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