That was fun but I'm not sure how serious people took it.

Last week was great, I had a good session at playgroup with Abi followed by a useful meeting with Rotherham museum where I think we put everyone at ease in terms of our exhibition in September. I took some nice pictures and thought a lot about the sensory and also the potential to co-produce with our young research partners.  I then made a colander to wear on my head with a fiber optic array from a special schools sensory room that I found in a skip.  I tried to dance in it but it was a bit heavy to go out in but looked pretty cool and will come in handy.

Although I don't have ethical approval for my research with Abi she does for her study so in a way I've started working within the frame of research even if it isn't my own study. I think its helping or rather in a very generous way Abi is helping me to understand the difference between doing and researching.  It's not the field notes or the structure or method it's more the approach to an informed doing that gives space for thinking. It is a slow and gentle way of easing into finding out and it stops me rushing.  Abi and I seem to like working together and this feels nice, its good not to feel out on your own, I left the studio 30 years ago to bide-a-while with people.  I remember calling the projects I worked on by myself bootstrap projects- this meant the only way to make them work was to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps,  like Baron Munchausen  defying the laws of gravity and pulling himself up by own hair. Bootstrap projects are very isolating so its nice to have this joint project. I have recognised that the relationship to doing and thinking in research needs to shift and this is a significant piece of learning that I'm aware of but secretly have not actually accepted.

I wanted to write an analogy about studying a wave here.  It was long and complex and referenced surfing, catching a wave of knowledge and riding it into shore.  I wanted to say I felt pressured into taking a sample of the sea water and studying it under a microscope.  It was a clever analogy that held my resistance to what I was seeing as a narrowing of  myself into the tiny focus that gets called called 'a contribution to new knowledge'.  I wanted to rage to point out that I would  miss the point of a wave.  I think though instead of making a clever point my analogy was trying to resist the inevitable defining of territory for effective research.  If you want to study a wave it's a problem if you can't describe what a wave is and any study of a wave may require at some point a focus on a cup of water.  Understanding some sort of area of study and set of events as the location of thoughts and actions that I will  be described as my PhD is just practical and essential to stop me writing shit about waves and surfing to avoid actually grasping the nettle of what I'm engaged in.  But also there is a contradiction and a binary at play, a desire to not reduce knowledge down to a set of component parts,  against a recognition that that what most academic or knowledge production does, is a reductive process to a set of categories or parts of things.  Richard Feynman says that 'All science is either physics or stamp collecting.'   I feel a bit like this with any of the reading I'm doing apart from continental philosophy, it isn't that it is not reductive,  more that if you want to understand something in a non reductive way you can't start off by carving up into pieces with a scalpel.

I was talking to an artist this morning who was struggling with the idea of a rhizome from 1000 plateaus, he is very clever but said he didn't find it very appealing as an idea. The flatness of the ontologies layering within a singular plane.  I told him that it was not something you could dip into and reject or adopt bits of and it was like moving from a position of not having faith or belief in a god to moving to a position of true faith, an epiphany and clarity in faith that meant that the structures that all your knowledge were built on were changing and would no longer work in the world in the way they did.  I wasn't saying that Capitalism and Schizophrenia presented pseudo spiritual texts that required a faith structure to read  I was more making the point that they are foundational-ontological concepts that cannot be understood from the position  where you now stand.  I can go to mosque tonight and break fast with my friends and I will experience an aspect of Islam but as I prayer I will not be part of Islam as I will experience it from my point of difference not my point of belonging. 

Today has being hard, I have struggled with two difficult things and they relate to the edges of things again. The first is the process of applying for ethical approval for my fieldwork. The process made me think of the wave.  It feels like the process of working out what will get ethical approval is narrowing the possible scope of study.  From most perspectives this is probably a good thing as the PhD process seems to involve a narrowing of the field of study, partly out of practicalities and partly because as you start reading you realise most of the field of study is written about better somewhere else.   The hard thing goes back to the work with Abi and the realisation that my research will not actual include much doing, partly because as Abi pointed out if you do to much there remains no time or capacity to think about it. Perhaps put  simply this is one of the definitions of research, it's not just doing.   I worry though and it makes me slightly sad that the area of doing will be formed and marked out by what it is possible to effectively explain within an application for ethical approval.  The system feels slightly screwed up by its potential to do harm and profit from others and a history of research that has done harm to people and communities.  The process has made me have to consider some very real implications of the fact I'm now involved in doing research and not making art and although not mutually exclusive doing research is not as simple as dancing around with a colander on your head.

The other strange thing that happened this week was in conversation with a curator about the subject of my PhD I explained it as focusing on artists working within informal education.  I came up with this as a way to avoid working directly with schools as I just could not see how I was going to work in schools as they made me so sad inside.  He asked if I was exploring the pedagogic turn and it struck me that I hadn't really thought about artistic education or the pedagogic turn at all.  Even after going to Toronto and thinking about FLUXUS and Roy Ascot the fact I'm in an education department and everything that actually means that art as education is a central concept behind any thinking I've done. Even in my reading list Dewey and Ruskin and Colin Ward but maybe less the more contemporary writing leans towards a unpicking of arts role in pedagogy.  In some ways this is useful as its a good chapter and some new reading and some positioning of my research.  Its also good as it cuts across fields but is pulled into clear focus by my PhD so I should be excited.  I feel a bit thick though for not really thinking about it. I wonder if I got distracted by Toronto. Whitehead the plane of absolute immanence  and pointers towards new reading from Sutton around play and also trying to get a feel for ethnography.  The wave has rolled me under and come crashing down on me and revealed my inadequacies and its maybe time to get out of the water for a bit and have a breather before trying to catch the next wave or collecting some water in a jam jar. 

 

In the middle of things

This is Patrick, helping to put up a Maypole for Mayday- it's nice to be helping out with stuff at the playground.  I think I have settled down a bit since my last supervision.  Moving away from an immersion in Affect and Event and issues that are essentially ontological and deeply philosophical, I have been reading and thinking about ethnography and how I am to approach it as a method within my research.  I have covered some basic stuff but also visual and sensory approaches mostly by reading through Sarah Pink. I've also been doing some reading about play and its relation to arts practice.  I have a book called The Philosophy of Play, it's analytical rather than European philosophy and that seems to suit me at the moment; it covers  minor stuff around the magic circle, sphere of play and rules but it's useful in relation to my last supervision and my work with Abi Hacket in Rotherham.

Both these areas are fairly new to me as is reading  analytical approaches to writing philosophy, it was never part of my casual reading or a specific interest.  Essentially, the reading is much easier to understand from the perspective of what makes sense, so you can actually take a few notes and in a very pseudo-analytical and concrete way at least feel you are getting somewhere, even if its probably not where you want to be.

I've also been working and thinking with Abi about our Rotherham project and doing bits and bobs at the adventure playground. All in all it's been a happy time since I got back from Toronto.  There is a flow to the work, a moving through and in and out that I'm enjoying in an intelligent way.  A few years ago I think I would have described this interplay as dialectical but now, perhaps with some of the thinking I've being doing, we could feel it as Event, a small event.

The problem that underpins all this work and thinking is their duality, the two states of things - research and making or doing and thinking as Heidegger mentions in an earlier post.  If we take each as part of dwelling perhaps dwelling is the aim, to dwell within this space of the PhD, to bide a while. This is the point I suppose of doing it at all, to learn to dwell, the process though does not make this easy, the process is difficult to fit to dwelling.  Building the space is important as there is a need to feel in control.  Space has always drawn me in firstly in the sense of Soja's notion of space as part of a trilectic of existence, his Third Space Theory, or Massey in her work, For Space sees space as something total. Place and space feel like they should be mapped and there is a certain type of mapping that is about power and ownership.  The importance here is to work out how to be both multiple and singular, to find a personal path and a singular way through a shared terrain.  I think that this explains my lighter mood it explains the reading that has an emphasis on doing. I'm working through some stuff I don't know and will need and to be honest, it feels good to put some of the more complicated stuff to one side for a while.

Tim, my friend says I need to just start writing and get down fifty thousand words or so of thoughts and fragments of where and what I'm thinking.  I told him about additive and reductive artistic processes, how we take away material such as carving or where you add material such as collage and how with some materials like clay you can do a bit of both.  That is how I feel I can make things work for me, its like a giant block of clay that getting bigger and bigger that I will knock about into a rough shape before I carve in the detail.  I am using a method that is a bit like when you make a giant snowball by rolling it around on the lawn. As it gets bigger it leaves tracks of green grass but also picks up bits of sticks and if you are unlucky, dog shit.  You then take a number of balls and build a snowman or an igloo out of them, at the moment I'm rolling the snowballs that will become a building material to be assembled at a future point, before they melt.

The problem here is one of form, everything comes back to form and the academic form is often old, lazy and redundant.  That is a very hard statement to write and seems a bit mean but at my level of entry into the system there seems to be a structure that prevents much good work happening.  It feels like a field dominated by internal logic and strange systems that evolve without being really questioned as to what they are for.  I am now embedded within this system and I am not prepared to invest my last life efforts into raging against it so I shall make a snowball out of its bits. I do not think it will give me a head or a body, it may form part of a small dog at the snow man's feet next to the mouse of artistic research methods.  This presents a problem for content and where it will live, if it does not sit within the forms of the academy then I am not sure where it could dwell.  Perhaps this is the work? Building my own route to unifying building and thinking, doing and knowing, being present and absent whether through events, trilectics, dialectics or going on about singularities.

If I am successful I think this will be the work - the addition to the giant basket of knowledge and also a small challenge to it.  When I woke up this morning Melvin Brag was doing a radio program about Henry Bergson.  I have quoted him a few times in relation to the event and Deleuze and Whitehead and James. I know what he stands for but haven't read him in the original.  There was a glorious bit where Melvyn really wasn't getting any of the arguments.  He was really struggling not to see Bergsons' ideas on time as just referencing that people experience time differently depending on what they are doing.  As a way to pull back the three philosophers who were really trying to be accessible but not really being able to talk about Bergson's notions of time in an accessible way - a way that didn't require a shift in the basic notions of common sense experiences of time.  Melvin said,

'Human beings do not experience time in the same way a clock does'.

The three presenters laughed and one said,

'Ah, so this is where we are then - back to basics.  No, humans certainly don't experience time in the same way a clock does'.

I know why this is funny and I know that to think of time like Delueze or Bergson you need to do a thing in your brain that allows you to think in a way that allows you to think in a way that allows you to move towards an understanding.  And this is the trick and the joy of much of this work, however the question remains, 'What difference does it make to think of time in this way as opposed to another way or indeed to think of time at all?'.  Perhaps we can experience it just as a clock does.

holding-Post

I was trying to think of a clever title so I wrote 'Holding Post' and then looked for ages of pictures of me holding a post at the adventure playground but couldn't find one as I take all the pictures.  On Monday, I went to a conference called the Failure of Participation in Edinburgh.  It was a trek.  I booked it a couple of months ago when I was feeling a lack of structure in my life, a need to fill the tumble weed nature of my dairy. At the back of my mind I am bothered by my encounter with and resistance to a link with what is called 'social practice' and in its more expansive form 'participatory practice';  I feel uncomfortable with it.

One of the things we say in our work as Poly-technic is that we are artists in the world not the art world.  We say this as we are not working in a given validated tradition - we do not follow Arthur Danto's notion of an institutionally formed definition of art, we see art as part of life and in turn life as part of art.  This assertion is fundamentally ontological - what is art?  In this way it moves us on from the circular question of whether something is or isn't art - we leapfrog this binary as it doesn't really matter to us if it is or it isn't.  The greatest problem of relational practice is Reification  a difficult word for me to spell but it sort of means turning the abstract into the real - here I use it to refer to a way of thinking about art that turns everything into its object.  This is why some social artists can speak of people as the material of their practice.  Joseph Beuys coined the phrase social sculpture but I think he wasn't carving artwork out of the social space to be authored by him as author, the comment was more that every aspect of social space can be felt as art.  Essentially utopian, Beuys offers us a totalising approach to art and life where neither is the raw material for the other.  Somewhere social arts or the social turn forgot this and tried to paint pictures with people rather than pictures of people and most people were not bothered.

It's not easy to pull these concerns with the failure of participation together in relation to my PhD but the fields are entwined.  Yesterday I was actually helping to make a planter with my friends at the adventure playground. I was also doing a PhD but this cannot be counted as I do not yet have ethical approval confirmed through the online ethical approval system. From an ontological position of what constitutes research the fact my research has to start and stop in relation to the systems of the university reminds me a little of Danto's ideas of the internal validation and indeed establishing the category of art as a distinct category.  I am also doing a relational, participatory social art work funded through Arts Council England around the notion of assemblage and sculpture.  Where I sit though with an expanded view of the event from Massumi  and the agencement rather than the slightly less animated translation to assemblage from Deleuze and Gattarri it is impossible to extract any element of anything that I am currently working on from what I could call the plain of immanence but would rather call everything else.  This totalising way of thinking about the world is very seductive, it does not allow for edges of territory, words like transversal, plane, immanence and affect and phantasm all deny metaphysics but in the trope of metaphysical thinking. 

I have never really bought into the social turn I don't like making people into objects and I don't think that, socially speaking, art provides good value for money in terms of delivering social change.  The failure of participation is not my failure, but I enjoyed the conference.  If a bigger failure came to light I think it is possibly art's problem with over-egging the pudding.  Essentially artists and people involved in promoting the arts make too grand a claim - art aspires for things it is unable to achieve.  This is more than ambitions and aspiration and endeavour, it is blatant self-aggrandisement and a deceit.   The transformative power of the arts always neglects to consider what is being transformed into what; for example, sad people into happy people?  People who present a risk into people who are no risk?  The fat into the thin and the thick into the clever?  The failure at the heart of things feels like the people who want art to be seen as useless and for its own sake, autotelic to use a more academic term, also want it to have enormous agency.  There is a contradiction at the heart of things and in the hearts of people. It is lucky that most of us don't care.

Where are we going then in this discussion and what are the positives and the relevance to the ontology of my research?  I use ontology here as a stand-in for, Why does my PhD research exist? I think I have something to say about the edges of things and that's where the reading is drawing me.  I feel that the edges of disciplines and the edges of the world are talked about a lot but rarely articulated well through any knowledge producing practice.  There is lots of work about the liminal and the edge-lands and the spaces between. There is also lots of work about totalising ways of thinking.  So far in my reading this all comes through Hegal's Dialectics through to Deleuze and The Plane of Immanence through to the salt and peppering of the Singularity; a bit of Doreen Massey and her conceptualisation of space, Massumi and the Event and mostly everything that mentions any type of omnipotent and present God thing.

I like this messy post, it is a bitty and scruffy bit of writing and notes but somewhere in it when I look back in the future I will see a struggle that at a later point I will work through better - it is a good mess of a holding post that requires a screen print to finish on.