Domes Without Looking

I’m practising for the 26th.

I’ll say the people holding it

Come to Some Arrangement

Circulation, Distribution, Dispersion

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.

Biro Line

In June I wrote a short audio play called Things Are Exact, which you can listen to here. I wrote it forwards rather than backwards: intuitively, to find something out by writing it rather than writing it to show something I’d already found out. It means listening to it remains a useful way for me to find things out.

The play draws to a conclusion around the idea of catching and joining together moments of time. Here’s part of the dialogue:

- Why do you always cry?

- I think we have to calibrate things. I think things have to be clear enough to mark differences between them. [...] I cry to mark things out.

- Do you cry because things are exact or so that things are exact?

- So that.

- Then it doesn’t have to be crying. It could be something else that joins things together. String.

Line Drawing

knee cushion jumper postcard

LIKE WHEN YOU

This is what I’m doing at the moment:

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?

(world (thing (art (world (thing)))))

Inhibited Things

I showed Elizabeth what I’ve been working on lately, beginning with the Vampyr text and moving on to Accretions and some of the notes I’ve written to go with them. I also showed her these photos of things I’ve made over the past year, and we talked mainly about the relationship between the objects, the notes and the accretions.

I told her I don’t like making the objects because it feels fraudulent. I told her the clay one was worst of all because at least the other ones are made from real things, that real people can really use too. Even glue is suspect, I said, because it’s hidden, and so I prefer to use string. These measures make me feel less guilty to make things, and less like it’s all a con. (I’ve often thought about this, and I still haven’t worked out quite what kind of conning might be going on – and among whom or what – when I make these things. Last year I made bunches of wool and clipped them onto the ends of the blinds in the kitchen to stop them hitting against the window frames noisily in the breeze, and I didn’t feel guilty about that.)

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