Katryn
Saqui
MA
Fine Art
UCA
Canterbury
Year 2. Unit 2.1
Tutor: Dr Terry
Perk
7th
January 2014
IN
AND OUT OF PLACE
Critical
research paper
DYSCLAIMER
I
hold every responsibility for the use of incorrect spelling and
grammatical
errors in this text. This is to maintain
creative flow
when
writing, with the aim of challenging the current and future
laws
of modern English language; to incorporate the possibility
of
fallibility in our lives and the necessity of expanding our
experience
of seeing error differently.
…Confined on
a ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river
with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great
uncertainty external to everything. He
is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openness, of routes…He is
the passenger par excellence….and once he disembarks the land from which he
comes….the two countries that cannot belong to him….
Michel
Foucault Madness and Civilization.
Following is
a conversation between Kath Abiker and Katryn Saqui December 2013
Kath Abiker
This quote from madness and civilization, connects to the idea of
being all at sea and this concept of being all at sea is the kind of one that
connects to being in the middle of something, he’s saying the person on the
ship is a prisoner in the midst of the freest
and openness of roots. He’s talking about it in relation to madness.
There is this way of Foucault to articulate several possible types
of heterotopia or spaces that exhibit dual meanings – all that are listed are
pathological crises. Not relevant to you as you are not in a sick heterotopic
space.
What you are doing is using the concept of heterotopia as a way to
think about your practice, but not in the way Foucault relates it. To me its
saying that actually here heterotopia is a place or a space that functions in a
non hegemonic condition, the concept of hegemony is really important to your
work because what you are refusing are a
hegemony or the rule or the dominant law around practice, by basically moving
about, flitting, surface in the way that
I travel across things and move around different modes of practice, or
materials etc…
Katryn
Saqui.
Yes and in the same
sense social conditioning hegemony that my dad always used to say “ for got sake kate, stay in one place and
get a proper job”.
K.A. Yes that’s more of a modernist hegemony about how to be and how
to be good and how to be successful. And a postmodern hegemony is actually more
about how you operate in many, simultaneously, different practices.
The heterotopia is a place that may be a place of contradictory that
connects to your practice as well. Because it is really contradictory from
saying you made paintings for John Lewis and churned them out like a factory to
what you are doing now with underground pearl.
K.S.
I wrote a manifesto on my degree and one of the criteria was that I have the
right to change my mind and contradict what I do at any time.
K.A. Well that just wanting your cake and eating it ! ha ha.
I think there is something about what you are also doing, to think
about the heterotopia here and the way it talks about the human geographers who
have been using the term heterotopia to help them understand the contemporary
emergence of difference and identity as essential issue in the idea of place,
and space to what you are working on too.
K.S.
My work has been all about being out of place, free on the sea but trapped in
the boat. Like the lobster in the lobster pot – it can actually get out, but
just doesn’t know how. The lobster is trapped in an open space.
K.A. By
adding a conversation into the essay you are refusing again the conventional
form of writing about your practice. We
have had a conversation about exactly what your doing..
“The artist is a DJ
re-mixing” (Nicolas Bourriaud 2002)
I am a non-specialised labourer who adapts to
multiple situations, a creative producer, a producer of situations. I am an
inconsequential surfer of art theory, Semionaut, I’m a DJ who mixes images,
texts and art movements. A precarious voyager who collects samples to generate
fragments of knowledge, a traveller of signs, formats and images, to visual
environments. A heterotextual, transtextual, transtextural, woanderer (wondrous wanderer) a
post-structuralist misreader.
PREFACE
Presented here, in the form of an
expositional expeditional essay, I have been exploring fixed ideas of what
‘studio’ means to me. I have been asking questions; ‘How can I survive as an
artist in a place with no contemporary gallery space,
how do I make do with what I have around me? What I can access and how do I
define what it is I am doing?’ I ask all this from my own economic
circumstances to exist
within capitalist and hegemonic systems without the pressure to meet traditional
expectations of selling and existing to survive.
Words are
the hegemony around presentation and format. Joyce first illustrated this form in Ulysees – a stream of consciousness, where something other is
formed in the text that refuses the dominant construction of narrative.
I have
chosen to disconnect from the traditional definition of chronological essay
writing, adopting instead an unfixed, nomadic post-structuralist approach,
inviting the reader to wander and roam through the pages, cruising chapters
like a tourist passing between continents, and at the same time mirroring my
creative process.
There is no
right or wrong way to enter this essay, and no guarantee where you might end
up. The text will also travel, migrate and wander across the pages, sometimes
looking out of
place. The
sentences may end abruptly and appear unfin
fragmented modern culture.
Accidental, unfinished, unplanned chance
occurrence, mock experiment, undetermined outcome, evading authorial agency,
generate chance events, concepts of uncertainty, consciously unknown,
meaningless accidents, fortuitous, happy coincidence, trouville – lucky find in
detritus. Unlooked for, time based, interactive, transient events.
Essay as a micro installation of a displaced
random collection of words and ideas with no logic or structure and no flow, a
word space, for the viewer of the words or reader to put the fragments
together, to dig through this shallow pool of text.
PASSE-PARTOUT
(a key to understanding the text…from The Truth in Painting (Derrida).
The inspiration for this essay format
is inspired by ‘Here There Elsewhere 2002’
by David Blamey and ‘The Radicant’
2002
by Nicolas Bourriaud.
…The artist has become the
prototype of the contemporary traveller, Homo viator. Whose passage through
signs and formats highlights experience of mobility, displacement, crossing….
‘The
Radicant’ Bourriaud p113
This quote
made me realise how my text has always wandered across
the page –
there always seems to be a misplaced word that crosses over into the wrong
sentence or page. Whenever I make booklets or business cards, the cutting line
always skews the text. This is part of my natural creative process; I have
surrendered to and embraced it, accepting the imperfect, as an example of my unique
human condition and appreciation of things flawed.
Words are
the hegemony around presentation and format. Joyce first illustrated
this form in
Ulysees – a stream of consciousness,
where something other is formed in the text that refuses the dominant
construction of narrative.
The artistic
structure of this essay subverts pre-conditioned ways of experiencing
and reading an essay. This format redefines
the way in which art is presented and experienced, raising issues around social
models and spaces, and prompting a re-think of the status quo.
My working
practice repeatedly returns to the same motifs of opposites, isolation and emplacement, freedom and alienation
and chance encounters, absence and presence. Changes in the artwork are traces,
landmarks on what seems to be a random expedition, reflecting journeys between
48 home and studio addresses.
This is not
just a search for emplacement in society, I seek it also internally as well as in
the Art world.
My most recent work is evolving into unplanned impromptu,
uncommissioned and commissioned artworks and workshops, public practice in the
public sphere, guerrilla art and experimental coastal interventions. This semi dematerialised post studio merges
closer to my past nomadic lifestyle and perpetually crossing boundaries.
Perhaps
defined as a Postproduction
artist in terms of looking to make art function usefully out of using what
already exists around me, not by making something new but with two boats on
Walmer beach. Being mindful of reproduction I have re-purposed an existing boat
and used another as the artefact for a salon discussion with artist Loren
Beven, to comment on social and economic change that (re) - contextualises
coastal narrative….perhaps workers of cultural re-appropriation? I
call these activities ‘eventworks’ that are sites of navigation to generate
activities, to remix nautical narratives and reconnect the viewer to the site
in that moment.
working with the poetics of coastal
narratives.
This essay is also about exploring ways
to describe, define, evaluate and sustain this kind of practice….where use,
objects and self-reflexivity, contemplation and face to face interaction are
important to find my utopian ideal, inside and outside gallery systems, hegemonic structures, and environments.
INTRODUCTION
The
production of art no longer requires the studio. Art doesn’t need the gallery.
Story-books can be performed, curatorial practice can be art. An essay can be a
photo, a list…. or a film.
….A space for freedom to reflect, critique, and
innovate, key processes for introducing change and advancing democratic ideal…
(Julie Kristeva).
Up until 2000,
I moved studio six times. Studios were my dwellings. Unlike popular romantic
myth, there were no berets, no smocks or easels. I used materials at hand;
lipstick, nail-varnish, items and substances (sometimes food) recovered from
skips, house-paint, sticks and cotton wool instead of paintbrushes.
Studios from
2002 to 2012 consisted of farm-buildings, residential industrial units and
double garages. These operated as factories with an exhibition display area of
up to 1200 square foot. In these studios I employed nine assistants working
with me at one time, mixing traditional materials and industrial household
paint, builders’ scrim-tape and Polyfilla.
2012 became
my post studio era, another era of poverty during art degree years, where
access to painting materials and storing materials became problematic. My
classic sense of a studio space has become absent from the physical but present
in a fluid, site-specific, unfixed, transitory sense. It has expanded further
into temporal, nomadic spaces that happen in locations inside the home (for
example as an open studio day) and outside in coastal landscapes, mainly the
beach and even inside the car on the street (Cheriton Light Festival 2014). It
is not isolated in one place, it can now be where ever my laptop is, wherever
my thoughts, materials and collaborators happen to be…..and of course, the
internet.
How do I
separate artwork from an event and what happens in the studio and in my head?
If inspiration can come to me at any point of the day in any place or space in
the world, is the real studio in my head? If so, then art and life become
blurred or were they always inseparable? My current practice challenges the
traditional meaning of ‘studio’ as a place to create and develop things and
where chance ideas and inspiration is born.
..The studio is an instrument, a
state of mind, a site of attention, but primarily a practiced place..
Caroline
Jones, Machine in the Studio:
Constructing the Postwar American Artist, 1999.
A studio
space is now needed for me to promote social change and create my own utopian
idyll/idea. I use public spaces as my studio to release creative expression
from the confines of studio and material expense, engaging instead in the
interpersonal and relational rather than the passive aesthetic way. It is not
anti-representational - it is an experimental expression of creative freedom to
repair and re-build social bonds in
public spaces, offering direct engagement outside the normal confines of
divisive (corrupt) capitalism which seeks to subdue and disconnect us from our
humanity.
Accidental, unfinished, unplanned chance
occurrence, mock experiment, undetermined outcome, evading authorial agency,
generate chance events, concepts of uncertainty, consciously unknown,
meaningless accidents, fortuitous, happy coincidence, Trouville – lucky find in
detritus. Unlooked for, time based, interactive, transient events,
semi-functional, function over contemplation, communicative sites
CONTINGENT
Temporary sites are supporting my practice financially and are now
promoting me as an artist. ‘Underground
Pearl’ is a community interest company, which interacts
directly
with the audience and builds upon my Utopian ideal/idyll.
Prosper is a two stage Canterbury Festival initiative to
fund the investigation of how collaboration could conjure possibilities and new
opportunities for sustainability. From this, funding was awarded to set up a
community interest company, to do three pilot eventworks in Deal and provide a
sustainable platform
to
continue doing art projects. Underground
Pearl (U.P.) is the community interest company, which I am the founder member
together with co-founder Loren Beven and local fisherman, Nigel Clements.
Rise
of the Renegade, Cineboat
and Site-specific
Art Salon were the pilot events. Underground Pearl’s mission is to
make site-specific art installations in public spaces that will prompt
conversation and debate, contemplation and utilisation,
as well as
to trigger social change through events raising awareness of nautical
historical events and environmental issues.
The ‘eventworks’
belong to the genre of magic realism, where enchantment, myth-making and
spectacle entwine with hitherto mundane settings which become rediscovered and
reinvented in a magical way.
Each project
sets out to encourage positive acts, conversations and engagement. A vision of
a better place, and a direction towards possible solutions, that are fun.
UP has provided a platform for two artists and one fisherman to develop
interdisciplinary connections and relationships. The intention is one of
collaboration in order to strengthen community bonds with a sense of place, and
enhance the participant’s experience of Deal, its relationship to the sea, the
town, the café on the
Green (where the events have taken place) and encourage other artists, students and professionals to become
involved.
Underground Pearl is a formula to create our own Utopia, to improve visibility
of contemporary art in Deal and provides us as artists with a role that
supports us in our locality. With the inspiration of people Ruth VanTobin from Encounters
Totnes, Colin Priest, LV21 and D.A.D, both Loren and I have an ambition to
generate regular art salons.
I see underground Pearl not only as a
sustainable structure for income and connection to the outside world; the
production of business is no different to the production of artworks. The business is not secondary to the
production to which creative output is channelled it is intrinsic to it, is a
structure to work with and part of the experience economy of contemporary art.
LV21
is the old Goodwin sands lightship which used to be permanently anchored 8
miles off the coast of Deal in Kent. The 40 metre steel-hulled vessel has been
transformed into a floating arts and performance space in Medway, providing an
environment for a wide range of activities and events and residencies. Underground Pearl was invited to be LV21's second ‘Lookout21’ residency in January 2014.
The company will be collaborating with artist Wendy Daws and Kent Autistic Trust to work with the local
community in Medway.
On 24th
and 27th January LV21 has organised two-days of activities for a
hundred children from twenty one schools in Medway. There will be five
different activity booths of which underground Pearl will be the ‘under the
surface/underwater world’ activity. As part of the Kent schools ‘INSPIRE” that is part of the
Education Olympic Legacy programme. The first stage
of the Walmer Parish Council’s commission will be maritime workshops around the
environment and conservation shared with structural artist Janice Shales. It
will then re-launch ‘Rise Of The Renegade’ for a second time (annually), on
Walmer beach. We will organise children-based workshops to recycle glow sticks
used in ROTR and re-configure them into stage three, which is restructuring the
Crazy golf area on Walmer beach into a more permanent Cineboat Film screenings
and talks all year around, where the glowsticks may be incorporated into bricks
which will then be used in a wall structure. To offer new forms of encounter,
and could become a viewpoint from which one can experience the seascape
differently and where the fabric of this location becomes entangled with
everyday activity. It will initially be consumerist-free, and embrace cultural
diversity not only of artists and fisherman. Children will design the structure
of the cinema in workshops, based on Underground Pearl brief. A capital grant
will cover local labour, materials to build the structure.
Dover Arts Development
commissioned Underground Pearl in September 2013 to work with them on the Kent
schools INSPIRE programme, providing school
workshops in preparation for the procession on March 29th 2014.
Post studio practice, temporal collaborative
interventionist art, live encounters, one-to-one interactivity, many people
participatory, community based art genre, collective projects, producer of
situations, co-producers, process based-experiences, new genre public art,
dialogic practice, soft social engineering, social situations, social
disruption through art intervention, collective authorship, multidisciplinary
dialogue, relational aesthetics, laboratory, construction site, relational
exercise, project spaces, institutionalised studio activities, experience
economy as a marketing strategy. Laboratory as leisure and entertainment, work
console, bar, reading lounge, cultural forms, face to face interaction, slow
impact, small impact, production of relationships, dematerialised projects,
relational artworks, production of relationships, interconnectivity and
interactivity, performing coastal narratives, interdisciplinary endeavours,
social alternatives, social emergency, sites for critical debate.
ESTHÉTIQUE RÉLATIONNEL
Art critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s term ‘Relational Aesthetics’ (2002)
is concerned with tangible models of sociability and the materialism of human
encounter which creates a ‘Micro-utopia’, something that has a slow impact on
social change through art in the moment.
Clare Bishop
demystifies Bourriaud’s term in her essay ‘Antagonism and relational Aesthetics’
(2004 October 110,
Autumn 2004,
p51-79 October magazine, Ltd). To me, she speaks of a ‘white cube’ becoming
outmoded and replaced by new metaphor; ‘experimental laboratory’, ‘construction
site’ and ‘art factory’, which are also being applied to the notion of the
studio and relational art, and where the exhibition becomes the studio or
experimental laboratory. This is a direct reaction to 1990’s open-ended works; function over contemplation.
The
‘laboratory’ is becoming a marketable space of leisure and entertainment, a reaction
against the ‘white cube’ and traditional museum exhibition curatorial modes
that replace goods and services with personal relational experiences.
The Pedro Reyes work ‘Sanatorium’ (June 2013) at
Whitechapel Gallery’s ‘Spirit of Utopia’ exhibition is constantly experimental,
transient and optimistic - providing short, unexpected treatments; Vaccine against
violence, Museum of Hypothetical
Lifetimes, Goodoo, and Philosophical Casino. He mixes art, psychology and philosophy, in a space where people meet
one-to-one or in groups to seek answers, release anger or reconcile with
someone. It is a ‘self-suggestion mechanism intended to facilitate a desired
change.
At this
stage of research, galleries and museums are borrowing strategies from
community based projects in order for ‘high-art’ to be more educational and
inclusive.
My
interpretation of Bishop’s text suggests that Bourriaud’s Esthétique Rélationnel declares the surface of
a painting is now unfit to be labelled as contemporary art and that
..
the realm of human interactions and its social context…
seeks to
establish shared ideas in order to
shape relations by more than one conscious mind, rather than the privatised space of individual consumption.
Artists need
to shift towards social change in the ‘here and now’ as a micro-utopian agenda that focuses on
present rather than the long term future. I prefer to describe the work
consuming me now, whilst being mindful of sustaining something of similar
effect for the future.
Bourriaud
argues that relational art privileges shared
ideas to shape relations by more than one conscious mind over specific
outcomes. Bishop
reminds us that this is not new, but are borrowed from happenings, fluxus
instructions and 1970’s performance art. These terms are still being used to
describe work today.
(see A4 poster concepts that come under the umbrella of an art
event)
Nicholas states
that evaluation of an artwork is in the social relationship, and the work
creates an interactive communicative experience. I see Bourriaud’s Relational
Aesthetic,
and Tiravanija and Gillick’s work a refusal of the
hegemony of the Arts Council’s funding criteria. They don’t need to shape their
work around the hegemony of regeneration and rejuvenation because they are
self-supporting multi-talented artists with a private income or a beneficiary
who can do what they want. Community art projects are usually funded by the
Government or local authority which is a good place to start progressive
experimentation to also allow the work to have potential inside the Art
institution. At the moment I am enjoying these funding structures because they
are allowing me to exercise my creativity, and the evaluative aspects are a
formula to self-reflect and validate the here and now. I believe that what Bourriaud is saying is that
the evaluative aspect is a private, discrete and autonomous thing, that is the
relational ‘outcome’ of their work, a poststructuralist outcome in the sense
that the outcome is always unfixed, has no guarantee and is actually impossible
to locate because there is always one more account of its reality. It is impossible to process all the
alternative differences. Though
Bourriaud argues that “Criteria of co-existence” in other words, evaluative
criteria to open-ended relational work is to politically judge the relations
that are produced. Bishops says
Bourriaud‘s questions are too difficult to answer (see A3 poster titled ‘Evaluating
Quality’), and Gillick’s
work just becomes a portrait of diversity in everyday life or just ‘NOKIA ART’ (just connecting people).
....Considered good because it permits networking
among a group of art dealers and like-minded art lovers, evokes atmosphere,
art-world gossip, exhibition reviews and flirtation...
He celebrates
the gift but only to gallery goers and private groups. Bishop however claims
that Bourriaud is merely sensationalising
the tangible. International Artist Suzanne Lacy departs
from the territory of the institutionalised and promotes values through
‘accessible’ visualisations of myth and narrative, ’Locally sited’ interactions
with broad and diverse audiences about issues directly relevant to their own
lives based on engagement. She fuses the attitudes of Bourriaud and Bishop, by
working outside as well as inside the gallery. She seeks a sustainable practice through
mass audience involvement and social issues in public settings, which bring
together an interdisciplinary arena of possibilities and progressive
alternatives. She is a socially engaged artist using site-specific social
practice that values ethics, audience and objects equally, an agent for change
who stimulates public awareness of pressing social issues in the community.
Paul O’Neill’s
experimental collective curatorial methodology in ‘Searching for New Publics’
takes both Bishops and Bourriaud’s concepts a step further by offering
potential to explore a collective co-operation that operates in the “unseen’
where the audience and people involved in the making, play a part in the
co-authorship of the work, display, site-specificity and spatiality of the
work. To further demystify Bourriaud, Bishop and the Palais de Tokyo opening 2002 exhibition I
take on O’Neill’s
proposed outcome for his Coalesce exhibition (June 2005 Redux, London E1) where
he says his aim is to….
…counter
expectations that artists are expected to exhibit their work….
The
‘Cineboat’ involves the boat and cafe owner (Peter Stange), the chef (Carolle
Forde), and, given the fact that the café had the ground space to display the
work, this determined the location and orientation of the boat. The site
determined a specifically captured audience as well as invited guests. The site-specificity of the Cineboat needed
to be linked to the film ‘Angelfish’ in
order to provoke connections between the audience and its geographic location.
Some
audience members still looked to identify where the art was actually located in
the event.
The questions collected from Bourriaud, Bishop and O’Neill’s’ texts are useful tools
to be self-critical and reflexive about the eventworks, however it is still
very difficult to know that the answers hold any real value or transformation
and for whom. I try to answer these questions, use them as a tool and guide to
achieve satisfaction and perhaps direct me to improve, enhance and expand what
I do.
Reforming a more beautiful place, a blueprint,
wishful landscape, ontology of the not-yet
(the becoming of being human), imaginary, future orientated, awareness
of imperfections, liberation of social life, archaeologies of the future,
therapeutic utopia, confrontation, equality of creative beings, rescue from
dehumanisation, sensuous non verbal experience, self location, connecting
people, networking. Locally sited, broad and diverse audience
CATALYST
After
looking at various Utopian
ideals particular interest is in Ernst Bloch's
Ultimate Utopian vision of a co-productive ecological vision, where humanity
engages with nature to create a wishful landscape to work towards social and
ecological progress. I do not wish to build a revolution like Constant
Nieuwenhuys
1949, though believe I am participating in a movement of micro revolutions of
independent artist led organisations happening all over the world which are in
opposition of the status quo, where more and more artists are creating their
own jobs and validating their position in society and finding independent ways
to make education and art accessible and engaging outside the art institution.
For example artist-led initiatives provide workshops, lectures and talks
to enrich the lives of the individual and develop cultural engagement.
Dover Arts Development
has received funding from the Cultural
Olympiad
to action creative leadership workshops in Dover schools, with Underground
Pearl having been commissioned to deliver these. D.A.D. Say “ the Cultural
Olympiad has had great success over the last three years, in cross-cultural
collaborations, bringing communities together and engaging new audiences and
new spaces, richly diverse innovations”.
The UK
City of Culture awards have funded Canterbury Festival and
Prosper to deliver ten creative experiments and five of these to continue on to
adventures in East Kent. Underground Pearl is one of these projects as part of
the catalyst to bring communities together and build the economy by developing
cultural activities.
The
Arts Council have a 10 year strategic framework brochure proposal to build on
'creating great art and culture for everyone' and plan to invest in making real
long term change in sustainable growth for the creative arts sector.
Building
cultural capacity is a current trend in attracting funding and is a major criterion for
the Prosper evaluation. My definition of BCC is about finding new ways to be
enterprising, building on trans- disciplinary, (cross
many disciplinary boundaries to create a holistic approach) activity with unexpected and unusual
partners. There is a duality here with the trans-disciplinary Art Salons to
expand perceptions in order to share knowledge skills between audience and
locals.
Irit Rogoff
(critical theorist of visual culture at Goldsmith University London) said in
her talk at the UCA 2013 that ….it is important
to make knowledge flexible to evolve humanity…..
The
Government model encourages funding to build cultural capacity in order to develop
cross-cultural exchange.
Artists
wishing to open up multiple perspectives as a way to re-purpose objects, all
contribute to this topical model in current global climate.
It is
also about finding ways to account for the benefits of art activity as a
creative process. Underground Pearl is
a tool to evidence this, since working with a fisherman (who enters our world
and where we enter his), has opened up new avenues and opportunities for us.
THE USES OF THE EVENTWORKS
Cine-boat, Site-Specific Salon, Cultural Laboratory
and the duality in the Cineboat begins as something new, out of place and unknown
until people engage with it. It then moves into the collaborative, providing
entertainment for people who become part of a micro 'social renewal' -
reflecting and reconnecting to the beach with a fresh perspective. In the film,
Angelfish (Michael Tyburski), screened in the Cine-boat,
references are made to the ‘overview
effect’
(Frank White 1987) where White coined
the
experience astronauts feel when viewing the earth from space (although in the
film the effect related to a man living on a boat experience the same dynamic).
In
this way it the film was a mechanism to reconnect to the audience to the
site-specificity of Walmer beach. It also facilitated conversation between
strangers, and re-igniting potentially lost histories about Deal.
Perhaps
at this point the artworks have the potential to be perceived as micro-utopian
in art, by which I mean a microscopic attempt to illuminate uplifting, playful
and social artistic activities.
There
are myriad small arts organisations (Nicole Mollett’s Kent Cultural Baton)
being set up around the Kent coast
contributing to a global movement whose principles are to offer hope and
inspiration, encourage curiosity and enquiry.
Organisations such as LV21, DAD,
Prosper, Canterbury Festival, Encounters Totnes, University of the Trees,
Underground Pearl, and artists like Pedro Reyes
offer an opportunity for a re-connection to either the self or the physical
environment of the self. An Entfremdung
is taking place, (where
the separation of people and communities that naturally belong together come
together).
‘THE ARTIST OF
THE FUTURE WILL BE UNDERGROUND’
(Marcel Duchamp).
The activities and events of
Underground Pearl have
critiqued material culture, the redundant studio space and change
in materials from Romanticists
painting in the landscape. We are also physically immersed in the landscape,
but use a boat as our medium, re-purposed it, contextualised it and the
audience joins us in the landscape. These events or artworks are a social
model, the structure of events and the engagement is the site of the artwork,
not a commodity in the same sense as a painting or a direct critique of the
museum, as for example artist Robert Smithson’s
(1938-1973) Earthworks in the 1970’s where he used trucks to move earth around
to create monuments of antiquity.
From the Romantic
artist immersing himself within the physical landscape, to the voyeur who observes
passively in a gallery, and now to the audience which actively engages with the
artist - co-producing the work within the landscape….
I have become anchored, but by no means
have I become static.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bishop,C.
(2006). Participation, Documents in
contemporary art. Whitechapel Art Gallery.
Bishop,C. (2012) ARTIFICIAL HELLS:
Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. Verso.
Blamey,D. (2002) Here, There, Elsewhere
Dialogues on Location and Mobility. Open editions.
Bourriaud,N. (2002) Postproduction. LUKAS
& STERNBERG.
Bourriaud,N. (2009) The Radicant. LUKAS &
STERNBERG.
Bourriaud,N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics.
Les Presses du rèel.
Doherty,C. (2009). Situation, Documents of Contemporary Art. Whitechapel
Art Gallery.
Jacob,J. Grabner,M. (2010) the studio reader:
ON THE SPACE OF THE ARTIST. University of Chicago Press.
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Visited July 2013
Visited June 2013
