms refers to a filed in which the symbolic is dominant, the other to a filed in which the imaginary is dominant, which must mean that, in a certain dimension at least, they never meet.” (Lacan, 1998) pg244.

8. “Analysis works by the readiness of this Subject-supposed-to-know to listen to the patient, with the accuracy of the ‘pure mirror of a smooth surface’ (i.e. without distortion), the knowledge contained in the patient’s own signifiers.” (Bailly, 2009. pg185).

Bibliography Bailly L. (2009) Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oneworld Publications Baumlin J & Weave M. (2000) Teaching, Classroom Authority, and the Psychology of Transference. The Journal of General Education, Vol 49, No 2. 2000 p 75-87.

Freire P. (1972) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Books Ltd. 1990.

Freud S. (1905-1931) The Penguin Freud Library: Volume 7. On Sexuality: Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality And Other Works. Penguin Classics (1991) Freud S. (I920) Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. A Public Domain Book. Kindle Edition. [Accessed 25th January 2013] 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.

Klein. M (1926-1956) Mitchell J. ed (1986) The Selected Melanie Klein. Penguin Books.

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The Signification of Costumed Dancers in the Tanztheater Wuppertal Katie Elliott

How do costumed dancers come to evoke meaning(s) in performance?

My PhD research is an enquiry into the signification of costumed dancers in the dance-theatre company Tanztheater Wuppertal. In the performance discourse of the Tanztheater Wuppertal the costumed dancers are a vital component of meaning, yet they remain over-looked in current research.

I use drawing as one method, alongside scenographic practice and semiotic theory, with which to engage with the signification of costumed dancers in live and recorded performance data.

Drawing allows me to ‘see’ the costumed dancers in this DVD material. The process of drawing invites personal observations and interpretations on the performers and has produced visible outcomes that can feed back into the research.

HB pencil on cartridge paper, A2, photographed February 2013

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These photographic images present a selection of recent drawings made by myself in the winter months of 2012. The works use notions of Julia Kirsteva’s psycho-linguistic understanding of sign systems to explore the ambiguity and heterogeneity of costumed signification in a DVD recording of a Tanztheater Wuppertal performance called Café Muller.

Kristevan semiotics differs from conventional semiotic theory as it additionally incorporates notions of psychoanalysis. Consequently, her writing is less concerned with classification; instead focussing on how heterogeneous meanings are made. I chose to use Kristevan theory in this research to stimulate and situate my drawing practice for its potential to offer insights into what lies beyond a cataloguing of signs.

The next stage of my project will involve drawing the Tanztheater Wuppertal performers during their rehearsals at Sadler’s Wells in February 2013, and showing some of my drawing practice as part of the CCW Graduate School VisUAL RESEARCH exhibition at The Triangle Space, Chelsea College of Art.

HB pencil on cartridge paper, A2, photographed February 2013

Katie Elliott 1st Year PhD student CCW Graduate School currently researching: The Signification of Costumed Dancers in the Tanztheater Wuppertal

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Mike Kelley at the Stedelijk Museum Gin Dunscombe

‘Widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of our time, Mike Kelley (1954 to 2012) produced a body of deeply innovative work mining American popular culture and both modernist and alternative traditions which he set in relation to relentless self and social examination, both dark and delirious’.1

So we are introduced to his mighty exhibition at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam.

The Stedelijk‘s new building was originally scheduled to open with the largest ever show of Mike Kelley’s work, but his suicide put paid to that. Eager aficionados have had to wait. Whether it is the show he would have made is not known, and immaterial to me as I had never encountered his work before. ‘Encountered’ is the mot juste – his work smacked me between the eyes.

He certainly never felt constrained by scale and most of the pieces are huge installations. Where they aren’t, they are often individual pieces of such size and scope that their effect is to make me feel like a small squeaky mouse talking to an elephant. If he were alive, would I want to talk to him?

I was certainly seeking answers as I went around this blockbuster show. I spent ages reading what was effectively his manifesto about uptight America needing to stop getting its rocks off, setting up celebrities so we could wank over them. Instead we should be getting a grip on our libidos and figuring out a way to satisfy them so that repression (which he contends is responsible for evils, violence and every kind of imaginable/unimaginable act of cruelty) could be dispensed with.

In his early career, Kelley fixated on sexual transgression. The notes tell us that it was only after he had been repeatedly told that his work represents evidence of sexual abuse that he began to make pieces explicitly about sexual abuse, about violence, other forms of abuse, repressed memory, systems of religion and transcendence. Most work with stuffed toys gives me the heeby-jeebies anyway, because of its hidden undertow of nastiness and unspoken secrets (I’m thinking Wayne Lucas’ disturbing earlier work here). A number of Kelley’s mainly huge collections of soft toys found in thrift shops were profoundly unsettling.

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To my surprise, as I’ve been writing this and looking at the images of the work, I’m inclining towards agreeing with the notion of Kelley as a ‘great artist’. According to the catalogue notes, over his 35-year career he worked in every conceivable medium - drawings on paper, sculpture, performances, music, video, photography and painting - exploring themes as diverse as American class relations, sexuality, repressed memory, religion, transcendence (mentioned earlier) and post-punk politics. To these themes he brought both incisive critique and abundant self-deprecating humour. I can’t fail to be impressed by his mastery of so many media, his pursuit of different ways in which to work, and by the breadth of his subject matter and intentions.

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How did this all play out for me? I found the show really difficult and disturbing, not least because aesthetically there were only a couple out of 200 pieces that pleased me. Kantor was a series of Kelley’s reconstructions of the planet Krypton, which according to the Superman myth never appears the same way twice. Made with mixed media, including resin and video projection, each Kantor was ‘beautiful’ and somehow mysterious in its own way; though I realised, once the title had revealed what I was looking at, my attention waned immediately. Unlike the rest of the work, these pieces held no tension, beyond the usual ‘how did he do it?’ I couldn’t resist the lure of the message in the bottle, even though I was not adept at reading it.

My favourite piece (unsurprisingly because I am lured and often captured by anything ornithological) was a series of bird boxes that seemed analogous with the path through life – Kelley’s Catholic birdhouse with its connotations of the hair shirt – The Hard Road vs the Easy Road. They all played with a bird theme, architectural space and myth in a really engaging way.

The curator, the new Director of the Stedelijk (not long in and maybe not for long) chose to present the work chronologically. Whilst this was an obvious way to make immediate sense of so much stuff, it fragmented the viewer’s attention. Perhaps a hang by underlying intention would have been a better option? I did settle into two huge installations that referenced Kelley’s biography: John Glenn Detroit River (a really good example of a clusterfuck project) and From My Institution to Yours; a remarkable set of architectural models of educational buildings and his house - all institutions in which he had experienced abuse.

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The exhibition ended with something particularly horrible. Kelley had dreams of a 365- part piece, some of which he had already shown at the Gagosian galleries. The final piece at the Stedelijk was a palisade, its vertical panels painted on one side with a harmonious palette, which lulled me into a false sense of security. On the reverse of these he mounted monitors, which at irregular intervals showed very short clips taken from YouTube of random acts of violence with a terrifying soundtrack. This left me shocked and shaken, which must have been Kelley’s intention - to shake the viewer out of any remaining complacency about society and human relations.

And I was glad to get out…

And yet…

And yet…this show is so rich in imagery, in ideas, in media, that I find I would like to return. I realise I have dwelt on his 3D work and haven’t mentioned his performances, his drawings, his paintings, his collages of thrift store jewels…(channelling Hew Locke?2) There’s more to explore…

Much more.

Gin Dunscombe MA in Fine Art at Camberwell/Chelsea.

Mike Kelley at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. 15 December – 1 April 2013.

The original copy of this review is available on Gin’s blog: http://djinngenie.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/mike-kelley-at-the-stedelijk http://djinngenie.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/mike-kelley-at-the-stedelijk/2

Endnotes 1. Quote from the exhibition leaflet (2012).

2. In reference to his technique using relics of costume jewellery i.e. Jungle Queen 1 (2003). Mixed media

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Light and the Implied Lens Shabnam Ranjbar

Although my background is in Interior Design, my practice consists of filmmaking and photography; I feel this is due to my interest in notions of spatiality and temporality. My current research project attempts to synthesise a theory of film, by drawing contrasts between philosophical notions of filmic reality, and contemporary debates around spectatorship.

Every object can be seen if the light reflected from that object travels to the observer’s eyes.

The total light reflected by an object, and how it is reflected, is highly dependent upon the degree of smoothness or texture of the surface. When the surface of water moves, rays of light are reflected, at angles that disrupt and refract an image. The surface of the water is contingent upon variables, fixed at the moment of its representation. There is a quasi relation between this notion, and the materiality of the image below.

Shabnam Ranjbar: MRes Arts Practice.

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What Lines Can Do: On the Representation of the Naked in Painting Jean Kim

In my painting practice I am fascinated with the human form, especially the naked. Quite often, both painters, including myself, and sitters themselves, regard sitters as objects, out of professionalism. According to the English art critic and painter John Berger, ‘A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude’.1 What I want to draw is real humans, not mannequins. In order to do this the sitters and I have to avoid the objectification tendency, avoiding adopting a male gaze, which makes me think about how to paint the naked, rather than the nude.

This piece is my study of how to represent the naked. In thinking about depicting real people, one might refer to ‘Realism,’ the artistic movement that began in France in 1980s. Objective reality was at the heart of the movement. I find, through discussions with my sitters, that nakedness is more to do with their psychology than with the fact that they are without clothes. When it comes to the idea of painting real people, I share common ground with realist painters. However, in an attempt to avoid objectification, and to represent sitters’ subjective status of being naked, I take different perspective from them. For me, painting flesh and building up body structure as close to the sitter as possible are not enough to express this aspect. Lines have a lot of potential for the viewers to interpret represented images in them. The focus here in dealing with the naked or nakedness is not on reconstructing realistic flesh on a canvas. The figure of the lines does not sit there as heavy chunks of flesh. The head on the painting is recognized as a head, but could be an imagined projection as it’s semi transparency reveals the background. This serves as an alternative form which embodies the intangibility of nakedness. Behind the head, exposed linen meets with a landscape, which could be read as an interior space or a landscape ruthlessly cut off, the lines of the head do not block the view. I want to see what lines do when painting naked human forms through further experiments.

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Objective reality doesn’t exist, 2012, oil on linen, 91 x 120cm

MRes Arts Practice at Chelsea, Jean Kim is studying the nakedness of sitters and how to represent it.

Endnotes 1. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin. p54

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Magazine-printed Artworks Ruth Solomons

How does the legacy of art’s ‘dematerialization’ in 1960s discourse inform the contemporary magazine-printed artwork?

As an artist who writes, I have tended to write about artists and artworks, using my practical insight as a starting point, and viewing the inclusion of images as subsidiary. My article Are Louisa Chambers’ Paintings Abstract?1 was an exercise in writing about what painters think – the balance between what is seen, and what is intended to be seen. Chambers’ painting Beams, featured in the article, was purchased from the exhibition which opened the same night as the magazine was launched. The sale may seem a logical outcome, but what link do we really make in coming to that conclusion – did the article simply provide additional exposure?

Was the re-contextualisation of the painting, in the context of that article, the reason for that buyer’s decision?

The very medium of the magazine-printed artwork can be seen to hold its own value, as demonstrated by the rate of sales, on that launch night, of a primarily image-based magazine.

The article recontextualized the painting, but the object-ness of the magazine as medium, added a further layer of validation still. By looking at the legacy of 1960s discourse around the ‘dematerialized’ artwork2, and subsequent forays into the magazine-printed artwork as a medium, I hope to cast some light on the contemporary context for artworks which are displayed in magazines.

In her open letter introducing the first issue of Aspen magazine, Phyllis Johnson expressed her instinct to present the magazine in an object-like form as a ‘harking back to the original meaning of the word as “a storehouse, a cache, a ship laden with stores” ’.3 The tagline on the front describes the format more succinctly still: ‘The magazine in a box’. Not simply an art magazine, this format lent itself well for the inclusion of art images and objects. Aspen 5+6 (1967) was specifically chosen as an art issue: a double issue in fact, due to the time taken to complete this ambitious endeavour. Guest edited by Brian O’Doherty, the aim was to step firmly outside the white cube in terms of both the editor’s role, and the artwork’s context. A range of media were catalogued in this edition, including music/spoken word recordings, poems and academic texts.

Artworks such as The Maze by Tony Smith, differentiated themselves from artwork as reproduction through their handheld, material format.

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In the same year that Aspen 5+6 was published, Dan Graham wrote the article The Book as Object, which described Le Livre, an unfinished project by Mallarmé4. An unbound book whose narrative could be co-constructed by its readers, Le Livre was ‘a structural inversion of the conventional book-form’ (Graham, 1967, p.18). Required to be performed aloud, its range of permutations included systematic omissions, and parts being read backwards. Aspen 5+6 exploited the unbound format in a way that not only reflected Johnson’s wish to present a ‘cache’, but that also allowed the artworks contained therein to stand alone. Differentiated from each other by their respective formats, the contents were unified by overall constriction within the magazine’s container. The order of their consumption was not pre-ordained: as with Mallarmé’s Le Livre, the reader of Aspen 5+6 became actively implicated in its construction.

Graham’s background running a gallery forms the basis to his insight into the multi-faceted nature of the magazine-printed artwork. He observed that the magazine lent an artwork permanence after the temporary exhibition it had been shown in was over. Far from the temporary medium a magazine is perceived to be in all other areas of contemporary culture, in fact, Graham tells us, the magazine has potential to form a concrete legacy for an artwork (Graham, 1985, p.131). The exhibition the image advertises may be fleeting, but the status accorded that image, once it is recreated and recontextualized in print, adds a new facet to its legacy. This double-life of the magazine-printed artwork is then further echoed by the role of the editor as curator of printed matter. Theories of display in the gallery become transmutable to the magazine: a last bastion of physicality where a curator-editor has defined limits within which to present a selection of work.

Graham cites the influence of Pop and its inception of mass media into a fine art context. The ‘non-art’ format of the magazine could be appropriated rather than filtered out: ‘…a work could function in terms of both the art language and the popular language of the media at the same time, commenting upon placing in perspective the assumptions of each’ (Graham, 1985, p.132).

Pop’s absorption of ‘non-art’ is echoed in art’s adoption of the magazine format as site for the display of artworks. Minimalism’s reliance on the white cube prompted a pluralist counterpart in the merging of disparate media that the art magazine allows. Juxtapositions encountered at the turn of a page still allow something new to sit alone in its own double spread. The white cube was not so forgiving. The ‘dematerialization’ of art, as described by Lippard and Chandler (Lippard & Chandler, 1968 in Alberro & Stimpson, eds. 1999, p.46), meant that the material nature of art became overtaken by its cognitive inception, with the consequence that an artwork’s legacy was more likely to lie in its reproduced image, than in the physical work itself.

At one time, the artwork alone was sufficient legacy. Questioning of materials, processes and institutionalisation of art, were all symptoms of art’s ‘dematerialization’, resulting in a type of art which had a multi-layered legacy through its surrounding documentation, as well as through the physical object in a gallery.

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Such documentation - writings, transcribed lectures, photographs, plans for artworks not yet made, or descriptions of performances that were not recorded in visual format – all lent themselves well to the medium of the magazine. The trajectory towards art as documentation resulted in the magazine becoming an integral part of an artwork’s legacy.

‘When works of art, like words, are signs that convey ideas, they are not things in themselves, but symbols or representatives of things.’ (Lippard & Chandler, 1968 in Alberro & Stimpson, eds. 1999, p.49) Dan Graham took ‘dematerialization’ to the next logical stage with Homes for America5 where the aim was not so much to make an artwork, as simply to present a magazine article, by an artist, thus bringing into question the artist’s role.

The February 1971 issue of Studio International (Vol 181) included four pages of collaged newspapers by John Latham6, with cut-off text and non-sequitur content inserted unexplained within this magazine’s dense format. Studio International’s self-proclaimed status as ‘the most authoritative international journal of modern art’7 accords a parallel status of authority to all its contents, including artworks printed within it. Latham’s pages containing adverts and local-news articles in parochial typesets jar against the functional aesthetic of the rest of the publication.

However, their containment by the magazine’s binding, editing, and conceptual framework, accords authority to their inclusion.

Chelsea College of Art & Design holds in its library periodical shelves, and in its Special Collection8, a respectable representation of some of the more obscure titles in the international field of contemporary art magazines. Garageland, (which printed my article about Louisa Chambers), or Turps Banana, present a more traditional format, which prioritises the representation of artworks within their pages. Artists interview artists, and artist-curated exhibitions prompt responses from artist-reviewers. However, from further afield, magazines such as Fillip, Kilimanjaro, The Happy Hypocrite and Maurizio Catellan’s Toiletpaper9 allow the artwork to exist unaccompanied by text, or alongside text that does not necessarily refer to any artworks. The artwork does not need to declare its independence from the magazine, nor its allegiance to the format. It simply becomes part of the magazine-medium.

The current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York - Millennium Magazines10, compiles an esoteric selection of international art magazines, lending credence to the catalogue of titles held in Chelsea College of Art & Design’s Special Collection. MOMA’s list reads like a who’s who of the contemporary art magazine, omitting journalistic titles such as Art Monthly, Modern Painters, Artforum, Frieze and Flash Art. The criteria for this list, ‘exploring the various ways in which contemporary artists and designers use the magazine as an experimental space’ (MOMA Millenium Magazines, 2013)11, focuses instead on how the art magazine can be used as a medium in itself, as a means for display of artworks. Three main types of magazine-printed artwork could be described as follows: 1. The indexical reproduction – artworks that existed already merely being reproduced as part of an article, advert, etc 2. The recontextualized image of an artwork – artworks where the change of context through their reproduction is acknowledged in some way 3. Magazine-printed artwork as art-form – artworks that did not exist before their display in the magazine.

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MOMA’s exhibition provides a rich starting point from which to examine how the magazineprinted artwork functions within each magazine’s particular agenda. Practical concerns such as seriality, methods of printing, and use of captions/accompanying text, all offer ways in which images described by the second and third type (as above) differ from the indexical reproduction of an artwork (as described in the first type, above) that might, for example, simply accompany an exhibition review. Overall, the magazine’s endorsement brings these images together. This could extend even to the clashing of concepts between the magazine’s editorial imperative and that of its contents: the binding, editing, and visual formatting, all contribute to the final curation. The root of this embrace of the magazine’s overall authority lies in the ‘dematerialization of art’ too, in the motivation to create ‘an order that incorporates implications of disorder and chance, in a negation of actively ordering parts in favour of the presentation of a whole’ (Lippard & Chandler, 1968 in Alberro & Stimpson, eds. 1999, p.48)12.

Strategies to acknowledge the change of context of an artwork might include the removal of captions, the text becoming in places subsidiary to image, several consecutive pages devoted to image only, and homogenized printing treatment of text and images. Fillip magazine seems to epitomize all of these. It is not simply an art magazine – it covers a range of local-scale international stories, not necessarily relating to art in their content, more in their juxtaposition to the other contents. Images are listed in the front contents, alongside these articles, and are printed in matt coloured ink, the same colours as those used for the printed texts and shaded spacer pages.13 There is a fresh inky feel to its appearance – Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller, 1595, (Fillip 16, 2012, p.26), is printed in cyan and green with a grainy, lithographic feel. There is a feeling of much being made from little, style dictated by resources. An illustrated booklet by Ariella Azoulay is presented as an insert, a fractal strategy through which to guide the reader to access further series of works. Overall, Fillip presents the ‘magazine’ as a compilation of indexes to various external and interrelated series, while also acknowledging the complexly layered recontextualization of the reproduced images within.

Ve 08/18 (Issue 8 of Veneer Magazine, 2011) presents itself with a torn off front cover. The website allows access to past copies in the form of upside-down text14. The format is essentially a series of 18 books, advertised as a magazine – subscription requires purchase of the edition.

Issue 08 includes a transcript of Margaret Thatcher’s 1976 speech ‘Britain awake’, and an article exploring various mathematical equations to describe the shape of a hanging chain.

But at the back a series of works titled Untitled Polaroids by André Kertész assert the magazine’s commitment to an image’s integrity. The disparity between the elements composing this magazine’s whole, serves to define each within its own terms. Thus the printed artworks are allowed the space to be seen as reproduced photographs, as a series rather than a single attempt to catch your attention, and as an artwork, or artworks. These complex layers of magazine format, Polaroid format, and image composition, are all inherently acknowledged within the context that they are presented.

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The Happy Hypocrite’s tagline reads ‘for and about experimental art writing’15, and features back to front photocopies of text, annotated photographs and poetic writings, printed artists’ writings, and full-page artwork images. It replicates the academic journal, a sketchbook, an exhibition catalogue, a text book, a poetry publication – all in the same binding. Elements from media become subverted or are glancingly referred to, such as The Plebs’ 1930s-style parody of a labour propaganda pamphlet16. This magazine is an example of the artist-written magazine article, with echoes of Dan Graham’s and John Latham’s 1960s forays in this area, with an additional layer of contemporary anxiety relating to where artists’ work, and their practices, might be seen.

The limited nature of a magazine, however it is bound, presents a compilation of printed material, within which artworks might sit more equally together than in the sprawling artworld outside its covers. The ‘dematerialized’ property of the magazine-printed artwork lies in the treatment of thresholds as they are conventionally understood – thresholds between text/art; conceptual intentions contrasting with the editorial agenda; and the relationship between the printed artworks compared to how they might be seen in a gallery, or any other site for display.

‘Experimental’ is a broad term, but perhaps MOMA’s grouping serves to draw attention to variety not just in terms of content, but also in terms of process. A key feature of these Millennium Magazines is their self-aware approaches to the serial format, allowing their agendas to emerge through common threads and interruptions between issues.

It follows that the magazine-printed artwork potentially provides insight to progressively discursive processes in art practice, as well as greater crossing over between disciplines than might otherwise be achieved. The marriage of art and design could not be more evident than in the challenge to contain this sense of art as object within what is primarily an interface for communication. Omar Kholeif proposes that the immediacy of new media might provide a usable solution to contextualizing art in contemporary culture (Kholeif, 2013, p.10). However, the example of the Millennium Magazines shows that such contextualizing demands more than just the juxtaposition of disparate elements. The physical, tactile nature of the magazine communicates, even within its narrow resources, a breadth of contexts that would be untranslatable to the purely cognitive realm of new media. Images of Jean Tinguely’s kinetic artworks featured in Artforum’s 50th Anniversary Issue recall the front image of that magazine’s inaugural issue; interpreted now as a forecast of the insidious takeover of mechanisation (Kuo, 2012, p.66).

This remains a concern to artists today, and is evident in the proliferation of new physicalmedia publications such as showcased in Millenium Magazines. The magazine-printed artwork enables the artist to access a broader remit for communication, within a format that connects together in a physical serial-network of related practices, exhibitions, and wider events: activities that benefit from their pocket-sized curation together in one document-container.

Ruth Solomons: MRes Arts Practice at Chelsea College of Art.

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Endnotes 1. Solomons, R. (2012). Are Louisa Chambers’ Paintings Abstract (article), Garageland 13:Paint, London: Lancing Press 2. With particular reference to Lippard, L. & Chandler, J. (1968), The dematerialization of art. In: Alberro, A. & Stimson, B. (1999). Conceptual art: a critical anthology, Massachussetts: MIT Press 3. From Phyllis Johnson’s open letter introducing Aspen 1, 1965 4. Described in Mallarmé’s notes from 1866, in Arnar, A. (2011). The book as instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé: the artist’s book, and the transformation of print culture, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 5. Printed in Arts Magazine, December 1966 – January 1967 6. Latham, J, (1971). Inno 70, printed in Studio International vol 181 7. Tagline from front cover, as observed from Studio International vol 181 8. Chelsea Special Collection (Rare Periodicals), Chelsea College of Art & Design Library, London. More information at this webpage: <http://www.chelsea.arts.ac.uk/ccwgraduateschool/archivesandresources/chelseaspecialcollections/> [Accessed 26 February 2013].

9. All magazines mentioned in this article are available either in the on-shelf periodicals section of Chelsea College of Art & Design Library, or by request from the Rare Periodicals section of their Special Collection.

10. Millennium Magazines, 2013. [Exhibition]. New York: MOMA, Mezzanine, The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building, 20 February 2013 – 14 May 2013 11. Introductory text, and full list with brief background and website link for each magazine, available from: <http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/millenniummagazines/> [Accessed 26 February 2013].

12. Lippard & Chandler accredit Donald Judd with this idea of a non-hierarchical whole, in an enticingly vague footnote: ‘In the New York art world, the idea seems to have originated with Don Judd.’

13. As observed from Fillip issue no 16, Spring 2012. Vancouver, Canada: Projectile Publishing Society 14. Veneer Magazine, [Internet]. Portland, USA: Available from: <http://www.veneermagazine.com/01-18/08/the_group/index.html> [Accessed 26 February 2013].

15. Tagline from The Happy Hypocrite 5: What Am I?, (2010). London: Bookworks 16. The Plebs, (2010), Paper Machine, in The Happy Hypocrite 5: What Am I?, Spring/Summer 2010.

London: Bookworks, pp.77-90.

Bibliography Aspen: vol 1, no 1, 1965. New York: Roaring Fork Press Aspen: vol 1, no 5+6, 1967. New York: Roaring Fork Press Fillip: issue 16, Spring 2012. Vancouver, Canada: Projectile Publishing Society Graham, D. (1967). The book as object. In: Graham, D. (1978) Articles, Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, pp.16-19 Graham, D. (1985). My works for magazines. In: Zevi, A, Graham, D. (1996). Dan Graham: selected writings and interviews on artworks, 1965-1995, Rome: I Libri di Zerynthia, pp.127-137 Kholeif, O. (2012). Virtual curating [Article] in Art Monthly 363, February 2013. London: Art Monthly, pp. 9-12.

Kuo, M. (2012). Art’s new media [Article] in Artforum 50th anniversary edition, September 2012.

New York: Artforum Inc, pp.66-69 Latham, J, (1971). Inno 70, in Studio International vol 181 no 930, February 1971. London: Medical Tribune Group, pp.85-88 Lippard, L. & Chandler, J. (1968), The dematerialization of art. In: Alberro, A. & Stimson, B. (1999). Conceptual art: a critical anthology, Massachussetts: MIT Press, pp.46-50 MOMA, (2013). Millenium Magazines [Internet] New York: Available from: <http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/millenniummagazines/> [Accessed 26 February 2013].

The Happy Hypocrite 5: What Am I?, Spring/Summer 2010. London: Bookworks.

Veneer Magazine 08/18, 2011. USA: YU Solomons, R. (2012). Are Louisa Chambers’ Paintings Abstract [Article] in Garageland 13: Paint, February 2012.

London: Lancing Press, p.59

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Atomic Semiotics Lillian Wilkie

The point of departure for this ongoing research was a black metal box found in the basement of a ruined building, destroyed by a bomb in December 1940.

The building was the 18th century home of the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society, and the box contained what are now the only remaining manuscripts written by John Dalton, the eminent natural philosopher who developed atomic theory and invented modern-day chemistry. Beginning by viewing these charred documents and discussing their significance with librarians, archivists, historians and scientists, I became acquainted with not only Dalton’s work and the atomic heritage of the North West, but a wider network of institutions related to scientific discovery, historical archives, nuclear research and subterranean storage.

The images presented are of objects stored in a forgotten ‘cabinet of curiosities’ at the Dalton Nuclear Institute The collection includes nuclear reactor components, uranium crystals and atomic memorabilia.

During the research process I have explored, through graphics, the designation of Manchester in 1980 as the world’s first “Nuclear Free City”, made work based on the Winslade salt mines where many historical and scientific documents are stored, and will soon visit Cumbria where work is taking place to develop solutions for long-term underground nuclear storage, similar to the Onkalo facility in Finland.

I am especially interested in the field of nuclear semiotics, where scientists and anthropologists are experimenting with ways to warn human beings 100,000 years in the future, using markers, monoliths and imagery, of the radioactive dangers of these subterranean facilities.

An Enquiry into the Origin of Springs Photograph 10 x15 cm

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I am fascinated by the hopefulness and futility of this endeavor; after all, most scientists assume that in 100,00 years time, despite our rapidly advancing technology, either global warming or one or several ice ages will have reverted the human race to a primitive state, where language and communication will be very different to today.

In a wider sense, through examining heritage, history-making and the problematic nature of the document-as-relic in our institutions and the waste-as-relic in our nuclear facilities, I aim to raise questions about the role of the artist-researcher and the relationship between research, making, failing, and concealing.

Lillian Wilkie: MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design

On a new system of grammatical instruction Photograph 10 x 15cm

On a new system of chemical philosophy Photograph 10 x 15cm

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Can The Artist Counter the Delusion of a Wireless Communications Network?

Cadi Froehlich

The physicality of the network: Copper Mines The main element employed to conduct our data around us is copper. Opencast copper mining is an industrial scale extraction of copper ore, from the earth. The scale and affect of the operations on the landscape and the environment mean that these typically occur in remote areas with very low population rates such as: South America, Central North America, Australia and China. European copper mining has largely ceased due to the economic benefits of scale. Previously, the UK (in particular Cornwall) was a main producer. The abundant mineral deposits of Cornwall’s mines provided large amounts of employment for the local population, and benefited the nation’s trade. Though more commonly accepted as a producer of tin and china clay (a main incentive for the expansion of the Roman Empire to the British mainland), Cornwall’s copper production supplied the original communications revolution, playing a vital role in the development of our digital industries today.

The decline of the Cornish mining industry is addressed in the above artwork, The Abolition of Work, by Cornford and Cross. The floor of a Cornish art gallery is presented carpeted wall to wall with coins.

They were laid by hand, heads or tails up, as they landed.

Cornford and Cross, ‘The Abolition of Work’ (2007) Artists’ fee and budget in one-penny coins laid on gallery floor, Exchange Gallery, Penzance, England

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The artists asked for their fee and materials budget to be delivered to the gallery in one pence coins, and enlisted a number of volunteers to help lay them by hand. In my interview with him, David Cross talked about the space becoming ‘filled with the coins’ (Cross, 2007), as their metallic odor mixed with the sea air, and light reflected onto the walls and ceiling around them. This material presence, and the small workforce who installed it, refer to Cornwall’s mining history, and its workforce.

As a much-valued metal, copper is routinely scrapped and re-machined. As the market value of copper has risen, the value of a one pence coin became greater than one pence in copper.

Subsequently, our ‘coppers’ were replaced by copper-plated alloy coins in 1971. This increased market value of copper may be the catalyst needed to restart some of the mining operations in Cornwall. Market viability and economic demands may result in improving the condition of the jobs sector in Cornwall. By presenting us with a room of coins - which seen as a whole become reunited as one material - the artists invite us to consider copper as a metal, and hint at its other uses. Prompts such as location and production underline this.

‘Money may be the standard definition of currency, but materials, information, objects, places and even people can also become a currency: at a given moment they may have a value, but this may not last…’ (Gaspar, 2010, p.21)

The physicality of the network: Submarine Cables

The Exchange Gallery in Penzance is located in the old postal exchange building, utilising a space rendered obsolete by modern technological demands. A few kilometers along the coast lies the Porthcurno cable station, which was the landing site of one of the first main submarine copper cables laid at the end of the 1800s. This was the era when we began to lay copper cables across the seabed, linking continent to continent, to transmit telegraphs. This physical connection to the rest of Europe and the wider world was the so-called ‘Nerve Center of the Empire’. (Porthcurno Telegraph Museum, 2011) Taken in perspective, today’s technologies are viewed with a detachment disproportionate in comparison to the physical impact they have: ‘Just before the start of the trans-Atlantic wired telegraph service in 1866 it took about three weeks to send a message to the other side of the ‘pond’ – the time it took to cross the Atlantic by sailing ships. With the telegraph, the transmission time for a 300 word message was reduced to 8 minutes. The internet reduced it to 2 seconds[…] this is only a reduction by a factor of 5[…] Compare that to the 2500 - time reduction achieved by the telegraph.’

(Chang, 2011, pp. 37-38)

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Those responsible for the submarine cables face a conundrum: The locations of the landing stations are highly sensitive vulnerable targets, which need to be protected. This protection needs to extend to accidental damage too – hence the conundrum. Local fishermen and utility companies who use the areas are usually kept informed by locations marked on seacharts, rather than roadmaps.

The role copper plays in our communication today goes largely unnoticed; as we become disconnected from wires in the western world, we instead rely on wi-fi networks to connect to each other. In her 2012 article Warning: Do not Dig: Negotiating the Visibility of Critical Infrastructures, Nicole Starosielski examined how modern technology intends to become invisible, either by being obscured – which is increasingly interpreted as secured today – or so seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives as to become imperceptible.

(Starosielski, 2012) In The Abolition of Work, by providing the visible physical presence of material and documentation (of the dirty hands of the volunteer workforce after installation), Cornford and Cross invite us to reconsider the coin. By dismantling our expectations of the object, the artists allow us to consider the material, and let us disconnect from our assumptions about money.

In his book on everyday objects Steven Connor writes, ‘we seem not to be able to do without the sense of physical involvement with wires[…] Telephones are linked to touching in a way that radio is not: your interlocutor seems still to be at the end of the line.’ (Connor, 2011 p.211)

Limitations to Development The industrialisation of production and consumption continues apace, creating a closed circle of demand for resources and expansion of infrastructure to support it. The mechanisation of systems has largely removed our hands from the tasks, and handed them over to machines, from mining equipment for digging, to mobile phones for talking.

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This disconnection places trust in the technology to overcome any obstacles to this development. As these obstacles become harder to overcome, the solutions become harder to find: science falters. Concerns are picked up on by us, the humans in the system, when they begin to affect our lives directly. Changes to our economy and our climate are undeniable.

The economic model for growth is unsustainable, and today’s zeitgeist places responsibility for finding solutions back onto our shoulders. The limitations of natural resources, from ores, to water, are becoming economic realities.

The artist Simon Starling addresses the limitations of economic growth in his 2006 work ‘Autoxylopyrocycloboros’.

In a performance on Loch Long as part of his Cove Park Commission in Scotland, Starling renovated a small pleasure boat salvaged from the bottom of Lake Windemere. The boat was fitted with an original boiler engine which was fueled by wood cut from the structure of the boat itself. This ultimately led to the boat taking on water, the flames being extinguished, and the whole craft sinking back to the bottom of the sea. In this determined and ultimately futile endeavor, the artist presents us with a view on industrialisation and human endeavor. He compromises his personal safety, and the role of a boat, to investigate the limitations of resources. We question the material of the boat itself, and the planned destination of the crew. This is unsettling and literal, and takes in the finer points of the labour involved in renovating the vessel, transporting it across half the country, and losing it once more. The name of the boat was Destiny, leaving us in no doubt that this is a possibility for our future being played out before us. On the online journal Art and Research, Starling comments on this, saying that he…

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‘always tried to find ways to use […] outmoded, outdated kinds of technologies and conversations and ideas and try to give them some new life in relation to a contemporary understanding’ (Starling, 2006/7) Both Starling, and Cornford and Cross, examine our relationship with the materials and objects we come into contact with daily. They provide us with space in time, to pause and consider the stuff of our daily existence: the visible signs of our employment of natural resources, which sustain our growth.

Invisible agents The consumption of natural resources such as wood, is a daily reality for most of humanity, for fuel or for object-based supports. We accept that trees provide a vital link in the ongoing supply of the air we breathe, yet we employ them for short-term gain. This could be likened to eating a chicken rather than its eggs.

Construction of The National Stadium, Beijing

We also accept the rising costs of living, as we are told of the increased costs of materials we need, from food to steel. In 2007, when China was building the Olympic stadium known as The Birds’ Nest, they purchased so much steel that it affected global supply, pushing up prices of the metal, and products made from it all over the world.

This model of supply and demand was the basis of Adam Smiths’ economic theories of 1776, and is still the basis of today’s markets. (Smith, 2000) In contrast to Cornford and Cross dealing with the materiality of money, and Simon Starling with the materiality of industry, the artist Svein Flygari Johansen opposes the idea of preindustrialism, with the highly conceptual financial markets, in his work Call of the Wild.

When I encountered Call of the Wild by Norwegian Svein Flygari Johansen at the recent exhibition Verführung Freiheit at the DHM, Berlin, the lighting was clear, but the accompanying audio was not: A chrome representation of a campfire site is presented complete with toasting stick and support. The spotlight is on this manufactured version of man’s first interaction with technology: fire. Situated as it is in an exhibition, in an art institution, the work is detached physically from its source reference.

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However on approaching it, the audio becomes discernible. The sound of a babbling brook and wind in the trees locates the metallic objects back into nature, where we might usually find them, surrounding a campfire.

Call of the Wild, 2012, Svein Flygari Johansen

The audio fades in and out, the volume gets manipulated. The mechanism for this manipulation is a real-time link to the world stock market. As it strengthens, the volume increases, and it decreases if the market falls. This intrusion into the primal association (of the babbling brook, the wind in the trees), is made by modern forces, and instigates a jarring.

Conclusion

The companies that work with market forces are the same agencies that provide the infrastructure on which they paradoxically depend. Service providers, engineers and miners are all parts of our societies. The responsibility of managing these services falls to the private sector. The responsibility of regulation falls to government. Our elected officials dictate as best they can how the organisations who control these assets must act. These actions can be understood as affecting us very directly, such as the disruption caused to rail services (by copper thefts), or the ordering of mobile network providers to limit service in areas with military intentions: In November 2012 Pakistani authorities suspended mobile phone networks to some areas as officials say ‘more than 90% of bombs are detonated by mobile phone’ (BBC News, 2012) Here in the UK, ‘Infrastructure company Network Rail wants a change in the law to make it more difficult for thieves to sell cable and scrap to dealers. A spokesman said: “Thieves, particularly those stealing cable, deny passengers the service they rightly expect and, through the massive cost to the industry, deny everyone improvements to rail services as funds have to be diverted from enhancing the railway to tackling crime”.’ (BBC News, 2 January 2012)

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In contrast to this, I believe that art provides us with opportunities for reflection and direct engagement with materials. In finding new ways to present creative contributions to the current debates surrounding contemporary attitudes to the environment and the economy, the ‘material matters’ (Veiteberg, 2010). Writing about objecthood in 2009, Michael Fried wrote about the dislocation between our understanding of artworks and the separateconsiderations given to sculpture and painting. He goes on to point out that realising the‘obdurate identity of a specific material’ provides us with occasion to experience ‘endlessness [,..] inexhaustibility, [....] letting the material itself confront one.’ (Fried, 2009) The artist is in the unique position of being able to access the different systems across society, from science to environment to health. This allows ideas to be communicated more effectively.

In finding new ways to contribute to contemporary debates and attitudes, Veitburg wrote in 2010 that the 'material matters'. Fried wrote in 2009 about realising the 'obdurate identity of a specific material.' Relocating artworks within this critical context, provides us with occasion to experience ' endlessness, .. inexhaustibility, .. in letting the material itself confront us.'

This feels like a faith in the ability of materials to show us their trajectories through our lives today. In making themselves known to us, we are able to reconnect with all our connections.

The global network of communications sits below, above and all around us in the physical sense. The intellectual connections this facilitates enable us to expand our sense of the literal connections this relies on.

'Your roles as artists is to present the unavoidable temptation for people to see the world as other than it is' (Andrew Simm addressing the INSATIABLE symposium, Chelsea 19/10/2012).

Cadie Froehlich is currently studying an MA in Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts. Previously having graduated with a distinction in Fine Art from Brighton University, and is Her piece ‘Tea Table’ won second in the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2010.

Recent exhibitions include Bend Over Shirley at Beaconsfield Contemporary, London, A Machine for Living in at Hannah Barry, London, and Without Boats, Dreams Dry Up at the Triangle space, Chelsea. She recently completed a residency and solo show at Grey Area Gallery, Brighton, and a group residency at Joya arte: + ecologica, Spain.

In my work I am concerned with the physicality of communication between people, materials and objects. In particular I investigate the hidden infrastructure and events which all go into how we interact. I manipulate salvaged copper in various incarnations to visualise these interactions. I see my work as interventions in the life-cycle of copper, with a broader reference to the natural world and our legacy within it. www.cadifroehlich.co.uk

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Bibliography Alloway, T.P. & Alloway, R. G. (2012) The impact of engagement with social networking sites (SNSs) on cognitive skills. Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 28, issue 5 (September, 2012), p. 1748-1754. ISSN: 0747-5632 DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2012.04.015 - Elsevier Science BBC News. BBC News - Pakistan suspends mobile networks over fears of attacks. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20469493 [online]. Accessed 20/02/2013.

BBC News. BBC News - Thieves stole £13m of metal from railways, say police. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16382806 [online].

Accessed 20/02/2013.

Chang, Ha-Joon. (2011) 23 Things they don’t tell you about Capitalism.

Penguin, London.

Connor, Steven. (2011) Paraphernalia. Profile Books, London.

Cross, David. (2007) Interview proposal with David Cross of Cornford and Cross concerning ‘The Abolition of Work’ installed at the Exchange Art

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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 his residency at the Albert. 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.

Picture Editor Alejandro Salcedo Colombian tourist, Alejandro is working on the idea of painting as an intersubjective threshold.

Promotions Kataryna Leach Kat is a book lover to the point to 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.

Jaws Branding Jade Nodinot & Jamie Simpson Jade and Jamie are a master-duo from graphics, they are responsible for the JAWS logo which has been accoladed as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;So sharky, and yet so little shark..â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

Due to our belief in free press and making research accessible to all, JAWS Journal is subject to a very limited free print run.

If you would like to order a copy of JAWS at the cost of printing price of £4.00, please email the team at:

jaws.journal@gmail.com

or

jawsjournal@arts.ac.uk

JAWS is also now seeking submissions for our Summer publication.

Please contact us at one of the email addresses above or through: www.jawsjournal.com You can also follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook for all the latest updates and lame philosophy jokes. @JAWS_UAL http://www.facebook.com/JawsUal

JAWS is the journal of academic works 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.