barren

barren 26.11.13

Monkeys Fists Project

Linearity underscores the workshop I am to embark on at Aberdeen University with an anthropological research group ‘The Knowing Project’. Exploring projects on our knowing of materiality we are looking at being with material rather than projecting preformed objectification. It discusses inherent and tacit knowledge, the divisions between acts of perception, agency and all that encompasses ‘making’.

barren has wandered through the doors of Aberdeen University with a single façade – me. I represent my research and bring along the artists and contributors to barren. We are unknown but mention barren at every creative act that supports the sense of what it is.There is no distinct representation of ourselves as yet nor do we all partake on the same project. Many and dispersed, it has more a molecular energy that reacts and contours across the grid of our interwoven ideas. I bring Adam Cluely’s starting point the Monkey’s Fist. The Monkeys Fists are arriving by post beautifully crafted by fellow thinker and PT maker Lauren Robson. Tools for ‘Drawing the body in Space’ with fellow researchers at Aberdeen, we are exploring the perception of distance, object and horizon through movement and measurement. By throwing the monkey’s fists we are connecting and marking messily, notions which offer insights to the very problem of drawing in space.

What is key as my façade is my experience as dancer, choreographer as drawer and I am prepared to be undone. Our objectives have converged – Adam’s notion of playful object and its contouring of space acts as pivot and trajectory to the project. Lauren brings the craft of making to the core of a project based on knowing and making in terms of her repetitive engagement with making towards execution of the object. So there is no single author here. barren brings single authorship to a dead end yet the clear objectives by each and the particular attention to take responsibility for fixed points allows for single author and shared authorship in a constellation of processing an idea. I have mentioned an air rig – now I am challenged as to whether that can be done. Mapping and geometric drawing are impossibly involved in drawing space therefore my horizon draws a distant line in connection to my body and maps the perspective from which I will throw.

As part of this affair with throwing and drawing in space is that there are agents within this to produce the work and produce the space a la Lefebvre (1974). Tim Ingold (2013;99) Professor of Anthropology at Aberdeen University and director of these research projects, argues that air is equally part of the materiality.

Interestingly the project I approached Tim with a year ago precisely relies on this understanding of the body and its interaction with materiality and movement plenary. It nicely conjunctures with Deleuze ( Buchanan.I and Lambert.G; 2005) on continuum and movement, avoiding the static space pinned by the built perspective. Architecture he ascertains allows for residences after it’s been built, and then the space is activated. But the movement is already designed by habitual nature somewhat imposed in the design of the distant author, the architect. Many times in architecture we have seen the gap between what is realised by an architect and the actuality of living in a space ( Ingold, 2013;19)

To lift away the static; If we take into account the Happenings, events of Allan Kaprow, fluxus to situationism and the moving agent of wandering within an architecture we explore what it is to live between structure and any space. It unfolds something different in form. We have seen parkour, dandyism (I’m jumping between time frames) to the derive and current works of psychogeography but I would go on to say this work is framed with the formless. Dropping a plumb line to Doris Von Drathen (2004) who looks beyond aesthetics and the formless to carve new freedom in contemporary art, points out the inadequacy of aesthetic categories. The stance posits a strategy without form. I will be projecting a form in mind i.e the rig, but processing the form rather than establishing it within a clear aesthetic form category. I simply do not know, so this ‘unknowing’ in order to ‘know’ perhaps liberates from the static nature of projecting image and that idea of what we project in our desire to become or to make.

barren 25.11.13

between here and there

So, here in Aberdeen, there are long stretches of beach either side, much granite and it is easy to romanticise the wanderer. It is harder to imagine the types of challenges of wandering when we have Wi-Fi at our disposal, together with romanticising ‘getting away from it all’. These remain personal and intricately woven in the journey we take. Journey equally romanticises and assumes a linear path carving and shaping our future, again equally linear. The phrase’ what is next for you?’ or ‘what are you doing now?’, supposes a linearity of a to b and does not necessarily assume a quantity of ‘x’s. For many of us ‘what’s next’ indicates a sense of becoming, and a burden of ‘what should I be doing?’, something else forwards and after our current selves. We tend to think of shedding the past and continuing on in a renewed self. But Proust countered wandering with the reality of voluntary memory that pervades every footstep and establishes how our past, present and future are already with us.

When faced with personal challenges we reach to shed and move on, drawing lines between us and what was. We make new decisions on seemingly new information and knowledge of ourselves. Which brings us to this term becoming, hinted at through Heidegger’s Being and Time as ‘Being in the world’ (1962) and surmised as, in constant pursuit or process of authenticity. This being alludes somewhat to a completed project of the self as truly authentic. becoming is established with Deleuze’s work and his collaboration with Guattari ; It’s point towards future and creating something new indicates that we become; I am not convinced we become. Nor do I consider the linearity of coming to an end of a life as a complete work. This is romantic and tiresome. We usually depart our lives with much incomplete, including the knowledge of ourselves.

Therefore my understanding of becoming has shifted to an understanding of courses, interwoven elocutions of our currency and presence towards. Becoming takes on a nuance of becoming a part of oneself for a time but continually towards, again unsatisfactorily, it is linear. Rather this towards could be suggested as myriads – Periods, seasons and episodes that sit side by side like hexagonal pieces where there is no finish. Rhiannon Williams stitches in ‘The Time I’m Taking’ (2011) Proust’s (1927) writings and episodes into neat hexagonal pieces as part of a series of patchwork quilts perhaps begins to explore this becoming point. Sliding off into new ethers of ourselves; in discovering the ethers and the varieties of oneself we then appoint a series of facades as Erving Goffman ( 1959), American Sociologist would announce, playing useful chapter titles in counting the episodes in life which Deleuze establishes as the difference to becoming and as history which is linear in its accounts.

I think of the horizontal not as a line but as a plane, a surface over which we skid, fall, lose and gain the vastness of our interiors in a world marked and objectified as exteriors. We move toward a constant shifting horizon that begins from beneath our own feet, our own position and our own stance and our point of view. The space within us is far more extensive and bewildering and our relationship with and in the world. So becoming can possibly be a sense of horizontal plane as surface and therefore becoming is simply exploring the diversity of self and being in the world rather than marking it in climbed contours. This is rather liberating and deals with becoming as processing rather than process. Process assumes an end and finish to an object; continuing with processing allows for ‘by product’ and continued engagement. It lifts the weight of being something and doing something that somehow needs titling.

This processing was exemplified in a workshop at Leeds College of art (Robinson.D, arts.brighton.ac.uk;25.11.13) using a variety of technologies as extended tools to drawing, writing, casting and in fact the outcomes were completely unknown. We just engaged with the processing and encountered turns. The exhibition that followed did not mark a territory of finished objects but a territory of possibility and before we romanticise that, it is perhaps wise to note that everything that appears possible does not become but becoming a supply of possibilities is being and becoming on a wandering basis.

Monkey’s Fist

By throwing the monkey’s fist it creates a liminal space through drawing and movement established with spatial ideas concerning sculpture, installation and performance and ultimately deals with low key aspects of contemporary art which end up as curtailed wisps on the edge.

Peg Rawes would refer to these as Acts of construction espousing the relationship between aesthetic judgement, space and geometry and link the transcendental intuition of space with the constructive powers of geometry. It is this relationship that I am encircled by and one intrinsic to understanding the properties that the fist represents. Particularly as the fist itself is made up of the Borrmean Rings underlying both folk, knot lore and intrinsically linked to hyperbolic geometry. Ellipses rather than geometric perfect circles, the rings are not linked but only linked as an entirety. Therefore the spatial construct is both within the fist and surrounded in the momentum that could be provided by an act of construction which moves us from the transcendental to a thinking, embodied and sensing subject .

So basically I can catch a fist, throw it, entwine it and use it singly or in multiples. I prefer the latter, a mass of lines, volume and shifting at once. This is my response to Adam Cluely insitgator of this challenge – that is my choreographic/ installation proposal.

I have been drawn to the short narratives of Primo Levi’s character Faussone who works on a rig in ‘the Monkey’s Wrench’ a solid tool epitomizing the modern world of construction and straight lines. Whilst the fist may bend and make arcs in a throw, equally it draws tight once connected with it’s conjoining component. The balance between suspension to tension offers the flight before the fixing. The high rises of the 20’s recall suspended girders and workers working without harnesses at crazy heights and buldings are now erected from fused pieces to fit like a jigsaw. New developments with Hadid’s architecture bring in waves and curves along boulevards. Meanwhile the geometric rig echoes within stage sets and outdoor theatre. It has been drawn again in Ellen Gallagher’s climbing frame at Tate Modern and Sol Lewitt’s open structures recall the modernist approach to construction.

A suspended thrown and performed rig, whilst an imaginative act at the most, at this point twists round the knots of the modern built environments fixings and solidity, writhes against the blank faces of glass buildings, recalls the performance of space of labourers and artists and in its fall into some place – embodies the weight of our own bodies bound to the ground despite Icarus dreams. The final tension can offer the tension between our moving and bodily existence caught within the restrictions and freedoms our built environment offers us.

All at once there might exist, briefly, a rig in the air. But this seems unsatisfactory and merely decorative of the rope itself. The thing is the knot the thud, the wrap, the tension, the pull and the lever all of which need to be present. If this is done amongst a giving surface, the thud of the knot as it lands will leave a trace of this bridging and map of the temporary rig. The cracks and splits the drying, rendering and violence caused by each attempt to bridge a gap.

In many cultures pieces of paper, cloth are knotted to ropes. I have often wavered over the use of these and ultimately rejected them but they offer a symbolism to tentativeness which mark borders where there is conflict, borders of division and so since the Monkey’s Fist is the most basic of bridges, the most tentative similalry I see the ropes of the fist covered on fluttering cloth markers acting as buoys for this moving apparition.

In commenting on borders and edges the act of occupying one of these does not amount to a specific site but a specific type of site. I do not want the stage but a geometric space of a space constructed through this act to make a space clearly divided on the an edge.

Lobbing the Fist back to you Adam..

Monkey’s Fist

The throw has a start, it lands, it has an end but the space between, its momentum and arc is a liminal space. My shift is that in the sublime aspect of landscape voyeurism we use borders as an edge and the remote as a point of escape. We embark from fixed points, normally our abode, and leave for a time, temporarily to escape. Thus mythical and romantic relationships with our landscape is what keeps the distinction between urban and rural so delineated and one which I wish to breach. The monkey’s fist connects, pulls, intrudes, lands and marks out arcs in its velocity and weight. Only an idea orientated piece at this point, the arcs and throws are to be my drawing of reaching into space. A low key response an d in Lippard’s words ‘often resembling ruins, amalgams of past and future, remains of something ‘more’, vestiges of some unknown venture’ (Escape attempts;1997)

There is a ghost of content loosely embedded within the binds of the rope that forms the fist, reminding of past physical interaction with basic tools; reminders of heritage and sea now echoed on land; as a conquering device to board a vessel and the relationship with architecture of landscape. This is my start – ephemeral, unintimidating, reliant on performance and document the conceptual forms of contemporary art. In the vein of Adrian Piper and her series of mapping pieces and her interrogation of philosophical and spatial concepts I sit with this fist to punch a pocket of air at a random border.

Chunky Move first showed a piece called connected appropriating ropes as connectors, Kraus’s grid, wheels and knots. The stage set acting more as art installations but progresses with Gideon Orbarzanek’s Digital Moves. Both instances draw upon Reuben Margolin’s kinetic and geometric studies moving between technically engineered prop to digital moving visions connected to the movement of the body.

I once worked with Sophia Lycouris from Nottingham University improvising with a single white spot in order to respond to a kinetic robotic spine later animated in the space with me. This imaginative use of movement beyond the realms of dance or street performance occupies my practice but I have yet to resolve it in relation to the Monkey’s Fist. However the fist does offer a synergy of everyday, functional repetitive movement such as the rhythmic throb of producing our habitual lived experiences and distilling it to a moment.

In recently working with an artist’s group with Gustavo Ceirico at Yorkshire sculpture park on ‘Where The Horizon Moves’ we were working from Casper David Friederich and looked at the possibilities of locating and moving the horizon within the location of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The works derived were moveable in terms of site whilst some were more specific to the architecture and infrastructure of the park. Expecting to mostly install I found myself returning to choreographic moments attuned to my research on the horizon looking at promenade and procession to everyday gestures locating a distant unreachable horizon.

The proposals offered varying perspectives from nomadic benches and comedy to processional gazing in regency /contemporary modes over to running up and down hillsides exchanging horizontal perspectives. These were experiments and a culmination of investigations to develop a body of work for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. However clutching this monkeys fist I now see a wider possibility with this idea of drawing and sculpting space.

Recently I have become concerned with the torrent of concepts and ideas I have fumigating my research and blowing it to dust. They escape me and in my attempt to reach them I am employing my own device of monkey’s fist – proposals and sketches the artists blueprints except I am literally blueprinting them through the photopolymer process which stamps and embeds the glimpses of work standing on the edge of rationality and imagination. My primary concern combines the drawing potential of the fist in the thrust of the fist and the arcs of the rope and the catches with object and person. It rests on gesture, learnt movement and inhabited through function relating to its nautical heritage where edges between ships, land and sea exist.

Monkey’s Fist

In my fist a palm sized monkey’s fist, paw, claw gifted on a doorstep by Adam Cluely playful artist, manipulator of events and occupier of traversing territories. My task – a report which I am appropriating to the archives of barren in the hope this collaboration extends that far.

Christy Georg completed a large scale monkey’s fist as part of her work Nautical Body (2007-2008), its overarching title identifying its primary relationship as a sailors knot. Knots and the nautical have a beautiful aesthetic fascination recently found in an installation in Michael Schmidt’s installation at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs but this replication draws attention to the maritime and its heritage. I would like to ask how that informs what the heck I’m to do with this fist apart from lob it into a wide open space and hear it thud into some damp sod.

As a tool it is primarily a throwing device the fist acting as a weight which on connection to another object such as balustrade, other rope, tree etc. It will wrap around it much like a fist on which the thrower can yank and pull either himself nearer , bridge a gap or even use to attach something to pull into place. This sounds vague to me but on throwing it over a washing line it is easy to see the weight pull down and the rope twist around the line and itself with the momentum.

So as a mover and drawer my concerns are with its possibility as a drawing tool and how this can add and draw attention to the body in a movement act which is functional. I have an intrinsic response to rhythmic repetition and the seductive actions of fly fishing over to throwing a stone in at the waters edge which puncture moments beautifully in our everyday practice of the mundane and ordinary. From Allen Ruppersbberg’s ‘ Fifty helpful hints on the Art of Everyday’ there is this word ‘specific’ which we often associate with site however he comments on specific being the revealing of something passing, recognized, acknowledged and undefined – what is specific is that your view has been subtly made different by an act. The moment is just a tip and underneath the myriad. I often have trouble with wish wash tripe but the fact that this shift is part of our aesthetic everyday experience is capitalised upon and fragments and delineates our interaction with space, time and the day. Many artworks replicate and copy such things in order to draw attention to it and as Ruppersberg would say create a 50;50 basis by which to create something new. In other words by removing the copied from one space and designing in it in another, or dealing with it as fragment, it gives the viewer another window by which to see it.

This is my basis for what I will do with this monkey’s fist, shift its context and location and gravitate towards my own research borders to hopefully create a window into how distance, connection can be perceived at our transitions at borders. I think in terms of location between cities, regions and towns. It is this between, the non-space seen as transitory and passed through without touching it which I would like to permeate and occupy with this fist.

Differences on a small scale yet accumulating in potential distance as we shake our fists from within the interiors of cars – the doors acting as fences. This is only in a small sense but a faint rumble of the dissatisfaction voiced beteen communities, regions, countries. We stand in opposition and face one another, whom we don’t know but draw lines between. Rather than shaking a fist if we looked in the mirror and saw our own reflection would we be more inclined to offer a monkeys fist? Idealistic wonders do exist and should continue to if the extent of our differences can be but gently undermined by small acts.

I recently finished a book Tortilla Curtain on the prejudice growing between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ on the borders of Mexico; Mexicans finding a gap in the fence and the unrest that emerges. In fixing difference an extra 700 miles of fence are to be employed at Mexico’s borders and the comment is, that it does not unite – I would have thought that was obvious.