I guess it feels a lot like christmas

 Stuff comes from stuff.  I think this is my favorite statement from the polytechnic manifesto. I wonder if its almost a concept. It is banal as a statement but more than most slogans its animated when it is applied.  I often hear myself saying it inside my head when something emerges from something else.  I have it spinning around like an ear worm, a catchy Christmas tune when I'm feeling unproductive or blocked.  It is the best piece of advice you can offer an artist who is struggling to come up with an idea to make new work - do something and stuff will come from it.

Writing is different but the same.  In writing we create texts and new texts can emerge from getting stuck in. Yet writing reproduces it makes representation.  Stuff like the event or the object can be expanded as a concept to include just about everything in the world. As a reluctant  materialist I recognize that this is probably all there is.  Stuff then like other words that aspire to represent the singularity of everything become of little use as a category.  It would be simpler to just say 'everything' and if anyone suggests anything else to answer - 'yes that as well.'  The simple use of language requires words and sentences to describe something as opposed to something else whether in difference or in similarity.

The stuff that comes from making something like a work of art or in my case a tree house or pirate ship sediments into the world and becomes a feature an edifice.  The stuff that comes from writing, at least for me always seems more fleeting.  I have just read Fridays blog and although I liked what I wrote and still feel it carries some weight there is a lack of momentum in the idea.  It is stuck rather than fecund.

If this idea had somehow become part of practice then the stuff of it would be bubbling away and creating so much stuff and  so many thoughts and trajectories that I would quickly and gloriously lose my way in it.  There would be no need to think or log where something came from, no need to return to something to make sense of it or wonder what I was doing at the time. All there should be is flow, nothing else is needed, all references are superficial.

writing is not like that, stuff does come from writing. I think it is more writing rather than more stuff.

black finger nails

 My black nail is growing out - it marks PhD slow time.  I have worked on my literature review for the best part of 5 days now.  I am up to nearly 10,000 words and it feels like it needs splitting into two chapters, like a dividing single cell organism an agentile cut.

 I have threaded through some of my own thoughts and my own experience.  These bits feel edgy, there is an anger in  them, but also a confidence that was missing before.  I have proposed that to work with the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari  it is necessary to at least aspire to come up with new concepts.  The concept for them belongs to philosophy an element of research-creation belongs to philosophy so concepts are important.   Therefore I propose in ignorance and sublime bliss that the best way to put any of these thoughts to work is to try and come up with new concepts.  These emerge from the situated event of research upon a plane of pure immanence or consistency whichever concept fits best as a platform or ground. 

I like this step in thought as it is serious but slightly ironic and after a week of struggling to work out why all the social science writing that uses D and G is a bit crap I think I have worked it out.  The point is to hit the ground running and continue the job of back filling with concepts to prop up the castles in the sky.  The job is not to apply theory or to lay it onto the world , the job is about opening the next franchise of concepts to keep the balls in the air.  I'm sure other people know this and try this but lots of people also try to live in the edifice rather than doing the work to keep it propped up.

This takes us to the concept of a raveling.  It is built as assemblage on the same plane but by thinking of raveling the concept of assemblage can flow into a project and think something differently, shed a little baggage.  This may be a small thing like building a platform with a tree in it that the kids have started calling the tree house.  It could even be as small as lining rusty nails up on a bench, catching a rat and fixing an asbestos flush tank.  I'm drawn to raveling as it holds its opposite the more frequently used unraveling.  This happens to all of us at points in our lives we begin to unravel. 

This idea of developing a new concept needs to be given some kind of structure and context but today at least I think that my writing and thinking has taken me somewhere. Better to spend some time coming up with some creative if crap new concepts to help move thought forward than to regurgitate the ideas of others and chain ourselves to a big pile of sick.  

 

 

 

Synonyms & Near Synonyms for raveling

• disentangling,
• unraveling,
• unsnarling,
• untangling,
• unwinding

• unbraiding,
• unlacing

• loosening,
• loosing

• unbinding,
• undoing,
• unfastening,
• unlashing,
• untying
• (or untieing)

Antonyms & Near Antonyms for raveling

• binding,
• fastening,
• knotting,
• lashing,
• tying
• (or tieing)

• braiding,
• interlacing,
• interweaving,
• lacing,
• winding

• entangling,
• snarling,
• tangling

feeling and looking guilty

 

It was supposed to be a writing day. I was going to start to write something about residency.  It started off quite well, I did some reading and I filled in my RD9 which is an online form that records my supervision meeting. In the form I said I was about to start writing about residency.  Then I went for a walk with the dog.  When I came back I chopped some logs with my new axe and returned to digging up the tree stump in our new garden. If I was writing in mental jumps which I have begun to enjoy I would now shout "Shane come back - come back Shane"  I would expect everyone to know that the removal of a tree stump figures centrally in the Alan Ladd cowboy Shane. On many levels I think it is rude not to know this indeed I waited until lunch when my muscles would be warm and ready before hefting my axe.  How can I write for people who don't know about the tree stump scene in Shane,. If they haven't been infected by it ?  Perhaps this is why I couldn't write about residency.  

 

'Sir I was unable to complete the assignment when I realized that only me my brother and a mate I grew with with in Selby would have a clue what I am talking about - come back Shane come back.' We all know that the film is really about getting that stubborn stump out of the ground. 

So at five I cannot start to write a new Phd chunk and my booster vaccine in combination with stump and rubble removal have combined to make me feel a little woosey.  I did have a thought though and this blog has evolved into a place to log thoughts, it is like Bentos sketchbook something that can become anything once it's lost. 

I read an interesting paper about residency by Karen Wall and Michel Lithgow.  They talk and define what they identify as embedded residencies and they frame it in some Deleuzian concepts.  I think they brought to text what I am thinking. The idea of nomadic thought and smooth and striated space and lines of flight basically residency as assemblage.  As I said in the blog before I can't see in simple terms a residency as anything else but an assemblage of parts that become an event.  Their writing was actually rather good which may be another reason why I had to go and attack my tree stump with my new axe.  This was not in any way because I felt they had done what I was aiming to do better. It was more that in attempting to write this position well they proved how impossible it is to lay these thoughts onto something like the actual assemblage of a residency with words on paper and it not really saying anything, it always misses the point.

There are some simple errors in language - I am not keen on the idea of suggesting residencies are embedded as although this suggests deep connections it does also produce two different things one within the other with potential edges.  It is useful when opposed to a residency that is superficial but not at all useful if we are to consider a residency as an assemblage or event, at the very least present it as singular and flat.   This brings us back to removing the tree-stump which is stuck in the middle of our garden and half way through the film Shane.  The tree-stump is embedded in  the lawn and it can be cut out.  The micillium of the Oyster mushrooms currently fruiting is now integral to the wood itself.  We could say that it has embedded itself into the rotting wood but the reality is it has become one with the wood and changed it into something else, rotting but still useful. 

The Deleuzian view of the artists residency in the paper is I think what Beth St Pierre would call the rush to application.  It takes some concepts and applies them to the artists residency and this gets us to thiunk about things in a certain way. However that way is still a thinking of things in parts with edges.  Art must holds its nomadic status and move through strited space and generate productive friction we are back to the grit in the oyster but this is not where I am.  At least not today.  All this said the problem is that to write in a languge of description about how concepts work within projects is the problem.  The problem is not to attempt to do this better rather its about attempting to do something different. 

The residency then operate as rhizome and assemblage and it can only enunciate itself within the singular event. The writing or diagramming  needs to be from the middle.  That's why I popped out to attack my immovable tree-stump.  I don't really know how to write from the inside of something, not even my own skin. 

Recuring themes- the eternal return

 I have always been really interested in walls and windows that have been bricked up or blocked.  It is a recurring theme in my work and I collect them with my eyes in my daily life.  I always stop and carefully think about the reasons for permanently blocking an opening, is it the window tax, the view, security?  I like how they look and this is usually enough. I know in a symbolic way they mean something, there is a sadness about most of them. This symbolism is not what I'm interested in, the things I like about blocked up windows sits behind the symbolism. 

I gave a lecture in Bristol to some MA students and I said I was interested in meaning but meaning that sits behind spoken or text  based language.  One of the students asked me for an example of this so I gave him the finger.  I was in some ways referencing Wittgenstein's later work around private language but also pointing out that I couldn't really talk or write about meaning that was beyond spoken or written language  without creating a circular paradox. I think the students liked my arrogance but also were frustrated I couldn't be of more use to them. The picture above says something that I could never put into language, it represents a moment and a space and a noticing.  It isn't something that requires autonomy or a transformation into something else but for me at least it does act as a reminder of how a practice flows in and out of a life.  If I was still reading Whitehead it would be a prehension but I've forgotten what this means in all its complexities. 

I am about to start to read about artists residencies. I have done a little of this but it was never an avenue of research that held me for long.  In writing my literature review I am trying as much as possible to adopt the writing style of analytical philosophy. I'm not really sure what this is but I will define it here as getting as close in language to explaining an idea as is possible and to write for an audience who may not have a grounding in any of the ideas or philosophies I am trying to write about and with. I have just finished reading a book called Radical Hope by Jonathan Lear, this book is written in this way. It tells stories and builds arguments and keeps bringing you back to the central flow of an idea. This is the type of writing I aspire to for my first chapter although through necessity it will require a smaller area of focus.

The sky was red this morning and a storm is coming, for the third day I got soaking wet walking the dog. The arthritis in my little fingers reminded me of how our bodies don't ignore the seasons even if we try our best to push on as normal. I met Tim at the top path just by the grave of Disney Tummy, Tim represent the Jungian wise man of this blog. He is constructed here in my minds eye from the  best bits of himself. The sounding board of the cemetery where only Tim and the dead seem to pay attention to my mumbling.    Today I made the proposition  of artists residency as assemblage.  This is to take from Delueze/Guattari the concept of agencement and think residency through it.  Like our walk the conversation went around in a large circle skirting the periphery and the main issue which is of course death.  My question to Tim put as simply as I can is.- If we conceive as the artists in residence as a manifestation or rather a becoming of a more than human assemblage that pays attention to its singular nature what the fuck difference does it make?

As it stands an artist in residence is an assemblage of artist, place, practice, traditions, materials, art works, people, time, process, politics, the law, religion, history, language and and and.  The residency becomes, there is an enunciation across time and space, something comes to matter.  This is what a residency 'is' and although some of these words are not words I would of previously used I would have felt the meaning behind them and lived them as ethos, tradition and position while in residence.  I think most artists would look at this recipe of reduced parts and recognise the singularity of a residency and all the expectations that go with this. My question to Tim was not about seeing the existing state of things as an assemblage, putting a name to something that was already there or seeing something in a new way. My question was about the potentials of a residency becoming assemblage within a new conceptual framework.  Initially I thought this was about de-materializing the art object and reorientation to pure process referencing John Dewey and Lucy Lipard yet this feels like retrofitting the abstract machine of capture that constituted the idea of residency before it became a body without organs. The proposition for residency held as assemblage where the ideas, practice and individual romanticized vision of the artists sublimate is the place I think residency as assemblage could pass through. Deleuze liked Lewis Carol as he felt the writing took you through and across surfaces, down rabbit holes inside skins at different scales, he liked Artaud because of his body without organs and his drug fueled chaotic journeys.  Tim had to go home to try and catch up with an assemblage of paperwork and forgotten jobs that really needed doing. We avoided some rabbit holes and I think agreed that most people live life as assemblages and singularities without questioning or refuting this position. So we were both unclear what fucking difference thinking through Deleuzian assemblage made to anything outside a very narrow world of the academy.

The long day closes

 "Perhaps in new empirical work, we might think concept as method and begin with concepts like assemblage and haecceity in the middle of the mixture of words and things, in the folding of the outside that makes the new, the new we will create" (Beth St Pierre)

I woke up with good intentions. I had not enjoyed yesterday because I felt too distant from the text I was writing. I was adding references ,I had a strong feeling that the words missed the point.  I got all my blood tests back this morning and they were in a folder that said- no further action. My lethargy must be a touch of the long Covid or the tail end of the house move taking its toll.

I read this- Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new empirical inquiry by Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre this morning. As soon as I started reading it I remembered I had read it before, in fact I can trace back some of my thinking to listening to Beth on a webcast and reading this article.  She basically says what I'm trying to say in my literature review put simply -you can't retrofit old humanist social  science into post philosophies, they both emerge from distinct ontological positions that do not align.   She also explains that the concepts held within the work of Deleuze and Guatari are all interdependent and do not work as monads they are fragile and fleeting interactions, not singular reducible bodies. 

The paper gets difficult in the middle when it starts to work through written language and takes us on a complex little trip.  As D and G state in the opening chapter of What is Philosophy there is no apologies for writing something complicated as the issues and ideas at hand are complicated.  I have decided that reading this paper then going out for lunch today was a good thing. I think this because I believe I have followed Beth's advice and my literature review is an attempts to share this process.  Of course it is difficult as the thing I'm trying to do is difficult.

In staying with the trouble as Donna Haraway would say I am at all points resisting the easy option. Partly as I have no real idea what the easy option is. Partly to quote Massumi after Deleuze I can only have my penultimate work of arts practice, not a final work because at the end of the final work I would stop actually being an artist. This thought is illustrated  by a story about an alcoholic never been able to have a final drink as at the moment they finish their final drink they are no longer an alcoholic.  This transition from been an artist to been something else is problematic. My scholar/artist identity is more fragile as it is for very good reasons more exposed. 

What Beth says in her article is that D and G offer us a way to move away from the humanist idea of the conscious individual subject at the center of things.  Other ontologies do this, Derrida and Foucault do this with a focus on the nature of language D and G do it through constructing a flowing assemblage of concepts that collectively de-center ideas of life and self, they literally enunciate a new order of things.   I think the sad truth is to really enter into their space of thought you need to be already on the road to Damascus, in need of an epiphany, only interested in taking the blue pill, or is it the pink pill.   You read and then there is a rights of passage from one side to the other. As Wittgenstied says you have to pull the old ways of thinking up from the root, discard the clothes of the old ways of thinking so they don't make any sense anymore. 

Beths article chastises social science for it's inability to shed the old ways of thinking, to transcend the hold of scientific method and humanistic ontologies.  It is at this point where I remind myself that I am not a social scientist and that my rites of passage in reading a Thousand Plateaus is essentially very different. The problem at the heart of the conflicting ontologies of art and social science is the same and it returns to the same theme I started with 3 years ago, arts practice is incredibly individualistic - the personal vision the artists way, the whole history of aesthetics and value yet these issues are manifested empirically in completely different ways.  This is the struggle with been as Kate calls me matter out of place. I have gone on the essential the journey that is necessary to enter into the world of DeleuzeGuattarian concepts, by hook or by crook I have made the leap, yet my journey starts off and ends up in a very different place to a social scientists journey, I am kicking against a different wall. 

This is my literature review, the fist 10,000 words that will be followed by a series of stories that will if read with care open some of this journey to experience.   I am hoping that anybody will be able to read the next 70,000 and get somewhere the first 10 will make it into a PhD the rest will be a journey where the reader will have to decide where they want to go.

Writing Day

 

I have had two weeks off, it was an accidental break brought on by moving house and a recognition I had a post Covid brain fog.  I would not say I have been unwell but I haven't felt myself and I feel better for giving it a name and not using it as an excuse.  We have just been away for a few days to Northumberland and sold our old house and I have sat down today with a clear dairy until Christmas opened my literature review document and made a start.  I know I am more serious when I actually start to put references in rather than just writing the word (reference) in brackets for filling in at some future point. 

I have a supervision booked in for next week so feel I should send this work off to Laura and Kate by the end of today.  I know it will not be ready but it will be something.  I think that this blog holds something really important in  terms of my journey of the last 3 years and I wonder if it is here where I need to start to pull something together.  I have managed to maintain it and although at points it feels like a moan fest it is by far the best writing and thinking I've done.  I am when I read it back both surprised and relieved that it holds so many thoughts and ideas. 

The literature review I'm reworking now however is not very good. Its actually surprisinly bad which is a little depressing.  At the final meeting of our Odd project I suggested we did some work at the intersection between writing, thinking, doing which is very research-creation .  I have actually explored this area reasonably well and I am sure that there is a gap.  There is a lot of art theory and a lot of critical discourse and a lot of curator speak, faux philosophy in writing about art.  There is a gap however where practice, my type of arts practice comes to writing.  As I said on a blog many many moons ago writing is not my first language and visual art has its own vocabulary that doesn't directly translate.  This means that when art comes to written texts we have to practice the art of looking sideways and write in the periphery, texts can illuminate something but only at the edges.  

I am going to walk the dog and then do a few hours more work.  The dead bird on the beach is sad and sublime, this is the feeling for the day. 

  

 

All things been equal

 I have left the mould, which has gone moldy, for this hope soap on a rope at my old house. It is one of the last things to pick up. It holds the potential of new hope soap in its negative space.  It is relevant today as I have been talking about putting together a new Festival of the Mind proposal the last one I did was with Kate and this was when when I first made the cast. On Friday we have explored radical hope in my trees-scapes project. I have also had two weeks of work that have felt more like the good old pre-covid days.  Jumping on the train and going places and meeting real people in offices and cafes, sat on chairs inside and outside. I have enjoyed it but its also tired me out in a place deep inside, not under the skin tired not something easy to shake off.  I am a little worried about my stamina levels so I'm booked in for a suit of blood tests tomorrow morning.  I haven't really done any PhD writing for a couple of weeks but I recon that's fine there really hasn't been time and I have had to manage a few things at home that needed managing. 

I have just finished reading Radical Hope, a book that uses the story of Plenty Coups the chief of the Crow tribe to talk about hope in the face of cultural annihilation.  I kept thinking about artists and how I sometimes feel I am part of a tribe that follow a different set of cultural codes.  My idea of what courage is and a successful life is somehow slipping out of view. Perhaps not within society as a whole but to an extent I, or my subjective self is falling away from it. A coup is a small victory for the Crow, like steeling a horse or hitting a rival Sioux warrior on his breastplate with your Coup stick.  The Coup stick was a way of marking Crow territory, the warrior would plant it in the ground and the enemy could not pass it or remove it.  Plenty Coups was good at getting Coups but then the white man came with his forked tongue and killed the buffalo and the Crow were moved to a reservation and counting coups became irrelevant.  I don't think the story or the history was supposed to be a metaphor or an allegory but I kept thinking about trying to win coups as an artist.

On my PhD I kept and keep planting my Coup stick and bashing my supervisors on their chests with none fatal blows yet as I've moved from the world of artists, counting coups has lost its relevance.  My world and all its principles have not being destroyed by external forces yet an internal malaise, a loss of faith has taken hold. The cloud was always there but a clever idea would hold it just enough at bay.  How then can I look at where I am and find some sort of radical hope?  I occasionally find a piece of practice that feels like a coup, building Derek Jarmen's prospect cottage in my garden perhaps. Only last week I had a slight buzz when I thought of constructing a machine of capture that would take the ideas and images of children and produce a giant identity collage.  I felt like this could be a coup but the nature of an artists coup is that it needs nurturing - you can find the seed of an idea but that is not a real coup unless it grows into something. 

Radical hope then takes me four years into the future when I have moved past the planted coup stick of my Phd and I'm living in a world that at this moment I cannot quite imagine.  It is not a new place that is built from the present it it a raveling of the significant threads that's I hope to find again.  Perhaps I was stupid not to drop a long line of breadcrumbs for the birds to eat so I could follow their migrations on the  the warm winds of hiemat.

Frayed at the edges

 My friend Gary just said I looked a little frayed at the edges, perhaps this is what happens when you try too hard to make a raveling.  My black nail is slowly growing out, like the cut on my finger the transformation is always slightly slower than expected but luckily it is inevitable, like entropy.  

 In late October I had a good week of writing then it got busy and it's kept busy since.  I should probably of managed the odd half day of writing but somehow I never got to sit down and get some focus.  I had a good supervision with Kate on Monday she is coaching me to think I am further on than I am, I know I'm not though, the bounce has gone from my bungee.

I've done no writing for two weeks and I've just eaten a double-Decker.  We have a plumber in fitting a new boiler and the dog is slightly mad, he doesn't like the long term intrusion or the noise.   Kate says I should decide my fieldwork is finished and start to look at what I have that is as Boris Johnson says 'oven ready".  Like the Brexit deal its about as oven ready as a chicken running around the farm yard, feathers, neck and innards intact. 

 I'm relatively happy though its nice to have a few bits and bobs of other stuff -arty, creative work.  I know my knowledge and thinking have moved on in leaps over the last couple of years yet my practice has suffered.   I have felt the little bubble of abstract confidence gradually slip away.  Non-sense was so much more fun before I started to read what Deleuze had to say about it.  Nobody drew attention too or cared about what was opaque until I read Glissant. Opacity was just there fizzing in the background, the pop pressurized with potential in the bottle before the introduction of a Minto. 

Life moves forward and changes happen and I can't regret my deep dive into theory or the privilege and joys of doing something slightly different for a few years.  The changes are ringing in now though and I'm thinking a bit more about the future.  At the very least the PhD thinking and writing will need to be contained somehow and the paid work and thinking forwards will really need to happen.

Kate was good at the supervision to remind me that I will need to have something ready to submit by the summer of next year but I am not going to start to worry too much just yet. 

I'm going out now to project on a giant Starling

Amal and the poet Laureate

 

 

Last week was busy and a bit stressful.  I did a projection for Amal the puppet on the Friday night then showed a film for Halloween at the Adventure playground on Sunday.  Last night it was the Simon Armetage performance with my film of the Peak District showing in the background.  It was the end point of two little projects that I had enjoyed been a part of. I was pleased with each pragmatic, yet better than expected outcome and it was refreshing to have big audiences present at all three of the events.

I have decided to go easy on myself today and do a bit of reading and to blog.  Although I would not say it was a busy weekend there were lots of stress points and the potential for things to go wrong or at the very least not work out.  I suppose the work I did this weekend is actually what people see me as doing. It is my professional profile, it does not really feel like a practice though. To an extent I have misplaced my practice,  I'm hoping to find it again at some point and recognise it when I do.  

Over the last few weeks I have been musing about building Dereck Jarmen's Prospect Cottage in my garden.  I think a prospect cottage is something many older artists desire in some shape or metaphor.  This thinking has had a twinkle of a practice at its edges.  The impossibility of it the crassness of it , the fact that if I were to construct it, it could be nothing other than a magical space.  Deep inside I have a little energy flash of excitement again.  This is held in the detail of the making but also in the idea. 

 

The original has parts of this poem by John Donne inscribed on the side.

The Sunne Rising

by John Donne

 

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?

Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide

Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,

Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,

Call countrey ants to harvest offices;

Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,

Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.

 

[Thy beames, so reverend, and strong

Why shouldst thou thinke?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,

But that I would not lose her sight so long:

If her eyes have not blinded thine,

Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,

Whether both the'India's of spice and Myne

Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.

Aske for those Kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.

 

She'is all States, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is.

Princes doe but play us; compar'd to this,

All honor's mimique; All wealth alchimie.]

Thou sunne art halfe as happy'as wee,

In that the world's contracted thus;

Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee

To warme the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art every where;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare. 

 

I was musing with the idea to  inscribe 

eeeba gum 

can ya belly touch ya bum

can your tits hang low

can you tie them in a bow

can your balls go flat

can you put em in a plat

eeeba gum can you do that.

In this private musing I see myself living much more in line to a  practice.  Hard learned through the years of anonymity.  Perhaps it is something of a musing about the potential to do things differently or perhaps within the raveling of a new making there exists a potential for or at the very least a kernel to hope , a longing for difference. 

I will return to my PhD writing this week - I was getting quite well stuck in yet it is always good to have a breather  as it helps to nudge things along.  This weeks nudging has made me think about territory and form.  I googled it to see what came up and I was sent to the home office website where you have to fill a form in to enter the territory of the UK if you are a foreign national.   I was pleased with this transgression,  a short but interesting diversion rather than a full rabbit hole.

Form and territory from the inside of a residency, there is probably enough there for a PhD  and much of my most current writing hovers around this area even if it struggles to say anything about it.

Art affords a scaffold which enables the creation of a territory.  (Historical/institutional/ through identity/philosophically)

residency happens within a space/( place/site/event) and holds that space open for a purpose.

Territory relates to form, we must resist saying gestalt.

The scaffold is about holding things open so something new can emerge, it does not have to be art. 

There are many ways for art to hold the space open in our minds and in our hearts and in our actions but not all of them end up raveling something recognizable as art.

 

 

Writing writing writing- stumped

 I have spent this week writing.  It has felt very unproductive.  So much so that at 5 yesterday I had to go out and try and dig up a tree stump.  I used a mattock and the dog kept barking and getting in the way, after removing half of it I left the rest for another day.

I am working on a literature review and it does not feel like it is going well.  I am procrastinating although I have focused on it for three days.  It was a document I started two years ago and have returned to now. I couldn't face an empty page with the title literature review.

I spoke to Kate briefly on Tuesday as I think things were getting to me a bit.  I keep trying to put some sort of framework in place for the future that I can feel better about but it doesn't seem to work very well.  Kate said I should keep things simple and as I try and write with some of the theory, the overarching philosophical content it all feels very out of touch with the work on the ground.  This is the issue I am addressing in the writing but it does not make it any easier.

 My literature review needs to frame why I am using research-creation as a method and that I am inquiring into the idea of the artists residency in  relation to nomadic  thought - or perhaps what Glissant would call Errantry.  In relation to what research -creation can do I am choosing two pieces of thinking or concepts and putting them to work within the body of the project.

The writing of the the fumbling literature review has at least brought me to this point - In a way what I am writing now may end up as a single paragraph that explains a focus and a gap in the literature.  I will  then have to turn the focus on a few bits of reading which I will have to do well and unpick in more detail and relate to practice. And do a much better scoping of where they emerge in secondary writing and this will become a second layer of the lit review.

This is feeling like a sort of plan - a plan in a long line of plans that only just seem to get started.  At the moment I'm reasonably happy with this one.  The stump is only half removed

literature Review

 

I have spent a big chunk of the last 3 days trying to write my literature review.  I have not got very far and I am feeling somewhere between lazy and distracted. 

I have always had a problem with the lit review for a number of reasons.

1. Whatever I write doesn't really look like a literature review.

2. Whatever I give Kate and Laura to read does not seem to cut the mustard.

3. The literature I have most enjoyed reading does not condense well.

4. The PhD is really about trying to work with a set of ideas and concepts in context.  This is messy and I can't seem to write anything that does not abstract theory from context I'm working in.

5. It is a task that seems a little pointless - technically I think its purpose is to convince the reviewers that I have understood to the extent required the literature's I am drawing on. As I have chosen some difficult texts I am not confident I have done this or demonstrate it within my writing.

In the gap between thinking and writing something has started to emerge but there is a lack of clarity and purpose.  I thought today that I should write as simply as possible what I want to say and hold points or the point of it in short glimpses or flashes of practice.  This may work well if I adopt a slightly more practice orientation and limit the concepts I tackle .  So the point of the literature review is to give some context to the concept.  So it isn't just floating - The key thing to all this work is territory and capture, after a more general introduction that contains the why it is into these two concepts that I will need to dig a bit deeper.

Eric's Funeral

 I went to my friend Eric's funeral today and said my public and private goodbyes. I will miss him as a person in my life and as an easy friend. His service was very similar to what I would hope for for myself.  Secular in a lovely spiritual building, surrounded by the people he loved and who loved him.  I will have my body present at my funeral though. I need its visceral already decaying flesh, absent of any mind, to allow my spirit an unlikely chance  chance to attend.  My sadness has gone but the funeral was a reminder of it, pulled it back from the edges and into sharper focus.  Death has an uncanny way to thrust itself into thoughts in a way that takes your breath away.  I would never use the loss of a friend to make a point within my writing yet in writing anything at all serious about life it is difficult to keep death at bay.  In a modern world filled with rationalism it is difficult not to feel that death is a passing, a stepping across some sort of threshold. An extreme edge of at least a singular life, a life that is bounded enough to have an ending.

I did a projection on the Crucible on Saturday and I  have been trying to write for my PhD.  I think last week was constructive, Although I got very little done on my literature review.  I almost felt  like I was at school struggling with my childhood shyness and dyslexia a little embarrassed.  Trying to hide  the bits I don't like about myself from myself.   This is the long journey to having something that looks like a PhD to submit though and I did put the work in. I made a start.

When I read through my blog I noticed some points where I had tried to draw attention to a serious thought or a step change.  This provided a texture and a structure to the writing- it also felt like I was trying to pay testament to a moment. I have gradually stopped doing this so I thought I would have a go at reviving the practice.

 My PhD is about residency as method, there is something residency can do for art practice that helps to let it live through time and space. It is a line of flight that allows art to escape the object in all its ontology.  I have been mapping terrain for an arts practice that unfolds through time within social research.  This is a space I have occupied before but there were no maps and therefore the space was unknown.  My blog and my writing and my thinking has started to map the terrain differently - chart some new waters because the ideas are located in a unique space.  My residencies only exist in all their relations making this new terrain and unique.  There are similar spaces, similar practices but they hold different maps and different insights.  I have woven a series of Deleuzian folds that generate a baroque pattern, a mesh work, a practice, a set of relations.  There is some strong writing some new things, a level of banality and what I can feel now, a raveling towards some degree of closure.

It feels like things are moving on and I am growing ideas that will develop into an acceptance of where I actually am and what I can contribute.

Reading my Blog

 Its about four months since I paid to have my blog printed.  I wanted to have something solid that felt like work.  I have managed to write once a week or so for three years which is in itself an achievement of sorts. I read it over three days in chunks as some of it was not that easy.  It holds the journey and it holds to an extent the disappointment of Covid in all its affects. At points looking back without the detail the pandemic feels like an excuse but reading my thoughts from the time I feel the sheer scale of its impact running through the last 2 years.

In the middle phase of the blog  I seem to fall into a slightly manic state where I worry about myself.  This is a good reminder of the time when I was building the loose parts play platform and reading 1000 plateaus; diffracting their affects through the event.  I create Tim as a Socratic interloper or Jungian wise man who occasionally visits me with advice.   We talk of Shaman and bodies without organs and I ask him questions of life, death, magic and enchantment. 

In the middle of reading it I was amazed how coherent it seemed as an object and how it mapped a journey in and out of darkness.  It needs a close reading and a level of forgiveness and immersion yet it does contain at many points flashes of knowing and perhaps even brilliance.  I do not know what to do with it but as it contains my best work. Part of me wants to edit and reference it and submit it along with my platform and say here is the best I can do as a PhD.  I know it is not really a PhD but it does contain something between the building and the thinking. Many parts of it are not banal. 

As I move towards the end of next year I suspect the only option I will end up with as the the puddings proof is in this writing. The blog is full of excuses and false starts but it does not read as if I have been at all lazy.  I seem to have fitted the work in and expanded the field of my practice.  held within the blog is growth thought and challenge.  The brilliance within it is in the struggle and the mess and the struggle never really seems fruitless it just does not produce anything that could be called insight or clarity. It is a stream.  

When I get to moving house and the new puppy there is a lull. Interestingly the first real lull and also some repetition the ideas from the start take center stage again and it feels a little circular . Covid is fascinating as the time that is now condensed into a single raindrop stretches out again and the anticipation, disappointments and fear that are now forgotten are mapped out within the text.  It really was a bit of a shit storm and we were more worried than we remember.  

Although the best bits are in the middle they would not work without the start or the end the flowing into and out of a certain type of madness. It is at least a thing but I have no idea at the moment where to take it.  As it is the whole of the residency in all its relations I wonder if I can edit a chapter or two directly from it.  It would be an interesting thing to do but without the in between bits it would lack the journey and its strength  lies within its journey.

Slow progress

 lots of pictures today as one of my hard drives with loads of image backups gave up on me last week. I felt like I needed some virtual backup of PhD stuff in the cloud.  I'm feeling a lot better from my Covid 19 but not actually better yet.  My black fingernail is slowly growing out and also starting to fade.  I have two days with a clear dairy to write, then a supervision and then a clear Friday so it is a week of taking stock and deciding where I am.

After this blog I am going to try and enroll for my writing up period at MMU.  The graduate school like most other things at the moment seems to be struggling to cope with the demands of our questions  and life in general .   I can live with this, at least in the short term.  I am currently looking for some discipline , I have quite enjoyed the recent spells of writing when I manage to sit down and do it, and time folds.  I'm also consistently surprised at how many ideas seem to arise within the writing process rather than emerge in my brain and then get written down.  I am not sure if it is an excuse but I only really seem to have a limited amount of writing in me in any given week.  Will Self and Coleridge's 500 words a day perhaps.   My current writing is nothing spectacular but I have a feeling it is something that hasn't been written about much before.  There is a danger it could be romanticizing the joys of manual labor and there is a danger that at the back of some of it there is some sort of male arrogance about shaping the world and bending it to a will. In many ways though this undercurrent that surfaces in manifold ways is what I am writing about and it is probably for this reason that the cut that happens when trying to reshape the world does not get written about very much.

I am writing about something that is not my PhD at the moment.  When I say this I am reminded of my friend Johan when he says that things are cooked and raw.  I think he is referencing Saussure - the relatively well known story of holding up a carrot in a field and saying' look I have a raw carrot.'  In this sentence you are defining the carrot by saying it is not cooked and so defining it by saying what it isn't and in  the process pointing to what it could be - cooked and on a plate.

This is the real point of the current phase of my writing. To hold back what is the PhD work by writing about something else yet to keep the text permeable enough for the writing to help shape and define what the thing is by outlining what it isn't.

On another note I went to a different adventure playground last week in Ferrybridge.  It was not the same as ours but was also great.  They had a bigger building and slightly more risky play equipment.  They also had quite young and active staff who had trained in play-work at Leeds Becket Uni.  They had a large loose parts area with pallets and junk but it didn't really seem to be in use.  A bit like ours there was a pile of stuff that looked great on photos and as it is actually a gold standard for free play the workers there initially said it got used a lot by the kids.   When I dug a bit deeper the staff said it didn't really get used that much and they wondered if children actually played differently now.  I felt the pull of conventional research, talk to staff, talk to the kids ask a set of semi open interview questions, observe observe observe record, perhaps make an intervention and flow into an action research cycle.  Get the staff and kids involved in it.  Write up some findings and see if loose play is still relevant and what the best ways to animate it as something young people would go to and explore independantly.

I really think if my PhD was to look at loose parts play then this " bringing of research to the table' would be an effective way of approaching the problem.  Some kind of structure we can call method, some kind of epistemological distance, an intervention and close observation and a way of reporting back that seems more than opinion. This isn't my PhD though yet the thinking about it may help in describing the carrot; whether cooked or raw. 

Winter is coming.

 In the time it has taken me to get back to writing this blog the winter storm outside my window has subsided and the sun is breaking through the cloud. Gods golden fingers are stroking the freshly mowed grass in our garden. I have cut it for the last time this year and run the mower out of petrol so it does not lose its volatility over the winter months.  Septembers warmth seems to have lasted an eternity and I am still wearing my shorts, though more from habit than good sense.

It is 12 days since my last post and it has really been a time of recovery. I have done a few things including a planning session at the playground about animating the loose parts area. I have days booked in the diary, events unfolding. I started to make a film  with the young people to try and promote what the playground does.  This was nice and easy and felt fresh but it can't form part of my research. It has to sit outside, but it is a good reminder of what we are missing.  It is clear to me that I can't use film as data and work ethically within research. The intention of my art/research is opaque, there is no real way to predict where it may end up so there is no ethical way to ask for informed consent.  I find this decision quite liberating and as ever within academic work it gives you something to write about. Making a film and actually working directly with young people on my PhD project feels like it may be impossible.  I can live with this and the films and conversations can fizz at the corner of everything - Like a glass of bubbling Berocca to save you from the hangover that it is difficult to wake up from.

Winter is a time for writing.  We are moved in now, feeling more at home and each morning when I wake up I am not driven to do a thousand jobs on the new house.  To walk down the steps of the old house, to fill the Volvo and to walk up the step of the new house.  It felt like 3 months of groundhog days, I kept other things ticking over but lost proper concentration. 

Today is Monday morning and its nearly October.  I have planned a final two weeks in  at the playground finishing with a Halloween light event and then I will be in my writing up period.  I keep thinking about how far I have come and the journey of a PhD. I have moved into another stage of life in some ways, the old ways of working had to end as the game of getting funded work was starting to tire me out.  I loved the freelance life, I loved its unpredictability but it was always a little stressful and lacked the throughline of thought and practice that I was consistently craving and regularly inventing.   

I have a chapter to write about mending the Arial runway at the playground - it is a chapter to capture the spectacular and the mundane and it will be problematic but it is a chapter I'm hoping will act like the kick-starter on a motorbike. I will kick it off and leave it on the stand to tick over so it warms up before shooting off on it and going to the woods.  It is a Honda 90 and not a big powerful thing but it is reliable and economic transport that gets you where you need to go.  And this is the thing. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance would not be the same if we replace the Harley Davison with a Honda 90.  Although the book does focus on the Zen of motorbike repair there is always something exciting about the bike itself.  My contribution to new knowledge will be about maintaining and riding the Honda 90, a step into the mundane and practical everyday of keeping something ticking over. A moped, an adventure-playground, a life.

Marking Time

 

I hit my thumb with a hammer.  I am not sure when I did this but it was probably while mending the arial runway at the playground a week ago.  I was up a ladder and, as it turned out, just starting to get Covid symptoms. I had high adrenaline levels due to fear and had to do some difficult hammering, at angles, while holding on with one hand.  I am pleased it isn't totally black, though from experience I know it will take a long time to grow out.  I once dropped a padlock on my toe while wearing sandals, the black mark crept forward at an infinitely tiny  incremental pace like an ultra slow motion penny fall machine at the seaside.  Black fingernails are a reminder of hitting the wrong thing with a hammer, dead blood under the nail.  As well as my multiple digit injuries I am recovering from my first Covid infection. Ten days in isolation and all that goes along with a strange illness that has had its major teeth pulled yet still has a good go at gumming you to death. 

It is an important week as I have had my last PhD payment. The job of work has now detached itself from the funding. Not that the funding made me get on with it any more than not getting funded but now it seems like a point has been crossed. Getting the funding is no longer the point, getting the Phd is the point so perhaps the point will change.

My phone sent me a word today

IMMANENT 

It means 

1. Existing or operating within, inherent.

2. (of God permanently pervading and sustaining the universe)

I thought I had heard this word a lot and thought I knew what it meant but I was confusing it with imminent - something that was about to happen.  This doesn't really matter as I think you could probably work with both definitions and in context I must of read Immanent nearly properly - God is about to happen and it is within this future orientation that his true power resides. However it is another thing that makes me feel slightly thick and out of my depth.

I found a very old literature review methodology piece of writing I had done yesterday, it actually seemed rather good when I read it.  It came from a time when I was trying to write more PhD like so it wasn't actually that good but it did look a bit like a piece of PhD writing.   I was tempted to pick it back up and work into it. Somehow though it read like it came from a different pre-Covid world, it read like an echo that had been bouncing around in Plato's cave for a couple of millennia. 

My PhD is Immanent, it is permanently pervading, it is existing and operating within - it is gestating.  It's not Imminent or about to happen, I think this is a good thing.

Two things to notes

Sarah Trueman suggested I submit the platform as part of my PhD - the thing not an image.  This is clever and I like it.

Research creation potentially develops a way to work with philosophical ideas and animate it through arts practice without taking on the full weight of its context.  It liberates a concept from its plain of consistency.  I might look to using the Phd to activate Glissant's idea of opacity  - the opacity of practice - I think that would be a good thing to achieve in writing,

Pete and Glenda

 I was up on a ladder trying to mend the Zip wire yesterday.  Patrick asked me how my PhD was going and I said that it wasn't really. It is and it isn't, I started back doing field notes and observing what was happening in the loose parts area and did 3 sessions with extensive notes.   This was just before I went away to Dorset and the bank holiday.  I have started to make a film at the playground, Sarah asked me if I could use it for my PhD and I explained that there was no way I could make something like that that could fit into the ethics of the University.  After lots of engagements with ethical process I have become more sympathetic to the process and why we need it.  Research can and does do harm, research harvests data from people without their informed consent and this in turn can shape peoples lives through policy and perception.

The simple answer to the question of ethics is don't make any films within research as the two forms are not compatible.  It is possible to work with stills that capture something without showing children faces, for the images to work with text to act as memory triggers. I think film is slightly different as it unfolds in time and carries its own rhetoric.  I know that the still image has its complex rhetoric but these can often be mitigated within the writing process. To film a playground and think about play and have all children absent is pointless and has its own message. Yes it is possible and there are nice examples of films where objects are juxtaposed with dialogue but these films are made with this in mind they are often reflective and soft and insightful and full of memory.  They can't capture the affective buzz of the playground, this is the essence that I would strive to hold within the frame of a film.  I will make a film for the playground and her funders and I may even write about it as an artifact that sits on the boundary between what is and isn't research that perhaps marks an edge.  Too many of these edges seems to be set through process and protocol rather than an emerging and felt relationship to practice and place which is what we always put at the center of residency as method.

Perhaps the next process to to sift through all the things I can write about that actually are about an affective relationship to place that are not compromised by research protocols and then I can begin a journey of hope that I will call the long revolution.

The Cut

 

I decided a month ago to have a break and get the move between houses sorted.  I haven't had a total break as I've been reading and thinking and going into the playground but doing my PhD has not been a priority, or the first thing on my mind and this has made me feel like I have had a break.

Today is probably a day I should get back to it, mainly because I don't have anything else which I could really call what I am doing.  I would like to say I am feeling less stressed but the tiny things I have got to sort out and the background feeling that I should be doing something else, whatever I am  actually doing  conspire to keep my stress levels consistently high.

I had my stitches out yesterday though I'm not ready to start back doing proper physical work with my hands, the wound looks really good but it did get a bit sore very quickly as I realised when I tried to cut the grass yesterday. In the month I've had off I have tried to gain some clearer thoughts about where my writing should go.  This hasn't really happened. The world seemed to sweep into some of the spaces that were opening up and wash the stuff that was starting to sediment away. I have a suspicion that this was a necessary thing.  I am not really a fan of bullet points but going back through this blog I am aware that the short and too the point bits are quite useful.  They are points of consolidation to be worked out from.  I will log them now and then move on.

Not doing anything at the playground with the loose parts area is actually a really good thing.  The playground staff are taking ownership and the kids needs to get used to it.  When I sit in the space and look at everything I've shaped over the years I think it is something to be proud of . The loose parts area is part of the PhD as it is much more about affordance and potential.  This project was always about space and not about running workshops.

I am not sure how to work with young people to do research with them and comply with the ethical protocol.  The study will be shaped very much by what it  is possible within external constraints which I have decided is a good thing but will probably make it slightly navel gazing.

I can probably make a contribution by expanding a space between researching with young people using research -creation and process philosophy and individual artistic practice in relation to process.

 

Interestingly what is lacking at the moment is a coherent practice  I feel like i have lost it a bit this year, misplaced a piece of the sense of it.  The last bit of fieldwork then has to be about regaining this with the playground and the young people - investing in finding a dispersed subjective within time and creativity - technically getting my MoJo back.

I will work on it. 

The other thing that struck me is how the making and shaping and building isn't understood and does not come to writing easily.  The writing and thinking about the body, the physicality of the space and materials the cuts callouses and bruises does not and will never make sense to people who don't have an insight into it through the doing of it.  There is an open gulf and seperation between those who make and those who don't. 

It feels like moving sand

 We moved 15 tons of sand yesterday at the playground.  I had arranged for it to be delivered at 7.30 in the morning. It was lightly used play sand that had formed a pop up beach at the Peace Gardens in Halifax only 12 hours earlier.  I am very pleased with my intervention, I was behind making it happen and it took a little maneuvering, we really needed to refresh the sandy bits of the playground.  I also enjoyed working hard with my friends and feeling useful. It has been a difficult time at the playground with the specter of Covid hanging in the background, a worry about funding and the fact we have been closed for building work for a couple of weeks. I think for the staff the sand was yet another thing to have to think about but now its all moved and raked flat it is actually one less thing to think about so it's a result. 

When you have to tackle a big job like moving sand you can only think about what you have done not what you have left to do. That is unless you get very near to the end when you don't really have a job to do so you can think about finishing it.  Completing a PhD is a bit like this except when you move sand it is harder to feel like you are going backwards the pile goes down. The task is simpler, move pile A to location B.  If you keep at it, however fast you work or don't work it will eventually get done, unless you stop. Working on writing feels more complicated. You can go past the sweet spot in writing, loose the tenuous threads that weave thought together through words, cut the ties.  You can move the giant pile of sand that hangs above you as a metaphor yet feel unclear about where it actually needs to go. 

It is Thursday and it is my writing day.  I had an hour long conversation with Yvonne this morning which was great.  It was the kind of conversation I thought I would be having all the time with people when I started my PhD before Covid and reality got in the way. Then my friend Hugh came over and we talked until 2.00.  We talked about theory and films and linguistics and post-structuralism and all my kids. We talked about new materialism and I pointed out the connection between Kathleen Stuarts Everyday Affect, Benjemens Two-Way Street and Ernst Blocks Traces all shifting the form, fizzing between fiction and fact .  We then talked about horror films and growing vegetables. I told Hugh I was tired and could not stop I said that at points I was beggining to unravel and part of this was physical, my body telling me to slow down.  I was not intending to tell him this. I don't really think I am unraveling in the slightest but it slipped out of the side of my mouth when he asked me how I was. Perhaps I need to pay attention. 

I am supposed to be giving myself a rest from the Phd as I haven't had a proper break for a while but like the giant heap of sand it is not going to move or write itself. I was intending to stick to my Thursdays writing.  I have written this Blog post  instead to cleverly remind my future self that there is something similar in writing a PhD to moving a giant pile of sand.

1. You cannot be overwhelmed by the task in hand or you will be immobilized

2. It is better to keep going if you can, when you stop you tend to seize up and its hard to get going again.

3. Its good to know where the sand is to be moved too. 

4. You can save time by working out the easiest route for the barrow, this is not always the most obvious one.

5. It is good to put a plank on the curb so you can wheel things smoothly.

6. The sand will never move itself.

7. You can bury your head in the moving of sand but the PhD will still be there when you emerge. 

*. Kids will be able to play in the sand dig and make castles it is important to do things that are useful even if other things don't get done. 

Seven is a good place to stop. I still can't really do any fieldwork with the kids but even though this is a reality it is starting to feel more like an excuse. I probably do need a break from thinking as it tends to become worrying and circular.