I’ve been reading a lot about Michael Snow recently and the effect his experimental videos had on cinema. I’ve been reading about him because this weekend myself and James are going to the LUFF film festival in Switzerland and Snow is a guest speaker and they are showing many of his seminal films. James has been selected as one of the finalists in the experimental shorts competition (good luck with that James!).
Nevertheless all this immersion into Michael Snow is having an effect on my work (although I’m still learning) and I spent a day last week filming in the cinema.
They do have some screenings on at the weekend but usually the cinema is quiet during the week. However as part of the educational workshops that the mill provides for primary school kids they sometimes show some Sennett comedies, including the Keystone Cops and these had me mesmerised. They have a small 10 minute show reel of fast edited segments of action slap-stick and the timing of the stunts particularly using real trains was just fantastic. It’s unbelievable what these actors did nearly 100 years ago for the sake of comedy and how creative and inventive they were. There were also some films showing home movies taken in and around Leeds about 60 years ago. As they were silent and lacked a logical narrative this, for me, only emphasised their seductive visual quality.
I spent a while filming inside the cinema trying to emphasise the space between the viewer and the screen , making the spectator aware that there’s a (passive?) relationship when watching moving images. I also spent time filming a certain section of the film and rewinding it and playing it again, I aim to edit this where it loops over and over without any respite. It seems to be quite a common theme for me as I’ve produced work before which could be linked to Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, where the work is locked in the same and repeats over and over again. Or maybe it’s just my OCD!
I also did some drawing on the window in the MillSpace. I’ve positioned my desk right near the window and I’ve spent a bit of time gazing out there, looking at the river and waiting for the Kingfishers that are supposed to be about (not yet seen them!).
I positioned myself in one view point and softened my gaze and just drew the lines of the mill and the water onto the window with a black marker pen. This method isn’t used for a reproductive lifelike drawing and the lines aren’t drawn in the ‘right’ position. It’s the act of softening your eyes and trusting what you draw. It’s also quite meditative. These drawings play with perception and it also question the act of looking and our trust in what we see as being truly representative.
So last week I spent some time in the archives with Neil, the museum curator and although part of my proposal was based on using objects from the archives in a sculptural context, he isn’t letting me used any out in the open in the gallery. I suppose that this is understandable but throws my work into a bit of a quandary. I can use things but they have to be locked up in a cabinet which really defeats the kind of work I wanted to do. I did say that I wanted to use some of the objects in the archives to experiment with, playing with things until things work and I have found a piece that I’m happy with. Needless to say that I don’t think that Neil was involved in any part of the decision process when choosing artists for the residency.
I was able to take some things from the archives though, and it’s the boxes that they use to keep objects in to store them. When I was first allowed in the archives alone, I noticed was the vast amount of cardboard boxes in different styles, colours and shapes. I had used cardboard a lot in previous work so it’s no surprise that I’m still attracted to it: I previously used it as a material which was free/cheap to paint on/ sculpt and I remember being heavily influenced by Rauschenberg’s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art whilst doing this. What I’m interested in with the archive boxes is the formal values: the shape and size and the composition of these in the gallery space. The boxes also evoke memory and absence as I’m not concerned for the actual objects themselves. But it’s also looking as to why we value certain objects over others either in a personal or collective historical reason. The boxes could be thought of as a nostalgia metaphor maybe, possibly similar to Rachel Whiteread’s interest when she was working on Embankment... I’m also reminded of Martin Creed’s Work No. 878 and his simple stacking and ordering of boxes.
Other things I’ve taken out are rolls of bubble wrap, some new display cabinets that are still packaged up, some clear acrylic display cubes and also the packaging for a massive plasma screen TV that sits at the front of the Loom at the entrance in the mill.
Armley Mill is getting quite a reputation for being a place where spooky ‘things’ happen and the place is taken over about twice a month for night time stays in the mill from companies such as Haunted Happenings and Dusk till Dawn Events. Now I am a bit of a sceptic but when I was offered the opportunity to go on one of these Ghost nights I jumped at the chance. The ghost night ran from 8pm till 2am and I actually thought it was a bit of a swizz and I got bored by about 11pm. It was interesting though to see how the museum has changed from being a place where people come to look and engage with history to one where people want to be experience and ‘feel’ something, the audience are not mere spectators anymore, they want to be participants. Even if it is some shallow, expensive, experience. I did hear one woman complaining that she was disappointed that she’d not ‘felt’ or ‘seen’ anything tonight and the organisers were placating her with the ‘unfortunately we cannot guarantee that you will experience anything’, how convenient! And how they would rub their hands (and fill their pockets) with glee if they could. I just think it’s such a shame when the museum has still got so much to offer, it seems that people can’t or don’t want the passive museum experience. The problem also is that a member of the staff at the museum said that these events keep the mill running.
This strangely ties in with the very recent unveiling of the work by Ai Weiwei at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. As they have found that the ceramic seeds were causing dust they have had to stop the audience from walking through the installation, leaving many people ‘disappointed’ as to not be able to ‘experience’ the artwork. The newspapers were claiming that some people had travelled many miles only to find that they couldn’t walk on the seeds as they expected. I feel at a bit of a loss at what/who to blame for this. The Tate for continually wanting to draw the public in with these installations, or the public who seem to expect art to be an interactive experience. I pity the artist actually because it seems such a poor idea; couldn’t he have come up with something a bit better? Or did the guys at Tate give him a specific brief (to create a work which is’ interactive’…) and really only be concerned about the number of visitors? Either way they both fell short this time, did they not actually make large scale model of the work, and test out people walking on them? Shame on them. It throws light on how ridiculous the whole situation is.
There’s a wonderful opportunity here to make some work about this issue in the residency. But I’m actually not sure if I’m or the residency is ready for that!..We’ll have to wait and see.
The next few sessions I skipped into the MillSpace and spent quite a few hours constructing spokes for the wheels of a crane on Photoshop and then setting them up frame by frame for animation. There will be a much easier way of doing it (keyframes on Flash??) but as I did a BA in Fine Art we never got taught anything proper and I actually quite like doing this odd strange long winded way. I get a great sense of achievement! I did get really excited at one point, I’d taken off the wheels and was fiddling with them on a separate page and it looked really good. I had flashes of other pieces of work going off in my head; this is what art is all about for me, the moment of realisation when an idea takes on a form of its own. It was difficult though and took me ages to work it out, at one point I was working with about 77 layers, this was the point just before my head could have possibly exploded but I managed to simplify it just in time!
There’s such a lot more work to do and I hope that these animations work like they are doing in my head! I’m worrying a bit now about how the whole show will come together (when I’ve got about 5 weeks left). I wanted to have some sculptural piece as well as the animation in the MillSpace and a video playing in the cinema. I know I’m heading for a fall when I’ve got such a fixed idea in my head, this is not what my practice is about. I have developed a practice that is experimental and process led which means that I mess about with stuff until something good happens. I like not knowing, it keeps it fresh and almost always something amazing that I could have never imagined takes place. Of course I have an art education (!) and work is usually fuelled by which artist I’m into at the time. I’m really into post-Minimal practices like Ceal Floyer and Martin Creed, throw in a bit of Rachel Whiteread too (and others). But I’m also starting to look at Avant Garde experimental video, people like Michael Snow whose work deals with perception and the flattening of the image, this really interests me too.
How then in this residency can I do my own practice justice, wanting to work with the things that are interesting me now, combined with doing stuff that’s influenced by the mill, plus worrying about what the ‘non-art’ audience will think about it? I know I shouldn’t bother about what people will think though but it’s difficult. I’m hovering between trying to doing something safe and accessible which I’ll not be really happy with and doing something ‘edgy’ and more ‘me’.
Is this normal on a residency? Where it’s like being on a roller coaster; one minute your having the time of your life, thinking, oh my God I’m getting paid for this? Next minute it’s all rubbish and you want to be normal and work in Asda’s (or something). Or is it just me & my neurosis, ha ha!
I’ve been in for 3 days this last week, Monday was a bit weird because it was the ‘first day’, I was a little nervous and although I’d planned what I was going to do, it didn’t feel like I’d actually done anything. There are loads of people who work in the mill too and it can be a bit daunting before you get to know everyone’s names and what their role is.
I must admit I was being a bit apprehensive and a bit mardy and actually had some doubts about the residency. I knew though that I’d been given a fantastic opportunity and I had to give it my best shot. (It didn’t help that I was also really stressed out looking at houses to move into and for good secondary schools. The last thing I want to do is not be prepared enough or produce something that I’m not happy with. God forbid, if that happened I would never get out from underneath my duvet and just eat biscuits for the rest of my life.)
So on Tuesday night, I had a big talk to myself, decided to shelve the plans to move, which immediately made me feel so much better, and got on with deciding what I was going to do at the Mill the following day. I came up with a plan; I was going to be assertive, I was going to sort lots of things out that were worrying me and I was going to GET SOME STUFF DONE! And I did! I sorted out things with Nina such as dates for the show, equipment I’d need etc. I had a word with Neil, the museum curator about stuff I wanted out of the archives to work with in the space. He was very nice and gave me some interesting ideas. I mentioned that I wanted to work with some of the large scale crane blueprints (there’s loads of amazing engineering drawings in the archives and some retired engineers who volunteer on a Wednesdays who are busy sorting out the drawings, labelling them where they’ve come from and what they’re for etc) and he mentioned that I’d have to have a word with one of them, Geoff. If I wanted to use them I would have to get them copied at the local printers as I couldn’t use the originals in the space. These drawings are fantastic, really beautiful and it had been one of my ideas to subtly animate some of the components in the drawings and have it projected onto a wall but it still retain the original blueprint aspect. Geoff (and his helper Trevor) were fantastic when I told them of my ideas and they helped me to understand the drawings more and which bit made other bits move etc. It seems a shame that these drawings and the knowledge of the volunteers is kept in the archives away from the public. They are so interesting and they were quite precious of the drawings when I took a couple away to the printers. You see Geoff, I brought them back all in one piece, no harm done! He was worried about them getting wet, but it wasn’t even raining!!! (£8 each to have them scanned in and put on my memory stick! And £3 a print. Phew, daylight robbery, well they are A0!) Anyway, the space has a few more things pinned up in it and as it was a beautiful day I spent an hour doing some filming outside for an idea I have for a video piece which hopefully will play in the 1920’s cinema.
