Writing as art. Art as Writing.

April 29, 2020

WRITING AS DRAWING

Ever since stumbling across the work of Paul Klee, I have had an interest in semiotics (the study of signs as a means to communication.) A major influence on my thinking has been the book ‘Legends of the Sign (INTERPRETATIONS IN ART)’ 1991 by Crone and Koerner[1] in which they discuss Klee’s ‘Signs in Yellow’(fig1). In this work Klee references the creation myth of the Torah. The Torah was said to be formed from a combination of white fire and black fire on vellum. The black fire being what the text says and forming the dark squiggles we read. The white fire surrounded the dark squiggles and was the negative space that we generally ignore when reading. This white fire held the meaning of the text. Like a hyper or meta super text. This I have come to understand is a linking thread that runs through all my work.

Just before starting the MA my work was focused on my mental health. Trying to make sense of the jumble of ideas and chaotic thoughts in my head. It’s only by completing this focused research that I see the thread running through my work is the search for meaning or ultimate truth.

It was in P Mc Carthy’s drawing from the archive module that I rediscovered my fascination with semiotics. We were tasked with recording the class as an illustrated doodle. Picking out the essences of the class as key phrases and words. I felt frustrated with the division between image and text. But I felt inspired to use this technique to record the lectures and my thoughts on them.

At first my research for artists that also dealt with language as art and explored the space where writing and drawing overlap turned up the obvious references, the art and language collective and my knowledge of Paul Klee. I looked at Joseph Beuys’ blackboard works and notes.(fig2,3) When exploring work of Cy Twombly I discovered the term asemic writing. Asemic writing which is commonly defined as a “kind of wordless open semantic form of writing.”[2] On the face of it a text without any specific content, it bridges the gap between abstract expressionism and writing. This led me to the work of Mirtha Dermisache(fig 4) and the work of John Court, (fig 5) who explores language through the lens of dyslexia. The work of calligraphy artists, such as Xu Bing and Che Guangwu, who transform elements of traditional writing, until meaning is lost. I am still exploring this asemic aspect having only recently discovered it.

In my reading I discovered the writings of Nicholas Davey’s thoughts on ‘Art and Theoria’[3] in and its focus on art research as experiential practice. A practice promotes a more subjective method to research. It encourages the value of research by doing, by practicing. This really clicked with me. And allowed me to focus my research on the exploring the idea of mark making for meaning and the fine line between writing and drawing. As my practice progressed this remit expanded to include, the semiotic nature of mark-making

In his work Davey talks about how an art work is influenced by two main features .
1) How all art is created with an inescapable weight of historical context.

2) How an artwork is just one facet of a subject and can never say all that can be said about the subject.

• With the understanding that art is created with a weight of historical context, I chose to think more about the history of my surfaces. A blank page comes weight of history from the Mesopotamians pre cuneiform scratchings into soft clay bricks(fig 6) to Tom Friedman’s ‘1000 hours of staring’.(fig 4)

• I wanted my surfaces to not only carry this history, but to encourage viewers to think about the history of the paper as an object itself. So, I began to carry my notes with me, making them more of a living document than a treasured artwork.

In other readings I found the work of Vilem Flusser and his essay on ‘The Gesture of Writing’[4] and Theodor W. Adorno’s work ‘Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible’[5]. Where in Adorno speaks of Klee’s work and its similarity to writing “all artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content”

Flusser’s work seems to echo this explaining how the Mesopotamian’s scratching in to clay was a process of removal (fig 5). That writing or mark making for communication was not an additive, constructive process, but a deconstructive one. A creation of voids by removal, and in these voids, these absences we find meaning.

I looked again at my Transmission and Gravity lectures notes and began to consider how to explore the hidden meta meaning within them. I wanted to see or reveal the scaffold of meaning that our marks are built on. How through loss and removal I could reveal something hidden. There is a weird feeling in me that by doing this I might uncover universal truth.

The text in semantics acts as a sign post to intention. The idea of the white and black fire of the Torah says that meaning or intent is found in the voids or negative spaces around the text.[6] The notational marks I made, the underscoring, loops, circles and arrows, (fig 6) isolate and accentuate the space the text occupied. The removal of the text exposes the void, that the text occupied and presents for me an unfiltered view of the universal meaning contained in the text inspired by the lectures. The translucency of the tracing paper adds to this aesthetic. Allowing light and sight to pass through, but with the hint of a membrane of meaning. A trace of the elusive intent obfuscated by the written text.

By removing the text and keeping the notations the tracings became asemic text commonly like the work of Mirtha Dermisache (fig 7) or Cy Twombly (fig 8). I feel my work has more in common with Dermisache’s work, that refuses to be treated as wall art or sculpture than Twombly’s much more painterly interpretation. My work like Dermisache’s feels more like a search for meaning, rather than using the formal graphemes of the written word as compositional and expressive medium, like Twombly’s work.

I came to realise over time that the creation of the lecture notes had a very performative aspect that I had not really considered before. Working within the lecture theatres required me to work with the restrictions of the spaces enforced on me. This recalls for me the performative aspects of John Courts work(fig 9). The way in which he uses objects to restrict and hamper his endurance-based mark making performances. I had to work with the spaces provided, they dictated how I began to use my materials. The paper had to be folded, rotated and flipped over. All of this restricting the size and range of gestures I could make. I was made much more aware of the physicality of my method. How I sat, how I arranged my pencils and pens. These restrictions influenced my marks and the gestures I used to make them. This also added to the history of the paper.

To investigate this further I chose to work on a larger scale. I used the reach of my dominant writing arm to dictate the dimensions of the paper I worked on. I also decided to work on this one sheet, for all the lectures I attended. This decision unfortunately came very near the end of the lectures, so this aspect of the work is not yet fully developed.

Recalling that the some of the original Torah[6] manuscripts lacked vowels, meaning that different vowels could be placed into the text and there by change the interpretation of the text. This special significance to allowed to these vowels intrigued me. They seemed to be key to understanding the Torah, and therefore a key to meaning. I began analysing and plotting the position of the each of the vowels on my large-scale lecture notes. These were again recorded on tracing paper.

I’m still trying to work out a method to represent my analysis, that feels true to the intent. At first, I did this with coloured chalk pens, trying to get a feel for how to document the positions and relationships of the vowels. Each vowel was assigned a colour. ‘A’ was Red, ‘E’ was Yellow, ‘I’ was blue, ‘O’ was green, and ‘U’ was black. (Fig 10)

I played around with making the circles the same size as the letters recorded, keeping the circles as out lines and uniform of size. I explored ways of connecting the various positions of the vowels. The tracing paper I allowed me to experiment with composition. Using overlapping and the opacity of the tracing paper to create layering and depth. This investigation of how to present the vowels is still ongoing. I am aware that I have not fully explored this aspect in terms of materials. I would like to screen print these, and to see how they look on the laser cutter. I had to buy bigger rolls of tracing paper as the small sheets I was using were very piecemeal. I bought a roll that was much wider meaning I only had to use two sheets to cover the large lecture notes. (Figs11-15)

Reviewing my larger scale work, and the performative aspect of my practice, I don’t want to follow a traditional performance-based route with the work. It is not about how I activate the space, more a desire to see how I physically use the space around the surfaces I work on. To reveal this gestures that are not recorded on the surface of a page. Flusser in ‘writing as gesture’ lists what he calls the ‘Bricks’ of writing, the essential elements for written communication. The surface, the stain, the tool that makes the stain and so on. In that vein I have started to conceptualise my own ‘bricks’ A surface as a thing we stain with our mark-making. Our mark-makings are our actions. Writing, drawing is not just the marks we make on the page, but also the gestures we perform in space to make the marks.

To begin exploring this idea I attached a camera to a pen I was using to retrace an earlier tracing. This was to try and capture the movements of the pen that are not recorded. Where the pen lifts off the surface and moves through space to descend and mark again. Like the story of the white and black fire inscribing or ‘onscribing’ as Flusser would have it meaning on the Torah, and the hidden text in the white fire. These motions are never seen performed when we read a text or look at a drawing, yet these movements are essential for communicating meaning. And contain yet another level of semiotic significance for me to explore. Upon watching the video, I became aware of the audio qualities of the pen ‘hissing’ across the surface of the tracing paper. This is something that I want to more consciously record and experiment with. It also has started me thinking about the sound of the words I recorded, their wave forms and how these occupy space. It is an area that I need to investigate more fully.

In summary I am now at the point where I need to review my work and pinpoint seams of inquiry to explore and more fully develop. To this end I have found this research module both very helpful and frustrating. In that it has helped focus my mind and thrown up lots of artistic distractions. I feel that the way forward for me is to follow the asemic writing aspect of my work, utilising a more intimate performance angle where I record the gestures of the pen on a micro scale and the gestures of my body on a macro scale, somehow combining this with and as of yet undeveloped concept of aural facets of the work.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing accessed 30th April 2019

[3] Edited By Katy Macleod, Thinking Through Art Reflections on Art as Research, Publisher: Routledge, 2005 Art and Theoria, Nicholas Davies, p20 .

[4] Vilém Flusser The Gesture of Writing (PDF), http://www.flusserstudies.net/node/207

[5] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthic theory, https://www.pdfdrive.com/aesthetic-theory-e18927250.html

[6] Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Kindling The Midrashic Imagination May 16, 2009, https://bethaverim.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/black-fire-on-white-fire.pdf

BIBLOGRAPHY

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing accessed 30th April 2019

3 Edited By Katy Macleod, Thinking Through Art Reflections on Art as Research, Publisher: Routledge, 2005 Art and Theoria, Nicholas Davies, p20.

4Vilém Flusser The Gesture of Writing (PDF), http://www.flusserstudies.net/node/207

5 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthic theory, https://www.pdfdrive.com/aesthetic-theory-e18927250.html

6 Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Kindling The Midrashic Imagination May 16, 2009, https://bethaverim.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/black-fire-on-white-fire.pdf

All out of gum.

April 28, 2020

THIS POST WAS FROM 2019 - DON’T ASK. Or do and I’ll tell you.

I came here to talk art and chew gum, and I’m almost out of gum.

I started the MA in October officially. It’s a really really good course; so rich in information and the tutors are extremely talented. I had intended to blog about the lectures and my thoughts, but the lectures are so frequent and my thoughts are currently in a whirl and take too long settle, to allow for regular posts. So I will use this as a space to hopefully spew my thoughts out and refine my ideas over time.

The big challenges ahead of me are:
1) Managing my mental health whilst on the course.
2) Managing my time between, Uni, some form of work, child care and being social.

On paper..um in pixel format that looks easy to my eyes, and I’m guessing your eyes too.
In reality I know it’s going to be really tough. I’m only in week 2 of the course (it feels like week 5) and I’m back in the crisis house. So things are difficult on the mental health side of things. It might seem frivolous to you to want to be social, but my big issue (it’s not a magazine for me) is the feeling of isolation I have. It’s a constant sense of being alone, even in company. But if i start talking about it I’ll get myself down and side tracked.

After week 2 where are my ideas at. The tutors are pushing us to look at our own practice and to treat our practice as a form of research. For me this currently entails the nature of creating work and I guess the nature of creativity. If we look at current technologies neural networks are creating works of art using deep learning. One has even created ‘The Next Rembrandt’ .
In an environment like this where algorithms can learn to create artefacts and can exhibit creative tendencies I find myself drawn to the question of what exactly is creativity.

I think as humans we baulk at the idea that a machine can create. That a series of instructions can result in a unique or creative response. That’s exactly what attracts me to the issue. I think of artists that explore algorithms, not that they would have thought of their work like that. Sol le Witt, and the conceptual artists spring to mind. They thought of the idea as the art, in which an artefact was only a solid form of the idea, not the actual art. My thoughts on this need refining and teasing out. Hopefully here is where I can do this.

The other strands to my ideas are as follows ( I might not peruse these strand on the MA but they are elements I think about often.)
1) The illusion of choice.
2) Art that can never be seen in it’s final state; temporally, spatially or both.
3) The scaffolding that exist behind plastic and virtual structures. ( I use the term plastic to refer to physical things in the real world IE not solely digital.)

(I’m on new medication and either its starting to have an effect or my mind is tired, either way my thoughts are cloudy.)

My starting idea is below.
1)I have used processing to create a basic drawing program.
2) reduced it to 90 characters, ignoring the white spaces between the characters.
3)the information was translated to binary.
4) the binary was encoded in to a visual image.
5) the binary of the program was transferred to a canvas in pencil. ( it needs to be tidied up a lot.)
The idea is that, the code that creates the drawing program is a scaffold to allow creativity. By drawing binary on the canvas I have in my mind at least drawn a scaffold that allows infinite drawings to be made. The canvas is not a only a drawing but a gateway to infinite drawings. But only if you understand the syntax used. ( I don’t really know why that last point feels important to me yet.)

MA day 1

October 2, 2018

This probably could have used a better title, but I wanted to get as much of an initial impression of my first day at Hallam for an MA with little or no time to think about it.

I’ll come back later to insert stuff less impression but that I fond funny. I’ve been upbeat most of the day, with the promise of new things and beginnings and the unknown which will build. A constructive unknown. Knowing I can do this because I've done it before when i was less prepared. The day was really just a run down of the ins and out of the course structure the main aspects of it. The assessment stuff and how the modules will unfold.

We got to get a more informal feel for each other on the course and sense of where we ( well I did at least) we fit in. The module stuff I’ll come back to. The day culminated in a really informal meeting with the rest of the MA cohort ( there may be other students yet to arrive due to visa and travel stuff.) I got chatting to a few of the other people on the course; 4 teachers by my count which is interesting, and 3 / 4 straight from the BA and one from a non teaching background.

I knew we were going to meet the other MA students, but it took me by surprise all the same and I think my mind had had enough just whirring from initial thoughts and ideas from off the basic introduction to the various elements f the course. I get a kind of nervous energy that I expel through chat in some situations, this was definitely one of those. I had lots of odd humorous thoughts that wanted to shout out, but I knew they were just annoying and not funny to anyone but my stupid head. (oh in slips some self loathing)

At the end of the thing I stood around, feeling I don't know what. A need to do, I guess. But it was a dead zone in my head and all that was required of me was to either mingle or just go. Most people had just went anyway. I hung around for a bit said some banal shit and left. Leaving the room is where my head/mind/brain whatever my anxiety began to kick in. I was in a whirl, a mad beast in a head, looking for something to panic about. I asked my self what was bothering me. (other than getting work which definitely was not the source of the chaos in my head.)It was just my head my brain looking for an element; a threat to jump upon and blow out of proportion. A reason to say well this wasn’t right or that will be a problem. I’m aware of all the known problems and although I’m not yet on top of them all I have plans. Not great plans, but ways to at least begin dealing with the issues. If only I found my mental health as easy to deal with.

So none of theses things were in a problem. You’d think that realising this would help dissipate the noise and churning of my mind. No. Instead I found my self trying to not just break down in to tears. Having to control my self rigidly. I want a space where these things the tears the panic can just come to the surface and be done with. I'm not even sure it is a panic, it's just an intensity of everything, formless but urgently demanding; all consuming in my mind if I let it be. I’ve just had to bury it for dealing with at another time.

How did I do that. well I made a list of 3 things I wanted to accomplish today. (This was number 4 i.e. not on my list but in doing it I realise how useful this could be for me over the course off the...um course of course. (It might even be a good decompression tool for me.) Then breaking those tasks into smaller elements, that I can work at immediately. I still want to crash and burn at time though. I need that space to be vulnerable, but I can’t do it one my own because I guess I'm worried about it spinning out of control and I want that comfort of an other human. I don’t need them to tell me it will be alright; just a presence that will allow me to know that I have someone there. Just being there would act as a safeguard to me spiralling out of control, to damage levels. I still hurt my self. Less visibly but left to my own self at the moment these overwhelming emotions emerge and a need for them to just stop, just stop, and then I get hurt.

The modules are fairly straight forward. 60 credits on ART Practice- In my understanding making things ( mistakes successes and so on) some documentation our thoughts on how and why we are making and having an opinion about it all , Art Context is 4 strands all designed to try to push the way we practice / make produce and display and to think about how we do this. each strand is 30 credits. Basically choose one of 2 choices as they are delivered. First choice is :
A) Drawing on/from the archive. or; B) Assemblage and collage.
And then:
A) Art Writing or; B) Curation - time and place.

A very rich layered course. I’m taken by all the strands like everyone on the course was, but being aware of time constraints I’ll opt for assemblage and collage, then curation.

That's me on this for now I’ll edit and move stuff around and be back for a bit Thursday.

I have a lot of thoughts to think out and this will be where I air them either immediately or after I give them time to breathe. Right now its time for tea, rice and some mysterious veg concoction I made. Tomorrow I’ll try to start moving my stuff over.

I also have therapy tomorrow and it will be the last session fora while because, I’m not finding time with everything to work on the therapy. I don’t want to be without that space as its the only one I have that is there for me at the moment. So I'm a bit terrified at the thought of being bereft of a space for a while. So until next time.

something about logic and emotion Part 1

April 10, 2018

To write this safely, I have had to use a lot of my therapy tools and hand write it out, to slow and focus my mind.

One of my core strengths is my ability to generate a zabilliion and 5 ideas and scenarios in my mind extremely quickly. I'm not saying I'm better at this than anyone else, its just one of the things I do well. My logic and creative mind kicks in and takes my mind whirling through thoughts at speed, its too much too quickly. So a technique I developed is to vocalise my ideas this forces my mind to slow down. It focuses my mind on 1 or 3 ideas which my mind will chase and flip between. Generally from talking to my therapist I think it's fair to say that ideas cause emotional responses. Like thinking about a bungee jump conjures feelings of fear, excitement and so on. These emotional responses cause physical responses. Fear can get the adrenaline pumping and so on. This all helps us identify and respond to risk levels.

My mind is great at generating the ideas, but it a bit addicted to the rush of new ideas and chases each idea as far as it can before jumping to another tangential idea and running with it. Its fun, honestly it is. (If you've spoken to me after I've been painting I'll complain of a head ache, being tired and yet I will talk about lots of ideas that my work will lead on to and where that can lead and where that....... (yawn) but I'm also quite manic in my actions being a lot more active.

Unfortunately my emotional mind is not as quick to keep up I think. All the emotions get pushed to one side and don't get dealt with. This would not be an issue, but for life and it's general demands; I have to react to events, and the emotions from the whirling mind don't get dealt with. (I should point out that my mind does this even when I'm not painting). I guess I use to be able to just push these things away or down and deal with them somehow - I honestly have no idea how I did it. But since the start of 2016(?) 17(?) something has given way. And the thing I did -what ever it was- no longer functions. So instead all the emotions sit there stewing unprocessed, unlabeled, unacknowledged until some stress or event triggers the dam to burst.

This next bit is hard to write. It's how my body reacts. I've had over the past few nights this happen hourly or so - I was really grateful for sleep last night. I'm not sure if they are panic attacks, but that's what I'm going to call them. When it kicks in my right hand starts to shake and twitch. Then I start crying randomly. It stops and starts over the course of 30 minutes or so. Sometimes that's it just uncontrollable crying. Other times it gets more extreme. I curl in to a ball, my anxiety peaks and I lose the ability to form words, both in my mind and physically. In my mind it rages.
I have no idea what it is but it causes at its worst my throat and chest and all muscles to tense. I make a horrible tortured noise and then it reaches its peak where I can't even breathe. I become a tensed up ball of bone and flesh. My thoughts are wordless and too, too fast.

Then my body releases itself and I hyperventilate to get air and the cycle repeats. This can go on for 10 minutes until my body is sore and exhausted. At it worst I was having these for 30 minutes with little break in between( thank fully the rethink team were there for me). My body might be exhausted but the anxiety is still there. This is conjecture, but at this point my logic mind is broken and I'm just reacting, not thinking. Maybe I see my self as a threat I don't know, but it can lead to self harming. I'm impulsively hurting my self. The unwanted thoughts of suicide will crash in again and again. It seems to be the only solution to end the nameless and formless torment. If I fight that urge off I can end up in the panic attack mode again. Then suddenly it stops. I might get lucky and that is it for the day. WOOO!
Mostly it cycles (i'm not sure of the timings) pretty much every hour for whatever length of time.

This is about as much as I can handle right now. My hand is letting me know I need to ground myself. In my next part I'll be using metaphor to get ideas across.

Stuff and Guff

Soundcloud is where I put my sonic dreams. When I make them.