The last Blog Post

 

Its time for the clocks to leap forward so I have just been in the cellar preparing the old sundial.  I've started to swap them over every six months again as we have moved and our new house is closer to Abbeyfield park.  I  have decided that this is going to be my last blog post on MYPHD the accidentally clever title, it has to end somewhere.  I spoke to Kate about it and she seemed to think it was a good idea, a transition from function to meaning or data to evidence or at the very least a publishing, the creation of an object with edges. This seems appropriate. 

This drawing of the line of completion is very significant in that the whole of my PhD inquiry has evolved into an exploration of territory.  This is close to the original concept of residency as method in that it expands on what a residency can be within its interactions with the world.  At points I have thought of residency as assemblage but this pins it too closely to the Deleuzian flag pole. I need a more practical and empirical set of concepts to produce something relevant.  The idea of territory has been present from the start and this Blog has afforded a line of flight across the assemblage of  residency.  The shift in thinking over the three years is a movement towards understanding process and flow better in relation  to arts practice.  It is a making sense of things that were on the edges of thought, not really moving them centrally but allowing them to fizz.  Like Berocca tablet bubbling in the glass to help with the hangover sometime effervescence is the only thing that affords a cure, however temporary. 

I had a text exchange with Kate who is keen to get me done and dusted she is been very helpful.  She says 

Start writing an introduction that explains 

1) why did you want to do this thesis 

2) who are you 

3) what the playground means and 

4) the problem in hand- how residency as method is both a proposition and a question.

These all seem like big questions and I am tempted to start to answer them here but as this is my last post I am required to sign off and open a new folder on my desktop called the final push and create a new word document. I am a reluctant academic and will attempt to finish what I have started. 

The Way Things Wear

I used to be interested in how peoples hands would wear things.  The shiny big toe on the crude elfin figure of Pan in the botanical gardens. The patina polished  away by the acid coated sweaty fingertips of stroking of hands.  There was a wooden handle on an old style across the path on the way to my school, the edges warn smooth now fitting perfectly in the palm of my child self hand.  Form following function warn into its becoming through persistent use.  I made a series of works called the way things wear. The cast of the space missing in an old stone step at Bolsover castle. The absent end of my Nana's Yorkshire pudding spoon given to her as a wedding present warn away in half a centuries batter and now nestled in our cutlery draw.  The visualized record of entropy, the fact everything is gradually been warn away and re-dispersed across the world.   The wood in the image above was salvaged from a piece of play equipment. It has warn quickly due to the presence of sand and the fact it was needed as a grip when climbing through a hatch.  This wood is a jump, a hyperlink back to a line of practice that is always present yet currently behaves like a well behaved cancer and lives in remission.  Culture is ordinary - this is a fact.  Where does this thing, the writing of a PhD sit within this line of undefined practice? this is a question for my abstract because if the PhD can not accommodate the practice within its event it is irrelevant.  I may need to follow the advice of my good friend a bongwater and find something more useful to occupy my last few years of my creative production. The piece that is warn away is also present, the space it once occupied resonates with its absense.

 I have come back to my desk after what seems like a long time.  The writing above is from one of my first sole authored book chapters, it resonates now.  Titorelli bemoaning his inability to make great art as he has spent too much time with the lawyers has always stuck in my mind. This along with K's long walk up twisted staircases to visit him in his studio. A life as an artist is specific and requires practice. It is not better than another life yet it is different, the things that make it different are things that make an artist.

The fear of becoming an academic has receded a little now as it becomes clear that there is little chance of that.  I am a starter finisher though and although the writing feels daunting in oh so many ways the task has a certain urgency due to approaching deadlines. I spoke to Kate this morning and she is going to set me a daily writing task, this will be good for me.  I copied and pasted everything I have written into a single document - it was only 35000 words which is a bit worrying- there must be over 60000 on this blog which isn't a PhD but I am rather proud of it.

Culture is ordinary this is where it starts.  I have done the work the reading and the thinking I just have the writing to do now and although this is daunting I think I have an idea of what I need to do.   Ben Shannon PhD has a big section where he writes about the affordances of research-creation in  relation to his PhD study.  He doesn't make a distinction between research-creation and PaR this coupled with attending a workshop about working on research projects with artists reveals a gap in knowledge even if it is present within the literature.  I need to write about the affordance of research-creation in relation to my journey through the academy.  When I first started working with Kate Pahl we set off to do a conference in Boston she told me that the university should be a station that the train of my life passes through.  A warning not to get stuck in  the thick mud of it, good advice and something I took on board. My train has stopped but I'm not getting off just splitting my ticket to save money with an eye on a destination of choice.

Busy Times

 I am currently working on.

1. Building a climbing wall at Highfields adventure playground.

2. Shadow Play at both Adventure playgrounds working towards an event early April

3. We are our Stories project in Bristol with Jennifer

4. Treescapes project with Kate.

5. Festival of the Mind project with Clare.

6. Potential Calligari project.

7. I am writing a paper on Multi-modality and research-creation.  

I have finished all the projection jobs we had booked in and will finish the climbing wall next week but I haven't had any time to work on my PhD for a month.  When I return to it I am hoping that I will have a focus on preparing something to submit.  It isn't the first time I have hoped for this but it is as I said on here a couple of months ago- crunch time.  I am aiming for the October 3 rd deadline for submission. I am not sure how practical this is but if I kick the can forward again at this point I'm sure I will not be able to get the focus and the time I will need to finish things off.

In the short term though I have enjoyed been busy and doing project work - I've pushed myself past the COVID barrier.  I've justified a lot of this by telling myself I need to earn money as my bursary has ended; there is some truth in this.  After Christmas I did feel worried about my mental health, part of my subjective ecology was starting to vanish up my own anus.  I know I should of stitched it up with fishing line if I was going to actually make a Body without Organs. I am a victim of my own neglect.  I have had four breaks from writing over the past three years, this is the longest and I am hoping the return will be more productive.

Working on the shadow -puppet project has reminded me of the things that happen when you are not doing research.  The fantastic and miriad relations, stories and connections that are always meant too be blown away by the wind.  The edge of the platform, the frame for this work is grown and flows from relationships, the ethics are located and persoanl.  Calling work 'research' seems to be the problem.  I liked creating living knowledge as a concept and I like the Manifesto nature of Kerrys book yet there is still an element of capture. Like the wild animals that roam the countryside an enclosure, however expansive takes something away from what it is to be alive, as Deleuze would say the pure  immanence of a life. 

There is a scene in the fellowship of the ring where the Dwarves have built a giant underground city - Gandalf does not want to go there as they dug too greedily and to  deep and awakened something that should of been left sleeping.  This is the way of a proper PhD study, to dig too deep into the foundations of thought.  It is good for the hastily built dwellings to have their foundations questioned and shored up, it can be good for some of the buildings to fall down and make way for something new.  however like  the Dwarves of Khazad-dum it is important to recognise the dangers that can be unearthed when we dig below the surface. 

Again the fear of banality enters the equation, to return to been measured against a standard I hold in low regard yet the desire remains not to be found wanting. 

A month off Fingernail Time

 

My fingernail is nearly grown out.  I don't remember how I did it in the first place, it probably involved a hammer or something I was using as a hammer.  The dead pool of blood started out near the perfect half moon of whiteness that I am told, on good authority, has the consistency of mashed potato.   I have watched it grow out over the last four months. It is a good marker of time as it cuts through weeks and months, deadlines and disparate projects.   There is something inevitable and progressive about its slow growth, this is how PhD time should flow. 

I seem to have accidentally taken a month off from PhD work. I was getting deeply stressed and frustrated with the writing I was doing.  I would not say it was making me ill because in my, family things of the mind never make you ill. Even though we have lived with the impact of mental illness destroying lives, our bi-polar genes cascading through generations, we all find it difficult to say that there may be a problem.  My problems always seem to surface when I get stuck into writing and produce texts that do not match up to what I have in my mind's eye.  Making art felt like this for a long time, especially after I had just finished art school. I did not feel like I had access to the tools, materials and time to make anything good enough.  I would gradually build my workshop, buy a lathe, a welder, a circular saw,  and I amassed a collection of bits and bots, bellows and false legs, things I found on the beach, hand worn pieces of wood, my Dad's tools, my Grandad's tools, and a leather bag of lead shot that my Great Grandad had used to make 12 bore shotgun cartridges. I gradually gave up on the impossibility of what I wanted to make in my mind's eye and started to make what was possible.  The possible then replaced the aspirational and I began to make things that I became happy with.  To be happy with is not to be satisfied, when you are satisfied you tend to stop. In contrast, as you start to get happy with things you feel inspired to do more. I have channeled my desire to make things into making things that are part of making something happen. The piece I carry from my practice is the importance of doing something rather than nothing, the strange yet potent truism "Stuff comes from Stuff".

I have been writing academic papers since 2010.  I do this with competence and flare.  As a writer I attempt to play with forms, to write in a way that is unexpected.  I am a poet and a storyteller with a belief that there is always something missing and always something more.  I play with written forms in a way that I play with materials and objects.  Never fully locating myself in something that can be recognised, yet consistently paying attention to the nuanced details of words and things that bring us closer to something.  My break from writing my PhD has made me feel better in myself but has not as yet, brought any resolution to start to write again.  

I decided today that what I needed to do was bulk out my writing.  I used the analogy of a meal where you only had 2 or 3 tasty things like some anchovies, olives and fillet steak and you had to bulk it out with rice or mashed potato.   I think I know what my tasty things are - they are concepts rather than garnish.

1. The opacity of artistic practice, the secret plan that nobody, not even the artist is fully aware of.  The plan is linked closely to feeling.  The feeling that something is the right thing to do and the internal and opaque logic of the sense of it.  All art comes from this place.  Sometimes it is located in a single person yet more often it is dispersed. 

2. Research-creation as a way to introduce and hold this opacity within a research project as distinct from the creation or event of art in the world.

3. The collective and irreducible singularity of the event as an ontological position.  It feels that although different to some extent there is a need for any way of being that sets itself against dominant modes of thought to have and hold a structure of concepts that can resist.  

4. My take on the singularity is to propose, use and define the term 'raveling' as a concept that will do work within my study.  This is the fillet steak of the meal, it needs to be cooked with care and shared out in careful portions. This will be my contribution to the field - a concept that I think will help artists think and work differently. 

This is what Deleuze and Guatari set out to do or at the very least propose.  A minor philosophy that would chip away at the foundations of thought until the edifice is undermined to the extent that the only way forward was to build something new.  We sit in the forlorn ruins of a near defunct capitalism where we feel everything is to be lost and nothing can be found. Everything within the structure of the academic way of knowing about the world seems unable to move away from a building block approach to knowledge.

Thursday writing day

 After a funny week of angst I restarted Thursday writing day.  River has handed his PhD in so the writing group isn't happening. This is sad but it never really picked up momentum and I'm not inclined to keep the stone rolling. It needs to gather moss. I went for a walk to Parkwood Springs as the day was glorious, on my return I've tried to watch Manning and Massumi on You Tube talking about Whitehead but after 7 minutes I switched off after 12 minutes I switched it off. 

I did start my literature review again with a focus on research-creation. I read Manning Against Method chapter 4 of A Minor Gesture.  She tricks you by starting normal and then going off the scale in terms of references and complicated rabbit holes of thought.  I was really hoping it would make more sense this time around but by the middle I was very confused.  It reads like it should be more like analytical philosophy in that it works towards or builds to as simple an explanation as is possible of a complicated issue but it just looses me in the middle, that's probably the point but I don't care enougth. 

At about 2 I came up with this idea about research-creation and ethnographic field notes.

So the proposition is

Research creation affords the potential to write fiieldnotes from the speculative middle with no distance or withdrawal from the field and no transcendental aspiration - yet they still have to be field notes as a heuristic as something that becomes enfolded into the practice.

I liked this sentence because it pulled together my field notes and the idea of immanence in that I was not doing ethnography or trying to become an ethnographer. I was merely drawing on the writing of ethnographic field notes into the milieu of a research creation project.  They emerged as boundary objects in the field, they were not performative or a representation of field notes.  Yet because they came form the middle and emerged in the practice, not planned for or applied they were enfolded. As such they count as research creation and this concept freed them or at least changed their relationship to a tradition. The art making tipped them out of the groove as Whitehead would say. 

If I was asked why am I doing field-notes and critiqued for turning to an ethnographic humanist tradition that necessarily bifurcates the known from the subjective 'I' that knows I am starting to formulate a response.  I can scaffold this in relation to research creation and I can say I don't give a flying fuck what Denzin has to say about it. 

When I was walking the dog I started to think about the actual location of my residency and its complex set of relations.  I always secretly felt that my actual residency was within the university and within the idea of research and arts/artists position or location.  The power of the university to separate itself from the world continues to fascinate me.  This again is to an extent tackled by research-creation with its concern for making- thinking- doing, it can't just work with a fragment it is hungry for an expanse with no edges only folds.

So we come to the real work of the Phd and the only really consistent work I've done in terms of thinking and writing lives within this blog.  It is here where I write the struggle and descend into madness and come back again only to end up in a stasis of frustration.  it is here and only here where I do the writing that I can do, that I'm proud of and that works.  It is here where I am able to talk about the actual residency that sits in the speculative middle between the becoming  of the virtual and the actual in the only real that counts as anything in relation to the event of my PhD journey.  

Art, Disobedience and Ethics

 I worked in Bristol last week. It was a new project with Jennifer and I was nervous about it for all sorts of reasons.  I called it coming out of my Covid coma.  It was the first thing I had done since the start of the pandemic that felt like a new challenge. I was as worried about the drive as I was about the work.  Jennifer goes to bed very early but on Thursday night she spent a couple of hours coaching me which was helpful. She helped me to recognise things I already know about the PhD writing process  and galvanized the idea that PhD writing is a process I  need to fully engage with.  It is no longer any use to dance around the edges and write large amounts of words that are not a PhD.  

I have some nice work to do at the moment. A build project with Tom at Highfied adventure playground, the Shadow-Play project for Sheffield Theaters, the We Are Our Stories project in Bristol and the most excellent Trees project. Along with a few projection events this is possibly about 70 percent of what I was doing before my PhD as a freelancer.  Leaving 30 percent for PhD writing which seems just about doable as the funding has now finished. 

I've been having a strange exchange of ideas with Tim where we send each other short video clips.  He is normally in his cellar and I can only see the top of his head. I am in the cemetery walking the dog. My films are a bit like a first person video game.  He is trying to help me find a way through, his comments mainly focus on the purpose of writing a PhD not so much about creating new knowledge more about what the PhD is for.

One of Tim's suggestions was to think critically about my work with the academy.  To look at how I work on research and how I bring my practice to research projects.  In itself this is not very useful as I tried to explain that this is where I am and the type of critique I would probably like to make would need to come from the outside of where I am.  Perhaps from the world and work of artists and musicians trying to find a place for their disciplines to thrive or at least find value within the world of research. I am on the inside now, I feel like I am on  the inside trying to make new-sense.  Working freelance again especially on research projects has allowed me to feel a position again, a position where I feel I am of value. The difference between my PhD and these arenas is that on the projects I can bring a practice, bring arts methods and know enough about how theory works and how the academy work to have the confidence to contribute. Feeling out of my depth is always part of this but I rarely feel like I am drowning.  Picking up on projects like Treescapes and the Stories project in Bristol have reminded me how I work but also made me think about how my PhD project at the playground is very different to this way of working.

My initial work with Abi was actually a perfect  example of how research can work between disciplines, bring something distinct and different and looking back it really helped me to think in new ways about fractures and interventions and collaboration.  At the playground I'm actually on my own, there are no other disciplines or projects to intervene in so there is no middle space.  What has evolved over the 2 years of my residency is an interplay with theory - the theory has become the thing that intervenes, the middle place.  I say theory as distinct from the literature.  It is as if I am working in a cross disciplinary way with Delueze, I have accidentally invented this relationship for the project to try and make an in-between. 

It feels quite clear now that in developing my own project as an empirical study I was unable to actually explore what I had been doing for years which was to be in residence within a research project.  As I was constructing and building the project myself there was nothing (no event) intrinsic or transcendental to intervene with. I produced the  research myself so there was a different possibility of interaction.  I also identify as a visual artist and not a researcher so there is an element of performing research that never sat comfortably. 

I am working through Dennis Atkinsons book on art disobedience and ethics.  Laura suggested it was a book very much about art education and since she pointed this out I have read with this in-mind which has made it easier to understand.  I would say it is a book that places art and the creation of something new within the context of school pedagogies  or perhaps schooling.  The book points out how art is disobedient and will not settle - art is like a dog with a bone.  I haven't taken notes,  I don't take notes when I read books I find difficult as the interesting thoughts, if they are good are held within the difficulties.  I also find that when I take detailed notes they can often miss the point, find the easier routes to understanding which for me often removes feeling the books affect.  

There is a lot that resonates for me and connects to my experience.  Immanence is introduced really well - the not-yet, the enunciation on the verge of becoming. The speculative possibilities of art to engender difference to be more-than - to over-code to be in excess to capture.  With my theory head on and given that I haven't quite finished the book there is a worry for me that art is been tasked with doing or having the potential to do more than it perhaps can.  I read the book in bed at Jenifer's as I thought about our next day in school.  A big part of me was in complete agreement with thoughts from Rancierre and Spinoza and Whitehead and Deleuze and Guattari and I was laying these thoughts and agreements on the lesson plan for school.  What I realized is that to have any type of freedom you had to first be let in.  To be let in you had to be trusted and that it was too much to expect art to be disobedient without building a context for this disobedience.  It also felt like a weight of expectations almost like art was a panacea or a magic corrective wand. Dennis's book does not aspire to be  practical guide and it is brilliant in many ways, it does bring the key thinkers that come up again and again together in a way that makes sense, it does explain through example and creates connections and it does challenge some foundational bedrocks within schooling that have a massive impact on schools at every level.  The perception of good learning and teaching and quantifying it is an oppression. I welcome any well thought through challenge. 

Reading the book and then going into school and dealing with the practicalities, personalities, research project, expectations and pure logistics did make me wonder where it fitted.  I felt I aligned with the core ideas about learning and it was good to see them clearly laid out and beautifully referenced.  The book is like an external justification of a practice and an approach I passionately believe. Yet the mechanisms that come into play to hold onto and work with this ethos seem more complex and nuanced in the world.  It feels like the trick is not to know when to stick to your guns but to be able to compromise without  loosing site of an ethos, an idea, a practice, a way an art.

Forgetting even the blog

My black thumbnail is moving gradually towards the end of things.  I was using it as a body clock to mark the passing of time and hoping that I would of got somewhere by the time it had grown out.  Alas I am not where I thought I should be and have recognised the real possibility that I will never be where I thought I should be.  After a genuine push before Christmas on producing a literature review I have hit a wall of inertia.  I have had to pull back from writing as my anxiety levels actually got quite bad.  It is good to admit this to myself and to admit that being anxious is something I have to live with and take care of. I over think things and find it hard to be in the moment of something without worrying about something else.

I have therefore taken my foot off the pedal and allowed the black dead blood under my nail to gradually grow out in the background.  This decision or what could better be described as a lack of decision started just after my last supervision.   The problem from my end is quite straightforward in that I cannot write in a way that holds the central problematic contradiction at the core of my work and thinking.  The reason for this is twofold, firstly I am not a good enough writer and secondly the form of writing that is required for a successful PhD submission doesn't hold the level of ambiguity I feel I need. Not knowing and the problem with arts practice align with immanence in the space of the work for me but I seem unable to work this through my PhD writing.  I was always hoping that I would be able to do this through art, stories and material things and it was this tripartite combination that gave me optimism hope and direction. To move forward it is these three things I may have to abandon.

A ladybird is making its way across a book on Art-based methods on my desk. It has been woken up too early,  either by the mild weather or our central heating. It is orange rather than red and has around 16 black spots.  I want to write a PhD that pays attention to the ladybird, allows for it to enter into the writing and the thinking and to make new-sense.  As everyone is so keen to tell me this would not really be a PhD but critically for today this is where I am. The ladybird has crept into my blog post in order to help me finish it off with a little flare of colour.