Though I am finding my practice static, in terms of what I consciously consider to be “making work”, I am finding other avenues of expression. This blog for example, started due to a feeling of stasis, could represent a development. Could it constitute a work on its own? It is certainly an expression, it is temporal, acting as a documentation of thoughts and struggles. These are all facets that echo a type of artistic production.
If “… gestures have a quality of blundering, indicating an imperfect consciousness” (Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube) then this form of writing, its meandering themes and exploration is a gesture. O’Doherty is writing in relation to the gallery being used as a form in itself, where the gesture is reactionary to what the gallery represents (its formal system). The gallery as context becomes the gallery as content. In the same way can this blog play role reversal?
At present this remains unclear to me. I recognise this writing as a release of sometimes in-coherent (or perhaps incomplete) thoughts and am still considering the potential within this. Writing has always been an important form to me, more so than drawing even. I have decided to try and resolve some of my other writings into more structured forms. I have been working as a technician in an art college and have noticed how risk assessments (and other written forms that require completion and authorisation before any artistic action) often act as constrictions rather than enablers.
As a gestural reaction I decided to start writing risk assessments of even the most mundane of actions, the use of pencils, sitting in the studio etc. These, in an anarchic anti-authoritarian statement, are to be put up on the display walls of the college. The reaction to them by management, as the academic year starts shortly, will perhaps be the completion of the work.
