I have actually worked out my PhD this morning. I was grumpy yesterday as I listened to Zizeck too much and thought I had wasted a day but then I talked to Kate about old projects and felt a bit better.
I am not sure why I felt better. I remembered been in a Sheffield station. I was recruiting an academic to our Studio legacy project, all full of hope and the energy. This is required to get you through filling out the extensive case for support and its appendixes. To try and shine a light on our aspiration I told a story. I explained how at a conference an artist and an archeologist had delivered a project about Quaker sheep farmers in the North York Moors now and used the dairies of Quakers in the same area at the turn of the century. They made a sensitive film of the working landscape juxtaposed with the modern day farmers reading about the hardships at the turn of the century - a nice and gentle piece of work - It did not try or assume to be more than it was. When the floor opened to questions instead of talking about what the film was doing or paying attention to the academics made suggestions of how to make it better. Things like
" I was confused because they were reading about winter but on the film it was a sunny day and someone was mending a tractor?"
The consensus in the room was that the film was confusing. My point was that despite all the clever people in the room there seemed to be an inability to actually be an audience for a piece of art. The academics were disabled by a knee jerk reaction to turn things into textual or at least semiotic meaning. I also have a story I made up about Erin Manning and Brian Massumi talking dirty to each other in the bedroom, that would make a similar messy point but that's another story.
The academic I was chatting to took a different meaning from the intended and asked me why I had an axe to grind. I had being thinking that I want to do a project that makes this better - finds ways for people from different disciplines to work with art in ways more akin to normal people help them live better with their disability; access to art for the text constipated over thinkers. I wanted this as I perform myself as someone who tries to do a good job - to find a cause and do the best I can. This was not supposed to be a single story with axes to be ground it was a trace that led to more deep seated barriers to a way of working, a call to work not arms.
From this point things started to go astray in all our projects on connected communities. Territory entered into all our fields and the age old battles began to rage in our backyard. It wasn't that we had been unaware of the battle it was more we felt removed from it within a bubble of friendships. The art school the art market, the art literature, were present but we were the peasants in the farms that only saw the soldiers passing through and had no allegiance and less interest. The studio project inadvertently dropped us into a battlefield and I had not ground my axe or remembered where I had put it.
I am sat infront of the Skype screen and you are recording and I am wondering what you want from me and then I sleep on it and I work it out. I work it out properly then lay it onto Deleuze and Guattari - this is the right way around for theory - most academics do it the wrong way around or perhaps their right way is my wrong way. The thing that I do is act as a nomad in residence - not settled in any one place and not carrying a bag of tricks or identifiable set of skills. As Holly says
" Dad anybody could do what you do but nobody ever would."
This is what I do - what everyone could do but what nobody ever would - which leads me to thinking about territory. After yesterday I thought about my RD2 interview and the idea of not giving away my practice the complete and only sense of keeping it secret. From this comes the notion of arts practice as the secret plan, the plan that is, that has to remain, a secret even to me. This is the point as as it becomes public it claims territory when it is private it allows me to proceed or perhaps the project to proceed in smooth rather than striated space. As the art object or thing that is preferal or ignored it sits outside of everything it is neither minor or major or molar or molecular it is nomadic. If it is unseen it does not become part of the meaning making where it is mounted to a board put in a frame or put on a wall - it is able to become what it can become, it has a potential for emergence. In putting it forward it is fixed. Its potential which was never great is rung out like a dirty tea cloth. It was never what the project was about anyway it was merely a node in the nomadic war machine of residency.
A bit more theory - Here goes then.
The line from new -materialism is infact the the flat ontology but rather than going from a Barad or a Bennet perspective I approach the flatness through a Guattari and Deleuze notion of smooth space and therefore presenting art as part of a nomadic war machine and the artist working as journeyman nomad that does not take their territory with them or settle. Kate used to say I should be a train always passing through and not stopping. The notion of residency is then not associated with dwelling but linked to moving through smooth rather than striated space. This position is counter to a tradition where artist with expertise explores space through established method with the intention of finding and communicating new meaning. The points in projects such as the unicorn horn or Carlos are territorilisations and deterrotirilsations but as they are minor they do not divide space they merely allow for what Whitehead would call a flight of the speculative imagination. A dropping down below the clouds to find a position, a 'where you are' at that moment rather than trying to map an area or terrain.
I take this little nit ( this was a typo but I quite like it) of theory and worldize it play it alongside the residency and then record both together so neither takes control neither is allowed to striate the space. This I think is what I have done with the idea of residency and art since the start of working in place across different fields of knowledge. Hold the idea of the nomad and nomad thought. I'm sure there is a lot written about this but if I look at my problems on this little journey into writing then they are all linked to space been closed down and structured. How ludicrous it seems to be doing any sort of research where the territory is fully marked out with ethical procedures where power enacts itself in very simple ways. How riddled and structured the academic space and approaches to knowledge. The desire is not for transgression nit (again another typo - this nit is god sent) is for nomad thought and many many artists can bring an element of this without having to think too hard about it.
Amazingly in my nomadic mind I have found a section in the nomadic war machine chapter in 1000 plateaus that talks of the Gothic in a very similar way to Ruskin. I mused in the bath about wether the Gothic tribes were actually our indigenous people. In tune with this northern climate in our austerity and love of the changing elements. Offcourse I am not the first to notice this and I am biased but I think that both Ruskin and D and G find elements of the same thing in the Gothic architecture and process of building cathedrals. This would be an interesting connection for a literature review (nit).
I wonder if this idea of the residency as nomadic drawing on the flatness or the desire for flatness that emerges in new materialism has any legs. The legs seem to drop off things really quickly at the moment. My dad told me this joke when I was younger it is rude but I think as it has a mirror in it then I could probably say in the current climate of poor schlarship that it references Lacan.
A man buys a magic mirror from a car boot sale and brings it home not knowing it can grant wishes.
His wife looks in the mirror, at her sagging aging breast and says 'Mirror mirror on the wall make my breast look like they did before.' Ping a flash of light and her breast return to how they had looked when she was 19.
Her husband enters the room and realizes the potential power of the mirror, its gaze, his smallness and his desire (nit Lacan) the inadequacy of his Object petit a (nit) "Mirror mirror on the wall make my penis touch the floor" and the punch line as it hits you in the face - HIS LEGS DROP OFF.
When I talk of mending the toilets at the adventure playground as part of the residency the problem with people making sense of this is they cannot see the actions as flat. Mending the toilets or building a sculpture from discarded wood or talking by the fire in relation to a residency are flat activities in that they are in the same category of activity.
I am not that sure if Barads approach to new materialism really sets out a theory of flatness in the same way. Agential realism proposes a different relationship in fact it is not really flat its just that human consciousness does not sit above anything could I take some aspects of this thinking and flatten them?
This way of thinking raises all sorts of issues around research creation and creative methods and PaR if I choose to draw from any of them as they are not nomadic war machines or assemblages - they originate in actions of territorilisation - it is their ontology the why of them. Nomadology and residency sound oxymoronic yet the nomad has to move through places just like the settler and the dweller and it is this moving through which is the ontology of residency.
propositions.
Nomadic artist in residence the artist is always moving through.
The nomadic residency is always within smooth space.
Art is not a nomadic war machine if it aims form a territory or to settle.
I like this idea waking up and reading everyday and thinking. It feels like I have attached a pull along string to the end of the last RD2 I did that was actually going somewhere. I have pulled the thing through all the shit in between like a unicorn on a string. The flatness of things is what I take from new materialism the position not as master either crafts-person or puppeteer. The hypothetical positioning behind, below or in the middle yet the recognition that the human or the nomad performs a position within the smooth space of a residency and the nomad subjective is not located in a singular bounded human body yet it is something that requires attention.
When it was in my head and just about to come out it felt clearer than this but I had to get it down in some shape or form - so in simple terms this emerges through the work with Abi and is expanded into the work at the playground - it was always going to be a hard PhD to write or to mark.
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