Bits and Bots

 It has taken me a while to sit down and blog this week.  We got back from Glasgow and then I had a days experimenting with the projector at the picture house.  Interestingly this is the only work I have done for about 4 months that isn't directly connected to my PhD.  It is good to remind myself of this as it means that I am on task even though I often worry I'm not achieving very much. 

It has been very rainy so I've spent more time reading and more time trying to write.  I feel like I am about to turn a corner as I have a document called literature review which is getting longer.  I need to really thank Pat Thomson for this as her book has really helped. Firstly it has given me some practical tips on academic writing. Secondly it has introduced the idea that we write ourselves as scholars through the process of creating texts. Finally it has pointed to the work at hand which is to maintain my identity as an artist through writing and not to set  two identities, scholar and artist in opposition.  I tried to do a bit of this type of writing just then - tried to do it in a way that had a little gravitas and potentially opened a door into a community of practice.  I worry about artist scholars though as they have never really squared the circle ( alchemist reference) with art and text and the various levels of what is and isn't representation.  In terms of reading I have bought a handbook of arts based research and read some stuff about new materialism.  This is an inching towards a clearer vision of an area of potential study - I cannot say focus as this is not the point. 

I also worried about not been able to finish the steps on the platform at the playground - it was partly rain but also the fact I'm working pretty much on my own now and its a two person job; or at least it is much easier with two people.  One of the reason this blog post is delayed is the fact that I've spent 2 big days down there and really pushed myself to get it done.   I paid Giz to work with me on Wednesday and nearly killed myself yesterday.  I've used all the wood all the nails and all the screws I'm like the DIY tiger monster who came for tea.

I did a projection on Abbyfield house on Saturday as a favor  - we took Shaun and Mary to the beach on Friday so I have put a couple of pictures in as a reminder.  We are going away to Greece for two weeks and I intend to try and switch off as my brain is a little addled and as I start my final year in a month I think it is time for a moment of transition. 

I recon its as good a place as any to leave things for a while.

Monday Again

 

 Last week we had a meeting at the playground with some people from architecture department. Carolyne was worried about some wool on a tree trunk - it was growing into the bark a so I sliced it off with my universal buzzy saw,  the tree has all sorts of cords growing into its bark. Trees have a hard time at the playground. I've done quite a lot of pruning to create a better view over the past few weeks. I do it guiltily and always in  small bits at a time hoping nobody will realize my brutality. It is the manipulation of nature to fit my evil plans of dominating the world of things the shaping it to an image from my minds eye. I at least released the tree from its decorative bondage. 

 I have just got back from the allotments with Tim after a dull start the sun has come out.  It is Monday the day I promise myself I will write a blog post so I have a record of where I am.  It is a snapshot, Tim talked a lot about feeling slightly removed from reality, a standing slightly outside of himself. I told him about Alfred North Whitehead and the origins of his speculative-realism where Christ is reborn and Angels dance on the heads of pins. He ordered Pizza from the most unlikely Italian restaurant anywhere outside Italy.  He asked me when I was starting the work on the platform and I mumbled a bit and tried to explain that I was interested in finding out how to embed loose parts play into the playground and that was what I was starting so my work was more holistic.  I also said that one of the things I was thinking about was how it may be important to not make loose parts play and building separate from everything else, or to establish them as ideals to work towards - that it was part of the whole thing.  I tried to extend this into the way that the playground builds community out of the loose parts of things- things that include people.  I want to make Tim part of a Socratic dialogue where I bring the reader along with me to a point of understanding, they follow with Tim a line of thought, their own thought along with a slightly re-imagined Tim that offers some sort of enlightenment.  

We were going to feed the Chickens which always seems like a euphemism but although it usually involves a lot of talking we do feed the chickens.  As they scuttle around the allotment I wonder how the giblets actually work to power them along. When I came up with the idea of the chicken without giblets as my own interpretation of the body without organs I didn't really think about a live chicken  with feathers and a face. Confronted by six today I wondered what the giblets actually did. I'm not naive enough to think of them stuffed inside the body cavity in a polythene bag but my chicken biology is also not good enough to imagine them doing work inside a clucking scratching hen.  I wonder if there is any mileage in the chicken without giblets or CWG taken seriously or as a joke the concept doesn't really add very much.  Things that are alive and things that are dead are very different though and if we are truly to embrace an ontology that  flattens the living with the none living we need to come to terms with the car crash of a carcass verses pecking hopping feathery chicken.

After a weekend in Glasgow I started the day off reading Pat Thompsons book on writing and PhD's.  I think it was good to read her talk about writing up negatively and to position writing at the heart of scholarship.   She says writing blogs and field notes is writing and the main thing to remember is it is the place where we work out ideas.  I do that in my blog and my field notes and my more esoteric meanderings. It was good to know that even though I am not doing all the writing I will surely need to do I am writing.  I am producing text and actively working through ideas. I have never really agreed with the separation that the idea of writing up holds and its good to know that it doesn't have to work like that.

At the playground and in the work in Rotherham I am part of trying to make something happen and part of trying to research something happening and I do not declare either as a specific territory or treat them as such.  The thing I'm trying to make happen is not a dead chicken with or without giblets its a live clucking and pecky thing scratching up set potatoes on a day when the weather doesn't know what to do with itself, a Rhode Island Red digging up a Charlotte to be precise .

I am now going to write some field notes from last week because I'm sure something happened that will be constituted or at least thought through in writing.   I have Tim to thank for this discipline, this is practical rather than Socratic and real not speculated Tim. 

Ambiguity

 

I had a long conversation with Richard Steadman-Jones yesterday where I worked through some thoughts that have been hovering for a while about ambiguity.  One of the things I have noticed in conversations at ESRI and in some of the papers I read are striving for clarity within texts.   I don't think this is about trying to be straightforward but I do wonder if it comes from the Anglo-American  analytical tradition within philosophy.  This is surprising as much of the writing seems to draw heavily from  the continental tradition. This can ends up leaving a sense of chalk and cheese, an attempt to pull definitions or applications from texts which were trying to make a new-sense of themselves on different terms.  I am sure that all the clever people are very aware of what from the outside can feel like a contradiction; it is in many ways necessary if this feral french thinking is to be brought to heal and put to work  within social science.

What struck me and surprised me in the conversation with Richard was the way ambiguity works if you give it space.  There is a tendency to try and pin words to definitions that creates the building blocks of knowledge, some kind of common sense system of exchange.  What I've taken from my slow reading of 1000 Plateaus is that it is within the vastness of the whole books layered ambiguity that its real use lives.  Everything that comes after  that tries to say what the pair of thinkers actually mean by concepts such as Assemblage try to lesson the ambiguity move towards sense.  Because art is generally not literal and not tied into a regime of signs in the same way as language it offers an opportunity to break from trying to explain things or more specifically translate them into spoken or written language.  Although research creation probably makes this proposition and brings the process of art into art and into the idea of process philosophy there is still a strange disjuncture that happens when art has to become encoded or perhaps over-coded so we can recognize it as art.  

Rusty nails marking a table can be seen as art because it doesn't really serve any other purpose, what the hell else could it be other than incidental? There is clearly something intentional about their arrangement and then the waiting for the rain. 

 

Most people would probably not see the marks that the nails left on the table as serious art or art at all but that doesn't really matter as I can call them an art work with a level of clarity and certainty.  Making the giant territorial platform for loose parts play to take place on is much more ambiguous. For most people it is clear what it is, an area, a summer house, shade, shelter, storage, a frame, a ground, a surface, the thing that comes before art, the stretching of a canvas at best.   

So it is not its failure to be art or its queering of arts definitions or anything fuzzy that is important it is a deliberate striving for ambiguity neither one thing or another and importantly not in a process of becoming one or the other.  

Literature review and Richard Wentworth

 

In conversation with the critic Stuart Morgan, Richard Wentworth said: 'I find cigarette packets folded up under table legs more monumental than a Henry Moore. Five reasons. Firstly the scale. Secondly, the fingertip manipulation. Thirdly, modesty of both gesture and material. Fourth, its absurdity and fifth, the fact that it works.'

I took the photograph above as a homage to the Richard Wentworth quote probably for another blog about 4 years ago.  I dug it out to is today as I think my current obsession with it has something to do with how I feel about writing.  I would like to try and write keeping in mind these five reasons,  a type of writing like an artwork that is  for-itself and not for purpose. This is the kind of writing that they find difficult to teach in school as it does not sit neatly in an established genre.  Obviously I can't write a PhD that is just for-itself but I can probably develop an aspect of writing that takes into account scale, the manipulation of words on the tips of my tongue, modesty of both gesture and material, absurdity and of course the possibility that it may work. 

I am a few pages off finishing Art and Objects by Graham Harman.   I had got a bit distracted by reading his overly enthusiastic version of Object Orientated Ontology late last year. It introduced another set of ideas  pulling me in a different direction that trickled into my writing. After the great performative identity deconstruction and necessary rites of passage I had to go back into my RD2 document and strip mine this line of thought.  Luckily I didn't really  like it that much it seemed very elitist and to be honest preachy like the kid in whistle down the wind who goes around shouting "I know something you don't know" at everyone he meets.  The reason I keep coming back to Harman is he actually tries to deal with aesthetics and although he has his very own take on this he sees art in its philosophical conception and more formal history as one of the most important companions to philosophy.  To paraphrase him in a way he would surely have issue with he suggests that through metaphor art and aesthetic knowing has the best chance of reaching towards what is unknowable within an object which is it's essential object-hood.  What is attractive about this way of thinking is it gives us within a western philosophical tradition an alternative to relativism and post -structuralism; It is an aspect of speculative realism that turns away from the linguistic post structural constructions of the real and offers a flat ontology that allows space for something more-than yet not beyond. To paraphrase Orwell within a flat ontology everything is equal yet within Object Oriented Ontology some things are more equal than others.

In my last supervision I mentioned Michael Taussig   as I had read about him in the Elizebeth Groz about art and territory book I was dabbling with last week. My friend Becci has been reading him over lock down and I was wondering whether he was writing  speculative ethnography and might be a bit like my hero John Berger.  Laura was very good  and just said Taussig is interesting but a phenomenolgist and that doesn't seem to be a direction that you are traveling in.   We also had a similar conversation about educational theory and where this would lead me in terms of what I would need to take into account. It is clear that within PhD writing there is little brushing up against ideas everything needs to be taken seriously.  Simon Nicholson and loose parts theory coming from architecture opens a small can of worms that can just about be managed however this does not mean I should open the large catering tins of worms like tins of artists shit stacked on the shelves of the gallery walls and cafe. One of the tings I know i have learned is that I only now really understand now what Laura is talking about. There comes a point where you pay your money and you take your choice and that choice has to have limitations.  I am probably past that moment now I've paid my money in the academic vending machine and all I can do now is type in my number and watch the spiral wind and the Kit-Kat sized manageable snack of knowledge drop into the dispenser draw. 

This morning though I decided that in all my reading I hadn't really come across much that actually expanded what art can be from the perspective of an artists trying to enact art into the world.  The closest I have come to feeling any real insight into how it feels is Glissants writing on the opaque. Even though this wasn't about art it resonated with me in that it presents what is there but cannot be known.  This is what art feel like for me, an unknowable surplus. Harman in  his exploration of Kant and the idea of the thing-in-itself also touches on this feeling about the impossibility of knowing yet the certainty that there is something there.   I don't know how to write about this without it coming out pompous, bigger than its supposed to be  however  I do feel-it or as I bring things forth into the world however functional and mundane they may appear at their surface.  Interestingly I never think of anything as art or not art it is not a category I find useful beyond funding applications.  Definitions  and categories are what Harman calls undermining and although assumed to be the way we organize knowledge they do not work well for Art with either a capitol or small a.

In my other writing about how art works in research I suggest that its OK to make art in what ever image you want, a golden calf to worships or everyday acts like brewing a cup of tea.  I know its not my position to say this or to give anyone permission to do anything. I go on to say that you will probably be able to get from art what you need if you take it seriously in all its relations  This is perhaps one thing you can say about good artists, even if we don't make good art we do take art seriously on its own terms. 

In all my reading and most of my conversations within the world of post- Cartesian social inquiry I haven't come across many approaches that expand art in a way that feels familiar or how I have experienced it as useful in the quest to better understand living knowledge.   In the writing of John Dewey, Harman, Rancierre, Deleuze and Guattari and Ernst Block I have found a thread that links to Bergson's conception of time. Through Dewey's notions of experience that extends art properly into process.  I think this is what I have always experienced art as, a process that relates us to the material world, ties us into the assemblage  of what Deleuze would call a life.  

Last week as I struggled to start my literature review I ordered Pat Thompsons book about how to encourage PhD students to write.  It was a moment of slight desperation. I like Pat and in a way it is a bit of a quid quo pro as Pat does a lot of academic work within my old art world.  I always smugly wondered what it felt to write about all this stuff but to be always kept at arms length, just in case you got a glimpse of the king in his altogether. It feels like the other way around now and Pat may be able to help me as a local guide who knows the territory.

Whitehead is another writer I've spent a little time with, he is complex and historically very attractive having a serious finger in the pie of principa mathmatica, quantum physics and later a rather idiosyncratic metaphysics.  Sadly he is often reduced like many great thinkers to set of basic principles for which his name is often presented as an inadequate shorthand.   One of these is the idea of the lure of the groove and the problem with getting stuck in it.  To easily extrapolated from metaphysics the grove gets used to mean stuck in one academic discipline so you can't see anything else - a problem of specialization. The groove for me though is much more about process and how you move forward, the stuckness is in process not in time. The answer in relation to the relations of doing a PhD is not to be frightened of the groove but as much as possible to plough your own furrow.  

At this point my thread through the field of the literature I've engaged with is how art is imagined and in turn what affects this has on how we think about knowing the world.  The groove that I seem to be stuck in is what this means in the context of new -materialism or rather Post Cartesian research  that mostly starts from a position of flatness.  How and in what ways can the process of art-making or to follow Dewey art as experience be part of thinking about how we experience and expand the fields of art and living knowledge.  Research creation and the origins of practice as research approaches complicated by a search for external academic validation and the search for research funding follows a parallel furrow or groove rich and full of potential but it is a furrow Whitehead may recognize as a groove.  On occasion well mostly at the moment the stylus is not staying on the record so I can only speak off it.

 

Plywood

Plywood is striated space it's made of layers stuck together, the grain of the wood alternating in different directions.  I've seen a film of them making it from giant trees from the rain forest; they mount the trunks on giant lathes and then peel them like apples - the lungs of the earth rolled out like a giant sheet of toilet paper.  I am reading Harmans book about art and aesthetics,  he thinks the only way we can describe an object ( which can be basically anything that has a form) is through metaphor that draws us towards a partial experience of of its Noumenon the thing in-itself or the bit about it that is real but can never be known according to Kant.  Harmen is quite useful in  how he describes the things and people he disagrees with and also the odd bits of other peoples thinking that he agrees with. In this book he talks through Greenberg and Fried and a bit of Kraus and the emerging history of modernity within art criticism.  He just expects you are with him on all the object oriented ontology guff and to be honest its a lot to swallow.  When he describes the American civil war as an object or a banana or the Hudson bay company you begin to wonder what could not be encountered as an object.

What Harmen does give us though is some ideas within the Western tradition that oppose relativism and shake up dualism and if you take the bait line and sinker can hook you in to the possibility of a different way of thinking if you were inclined to think in a way in the first place.

From an OOO perspective then what can the metaphor of plywood bring you closer too ? This was my question for today for trying to work with theory as I go backwards and forwards to the playground reading dense text and trying to work out how to build a slide from my platform, develop loose parts play and still maintain some identity that resembles  what I carried with me before working on a PhD necessarily deconstructed me.  All my images of plywood are in a process of laminating the weather has crept into its edges and dissolved the glue which was obviously under specification.  We have interior ply, exterior ply, Far-Eastern ply, Birch ply and Marine ply - you should always use marine ply at an adventure playground but we never do as its too expensive.  They all look the same when they are new.  As I look at the stamp that says its from managed forests I wonder if this is true, I suspect its not, I have always felt guilty building stuff from the rain forest.  We have the material plywood and the implication for the planet and for  my lungs as I inhale its dust and we have the flatness of surface but the real strength of plywood as a metaphor is when it laminates and spreads itself across the playground, it becomes beautiful within its decomposition.

Plywood in the images above is an active metaphor that holds the object of entropy, things however strongly adhered together, whatever adhesive we use, at some point will begin to laminate. Striated space lets smooth space in, it begins to flow and structural strength is lost. As the age of usefulness passes there is perhaps a moment where aesthetics take over to be noticed sideways and at the edges of perception. This is not so much captured in a photograph but aspects of it are remembered and pointed towards in an image.  And here Harmen is useful as the metaphor is not a simile or a literal comparison,  it is not like the surface of something else it just draws us closer to the thing in itself that can never be known.  This laminated plywood is a metaphor for the object of my PhD writing, PhD as Plywood makes sense and Plywood as PhD doesn't. Its past its best, laminated and becoming soft.  Its no longer useful to build anything practical but as it decays and goes back to the soil it holds a staggering new potential to become something quite different.  

Soil

keeping positive

I am conscious that I moan a lot on my blog.  I tend not to do that in my field notes where I leave little messages to my future self that will cheer me up when I read them.  On my blog I tend to vent a bit and even though I can see that nobody is reading them I have a misguided idea that at some point posterity will choose to discover them and unlike in my field-notes I want to be wearing metaphorically clean underwear.  I also choose to write here when I have nowhere else to write, when I can't quite think of my writing as field notes or academic discussion -this somewhere between writing is helpful. Somewhere between a diary and an auto-ethnography and personal notes and a story; somewhere between fact and fiction and right and wrong, heaven and hell the playground and home.  This is not too dangerously claim it's from any middle -  the writing is between unhinged and bolted down it is not really for anyone even the future me.

The rightness of the previous three weeks of early morning Joe Wicks exercise plan followed by close reading of a Thousand Plateaus followed by some esoteric writing on this blog followed by practical building at the playground has necessarily started to fade.  It started to slip away when the chinks and gaps in the territory I had been beavering away within began to get pried apart by the bogie man of writing for a PhD.

I'm reading the Plague by Camus it's great and there is a character in it who is always writing and complaining how hard it is to say what he wants in words. The doctor who is at the moment the main protagonist goes to visit him as he wants to share where he has got too after months of dedication focus.  He has written a single sentence it is something like. 

"The woman rides by on a chestnut horse and her hair blows in the wind."

It reminded me of the poet played by Steve Buscemski in the film Big Fish.  He spends a lifetime trying to craft a poem about the toxic yet perfect small American town of Splendor where people get stuck because of the sheer impossibility of moving anywhere better. The poem he writes is perhaps a pastiche of the New York poets cut back style but Buscemski delivers its perfection in three words " Splendor is good' .  It is perhaps the lifetime of struggle that takes us to these three words or more likely its a joke at the expense of poets in either case it sticks in my head. 

'The adventure playground is good.' there is a truth in this and perhaps it is more than a truism but it is not a poem or a PhD.

I am trying to keep positive but my struggle to start writing proper PhD stuff and not blogs or very short true poems is weighing heavily on me. This is mainly because I am sitting doing this blog to displace the looking at the literature review document I started yesterday.  The normal thing I would do, actually the thing I am doing is just to give myself time where there is nothing else to do but start writing. This works because if I don't start to write it I have literally wasted my time.  I am not good at wasting time as luckily  my time is generally my own and I tend to cherish it.

The last time I tried to write a literature review I wrote a few thousands words on why I wasn't ready to write a literature review. I can't do that again so will need a positive approach.  I've been trying to get started for a week now and although yesterday I did get started I dare not really look at what I wrote today in case it's not really a start  " The literature review is good." I did however find a quote from Lukac that I copied and pasted and it ended up pasting a bit like a concrete poem as it was from a PDF . it reminded me of an important thought I had had and then forgotten.

At this point I realized that I am an old school materialist and find speculative and neo materialism Bourgeois , a word I will always struggle to spell - its the same with plateaus - just write the first bit then all the vowels you know in any order twice.

A

spider

conducts

operations

which

resemble

those

of

the

weaver,

and

a

bee

would

put

many

a

human

architect

to

shame

by

the

construction

of

its

honey‐comb

cells.

But

what

distinguishes

the

worst

architect

from

the

best

of

bees

is

that

the

architect

builds

the

cell

in

his

mind

before

he

constructs

it

in

wax.

At

the

labour

process,

a

result

emerges

which

had

already

been

conceived

by

the

worker

at

the

beginning,

hence

already

existed

ideally.

Man

not

only

effects

a

change

of

form

in

the

materials

of

nature;

he

also

realizes

his

own

purpose

in

those

materials.

And

this

is

a

purpose

he

is

conscious

of,

it

determines

the

mode

of

his

activity

with

the

rigidity

of

a

law,

and

he

must

subordinate

his

will

to

it.

(pp.

283-°©‐284;

quoted

in

Lukács

1980,

p.

3)

Tyres and Giffs and Monday morning

I found this stone at the adventure playground about an hour ago.  I had written Anarchy on it about two years ago at a workshop in Peterborough- I only realised I had spelt it wrong when I got home and Kim pointed it out - I don't think the missing H  adds anything but I can cope with it  on this GIF.

A back-burning recurrent theme for me seems to be how materials or objects keep getting recycled and turning up in new places. Even though we know this we somehow forget it or forget to notice it.  This forgetting is another one of those things that flows through all my work as an artist along with the obsession with objects and materials the forgetting of them.  This stone painted with glitter and miss-spelt is a mistake.  As I walked home I thought of turning it a GiF for this blog as I had forgot my phone so couldn't take any pictures of all the tyres we had just got from the garage across from my house.   I could think about all the miles and journeys they have been on on different cars - perhaps across land to Saudi Arabia carrying people on the Hajj or on a taxi driving students around Sheffield most of them seemed warn far beyond any point of  legality each or most must of belonged to criminals.

last week and this week have felt a bit messy I am more between things now as I have run out of steam on the building project and am finding reading and writing difficult.  I am working with Kate on a chapter for a book and I have read Elizebeth Groz about art and territory. I'm reading Graham Harman on object orientated ontologies.  Both of them talk a lot about art but neither really mention artists, they mention them but not in a way that gives us agency, its like art is something that just happens to us as if by magic. This is quite difficult to think with  and reminds me that art criticism and philosophy  are one stage removed from the making of art removed or perhaps abstrated.  I don't really get the conception of art in both these writers work -it isn't something that makes sense of things  in the doing - the flow.

I am wondering if residency is trundling on as that is what I am always doing keeping trundling away.  Today just before I wrote this  Patrick came to the back gates and picked me up and we went and collected some used tyres to use as infill for the front of the platform I've nearly finished.  I was reminded of David Macs Poseidon submarine from the 80's , it got set on fire by some art haters and someone died.  Jumping up and putting old cloths on and going to the playground was like a strange event - a pulling back into what felt quite distanced.

interestingly the Harman has got me thinking about aesthetics and the few moments when I make aesthetic rather than practical decisions when I'm building something.  Using the corrugated  metal for the roof was an aesthetic decision an honest decision.  Leaving the tree growing through the structure was both symbolic and aesthetic.  Using tyres to construct a wall at the front is a practical decision to save money.   They are also used a lot historically within adventure play- my worry was that using them would look a bit like decoration or trying too hard - dressing the the thing to look like it should.  However as I played with them trying to work out how to use them they started to look awful-ugly whether stacked or hung on their sides, or as circles, hoops to jump through they were offensive to the eye.   This is a simple design decision and is about causing the least offense but it also feels like a straightforward aesthetic decision based on scale and materials and feeling of what looks right and wrong .  Although I spent all last week and most of this morning reading about aesthetic theory   I have read nothing that gives any insight into how to build this Tyre wall.  Nobody but me at this stage will have any concern but everybody will feel the not working of it if I make it and it doesn't work.  I think this is part of the refrain and the minor key and the things taken for granted.  The half hour I spent shuffling tyres around felt like something an artist does I was getting as close to aesthetics as I could without actually getting your eyes burnt.