Have you been watching the You tube video’s by Mark McGowan?
I think you should.
http://www.youtube.com/user/chunkymark?feature=wat…
Despite all the terrible things going on i believe there is enough goodness to change things for the better. We’ve all been living lives that exploit the poor and weak and now we have to change.
Rip it up and start again.
As an artist I feel privileged, but with that privilege comes the responsibility to society to enable change. By facilitating a discussion about what we have got now and where we would like to be the artist can ‘reveal mystic truths’ as Nauman declared. Can we?
Can we really help the world? Is this an unachievable aspiration? Should we aim for it anyway?
What if what we reveal is not truth? What if we are lead by riches, fame, power? How do you remain truthful?
On Friday I went to the Artworks Christmas auction. Despite a crowd not a lot of works sold and none for the kind of money that could buy you a decent lunch never mind cover the cost of production. A lot of the artists were disappointed. I wasn’t sure I felt as disappointed as they did. My drive to make anything comes from a personal desire and the reason I share it with others is so that maybe they connect with it and it inspires them. That’s kind of enough for me. I sold 4 framed works, all for less than a tenner. I was glad that someone wanted it in their lives and like me I think they would have paid more if they had the money. I bought 3 pieces for 50quid which was all of my wages from working in the restaurant this week. I wish I could have paid what I felt they were worth, at least ten times that.
Each of the pieces I bought I have a connection with. I’ve seen them in the studio for months and they represent the artist, the time, the place. The narrative is as important as the object. In a way the objects are documents of the narrative and that’s why I am connected with them because they are part of my narrative also. The cash I hand over is just a representation for the appreciation of this and really the art always belongs to the artist. The collector just holds the document.
Back to Mark McGowan. He is uploading videos everyday reminding us about where we are. They are there for everyone to see. The more people who experience them the better, but who is paying for his food? Who buys his kids school uniforms and lunches? If the artist is challenged with revealing mystic truths then these cannot be bought. What does the artist do to feed themselves whilst in pursuit of mystic truths? Work in a restaurant? Make craft pieces to sell? Maybe the collector also needs to change and rather than hold a document of the work appreciate that no object may change hands in the quest for truth.
At the end of the event I went up to the tech room where I had set up my Flip HD camera held in place with a piece of blu tac. It had fallen over and out of power. Well, I thought, that’s it no chance of having captured anything on this.
After yesterday with the trauma of capturing the video from the DV tape which took most of the day and then finding out the paper we’d used had been taken away by the cleaners I was overjoyed today to find that my little friendly Flip camera had stayed alive until the end and must not have fallen over until I’d arrived upstairs.
Now is the task of editing. A while ago I did a course on Final Cut Pro, but only afterwards I researched the cost of the software so I haven’t used it much since. I have Adobe Premiere Elements but I find it so frustrating to use. I think at university they have Final Cut Pro but now that the place is closing for Christmas I will not have time to edit…
..actually i got side tracked here…
I’ve just given up on Premier and decided to take stills from playing it in movie player as I pressed the fast forward key and almost fell off the chair laughing at the action in quick motion.
I love how you can see how it developed, the different activities going on, the conversations and interactions between people. If I edit it I would have to cut out these little sideline things that happened but these are important because they all informed the entire event.
And the chipmunk style sounds are hilarious!
It happened.
tearing
stuffing
sliding
throwing
batting
jumping
covering
sweeping
laughing
showering
folding
twisting
clapping
reading
acting
filling
Is it chaos? is it play? what would happen if we never stopped?
Tomorrow I will present a live art work in the studio theatre at AUCB that has been developed from an improvised performance at Polymer Culture Factory.
It’s been cut down and reformed and is quite far removed from what happened in the first event. The main focus of the event was tearing paper and this has remained the focus of this event but with so much stripped down will it still work?
Since the beginning of the new academic year I have been running Peer Critiques every Wednesday. I’ve been using these sessions to learn about other people’s work and to discuss why had how I am presenting this work. On one occasion whilst we were discussing the use of sounds for the piece a loud debate broke out. I sat and observed and then one student turned to me a quietly asked about the importance of the ‘party’ atmosphere that the music was intending to create.
It was like someone had opened the window and let fresh air in. What about silence? What about allowing the sound create itself? By adding music at the first event it created an energy. It was completely improvised; I asked Tanel to put on some music and he chose Bille Jean. This was great for the event but at the same time the connotations of this song, this artist added another level to the event.
I expect that the absence of this baseline will have a dramatic effect on the event. The fact that the venue is an art college and that about half the attendees will be people I know and who know about my work will also change it. The studio, professional lighting, HD camera, the planning and the fact that it exists outside of a festival and is in fact a research project will make everything about the experience very different.
What I need to decide is what I want from this experience. Just like the previous experience I am nervous. I have no idea how the attendees will react to the situation. I want to see what happens without time constraints and without random additions. How does the idea and the process stand up by itself? How do people engage? How do I direct and manage the experience?
At the back of my mind I feel that the lack of sound will create tension, which hopefully will be released and transformed into giddiness and excitement and an atmosphere for play. This is the key thing for this activity; a group of people coming together to play this is the artwork, to create a situation where the public have a shared experience of playfulness. Whether they understand that the destruction of rejected materials as part of a process to create whiteness or as Kenya Hara describes it itoshiroshi ‘that extreme form of purity that is ladled out of chaos and which appears to us both potentially and actually’
