Play trip to London

Friedrich Frobels gifts were design for Kindergartens or children's gardens they were all a little prescriptive and involved making patterns but I would love to have some for my shelves.  I visited the exhibition "Play well " at the Welcome center on Wednesday I also went to Tate modern to see the   the work of Nam June Paik a Korean artist who navigated the edges of Fluxes and had worked with Jon Cage and Joseph Beuys before they were famous.

The play exhibition had a lot of art in it and the art exhibition had a lot of play in it, in some ways this felt good but it also made me wonder where I fitted in the mix.  I suppose I am an artist who is interested in play and my main interest is in making art.  Nam June Paik had fastened musical instruments to strings and dragged them around to make noises and it made me think of my exhibition of things on strings.

I had not really been thinking of art references but I had remembered a Gordon Matte Clark piece where he had walked around New York with a large magnet on a string and collected bits of random metal.  I like Fluxus works especially the idea of the score and the introduction of the accident and some of Brecht's ideas on intermediality  The thing about this kind of artistic backdrop is you find more meat in it if it remains a little bit of mythological history - the more you look into it especially beyond the works the less useful it becomes.  The shorthand of history allows it to go somewhere new, be reworked rather than pinned down.  Fluxus always seems to have an edge of ego and control that I'm not that sure about. The accidents feel contained and authored the artists hold on to their subjective position.  Art history is a well for artists, sometimes the water is father away  than the length of the bucket rope, sometimes the well is dry and sometimes the water has gone bad but it is always a well.

Philosophy or maybe theory if we like doesn't work like a well it works like a map of where to find a well or perhaps instructions of how to dig one.  I read about 50 pages of Barads Meeting the Universe Half Way on the train.  I have to say it was very good and I found it much easier to take seriously than Bennets Vibrant Matter.   I'm on a journey into new materialism to find an area where I can talk and not feel like an idiot.  Its making me feel a little bit uncomfortable as there is something essentially against the grain for me. Some of this may be being a privileged white man, some of it may be a life long commitment to humanism and trying to be a good human.  I am resistant to the dissolution of the subjective, it sometimes feels like just a mind game, a trick of positioning.  I secretly think that the conflict may not be the theory as much as the way it clashes with how we imagine art, how art can be speculative.  I know that for lots of the theorists this is a problem easily worked through, we can still have our subjective agency but it doesn't take priority over everything else. When you try to be an artist the drive to realise your ideas becomes a big part of who you are.  The motivation for the work, the priority, is to hold it together against multiple forces, a subjective dispersed across ecologies is difficult.

This is an image of the Opies skipping in a school. I really liked the play exhibition- it wasn't very academic but it did remind me how little I know about play and the play movement.  There was a limited amount about adventure play but a great film of Lady Allen it was nice to see her in the flesh.  She talked about building 500 playgrounds withing 5 years after the war, it made me feel sad that they are all closing and I recognised a danger within this nostalgia.  There was a brilliant film of a group of boys let loose in a gallery destroying sculptures and then rebuilding things and making dens although it actually wasn't that organised they really just smashed stuff up and then felt a bit guilty.

The artist Adam James who does lots of work about Larps had got into loose parts and made a strange sculpture that it seemed impossible to do anything with.  This said the enabler people were brilliant and loads of people were having a good go to build mini Stonehenge.  My reflection was although he talked about Loose parts theory he hadn't really taken it on board.  I have read the short piece by Nicholson and like the chapter in Anarchy in action by Colin Ward there is a definite lack of content in these texts.   They talk of different times and different worlds and I really do like them but they don't lay things out very clearly rather they put the issues at hand central. 

Writing this jumble I wonder if I'm getting distracted again I'm certainly working and reading and not doing anything else other than read write think and look but it feels a bit tractionless again, like a big tank stuck in the mud - that's a reference to Deleuze and Guattari's war machine now - last year it would of been a metaphor about feeling stuck.

assemblage

I have passed my RD2 progression and I am still not past it.  I have lots going on and I have recognised that to an extent the RD2 process had made me withdraw from things.  I have three ideas and they are quite short.

1.  Art helps us keep on the edge of chaos it helps us to stay on the edge of anything that makes sense.

2.  This keeping on the edge of chaos is maintained by a consistency of practice - what I have started calling the secret plan.  It is a plan that is secret from everyone it is in the background like the space behind your head - you have an idea it is there but are not sure what it is.

3. I get sad when I can't get my life to fit the secret plan of practice my plan is very flexible but it is not shatterproof.

Aspects of doing a PhD can't bend to fit my secret plan and this has messed with my melon and left me feeling a bit lopsided.  I am waiting for the feeling to lift as I'm not sure what I need to do to make it go away.  Underlying the last few days has being a minor guilt that I'm not doing any work.  I have been really busy and read and thought a lot and had meetings.  I have started to think about writing my literature review about loose parts play and their affordance.  I have read quite a bit and its been useful.  My problem is that I'm been drawn into play theory when I think I want to work with art theory.  Perhaps it is these two phases or modes of assemblage that I need to weave together in the literature review through aesthetics.  This was what was in my first RD2 before  had my wings clipped perhaps I need to get a little bit of this out of my system as it did fit my secret plan.  I know it wasn't a PhD though so perhaps I should do something else. 

And now this is me.

I took this picture just before Christmas. I took it with the intention of writing a blog post about measurement and the fact I need to remind myself to be shatter resistant.  I moved the pan scrub in the sink to improve the composition. I only mention this as Abi had noticed me repositioning children's tissue paper  on sheets I was laminating while saying  " That's perfect, brilliant" to the kids. Whether this is aesthetic OCD or my Faux-Bauhaus artistic training it has always seemed important that things are positioned properly. That they hold their weight and composition.

I am not shatter resistant; I feel shattered,  stretched, strung out - as Bilbo the Hobbit says, 'like butter spread too thin'. At least I remembered I had moved the pan scrub, I noticed my action and chose to ignore it. I have discovered that the moving of the pan scrub is a distraction.  Someone could probably write a pointless study about where it should go and somehow link it to the new materialism  through assemblage theory but you need to ask yourself why would ya and what would it do.

The RD2 is passed; I got some interesting feedback and I have a focus.  The rulers in the sink were going to point towards measurement.  I was going to say that the ruler is an instrument of measurement that works and changes neither what it measures or itself. The point was that having  read lots of new materialism that was referencing the quantum world and quantum measurements and uncertainty principle, I wanted to try to say that on some scales a ruler is fine especially if you want to know how long a piece of string is. This is my first problem - I need to get past it.

This all seems a bit pointless today. I drank champagne on Friday to celebrate getting through my RD2 and then finished Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?  this morning. I  have then been reading adventure play literature about loose parts play for the rest of the day and writing an abstract for a conference in Finland. It all feels not quite right, like I'm a wannabe play-worker/academic/artist.  What I want to be is an artist who is interested in thinking differently about the world as I have run out of rope to hang myself with.

I have now got to do three reminders.  The first is that in What Is Philosophy chapter seven, D and G explain that art does not sit on the same plane as science or philosophy it sits in a world of sensation - the aesthetic realm.  They are very clear about this and they are clear about the mind being a point where the plane of science (what can be measured and find a center through the forces that hold it) and philosophy (that which establishes concepts on an unfolding plane of immanence) and art meet. I liked this book and I think that it makes sense of things. There is a bit where they say that drugs as substances are flaky so the thinking or ideas or art that emerge from taking drugs must also be flaky. I loved this bit partly because it is so stupid and also partly because I had reached the point when I read it that I considered it to be true. In the conclusion there seems to be an intimation that they had lost their edge and even that some of the thoughts they had had were losing their coherence as if they had built something bigger than their current selves; they were old with decaying minds, only a few years from not being able to resist jumping from the open window.

Laura and Kate have asked me to start to write my literature review when I'm not under pressure.  Something to share at our next supervision.  The RD2 process let me know that there is an ordering at hand and for all the investment in an ontological turn there is a certain amount of stamp collecting that needs to take place.  I think I have started this today I am reading some nice stuff about adventure play. I am taking a new materialist line of sight and avoiding a line of flight but I wonder what this means.  I don't know why the Paul Anderson film about the dress maker was called The Phantom Thread, but that is what it feels like today - chasing a phantom. There is a scene where Daniel Day-Lewis knowingly eats the poison mushrooms his lover collects and cooks - she says, "I want you flat on your back, helpless, tender open.......you need to settle down a little." This is what it feels like today.

New Year New Materialism

I made these out of plastercine  at a sleepover at the science museum in London a couple of years ago.  It was a strange event, Richard Wentworth was there doing a talk, he was very good, he is an old school artist and a good art reference when we talk of materialism.  I especially like the green bean but Lollo Roso is not an easy thing to make or model, some things are easier to represent than others.

A few years ago I wondered why the figures at Madame Tussourds are not considered as super-real sculptures. I know they have their own tradition yet they are striving to represent the reality of a human, even if only from the outside. I don't know if anyone has written about it and for my blog I don't really care. There seems to be something in the negative or difference, the "not art" that might help us understand what art is.  What is it about Wax works that means they are not art ?  On Wikipedia it suggest that they are not art as they are not intended to be art and this makes them popular visitor attractions, perhaps this is why the fairground was a home for the early moving image as spectacle and ahy many art cinemas are empty.   When I went to see Francois Massarto  a couple of years ago he suggested that the term artist was a problem and perhaps we all needed move on; it was what Jessica Gullion would describe as a Zombie category. I still feel a bit niggled by this, I can see his point but behind being a dad and a husband it sometimes feels like I need the label. Nobody says firefighters or mechanics should not carry their labels within their job descriptions.  Perhaps Francois point is that artists are like firefighters but all the fires have gone out. Perhaps that firefighters now do much more than fight fires so the label is confusing and outdated. I like being an artist because it is wild, undefined and is as Sartre would suggest it helps to live a life not as an object, to position existence before essence.

We are now here and here is where we are. I have just sent Kate a new draft of my RD2 which I seem to have been going on about for ages. It did seriously let get under my skin.  I have learnt a few major lessons from this process and they will be helpful for the next couple of years so I put them here to remind myself.

1. In the end I am doing a PhD and although I can mess with the edges I need to make what I write into something that can be marked as a PhD.

2. The conception of knowledge at the university is not like outside the university.  It is faith based in that it believes in itself.

3. This is not an opportunity to be honest or to perform - the path is somewhere in the middle.

4. Everything you read you forget.

5. It is easier to represent a green bean than Lollo Rosso sometimes the best thing to do is take the easy option.

6. The best writing, like the best walks ends up where it sets off . Dad doesn't always have to run back to get the car.