The last Blog Post

 

Its time for the clocks to leap forward so I have just been in the cellar preparing the old sundial.  I've started to swap them over every six months again as we have moved and our new house is closer to Abbeyfield park.  I  have decided that this is going to be my last blog post on MYPHD the accidentally clever title, it has to end somewhere.  I spoke to Kate about it and she seemed to think it was a good idea, a transition from function to meaning or data to evidence or at the very least a publishing, the creation of an object with edges. This seems appropriate. 

This drawing of the line of completion is very significant in that the whole of my PhD inquiry has evolved into an exploration of territory.  This is close to the original concept of residency as method in that it expands on what a residency can be within its interactions with the world.  At points I have thought of residency as assemblage but this pins it too closely to the Deleuzian flag pole. I need a more practical and empirical set of concepts to produce something relevant.  The idea of territory has been present from the start and this Blog has afforded a line of flight across the assemblage of  residency.  The shift in thinking over the three years is a movement towards understanding process and flow better in relation  to arts practice.  It is a making sense of things that were on the edges of thought, not really moving them centrally but allowing them to fizz.  Like Berocca tablet bubbling in the glass to help with the hangover sometime effervescence is the only thing that affords a cure, however temporary. 

I had a text exchange with Kate who is keen to get me done and dusted she is been very helpful.  She says 

Start writing an introduction that explains 

1) why did you want to do this thesis 

2) who are you 

3) what the playground means and 

4) the problem in hand- how residency as method is both a proposition and a question.

These all seem like big questions and I am tempted to start to answer them here but as this is my last post I am required to sign off and open a new folder on my desktop called the final push and create a new word document. I am a reluctant academic and will attempt to finish what I have started. 

The Way Things Wear

I used to be interested in how peoples hands would wear things.  The shiny big toe on the crude elfin figure of Pan in the botanical gardens. The patina polished  away by the acid coated sweaty fingertips of stroking of hands.  There was a wooden handle on an old style across the path on the way to my school, the edges warn smooth now fitting perfectly in the palm of my child self hand.  Form following function warn into its becoming through persistent use.  I made a series of works called the way things wear. The cast of the space missing in an old stone step at Bolsover castle. The absent end of my Nana's Yorkshire pudding spoon given to her as a wedding present warn away in half a centuries batter and now nestled in our cutlery draw.  The visualized record of entropy, the fact everything is gradually been warn away and re-dispersed across the world.   The wood in the image above was salvaged from a piece of play equipment. It has warn quickly due to the presence of sand and the fact it was needed as a grip when climbing through a hatch.  This wood is a jump, a hyperlink back to a line of practice that is always present yet currently behaves like a well behaved cancer and lives in remission.  Culture is ordinary - this is a fact.  Where does this thing, the writing of a PhD sit within this line of undefined practice? this is a question for my abstract because if the PhD can not accommodate the practice within its event it is irrelevant.  I may need to follow the advice of my good friend a bongwater and find something more useful to occupy my last few years of my creative production. The piece that is warn away is also present, the space it once occupied resonates with its absense.

 I have come back to my desk after what seems like a long time.  The writing above is from one of my first sole authored book chapters, it resonates now.  Titorelli bemoaning his inability to make great art as he has spent too much time with the lawyers has always stuck in my mind. This along with K's long walk up twisted staircases to visit him in his studio. A life as an artist is specific and requires practice. It is not better than another life yet it is different, the things that make it different are things that make an artist.

The fear of becoming an academic has receded a little now as it becomes clear that there is little chance of that.  I am a starter finisher though and although the writing feels daunting in oh so many ways the task has a certain urgency due to approaching deadlines. I spoke to Kate this morning and she is going to set me a daily writing task, this will be good for me.  I copied and pasted everything I have written into a single document - it was only 35000 words which is a bit worrying- there must be over 60000 on this blog which isn't a PhD but I am rather proud of it.

Culture is ordinary this is where it starts.  I have done the work the reading and the thinking I just have the writing to do now and although this is daunting I think I have an idea of what I need to do.   Ben Shannon PhD has a big section where he writes about the affordances of research-creation in  relation to his PhD study.  He doesn't make a distinction between research-creation and PaR this coupled with attending a workshop about working on research projects with artists reveals a gap in knowledge even if it is present within the literature.  I need to write about the affordance of research-creation in relation to my journey through the academy.  When I first started working with Kate Pahl we set off to do a conference in Boston she told me that the university should be a station that the train of my life passes through.  A warning not to get stuck in  the thick mud of it, good advice and something I took on board. My train has stopped but I'm not getting off just splitting my ticket to save money with an eye on a destination of choice.

Busy Times

 I am currently working on.

1. Building a climbing wall at Highfields adventure playground.

2. Shadow Play at both Adventure playgrounds working towards an event early April

3. We are our Stories project in Bristol with Jennifer

4. Treescapes project with Kate.

5. Festival of the Mind project with Clare.

6. Potential Calligari project.

7. I am writing a paper on Multi-modality and research-creation.  

I have finished all the projection jobs we had booked in and will finish the climbing wall next week but I haven't had any time to work on my PhD for a month.  When I return to it I am hoping that I will have a focus on preparing something to submit.  It isn't the first time I have hoped for this but it is as I said on here a couple of months ago- crunch time.  I am aiming for the October 3 rd deadline for submission. I am not sure how practical this is but if I kick the can forward again at this point I'm sure I will not be able to get the focus and the time I will need to finish things off.

In the short term though I have enjoyed been busy and doing project work - I've pushed myself past the COVID barrier.  I've justified a lot of this by telling myself I need to earn money as my bursary has ended; there is some truth in this.  After Christmas I did feel worried about my mental health, part of my subjective ecology was starting to vanish up my own anus.  I know I should of stitched it up with fishing line if I was going to actually make a Body without Organs. I am a victim of my own neglect.  I have had four breaks from writing over the past three years, this is the longest and I am hoping the return will be more productive.

Working on the shadow -puppet project has reminded me of the things that happen when you are not doing research.  The fantastic and miriad relations, stories and connections that are always meant too be blown away by the wind.  The edge of the platform, the frame for this work is grown and flows from relationships, the ethics are located and persoanl.  Calling work 'research' seems to be the problem.  I liked creating living knowledge as a concept and I like the Manifesto nature of Kerrys book yet there is still an element of capture. Like the wild animals that roam the countryside an enclosure, however expansive takes something away from what it is to be alive, as Deleuze would say the pure  immanence of a life. 

There is a scene in the fellowship of the ring where the Dwarves have built a giant underground city - Gandalf does not want to go there as they dug too greedily and to  deep and awakened something that should of been left sleeping.  This is the way of a proper PhD study, to dig too deep into the foundations of thought.  It is good for the hastily built dwellings to have their foundations questioned and shored up, it can be good for some of the buildings to fall down and make way for something new.  however like  the Dwarves of Khazad-dum it is important to recognise the dangers that can be unearthed when we dig below the surface. 

Again the fear of banality enters the equation, to return to been measured against a standard I hold in low regard yet the desire remains not to be found wanting. 

A month off Fingernail Time

 

My fingernail is nearly grown out.  I don't remember how I did it in the first place, it probably involved a hammer or something I was using as a hammer.  The dead pool of blood started out near the perfect half moon of whiteness that I am told, on good authority, has the consistency of mashed potato.   I have watched it grow out over the last four months. It is a good marker of time as it cuts through weeks and months, deadlines and disparate projects.   There is something inevitable and progressive about its slow growth, this is how PhD time should flow. 

I seem to have accidentally taken a month off from PhD work. I was getting deeply stressed and frustrated with the writing I was doing.  I would not say it was making me ill because in my, family things of the mind never make you ill. Even though we have lived with the impact of mental illness destroying lives, our bi-polar genes cascading through generations, we all find it difficult to say that there may be a problem.  My problems always seem to surface when I get stuck into writing and produce texts that do not match up to what I have in my mind's eye.  Making art felt like this for a long time, especially after I had just finished art school. I did not feel like I had access to the tools, materials and time to make anything good enough.  I would gradually build my workshop, buy a lathe, a welder, a circular saw,  and I amassed a collection of bits and bots, bellows and false legs, things I found on the beach, hand worn pieces of wood, my Dad's tools, my Grandad's tools, and a leather bag of lead shot that my Great Grandad had used to make 12 bore shotgun cartridges. I gradually gave up on the impossibility of what I wanted to make in my mind's eye and started to make what was possible.  The possible then replaced the aspirational and I began to make things that I became happy with.  To be happy with is not to be satisfied, when you are satisfied you tend to stop. In contrast, as you start to get happy with things you feel inspired to do more. I have channeled my desire to make things into making things that are part of making something happen. The piece I carry from my practice is the importance of doing something rather than nothing, the strange yet potent truism "Stuff comes from Stuff".

I have been writing academic papers since 2010.  I do this with competence and flare.  As a writer I attempt to play with forms, to write in a way that is unexpected.  I am a poet and a storyteller with a belief that there is always something missing and always something more.  I play with written forms in a way that I play with materials and objects.  Never fully locating myself in something that can be recognised, yet consistently paying attention to the nuanced details of words and things that bring us closer to something.  My break from writing my PhD has made me feel better in myself but has not as yet, brought any resolution to start to write again.  

I decided today that what I needed to do was bulk out my writing.  I used the analogy of a meal where you only had 2 or 3 tasty things like some anchovies, olives and fillet steak and you had to bulk it out with rice or mashed potato.   I think I know what my tasty things are - they are concepts rather than garnish.

1. The opacity of artistic practice, the secret plan that nobody, not even the artist is fully aware of.  The plan is linked closely to feeling.  The feeling that something is the right thing to do and the internal and opaque logic of the sense of it.  All art comes from this place.  Sometimes it is located in a single person yet more often it is dispersed. 

2. Research-creation as a way to introduce and hold this opacity within a research project as distinct from the creation or event of art in the world.

3. The collective and irreducible singularity of the event as an ontological position.  It feels that although different to some extent there is a need for any way of being that sets itself against dominant modes of thought to have and hold a structure of concepts that can resist.  

4. My take on the singularity is to propose, use and define the term 'raveling' as a concept that will do work within my study.  This is the fillet steak of the meal, it needs to be cooked with care and shared out in careful portions. This will be my contribution to the field - a concept that I think will help artists think and work differently. 

This is what Deleuze and Guatari set out to do or at the very least propose.  A minor philosophy that would chip away at the foundations of thought until the edifice is undermined to the extent that the only way forward was to build something new.  We sit in the forlorn ruins of a near defunct capitalism where we feel everything is to be lost and nothing can be found. Everything within the structure of the academic way of knowing about the world seems unable to move away from a building block approach to knowledge.

Thursday writing day

 After a funny week of angst I restarted Thursday writing day.  River has handed his PhD in so the writing group isn't happening. This is sad but it never really picked up momentum and I'm not inclined to keep the stone rolling. It needs to gather moss. I went for a walk to Parkwood Springs as the day was glorious, on my return I've tried to watch Manning and Massumi on You Tube talking about Whitehead but after 7 minutes I switched off after 12 minutes I switched it off. 

I did start my literature review again with a focus on research-creation. I read Manning Against Method chapter 4 of A Minor Gesture.  She tricks you by starting normal and then going off the scale in terms of references and complicated rabbit holes of thought.  I was really hoping it would make more sense this time around but by the middle I was very confused.  It reads like it should be more like analytical philosophy in that it works towards or builds to as simple an explanation as is possible of a complicated issue but it just looses me in the middle, that's probably the point but I don't care enougth. 

At about 2 I came up with this idea about research-creation and ethnographic field notes.

So the proposition is

Research creation affords the potential to write fiieldnotes from the speculative middle with no distance or withdrawal from the field and no transcendental aspiration - yet they still have to be field notes as a heuristic as something that becomes enfolded into the practice.

I liked this sentence because it pulled together my field notes and the idea of immanence in that I was not doing ethnography or trying to become an ethnographer. I was merely drawing on the writing of ethnographic field notes into the milieu of a research creation project.  They emerged as boundary objects in the field, they were not performative or a representation of field notes.  Yet because they came form the middle and emerged in the practice, not planned for or applied they were enfolded. As such they count as research creation and this concept freed them or at least changed their relationship to a tradition. The art making tipped them out of the groove as Whitehead would say. 

If I was asked why am I doing field-notes and critiqued for turning to an ethnographic humanist tradition that necessarily bifurcates the known from the subjective 'I' that knows I am starting to formulate a response.  I can scaffold this in relation to research creation and I can say I don't give a flying fuck what Denzin has to say about it. 

When I was walking the dog I started to think about the actual location of my residency and its complex set of relations.  I always secretly felt that my actual residency was within the university and within the idea of research and arts/artists position or location.  The power of the university to separate itself from the world continues to fascinate me.  This again is to an extent tackled by research-creation with its concern for making- thinking- doing, it can't just work with a fragment it is hungry for an expanse with no edges only folds.

So we come to the real work of the Phd and the only really consistent work I've done in terms of thinking and writing lives within this blog.  It is here where I write the struggle and descend into madness and come back again only to end up in a stasis of frustration.  it is here and only here where I do the writing that I can do, that I'm proud of and that works.  It is here where I am able to talk about the actual residency that sits in the speculative middle between the becoming  of the virtual and the actual in the only real that counts as anything in relation to the event of my PhD journey.  

Art, Disobedience and Ethics

 I worked in Bristol last week. It was a new project with Jennifer and I was nervous about it for all sorts of reasons.  I called it coming out of my Covid coma.  It was the first thing I had done since the start of the pandemic that felt like a new challenge. I was as worried about the drive as I was about the work.  Jennifer goes to bed very early but on Thursday night she spent a couple of hours coaching me which was helpful. She helped me to recognise things I already know about the PhD writing process  and galvanized the idea that PhD writing is a process I  need to fully engage with.  It is no longer any use to dance around the edges and write large amounts of words that are not a PhD.  

I have some nice work to do at the moment. A build project with Tom at Highfied adventure playground, the Shadow-Play project for Sheffield Theaters, the We Are Our Stories project in Bristol and the most excellent Trees project. Along with a few projection events this is possibly about 70 percent of what I was doing before my PhD as a freelancer.  Leaving 30 percent for PhD writing which seems just about doable as the funding has now finished. 

I've been having a strange exchange of ideas with Tim where we send each other short video clips.  He is normally in his cellar and I can only see the top of his head. I am in the cemetery walking the dog. My films are a bit like a first person video game.  He is trying to help me find a way through, his comments mainly focus on the purpose of writing a PhD not so much about creating new knowledge more about what the PhD is for.

One of Tim's suggestions was to think critically about my work with the academy.  To look at how I work on research and how I bring my practice to research projects.  In itself this is not very useful as I tried to explain that this is where I am and the type of critique I would probably like to make would need to come from the outside of where I am.  Perhaps from the world and work of artists and musicians trying to find a place for their disciplines to thrive or at least find value within the world of research. I am on the inside now, I feel like I am on  the inside trying to make new-sense.  Working freelance again especially on research projects has allowed me to feel a position again, a position where I feel I am of value. The difference between my PhD and these arenas is that on the projects I can bring a practice, bring arts methods and know enough about how theory works and how the academy work to have the confidence to contribute. Feeling out of my depth is always part of this but I rarely feel like I am drowning.  Picking up on projects like Treescapes and the Stories project in Bristol have reminded me how I work but also made me think about how my PhD project at the playground is very different to this way of working.

My initial work with Abi was actually a perfect  example of how research can work between disciplines, bring something distinct and different and looking back it really helped me to think in new ways about fractures and interventions and collaboration.  At the playground I'm actually on my own, there are no other disciplines or projects to intervene in so there is no middle space.  What has evolved over the 2 years of my residency is an interplay with theory - the theory has become the thing that intervenes, the middle place.  I say theory as distinct from the literature.  It is as if I am working in a cross disciplinary way with Delueze, I have accidentally invented this relationship for the project to try and make an in-between. 

It feels quite clear now that in developing my own project as an empirical study I was unable to actually explore what I had been doing for years which was to be in residence within a research project.  As I was constructing and building the project myself there was nothing (no event) intrinsic or transcendental to intervene with. I produced the  research myself so there was a different possibility of interaction.  I also identify as a visual artist and not a researcher so there is an element of performing research that never sat comfortably. 

I am working through Dennis Atkinsons book on art disobedience and ethics.  Laura suggested it was a book very much about art education and since she pointed this out I have read with this in-mind which has made it easier to understand.  I would say it is a book that places art and the creation of something new within the context of school pedagogies  or perhaps schooling.  The book points out how art is disobedient and will not settle - art is like a dog with a bone.  I haven't taken notes,  I don't take notes when I read books I find difficult as the interesting thoughts, if they are good are held within the difficulties.  I also find that when I take detailed notes they can often miss the point, find the easier routes to understanding which for me often removes feeling the books affect.  

There is a lot that resonates for me and connects to my experience.  Immanence is introduced really well - the not-yet, the enunciation on the verge of becoming. The speculative possibilities of art to engender difference to be more-than - to over-code to be in excess to capture.  With my theory head on and given that I haven't quite finished the book there is a worry for me that art is been tasked with doing or having the potential to do more than it perhaps can.  I read the book in bed at Jenifer's as I thought about our next day in school.  A big part of me was in complete agreement with thoughts from Rancierre and Spinoza and Whitehead and Deleuze and Guattari and I was laying these thoughts and agreements on the lesson plan for school.  What I realized is that to have any type of freedom you had to first be let in.  To be let in you had to be trusted and that it was too much to expect art to be disobedient without building a context for this disobedience.  It also felt like a weight of expectations almost like art was a panacea or a magic corrective wand. Dennis's book does not aspire to be  practical guide and it is brilliant in many ways, it does bring the key thinkers that come up again and again together in a way that makes sense, it does explain through example and creates connections and it does challenge some foundational bedrocks within schooling that have a massive impact on schools at every level.  The perception of good learning and teaching and quantifying it is an oppression. I welcome any well thought through challenge. 

Reading the book and then going into school and dealing with the practicalities, personalities, research project, expectations and pure logistics did make me wonder where it fitted.  I felt I aligned with the core ideas about learning and it was good to see them clearly laid out and beautifully referenced.  The book is like an external justification of a practice and an approach I passionately believe. Yet the mechanisms that come into play to hold onto and work with this ethos seem more complex and nuanced in the world.  It feels like the trick is not to know when to stick to your guns but to be able to compromise without  loosing site of an ethos, an idea, a practice, a way an art.

Forgetting even the blog

My black thumbnail is moving gradually towards the end of things.  I was using it as a body clock to mark the passing of time and hoping that I would of got somewhere by the time it had grown out.  Alas I am not where I thought I should be and have recognised the real possibility that I will never be where I thought I should be.  After a genuine push before Christmas on producing a literature review I have hit a wall of inertia.  I have had to pull back from writing as my anxiety levels actually got quite bad.  It is good to admit this to myself and to admit that being anxious is something I have to live with and take care of. I over think things and find it hard to be in the moment of something without worrying about something else.

I have therefore taken my foot off the pedal and allowed the black dead blood under my nail to gradually grow out in the background.  This decision or what could better be described as a lack of decision started just after my last supervision.   The problem from my end is quite straightforward in that I cannot write in a way that holds the central problematic contradiction at the core of my work and thinking.  The reason for this is twofold, firstly I am not a good enough writer and secondly the form of writing that is required for a successful PhD submission doesn't hold the level of ambiguity I feel I need. Not knowing and the problem with arts practice align with immanence in the space of the work for me but I seem unable to work this through my PhD writing.  I was always hoping that I would be able to do this through art, stories and material things and it was this tripartite combination that gave me optimism hope and direction. To move forward it is these three things I may have to abandon.

A ladybird is making its way across a book on Art-based methods on my desk. It has been woken up too early,  either by the mild weather or our central heating. It is orange rather than red and has around 16 black spots.  I want to write a PhD that pays attention to the ladybird, allows for it to enter into the writing and the thinking and to make new-sense.  As everyone is so keen to tell me this would not really be a PhD but critically for today this is where I am. The ladybird has crept into my blog post in order to help me finish it off with a little flare of colour.
 

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.

 

removing the obstruction

 I managed to remove the tree stump with Tom at some point over the Christmas break. It happened between the hangover and the winter vomiting virus.  We ended up snapping it using two long levers; it's last gasp of splitting timber was very satisfying.  It was so big that after getting out of the ground we could hardly move the bloody thing.

The new year has started and I have spent my first day back at work, pause, whatever that may mean. I have done some emails and some readings and gathered myself. I have picked up the ends of the raveling I've created.

It is good when you get somewhere to remind yourself that you have got there.   I did remove the stump and as with any good metaphor I need to layer this into my PhD process.  

Picking up a thread of a thought from the end of last year when I decided the purpose of doing as opposed to writing a PhD for a person like me is to endeavor to make something new. To bring something into the world, to create something.  Whatever is created and the potential for it is to a degree irrelevant. It does not have to be great or special, it can be poorly explained, derivative and  ugly.  What it can't do, at least  for me, is to be a representation of something that was always there.

At the back of much of my reading lies the lure of creation. Like a secret thread that gets swallowed and  eventually becomes an entwined part of a body.  The tree stump removal and the realization of the need to create something new are two events that span the end of last year and the start of this year.

The justification is for struggle. The moment when all that will do is muscle and sweat. The moment to find a groove, a refrain, a vibrancy, a purpose and to hold it dear.  I will plant the lawn and level out the place where the stump grew.  Many people might come in to the garden and not know the stump had ever grown there yet I will remember the struggle of removing it. Digging down deep with my mattock my spade and my hands and looking for any object, close to hand to help lever the obstruction out of the way. 

So this is the start of the new year where writing however bad finds its purpose.  I'm not sure why I started to dig up the stump but once I began the process the task took on its own requirement for completion.

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.