As I sit in my living room, back home in London I have found myself watching a Art documentary.
“Understanding contemporary art- Published on Jan 31, 2013,Category-Education,License-Standard YouTube License”
The documentary was a lecture and it was talking about how art has changed over the years and how artist, went about there practice. It was also talking about documentation. This is the Part that has stood out to me, I wanted to touch upon it on my blog as I feel that this thought is very important to me and my practise, especially when thinking about the way I want to present my final year show.
The lecture was talking about something that was spoken about in my 1st year in one of the lectures. it was about documentation and where the art starts and the way in which we choose to display or record this information has its effects on the outcome and overall way this work will be responded to by the public.
The artist that got me thinking about this was Hamish Fulton, an English artist. who invited people to come on a walk with him. the image is of one of these walks that he done in Margate.
to Hamish the walk is the work, the walk is everything.The photos are just documentation. he also creates a number of poems that he feels captures the essence of walking. so in this scene text becomes sculptural.
It was this that got me thinking about how I was planning to lay out my final show, I was thinking of having a video of me reading a book, but the act of me reading the book is the art the video is documentation. so the question that has now come to my mind is do i want my final outcome to be a video of me reading a book, that goes of for X amount of time. or do I feel that like Hamish a Poem or painting shows the exact same thing. it’s just more engaging with the mind.
from watching this I feel that I have shifted my thoughts on my Practice. Perhaps I have been too blinded by the other options that I could use to layout my work. I think the reason that I have been too quick to brush off any idea of this is because I feel that I became to precious with the book art and I didn’t want to fall back into the same habit that I had last time.
