Thinking through Practise

 I've just listened to a talk from 2016 about Utopia and adventure play. In many ways it was a helpful reminder of how long we have been thinking through some of the key concepts that have emerged across the 3 years of my PhD study. In my very first blog post I talked about how practice would be my safety net and I confidently self identified as a practitioner. This seems like a long time ago

As the funding for my study has now finished I am officially a freelance practitioner again.  From memory I think this part of early January is always hard and things are slow to get going.  In many ways this slowness is a good reminder that it's not good to not be busy.  When I am not busy the small things grow in size and fill the foreground of a life.  Not being busy is a necessary part of practice, it defines the space of it by carving out the negative form.

Everyday when Kim gets home form work I tell her that I have struggled. Luckily it has only been 3 days so far, she is very busy and carries a lot of responsibility,. She is also not that tolerant of my needy version.  I am not busy and carry very little responsibility for others yet I still seem to be carrying a weight on my shoulders. 

Today when I woke up  I felt like I didn't know anything. Like I didn't have a practice. Like I don't have a raveling of potentials that I keep going on about.  It is difficult to work or contemplate doing work as I am  no longer sure what doing work would actually look like.  I have had a few false starts and I am slogging through Dennis Atkinsons book about Art and Disobedience. It brings together Spinoza, Whitehead and Deleuze into the arena of artistic learning.  The book feels like it should fit and it works through some of the concepts I have been struggling through in a way that is systematic yet pays attention to the complexity. I can't work out if it is bringing me closer to something or moving me father away.

From a professional perspective in the moment of inactivity, within this pause in things I feel like I am on the brink of a crises.  The Christmas break has not taken me to a place where I can get stuck in it has put me in a place where I feel stuck. I feel like the character in the Billy Brag song who is waiting for the great leap forward. ( never to come)

I cannot help but think that part of what I'm working through is a move away from practice and feeling like I have/had one. Not having a workshop is part of this and probably not having a project that is very clearly visual art is part of this.  The writing I seem capable of, the writing  that works is always slightly angry and always raveled in with making thinking and doing. It is a journey through the hyper chaos as Johan would say.  The concept of raveling is about working with practice within an event which includes research.  This is the part of my PhD that I often point towards but have not really started to write. Perhaps I have without realising it. This then is the thing, to develop an identity as an artist scholar which I seem to be harping on about I need to develop a practice as an artist/scholar which may involve giving something up in terms of my identity as an artist. 

So we have the catch 22 situation which is closely linked to the catch 22 situation in the book.  To write about a subjective arts practice in the arena I have entered I need to become an artist/scholar and to do this I need to develop a practice that enables this becoming.  The catch 22 is that in becoming an artist scholar practitioner a part of practice needs to be abandoned.  This opaque and felt part of practice what I like to think of as new-sense that needs to be abandoned is never really there. It is always on the edge of being there, it is not manifested within an art object , its becoming is not a coming to matter or words or ideas it remains on its own plane.  

For most of this PhD I have maintained the throughline of a practice. Think of it as one of the ends of the raveling, a place to start to unpick the ball of emotions and actions that constitute the ever expanding event. Since I've sat back at this desk post Christmas I have lost the dangley end of things that however complex the knot would always give you a place to start.  A raveling is not a tangle and perhaps the tangle is something that needs to be avoided.  When you go fishing there is a point when you get in a tangle that you just need to cut out the mess and start again.  Perhaps spool on some new line and push the mess of mono filament deep into the bottom of your bag partly so you can forget about it and partly to avoid causing damage to wildlife.  My knowledge feels narrow and not expansive, the shape of a practice is slipping away and I'm not sure where to bolster it.  

Tim was helpful yesterday he again said that my literature review was not really a literature review which I knew already.  The form of a literature review is robust and there seems no real point in trying to subvert it, the subversion would do nothing except undermine what comes after. We talked about the body without organs and he gave me two pieces of advice. The first was to stitch up my Anus which is Delueze and Guattaris advice on making yourself into one.  They also suggest stitching up every other orifice that presents an opening onto the world. We both acknowledged how ridiculous it is that in a world so grotesque it still jars when someone in polite society demands that you stitch up your arse.   He then more usefully proposed that I spend some time defining my terms - the words I will use and how I will use them.  I wondered if this was perhaps a lexicon?  this word crops up a lot in my projects at the moment. I think I know what it means but it seems to be a word that is asked to carry more than its everyday usage. I think Tim is encouraging me to write a lexicon for my PhD as a way of presenting or working through a literature review  more appropriately demonstrating a route through some specific literature in a way that does what a literature review needs to do.   I am grasping at straws now but feel like I need something to grasp firmly in both hands.  500 words about each concept that frames its use within the PhD writing - the raveling through a practice.  It would mean nearly starting from scratch although everything I have written will find a place I'm sure.  What words will form my lexicon of practice, what words would afford a structure that would scaffold a journey through the literature? what words are important?

1. Residency

2. Practice

3. Nomad

4.Assemblage

5. Concept

6. Research

7. Enchantment

8. Aesthetics

9. Body

10. Event

11. Ravelling

12. Platform

13. Play

14. New

15. Dream

16. Speculate

17. Proposition

18. Art

19. minor

20. creation.