All posts by Chris

Group Worker . Art Maker . HCPC Registered Drama & Movement Therapist

A Note About Attention

Andrew Freiband

”Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought…It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”

William James


Andrew Freiband is a filmmaker, producer, researcher, writer, educator, and multimedia artist who founded ALI based on several years of original research and development into the unique capacities – and imposed restrictions – of artists in contemporary society.

He has 20 years of professional experience in the film, television, museum, and fine arts fields, having worked in productions everywhere from the top of the unfinished skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan to post-earthquake Haiti to the slums of Nairobi and beyond.

Freiband is an advocate of art as research. In his Substack, he recently wrote a great article called ‘A Note About Attention’, about art as attention. In this article, he says..

“Paying attention is how artists channel experience into knowledge.”

Freiband has some interesting things to say about how attention has become a commodity. In broad terms, this may be referred to as the attention economy.

Approaching art making as intentional attention is an antidote to the attention economy.

Click the link below to visit his Substack.

ANDREW FREIBAND

To read the full article on a separate page, click page 2 below.

the world naturally swings

Working with art as research has convinced me that all that we make as art already exists in the world, in its actual material structure. All we do is find it and reveal it. It is in the physical nature of paint, in music theory and music making, in our bodies in performance, in the vibrations in the air that make sound and in the wind in the clouds making patterns.

Below, swing reveals itself in the act of moving a shaker.

Richard long’s walking works as art

The artist Richard Long started a career in art by walking.

He has made a lot of indoor works, mostly in response to his outdoor experience, and these stand as conventional gallery works. But the work that intrigues me are his walks. These are many things, but essentially they are performance pieces that make a mark. In many cases, the marks made as art, like the walks made as art, are temporary. This is what makes them performance art. They are temporal.

Showing this is therefore difficult.

In many cases, Long has used text to stand in for experience. Click the word TEXT below to see this.

TEXT

There are a lot of videos of people talking about Long’s gallery work and his walking work, but there are few that simply show how Richard Long’s walking works as art.

These two below show his work well, without recourse to the opinion of third parties.

The link to his own site is below the videos.

Richard Long’s Personal Site

Croci Liked Crow

For Ted Hughes

Croci liked Crow and
Flicking the pages
Tapping ones that looked interesting
The old man read them out
Croci listened, head cocked
Did not understand them all but
Said that whoever wrote them
Knows about crows
Knows their blackness
And their eating habits
But went no further

Croci
Flicked on to other pages and sat
Again, head cocked
The old man spoke on
Croci comprehended, compended
And collected
Morsels of poems
Choice items
First the eyes
Then the tongue
Then fat, flesh, bone marrow
Then stolen eggs, earthworms, insects, fruit, small mammals, amphibians
Croci had a strict order
Favourites first, fluids, then
Fast fatty food
When the ground was frozen
In the winter
This could save lives
So it was passed on
As poetry
Bird to bird
Eat…
Eyes, tongue, fat, flesh

The old man talked about
All the words
Written
About Crow
By people
Who never wrote
The poems
About Crow
And
Croci huffed
Phewph
What do they know about winter
In their warm houses
With their warm toes
And their warm hearts
The man who wrote Crow
Knew about the cold bleakness of winter and
His frozen heart
Had eaten carrion
To keep himself alive
The poems in Crow said this
Which is why
The people with warm toes
And warm hearts
Wasted the warm air
That made words
Instead of eating
Eyes and tongues
Whilst still warm
And moving
And in silence
Speaking
About
Survival

Croci said
Poetry does this

Chris Reed

Croci Dug Down

The birds were busy
It was that time of year
Dancing, preening, chasing, breeding
Being pretty
Croci was busy too
Digging down
Doing dirt work
Being black coal glistening oil slick rainbow
Shifting shapes
Universal and bedecked by stars
The night sky
Constellated different at every glance
In the field digging
Heads down
The Rooks
Barefaced
Marlin spiked
Trowel headed
Looking for some sub surface thing
Long lost

Chris Reed