The show is up at the Old School Room, Phase Two has been handed in and things are underway with the urban sculpture garden in Branksome.
It’s pre- Phase Three, the final stage of my masters studies. Last phase I didn’t do myself justice. The shock of having my work assessed by a university really threw me. Well that along with almost being evicted because the landlady didn’t pay her mortgage.
I was struck with inertia for most of the time. I lost track of making and as to writing I just couldn’t put anything together. Knowing that all of this mattered; this was my first qualification in Fine Art and being aware I was letting it slip out of my hands just made it all worse and perpetuated the spiral of negativity.
I kind of pulled it together by going back to Polymer. I feel at home there, accepted and I work hard when I am there. This time I set myself an unachievable goal. To make a mutoscope in less that three weeks. Of course I did not complete it and the object that I created seemed to be proof to myself that I was incapable of achieving anything.
At the time I was reading a book published by the Whitechapel Gallery in their series on documents of contemporary art. This one was titled Failure. During making I listened to recordings of myself taking to school children about the idea of failure and all the while I was producing something that I knew was destined to fail, in that it would not be a functioning mutoscope.
Perhaps there is the argument, as there was in the book, that failure is something we must embrace and that if you are not failing you’re taking it too easy. I certainly wasn’t taking the easy route going to Polymer. Everything is harder in a factory with no heating and shared showers. You have to rely on everyone else for materials, tools, access to resources. Even to make a cup of tea you have to go and fill a bucket with water.
It’s not the first time I’ve ‘failed’ . A few years ago I made a year long project on rejection after I failed to secure funding for a project.
Perhaps I knew when I began my investigation into making a photographic document of the process of making the document that the outcome was unpredictable.
Is this why my work feels better when it involves participation? By involving others it creates certain unpredictability. You can always rely on people to behave unexpectedly. By asking people to be involved in making my work either through contribution of information, like at Show and Tell, action like in Invitation to Shred or materials like in the Fine Art of Rejection in each case it the outcome open and unpredictable.
Phase two taught me that I need to continue to write and to research and from there the making will come. I am never satisfied with the things I make by myself. They lack something. They lack any sort of connection, they are contrived and awkward. I am always impressed by what I can facilitate in others, what I can instigate.
At the beginning of this process I wanted to delve into dialogical practice and ‘relational aesthetics’ and somehow I got distracted because I was isolated and I tried to impress by making clever art. Now that I have learned some new skills in early photography which I feel compliment my current skills I know that I can learn new skills but how I apply them should embrace chance, or more correctly acceptance of unpredictability and the best way I can do this is by re-appropriating these processes to create a different object determined by the circumstances it is placed into.
