response from Alice Flight, artist:
"I don't usually look for what people have written about things but wanted to to this…felt like I wanted to join in a communal response to these images…not in my name…didn't feel any responsibility or anything but just wanted to see what people wrote….it was weird having my back to the images to start with. I felt like that felt insensitive to start with when I turned and looked at the books on the table where the images are. I could sort of feel the images there behind me….the faces….that was sort of the thing to me….afterwards I walked along the seafront and past the children's playground on the front and all the kids running around in the sunshine which was heaven."
On Tuesday a group of photography and art students from BHASVIC (Brighton and Hove 6th Form College) came to Fabrica for a workshop with their teacher, Polly. I was nervous about the session because I was curious to see how what a workshop would be like where it was possible that not everyone would have seen the exhibition. Since everyone who enters the Fabrica exhibition has the choice as to whether to go in and see the banner or not it was important that this group had that choice too and that the individuals in it did not feel that they all had to look at the images just because they were there as an organised group. I think the session went very well in the end and the students were very articulate about their thoughts and feelings about the work. They had to come up with a brief for a new piece of work involving photography and their ideas were great. They suggested putting on a multi-voiced outdoor exhibition in as a protest against war using a stage and projections representing different views in the same spirit. Another idea was to throw paper aeroplanes from a tall building each with handwritten message on it protesting about how it is never the sons and daughters of those in power who are sent off to war to be killed. They thought it important that the messages be handwritten so that there was a personal touch to the planes and they pointed out that the planes would remind people of war. Someone raised the doubt about how to get so many messages handwritten and one fo the group really impressed me with her matter of face response to this that all you had to do was involve loads of people. She made it sound so easy to involve loads of people and spoke with such assured confidence which was really inspiring.
Friday 24 October
5.55am
posted 17.15
We have had no internet connection at home since Tuesday evening. This has left me with no chance to write this blog since my usual blogging times are late at night after the working day when I have some peace and solitude. However, it occurred to me last night that I could write something anyway and take it into college with me and send it from there. It is interesting how not having an internet connection made me feel that I couldn’t write anything at all. I even considered writing something in an notebook to be typed up later as if I were unable to use my computer at all without internet access.
Anyway, it’s been a very frustrating experience not to be online (as it always is now) and it makes me realise how dependent on the internet I have become. At the beginning of the week I developed some thoughts that I wanted to tell you about but the energy of that thinking seems to have dissipated somewhat and I haven’t been able to do the research (another late at night activity) to back it up.
It was to do with a news report I heard on R4 about The Foresight Commission which has come up with evidence of the links between a ‘mentally healthy’ populace and the economy. The representative of the research was speaking quite shamefacedly about how what he called ‘mental capital’ pays directly into the economy as revenue to the government. This, in conjunction with all the government sponsorship that is going into researching what creativity is led me to see how ideas are the next booty to be plundered by governments. As natural resources dwindle and it becomes increasingly perilous to get our hands on them without costly and unpopular wars we have to find another kind of asset to translate into dollars and what better material than people’s ideas. So I came up with the idea of ‘intellectual colonialism’ for this approach. I seem to have had several conversations with artists in various situations over the past year or so about our creative processes and have often detected a reluctance to give up the goods (as if they were secrets) of what one’s processes actually are. There is plenty of money going into university and schools projects aiming to find out what creativity is. Since the thinking goes that if we can turn ideas directly into capital in this technological age then to wrest how those ideas come about from creative people is the key to future economic wealth.
As I say, I have to research this more myself to see if there is any basis for some kind of theory. But if you have heard anything that would back this up then do get in touch.
Judith Kazantzis, poet, has sent me a response to the Incommensurable Banner as well as the image that accompanies this post, which is entitled 'war is pants':
"I meant to send this pic earlier, the woodcut I did after the 2 million march of 03. I am not familiar with pdf files but I think you can print it out for the banner you are making. I do hope that is going well. This last week I have been back to Fabrica to look at the show again (and with Cecile's brilliant tech help to ready a short light projection piece on art/war I want to start with in my 'War and Writing' workshop); for the first time I really made myself walk the length of the banner and look at every picture. That was on the third visit! I think the writeup on the website was very good, didn't mince matters. I look forward very much to visiting your blog, and thought I would try this out first on you. There are at least 3 other woodcuts all about Iraq, (jpegs) but this was the one I mentioned when we met."
Judith's own blog:
www.judikaz.blogspot.com
Taught my Critical Fine Art Practice students today all day in Fabrica sat around the large round discussion table in the gallery. It was part of my plan to explore new environments for teaching in. It went very well. The students fed back at the end of the day that they had enjoyed the round table and being in a 'proper gallery' and that it was good to be working and thinking about photography near Hirschhorn's banner, which was indeed a constant reference for our discussions.
I found myself saying at one point that the more I have thought about the banner the less I know about it. That it seems as if my thinking has broken down, is broken, like the bodies. And that if one of the bodies were to get up and reconstitute itself what radical potential there would be for new thought.
The students introduced very interesting perspectives on their own practices via texts they had chosen for presentation to the group. We looked at Mary Midgley's examination of human nature in 'Beast And Man', David Green's short essay 'Moving to Manual Override', an extract about gypsies and their persecution and extermination by the Nazis taken from 'The Gypsies' by Jean-Paul Clébert and Fredric Jameson's reading (in 'The Deconstruction of Expression') of Heidegger's reading of Van Gogh's painting of the peasant shoes.
