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.