I have had a busy time again. A trip to London and then a week of finishing off the tail end of bits and bods of work from before I started the PhD. I have done a projection of films in the Culverts under the station in Sheffield and I've projected a large piece of graphic art on Park Hill flats. I've dressed a room with projections at the Millennium Galleries with drawings by Da Vinci and I finished a little bit of teaching on the fine art MA at Sheffield Hallam. I say teaching though it was more of what I would call a workshop. None of this works fits in with my PhD other than it is part of what I do as a freelance artist. Rosie who works at Museum Sheffield said she likes me because I make stuff happen. I can see this as all the above would not of happened in the way they did without me problem solving and providing momentum.
I read a little about Derrida as I'd forgotten what he stood for, I have tried to read Writing and Difference in the past and got a bit stuck. In the Wikipedia entry it says that Derrida writes about how things are defined by what they are not rather than what they are. They use the example of a house saying we may not know exactly what it is but we know its not a tent or a hotel or a school, it is defined in relation to what it isn't. For some reason this reminded me of Duchamp's fountain . The up-turned urinal changing its function to art as it stopped being a urinal - it was defined by what it isn't. I've being photographing broken urinals for about 4 years now. I think men especially when drunk try and piss in anything so when a urinal is out of order any labeling needs to be very emphatic. A broken urinal though is perhaps just that, a broken urinal it isn't anything else, but by god unless you wrap it in plastic men will try and piss in it- perhaps urinals cling to their ontologies more than other objects.
When I first decided to think about the PhD as an approach to residency and I stuck as method on the end I was drawing on the way Ruth Levitas had coined the phrase 'Utopia as Method'. The reason I liked it was the way the language seemed to re-energies utopia - suggest it was a process. I never really thought about it as a method of enquiry, it was more a method of thinking about and building a better future. I ran the idea of 'residency as method' past a few people. It has a nice ring to it, Angela Paccini said that residency unlike utopia was already a method so the phrase was a bit pointless. Residency is actually a catch all for lots of approaches to making art and I suppose enquiry. Its hard to ignore this fact, especially as an artists working within a tradition of artists in residency to call it a method may not bring much to the field. Choosing a term that is already loaded and carries years of tradition and conflict is a difficult starting point. I want to log here why I think a re-imagining of the potentials of 'to be in residence' is useful and more specifically why I choose the term as method.
The origin of the idea is very straightforward. I felt that as I worked in the world on projects as an artist I could identify the projects where I felt like I was in residence and the projects where I didn't. This was a feeling rather than a value judgement. I was never thinking of it as a category of work that could be identified through a set of criteria. Looking back on the past 20 years I could think about my relationship to projects and through the use of what was different about them identify my relationship to the work. This was always an expanded view of what it meant to be in residence a set of complex relations to space, people, ideas and time. It also relates to what I have been calling art as apparatus. One of the first things I need to clarify is the simplicity of this idea for most artists working in the world and how if we connect residency to place and art to the production of objects a residency has a straightforward and useful definition. However in the context of research approaches that remove the subjective perspective and to an extent the human position from ways of knowing the accepted definition becomes less useful. To try and catch the traditional and accepted use of the term a residency is usually an artist going into a place, usually geographically located for a period of time and responding to it through their personal art practice.
an example of this we often refer to is an artists who worked with Kate Genevers sister who is an international expert on pig farming. She spent a few months in the research unit in Cambridge and drew multiple pictures of pigs that were displayed in a public exhibition. Everyone was happy and the drawings brought a new perspective to the work of the scientists - a different way of looking. This approach although over simplified here is accepted and acknowledged. It requires an acceptance of the artist as a person who brings a personal and developed practice to an environment and creates a response. This response is validated by aspects of art history, tradition and an understanding of what artists do and the social role they play. It also presents a residency as a specific method and mode of enquiry into the state of things.
In my work I think I am working within an expanded field. Thinking back to Manning and 'research creation' I did recognise something within this that felt familiar, at least more familiar than practice as research approaches. The work I do as an academic/scholar/artist/activist is much more complicated than all the other work I find myself doing. This could be because it involves more thinking than doing but especially in the context of my PhD the struggle is more fundamental or perhaps ontological. In the academic projects I am only just an artists and I spend a lot of time trying to define myself by what I'm not - my identity and position and history are never really under question in other projects ( they are by other people - especially other artists) but personally I have worked it all out and it sits quite easily.
Within research teams the role is constructed by the research and the relations - all the relations within the work. This is why I think the idea of residency as method is critical as a way to enable artists to operate agentively within the space of research and perhaps why thinking through residency as method may be helpful.
Perhaps residency is a term I'm using to suggest a complete dissolving into the space of a project where the edges - a term that seems to be coming up a lot in this blog - blend. I have read a lot of stuff that is about not splitting things up and not dividing things into parts with an aspiration to better understand wholes. I am drawn to this as it feels like a way to move away from my science orientated ways of thinking about the world. The method of residency then that I am thinking about is a way to live within the whole to place the body and all its parts with and without organs into world. Our textual language as can be seen in the difficulty in trying to write in a way that does not create divisions is limited within this conversation. I hope that art can sometimes create more of a flat flow of knowing - if its good art it can never become words or at least only words. Residency as method then is about relations how we can- be within so that there is no outside. Or perhaps its just a broken urinal I will try and piss in.
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