Getting By in Art and Languages

I think this period is about taking stock. Over the past decade and a half I have been very busy. Yesterday I compiled a list of all the residencies I have undertaken since 2000 as part of preparation for a talk to give to my students about working with organisations. It is an impressive list. At the time I probably felt that I wasn’t doing enough even though I was working flat out including carrying out several freelance projects and holding down a teaching post.

Taking stock.

Learning a new language as a way of giving myself the chance of a beginning. Over the past few weeks learning Spanish I have realised that I am not and cannot be a beginner. This is rather disappointing. The reason? I have an accumulated knowledge about language, about grammatical structures, a sound knowledge of French and a highly developed knowledge of German and these feed into my experiences with Spanish. It is a kind of innate understanding of how languages work. I use the word ‘innate’ there advisedly. Because it is learnt, but it is also, of course, innate.

As a baby I learnt how to speak. As I learn a new language an intense joy arises in me which I know to be a memory of that first experience of language. Learning to speak amounted to access to power: acquiring the tools to articulate my experience, to ask for what I needed in the language of those who were bigger than me and in charge of my well-being. Being able increasingly to take charge of one’s own existence in the world and the entry into language must be one of the most significant steps we make.

So, language is power and learning a new language is a re-living of those first, early, empowering stages. And when I learn Spanish now I am assisted by my previous experience, both in its general and its particular nature. Therefore I am not and cannot really be a beginner. Instead, I am a ‘builder-upon-er’ in that I am building upon what went before. And the feeling of it all just beginning, of it being new resurfaces,, as if it is new, which is the wonder of it all.

It is November 1st today and the clocks went back at the weekend. These things signal something: that it really is Autumn by now and we are heading for Winter. Time finally to give up on longing for summer until next year.

I missed my Spanish class last week because I went to a conference in Portsmouth about social pedagogy and art. I gather from looking at the online resources for Spanish Foundation (Thursday class) that the class learnt numbers up to 20 and to introduce members of their families. So at the weekend I tried to catch up by learning 1-20 though have no idea how to pronounce 16 and 17 ‘dieciséis’ and ‘diecisiete’ and watched and ‘repeated after them’ the BBC film about family relationships: ‘Este es mi marido’. At the conference I asked a question of the panel which was roundly misunderstood by one person who threw it back at me. I keep feeling as if people misunderstand what I am saying at the moment. Individual positions getting tighter as the cracks open up in the social and economic fabric?

I am rather haunted by the fact that there is nothing visual accompanying this blog as yet. But I’m also rather intrigued by this impasse. I do have an image which might suit: one I used for the exhibition ‘North and South’ where my rendition of ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’ sung in Arabic was played. The image shows the arabic text laid over an image of the bandstand on the seafront in Hove and the characters look rather like the starlings that circle around there.

So I was intrigued to read ‘On Translation’ by Mark Prince in last month’s ‘Art Monthly’ because he writes at one point about Nathan Coley’s ‘Bandstand’: “The concept of a bandstand objectifies public space. Open to everyone in principle, the limits of its accessibility are synonymous with the actual limits of what is understood as public space, which are inevitably local.”

How interesting and how clever. I am interested in how many of the choices we make as artists which at the time seem intuitive arise in fact from a considered thinking process.

A buddhist tells me about the idea of ‘beginner’s mind’. Wikipedia tells me it is “an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject”.

Yesterday, an interesting conversation with Matthew Cornford about academia. Can I make that place work for me as a place for dreaming in even whilst it tugs at me to become an expert? Surely my decision to take on a new language at the very institution where I am employed is tied into that attempt: to be, to remain, a beginner and to claim wonder for myself.

Key vocabulary: tents, ongoing collapse of Capitalism, fear, hope, focus, dissolution, the local and the global, uno, dos, tres, . . .

I’ve called this blog ‘Getting By in Art and Languages’ because at my last Spanish class (which was only my second so far) the teacher, Carmen, said that at the end of this foundation year we would be able to “get by in Spanish”. I thought about how ‘getting by’ is often in the title of language course materials and I like its realistic ambition. I suppose it is meant to make the task of learning a language seem less threatening and offer the hope that something will have been achieved at the end of it if one makes some effort. I also like the suggestion of there being a physical obstacle there that one has to ‘get by’ in order to progress.

I am aware that taking on this blog as well as learning a language in addition to doing all the other things I’m meant to do in a week is extra work but I’m starting it precisely because I would like it to form a connecting thread that will help me better understand what holds my various activities together rather than being a new separate distraction. When considering whether or not to learn a new language I found myself weighing up whether it would be better to spend those two hours a week making art or in a classroom speaking Spanish and I decided that there didn’t need to be a conflict if I reconciled the activities by perceiving them as part of a whole.

I know that I have always hugely enjoyed learning languages. So far I have learnt French at school from age 7, German from age 16, studied both to degree level, studied Arabic for one year and Polish for another at evening classes and dipped my toe in Armenian for a recent art event. The desire to learn Spanish came from having spent our summer holiday for the past 6 years in Spain without ever having learnt the language. This summer I decided I was too ashamed to still be communicating in hand signals with people we have got to know in the places we always visit and resolved to get on with learning to speak.

Key vocabulary: Beginning. Enjoyment. Holiday. Learning. Art. Connecting. Communicating. Understanding.