Tag Archives: Art as Research
Ideas about art making as a way to research personal experience
Art Can Speak for Itself
Personal Practice : Being told to move on and out into the world.
Autumn on the border between England and Scotland is approaching. Students and teachers are returning to school. It is for many families a time of change.
Over the summer, I worked on a large painting. This was in response to arts and research I had been doing locally. Our house sits at the northern limit of Brampton Kame Belt, a vast area of sediment dropped by the melting of glaciers thousands of years ago. This is featured materially and thematically in the painting. This painting was the endpoint of a long chain of outdoor experience and art making. This included imaginal walking artwork, just researching and exploring my local environs and more empirical work with conventional data, some of which is shared through links above and below.
The combination of the empirical and imaginal is very interesting. We can only know so much about things in empirical terms, and in knowing thus, we inevitably do so through entirely objective sources. Myself and the living environment have a subjective way of knowing and doing. To me, this is where art as research is useful. Artist and therapist Pat Allen suggests, ‘Art is a way of finding out what you believe’, and belief is subjective. Art connects me personally to place and process.
‘Art is a way of finding out what you believe’,
Pat B Allen – Artist and Art Therapist
The painting was an object, which was a product and record of my subjective experience of making it and an objective and subjective account of the place it was attached to. And the painting grew out of a mystery.
Background
On our arrival at our house decades ago, we had been told by a neighbour about a flood that came down the ridge above our estate and into her house as a child. There is no water course anywhere nearby, so we put it down to a confused childhood memory. Then, through my walking and art making, I found a culverted stream and confirmation of the story.
The stream was culverted in 1972, after a flood, so it was a real event, hence the culverting. Another older man on the estate saw we doing some research and told me about the flood, and dated it, and when the groundwater rises, the ghost of the stream emerges in the playing field that is now there, as unusually wet ground, and the sound of rushing water under a usually silent concrete block.
Much of my art making involves walking and creating art objects in response. It is never meant for display, just my way of exploring a place and my experience of it. I became interested in the idea of the land as the substrate of experience, the unconscious if you will, with water as a symbol of emotion or affect.
Looking on the Britice Glacial Map, I found that just north of our house was a glacial lake, and on my walks, a site where clay was abundant.
This was, I believe, the head of the lake. I took clay and made clay figures, and used the clay in paintings.
Making the Art
I baked the clay in a domestic oven and explored putting the figures outside to dissolve over time and return to the substrate from whence they came. Click the slideshow below to see the change.
I found this very satisfying. I have an image of them as a kind of worry doll, being put out by a worried person as a way of animating the worry going back into the earth.
Then I worked with the clay in painting, mixing it with acrylic medium or just domestic epoxy to make a medium. I also put it onto a base of black acrylic paint, let it dry and then removed it with a hair dryer to see what happened. In the end, the object before the removal was much nicer, in fact, curiously beautiful. The slideshow below shows the painting before the removal of the clay, some close-ups, and the painting afterwards.
The final piece was not as I hoped. But the thing before the clay was removed was very interesting. I liked that it made itself, it made itself beautiful, and was entirely temporary. The only permanent thing was the picture of the process of it being made. It struck me as a kind of performance, and it seemed to tell me something. I see this all as work in progress. But the beauty of the moment, captured as a picture, as potentially a work of art in itself, talked to me of a way to make the process of making, the art form itself. I felt a need to show this in public as ‘Art’ or as performance.
What I took this to mean was that it was time to take my art making out of the very fruitful and rewarding realm of purely personal arts research practice and out into the world of public exposure. None of this was verbal or rational or even cognitive. I had the image in my head of the delicate and beautiful patterns made by the clay and a photograph as an objective account of this point in the process of making, now lost. It was the photograph, the image of the image of the painting now gone, and like the Pat Allen quote above, a belief that I needed to make this public emerged, that the photograph was as much art as the object itself and more than just a record of experience, it could be an experience in its own right.
With my background in groupwork outdoors and with art, it told me seek to make this experience available to other people, and that this could also be art in its own right. It could be performance.
So I found the Ramblers Association was looking for Wellness Walk Leaders, and I did the training and am doing three Mindful Art Perambulations.
Moving On
I have three walks in September, October and November. These are targeted at anyone wanting a short, easily accessible walk, including people in wheelchairs and seniors.
The link to the first can be followed by clicking the picture or the link below.
I will post more later about the walks and what happened.
Make art not ‘Art’
Making art nobody sees but you
This article is about Jonathan Beller, film theorist, culture critic and mediologist, and Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt University.
Beller is a writer and generally avoids having too much of his work online. His work skirts around art as research, but as an academic, not an artist. He is focused on visual culture, cinema and anything with a screen.
He has a Marxist background and sees the ideas of Marx as useful in understanding how social and cultural structures influence thinking and may help us think critically. He is an academic, and his work must be approached in this context. He does a few online things, see here, but I get a sense that he is most comfortable as a writer. Stick with the video as he does give his thesis, but does not present in a comfortable way. He lectures, but not that well.
What I found most interesting is his emphasis on visual culture, particularly what we attend to visually.
As an example, to open my mobile phone, I am now expected to look at it, gaze at it and have it gaze at me. He proposes that this is an act of having me become part of the world computer to make money through this as post-capitalist economic media. He proposes, for example, that this could be seen as labour as it makes money for the provider of the media, and provides me with a benefit, ie the phone and all that it does.
One bit of Marx that he talks about, in his very academic way, that has to do with art making that nobody sees but you, is to do with use value and exchange value, in this case, of the art you make.
Marx argued that workers in making stuff, prior to ‘capitalism’, ie being paid to work, the value of the stuff they made for themselves was in how they could make use of it, themselves. Marx called this ‘Use Value’. The worker grows corn and uses it to make bread, then eats it. The use value is retained by the person who grew the corn.
In making stuff for money for someone else, benefits came from ‘Exchange Value’. The stuff was exchanged for money. And the more times the stuff could be exchanged, the more money the person doing the exchanging makes. So the worker grows corn for a landowner, it is exchanged for money by the mill owner, it makes flour, which is exchanged for money by the bakery to make pastry, which is exchanged for money by Greggs, who sells the worker a sausage roll. All the people who do the exchanging make the most money, not the worker.
All I am suggesting is that in making art nobody sees but you, the use value is retained by you.
Exchanging art for money can be a great thing. Think of Picasso paying his bar bill with his signature on a paper napkin, or Jeff Koons selling a sculpture for $91,075,000 at Christie’s in 2019. If you want this, go for it.
But making art that nobody sees but yourself changes your relationship with what you make as art. It makes seeing its use value to you more available.
I cannot tell you what its use value is, only you can do that, or more importantly, the artwork tells you. This is useful in telling you something about your experience of making the art and thus something about your experience.
Clearly, if it’s exchange value would pay for a 3-week stay for you and your family in the Maldives this summer, then its exchange value to you is useful to you.
But making art nobody sees but you is a useful way of shifting your relationship with it away from exchange value to use value. And, if you do not see yourself as an ‘Artist’ because the art you make would clearly not sell, you retain the use value the art has in talking to you about experience. Seeing its use value makes you make it in a different way.
Post Factual
I’m just in the process of bringing some fiction writing to the site. It is partly started, I have a few episodes of a fictive theme on global warming and how to have a response by writing fiction about it and not going mad with fear or despair.
It developed a block, and I unblocked it last week, interestingly, about the time I committed to writing a poem or a post a day. Funny that! It will appear sometime soon as posts and I like the idea that it will be shared as posts and it will work in a post-factual way. We don’t have to get stuck in ‘facts’ but we may see what may follow after the fact, in fiction.
Anyway…
I found this below on Tumblr. It should link to the site.
No idea what ‘Periodic rent-lowering-gunshots:’ means. Maybe inform me.
But this just gets to what the power of fiction, especially fiction you write yourself FanFic, Pomes, stories, whatever.
This could be a bit like an arts/writing/reading manifesto.
I chose the picture ‘cos I like that you can close the book and the writing is still there, but in a closed book. I think that just as online life for many people took off, Harry Potter came out as a book. People found they could close the book, and the writing is still there, but in a closed book, but they cannot close off social media.
It controls sensory overload.
#dvolvd
Un Biblioteca
A good resourse
A Working Model for Art as Research
Introduction
This article introduces a number of ideas I have explored as an attempt to develop a basic experiential learning model to become a model for art making as research of personal experience.
This is the model I developed to describe my own working practice. It draws on all sorts of sources that are generally not referenced in writing I have seen about experiential learning, but through my own practice research, I think are relevant to art making as experiential learning. Experiential learning is assumed to be a form of personal research, and references are made to work from post-graduate arts-based research in Fine Art and the Arts Therapies.
It has seven elements, which are presented as parts of a circular sequence that returns to itself. In practice, these elements often occur simultaneously.
It is a long read of about 7k words, taking about 25–30 minutes.
I present it as a long blog post, click page 2 below.
A Note About Attention
”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.
To read the full article on a separate page, click page 2 below.
Moving Space 