Tomorrow evening from 7pm antepress are hosting an art writing event at the Whitechapel. Here’s a bit about us from their website.
Continuing the series of playful and participatory events exploring language and its parameters, writers collaborate with artists to produce games and scenarios that challenge the audiences’ relationship to language.
This Word Play event is hosted by imprint and project platform antepress. The audience is invited to create six unique ‘artist books’, each based on a famous work of art. The books will be published on the night and will be downloadable from the antepress website. antepress was set up in 2008 by Julia Calver, Patrick Coyle, Cressida Kocienski, Claire Nichols, Tamarin Norwood and Gemma Sharpe.
This evening I’m going to describe to some friends the following work, which is the same work that appears in the diagram I drew last week. We won’t be able to put the work into practice because we’ll be at someone’s home and we won’t be able to draw lines all over its walls, and so once I’ve described the work as it should be, we’re going to try to find ways of replicating its effect but within the constraints of the domestic space: no lines on the walls, no lines on the floors.
Genuine Smiles uses a faint pencil line in place of writing – an attenuated, quietened form of language drawn between signified and signifier: between the thing described and the description of it. But once the line is drawn, the thing it started from isn’t there any more.
A sheet of paper of any size is attached to one internal wall of the cube, and attached just above it is a long piece of string Read the rest of this entry »
This is our new home. In a complete change of everything, this home consists of a white studio. It means rather than making artwork in a domestic space as I have been for the past few years, I’ll be doing domestic things in an art-making space.
In November we’re holding a workshop at Goldsmiths around circulation, distribution and dispersion of artwork.
I want to think about artworks that make claims about not being circulated. My interest in this area stems from my own work, but I want to use the opportunity to research things other people have done. Because of the nature of the subject I don’t anticipate sticking exclusively to examples from art, but I hope to draw some conclusions that have relevance to art.
Most of the work I’ve found on this subject is around event-based art. A starting point could be the dissemination of happening-type work Allan Kaprow calls “lifelike art”. In his 1966 lecture How To Make A Happening he urges us to “happen” in the real world and not in art, and not to put on shows for audiences. He differentiates between the happenings and the instructions or descriptions of them, saying that the latter are not art, “just literature”. Nevertheless these happenings enter an art context and find an art audience through this “literature”, or informally through anecdote. Read the rest of this entry »
Tomorrow from 12-6pm I’ll be at FormContent with antepress. Here’s a bit about them:
FormContent is a curatorial project space, initiated in 2007 by Francesco Pedraglio, Caterina Riva and Pieternel Vermoortel in London’s East End. Its mission is to create a space in which to experiment with ideas and exhibition formats, to foster an active collaboration between artists and curators while challenging their roles.
… and here’s a bit about what we’ll be doing there:
For the month ahead a printed text work of mine will be online as part of WE’RE ALL GOING TO BLOW SO THE BUILDING GOES. It’s the first in a series of month-long online exhibitions at www.gandtpresents.com. Most works in the exhibition are scans of limited edition printed artists’ books, and they’re available to download until August 9th.
The picture below shows the framework of a discussion we held last night at the Vyner St space. We talked about LIKE WHEN YOU in connection with Claire and Altair’s Empty Studio Interviews project, as a way to think more about correspondences between studio and gallery spaces.
A number of practising artists came along and talked about how they use their studios, and many of them didn’t feel the space of the studio presented any specific problems. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve got hold of an art space on Vyner St for the fortnight and I’m using it to generate ideas and work around the process of art-making. The process is often a solitary and rather fraught one, which tends to be supplanted by its object as soon as it’s over. Since the artwork is the thing left over from all the making, it often becomes the result or accumulation or culmination of the working process. Like many artists I’m interested in the bit that comes before the culmination, while everything’s still a mess and has yet to yield anything coherent. How does the process remain (in the mind? in the air? in the wood shavings?) after it has conceived an artwork? Which bit is the artwork? When does the art work? Read the rest of this entry »
Tamarin Norwood gratefully acknowledges the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. For more information on the AHRC, please see www.ahrc.ac.uk.
