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.