Posts linking to realted, useful and informative source material including work of practicing artists, theorists and commentators, research of anecdotal evidence, magazine or news items.
Great video of artist Tauba Auerbach who works right on the edge between arts practice as personal subjective research and objective material research to the point where they become some other thing. That they are they reinforces the post-curricular, nominal nature of their work. That they seek to find the substrate that underpins our surface world fills me with wonder and awe. The header image is a boat she painted.
In this video Tauba says “I want to learn new things constantly. And I am always trying to find the pattern behind things. I have educated myself about a number of mathematical and scientific principles through crafts like paper weaving and paper marbling. To marble paper it is all about relationships and ratios…”
This appeals to me a great deal. I read nothing but books about maths for about 6 months once on the principle that maths may describe the underlying substrate of the material world. In the end I was unconvinced but concluded that maths provided the best map we have available for the underpinning of the objective world, but the maths was the map not the territory.
So like Tauba I explored art making as a way to get there by other means, subjective means that meant something to me personally. I made a things called ‘A Step Back’ here as this path about maths led to me exploring ideas about recursion between the digital and analogue domains and the oddly dissociative effect of things being in both domains. Recursion as a phenomena connects lots of things in maths, science, art, ecology, sociolology, philosophy, on and on. I believe it is a source of creativity and distributed or collected intelligence between intelligences other than just people, see here. Art making helps us encounter distributed intelligence. James Bridle wrote a great book about this idea, see here and the way it is embedded in the world.
Tauba also talks about art making as a way to get out of thinking in words. This is also important. Materials used in art making have their inherent material intelligence made available through the act of art-making. This intrinsically and in an embodied way extents your perceptions to re-view the world through art making. Thus arts practice facilitates the extended mind see here.
Tauba’s website is here and a great pdf called ‘Thy Fearful Dissymmetry’ is here to see more.
And the original link was for Art21, a great arts website here and here.
At some level there is a connection between art making and adventure. The place this can happen is in the making of art. Arts practice. Arts practice could be seen as a journey of uncertain outcome. A big part of the adventure journey is the travelling rather than the destination. The journey is made in the walking of it. So it is with art making. I will give you two ways.
Art as Adventure – No 1
The Journey of Uncertain Outcome
I had an art adventure this weekend (Oct 21–22 2023) on Adobe FireFly here. Adobe is doing a big sell on their new service, FireFly. This is an AI image maker. Kinda controversial in some quarters. Some AI image programs scrape art off the interweb and quite rightly some object when art is scraped but not attributed to the maker. Everybody wants the artist to do some art for them for nothing. Hey it’s good publicity right!
But Adobe base FireFly on their product Adobe Stock of 2 million or somethingorother images here and here. For this you sell them a photo or artwork and they then own it, then designers and advertiser and artists can buy other people images for their art/product/service etc. So Adobe scrape their stock of bought art and images, where the artists are paid. Fair enuf. But this is then used to drive their AI image making machine. They then sell on this service to subscribers. But this all goes (or went) live November the 1st , the paid bit that is. But ’til then it is (or was) up for grabs for payed up subscribers for nowt. I have the ‘Photography Plan’ so I experimented with it. This was my adventure. I put in ‘a monkey in a tree wearing trainers and smoking a pipe, looking at her mobile phone,’ and this is what I got…
This begs the question ‘Did the monkey agree to this and did she get payed and is she in Equity?’. Art can be so difficult.
My interest (beyond smoking monkeys) really was not in such concrete manifestations but in more abstract ones. Below are some images and the text prompts I gave for more abstract ideas. I wanted to see what I would get.
I prompted with ‘cycles and cycles and cycles of dark foreboding substrate’. I got this…
Then I changed parameters, making the image ‘oil painting’, or ‘archtectiral drawing’ or ‘bright colours’ or included say, ‘three cycles’ and got these.
It was impressive. I suspect this will make millions for Adobe. Designers no longer need to trawl through image libraries, if they want a ‘a monkey in a tree wearing trainers and smoking a pipe, looking at her mobile phone,’ for say, a New Scientist article on hominid evolution in the age of the interweb. They subscribe to FireFly on their device, type in the aforementioned prompt, and then there she is, on their PC in about 5 seconds if you have the latest Intel chip. So as mentioned, from Nov 1st on you will be charged for this as part of your plan.
So my counter cultural alter ego kicked in and I decided to make a little artwork from the initial text prompt ‘huge face with big white blank eyes with no pupils looking up’ and got these.
Part of what I was after with my little artwork was some critique of the Attention Economy (see here), about how young people particularly are being trained by social media and their device centric social life to make money for the shareholders of multinationals see here. Adobe apparently read my mind. Uncanny. Scary. My Lu’d I rest my case. Adobe initially gave me children with big trustful eyes.
But to be truthful in this case I was after a more specific image so I typed in ‘huge grinning smiling business man face with huge big oversized white blank eyes’, then ‘huge ugly grinning smiling business man face with huge big oversized eyes looking at viewer’ and got these (amongst many more, unlike a real human artist, AI never gets tired or wants to eat or go to the toilet).
Now FireFly is connected to Adobe Express, a thing to make graphics and images for social media. Express is a quick and easy way to make graphic design. So I made this…
It kinda worked but was not quite what I was after. I moved on and planned to come back to this ismege agian later. But this moving on made me think.
Art as Adventure – No 2
Artworks as way-markers (and as cheating).
This act of art making lead me on to my No 2, Art as Adventure idea, the art object as way-marker or ‘flash’.
On an adventure the ‘flash’ was a thing you left on a tree with your hand-axe. In the wilderness an axe mark can only be the work of a human hand. A bit like a work of art. It was a way to mark your trail, so you can find your way back to whence to came, or have someone else find your remains if you were eaten by a bear say.
People are afraid of bears as people are afraid of art. Like avoiding hungry bears, people avoid making art for fear their art be seen and critiqued. Publicly. In my school if you had your art put up on the wall it was sign of a being a sellout, see here and you were shunned in the dinner queue. Harsh, but just. I got CSE grade 1 in Art and Physics. Social pressure has a lot to answer for. I did a BSc.
So to overcome this fear a suggestion is to see each little artwork you make as a way marker, a flash, a flash in the pan, a thing to be discarded and left behind, a thing to show where you have been not where you are. A thing only you see. A small sign of moving on.
A bigger art work, a project, a show, an article on your local radio station, then a national, then Breakfast TV, Sky Arts, the Venice Biennale here the Turner Prize here, can be seen as an encampment. You set up camp and make a lot more mess. A midden, a dunny, a campfire circle and some discarded lager cans. You know…. ‘Culture’. An encampment will make you officially a ‘Real Artist’. Is it an old tent or Tracy Emin’s artwork? See here. I have seen her tent and I loved it, don’t get me wrong.
So I made the image above and moved on. The lettering did not work. The £ and $ signs ended up upside down so it kinda missed point. The face was great, but I did not make it, AI did.
So what? Well some principles from the arts therapies and experiential learning apply. Whatever thought or idea you had becomes concretised, reified, made a subjective object see here. You make it as art and this experience becomes concretised, reified, made a subjective object. You get to view and re-view yourself, your inner world. You go beyond being a consumer of images and become a producer. That nobody sees your way-marker but you removes you from the echo chamber of on-line life. Like a sketchbook or journal, you see your journey unfold and know where you have been that you better see where you could go. I believe this can make health. It can aid recovery of whatever need to be recovered. It is recovering your own ground. It is in the process in which states become traits to quote Dan Siegel see here. It is art in process. It is art making with intention, attention attitude. I intend to make art, I attend to what I make and what happens when I make it within an attitude of openness and the capacity to non-attachment. This is a just way-marker and I let it pass. Nobody sees it but me. It shows where my adventure took me. This is art not ‘Art’. I do not have to account for it. I am a safe in the dinner queue.
So check out Adobe FireFly. Or ignore it out of principle. But remember David Hockney said ‘The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.’ See here and here. My business man was not a beauty, nor was my art, but I was a bit of a cheat so maybe I was being an artist. If you cheat, you too can be an artist. Just avoid the dinner queue.
Above is a link to a great article about the mutual creation of place. Place as relational. Place as performance.
To me this connects more directly to the idea of artmaking as co-creational with the artist, the materials, the substrate, the artform as partners. Place is performed. All art is performance. It exists in-process in realtionship with the maker, the materials and the viewer. The viewer includes the maker. She sees her own making, and it can tell her or show her new stuff.
Featured image is from Adobe Firefly from Adobe images.
“Each camera click is an exploration, a deep dive into another person’s worldview, making the photograph a captivating tapestry of human perception and worldview. This process, this dance between creativity and reality, transforms an ordinary image into a captivating story that is a trustworthy reflection of a real and true story with which the viewer can identify. It is a fusion of different minds and points of view converging to create something unique, trustworthy, thought-provoking, and priceless. The process of searching for meaning and truth in documentary photography is a value in itself that AI is not likely to give.”
After reviewing my photography and looking at images I had not looked at for years, my re-viewing also took another retrospective perspective.
Years ago I became fascinated by the whole idea of DTP, Desk Top Publishing. In those days I had access to Adobe Pagemaker here now InDesign. I briefly had a part-time job as a magazine editor but around this time the scope to publish online became more easily available and I had various websites. Whilst I maintained an interest in magazines and paper based analogue communications, the world fell in love with the digital on-line world. Like painting, the death of the paper newspaper, the death of the analogue has been predicted for ages. See here and here. But vinyl is being sold in my local supermarket again. Maybe the analogue is not to dead. All that stuff we did years ago that we no longer do is maybe useful after all.
I love the interweb but at heart I am a group worker, a carer, a therapist. I like the hands on. I have an interest in the digital and invite discourse online, but the idea of ‘friends’ and followers online kinda always bemused me. I am 65, forgive me.
I have lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.
Joan Didion
My re-viewing has taken me back to inDesign. I reconnected and actually did some online (YootYoob!) training and now finally understand the power of the frame and its relationship with content for example, something that drove me mad before. As a professional trainer I should know better than to expect intuition to guide me.
My goal is to develop work with art-making locally and I am exploring making a free newspaper to be distributed locally to invite fellow travellers to join in an art-making journey as well as people joining an online conversation. The image I have is a kind of Art Fanzine. See here and here. In the second link I loved the simplicity of the little magazine made out of an A4 sheet. So… the possibilities are endless. I want a kind of slick looking A4 minimal magazine like this here with a clear narrative inviting people to use art making to promote their own health and wellbeing, but also I could make little fanzines to promote my website, designed to be a bit more rough and counter-cultural. I like graffiti art and particularly stickers, here but don’t really want to be breaking the law to promote my work.
So I love my online digital object, but I have reconnected with the analogue object. It feels oddly counter-cultural.
A great series of 6 videos about the life and writing of Ursula le Guin.
A number of things interested me with this video series. The description of the journey being the thing that matters reinforces the idea of art as adventure. The path is made in the walking of it to quote Zhuang Zhi. The act of making your art is inseparable from the act of making yourself.
The path is made in the walking of it
Zuang Zhi
So whilst the author published goes on to be read by others the first reader is the author herself. She sees herself on the page, her own words as subjective objects. Her life reified.
The product is important but the process of making the product, the journey, is what matters.
A way of working with art as a form of experiential learning is the idea of the review or reviewing. The simplest version of the experiential learning cycle goes ‘Plan – Do – Review’. Experiential learning nods to Kolb and Dewey but is presented here as a way of learning through doing that is cyclical or recursive. We learn through personal experience in situ. It is in contrast with schooling which tends to value the input of curriculum and output as testing in a linear way.
The capacity to have experience and learn from it is a central aspect of our consciousness. We maybe don’t think of it that way as thinking, writing, talking about things then making plans and acting on them seems so normal and simple. Humans do it in a way that seems a bit different to other living things. It is maybe a blessing and a curse. Art reviews our experience in many ways. But with photography, the act of ‘Taking a photo’ does this in a very immediate and concrete way. The act of framing a shot, on a phone or with a camera immediately reviews how we see the world. Then we make an image and put it in some place other than where we took the photo, with a caption, in the public domain, or a chosen person. This is an amazing thing to do.
A favourite photographer of mine is the street photographer, Garry Winogrand. I love his images. He took thousands of images in New York and after his death, thousands more were found on unprocessed 35mm films. Of his practice, he said ‘I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.’ This struck a chord with me. I posted 400 of my favourite photos and the act of sharing still seems strange. I never took them with the intention of showing or sharing them.
I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.
Garry Winogrand
If Winogrand had vast numbers of images entirely unseen, I kind of figure he may also have some relationship with the act of taking the photograph that is different to the showing the photograph. He talks about photographing as a way of ‘finding out’ about something. It is the process of photographing that has value for him as much as the product, the photograph and the photograph shared. This to me is an act of research. To search for something is an act of finding some specific thing. The French ‘recherché’ means to seek something out with care and add value to it. In art making, we find value in things.
Below are links to Winogrand’s work. He does what all artists do, he engages in an act of reviewing. Below whatever words we find to describe this act, art and photography allow us to review experience.
Fraenkel Gallery- Winogrand Portfolio
Guardian article – Garry Winogrand: the restless genius who gave street photography attitude
Moving Space 