Its the last day of January which means I have chosen a challenge to be carried out. Despite having a few exciting challenges, the most truly challenging was from Alexander Stevenson and is:
January Challenge
Invite local celebrities, national celebrities, local government, local clubs and societies, local press, important people and less so, to come to your studio and have you explain what it is that you do / are doing. It will take all of your cunning and tactical skills to get people to actually come, and you can rate the exercise based on who you manage to get (ie. the mayor = 10 points, head of the local hells angels = 4 points).
I find this both really exciting and really daunting. For a starter I recently gave up my studio and re-located it in my house (it was time to learn to drive and the studio was relocatable) meaning the whole event will have to be in my living room which is tiny. Getting local celebrities etc to my front room is going to be a challenge in its self. although if The Institute (www.twoaddthree.org) can do it then I can give it a damn good go.
Task number one is to make a list of appropriate people and go from there.
Its also time for the February challenges to begin being submitted.
The project has hit a minor slump recently as I am having major trouble posting to arts jobs, the free online listings of arts jobs and news. It would appear the website keeps logging me out. I have tried this with three email addresses and on three different computers which run off different IP addresses, short of hacking the website I have no idea how to get any news up there, and apparently nore does the site managers. Its obviously a limited problem because there are other posts on the listings. Strange I have done it in the past (on the old site)
This really means that I need to utilise other online information portholes to get information about the project out there. Im not uncomfortable with the amount of challenges for January it will give me something to get my teeth stuck into, and I am hoping the project makes steady progress through out the year. Its a bit of a waiting game now until the end of January, and then full steam ahead.
I have spent some time organising the structure of how people will interact with the project over the past week or so. There are now some guidelines in place, I have a feeling however with the nature of the project they may become adapted.
Last night I sent a short mail shot out to begin to raise awareness of the project. I am now blogging with excitement from the out comes of that. So far I have received three challenges and they are very different and very exciting, each one is a completely different style of challenge, two verge on being illegal and one has a very high chance of me looking ridiculous unless I am cleaver enough to make it a success.
Until a few days ago I had thought that I would choose the challenges from those I receive, however some one put to me that it should not be me that selects the challenge. I find that a really interesting notion but there are two sides of the coin. If I were to choose however objective I attempt to be, there will always be an element of subjectivity choosing challenges that interest me most over those that are the most challenging. However these challenges are personal and if some one were to choose for me I may not find the selected option challenging. The question of authorship is then raised, if some one else chooses the challenge then my authorship is only in initiation and fulfilment, and not in being an objective selector.
I feel in truth to the project structure I have put in place so far would be for me to choose the challenge objectively, perhaps I say that as I have set the structure of the project and am not as open to changing that structure as I would like to be. The challenge however is to remain objective. I need to make the decision about this before the end of the month which is achievable, however what I choose should then become another project rule. I am also actually quite scared about another person selecting my challenge for the month, comes with the territory!
You can now become a part of the project on Facebook.
Toady had to be the day to start this blog and really begin work on the project. Although at this stage there is still a lot of planning to do. The project however has a definite start and end so here it is.
Challenge 2010 is a project which will see people set me challenges through out the year, one a month. At the end of each month I will select a challenge out of the one’s people have sent me to be carried out, there is no limit to what the challenges could be as long as they fall with in an artistic discipline, which leaves it quite open to interpretation. In other words I am not fixed by a title of curator / artist / critic etc, or any one medium and it is individual imagination that will make the challenges interesting and diverse. I could of course have set my self challenges each month but they would be subjective and limited to my own thought processes.
The reason for starting the project is simple, I believe in challenge and fear that with out challenge practice and indeed life can become stale, challenges help us explore, take risks and fail, but with out challenge we can not excel our potential.
The project has been in development for some time but until today I have not allowed any work to happen in relation to it, in keeping with the time restraints of the project. So presumably January will be the hardest month as I configure the project structure and the methods people will use to interact with the project as well as getting submissions for the January challenge. There are still unanswered questions about the project but they will be answered in time, or else drift and become irrelevant.
I aim for this blog to be an honest documentation of the processes the project undertakes and the situations that come from it. 2010 is by no means an empty year, but there is nothing foreseeable which would cause the the project to not be carried out accordingly. So I set out in search of a true challenge…..
