Making art politically

An evening with Hirschhorn continued:

Afterwards we went for dinner: Liz, Matthew, John, Helen, Thomas and I.

It was relaxed and enjoyable. We talked about football, running, England, philosophy, a bit about art. I wanted to spend the whole evening telling him about what I have been doing but I held back not wanting to take over the entire conversation. Why am I so polite? It's really annoying.

Helen (Cadwallader) the Director of the Photo Biennial took a much nicer picture than the one I show here of me and Thomas together (it's still on her camera and she's said I can have it after January). For the photo I put my arm around his shoulders and then asked if he minded. He smiled and said 'no'.

After nine months engaging so closely with his work I felt close to him. But of course that goes through the work.

It's the work that brings The Other closer.

An evening with Hirschhorn

With this, one of the worst photos I have ever taken on my mobile phone, I am announcing the end of my residency at Fabrica engaging with the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, specifically with 'The Incommensurable Banner'.

The picture, though you wouldn't know it, is of Hirschhorn himself, or Thomas as we like to call him.

On the evening of 13 November, last Thursday, he gave a talk at Fabrica about his practice.

I was over the moon to see that he called his presentation, which was accompanied by a powerpoint slideshow, 'Doing Art Politically'. I called this blog 'Making Art Politically' which I took from an interview I read with Hirschhorn where he is asked if he makes political art. His reply is that he does not make political art but that he makes art politically, a phrase that he borrowed from Jean-Luc Godard who talked about making films politically. I was pleased that I had picked out of all the articles I read about Hirschhorn, this one phrase to sum up my approach to the blog and my residency and that Hirschhorn too had felt this phrase to be significant enough to make it the title of his presentation.

I enjoyed musing over the differences between 'making' and 'doing'. In German 'machen' means both to make and to do. In a sense I suppose 'doing' is broader than 'making' in that it might encompass many aspects of the processes of doing art: thinking, editing, collating, talking, collaborating etc. etc. as well as making.

Hirschhorn outlined his 'doing' of art politically under a number of key words which were:

Form

Creation

Decisions

Tool

Platform

Material

Guidelines

The Other

Warrior

Collage

and Market

He spoke passionately and with great conviction. His enthusiasm was infectious and his way of elucidating his ideas was concrete and graphic. For example: "I want to work for the Other, the Other in myself, that I don't know that I don't control, to include it in the work."

He also made one or two nice mistranslations from the French or the German, such as speaking about blesséd bodies on the banner, which I guessed came from the french blessé meaning 'wounded' but the notion of them being blessed was just as apt.

He concentrated in his talk mainly on the work he made for the Viennese Secession called 'The Eye' and showed many images of it. About the eye and about the colour red it is a room-sized sculptural collage of mannequins, soft toys, text and chairs with imagery and ideas taken straight from street protesters and their homemade props.

There is a lot more I could say about this. If you have any questions post them here and I'll answer.

It's been a very busy and stimulating week. On Wednesday night there was a panel discussion about ethics and the use of public images at Fabrica and then on Thursday Thomas Hirschhorn came to Brighton and delivered a talk about his work. And today was the closing conference of the Brighton Photo Biennial at Brighton University.

I'm thinking about the fact that my residency is going to end soon (tomorrow!) and what that means. I am aware that I've got a backlog of material to put on this blog and I don't want to 'lose' it by letting it slip by without writing it up and thinking about it in the considered way that the blog encourages.

So I think I will continue to keep the blog for a while longer and see how it develops outside the official space of the term of the residency.

There are lots of loose ends to tie up and many questions still to be posed. The ends won't get tied up. I kind of hope they don't, because they are all threads that might lead somewhere. And the questions seem to give rise to further questions. Answers seem like illusions.

Having not had internet access from home for nearly three weeks for the second half of the residency was, I feel, very detrimental to this blog. It was so unfortunate. I lost the rhythm I had got into of late night blogging: that quiet, night-time space of darkness and the expansion of thought. I had to adapt and post items up hastily from my work venues which created a different kind of mood to the postings; less reflective and considered, less well-edited and ultimately rather unsatisfactory. I tried to make the most of it calling myself a 'nomad blogger' but really I was not happy.

Tomorrow is my last session in the gallery at Fabrica. I've sent an email out to all at Fabrica thanking them for making my residency such a good one. And tomorrow I'm taking in some cake for anyone who is there. It was an odd email I sent out. It was right from the heart but after I'd sent it I worried that it was too euphoric and too revealing. I made a connection at the end of it between aspects of my parental grandparents' lives and my precarious sense of being in the world. I started off this blog mentioning parts of their lives and it feels as if I have come full circle in some ways to have got to this point but with a greater understanding and some new insights.

I know this sounds rather cryptic and unexplained so I will attempt to unpack some of what I am talking about in the posts that follow this. And I will do this, I promise (myself), in order to make the connections apparent, through writing.

Emailed to me by a friend on Monday:

"A couple of images from the Menzel book because when I saw them I thought about you and the Hirschhorn banner.
My thoughts about them are not very original – more emotional really.
The drawing is of dead soldiers in a barn during the war between Prussia and Austria in 1860s when Menzel spent time behind the battle lines to document the war.
The other drawing is of the Prussian commander Moltke's binoculars, which is interesting in a different way.
…
[there were over 6000 drawings when Menzel died in 1904] engagement with interpreting reality.
I know we can't turn back time or deny the camera as a tool – that gives another truth – but one not filtered through the draughtsman's body.
Adorno said there could be no art after Auschwitz ….then more recently someone, I cant remember who, said there could only be art [ to make sense of experience] after Auschwitz.
But the celebration of the 'abject' …. with the elevation of the 'artist'…. and the experience so dematerialized…….
I always thought that the function of the 'artist' was in some way to be to transform experience…. [actually the word 'experience' is devalued now, as in the Imperial War Museum's 'First World War Experience' I saw recently]"