Until this point I've been slightly reluctant to write about the Rotherham project as it's felt like a space in which to try things out. It's been a journey of personal reflection and I've put some feelers out into doing a different sort of research. Until now, even though I've been involved in 14 research projects the world of research has always felt like an encounter. I come out to meet it in the street or go to the pub for a date. I've never, to be honest felt married to it or even that fond of it.
Working on my PhD and a research project in a playgroup and with Rotherham Museum initially felt like a perfect alignment of the planets; a marriage made in heaven. The time with Abi in the playgroup messing about with tissue paper, a gazebo, a 360 camera, Multi Cheerios and shaving foam has worked out really well, the conversations the playfulness and mostly the thinking.
Since I started back at work after been a dad at home I've always felt like a shape shifter; sometimes an artist, sometimes a researcher, sometimes a play-worker and sometime a technician. I wear all these hats with pride and do the best job I can.
On Friday though things got to me a bit. I have always had an internal logic that justifies and places my practice in a line that connects Joseph Beuys to social sculpture to the Fluxus movement to the Artists placement group. It has a more difficult relationship to the 'social turn' and its difficult incorporation of participation and relational aesthetics. Of course my work also relates to political community arts and cultural democracy. Was I a man who had only dreamed he was an artist? The problem with thinking yourself an artist and working with internal logic based on a life of practice is it can situate you in a cloud cuckoo land. Cloud Cuckoo land can be nice while you're in it but difficult to crash out of.
I don't think my feathers were ruffled by a period of deep self reflection or a personal epiphany - it was more that I popped my own self-blown bubble. My self image of what I was doing no longer fitted with the reality of what I was doing. I invested time and thinking in doing a research project differently, doing my own research made it different. I think one issue is locating the practice in the production of the best art I could, rather than within the best project I could. I forgot to give up on some of the things I knew I would care about before the inevitability of having to to give them up, I have become practiced at giving up.
I invested time in trying to take images that captured a sense of place, that were evocative of space, time, and feelings they work with the position of the camera and the lens and required me to be present. I became invested in these images and decided I liked them, that I had accomplished something, obviously not new but of a place and a time, sensory, and evocative. I have these images and they are interesting things to talk about and talk through. Our exhibition at the Museum is co-produced and the parents involved prefer other images I've taken. This of course it what I knew all along, it was never suggested that I would get to choose what images we used. I think co-production works when nobody knows best, the images I liked looked out of focus, they showed movement but not really the concentration of young people on what they were doing. To a general audience they probably looked a bit strange; at best arty, at worst blurry. The other images were more than in focus; they looked like images that a professional naturalistic photographer might take. It is another hat I've worn and the style rubs off although you need to keep your hand in and years of film making have got in the way of my natural sensitivity to composing stills, they will pass they are good photographs. In a still, you aim to tell a story within a single frame - this child is happy, this child is focused, this child is learning, this child has friends, these parents care. They are not public relations images but they borrow from the genre.
My problem then is not the fact that the parents didn't like my pictures and it's not the fact I took both kinds of pictures it's that for some reason, perhaps because this was about thinking about myself and my role, I had become over invested in the wrong thing. That is not to say that I don't normally invest in taking pictures it's just I don't normally see the taking of the pictures as being part of my practice so if people don't like them or in this case don't select them it is easy to move on. It was harder to move on here as, if I'm honest, I put myself in a place where I believed I knew best, I thought I could educate people to like the blurry touchy-feely pictures better if only they looked at them long enough. Or I made assumptions why people didn't like them based on things I don't know. It doesn't really matter if I was right or wrong about any of this, the point is because I was researching myself, I approached the project differently to how I would normally. Because I was trying to see the running of the workshops and the making of the exhibition in the context of an ongoing creative practice, I had located this in the work I produced. I have very rarely done this on any of the successful research projects I have worked on. I have written about the dematerialised artist, the notion of the 'not yet' and 'becoming'; the idea that art is not about objects and art's potential life within research does not chain it to specific forms histories and trajectories.
It feels ironic then that when I actually get to look at this and think about residency as a method of enquiry and think about the location of practice I regress into a space of making art from my perspective as an individual. I talk about the lens and being at ease with my camera; I discuss F stops and motion blur and read Walter Benjemen's A short history of photography (again) . These are the things in the background that prop me up and keep me going, my secret hobbies and concerns but I was never intending to bring them into the foreground. I slipped up - not in the project but in where I locate my energies, where I locate my feeling of belonging or in keeping with my PhD title, where I reside.
This raises questions of how honest I have been with myself and how fragile the idea that I'm working in a radical tradition of engaged art within the world and not the art world. Kate says I'm matter out of place and I think I am - neither one nor the other. Better than expected at lots of things but not that good at most.
I'm now making the the Museum display boards for our show. In my head I'm doing it partly as a complex set of relationships, partly to prove my value in a practical way. Previously, I could of framed it as a complex set of practices that drew on multiple traditions including participatory and community art but now I have a chink in my armour I wonder if I'm doing it to help save money. There is nothing wrong with this as long as I recognise where it sits, what it is and don't over invest or may it into something it isn't.
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