<h1> Visual Art | Blog </h1>

Slippage or Embedded Artist

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 07:22:32 +1000

slippage
slip·page \ˈsli-pij\ noun
Definition of SLIPPAGE
1: an act, instance, or process of slipping
2: a loss in transmission of power; also : the difference between theoretical and actual output (as of power)
Examples of SLIPPAGE: The boot's sole prevents slippage.
First Known Use of SLIPPAGE: 1850
(Free Merriam Webster Dictionary online)

A recent post over at Art21 blog got me a bit excited (I even posted a comment!) Frances Whitehead talks about defining and harnessing the artist’s cognitive tool box for engaging with practitioners in other fields such as industry, government and communities.

Frances has worked on water pollution remediation and industrial remediation projects, as well as designing her own sustainable house.

“Whitehead’s involvement in public works projects convinced her that she had something valuable to contribute to the growing discourse on urban sustainability and design. She wants to continue to work in the public sphere, but she isn’t interested in adding more “Plop art” to the universe. Several years ago Whitehead founded the Embedded Artist Project, which she now conducts in partnership with The School of the Art Institute and the City of Chicago. The goal of the program is to “embed” practicing artists into city government in order to “bring new perspectives, mindsets, and processes” to planning projects that revolve around the city’s future. Whitehead now works part time in the city’s Innovation Program, where she works in the Department of the Environment on the Brownfield Initiative alongside a team of planners, scientists, botanists, and other experts on a project called Slow Cleanup that involves using phytoremediation techniques to reclaim abandoned gas stations throughout the city.

Whitehead says she’s not sure if what she does now is art, or some new category that hasn’t quite been defined. “My question is, how do you change the culture, and what do artists know that can contribute to this [change]?” she said.”

Currently I maintain a ‘profile’ in several disciplinary areas. I study and also attempt to maintain a practice as a visual artist, I manage a business partnership with my sister, and I work as Records Management Consultant. I do all these things, and I mostly enjoy doing all of them, but only one makes me any money (at the moment).

At times I experience a loss of power and energy, particularly when I am forced by financial constraints to work more and practice art less. It is then (and in fact, right now) that I wonder why can’t it all be merged into one holistic practice. If I was ‘merged’ then what would that practice be called?

Possibly even more importantly, what industry would I select to display on my LinkedIn profile?

An invitation to all passionate amateurs

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 08:29:28 +1000

The Satellite Exhibition opened last night. I have two works in the show, An invitation to all passionate amateurs & The wattle tree only pours gold for a short time. I’ll be taking bookings for the tent today (Friday) from 3-5pm, Monday 4-5pm and Tuesday 4-5pm. I welcome anyone who would like to visit and share your hobby or passionate interest for half an hour! I’ll also be re-enacting the wattle tree work, so swing by and walk up and down Kelly’s Step for a view of it glowing in the dark!

ARTIST STATEMENTS

An invitation to all passionate amateurs

Medium: tent, stools, brochures, booking sheet

The tent is intended to function as both a site for interaction and also an inspirational mechanism for passionate amateurs and hobbyists. A booking sheet will be available. At your allocated time you are invited to share your interest or passion with the artist, who will provide you with her undivided attention and enthusiastic support.

This work is dedicated to Jack McKinney, who was married to the poet Judith Wright. A returned soldier, McKinney started wondering why advances in Western thought had failed to prevent further and more deadly wars. Untrained, he began reading philosophy, starting with the ancient Greeks. He devoted the rest of his life to the task. Wright supported him (both emotionally and financially) while McKinney struggled for the respect of his peers and for recognition of his theories. I find it both fascinating and sad that Wright was more successful at communicating McKinney's philosophical concepts than McKinney himself was. In fact, many of Wright's most famous poems are a response to, and an extension of, McKinney's ideas. While Wright found her perfect medium of expression, sadly, McKinney never did.

Constantly struggling with the problem of how best to communicate my crackpot ideas, I think I understand how McKinney must have felt. Luckily, I have chosen sculpture as my artistic expression. It gives me complete freedom to communicate in any medium, and I will never feel pressured to gain complete mastery or become an expert at anything ever again.

The wattle tree only pours gold for a short time

Medium: glow liquid, starch packing pellets

Wattles are our national floral emblem, and we love them for their beautiful but short-lived floral display in late winter. Wattles are also extremely useful trees, and have been planted in many parts of the world for making tannin, timber, medicine and glue and for improving soil quality. Because they are so successful at replicating themselves they are also rapidly becoming an invasive pest species. I was struck by the wattle tree in the corner of Kelly's Garden and was also inspired by a Judith Wright poem, The Wattle Tree, which contains the line “and the cascading light poured gold, till the tree trembled with its flood.” This ephemeral work utilises a chemical liquid which, like the wattle flower, glows beautifully for a short time. After the glow disappears, the liquid remains, a problematic residue.

A Void

Sun, 1 Aug 2010 07:20:38 +1000

The mid-semester break was a busy time for me, but no time to make any artwork. This post is about the strange feeling I get whenever I’m about to tackle the art thing again, after I’ve been away from it for a while.

So I got back to Uni finally on July 22nd. That avoid/void feeling happened in the week leading up to it. Surely I’m not the only person who is afflicted? It is like a hole in the chest with an ache associated, anxiety a symptom. Afraid to start, and yet afraid not to start. The only cure seems to be to start making SOMETHING. ANYTHING.

Our first task this semester is to produce works for Kelly’s Garden. The theme is ‘satellite’ so I’ve been researching many things that are satellite and space related. And I found this. I don’t understand it at all, but these people have made gorgeous animations of the evolution of voids in space. I love this one.

Another whole new world I have discovered is around the use of satellite imagery to draw attention to various environmental issues and political concerns. This includes targeting illegal forestry practices ( PDF), deforestation caused by mining and even oil spills. One particular site, operated by Amnesty International, uses satellite imagery to draw attention to attacks on villages in Sudan.

Also, I’ve been investigating scientific and astronomical observation of the night sky, and came across these wonderful historic images of US Naval Observatory (USNO) expeditions to view the transit of Venus in 1874 and 1882. It’s coming again in June 2012!

Meanwhile, the work of Trevor Paglen and Peter Fend (note Fend’s snippish comment about grammar! Don’t you love the internet?) also fits the brief.

I love the research part of any new project. I love the way it opens new paths to explore, new artists to investigate and new materials to use. A void has disappeared, replaced by energy and enthusiasm.

The worship of objects - art on the web

Fri, 2 Jul 2010 07:03:49 +1000

From an article in Hyperallergic by Hrag Vartanian:

“The Sydney Morning Herald reported about MoMA Director Glenn Lowry’s keynote address for Museums of the 21st Century, a panel discussion that was held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne.
Some things of interest in his speech:

The idea of a center, Paris in the 20s, New York in the 60s, is simply a untenable idea today … Every museum of modern art is going to have to develop a strategy for dealing with this problem, how to know about what you don’t know, how to cover the world … in the kind of depth that’s appropriate … There is no periphery;

”[But] virtual space can’t exist without real space; the two are locked in a relationship, and the communities that establish themselves online are real communities, with real interests and real experiences.”; and

Art museums must learn to deal with the fact that their audiences are going to increasingly come from the World Wide Web and may never actually set foot in their physical space. MoMA in fiscal year 2010 will have 3 million visitors who actually come in our door and 18 million discrete visitors who connect to us on our website … You need to have literally a parallel space on the web. It’s no longer simply a means of providing information about what’s taking place inside the museum. The web itself has become a central space for any museum that takes its mission seriously.”

These are issues that libraries and archives have been grappling with for over a decade. In an attempt to engage web visitors, many large institutional libraries and government archives have digitised their collections for online access.

Art galleries have been much slower to embrace the internet and provide access to their collections online. Granted, both libraries and archives hold collections of things that are mainly text based. The informational content of those things more readily translates to a digital format. Photographs and videos of objects are certainly not a replacement for the experience we have when our physical body is located close to a painting or a sculpture.

Did galleries just hope the fuss would die down and the internet would just fade away? Well finally, it seems, they are beginning to acknowledge that it won’t. As Vartaniain points out, the relationship of the virtual to the real is up for discussion. The centrality of the real and the physical to our lives can longer be simply assumed. Is object worship on the way out?

I follow this topic with interest.

The World on the Earth

Sat, 22 May 2010 11:05:10 +1000

In my last post I wrote; “Fox believes that through art, we attempt to model the world and its systems. The artist represents meaning through form, and thus, systems of knowledge become embodied in art.”

I would like to expand on my meaning of the term ‘world’. Here I mean world in the sense that Jack P. McKinney (Australian philosopher and playwright) meant it. McKinney wrote about the ‘world-picture’, and I interpret him as meaning: the body of knowledge that constitutes our common (common as in ‘everyday’ and ‘common to all’) picture of the world.

McKinney was an incredibly unique thinker, whose contribution to Australian history and culture, I believe, has been tragically overlooked. Try reading Judith Wright’s poems with the understanding that she was writing her poetry as a response to and as an extension of McKinney’s ideas, and you’ll be surprised how much it activates your mind (and re-activates her poems). Thinking about it another way, Wright was making poetry-forms out McKinney’s thought-forms, and what more beautiful tribute to a loved one is there than that?

Unfortunately, it’s very hard to find McKinney’s words on the free-web, but here are some from JSTOR:

“It is clear what happened in the change-over from ‘classical to ‘modern’ thought was that the procedure of ‘knowing’, which hitherto had been accepted as a spontaneous act of reasoning faculties (backed up, of course, by observation and experiment), now came into question. Bertrand Russell noted this aspect of the development of thought when he said: "As physics has developed it has deprived us step by step of what we thought we knew concerning the ultimate nature of the physical world" (The Scientific Outlook, p. 272). It was the very success of the procedure of knowing the world that gave rise to the questioning of that procedure...

The nineteenth-century thinker [...] did not ask himself,’ What do we know?’ he was concerned only with knowing the what. It is our modern concern with epistemology that has caused us mistakenly to attribute that question to him. So the question, ‘What do we know?’ is actually a modern question. And, as such, it is evidently an expression of our interest in epistemology.
But we do not ask ourselves, ‘What do we know?’ Instead, we ask, ‘How do we know?’ and endeavour to answer that question by a methodical analysis in which our traditional world-picture is progressively referred back to its experimental bases.

Now our traditional world-picture is, in another sense, our accepted body of knowledge: it is what we know. So, in order to answer the question, ‘How do we know?’ we are analysing what we know. In the outcome, the answer which our analysis yields is not an answer to the question, ‘How do we know?’ It is an answer to the question, ‘How do we know (what we know)?’...

If...we see the modern epistemological inquiry as giving us an answer to the question, ‘How do we know (what we know)?’, we get an entirely different view of current developments. By making a simple and obvious distinction in the form of our question, we are saved from having to make a whole complex series of theoretical distinctions in our answer; we are saved, in effect, from having to throw over reason in an attempt to preserve reason. This is so because our answer relates to the whatness of knowledge.

Our analysis of the world-picture which is presented to our everyday experience is an analysis of what we know. It is a procedure by which we are brought into progressively closer intimacy with our everyday world by being shown how that world is known. Briefly, we now see ourselves not as engaged in a criticism of concepts, such as Time, Space, Substance, Causation, which shows that they have no meaning, but in an analysis of these concepts to disclose how they came to have meaning; to disclose, literally, how meaning and knowledge, having universal validity, have been generated out of the indeterminate elements of experience.

J. P. McKinney ‘Concepts and Meanings: A Footnote to Philosophy’ in
The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 52, No. 19 (Sep. 15, 1955), pp. 515-518

(Bolds, italics, brackets and underlines are mine)

As more and more of us connect, in our globalised culture, this world-picture expands. The body of knowledge which makes up the ‘what do we know?’ becomes ever larger. Yet, we still seem to be at a loss as to how to make sense of it all.

Now, I don’t think art is asking ‘What do we know?’ and I don’t think artists are wondering ‘How do we know?’ So maybe art-making is an analysis of the question ‘How do we know (what we know)?’

By representing meaning through form, by making material systems of knowledge, perhaps art-making as an embodiment of thought-forms is one of those literal disclosures that McKinney refers to.

Meanwhile, here is a random link I found, explaining ‘World vs. Earth’. I kinda like it.