Practice as research

After hearing artist Dr Nicky Bird speak about her work Question for Seller at the Leeds Artist Book Fair in March, I thought it would be useful to meet her for a tutorial. Dr Bird was the first person to graduate from the Practice-led PhD program at University of Leeds in 1999. Apart from being able to present an informed opinion about my situation, she was also able to highlight conservation issues of art practice documentation.

For example, the fifteen years since her graduation have seen exponential developments in technology, rendering the VHS submission of her video installations increasingly irrelevant in documentation terms. Therefore, although the practice and research are still viable products, it is worth considering the longevity of the submission medium when submitting practical work, particularly in a digital format.

It was also useful to speak to another artist scholar about the kinds of materials and formats I could use as part of my submission. Bird’s own final submission included a site specific installation of sound and video work at Lotherton Hall. In addition to this she presented documentation of the works in progress, published articles, and a professional practice dossier. Her written submission was actually a close reading of a photograph by another artist, rather than an interpretation of her own photography.

The Practice-based PhD submission
The focus of my meeting with Dr Bird was on how I could consolidate my practice for PhD submission, particularly in relation to questions of originality, as a unique contribution to knowledge. Our conversation confirmed my previous understanding of originality as a new method or approach to working, as opposed to an entirely new concept. Bird also considered my use of a research log or blog in the Practice-led PhD as a pertinent way to explore emergent art practices.

Emergent art practices often incorporate digital technologies into documentation and dissemination of artwork, and are useful in exploring the ways in which artwork is produced as a process, rather than as a finished product. Although I felt as if my practice was quite disparate, Nicky was able to extract key themes from our discussion. We discussed ideas around image vs object, curation, collection, digital humanities, artist gifting, authorship, authenticity and DIY culture, in relation to both my individual and curatorial practice.

Art as research
It was suggested that I should consider each body of work as a case study, in conjunction with a dominant theme in my writing. As my practice tends to emerge from outside influences I thought this would work quite well. However, it should be noted that artworks should not be considered as illustrations of the text, or writing as explanation of the artwork, but rather each operating in conjunction with the other as interpretations of the research.

This also enabled me to view my work as a process of translation between text, image and object, which was underpinned by an autoethnographical art practice. In this way, I was able to consider all of my individual and curating work as part of my research practice. Nicky also suggested that I considered the terms I want to use to describe my practice, particularly in relation to co-curation.

Artist collector
Dr Bird was particularly interested in the use of collection in my practice and suggested I look at some of the exhibitions by Mark Dion, another artist working with collecting and collections.The latest Mark Dion project, ‘200 years; 200 objects’ was part of Ever/Present/Past, a series of commissions marking the 200th anniversary of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. It was held at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh from 16th November 2013 – 15th February 2014, and featured a large cabinet full of 200 objects; one for each year since the hospital was built. Each object was related to a story, real or fabricated, from the hospital’s past. Objects included letters, portraits, and other ephemera which aimed to shed light on the former patients and doctors.

As with his other projects, such as Tate Dig, Dion’s collecting practice shows an irreverence for the boundaries between the things that would be considered worthy of collection and those that would not. These examples are of interest because they subvert the usual criteria for collection. By focusing on stories of the everyday which become more poignant due to their heightened status within the museum collection.

All in all, it felt like a very productive meeting, which allowed me to consider the main themes of my research and practice in relation to the work that other artists were making, as well as suggesting ways that I might submit my research for assessment.

Further reading:
http://eipcp.net/transversal/1210/sollfrank-renwick/en
http://shura.shu.ac.uk/979/1/fulltext.pdf
http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/3745/
http://www.afterall.org/online/art-practice-and-the-doctoral-degree#.VLfetfl_vTo
http://www.berylgraham.com/cv/writ.htm
http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/arts/visual-arts/art-review-mark-dion-claire-barclay-1-3264836

In addition to notions of DIY and self-publishing, Nick Thurston’s talk (which was discussed in last week’s blog) also explored themes of media theory and digital distribution. After detailing his recent exhibitions and publications, Thurston continued to contextualise his practice within works relating to online media, reproduction, plagiarism and open access material. This was of particular interest to me in my use of digital image archives and my hypothesis of the necessity of transmission between cultural networks in order to assist innovation.

Art Post-LaBeouf
Thurston began this section of his presentation by discussing the essay Art Post-LaBeouf by Niklos Szabo. In a similar way to previous discussions around post-internet art, Szabo suggests that the internet as a tool for remixing ideas has led to increased creativity and innovation through the use of networks. Technology has become a reflexive tool, where books are written by algorithms and artists pretend to be bots.

Art Post-LaBeouf was written in response to the essay #stopcreating by Shia LaBeouf, which aimed to explain LaBeouf’s relationship to plagiarism and creativity. Although the idea of Art Post-LaBeouf appears ironically pretentious (in the style of other postmodern artistic movements), the premise of the article raises interesting points about the artist’s relationship to artworks and media platforms.

Death of the author
Szabo highlights concerns taken from discussions cited in LaBeouf’s article. LaBeouf quotes these concerns as follows: “Once we begin to accept all language as poetry by mere reframing, don’t we risk throwing any semblance of judgment and quality out the window? What happens to notions of authorship? How are careers and canons established, and, subsequently, how are they to be evaluated? Are we simply re-enacting the death of the author, a figure such theories failed to kill the first time around? Will all texts in the future be authorless and nameless, written by machines for machines? Is the future of literature reducible to mere code?”

He answers in support of LaBeouf: “Far from being ‘authorless and nameless’, texts are both attributed and timestamped by the technology that created them, and then indexed by search engines. The fact that anybody paying attention was able to discover that LaBeouf’s tweeted apologies for plagiarism were themselves plagiarized on the same day that he plagiarized them shows that far from anonymizing text by facilitating copying, the Internet makes the possibility of significant plagiarism vanishingly small”.

Kenneth Goldsmith
The same article also mentions the artist and Ubuweb founder, Kenneth Goldsmith in relation to his essay The Writer As Meme Machine and his exhibitions Printing out the Internet and JStor Pirate. Goldsmith is concerned with ‘found text’, remixing, appropriating, and collecting, both on and offline. However, although his interests are similar in some way to LaBeouf, he believes that creativity is not dependant on the editing process, but rather in the “mastery of networks” (Szabo, 2013).

These networks are explored in his ongoing project ‘Printing Out The Internet’, which began as an open call for pages printed from the internet to be exhibited in full at Labor Gallery, Mexico City. The premise of the exhibition was to utilise crowd-sourcing methods to promote open access and a free Web, in memorial to the internet activist Aaron Schwartz, who committed suicide “while facing federal charges of computer hacking after his alleged theft of millions of documents from the academic database JSTOR”.

Printing out the Internet
Throughout the course of the exhibition, the gallery received 10 tons of printed material including “spam folders, bank statements, online diaries, news articles, 20 pages of the letter “A” repeated continuously, 500 pages of poetry created by erasing text extracted from Web sites, and musical scores to the complete works of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler”. This material was displayed as stacks of paper, and submissions were also read aloud by members of the public from a platform in the gallery space.

Although the project had support from the gallery and its contributors, it also gained detractors, who felt that the work was at best, pointless, and at worst, irresponsible. A major concern of Goldsmith’s opponents was that he was encouraging wastefulness of resources in the name of art. However, Goldsmith believes that it is necessary to attempt to concretise such large amounts of information to begin to understand the capacity of the Internet.

Data collection
Dan Zak’s article for the Washington Post quotes Goldsmith’s experiences of trying to understand data in a physical sense: “I downloaded a torrent that was supposed to be some chunk of Swartz’s heist. It was 33 gigabytes, and it was something like 18,000 documents, and I began unzipping those files. And within each one of those were thousands and thousands of pages… We have no idea what we’re talking about, and I think the way to understand it is to concretize it… We’re dealing with abstraction, and we have no idea what this is. We need new metrics for infinity”.

Despite the fact that printing out the internet is a task which is doomed to failure, Goldsmith dismisses this as irrelevant, preferring to focus on the symbolic questions that the project raised against data loss and restriction, as well as the ways in which art can be produced from existing objects to create meanings which increase exponentially.

Further info:
http://dismagazine.com/blog/47801/unstable-media-curated-by-anne-de-vries/
http://www.artfcity.com/2013/06/26/kenneth-goldsmiths-printing-out-the-internet-is-not-about-trash/
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/may/1/printing-out-internet/

“Public language is determined by more than composition”

This week I went to the Publishing as Praxis presentation by Nick Thurston, an artist practitioner and scholar based in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. The talk was organised by the Centre for the Comparative Histories of Print, which incorporates scholars from schools such as English, History, Medieval Studies, Fine Art, and Design. The talk was presented as an overview of Thurston’s practice, rather than a traditional paper presentation, and covered such diverse topics as talking animals, repressed histories of self publishing, public libraries of dissent, the objectification of speaking, voice synthesization, database management, computational capitalism, and media theory as a question. The thread running through these topics related to different aspects of publishing, described as “the long history of making language public”.

Alongside his individual art practice, Thurston is also on the editorial team of independent imprint Information as Material, alongside Simon Morris, Craig Dworkin, and Simon Zimmerman. Established by artist Simon Morris in 2002, Information as Material “publishes work by artists who use extant material — selecting it and reframing it to generate new meanings — and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things. The imprint’s activities involve publishing, exhibiting, curating, web-based projects, and  invited lectures.”

I, Sparkie
As part of his presentation, Thurston described particular projects he had been involved with as part of Information as Material. One such project, ‘I, Sparkie’ is a recent publication produced as a limited edition of 350 and edited by Thurston himself. As Mark Dion described in his foreword to the book: “I, Sparkie represents a rich and unusual archive relating to the life of a real budgerigar, Sparkie Williams, who was raised and trained in Newcastle, England by Mrs Mattie Williams. Between 1954-58 Sparkie came to be recognised as the world’s most famous talking animal. His vocabulary included over 500 words; he won awards and a place in the Guinness Book of Records; his voice was used on pop records and bird seed adverts; his dialect was distinctly Geordie; and his taxidermied remains have their own strange history of display”.

Written and compiled by Northern Irish artist Andrew Dodds, the book revealed “an [extensive] artistic study of Sparkie’s history and the relations of that history to the natural sciences, museology, the voice, human/non-human relations and the government of ‘nature’.” Accompanied by an 18 minute CD recording of Sparkie learning to talk, the work also considered wider questions in animal studies and language, which are explored in the invited essays by academics John Mullarkey and Robert Williams.

Do or DIY
As illustrated by the nature of the Information as Material project, printed matter is only one form of publishing, which can also extend into exhibition practice and installation. The exhibition Do or DIY, which ran from 9th March – 16th April 2012 at Whitechapel Gallery, London, aimed to showcase this expanded definition of publishing, through the production of a free to handle reference library of self published books in the form of a gallery installation. The six week exhibition marked the end of a year long Writer in Residence programme held at the Whitechapel Gallery, and elaborated on a previously commissioned essay by the editors on the history of self-publishing. As reflected in the title,  the essay and subsequent exhibition advocated a strong DIY approach, in opposition to previous criticisms against ‘vanity publishing’. For Information as Material,  the sentiment is clear: “Don’t wait for others to validate your ideas. Do it yourself”.

The essay and exhibition cited previous examples of rejected, and subsequently self-funded, publications by writers now canonised in English literature. In doing so, they aimed to “present a set of ideas and artefacts that reveal the concealments required by the value structures that underwrite canonising historiographies and culture industries”.

Pretty Brutal Library
Ideas about temporary libraries and publishing continued into Thurston’s own practice in the exhibition Pretty Brutal Library which was exhibited at &Model, Leeds from 25th July – 14th September 2013 (discussed in Week 46). The exhibition was first conceived of following a commission by the Hannah Mitchell Foundation to produce a new print work. The print work, in the form of a bookmark, folded to create a free-standing microstructure, and contained a doublet composed with American poet Kim Rosenfield. This two-part text “The Brute Material of Words / The Brutal Material of Worlds”, also became a focal point of the exhibition, as each part was featured in large vinyl letters, on opposite walls of the gallery space.

These forms of self-publishing and alternative press open up ideas as to what words and language mean in a visual art context, from written forms and typography, to the spoken word, and synthesized speech. Most of all, it highlights the imperative to embrace forms of open source and open access culture, in order to pursue DIY philosophies.

My consideration of gift theory within contemporary art practice is led primarily by an interest in anthropology as a theoretical framework:

“Theoretical frameworks provide a particular perspective, or lens, through which to examine a topic. Theoretical frameworks usually come from other disciplines – such as economics, the social sciences, and anthropology – and are used by historians to bring new dimensions of their topic to light. Theoretical frameworks, however, are even more specific than these broad subject approaches. Theoretical frameworks are specific theories about aspects of human existence such as the functioning of politics, the economy, and human relations. These theories can then be applied to the study of actual events.”

Actor-network theory as a theoretical framework
Despite the ease of theoretical frameworks in allowing analyses of events and objects to be developed, my interest lies more in the maintaining the difficulty of objects through allowing numerous viewpoints and perspectives to remain. Within anthropology, the use of actor-network theory (ANT) is one such framework which enables this to happen. Developed from science and technology studies (STS), actor-network theory is a mixed method analytical framework which combines elements of post-structuralism and material semiotics. In this way, it suggests that “entities take their form and acquire attributes as a result of their relations with other entities, [in other words, that] entities have no inherent qualities” (Law, 1999, p3)

The non-essentialist nature of objects from the ANT perspective, also demands that these objects perform themselves in order to enact their characteristics in relation with other objects. In doing so, it “[insists] on the possibility,  at least in principle, that [these characteristics and relations] might be otherwise. Some, perhaps many, of the essentialisms that it has sought to erode are strongly linked to topology, to a logic of space, to spaciality”. (Law, 1999, p7)

The problems with actor-network theory
However, the success of ANT in destabilising essentialisms, by understanding entities as being performed through networks, has led to “its own topological assumptions [becoming] naturalized”. (Law, 1999, p8) By naming actor-network theory as a particular way of interpreting materials, the theory itself became essentialised.

Thus, when John Law asks in his essay ‘After ANT: Complexity, Naming and Topology’: “What is a theory? Or, more broadly, what is a good way of addressing intellectual problems?” (Law, 1991, p1), his aim is not only to consider the method of academic enquiry, but also to undermine the development of actor-network theory as “a specific strategy with an obligatory point of passage”. (Law, 1999, p2).

After ‘actor-network’
Since the development of actor-network theory in the 1980s and its subsequent incorporation into other disciplines, there has been much work undertaken by STS scholars to address the problems of ANT. At the beginning of ‘Recalling ANT’, even Bruno Latour criticises the name he gave to his method by saying that “there are four things that do not work with actor-network theory; the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen!” (Latour, 1999, p15)

The problems in naming ANT for Latour, are not just embedded in its fixed nature, but also in what the name implies, as the fixation of social scientists on the opposition of the actor and the network (or agency and structure) appear to be borne out in his terminology. However, Latour denies that this was his aim, and also that agency and structure are the real oppositional forces, preferring to focus instead on close and distant readings.

Two dissatisfactions of social sciences
He states: “It is not exactly true that social sciences have always alternated between actor and system, or agency and structure. It might be more productive to say that they have alternated between two types of equally powerful dissatisfactions: when social scientists concentrate on what could be called the micro level, that is face to face interactions, local sites, they quickly realise that many of the elements necessary to make sense of the situation are already in place or are coming from far away; hence,  this urge to look for something else, some other level,  and to concentrate on what is not directly visible in the situation but has made the situation what it is. This is why so much work has been dedicated to notions such as society, norms, values, culture, structure, social context,  all terms that aim at designating what gives shape to micro interaction…

But then, once this new level has been reached, a second type of dissatisfaction begins. Social scientists now feel that something is missing, that the abstraction of terms like culture and structure, norms and values, seems too great, and that one needs to reconnect, through an opposite move, back to the flesh-and-blood local situations from which they started… And so on ad infinitum.” (Latour, 1999, p16 -17)

In Latour’s articulation of these “two dissatisfactions”, I recognise my own struggles in locating my artwork within the micro of my practice and the macro of the conditions of its production and reception. However, through applying the logic of actor-network theory to the art making process, it is possible to conclude that art as a social object, possesses the “property of not being made of agency and structure at all, but rather of being a circulating entity”. (Latour, 1999, p17)

Further reading:
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/ant/antres.htm

“In the world of gift… you not only can have your cake and eat it too, you can’t have your cake unless you eat it”.

After reading about artists Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska using gift theory to contextualise their practice, I thought it would be useful to study some introductory texts about the gift to see how it might relate to my own artistic research.

Lewis Hyde’s ‘The Gift’
One such text, ‘The Gift’ (1983) by Lewis Hyde, fuses art, economics, anthropology and folklore, to explore gift culture and its impact on creativity. The text functions as a useful introduction to theorists examining the notion of ‘the gift’, as well as using these ideas to “illuminate and defend the non-commercial portion of artistic practice”. (http://www.lewishyde.com)

Hyde converges these two concepts, “the idea of art as a gift and the problem of the market”, by applying previous work on the anthropology of gifts, such as Marcel Mauss’s 1924 essay ‘The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies’ to a Western model of capitalism, particularly in relation to art. Hyde suggests that art which is turned into a “pure commodity” is used up by the economic transaction, in the same way that capitalism “removes surplus wealth from circulation and lays it aside to produce more wealth”. In contrast, the gift which is allowed to move freely, always promises to come back and therefore, although consumed, is never “used up”. This is reflected, to a certain extent, in the model of social enterprise, which reinvests its profits back into the community.

Gift/commodity
Hyde establishes the distinction between the work of art as gift or commodity using the example of a series of romantic novels which have been “written according to a formula developed through market research.” (Hyde, 1983)

“An advertising agency polled a group of women readers. What age should the heroine be? Should the man she meets be married or single? The hero and heroine are not allowed in bed together until they are married. Each novel is 192 pages long. Even the name of the series and the design of the cover have been tailored to the demands of the market. Six new titles appear each month and two hundred thousand copies of each title are printed. Why do we suspect that Silhouette Romances will not be enduring works of art? What is it about a work of art, even when it is bought and sold in the market, that makes us distinguish it from such pure commodities as these?” (Hyde, 1983)

Two economies
Despite this calculated mechanism of production, it could be argued that were an artist to create these novels as a reflexive nod to market forces and participatory art practice, then they would still be a work of art. This implies that the same object and process can produce very different meanings and values depending on the context of its production and distribution. As Hyde himself later writes “Any object, any item of commerce, becomes one kind of property or another depending on how we use it” (Hyde, 1983).

However, despite this discrepancy, Hyde recognises that “works of art [can] exist simultaneously in two ‘economies’, a market economy and a gift economy… however”, he notes, “a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art” (Hyde, 1983).

The work of art as a gift
In understanding the work of art as a gift, Hyde considers the relationship of the artist to the artwork, by extrapolating on ideas of of talent, intuition and inspiration as gifts: “As the artist works, some portion of his creation is bestowed upon him. An idea pops into his head, a tune begins to play, a phrase comes to mind, a color falls in place on the canvas. Usually, in fact, the artist does not find himself engaged or exhilarated by the work, nor does it seem authentic, until this gratuitous element has appeared, so that along with any true creation comes the uncanny sense that ‘I’ the artist, did not make the work”. He uses the Grimm folk tale ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’ to illustrate his point, with the shoemaker as the artist and the elves as his developing talent and inspiration. 

However, he poses, “If a work of art is the emanation of its maker’s gift and if it is received by its audience as a gift, then is it, too, a gift”. According to Hyde this is indeed the case, for example “when art acts as an agent of transformation” or when it “leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges”.

Further reading:
http://sacred-economics.com/
http://erikwdavis.wordpress.com/2006/10/26/the-gift-mauss-bataille-hyde-and-derrida/
http://www.altruists.org/static/files/The%20Time%28s%29%20Of%20The%20Gift%20%28John%20O%27Neill%29.pdf
http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~jparker/social-issues/links/pdf/rethinkingeconomics.pdf
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/capital-seminar-1-gift