Hi Everyone,
I tweaked the edit of this a wee bit, and added some info at the beginning. Your viewing pleasure will be greatly enhanced watching this in full screen mode, and with a quality pair of headphones or speakers. To access full screen mode, click on the video itself, which will redirect you to my vimeo page.
Chapter 5 has been on my ass for weeks now, so I went back to the start and tried to break it down. I know for each chapter it says why did it come first, cause it was easier to copy and paste within this template from Word than type directly.
I’ll write an entry after 5 is complete to analyse the success of the outline
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Hi
This is the video documentation of my third and final installation within my PhD research.
Some of you have seen the actual installation and some of you haven’t, I would really like feedback from both groups those who have seen in person and those who haven’t.
Please email me at: alex (at) noisefornothing (dot) com
Thank You!
1. What is a pro forma?
A term applied to practices or documents that are done as a pure formality, perfunctory, or seek to satisfy the minimum requirements or to conform to a convention or doctrine. It has different meanings in different fields. (Wikipedia)
Within the context of my research, I have defined a pro forma as a form or document designed by myself to be unilaterally applied as a method for analysing data. Whilst this pro forma document could be defined and or identified as a questionnaire, I feel that the intention and application of these self-constructed pro formats differ greatly from a questionnaire both in form and intention.
2. What method are you utilising this pro forma?
This pro forma can be applied under the guise of any method, but I have been primarily analysing the collected data to date, within the context of Action Research.
3. What is the intended outcome of this pro forma?
The primary use of this pro forma has been to analyse the data generated by the three aural immersive installations. I have chosen to triangulate three different methods: Self Reflection/Action Research, Expert Readers/Focus Groups/Critical Friends/And Literature/Contextual review. I will break down my answers below in three different sections: What is Action Research, Why am I using the Whitehead/McNiff method, and how does the pro forma better enable me to assess my data?
1. What is Action Research?
It is a reflective process of progressive problem solving led by individuals working with others in teams or as part of a “community of practice” to improve the way they address issues and solve problems. Action research is done simply by action, hence the name. Action research can also be undertaken by larger organizations or institutions, assisted or guided by professional researchers, with the aim of improving their strategies, practices, and knowledge of the environments within which they practice. As designers and stakeholders, researchers work with others to propose a new course of action to help their community improve its work practices (Centre for Collaborative Action Research). Kurt Lewin, then a professor at MIT, first coined the term “action research” in about 1944. In his 1946 paper “Action Research and Minority Problems” he described action research as “a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action” that uses “a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action (Wikipedia)
2. Why have I chosen to utilise the Whitehead/McNiff method?
I have chosen to utilise Action Research as its been defined by Jack Whitehead and Jean McNiff. In this method, the idea of the researcher as spectator is subverted by switching the focus from that of the removed, observant researcher to that of practitioner researcher. In this role the researcher is examining their own practice either within a solo capacity or within the company of other practitioners examining their practices within the collective context. In this new role, the researcher explores every aspect of their practice, and poses questions or determines theories based on actual evidence and actions generated by their own practice.
This form of action research is germane to my research because the aural/visual practice is what generated all the data and whilst researching various methods and methodologies I was unable to find another method, which placed the focus on the practitioner and the practice so centrally.
www.actionresearch.net
3. How does the pro-forma better allow me to assess my data?
The implementation of this pro-forma has been essential to data analysis. Foremost the creation of this form allows me to have an organised and systematic approach to analysing the collected data. Additionally, by creating and designing this form, I am identifying a method individual to my own practice, which can be applied under the ethos of other methods to analysing data produced by all facets of this research. This streamlined approach to analysis will be validated by other methods.
4 What makes this method successful?
Thus far this method has been successful by providing me with a consistent and organised framework for analysis.
5. What makes this method unsuccessful?
Drawing upon what I wrote above, in relation to action research its greatest issue remains the nature of validation and how to create secondary forms of validation to ensure that the data has been considered with rigour.
6. How would you change this method in the future?
Generally speaking I wouldn’t change the format or the structure of this method. It’s simple both in execution and use. In order to ensure that the validation process has been rigorous, I aim to use the pro forma in a tired system, beginning with simple questions, gradually asking more pointed and focused questions to ensure validation. By using these documents to create an organised system I will be able to elucidate and map out the data and it’s contribution to new knowledge.
Is there a blueprint to create the ineffable? (Originally asked on 4 August 2007)
I really should have started this entry before Chelsea bombed out of the Champions League to Jose, I mean it’s bad enough to lose but we sacked the guy. Christ.
The original intention of this blog back when I started it 2.5 years ago, was to function as a reflexive method, an informal way to gather my thoughts on the research and it’s been great. For the most part I blog when I need to and it provides me with an easy, attainable goal within which to complete work. Now as I focus on the light at the end of the tunnel I need to find a way to look at the data that I have amassed and process it somehow. The most cohesive way about going about this was to create a physical archive, print out the pages and read through, thus letting the good bits float to the top and pushing aside the crap. It’s interesting because I have done this a couple of times but not with any focus, but today it kind of started to click back into focus how useful this has been.
On 4 August 2007 I wrote a fairly long entry where I asked both the question above and this:
‘I know I am doing this because of the PhD, but it might be worth checking back in a few years to see how this particular element of the research has affected my practice. Will it make it better, or by taking off the cover and showing the bones will it make it worse? Is some part of making art supposed to be inaccessible to not just the viewer but the artist as well’? (Spaulding 2007)
It’s hard to mentally contextualize yourself back and say with definition I can recall exactly what I meant, but I have a very strong reaction to this particular statement. As an artist, it has been my belief that the creation of work is both the completed set of tasks but also an act of magic. There has to be an element of wonder and the will to create it as such present in the making. You don’t get the colour green without the colours blue and yellow; it’s not a question rather a statement of truth. I was concerned by the role of this blog and the role of research in relation to my practice because I felt that lifting the lid and showing the mechanics of the tricks would devalue the outcome of the work. I still believe that, but an enhanced exploration of the methods used to make the magic is not out of bounds.
I think that I got lucky because I subverted the blog to do what I needed to do, I allowed it to be a place for reflection at certain times and an actual functional tool at other. As an example the live blogging my dice compositions, this task allowed me to focus on the creation of new work without being bogged down by the very real issue of making it ‘special’ or ineffable. Having that as your conceptual umbrella is not easy, often it makes the conceptualization of new work next to impossible because your constantly demanding that every one thing BE SOMETHING to someone or everyone in some way, all of the time. That’s more restrictive than the actual PhD itself and it creates a bottleneck mentally. Often ideas are chucked out before they even make it to a sketch because they are deemed stupid or unworthy. What the blog has allowed me to do was shake free of the preciousness of it all a bit.
The dice blogs remains a germane example, after the first album I was like a kid looking through the window of the proverbial candy story. Excited by my own ability but hampered by my serve criticality, I was turning down ideas faster than I was coming up with them because the ineffable seemed so unattainable. It seemingly requires that I create at every stage an act of perfection. This is both counterintuitive to both being an artist and conducting research. The research begs you to ask questions and find answers; the work need not always be perfect. It is this unhealthy obsession with perfection that led me to the dice blogs. (Click here if you want to read the dice blog before continuing) Link will appear in a new window, neato!
Before this exercise my compositions had been created intuitively but that often meant that I only made work, when I felt like it or rather when I felt it was ready to be made. Whilst being a viable method is also kind of tough because sometimes-new work and compositions are shy. If you have read the Dice Man you will understand where this experiment comes from. Essentially I read a book called the Dice Man where the protagonist makes every decision based on the roll of the dice. So with that in mind I set forth the rules, utilizing two dice I assigned a task to each number up to 12. Then I rolled the dice, over and over within this experiment I also took it further from my usual style of working by live blogging the results. By taking out the ‘gut’ instinct and leaving things up to chance I produced a raft of things I hated but I also produced a large amount of useable material. This new method also demanded that every aspect was down to a random roll of the dice. Sometimes I rolled 7 four or five times in a row and you had to abide by task the given to the number 7 no matter how much I agreed or disagreed with the decision. I would also experiment sometimes just rolling one die instead of the pair, this allowed for more varied results. The thing of it is I wouldn’t have even tried to do this without the blog as a vehicle for change and experimentation. There was no reason before to question my methods in such a way (Actually that’s a lie, there has always been a reason to change things up a bit, but I was never brave enough to do so). But this way of working had nothing to do with bravery or fear. It was measured and methodical. It had real time results and I was afforded the ability to see the outcome of change immediately. Live blogging was so successful that I utilized it as method through the composition of the second album, but not in the conceptualizing of the visuals that went along with it. Since I have 6 more albums to produce I feel that it is something I will be visiting again because work begets work and the need to create a momentum tide is upon me like no other.
Now back to the start, and the other line I highlighted: Is there a blueprint to create the ineffable?
I don’t think there is a blueprint, per say. I was never going to be able to sit down and create a set of rules that applies to a majority of practionairs within which to generate an ineffable experience. The creation of such an experience is largely subjective (beating that dead horse again) for both the artist and the viewer. I can tell you what I have done and what aspects were successful and what were unsuccessful but that doesn’t mean that a new artist utilizing my methods within their own interpretation of the ineffable is going to be successful. Rather I can provide a map of my experiences, which can be studied and I can begin to stake claim to the validity of certain methods, but I don’t know if it’s transferable across the board.
As an example my art boys Turrell and Irwin and myself. I could copy a Turrell down to the very last exacting measure but it might not work. I can utilize the same colour lamps that they use in their installations within my own and while a particular blue works for them it might not for me simply because it creates an unwanted friction with my other assembled methods and tricks. You can learn, take and borrow as much as you want but the generation of an ineffable experience is dependant upon the sum of the parts not the parts as singular entities.
To reproduce Irwin’s and Turrell as if they were created by the artist’s themselves is not something I have attempted because it asks more questions about appropriated art than it answers about the ineffable, so I stole their most successful bits, the use of light within space and melded it with my own methods of this emotionally suggestive spaces which relied as much on the ocular as they did on the aural, but my inclusion of such materials was because I didn’t think I could do it simply by copying Turrell and Irwin. Plus this is about the acquisition of new knowledge and what they have done both historically and within the context of their own careers is not underdeveloped. Conducting a quick mental survey of the successful methods over the last fives years, it was about borrowing in the nicest way from my heroes and stripping back the wrappers to allow these singular successful elements to become malleable and free of their previous context. Utilizing fluro bulbs for example doesn’t mean I am waxing Dan Flavin hard, but I am acknowledging that he was on to something in a big way.
It’s worth continually unpicking, as this is the crux of the whole new knowledge issue and what my contribution to that actually is.
The past couple of months have been a little thin on the ground here at alexandrapspaulding.wordpress.com with good and bad reason. At the end of Nov 2009 I underwent knee surgery to repair my ICL. What they didn’t know before they went in was how fucked my ICL has gotten. It’s March now and I still don’t walk completely correctly and various other parts of my body are still suffering. Make no mistake, surgery is a violation of sorts, I allowed someone to cut into my body and not in a fun sexy times kind of way, but in a way that I believed to be restorative and helpful. I am in more pain now than I was before the surgery but I have to keep up the belief that it will get better, but it’s discouraging and depressing. I have spent more days since enveloped in a blackness that I can’t shake.
As for my PhD, when I got back to the States to have the surgery done I was a shell of the person I was at the beginning of the year. Strung out, exhausted and this close to breaking in two. I just wanted to quit and be done. To be honest, I don’t think that completing a PhD proves that I am smarter or better than anyone at anything, even within my own field. I think it proves that I have the stamina to swim upstream against the constant downstream of shite, the shite of research, of how the research rules your whole life, and how I had put it ahead of me, and I simply wanted to quit. I was and am now in the headspace where I had to know that I could walk away if I wanted to and it free of regret. This isn’t all I am just a simple part and I needed to put it into context. I feel in some way that for all the positive things that come forth from this, it’s brought and incredible amount of pain and suffering to my life and I didn’t know if I wanted to deal with that anymore.
Wait! Stop! But…! What about all the time you have spent doing it, what would you tell people about that, how would you explain quitting? Very simply I suppose, because I can and I want to. It’s not a slight to all of the people who have supported me thus far, without them and you I wouldn’t be here. Rather it’s about having the ability to say: ‘thank you, now respectfully fuck off’. I am not actually going to say it but knowing I am ok with saying it makes it okay to keep going forward. Now I am going forward because I want to get this done, I want to move on and move forward. This is no longer the picture I want to be defining me, but I didn’t know that 3 months ago because everything was so twisted.
So why am I back and what is that I am back to being about? It’s not that simple to explain, but I will try. I am back because I believe in the ineffable and the magical moment that happens when you push people into the rabbit hole you created. I am back because I am fucking good at this: I am a good artist, I am good researcher, and I have my swagger back. It’s silly to say but it’s all about confidence and standing up and taking the punch whether or not it was deserved. I am back to standing up and taking the punches because I saw something that made me believe in it all over again.
The last couple of weeks have been kind of interesting weather. Hot, cold sometimes in the same day, even the same hour. Last week was warm temperature wise, I mean I was running about in short sleeves letting the sun kiss the skin a bit, but there was still all this snow on the ground, a bit of a paradox. I happened to be driving home and it was the middle of the afternoon, right before the left hand turn onto our street is a little creek set back in the woods. The sun was streaming through the clouds, the sky was blue, the windows were down and the air had all the promise of spring summer nights, but as I was passing this creek set back in the woods there was mist hanging over the water. Thick in some sports almost like cotton wool suspended in mid air, it was phenomenon all to itself. It was isolated and viewed out of the corner of one’s eye as you pass by, so quickly you would think you made it up. It was fucking magical and I suddenly got it all over again, suddenly I fell back in love with being bowled over. It was so amazing I turned around and parked there on the side of the road just looking, looking at the mist hang almost solidly in some areas and being worn thin in others and it made realize something. Not for nothing, but all my ineffable experiences come from the nature place, the work I make is about the replication the desire to best the thing that occurs simply because it does. I know that phenomenon I viewed was based on air/water/ground temp and it has a scientific explanation, but who gives a fuck? You forget and you look past it because it takes your breath away. You look closer because it’s happening then and there without viable explanations and contexts; you look because you can’t look away. (By you I mean me)
Thus far I have avoided asking the questions about the natural occurrence and what that means within the research and I wonder if I have undersold my entire context by negating this fact. No matter the bullshit I spin and the books I read at the end of the day I am trying to replicate the magical thing that I saw in my bedroom as a kid or in the woods, I am trying to harness the NATURAL phenomenon.
It’s all coming together, or it’s all coming BACK together I suppose. I have gone so far into the exploration of the natural self: meditation and yoga that I sort of forgot about the NATURALLY occurring phenomenon that exists every day in front of me but because I have my head usually so far up my own ass I miss it. Before my surgery I went to a Gregory Crewdson talk at the Albright Knox Art Gallery. I was curious because in my undergrad like any other photo major I waxed Crewdson hard. It was beautiful, lush, cinematic, and magical. I sort of lost desire for his work but then I went to this talk and while he may be a bit of a weak public speaker he said two words that basically hit it out of the park for me: ‘magic hour’. A descriptive term used to describe that time of dusk when the light is slipping away and the shadows begin to fall. This term the ‘magic hour’ describes the thing I am looking for perfectly, and since I need to start banging out this lexicon that will defiantly make the cut.
That’s the thing; I lost sight of the magic hour. Even though I spent two months in bed basically starting at the wall watching time pass, watching the magic hour happen EVERYDAY I didn’t see it because I didn’t want too or I couldn’t see it. I lost sight of the magic, the whole reason I am here in the first place, but finding it again does bring up the question of the natural occurrence and why I haven’t been engaged with it. A lot of what I am doing currently for research is to cull through my archives and I don’t mention it at all, how problematic is that, what did I leave out and was this omission major or minor?
So yeah, it’s nice to be back and it’s nice to be engaged/engaging with the pulse of it. As the days pass especially the next ten or so I intend on more entries and more questions. When you go through the archives the thing that comes up, are the gaps in my knowledge and the questions that need to be asked: again or for the first time.
Foremost I will need to assess my research questions, over the next few days I intend to do this in a variety of ways, utilizing my blog and social networking sites to see what and how people view what I am talking about, but also the questions I asked five years ago aren’t the same questions I am trying to answer, rather they were the starting point.
So yeah, I am back kids, I am back.
Gregory Crewdson. Image courtsey of Luhring Augustine Gallery
First of all, sorry for the massive delay in posting.
I have a massive bunch of updates, but the only thing I have been thinking about is the difference between truth and fact. For something to be true it doesn’t always mean that it needs to be supported by fact, although fact helps.
So I have mad crazy images etc. But I wanted to throw that out there. ASAP. Hopefully more before the year’s out. Happy New Year kids, 2010 can only be better, 2009 sucked.
I always bang on and on about how I never blog and how fucking long it’s been-cause it’s true. I have been absolutely rubbish lately at keeping this thing up to date and it’s not cause of sheer laziness, but because I am busy.
Really I should be more on top of it; it’s good practice and a reflexive method. So with that in mind, what do I have in store for you today, what am I thinking about?
Since I saw the National, I have sort of been focusing on the good things, the little things. For so long I have been putting the idea and the notion of the ineffable on a pedestal treating it like a girlfriend I don’t want to upset, but that’s pretty stupid. The whole point is that I am here to batter it around and find out what makes it tick. In some way it’s about a sense of respect, I respect the ineffable because I can’t break it or twist it to far. As a notion and a theoretical idea it sort of defies that kind of thinking, but why should I be so gentle with it? I am not gentle with my listeners or my viewers or purpose. I am here to put them through their paces, why not the very concept that started it all off then?
So back to the good things, the little things-what are they are, and what do they mean to me? In some way I feel as if this research has created an uncomfortable kind of tunnel vision within my thinking and my approach; it’s a natural extension of research to narrow your focus, but as an artist you want keep your eyes wide open and try and take as much in as possible. So in some ways (let’s be honest, not even some) research of one’s own practice is counterintuitive. It almost defeats the purpose of the making. The making is about the exploration, the need to find things out through success and failure, and I feel because research is so goal orientated that sometimes I lose sight of the small stuff.
What is this small stuff you speak of Alex, stop playing around and lay it out. Well I guess what I am trying to unpick and rescue is the way I used to look at things: art, the sky, people on the street, you know the way the sun hits the wall as I lay on the sofa. Now, when I look, I try and impose my idea of the ineffable on to the situation-where as before I looked for the ineffable within the situation (remember those three kinds of ineffable). I was in Ibiza this weekend for a mate’s birthday and Monday we were sitting on Salinas Beach, which is tucked away and not full of full on banging ravers and in hindsight it was such a great chilled out experience that in it’s self was ineffable. I’m sitting there, the sea gently rolling in and breaking, wet sand beneath your fingers, sun coming down, amazing tunes on the sound system and all this natural beauty just laid out in front of me. It’s easy to attach one’s idea of the ineffable to the amazing pink sunset that we saw as we were leaving, but that was icing on the cake compared to the rest. There was sense of peace and harmony and THAT’S what made it ineffable. All of those aspects are merely components but when combined they came together and formed something greater.
As I was sitting on the plane coming home Tuesday night I started to unpack all the things that work, and have worked in the 5 years I have been conducting this research. At various points if you read the earlier entries I touch on so many different variables: drugs, circumstance, music, atmosphere, context, and on and on and on. I have been saying all along that it’s subjective. My construction and ideas and my ideal of the ineffable are based on what works for me, I make changes and tweaks to the work based on the critical feedback that I have received since I started but at the end of the day the gestation of the idea is about what gets me off. To say anything else would be false to a certain degree because I have learned that I can’t make work based on the idea of what might work for someone else, I have to make work based on what works for me and hope that there is enough general crossover to reach someone else.
So how do the small things come back into play, what am I missing? I suppose to some degree I have been hung up on things that aren’t actually important. Having to stop and slow down, I realised that considering the small things is as ineffable as sitting in an installation I have created, it’s the small things that inform the big things. It’s the way that a cold glass of sparkling water tastes on a hot day. At the end I am chasing that fleeting moment-it’s there and gone before you know it. That water is ineffable for moments not minutes, but to try to catch it would be like catching lightening in a bottle. The fact that it’s fleeting is what makes it powerful.
I used to be a collector of the fleeting moments, carrying a camera around and trying to document the things that made sense to me and the things that didn’t, same with my mini sound recorder. But as my ideas and installations get grander I have tailed off and sort of forgotten to continue, but has the loss of this act hindered the work? Is my lack of looking doing me a disservice?
I guess what I am trying to come to is how important those fleeting things are, they are as informative as reading a shit ton of Merleau-Ponty. In fact you need both one alone will not suffice.
Yeah, so what does it all mean? How does it relate, where am I going with this? When I was practising yoga this morning it sort of hit me. I found my breath. In yoga this is king, without the breath it’s just exercise, but with the breath it’s moving meditation. Suddenly I am not Alex moving about on a piece of rubber, but I am Alex moving with purpose and determination. I am not thinking about my movements rather I am focusing on breathing and my gazing point. Everything else just falls away the movements become natural and guide themselves. It’s all you can ask for in Yoga, I may not be able to do certain things but finding my breath is the one thing that will guide me.
It’s been a question this: my yoga practice and my research? How does it fit, what am I using my yoga for? I suppose when I started, my answers were unclear because I didn’t know. I knew that I was using my meditation and yoga practices for a reason but I just didn’t know why. I am not using them in the physical first person sense, I am not asking my viewers to do Ashtanga with me rather I am using my practice to create a rhythm for myself. As an example when I practice I do 5 Sun Salutation A’s and 5 Sun Salutation B postures to build heat within my body but also to form a rhythm with my breathing. And I realise in a certain way I have subtly, and unconsciously shifted and changed my way of making things artistically to more closely resemble the way I practise yoga. When I do yoga the movements are set and in a particular order, in some ways I have created this aspect within the work: how it’s approached, how one enters, when the sound comes one, what the circumstances are etc.
The use of yoga is purely for me, it’s about helping me shape and form the installation, and the crucial thing about yoga is the small stuff. Some days I go and practice and bang through it because I want the physicality, I want to punish and cleanse myself. But some days like this morning I relish stretching that much further, I relish allowing the breath to help me go one step more, a step further that sheer strength couldn’t get to, and it’s like yeah how does that translate if I am not making people actually move? But it’s not about making them move it’s about making me use what I know from yoga to be truth and trying to create my own truths with the installation. Every aspect has been considered, I admit when I did the first and the second ones there were elements/factors that I let slide by the wayside and I firmly believe you’re only as good as your smallest mistake and believe me, people remember the mistakes because they are the easy things to comprehend. In yoga it’s not about your mistakes, it’s not competitive but I remember my ‘victories’. Like the first time I did a solo shoulder stand, I remember the joy of the success cause it’s easy, but what I remember most is what was working differently within my own body, how I had used my breathing and bandhas. Yoga has allowed me to be attuned to my artistic practice in a different way, because now I listen to it. It’s almost as if I have implanted the Primary Series as an invisible template to my way of making.
I think this is one of those entries and topics that requires further investigation. But I know now more than I did, and what I do know with out question is that I don’t know ‘the ineffable’. I only know Alex Spaulding’s ineffable experiences and that’s also been playing games and tricks in my head.
(this is a bit all over, but it’s my blog and this style works for me)
Alongside of noticing the influence of the small stuff and yoga on my practice, I also realise how shit scared I am. The first installation was a doddle as they say here. It was almost done for me, all I had to do was recreate what was already there, granted it’s there in Eden NY, but the layout of the room, the light, all that was given to me by circumstance and previous experience. All I did was recreate it and hope that by showing people the way that I saw/see and heard/hear things in that context, that they would be able to climb into my head a bit more. The second installation was about the delivery of sound, which mode worked better: headphones or speakers (50-50 split for those keeping score). My imposition of an aesthetic experience as well was secondary to the cause.
But this installation, this time it’s real. I can’t fall back on childhood memories or hide behind the notion of testing modes of listening. For the first time the artistic shackles are off and it’s about the experience, the atmosphere, how good is Alex at making the magic? When I realised why I was so paralysed it was both freeing and more concerning. Do I have the stuff to make it work are my ideas strong enough? This installation is big and encompassing of so many factors-is it gonna work? I suppose this is it, this is where I discover if I have what it takes or am I the great pretender? The installation itself deserves it’s own entry and I promise to be on it. But yeah, could my momentary inability to notice the small things be a factor in this work not being successful? And what is the measure of success-within the PhD it’s one thing, within the context of my career it’s another, but within the context of Alex is getting it up and installed simply enough? Has the ferocity of the process broken me down beyond the point of caring? As a paper artist I come up with the ideas and make the crappy funny looking sketches, then I hand them it over to fabricators and they make my ideas come to life, I just hope that nothing gets lost in translation and maybe it’s finding out what ‘nothing’ refers to that is the breakthrough, but in what context?
That’s not to say I don’t believe in the work-that’s not true. I believe in this work because I have to do. I believe in this work because in the darkest part of night I know it’s going to work. I have to trust the idea and myself, so maybe as an artist the most ineffable part is the let go, it’s the finding of my ‘artistic breath’, like when yoga ceases to be exercise and becomes moving meditation. But I need to highlight and draw attention to that shift cause it’s key.
Here are some images of the steel frame of the work; I am also attaching some youtubes of yoga so that you can see what I am talking about.
As well I think that you should all run out and get the xx cd.
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The xx
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Images of the Steel Cage frame for the Room
Duuuuuuude! Where the hell have you been?
I know, it’s a really good question, where have I been and what have I been doing? It’s fairly obvious, not blogging.
I could bore you with trivial tales about this and that, and that’s what I had planned to do up until last night. But….
Last night, I saw one of my favourite bands The National play at the Royal Festival Hall in London and it knocked me sideways (in a good way).
This was not from the gig last night, but youtube can’t produce everytime.
If you have never seen them perform, I command thee to do as soon as possible, they make great music and are committed to playing their songs with force and dedication, it’s as if there is no wall between the band and the audience, everything melts away and it’s just one group of people sharing in this ‘thing’, and it’s this ‘thing’ that’s so important to talk about.
As I have mentioned in previous blog entries I hold Andrea Fraser’s Why Does Fred Sandbeck’s Work Make Me Cry as a key text for me, and in a way I suppose I held her reaction to Sandbeck’s work as the penultimate response. If you have people crying then it works, it’s so great that it’s beyond words and the only reaction is to cry. But as the research has progressed my thinking on this is progressing as well. I am not saying that crying is right or wrong, what it is, is one particular individual’s response to a particular piece of work in a particular setting:yeah, context-it’s everything.
During the set I was standing there singing along, doing that strange indie white person’s dance and really feeling it. As the band’s set grew and their relationship to the audience developed and it was almost as if there was a swell, a combination of the audience being so caught up in their performance and the band being caught up in our adulation.
Aside from that something began to happen to me, as I stood there as they played Slow Show, there seemed to be this expansion in my chest, it was amazing. Suddenly I was filled with feelings so good I would like to find the drug that equals what I felt, I mean it was as if my heart and my chest might burst at any time because I felt so moved. It was a multitude of things, I was drawn deeper and deeper into the tunes, I felt this incredible sense of love for certain people in my life, and I honestly believed as I was standing there that I was in the presence of something that couldn’t ever be put into words. At that moment I have never felt better.I actually sent this email to myself in the middle of one of their songs because it was so important for me to remember this:
What if it’s about trying to create a physical being, why can’t we believe in thing we can’t see? What does it mean?
Slow Show
Dude, I know, we’re getting close to the G O D word, but maybe that is what it is about. I mean the whole thing is that I don’t know anything for certain, but as I stood there with my chest bursting and my head expanding because I couldn’t comprehend or define how amazing I felt-I thought, maybe this is how people feel about God. I am not going to tackle the God thing here because it’s not what my research is about, but part of me was thinking is this how we deal and experience the ineffable? In fleeting moments where the mediums we can grasp come together in the right way and suddenly we’re thrown into this feeling, this place, this experience that is big, so grand you just think-fuck me. What just happened?
What this is beginning to expand for me is how much I relate to the ineffable as a malleable idea/experience rather than a thing or object. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think these things can be ineffable, but for me, and my work, objects et. al are the sum of the parts of the thing.
I mean as I sit here recollecting what it is was I thinking it was that I was in the midst of an ineffable moment and I wondered if the band’s music is simply an instrument or a portal to make such an experience physical. In hindsight what is also interesting for me about that is that I was actively being self conscious and aware, yet the experience wasn’t dampened or destroyed, something I had previously thought would happen the minute one perceived themselves perceiving.
It’s so hard to try and decipher and as I sit here trying to put the ‘unutterable’ into words I laugh. To try is futile, so what is my research going to do? What am I trying to prove?
This is a bit of email I wrote someone this morning about the gig… it fits.
I have seen the National about 6 times already and every time it’s always been amazing and restorative, like I leave the gig thinking and feeling more whole. But last night’s gig was amazing, it’s been a while since I have gone to a gig solo-it’s has a sensation of loneliness but also complete freedom. I drank only water and was literally blown away by them. At one point I felt as if my heart was going to explode out of my chest because I felt so good. It deepened my love for people I love, you included and I just wish you could have seen it. I sent myself a lot of mini essays during the gig, as it’s really research related. But I get God now, like I get this thing, this sensation and I wonder if because the belief in that which can’t be seen is hard is everything we do a way to personalise that relationship and bring it to our own level? Is that what I am trying to do with my work? I don’t know, but I suppose this is my job. It was simply amazing. I really wish you could have been there, but I will make sure you get to see them either here or in the NYC.
And this song closed it out, although this was shot in Vienna.
(I wrote this a month ago when I was in NYC on 1 July)
It often starts with the tossing and the turning, searching for the cool spot on the pillow. Most people find it and fall back asleep. Me, I never find the cool spot.
I am sitting here, looking out over New York City as the sun rises and lazily tries to break through the low-hanging haze that seems to be a permanent fixture on the skyline. When I leave my cocoon of air conditioning and sound-proofed windows, not only will I be immersed in the city but also in the haze and the humidity.
So, why start like this, why bring us into it? you ask. It’s simple: it’s about work and ways of being and thinking. I know this is a shared blog and in general the policy is that I don’t really write on my own work things in the specific, but I feel that this is a worthwhile endeavour, so here we go:
WHAT DRIVES YOU TO MAKE THE WORK?
I am asking this, because this morning I woke up wrecked with anxiety, an anxiety that makes me want to hide from everything: my work, the PhD, and life in general. It’s not as if it’s too much, or as if there’s something that I can’t manage, but it’s like the haze outside my window: it envelopes you like a blanket, and right now it feels too heavy for me to move myself.
As I am about to embark on another installation I think about this state of mind and who I am, and which aspects of it are present within my work. It’s not like I have come to some sort of light-bulb-like conclusion: ‘Oh anxiety, that’s what it should be about’. It simply seeps in.
So what and why and how is this in any way relevant to this blog and the working relationship I have with G? The reason is that it’s about the base for everything I do: in some way every work I have made has in some aspect tried to address this issue. I suppose it comes down to the question of ‘what kind of experience am I trying to create?’
It’s such a vital and important question, and in a way I haven’t answered it or even asked it directly. My father came over to Glasgow after the second installation in my PhD research was completed, and we did a brain-storming session, I have never worked with my father like that before on a project. For the most part my parents don’t participate in that way. But working with someone outside of my contextual framework was amazing. I had to have answers and I had to know, as he was asking questions out of curiosity, not malice. It made me realise how little I did know about what it is that I want. To some degree working within the structure of practice-led research creates some kind of tunnel vision. I was going full steam ahead on the work, with in some way letting my instinct and gut feeling take over when it came to the nature of the experience. But I never directly addressed what that experience was to be or what I wanted it to be. A bit cart before the horse. Now I have the chance to rectify that process, can I change that with the third installation?
So back to the nature of experience: what is it that I want? The best way of doing this is to look at work that I have seen lately, and to give you a peak at the thinking inside my head.
When G and I were in Basel there weren’t any immersive installations per se, but there was a lot of work that was immersive in some way. Lots of glossy black plexi, in which you’re reflected, but not forever like in a mirror, but in a rather flat 2D way. I have never enjoyed seeing myself in artwork, because it break the fantasy: I am real but the artwork is producing this thing beyond myself and then bam, there I am. In some way that inclusion of the self is vitally important. It’s jarring in the sense that for the most part we have an idea of how we look, but sometimes our reflection is not the same as the internal image we have created of ourselves. That’s where the black plexi and the mirrors come in.
I had been deliberating for months, or rather the past year, that Room 3 would involve a pool. I had seen it done in Basel several years ago, and besides the sheer coolness of it, being in a pool was something so ineffable within the context of it being a work of art. The work came alive when it was engaged with by the viewers, and it contained an ultimate sense of immersion. But as I have neither the funds nor the physical space to create the work that I want to create, the questions is how do you substitute that and what do you do to keep moving?
In glimpsing all of this black Perspex in Basel and seeing some mirrored pieces, it became apparent that I wouldn’t need water to generate the effect that I am after. I can create an environment about immersion without having people actually physically immersive people within the work.
Within the last two installations, the work has had a high aesthetic sensibility while I am also cultivating and actively generating a sense of dread or doom. There is something about the work that makes people uncomfortable. I like that, and I want that as that is my way of allowing people in, to give them a sense of certain things that I feel at particular moments, if only for a short time. I am not just immersing people into this aesthetic visual world, but I am using the music that I create to integrate the visual and the aural, to make something that is more than the sum of its parts.
So back to what it is that I want, what kind of experience I am after. What is the purpose of Room 3? Simply put, I want Room 3 to be the integrated accumulation of all that I have been working towards. This is my chance to really show not only my aesthetic sensibility, but to also highlight what that sense of aesthetics means to the work as a whole. I want the experience to incorporate aspects of calm but ultimately to have people leave feeling unsettled. I want the hair on the back of your neck to stand up and for you to feel a mental itch. If the work were to be realised right now, I would say that the purpose of the work is to drown you in my anxieties and to allow someone else to feel them, to truly know the level and depth of someone else’s fears. And I want it to look good.
For the moment I feel pretty I have said everything there is to say. The sun has broken through the haze, so it’s time for me to frolic.
aps
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