Assemblage

I made the sculpture above last year, it formed the center of a newspaper about the Sheffield artist George Fullard and his assemblages.  My Friend Stephen Walker wrote this small piece for me-

It is interesting to consider George Fullard’s Assemblages from the 1960s alongside other assemblages (and the broader context of their emergence in the same period), in order to emphasise the particular intention and impact of Fuller’s pieces.

Many people during this time celebrated the potential they observed in bringing together —assembling—material and ideas from a wide variety of things and disciplines. Gilbert Simondon referred to this as supporting ‘transcategorical knowledge’. It was believed to operate across widely differing categories, low and high, science and art, human and nature.  Fullard’s near-namesake Richard Buckminster Fuller’s work through the post-war period became emblematic of this work for many North American and European countercultural groups. The environmental impulse in 1960s art, associated with the Independent Group in the UK or avant-garde artists in the USA, emphasised superficial similarity between categorically different things, or advocated immersive environments and Happenings (Kaprow etc) where the assemblage of artist, spectator/audience and location attempted to smooth over categorical complexity that related these ingredients in traditional art.

But Fullard’s Assemblages operate by maintaining a clarity of origin and reference to the strange ingredients he brought together in each piece. More akin to William S Burroughs’ ‘cut up’ technique, Fullard’s Assemblages play with both visual and material languages: defying the smooth ‘transcategorical’ products of contemporary Assemblages, his works retain sufficient legibility of their component parts for these to transport the audience away to multiple other contexts, while the strangeness of their assembled composition pushes and pulls these component parts, and their resonance (dissonance). Moreover, maintaining contact with the art-gallery system, Fullard’s Assemblages also operate by posing a challenge to the contemplative distance expected of viewers in front of conventional artworks in the conventional surroundings of the art gallery. This mixture is further complicated (or smoothed) by (proposed) castings in bronze of some of Fullard’s Assemblages and the resulting homogenization of their operative material dissonance. 

I have come back to it here as it's probably the last work I did that people would recognise as an artwork - not just the assemblage homage but the whole thing. I made paper hats from the newspaper and placed them on the head of one of Fullards' bronzes that are is sited in front of the winter gardens in Sheffield.

I'm in the thick of reading and it feels like an assemblage of ideas and thoughts forming.  After meeting with Laura I felt like I had a way to move forward so in the background I'm quietly reading Dewey and then I'm going to read some Maxine Greene and I'm hoping to fill in a few holes.  The thing I'm learning is to be consistent but not systematic and that is why I'm returning to arts practice, this is how I always approach the making of art, it is a process of falling through an idea and living on the inside of it.  This is very different to having an idea and trying to realise it or manifest it in the world. I'm really pleased to have found this correlation it makes the thinking fit better and the long walks and jiggling of ideas feel both  familiar and  unfamiliar.

Two things have struck me as I've been reading some of the more recent literature on artists in education.  The first is that much of the writing that attempts to decentre or flatten the individual, the subjective, the position in space and time, whether through the post-human or individuation or the rhizomatic  or the corporal and affect or event  can take some of the raging egocentric idiosyncratic navel gazing out of what constitutes art.  To an extent it frees art from the double bind of the self and individual desire, makes it more open to possibilities of the collective and collective actions. Secondly in the massive struggle to avoid dualism, bifurcation, deconstructionism, the breaking down into parts there is often a very difficult and examined bifurcation of Art and none Art - and Artist and non Artist. In some of the writing , actually most of the most recent writing within the context of education there is an almost spiritual potential to how art and artists are imagined within some of the writing.  Although it is reminiscent of Joseph Beuys  ideas of artist as both Shaman and Sharletton it is as with Beuys completely sincere, it has to be sincere for it to work.

So my reading and thinking is drawing on the idea of assemblage or as Manning corrects Massumi - assengement and I quite like the disparate nature of what is coming together and the need not to actually be making sense of it.  That is what art has to feel like, for me it has to be a falling through.  In my first post here I talked of needing a safety harness, perhaps that is the last thing I actually need.  

 

Week Six- The Penetrative Imagination

As a young man John Ruskin had to rewrite the history of art in his head after walking into the Scoula di san Roco in Venice and experiencing the Tintortto's painted onto the walls and ceilings. He went outside and lay on a bench to come back to himself.  His experience formed part of a chapter in Modern Painter Three called the penetrative  imagination.  Here he talks about seeing beneath the surface of things to the reality of what is really there, what constitutes them.  In terms of the crucifixion I projected onto a building in Sheffield on Saturday he was talking about the truth of the bodies and the flesh the spirit and the corporal.  Sat in front of this painting at the Scoula, Christs bowed head is very human,  totally present, Tintoretto paints what is actually there, the truth of the fragility of our bodies and our mortality. 

Since my meeting with Laura last week I have constructed a line which starts at Ruskin within his writing on the imagination.  I am not sure where it goes next but we decided I should read some Dewey and some secondary texts on Dewey which I have started.  I am enjoying them but its slightly depressing that so little has seemed to change in the 80 or 90 years since he was writing in what is actually valued in education.  As I dart around in my reading the theme of failure seems to be coming up more than I expected.  Its not a reframed failure that turns into good art, or as Samual Becket put it ' Fail, fail again fail better.'  It the big failures of Marxism, of the politics of resistance , of social science to understand anything, of any type of intervention in the world that actually makes anything better.

Art carries enough failures and enough inadequacies of its own.  It is riddles with elitism, class , power, colonialism, appropriation and the fact that for it to be art most people feel it needs to be useless. I think art ended before history and it may end before the end of the world which will surprise everyone.

We have had a paper accepted for Aera .  It's for our project about feeling Odd in the world of education.  Me and Kate Pahl are presenting with Maggie Macclure so I have been reading a few of her papers. Its really refreshing to read something that is so well written and reflects what I feel I have taken from all my personal encounters with Post - structuralism and my newer encounters with the New Materialism.  What is very apparent when I'm reading though is that of all the things I feel guilty for the failure of method within social science research is not one of them.  I do not carry the sins of the fathers and I'm not complicit in it's failures. I realise that much of what I'm reading in terms of the newer publications is reacting to challenging established ways of thinking and doing research and this is making me wonder if I'm part of the problem or part of a solution.  In a strange way moving into the world of research is affirming my identity as an artist in a way that I didn't really need before, I just was one even though often it didn't feel like that.

A week of distractions

Its been a week of distractions.  I did however do this amazing projection onto Weston Park Museum and someone came up and said they loved me because I made stuff happen which was nice.  I got a bit distracted by thinking about my RD1 form and the gradual feeling that I'm moving further and further away from having a clue what I'm doing.  I wish I could go back and quote the original "Case for Support" the stick we normally use to measure and beat ourselves with but there isn't one.

I am also getting to be a bit to careful in writing this blog, perhaps trying to be clever and come across as a ""big head" like we used to say at school.  So I am going to do a few bullet points to map where I am and fewer metaphors and narratives.  It is a day to draw a line of some sort in some place.

1.  I am moving away from working in a school.  I am currently working in a brilliant school on a project about feeling odd in the worlds of education and I am enjoying it but there seems to be so little space even for a high status research project so I would be worried about making space for a doctorate project. 

2. This got me thinking about Anarchy and education so I read Colin Wards a very short history of Anarchy and re-read some bits of Anarchy in Action which I really enjoyed.  It was good to do this after Massumi and Manning  as they messed with my melon.

3.  I started to think about the possibility of working more closely with my adventure playground - it is a place where I feel I can dwell and have respect its also a place of learning and Anarchy. 

4.  I want to do some work around Residency I have positioned myself to do some work with two studios in Sheffield's school of Architecture in their Studios in residence and I also have small projects with Geoff and Abi Hacket.  I can't do these as part of the research as I do not have my RD1 or ethical consent but I think they will inform my initial thinking and allow me to situate these thoughts within a project.

5. From Massumi I take the idea of the event and how it is totalising yet allows space for becoming. I think it will be useful but I'm not sure where it fits in.

6. From Manning I take the idea of Research Creation it is attractive and feels different but has a family resemblance to Practice as Research approaches.  I will think about it more.

7.  From Geoff I take the idea that all the theory is interesting but it is not clear what it can do - in practice but also in helping to build a better world together.

8. All Laura's reading was new to me and I found it fascinating.  It made be a bit cross especially the Springay which for the most part felt really wrong.  It reminded me of the precession of the simulacra.  I had just been trying to explain it to my daughter Alice who is studying art in Glasgow.  I used the story of the Golden calf that Moses destroys when he comes down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments.  The people had made a graven image that they began to worship and it became their god Moses destroyed it continuing a long history of iconoclasm.  Anyway the point of this long metaphorical story is that I'm starting to think that the space of "Art' can be anything people choose to make it and I don't want to melt down any golden calves or as we say in Sheffield 'Piss on anyone's bonfire'.  But then I think if I can help refine things a bit more so instead of worshiping the image of art we make the space of art more inclusive and more useful. This I suppose goes back to Geoff's point of what this theory does or enacts in the world.

9. I still want to think about creative partnerships and do some historical unpicking and make sense of that period of work for myself and perhaps encourage other to look at it from a different perspective.  It feels like this is not fitting in as well as it was so things may have to shift.

10.  I feel better I have learnt to pace myself and have slowed down in the number of new ideas I'm trying to take on.

Four ways of Reading

It is Monday morning and I have decided to try and get back to doing what I said I would do.  It is ironic that since starting the PhD I've actually done less writing than I was doing before.  Probably as much of the other writing I was doing was writing for a purpose and the new writing, I'm not doing, is more speculative.  I am holding Quaker silence as I don't feel I have anything to say that is worth breaking the silence for.

I wanted to start with a visual metaphor.  My brain feels like a sea-side Penny Push machine. I am feeding in snippets of knowledge like coins and very little is dropping out into the pay slot.  When I was a kid I didn't really understand how these machines worked.  Common sense suggested that you would get as much out as you put in - it was just a matter of timing, watching the accumulating avalanche of coinage teeter on the edge of the void, aware of the no tilting mechanism, always on the edge of a big win.  Later I realised that most of the coins were falling into a money box at the edges of the machine. On a more personal level none of us ever left the arcade with any two-pence pieces anyway, we always spent everything we had.

This is my metaphor for reading for my PhD, what I put in does not relate to what seems to come out at the other end - something gets pushed to an unknown space at the edges. I'm aware that at some point there may be some kind of pay out.  I'm also sure I will probably push everything back in at the top in an attempt to shift everything a little further forward towards the big payout that is balanced in awkward equilibrium on the precipice of knowing.

Since I've started, I've discovered or been told about four new ways of reading.  They are helpful and have changed the way I am trying to read but it is taking time and they are not what I thought they would be.   Two were given to me by other writers, one by Kate and the fourth is my own, it's not really new but I have become more aware of it, perhaps it is a way of reading that I may need to question.

1. Inhabiting books.  At my last supervision I mentioned to Kate that I wanted to be more systematic in the way I approached reading.  I had/have made much more time for it.  People have said I should start using 'End Notes' though I haven't - it is like getting around to having a blood test to check for an inherited blood disorder, I know that this is probably the sensible thing to do but I just ignore it.  I have no idea why I have struggled to do either, I have no excuse or rationale.   Kate said I should try to inhabit a book,  I liked this idea as it reminded me of being on holiday and reading a great trashy novel.  The way part of you lives in the book and how each time you turn a page its like opening a door.  Very little none fiction does this for me - I am reluctant to enter the space of the book and the idea that I now have the time and space to inhabit a book is exciting.  I am currently trying to inhabit Erin Manning's The Minor Gesture and Massumi's  Semblance and Event.  I think these two books work well as companions, both are significant achievements and both have dropped a few pennies in the tray of my understanding.  I'm not sure how easy they are to inhabit, taken in small chunks, parts of them are comically dense - the kind of texts I could email to normal people like my brother to make fun of academic writing, the content I've been asked to read.

In fact, I did photograph and send this bit to my brother who responded with this text;

To be fair it reads like
you have written it yourself.
Basically if this meaningless
drivel is content that you have to
understand and comment on
then simply produce the same sort of
shit yourself.

Of course the very act of
comment will diametrically impact
the intermingleness of the idea or
proposition and render the very subject
of the discourse and the discourse itself
changed and no longer static.

I responded -

Yes, you are correct.
True - you have entered
the transgressive space that
is the Schizophrenia of the
Phantasm- a spacial trangression
defiantly cut into the hegemony
of your everyday.

I am not fully ready to inhabit these books and it's not because I want to make fun of them it's more that I am still coming to them as a practitioner - I want to know what they can do.  To inhabit something there needs to be a space where you can strive to dwell.  I have made a good effort though - I'm 60 pages into the Manning and about 80 into the Massumi - I reckon I'm doing 'close reading' rather than 'inhabiting' which brings us on to the second way to read a book.

2. Hypothetical Sympathy. On page 38 of A Minor Gesture Manning quotes Bertrand Russell.  I was probably ingtroduced to philosophy by Russell in my early 40's after my wife was diagnosed with cancer.  In a godless world I searched for something different to make sense of things and ended up reading a History of Western Philosophy from cover to cover.  I had stolen it from our local cemetery along with a copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness which hadn't really offered much solace in the dark hours.  Russell says  in Manning;

"In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held."

Russell writes in a way that makes this way of reading easy.  In his introduction to western philosophy he takes the outstretched hand of someone desperate for a guide and walks you through a labyrinth. It is difficult, not in a minor way, to fall in love with him. Especially if you are looking for a guide through trauma as well as ideas.  Manning for me does not quite manage this, yet after reading her quote from Russell I am attempting to walk more closely with her for a while.

3. Fuck em up the arse and give them an immaculately concieved mutant child.  I was taken by this approach in my last blog.  It came from a discussion with Geoff about Hegel and Deleuze and Gattari and dialectics but I like its irreverance.  There are a few things going on here - one is that to read you must bring something of yourself, two - that sometimes ideas carry a level of hidden violence and thirdly that in reading you can make something new but it may not be what you expected.  I like all these things and I think Deleuze would like people to fuck him over in the same way.  I am probably struggling most at the moment to work out why there is such a problem about thinking about things as a whole rather than a set of parts.   The problem seems to be about 'feeling' and it 'feels' like many indigenous belief structures have a set of faith practices and beliefs that enable a flatter way to feel the world - an agencement or assemblage, a singularity or dialectic - the events are all presented as a place of resistance to the reduction of life to a set of parts. I believe many people outside philosophy and the Academies, whether through faith in a god or an alternative approach to the notion of communion, feel this anyway - they do not need to resist positivism or reductionism or structuralism they just feel the world as a set of relations.

4. Sit on the sofa with them. This is my way of reading the people I like to read.  They become my friends and my companions and many of them, now ghosts, sit on the sofa with me.  Kurt Vonnagut and Philip K Dick are there as my school friends and John Berger is lording it up with a glass of red wine.  Zizeck is in the kitchen on his own as its all too borgeois.  Colin Ward and John Ruskin are having a discussion about if they could of done more, if they were radical enougth.  Annie Proux is doing research for another book she has said she will not write.  Bertrand Russell is there but more as a father figure.  Deleuze is having a fist fight with Lacan in the toilet and Gattari and Foucault are both speaking fast in filthy street French.  They are all present; talking, disagreeing and shouting at each other - everyone is waiting for the big idea - the penny to drop but as in the arcade machine, much of the coinage is dropping down the sides into a secret storage box that only the owner of the arcade has the key for.

I am mostly thinking about being a practitioner.

I'm already behind in keeping a blog and strangely since I've started the PhD I have actually done less writing than I normally do even though I have tried to make a commitment to writing everyday.

Hows your PhD going people keep asking and as I've made it my absolute aim to enjoy my 3 years I say " Really well, I'm just in that moment between absolute terror and feeling completely lost  its a joke of course but also as with any good joke holds an element of truth.

After Harry did his very good introduction to research methods on Tuesday I asked him what single book or book chapter would he advise we read on the train on the way home.  It was a slightly cheeky question I suppose as his talked ranged across 200 years of research history with a Tiny bit of Greek philosophy as a backdrop.  He popped the reading list up which was around six books that sounded rather long and said something like - "some of these will start to give you an introduction to the field."

Within Geoff's reading he gave me there was an interesting chapter that explained who Deleuze and Guattari who against - why they didn't like Hegal.  In Massumi's introduction to his translation of 1000 Plateaus he suggests that Deleurze conceived the history of Philosophy as "a kind of ass fuck" he goes on to say he imagined approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous - Hegal is absent being too despicable to merit even a mutant offspring. " I like the idea of how we define ourselves by who we are against as much as what we are for - but of course we don't really do binaries.

One bonfire night years ago I was in a friends garden and a six year old came up to me and said - " What do you believe in God or Ghosts? "  I think I said neither and she walked off disappointed, now I'd probably say both.

I am just about to go to a conference about socially engaged practice and I want to write something practical to remind me where I've got to and I only have time to do a list now as I spent to long writing about Deleurze ass fucking the history of philosophy but it felt important as it holds a certain truth of the way I'm feeling about some of the reading I'm doing.

1. Big take home at the moment is the more I get into the reading the more I think of myself as a practitioner - it feels fundamental to how I identify myself and I can't leave it  behind.  I am reading everything and thinking " Interesting idea but what does it do? "  I found this nice quote From Bruce Archer in an Article Education for Participation by Eileen Evens.

".....One works best from practice towards theory and not the other way around;that one works best from the classroom to the seminar room and not the other way around;that one works best from the teacher to the investigator and not the other way around; that one seeks leadership from the field and not the center; the action must precede speculation; and that it is from the particular that we arrive at the general and not the other way around"

In the context of my reading - mainly Massumi and Manning as Kate has encouraged me to immerse myself in books this quote feels a little old fashioned yet it is also the common sense position I inhabit as a practitioner.  It is a core belief that perhaps I need to as Deleuze would say as fuck and produce my own mutant offspring.

2.  I am learning to inhabit books but it is slow and hard and the books are complex - I am leaning to be more generous and less resistant.  I want to be a cross between John Berger and Colin Ward I want to learn to write like them - I know this is arrogant but if I feel it as an aspiration it feels like a good thing to aspire to.

3.  I love been part of ESRI I feel like I have been welcomed into a space and a field and I feel at home their . Its made me realise that I don't feel welcome or relevant within the art world - perhaps because I'm shit at drawing.

4. New materialism relies a lot of radical pragmatism Whitehead and Dewey come up lots - I wonder if its because it's American - the Uk and Europe critical theory draws more on the Frankfurt group - I think this may be to do with a fear of relativism - I want to talk to Geoff about this he will know and point to some reading but It will jump me away from Massumni and manning which I'm trying to inhabit.  That is the trick of reading this philosophy you need to Ass fuck it and produce your own mutant children - that's probably  the way to inhabit it like the people you love.

5. I have no idea what will go into my RD1 I move further away from knowing everyday and less able to articulate even a sentence - I think this is a good thing.

6. Lot of the theories that seem to be knew feel like they skirt around dialectics and the idea of what is total or totalising.  The singularity , the event, the assemblage or from now as Manning correctly says the agencement  I'm sure Massumi probably told her that in bed - sorry love when I translated that as assemblage I should of probably stuck to agencement its confused a lot of people.  This idea of the indivisible whole that cannot be reduced is critical as a sate of mind to enter into the literature but in a way it also creates a binary between people and methods and we all know the dangers of totalising ideas - that's why Hegal wasn't even allowed a mutant offspring.

Oh and I'm actually a practitioner!