Art as Apparatus

On Thursday I attended a conference called the artists journey. I think I made it part of my PhD in my head but I booked it in because I felt like I needed some things in my dairy and it was free.  It was good to go as I have been thinking a lot about being an artist and what it means.  On the way in I started to think about my last post on here and the idea from Kafka of the Penal colony where the machine or I think it gets called the apparatus, tattoos you to death with descriptions of your crimes.

The reason I thought about art as apparatus was the importance of the machine to the prison warder. When I read it I hadn't really had any thoughts about what the apparatus actually was.  I am a bit slow sometimes with metaphors but it struck me that the apparatus is the entirety of our lives inscribing our crimes or perhaps failures onto our bodies until we die.  For a strange reason this quite gloomy thought made me feel really happy about art.  I thought about it as I filmed the motion of the black plastic blowing in the wind, a minor gesture, moving perfectly and inscribing the beauty of the world through the apparatus of life.  Without the art I have seen or lived then perhaps I wouldn't of noticed the black plastic, I have it on my phone but really its in my head now.

At the conference I asked myself some philosophical questions about art.  I have suspected for a while that art for artists is not something contingent it is embodied.  Few artists realise this and want to see it as a form or a discipline.   Manning and Whitehead and to an extent Dewey describe art as a WAY in the sense of the Buddhist Tao.

The space is apologetically constructed differently all the time.  When you read lots of literature especially   stuff that talks of cultural democracy and cultural participation there is a problem when this hits art that revolves around the individual.  I mentioned earlier how Mannings 'research creation' can help us take art away form a vaguely Neo-liberal focus on the primacy of the individual .  It only goes so far and as I always think when I go to conferences about artist I always end up leaving thinking how special they all think they are - how special I think I am.

because I was doing my PhD I took some notes - they arose from listening but they are a coming together of lots of thinking about what it is to be an artist and more importantly what it does.

I had 5 projections of the artist

1. The artist as a label you can adopt
2. The artists as someone who has trained - been to art school is a professional (like a Doctor)
3 The artist as Master ( A throwback to a guild system - master and journeyman)
4.A thing that just happens to a certain set of people when a certain set of circumstances emerge
5.The artist as disciplinary expert.

I then write that all these positions are constructed through a relationship to form.

I think I have been neglecting this from my PhD thinking and reading - what is embodied and what is contingent this will be a useful way to think through agency

Anarchy in the UK

This is my friends Tattoo he gave it to himself when he was 15 with a bottle of Quick ink and a safety pin under a railway arch.  He said its blurred around the edges as he couldn't stop himself picking the scab.  The New Year has started and I really feel like things have changed. I'm not really doing much work other than the PhD which is very liberating but also a bit discombobulating. I am also thinking through the ODD project which we are keeping very separate from the PhD,  however the picking of the scab where it itches is allowing its ink to bleed into the margins and blurring things.

Myself and Kate are working with Maggie Mclure  to deliver a paper at the AERA conference in Toronto in April we have had a meeting and done some planning.  This part of the Odd project feels impossible to distance from my PhD as it will be my first conference as a student and not an artist - or at least I will be a hybrid - running on two fuels. I say this because starting a PhD changes you.  My friend Tim took to me one side about 6 years ago and said that you don't ask people how their PhD's are going. If you are not doing one then this makes no sense,  it's just polite, like saying -' How are the kids ? ' but when you are doing one, firstly you get sick of people asking and secondly its not really a thing that can be going well really it just is.  Perhaps its like saying 'Is the sea going well ?' it doesn't feel like a thing that goes well or badly it is just a thing.  I understand that more now, I always say its going well, and it is, but behind that you are aware that you can never be sure if its going well or not.

For the record the last two weeks have felt very desk bound.  I have nearly got an Arts council proposal which will augment my work at the Adventure Playground ready to send in.  I have worked up two applications through the Ethos system at MMU that are nearly ready to send in. I've been reading Releasing the Imagination by Maxine Greene and actually taking detailed notes.  This is probably the best thing I've done as I feel a better way of working through the literature emerging.  Because I have notes I have something that feels like work , as I'm taking them for myself I am working out how this can work for me.

I've met with the Adventure playground and explained how the PhD will work and how it will fit in with their aims and ambitions. I've also talked through why we need to do ethics with them and what I will get out of the process so I feel like I have met my own ethical position. Filling in the ethics forms felt like a chore but it did make me realise that the work on the RD 1 was valuable and my final submission was well crafted and fit for purpose.  I also experienced first hand how the ethics application process forces you to think about and articulate important issues within the research, it was much more than the going through the motions that I  had expected.

I am still thinking a lot about being useful and trying to work out what will be a useful thing to do with my three years as a student.  Some things are clearer the ink of the experience working on research projects is deep under my skin, it is not faded or blurred, it is becoming more important, more vivid.  I'm recognizing that as in Kafka's In the penal colony  your crimes are tattooed onto your skins through the apparatus of life.

I have being setting things up - clearing  the way.  I read Kate and Richard Steadman Jones Blog this morning and it mentions me thinking through the idea of the 'throughline' so I looked it up again on Wikipedia - this is what I wrote about it.

Through-line is very specific it comes from Stanislavski's System. It was described to me as the pumping artery of the play -the point where the blood of character , narrative, emotion, moments flow together to form the whole of the play. So even up to the capillaries of our finger tips, the blood is flowing for a reason that links back to the whole - the living organism or the sense of the theater piece - the reason for it to exist. That is how I try and use it although it does get used more loosely - I like to think the pull of the through line on a good project is so strong that it forces a coherence pushes past disciplinary boundaries - helps to make something new.

I also found this diagram which is classic

 
The through-line is important here as its supposed to be my PhD as a thing, not the sea,  as a separate 'new place' but perhaps it is actually a practice or if we think of Kafka an apparatus.  The scratching of the edges of the wound lets the ink bleed into the edges and softens the image.  The through line is to resist the edges rather than to map them, to make something interesting but also blurred.

Monday Morning

I have woken up and for the first time have a completely clear PhD week.  This is both a privilege and a burden.  After writing this short blog I will busy myself on the practical aspects of pulling together my application for ethical approval on the Ethos website.  I will then read some Maxine Greene and am for the first time going to take some notes.  I think I'll then watch one of my favorite youTube people talking about ways in and out of the Hermeneutic Circle.  I don't know why but this series of Harvard lectures seems to be filling some of the giant holes in what I know. I find them quite relaxing although this one is proving difficult to get through.

I'm also doing an arts council application to try and get some money to do some work at the adventure playground alongside my PhD work.  I say alongside but I'm not sure where it actually sits, I can't bring them together anywhere other in the idea of the 'project' and it sits in inverted comma's for a reason.  I am wondering if the project is actually the place I'm feeling towards with this work, resisting separating thinking and doing. I was reminded of a piece of writing from another project about building rabbit hutches - its here as a reminder.

"e's not so daft ya knows he gets his living owt a not working which is more than the or me can do."