Tag Archives: Artist

Source Material

Modern Art is Rubbish

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This is an old TV series about Modern Art for those interested in art history.

Ironic eh?

This is Modern Art is from Channel 4 in the UK from 1999. It is a sardonic but serious series of six 1-hour shows, and covers ‘Art’ from Picasso to the Sensation show at the RA end of the 20th Century.

If you can accept the common misconception that ‘Art’ is famous white male painters, then you will be OK. The writer and presenter is artist and critic Matthew Collings. He is very tongue-in-cheek and disrespectful about what many may call ‘Great Art’ and many more may just dismiss as rubbish. He is informative and offers a useful commentary, but is suitably ironic. It also has a good late ’90s soundtrack.

It should appeal to people who know nothing about modern art and people who know a bit more than nothing, and its content is likely to have some people frothing at the mouth with outrage.

I went to Sensations and witnessed a great bit of theatre. The Damien Hirst pickled shark The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living was the centrepiece. A father and child came in, and the boy saw the shark and ran over, shouting “SHARK SHARK SHARK” then ducked under the little rope barrier around the tank full of thousands of gallons of preservative and whacked both hands, very loudly, on the tank and triumphantly screamed “SHAAAARK!’.

Everyone jumped, especially the ushers who all charged over in horror, not least ‘cos the boy could have broken the glass and flooded the gallery, thus wrecking the whole show. The boy then, under father’s tutelage, went around pointing to every piece he liked and described them all, now quietly, as ‘A shark!’ It was at least as good as the show. It was so funny. This post is dedicated to that boy.

Collings explores modern art through six themes.

Episode 1 – I am a Genius

Focuses on the current state of modern art, and looks back at Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol to see how they changed the definition of art.

Episode 2 – Shock! Horror!

Revealing the ways modern art attempts to shock the audience.

Episode 3 – Lovely Lovely!

Investigates whether the once accepted view of art as merely a thing of beauty prevails today, examining the works of various artists.

Episode 4 – Nothing Matters

Focuses on minimalist art.

Episode 5 – Hollow Laughter

Examination of the jokes used in modern art.

Episode 6 – The Shock of the Now

An exploration of the authenticity of modern art and the media hype that often surrounds it, asking if it can be accused of repeating the art of the past.

At the end of episode 6, Collings talks about the state of modern art at the turn of the millennium and contemplates the future. He describes what he sees in art then as ‘Big corporate global display.’

So in this old TV series about Modern Art, ironically, we see art as a means by which to contemporaneously see what is coming down the line. We are now, 25 years later, subsumed in the world of the big corporate global display. In retrospect, we may now see that the art was telling us what was going to happen. Just don’t tell our current philosophers and politicians and academics and influencers. They will be so pissed off art beat them to it.

All art asks is that you pay attention, intentionally, with an open mind, and be objective about your subjective response to what is made as art, especially art you make yourself.

Personal Practice

Art Can Speak for Itself

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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.

  • clay figure
  • dissolving clay figure
  • dissolved clay figure

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.

Map of the start of the first wellness walk in Carlisle.

I will post more later about the walks and what happened.

Personal Practice, Practice Ideas

A Working Model for Art as Research

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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.

Pages: 1 2
Source Material

Art as shitting & dancing & cooking – John Baldesarri

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Artist John Baldessari is notorious for, at some point, burning all his paintings. This act enabled him to become a major figure in the development of conceptual art, an art form equally derided and applauded, but close to the idea of art as research of personal experience.

This is what he had to say about it.

“Doing art is the only thing I’ve come across that’s gives me any idea that I’m anywhere close to understanding what the universe is about. It all sounds very mystical I know, but I think that’s what drives me.

The real truth in the universe is there’s movement and change and art reflects that, and dance, you know, any anything with movement or music or whatever. But, you know, in painting or sculpture it’s just all static. I guess around certain objects or certain situations there are certain conventional parameters, and we can begin to use those meanings like a writer you know, like a musician, or like a cook, whatever and create some sort of composition or dish.

I think was around ‘68 thereabouts, close enough, I was getting doubtful that painting equals art and art equals painting. I began to suspect that art might be more than that. I was literally thinking of my work as a surrogate for me, and me talk about a body of work, and so I took it very, very literally and thought of it, you know, this body had to be cremated. The ashes I still have, they were given to me in these sort of like shoe box’s, but not quite as big, and that would be the size for the ashes of an adult.

So I got nine boxes of those and then one smaller box which was used for babies and amputated limbs. They asked me if I wanted an urn for the ashes, and I hadn’t thought about it prior, and I said well let me see what you got. The one I chose was in the shape of a book. I like that you know, that I could have it on my shelf. And I did actually make some cookies out of them at one point.

Only one person and I knew ever ate one and the idea there was that there be some sort of eternal return you know, that pigment comes out of the earth and it comes back you know, and is made in the paintings and the painting is burned and goes back into the Earth again by shitting it out and, and so painting is just one point on the circle. I was truly sick. It was just like a whole new world opening up. I didn’t know what it was but it wasn’t going to be painting….”

Watch the video below.

The transcript ends at about 3:30

Practice Ideas, Source Material

Art is Anything You Make as Art

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We may ask, “What is art?”

It could be….

Art as a Verb

At the core of ideas about art as a way to explore and express personal experience, this is of central importance. We are talking about working with art as a verb.

A verb is a word used to describe an action, state, or occurrence. We are focusing on art as an active state of being and doing. If you look up the word ‘art’ it is only ever expressed as a noun, the name of a thing. This means we tend to think of art mainly through it being an object, a painting or a sculpture, and not the process or the experience of making the art. For art as a noun, the act of making can get overlooked. The art object has a name, but the act of making art does not.

Could I Ever Be ‘Arting’

A person can describe themself as a ’Traveller’. This could be a description of a discrete cultural group. This could be the name a person calls themself if they practice independent travelling to remote settings. For both, their experience of being a traveller could be ‘travelling’, a description of an experience, a verb. They could say their favourite experience is to ‘travel’. But a person describing themself as an ‘Artist’ would not describe the experience of being an artist as ‘arting’. They could not say their favourite experience is to ‘art’.

Art as Change

But this factor is not lost in the world of fine art. Yoko Ono is a fine artist and was part of an art movement called Fluxus. Yoko was once quoted as saying, “I thought art was a verb, rather than a noun.” Wiki describes Fluxus as ‘…an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasised the artistic process over the finished product.’ The name derives from flux, a state of continuous change. An object like a painting does not change. But an artform like music or theatre can exist in a state of change. Unsurprisingly, Fluxus had a manifesto here, of which the first line was ’To affect, or bring to a certain state, by subjecting to, or treating with, a flux.’ and equally unsurprisingly included a goal to ‘Purge the world of bourgeois sickness’. Art as revolution….

I thought art was a verb, rather than a noun.

Yoko Ono

Art Making as Performance

So, given what Fluxus extolled, a performance sensibility could be applied to art making. Richard Schechner is a theatre director and Professor of Performance Studies. He asserts we can understand any human action ‘as if’ it were performance. From the point of view of performance studies the performance is the thing that happens between things, with one thing being a view of the spectator, the other being the thing viewed. So a painting can be seen to be performed as much as a play, if the painting or the play is seen by somebody. It becomes art if it is observed in such a way as some thing happens for the person who sees the painting or the play. The object does something. It becomes subjective. It goes beyond being just a passive object.

This suggests that we may make art out of anything we do that we pay attention to if we attend to it in a particular way, with a particular attitude. When we write in a journal about our experience. Or when we draw in a sketchbook some thing we saw. When we make a representation through words or image of some thing we experience, we can see our words or our drawing as art.

A Definition of Art as a Verb

It is tempting at this stage to seek a definition of art. But given a definition of art will necessarily refer to art as a noun, as an object, even if that object is theatre, a performance, I wondered for ages about a definition of art as a verb, a doing thing, an action. In the end, I figured one definition of art as a verb could simply be ‘Art is defined as anything you make as art.’ For me, this works. This renders the definition subjective. This makes the making the definition. It does not need words. What you do is the definition of what you do. This makes art recursive, a theme I will return to.

But. You may well paint a garage door with high-gloss exterior paint and call it art. And you may well be laughed at and be shown the door if you seek to sell it to Sotheby’s. However. If in painting it, you learn how to paint it better next time, if you find a way to make it be flatter and shinier in a way that pleases you aesthetically, then for the purposes of Moving Space, you have made art if you say it is art. You may have to accept that your subjective definition has little or no objective value beyond your subjectivity, hence Sotheby’s declining to put it up for sale alongside the next Banksy or Breugel. Sorry. It’s back to work for you buddy.

Art is defined as anything you make as art.

You the reader…

I think once we see art as process and activity in a state of flux, art as a noun, art as an object becomes less important. The art object as ‘Fine Art’ however, never becomes irrelevant. The fine art object made by a fine artist can become a source of ideas and inspiration for your own art making. And ‘art’ as a subjective definition, art by your definition, as a thing you make as art, may be just a garage door to someone else. Seriously, get over it. But Andy Warhol, an artist equally loved and scorned, once said, “Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” I can tell you I have thought a lot about all this, but art making has tempered the value I place on thinking. Art can help you to avoid thinking too much. This is a health benefit.

Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.

Andy Warhol

Practice Ideas

Top 10 Tips for Arts For Health

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  1. The art is the experience. We learn to make art through our experience of art making, so art can be used to learn about our personal experience.
  2. Make art not Art. We cannot all be artists but we can all make art. Make some art to neither sell nor show. Treat art making as research and investigation of yourself.
  3. Intend to attend. Pay attention to what you make and what happens when you make it. This makes making art like meditation. Inhabit and enjoy the process.
  4. Make art as adventure. It is a journey of uncertain outcome. Enjoy the journey. Your destination will make itself known, and it will pass.
  5. Make art as performance. It is what happens between you doing and you seeing what you are doing. Your thoughts and deeds are the material of your own acting.
  6. Just keep going. Do little bits regularly. Take a break. Benefits appear and grow over time. Just keep going.
  7. Attend to other peoples art. Find stuff you like and want to copy. Steal it and make it your own. All art starts with theft. Be a thief.
  8. Try lots of ways of making art. Find stuff you like and explore your way of making it. If you don’t like it, don’t make it. Be ruthless.
  9. Art is anything you make as art. You can paint, sing, dance, walk, sculpt, write, sew, draw and even sail or sleep as art. Seriously it’s all been done. The world is your oyster.
  10. Show and share carefully. If you do show what you made, show it to your people, the ones you trust. It is still art even if it is not in a gallery or for sale. People, including you, don’t need to like it. Your art can speak for itself. This is it’s power. Pay attention.
Practice Ideas

Art . Outdoors . Health

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Introduction

Moving Space draws on ideas and practices from experiential learning, and the arts therapies to use art making as research to explore and express personal experience and promote health and wellbeing.

The website is intended to provide materials to support this and invite conversation and collaboration.

Background

This work has been developed through 40+ years of professional work with experiential and outdoor learning in a variety of education, therapy and care settings in the UK, EU and USA, guided by professional training as a teacher, counsellor and HCPC registered Drama and Movement Therapist, and supported by a decade of personal art practice researching arts for health indoors and out.

Art, the outdoors and health are the three key themes that comprise the content of this website and the work of Moving Space.

What follows is a kind of benchmark for what art, the outdoors and health mean on this site and for Moving Space.

Art

Art as Research

Essentially, I am proposing that art making is the most accessible means by which to research personal experience. It is research you can do with a sketchbook and a pencil. You do not need a research lab and a PhD.

Research as a singular descriptor brings together a lot of the ideas and practices that comprise the content of the site. The content of the site has been

Art making is…

research (v.)

1590s, “to investigate or study (a matter) closely, search or examine with continued care,” from French recercher, from Old French recercher “to seek out, search closely,” from re-, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see re-), + cercher “to seek for,” from Latin circare “to go about, wander, traverse,” in Late Latin “to wander hither and thither,” from circus “circle” (see circus).

From Etymonline

It describes art as a verb, a doing thing. It supports the idea of art making as an intentional and concerted search or investigation. It supports the idea of it being a bit of an adventure, a wandering journey where we don’t know what we are going to find. It supports the idea of having a circular or recursive quality. What we find in our search feeds forward into the next act of searching and finding. It also has, through ‘circus’, connections to performance.

It supports the idea of art making as a way of researching personal experience. This emerges directly out of experiential learning and the arts therapies. It focuses on the process of making art rather than the product made. In this, it can promote wellbeing, make art a form of experiential learning, and when done outdoors, deepen and expand the experience of being outdoors.

Art is Anything You Make as Art as Long as it is Art.

The emphasis is on doing art more than viewing art, on art as a verb rather than a noun, and on art as a process more than a product. You make art, attend to what you make and what happens when you make it. Art is anything you make as long as it is art. You draw on the work of other artists, of art you like, and you make it your own. The art making is seen as a form of research, exploring and expressing personal experience. You may show and share if you wish, but this is not seen as the end point. The point is to make something yourself, for yourself.

Treat Art Making as Experiential Learning

Art making as a way to promote wellbeing is best undertaken as a way of learning from the experience of making art. The art is the experience.

When I worked with climbing or expeditioning participants, the learning to climb or hike was not the point. Sure, people learned new skills, but mostly what they learned from the experience of climbing was to overcome fears, or from expeditioning was to work as a team. When I worked as a Dramatherapist using dance, the non-speaking clients learned new ways to move. Movement and gesture were often their only means of communicating. In the absence of words, they found that their movement vocabulary was extended. They learned new ways to communicate. On the climb, on the expedition, on the dance floor, the experience of the clients was the source of their own learning. So it is with art making. You learn to make art in the experience of making art. What you learn is down to you, your art and your experience making it.

Treat Art Making as a Therapeutic Experience

If you make your own art to make you well, you are not doing therapy, but the experience can be therapeutic. At its most basic level, to make art, attend to what you make and what happens when you make it is a form of mindful meditation. It is intention, attention and attitude, the core of meditative practice. You intend to make art, you attend to what you make and what happens when you make it and you do so with an attitude of openness to what may happen. An absence of skill to knowledge enhances the openness. Tom Waits for example, always seeks to use new instruments he cannot play, or to find ways of making new instruments for his music. He says this helps him find some new thing to do with his music.

Learning that you can learn some new thing is intrinsically therapeutic. It is an act of moving on. That your personal art making facilitates this process through the same principles as mindful meditation supports the principle that the act of making is as important as the thing you make. It is in the process. Whatever ails thee is exposed to your knowledge that, by making some new thing, you can make some new thing happen. There is a movement in your vocabulary. Your art has done some new thing so you can say some new thing. You witness yourself doing some new thing. You know from experience that you can make yourself change.

Also, if you are anxious about art making, the principles of the arts therapies also apply. Arts therapies take place in a closed space. If you make art nobody sees but yourself, whatever you make as art never leaves your sight. It is never open to being called ’not art’, ‘not good’, ‘not skilled enough’. Nor are you. It is still art, because you made it as art. It becomes part of your personal arts practice. You are an art maker.

Steal Art and Make it Your Own

The emphasis is on you making art. For this, you do not need to be an artist or skilled in art making. You may well look to what is called ‘Art’, or ‘Fine Art’, and made by a professional ‘Artist’. All artists start with theft. They use what are called ‘source materials’, images of established artists work, or they learn the chords of their favourite musician, or they read the poems of a favourite poet. Jean-Luc Godard the French New-Wave film-maker said ‘It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.’ In his book ‘Steal Like as Artist’, Austin Kleon quotes Picasso as saying ‘All art is theft.’, David Bowie is quoted as saying ‘The only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from.’

When you make art you take some thing you like and make some new thing of it. Just look on YouTube about how to use oil paint, or how to make beats for your poem to turn it into a rap, or how to edit your photographs. Just do something. Make something and see what happens. Some thing will happen. Some thing will come into existence that did not previously exist. Inhabit and enjoy the experience of making it.

Outdoors

The outdoors is the place outside your front door

The outdoors is a creative Place. Even in the most urban of settings, if you venture outside, over time some thing will change. One day it is dry, the next it is wet. Last week it was cold, now it is warm. Your indoor space keeps you dry and warm over time. We hope our indoor spaces are safe and consistent. Sadly for some people they are not. For many people I worked with who inhabited unsafe home spaces, the consistency of outdoor spaces was a great boon. They liked that it was consistent in the way it changed. It remained unmoved by whatever ailed them indoors. The outdoors, like art, is paradoxical. Both are intrinsically creative.

An Inclusive Place

Much is made of the health benefits of green spaces, of exposure to nature and natural environments. For example, evidence shows that exposure to Phytoncides, which help plants fight disease, when we breathe forest air, help our bodies make white blood cells, which help us fight disease. But in proposing exposure to nature and natural environments, to forests, to green space, whilst evidentially beneficial, has intrinsic limits for many people. Most people live in cities. Also the identification to ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ has to me always been a bit academic and open to interpretation. It is useful, and easily understood, but in the spirit of creativity, of seeing things with new eyes, I suggest that it has become a bit of a trope.

So my proposal is that to work simply with ‘The Outdoors’ seems much simpler, more concrete. It is that space outside your front door. It is unequivocal. It is a concrete place, not an abstract idea or an evidential phenomenon. I have run several ‘urban outdoor programmes’ in which the outdoors was canoeing on a canal full of traffic cones and discarded tyres. I have been on Alpine mountain tops and seen the same crowds of shouting crows as I see on the tops of city tower blocks. ‘Nature’ is everywhere. Do the bugs eat your beans in your garden in the city? They do, they are part of some bigger ecosytem displaying biodiversity over urban and rural spaces. The bugs don’t care about Phytoncides. They are hungry everywhere. ‘Nature’ is a philosophical construct. The Outdoors is a physical place.

In urban settings, the street is outdoors. The street can be heaving with people of all races and creeds. The street can be a vibrant outdoor setting full of human diversity. Often, rural spaces run on low levels of human diversity. The outdoors can be dangerous and replete with adventure. So can urban spaces. All that is different is the nature of the danger and adventure. The act of going ‘outside’ seems to me to be more inclusive than being exposed to nature.

The Other Place

What makes the outdoors valuable is its ‘otherness’, it’s act of constantly changing whilst being also being consistently unchanging, it’s being just outside your window or your door, yet extending to the ends of the universe. Its otherness invites other ways of experiencing. Art does the same thing. The outdoors and art are both dialectic, thus both are containers for change. Our indoor spaces are human-made spaces, controlled by us. The outdoors is home to the more than human world. To step outdoors makes you a guest in their home. To step outdoors, you become a visitor, a foreigner. This, like art, promotes the scope for reflection on who you are. You become changed by a step change out the door.

Like a health benefit of art making is just making art and attending to what happens when you make it, a health benefit of the outdoors is just being in it and attending to what happens when you are in it. With its weather, its daily darkening, its consistently changing seasons, its capacity to be warm, wet, cold and dry on four different days or even in an hour of a day, provides for consistent exposure to new things and new experiences. It can be a mountain top and a street corner, a flowerbed in a park and a forest far away. Most of my art making outdoors has been either outside my front door, within walking distance, or under a half-hour drive away. Art making, like the outdoor experience, is always accessible.

A Place Just A Step Away

Avoiding the trap of assuming one needs to be an ‘Artist’ to make art mirrors avoiding the trap of assuming one needs to be exposed to ‘Nature’ to be outdoors. It’s all a bit too academic and conditional, a thing defined. It is all a bit prone to gatekeeping and control, a thing permitted. You can experience the health benefits art and the outdoors without an evidentially significant ‘control group’ or some controlling opinions of what is or what is not ‘Art’. Make art! Step outdoors! Anyone can do it. What benefits accrue are due to what you do. You make it and you make it happen. The outdoors is a step away.

Place and Space

Place and Space provide some very useful ideas linking art making and the outdoors. Emerging originally out of my degree in Human Ecology and the humanistic geography ideas of Y-Fu Tuan, the assumption is that our use of space and place is relational, and we start with an empty space which we make into our place.

I suggest that place is followed by polis, the Greek name for a governed city-state. Now in polis, the place we occupy is subject to influence by people other than ourselves. Art making follows a similar sequence. I start with a blank canvas. The canvas becomes my painting. Then my painting may be placed in the public domain. In art making for health and the arts therapies, the sequence ends at place, a safe place over which I/we have control. For fine art, the sequence ends at polis, a place over which I have no control. We may choose to go from place to polis but we do so with intention regarding to our health and wellbeing.

More recently, the idea of the more-than-human world extended this. When we enter or occupy the outdoors, we do so as a place that is already home to the more-than-human world. It is already occupied. This supports a post-humanist perspective. Art making outdoors helps us connect and co-create with the more-than-human world. The closer we are to our own home, the more the place we enter is co-occupied by the more-than-human world. This helps us gauge what art to make outdoors. We may thus seek to conduct our outdoor art making in urban and urban fringe settings if our art making is invasive. As a respectful attitude, we still seek to leave nothing but footprints and take nothing but photographs.

Health

Health is your ability to interact well with your environment.

Health is your ability to interact well with your environment. This description of health comes from ideas of mind from Dr. Dan J Siegal which goes thus “The mind is a self-organizing, emergent, embodied and relational process that arises from and regulates energy and information within the body we live in, between our self & other people, and with the planet.” Siegal’s description is integrative, suggesting the mind, the body, other people and the place we live are inseparable parts of our health and wellbeing. This fits well with using art making and outdoor experience to make you well. They will affect mostly your mind but in an integrative way. They will not treat illness the way medical treatment does and may be best understood as an adjunct or complement to allopathic medicine.

Art is Health

This description of the mind also reflects ideas in art as research by artist and researcher Professor Estelle Barrett describes art-based research as an experiential, self-organising, emergent, embodied and relational process. Art making as a way to research personal experience is thus suggested to be integrative, the way Siegal suggests the mind is integrative. It is a good way to explore and express personal experience to promote wellbeing. Siegal offers simple and powerful dyad for describing unwellness. If the process becomes problematic, he suggests it does so by becoming too rigid or too loose. We cannot self-diagnose, but we can attend to whether our ways of integrating with the world are too loose of too rigid. We may, by choosing how we make art, act to counterbalance what we perceive as a state of being out of balance.

Siegal’s description also sees ourselves in relation to other people and our environment. As such, we may not be in control of other people and our environment. To take some lead out of the idea of the social model of disability, such that a person in a wheelchair in seeking access a building, is only disabled by stairs. A ramp or direct access renders them not-disabled. Our ability to integrate with the world in a healthy way, is situational. A situation of poverty, poor sanitation or building quality, lack of access to services or the presence of threat or trauma may render us unable to be fully healthy. A remedy takes more than art making, but in art making, we make an environment with which we can integrate. In his book ‘Will to Power’ Friedrich Nietzsche says ‘We have art in order not to die of the truth.’ I think this is what he means. Art cannot treat illness or threat, but it may help us process the experience of them.

Practice Making Yourself Well

My experience is that art making and outdoor experiences evoke what is known in meditative practice as an ‘approach mentality’. I am through art making, able to approach things that previously seemed to big, or fearful, or uncontrollable. Explored and expressed through art, the art object made, and the process of making it, makes the source handleable. Augusto Boal, theatre practitioner and social activist says ‘It is not the place of theatre to show the correct path, but only to offer the means by which all possible paths may be examined.’

My proposal is that we may replace Boal’s ‘theatre’ with art making as performance, in which we see ourselves in the process of doing and viewing our own experience. We make it concrete through the materiality of the art medium. This renders experience handleable. Long time collaborator with Estelle Barrett, artist and researcher Barbara Bolt has written about the value of art making’s handleability as a source of praxical knowledge, knowing through doing. She says that researching things that concern us, that we care about through art brings understanding, ‘Understanding is the care that comes from handling, of being thrown into the world and dealing with things.’ And the art making is integrated, in relation with the world such that ‘In this relationship, the work of art is the particular understanding that is realised though our concernful dealings with ideas, tools and materials of production. The work of art is not the artwork.’ The art work is the work we do with art regards the thing that concerns us, our own experience. The art is the experience. The experience of art making is the source of our making ourselves well.

Just Keep Going

My Dad called this ‘Nous’. Knowledge gained by doing. He ran British Railways Craft Apprenticeships. Each apprentices first learning task was to learn to file ‘flat and square’, They got five, 1 inch blocks of aluminium, a 1 inch hand file and a vice. The had to make one block an inch by an inch by 7/8 of an inch. The cutoff had to be ‘flat and square’ as measured by a micrometer to a specific tolerance, a specific degree of error. Few did it first time. All did in the end. What they learned was partly about metal, but mostly about how they filed. Each apprentice learned about themself. It was learned through experience. And it took time.

My experience is that the health benefits of my art work to promote my wellbeing were immediately apparent in my own arts practice. But the benefits, apparently, given 10 years practice, were just the first few simple blocks. The more elaborate and difficult engineering came later, often unbidden, but only by continuing to file flat and square. I have learned a lot of interesting stuff along the way, but most interestingly, every new thing I learn, I learn eventually is just an aspect of filing flat and square. So this seems partly futile, but also partly liberating, given that the first thing I learned was the most useful thing. I realised whatever new thing that I learn to do now, that I could do it all along. It is reassuring. It produces, promotes and proves resilience.

For the Journey

In the health practice of ‘Recovery’, one comes to realise one can become ill but recover ones health. But it is best approached as an ongoing journey. Like an adventure, the power of healing is in the walking, the journey, the filing flat and square, the making and attending to what you make and what happens when you make it, the thing that happens before you arrive. As Barbara Bolt says, the art work is not the artwork.