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.
