Slip sliding away

Last week  was a funny  really as I ended up inadvertently starting my fieldwork again. On Friday I fitted a slide to the platform it is the focus for my research so I had to start to write field notes again. I had forgotten how extensive my field-notes are - I haven't read them mind they may be crap.  All day Monday and all day Friday back at the playground building off the platform - a new way off and probably on.  The kids came in the afternoon and the little ones were shooting off the slide before I finished it- dodging around my circular saw.  They made me laugh,  as the second one down came head first - the best plans of mice and safety officers.  This bit was fun but I ended up feeling a bit grumpy as the job took a lot longer than I thought it should do.  Retro fitting anything to anything especially when its old and a bit broken always takes longer than you feel it should do, also you can only ever to an OK job.  I have written extensively in my field notes about the guys at the playground burning my wood.  I even gave them all pseudonyms to protect their identities - one was fire-starter the rest were probably quite insulting but that's research ethics for you. 

On Monday I went back to the playground and decided that there were a few jobs needed doing.  This was mainly brought on by thinking of the risks involved in the new slide and the fact we were all worried about it but there were other risky things that I was partially responsible for.  I hadn't really cleared everything away after finishing building and we had brought load more stuff from other playgrounds.  There was also a large pile of bricks the builders had left which was a bit of a safety hazard.   Anyway we consolidated the tippy bits as I call them and made most of the stuff safe or at least out of reach. I put a few things that looked Loose parts like in the loose parts area.  This included some bits of wood, a blue barrel, a red thing, a dustbin lid a pan lid some plastic hoops some plastic containers and a couple of old cable drums.   I told Patrick we could just leave it there and see if anything happened - I don't really think it will, to be honesty it looked more fun and more loose parts than it probably is.  This morning I did a talk about the Odd project and again I think people were interested in what I said though nobody seems that interested in what I write.

This is becoming a problem as I'm shifting my practice from visual art to the written.  I'm not making films anymore which was a place of experimentation.  I'm not really doing much visual art, even in workshops with other people.  Much of my focused time is spent writing and reading now and I suppose as I nearly turn 54 this might be the thing I decide to be good at.  Even with or perhaps because of my dyslexic struggles with language I sometimes get close to writing something with a passion.  My last blog post made me cry when I wrote it although I've just read it back and am reminded for the need for opacity.  

Drawing attention too and the going on about something too much is the problem.  As an artists as and artist as an artist as an artist! was the central line to a theme tune I wrote with a young artist called Louise.  For a brief moment we contemplated setting up a company that would write and produce banal theme tunes.  When I was a kid all our games would have theme tunes 'Nna nana nana nana Zoo Gang' -  'Sackly and Muckly the greatest men on earth'. No game could start without the production of and singing of a theme tune. But as a failed  artist and failed theme tune writer the only lesson I have learnt is that to hold anything dear there needs to be a level of opacity.  Nothing we truly understand can actually hold what we need from art.  Understanding sits within the realm of philosophy and science. art sits within a different plane. Here it is fine to not know what you are feeling as long as you are able to feel something.  My theme-tune for this week is - 

Fire starter  why did you burn my wood?

You took away the affordance

of my loose parts 

to warm your cockles 

If I had labeled every piece in bright crayon

if I had cherished every length in ordered piles

cradled each log like my own child

wood you of burnt my wood pile

I suspect you wood  

it was only ever a stack to you

you never saw the things that grew

in my minds eye

great castles the domains of dragons

the Swiss family Robinson

Making the best of things

escaping the flatness of today

sometimes you need a platform

to jump from 

we are what we build

we dwell where we make

 Its more a poem than a theme tune or maybe its a stream.... 

 

 

Transient Art

 

 

I have spent the day trying to think about Loose Parts Play and Assemblage Sculpture.  I began by wondering if there was something about the autotelic which I hope means 'for its-own sake'; auto as in self and telic as in teleological.  It feels like both play and art have the potential to be instrumentalised in pursuit of something else, this for many practitioners in both fields is actually  an existential problem. The for-itself concept is held dearly within each standard and accepted definition. I am not very uptight about arts autonomy. I don't believe, like Oscar Wilde that art needs to be 'quite useless' to be art. I am also confident that whatever the intentions of adults, children will maintain a place where play is for-itself. They will continue to hold the definition of play in the process of playfulness, not in the unpicking of language.   If an adult believes they have helped in mathematical thinking or hand/eye co-ordination and have monitored proof, by go-pro, fitbit or eye movement tracker then this can be thought of as a useful by-product. Like buttermilk or Marmite, it's the useful tasty outcome of a process that was always about making something else. Play bubbles and bobbles along in the background, its territory generally unchallenged as it works best when we do not draw attention to it, or try and capture it with technologies or direct observation with the full frontal eye. 

I had a walk with the dog around the cemetery and I thought about Simon Nicholson writing about loose parts play in 1971.  I cannot think of him without the images of soft British Modernism produced by his mum and dad cascading across my minds eye. This took me to where art history was in 71. Just before the end of conceptualism as a legitimate turn, then the dissolving of minimalist modernity by the multiplicities of Pop Art.  Fluxus was bubbling away with its anti-aesthetic that somehow became a more oppressive and distanced aesthetic than any romantic landscape that had gone before.  Assemblage Sculpture had been dabbled with by the Cubists, Dada and the Fur cup of Surrealism. It had evolved into abstract and representational three dimensional collages of representation, words, noises, and there is nothing wrong with that.  Rosalind Kraus was yet to expand sculpture into its greater field,  leaving a little uncontested space for both gallery and plinth.

Walking along, I thought that perhaps there is something about the autotelic natures of art and play that if we were to bring them together in one space they may both be able to do something interesting. Perhaps they can resist the slings and arrows of contingent purpose.  I was hopeful that combined they could maintain the integrity of their definitions even within the most instrumental of learning contexts.   

A quick google search when I got in of Loose Parts Play and assemblage sculpture took me to a web site about transient art.   I had never heard of this before as an actual thing but I did find lots of advice.  It seems to be mostly arranging things on the floor or a table and not sticking them down - it should be called art that doesn't last very long. My dad would say 'you might call that art. I would call it at best a mess, at worst a fire hazard.'  I would like to  call it, if I'm involved in my professional capacity, process-based, material-focused art. Online there are lots of images of different materials that seem to be what my mum would of had on the sorting out table at school.  To be honest it made me feel a bit lost at sea again. I wanted to say something (only the dog will listen) about the instrumentation of hope, my own private kernel of jelly bean hope not made of stone.  In the moments I sit and play with materials properly I am at my most hopeful. As a glimmer of original play stirs within, the warm winds of heimat, the original imagined and real home of our childhoods echoes, into the present moment.   

 

I  had wanted to do something simple, some writing that drew on two fields and so made the writing of them together something that was new, perhaps a little easier.  Instead I end up with Ernst Bloc with his kernels and principles and hope for a better world.  I have this idea that there is some writing somewhere which will be easier, this is an abstract utopian hope,  that somewhere this place of easy writing exists yet it is always elsewhere. The concrete utopia is the sitting and writing and building thoughts, it is just as hard as every other type of writing.  I stumble over my words. 

I will read a bit more and work out what transient art means but it feels like the opposite of what process-based art actually is - for me it is a complete investment of time and effort in the moment of feeling with materials. This is not new materialism it is the old ways of the artists, to take something that perhaps nobody else would see as serious and work with it in a serious way, without doubt or alternative motive.  To be wary of the fetish, the schema,  to recognize the point of completion, and where to move to when something is never finished, to flow in and out of authorship and any sort of knowing, to hand yourself over to the world of things and expect nothing back and most importantly to not make a fuss about it.  Sorting stuff out in the sorting draws and laying them out on the floor or a white sheet so they are more easily identified or differentiated is not actually what 'this' is about and the fact the 'this' is orphaned and in quotation marks twice is deliberate. I have deliberately not located the this of this this. 

I am grouchy today - I want a place for art and play, playful art and artful play and I want this place to resist.  To resist everything, to resist everything that tries to capture it. Whether ideas, bodies or politics, habits or new approaches to the sorting table.  I know that the way to resist is to be missed. To live in the margins and never to step out into the bright light, to feel the warm wind on your face, as sand trickles through your fingers and makes a beach, a map a memory, a story, a moment of art escaping the hour glass.

I hope I havn't overdone it

 I am resting  today as I think I overdid things yesterday.  It was nice to be back at the playground working in the sun.  When I got home I wrote some field-notes for the first time in 4 months.  Field-notes are an affirmation  of ethnography and in turn doing research.  The fact I started up again, as I worked on the loose parts play platform seems appropriate.  It was a good day, I manged to fit a second hand slide to the platform and digging holes and cutting wood was a good reminder of the work I have done in shaping a landscape.

 I had spent the last week worrying about my final panel review meeting which I hadn't worried about before as I was oblivious to it.  I felt like the giant machine of academe was processing me again; though from what, into what, I am not sure.  It is unclear why I got so stressed about a formality but I very really did get stressed.  I gently wondered what would happen if they decided I was too crap to progress and if I could just diminish and go back to my pre- PhD artist state.  However as I tell my kids it is rarely possible to feel happy while moving backwards.

I like the first picture I have blogged, it is from a few days ago when I walked past the platform with the dog on the path at the back of what we call "up top' .  The photo isn't actually from then as I didn't have my phone with me but I popped back to take it the day after.  It is a good angle to appreciate the tree  growing through the platform, I am not sure if this is because its a new angle or if the lines meet differently.  I've got used to seeing it from the front and when you are on the platform you only really notice the trunk in the middle - the tree and the platform are much more a single thing or two things working together from this new angle.  They both tree and platform look like something that has grown over time.  

It was nice to do some graft, my back is a lot better now but at the end of the day it started to feel fragile.  I have done a number of counter intuitive things that have put my health at risk over the past few days.  I feel stupid taking these risks but I can't work out why I continue to take them - it is like some strange compulsion or an unnecessary personal testing.  I read some of Deleuzes 'the fold" this morning - he just isn't very funny without Guattari - he is like Ernie Wise without Eric.  I read the section about having a body, I really didn't get far, sometimes I like to pretend something has sunk in and I have perhaps got further than I think but sadly today this wasn't true.  Liebniz, the Baroque a strange take on differential calculus, the distinction between the Monad and the singularity were all like water flowing off a ducks back and not sinking in.   I put the book down and took the dog for a walk.   

My body stretched out and aching seems far removed from a body without organs. Perhaps it is the obsession with the physical world of flesh and things interacting, the setting of yourself against the wheels of entropy that forms a robust core of things and thoughts.  Not singularity, monad or subjectivity, more like Samuel Becket's habit that chains the dog to his vomit. 

Something feels different today - like I have had to switch on after a holiday I didn't realize I was having. I have done lots since Christmas, I have been busy, I have read and I have written stuff but in most ways I haven't really for all sorts of reasons beyond my control been fully engaged in doing a PhD.   It is good to recognize this and start to put some things and thoughts in place to move things forward.  Ending my fieldwork and writing up will be interesting - I will kick the ball to the autumn - it has been a year of kicking balls forward.

Lost at Sea

We had a yard sale on Sunday to get ready for moving house - I sold a lot of stuff that was at one point going to be made into sculptures; it was a sale of prehensions or at the very least lost potentials. 

 I'm listening to a song called 'Lost At Sea' so I stole it for my blog title.  When Tom was in a band he had a song called " War in the Pacific ".  It was written on his school history homework which was a cartoon he had drawn about the war in the pacific.  The song had nothing to do with this, it was about nearly asking a girl out but loosing confidence - A line went -

 "I thought I would end up going out with you, but somebody else will do."

The title really added to the song especially if you didn't realise its accidental nature and tried to build connections.  I do today however feel a bit lost at sea.

Doing a PhD as a 53 year old is complicated,   especially as a dyslexic with a few personal issues with writing and reading that bubble under the surface of my over confident smug interior.  I don't have imposter syndrome I have been working in the academy on and off for 20 years.  I do have some insight into what I'm good at and why I continue to live and work at the edges of academic projects.  I always knew that the PhD would locate me within a system that I have previously managed to navigate as a knowing outsider.  As I move toward the end of my funding and consider what to do next it seems more critical than ever to reconnect with the distance that gives me a certain desirable agency within research projects it makes me a commodity.  I was never intending to become an academic, rather I was intending to understand what it may mean to be a 'becoming academic'. 

But now it's a real thing it feels like there is no going through the motions of performing a PhD as when I finish and indeed as I progress an element of clarity and self knowledge in this moment seems essential.  

I did a keynote with Kate last week with no notes only stories and charisma.  It is clear that this presentation of a thinking differently is what I have to offer the strange interior world of academic thought. Perhaps its more about systems and structures, hierarchies and habits.  within this scaffold there is a need for thinking difference and thinking differently and this to a greater or lesser extent is my currency.

PhD study is what Deleuze and Guattari would call an apparatus of capture, a war machine, perhaps that over-codes the territory of thought creating striated space.   This is not bad in itself, when you read A Thousand Plateaus D and G keep reminding us that striated space is necessary that it is not bad, yet you are secretly drawn to their ideas of the nomad and smooth space and the royal or state science and the associated war machines feel at the very least a little invasive.  I want to be a sorcerer, alchemist, artist, body without organs or at least present myself as something that it not sediment in a fixed structure.  I am of course all of these things and I do want to start and finish the process of writing up a PhD and surprise myself.  I am working out how to do this without becoming something else.  It is an interesting process, a trick of the eye, a deflection of attention and then it will be done.  Not to be read of course, but also not to jump through a hoop.  I am not sure if a becoming academic looks like me, I am certainly different to when I started and I am enjoying 95 % of the process. Yet occasionally I notice I am not laughing as much as I used too and I am not actually thinking thoughts that flow or just feel like the right kind of thoughts.  On these days I remember why I called this blog MYPHD and wait for the clouds to shift. 

Cappuchino froth, puppies and Plato's forms

 Checking in again I suspect I need to check myself rather than check in with myself as I am treading water at the moment and the tide of time is speeding past me like a rip current on a surfers favorite beach.   I am not writing much and the dates on the things I am writing seem quite old - November 2020 version 12, but not much of anything new and nobody to blame but myself and fucking Covid of course. A time will come when there is a return to writing and thinking and doing but it all feels a little impossible at the moment. 

If I was going to spin myself a yarn to make me feel better, when I read this back in a week or a year, I could mention the keynote at the national education media conference we successfully delivered last week - here I told stories and quoted Raymond Williams.  The last chapter of his final book in prose is called 'Resources for a journey of Hope' and it is to Williams and his long revolution I look for inspiration.  I think that to land a tank on the beaches in Normandy and drive it to Berlin must be harder than writing a PhD. My deep respect goes out to the generation of men and women fort this war who as Kurt Vonnegut said it was a nightmare that many of them never woke up from. We also resubmitted an article about research-creation with young people to a journal, hopefully it will get published this time - it has some good bits and some crap bits but there isn't much written about this so I think it may end up been quite important.  I sometimes wonder why I find some writing easier than other writing I suppose it's having a purpose but also recognizing my actually skill as a copy editor and speech writer.  I am always better at presenting as a diamond in the rough. I do not cut well as it exposes my flaws and these are much more than the occasional spelling mistake or misplaced full stop.

 I tried to get a bit of focus today and watched a nice introduction to Plato's Forms on you tube in  a series of lectures I've discovered.  I learnt about the origin of dialectics which is a way to help us recollect the truth - the higher order of things.  It was important as it made me realize that one of the reasons Deleuze liked Spinoza and the Stoics is that they are essentially alternatives to platonic thought.  We may not think that Plato remains relevant but boy did he know how to shape a form and the shape of his thinking has stuck to the surface of lived experience like scrambled egg to a pan. Then the dog started to lick the froth from my coffee and I took him for a walk and avoided poison meat.

In the cemetery a man told me that someone had found eight jars buried in the soil up to their lids and filled with some kind of intestines.  The police had come and taken them away and tested them, they were pig guts and not human, which was a relief.  He then said a couple of weeks after the jar incident his dog had run towards him and tried to get behind his legs, he thought he was frightened by another dog but it was in fact a whirlwind, he described it as a  'tiny tornado,' I suggested 'dust devil' .  It had woven its way across the cemetery and then bumped into a wall.   The stories were not connected by cause and effect, just two strange things that had occurred in the same place to the same person. I told him about finding a gun in the undergrowth and an armed police unit turning up in what seemed like minutes.  We then discussed the poison meat, wrapped in string and pierced with knives. We speculated on whether these were small talisman offerings to the gods or some part of training dogs to fight.  None of this can squeeze into my PhD writing. I have in opening a door on what is in the PhD perhaps closed a door on what is out. Yet today was filled with talismans made of meat, tiny whirlwinds that chase dogs and pigs intestines in jars. The world is not a straightforward place.

I sold my welder on Ebay - I haven't used it for years but I like having a welder in the event I would need to use it at some point. It is like having a rope in the car, a practical part of an identity that prides itself on the potential to mend everything that can get broken. 

I replaced the bulb in the headlamp on my car - I had to read the instructions in the handbook, although this felt like a  great defeat it did make the job much easier.

I also had a walk in the peak district worried about not writing enough, dispelled the worry and wondered what I would do when I have finished not writing my PhD.