Photographic triangualtions: need help in understanding

The photograph and reproducibility is perhaps the medium of the postmodernism. To take a photograph is to freeze reality in an image, cut it out and seal it off.

postmodern because it is a work which can never be fully autonomous. It breaks down the possibility of the original. Douglas Crimp comments on this as plurality. Not a 'pluralism of originals' but plurality. As such no concrete origin can ever be located, no single moment, even though the photograph is supposed to capture a single moment for duration.

What about when a photograph lies, when it is doctored, when it is altered in post-production. Then is it art?

What about typological photography? Reducing taking pictures to a constant process which reveals difference or sameness, presence or absence, the extraordinary or the banal? Then is it art?

What about the photographic object? Then is it art?

Photographic presence, is a ghostly absence- is that the postmodern art experience- the emptying out of the image and filling up of potentiality without didacticism but subjective possibility.

These are questions... please help me answer them....

They are triangualting in my mind

Future?

I've been thinking alot about the future. Firstly through my writing; currently an essay on Turner Prize nominees The Otolith Group. The future in this essay is a hypothetical one, one that is always in the future, always just beyond our reach. Yet in a complicated turn this is a hypothetical future brought to bear on the present. Cool. Secondly a future, less hypothetical, my own. Less cool.

The Otolith trilogy is really quite inspirational, quoting, appropriating, mixing a culture which doesn't fit or doesn't quite work into one that does. A future in which images are not consumed dumb but thought about, chewed over and spat out.

The future, my future, could follow in these positive footsteps. Yet the work of the Otolith Group is in response to their unhappiness in the present moment of each film's production. Kodwo Eshun talks about the difficulty of bringing an image into a world already over-saturated; it seems that his reasoning for creation is only within a climate of need, of want, of desperation. Creation is positive in response to a dirth.

(Creation or production? A question for another time.)

So in these times of economic strife, where it seems unlikely that my future will be anything but plain sailing I feel a little bit excited. Opportunities for creation and individuality spring up when the big institutions come under pressure. People have to go elsewhere, either they create in new and exciting ways propelling the bounds and casting them aside in order to exist or they drift into another place and forget. I see neither as a negative option.

Lets hope for creativity, more ambitious writing, more interesting exhibitions which occupy the empty space created by this cultural, social and economic dirth.

See 'hither and thither' on tether television for curator's testimonies from artist-led spaces across the country.

So what happens when you have your first 4,000 word essay due for your v. expensive and renowned MA course?

Obviously, you think of a topic, plan it, write it. Hopefully (and especially if you get non-work guilt like 24/7 heartattacks) with plenty of time to spare.

Forget it, if you are writing on contemporary art.

Is it on show in London? No. Can you see it elsewhere? No. Can you write about it? No. Damn.

Annoying as this is, it also leads to some prominent questions; How do we write about a discourse which is very much still in full swing? How does chance form what we write about? How, in an environment of art over-stimulation does something stick in your mind? What if I don't want to write about something with no images? (-2 marks for bad presentation I'm afraid).

What if we do not want to write about work in institutions (ie work's already chosen to be enveloped into the canon or put up for sale), does that mean writing outside the institution cannot be done- but then are we writing an art history or an institution history?

This can surely only get worse with cuts to the arts which will reduce exhibition budgets and money for the proper archiving and making available of mixed-media and performance based artworks. These are sad times.

Wish me luck for the essay...

Marina Abramovic at the Lisson Gallery

Abramovic is one of the most famous female artists of the 21st century. Her performances from the 1970s and 80s are famous for their extremity. In 'Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful' a work foundational to the women's activist art of the 1970s, Abramovic brushes and combs her own hair with varying degrees of violence whilst chanting the title of the piece. At one point she pulls in different directions quickly, catching and knotting her hair, her declarations quickening in pace and anger. This work, which connotes on a number of levels, questions the nature of beauty in art, the woman in art and the woman artist. Making herself the subject she interrogates the position of the woman's body to be perfected, what happens when it is not the man performing this action but the woman herself, when she takes the role of artist. As such does the woman artist have to violate herself to place the woman as the centre of the artwork?

This work features in the Lisson Gallery's exhibition of Abramovic's work. Split across two sites the exhibition includes the complete collection of Rhythm works (10, 5, 2, 0, 4) along with works with Ulay in the main gallery and the more recent 'Back to Simplicity' series in the second space.

This splitting was interesting; from the angry, emotive and disturbing work in the first space to the large scale photographs, films with similar photographic stillness and marble pillows for visitors to line-up their 'sex, heart and head', there was a definite shift. A case of maturity and maturing work perhaps? The press release would agree suggesting the work illustrates Abramovic's desire for a simpler life. However it is not the specific meaning of the piece that really struck me, but the difference, the shift from historicised feminist-activist work to those high resolution images of Abramovic holding a lamb as if it were a baby or lying still, dressed in white underneath an incredibly mythic looking tree. Shocking maybe not, but definitely bambooziling. No bodies on the verge of mutilation, no pushing the limits of the artist making artwork beyond consciousness just concentration, animals and lush natural settings.

There could be suggestion of the woman and nature, a redefinition of what it means to reengage with the living planet after one has tested the body and the definitions placed upon (gender, profession, etc). This seems to be a conclusion too easy to draw and it is the uncomfortability of making this or any certain definition which is provocative. The difference between the works resonates between the two settings as if splitting work that is labelled contemporary into two; the near-past and the too-near-present/future. Seeing either space alone would not be as affective as seeing the two combined-at distance, the works play off each other, jarring temporalities and contexts, juxtaposing the smooth, youthful face of anger and activity with the older face of passive wisdom. This interplay between sites and works marks the strength of the exhibition, no matter what other conclusions maybe drawn.

Frieze Art Fair, Regents Park

So, my first post from London and what more appropriate than Frieze Art Fair?

Today, as part of my course I went to Frieze Art Fair. Entering the fair my tutor's question 'What is the contemporary' rang loud, mainly because we had one hour to find a work that could in some way answer such a question.

Not so hard? Maybe not, after all anything considered with contemporary eyes could be seen as such. Is contemporary all about interpretation then? Well thats another question, one at a time.

No the question rang with resonances of time, distance, difference, light/ darkness, hierarchy and generation. There was certainly alot of that yet the hour of searching gave nothing to me but endless references to mass culture, pastel colours and art world glitz. Intimidating certainly.

Last minute I selected a work, with a rather obvious title for our Agamben-related seminar, 'The Future Chasing Past the Present' by Gabriel Lester. The work consisted of a production line belt onto which minitaure clusters of trees, people and trees had been stuck. As the production line rotated lights shone onto three of it's sides. In a darkenned side room the light cast shadows of the rotating mini-verse. Presenting ages systematically it was abeautiful piece full of delicate intricacies and literal meaning to Giorgio Agaemben's 'What is Contemporary?' essay.

Yet it was only later in my confused meanderings around stalls that I noticed another work by Neil Beloufa. Entitled "Documents are flat" the work is composed of a video framed by an installation. The installation includes a wooden structure with built-in seat and viewing space. But this is no minimalist framing it is adorned with corners of frames and images, its structures are decorated with scraps of building fabric, previously functional, here they are reduced to decoration. Beloufa's piece is focused around found materials and documents, re-using and re-applying them in this new contingent, broken-up context. The film, which forms the centre to the viewing structure is made of accounts of house lived in by terrorists that was paradoxically made of glass. As neighbour's accounts try to reason out the paradox the film traces figures, bodies to the narrative voices, walking through a paper reconstruction of house. The document which is flat, made of paper is made visual, the voices held in its words are reanimated by appropriated voices, the previously-recounted and imaginary perceived space is occupied by strange bodies.

The information offered comments; 'This improbable and irresolvable anecdote encourages the characters to invent images of an event given by media coverage, without actual images or facts, and thus missing the main issue.'

Thus this remembered-document house is made tangible, not through reconstruction but through video which cuts between images of it.

We can't fully conceive of the document-house in the same way that the space of the installation is unfathomable, it does not make sense, it hangs in the air picking up the excerpts of narrative truncated by the film. joints are overdetermined by excess of support, whereas as others are left empty, some pieces are painted vibrant colours while others are left as chipboard. The corrugated plastic roof is doubled on one half and not on the other.

So why is this contemporary? Its playfulness, its use of document, of truth of narrative of inclusion and exclusion. Breaching the topic of terrorism. Its wit, its beauty and ugliness. Its craftmanship and lack of it. But mainly because of the many questions it asks and leaves unanswered.

Exhibition = open

My body feels like ti has run 5 maratons, shoulders refuse to raise my arms above two metres, legs inscribed with splinters- installations take their toll but the exhibition I have been working on this summer at the Grundy Art Gallery is open.

Opposite is one of the images from 'Fanclub'. Don't be fooled by its vintage appearance this is no dose of nostalgia. See works by Jeremy Deller, Susanne Burner, Jessica Voorsanger and my particular favourite Graham Dolphin explore the intricacies and eccentricities of fandom. Give it time; watch, listen and look as contemporary art and contemporary culture merge....

eerie....

Ttttransition

Crikey, so many weeks I have passed without a drop. Although time has been consumed, on walks and buses, at work and at the gallery, it has not been well spent. Filled up with things to be done rather than time to do things I have read little and thought less. Yes that sentence does sound a little poncy, but facing a year of hard academic graft after a summer of relatively little serious research or thought I am scared!

Its not that I'm not interested anymore its just I feel caught up in something real rather than a complex entanglement of thoughts which will not work themselves out in my head for at least another 4 years.

Its worrying me because I have always been preoccupied with working things out. When my French teacher said write a story en francais in year 8 I muddled by narrative with complex past participles and infinitives- there was a sentence I needed to write. Well similarly my attempts to grapple with 20th century philosophy and psychology during my undergrad were often bolstered by my tutor's 'You're only an undergrad, this is difficult stuff'. I am NO LONGER an undergraduate. I am surely in a little trouble mais non?

So from learning to live with the reality of everyday in Blackpool and rediscovering the magic of its heritage to returning to that nook in my head. That web of questions, thoughts, images and sentences. This is not a sad farewell, this Summer has given me time-out, time to grow-up. (What you don't learn at uni you learn in the months directly after.) In fact it is not a farewell at all, leaving Blackpool this time does not feel like an escape. Just another chapter will begin.

(I don't think I'll see anyone else smiling in the Courtauld Institute Library either!)

Nostalgia

Things half-knitted (with the needles sticking out), jam, hot water bottles, blown out umberellas, September-October traffic jams, tram tracks, videos, Rock Lobster.

All these things inspire snapshots of memory, nothing longer. Those memories are like a place left behind or something seen long ago from far away. They are dulled by vivid.

That was the week that was...

Well it has been a fair while between posts and worryingly this is because I have been busy. Doing things. I've been meaning to write but every time I sit down in front of my keyboard I don't. Worrying to me, because I want to write about the great time I had last week, the exhibitions I saw and the simple pleasure of being elsewhere, walking around and even being on a train. Now I start to write it flows out, I just listed why I had a great time, I could go on discussing the wonderful feeling of seeing someone again after a long while or the excitement of my up and coming move to London. However it did not dawn on me to do that because we don't analyse why we are happy we just enjoy it.

We find lots to write about in our misery and our boredom. We notice details and take the time to take them in. Our starved eyes and minds look for something else in our lacking lives. When we are happy we enjoy those things. Jean Rhys commented that she only wrote in periods of unhappiness. Wide Sargasso Sea was published after a thirty year stop-gap. Many thought she was dead, she was just happy.

The title of my blog itself speaks of this culture of misery, or less harsh, irony. But too often are these blogs used as a place to vent our woes and boredom. Honestly this blog was set up in the same vane, yet over these two months although I haven't travelled the world, worked for a big corporation or interned at a magazine (all things I desired) I have been happy. I hope this blog shows that in some way. Hopefully its title will evoke its provenance; Jarvis and his Grecian sculpture-student running through the supermarket. This is not to say I'm a misfit in an unknown 'common' world but look past the ordinary and appreciate the everyday... just a little.

Ok so this will do nothing for my disillusioned-young-adult persona, my usual irony and sarcasm have been dropped by the wayside for a little cheesey, optimism. Its hard to write about happiness but easier to write about, writing about it.

All you really need is love

Volunteering at the Grundy is proving an invaluable experience. During discussions with the curator Stuart Tulloch and artist and assistant curator Tom Ireland I have learnt so much. Whether it is processes which define Stuart's career or indeed Tom. They come from quite different professional backgrounds yet both work in the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool in 2010. For me they (and the two other permanent members of staff) are incredibly lucky; it is a dynamic space, small but beautiful. Like any other gallery they struggle under issues of funding, visitor numbers and audience diversity but they are also incredibly lucky in their setting- Blackpool.

Ok, so skip back a few posts and read my moaning about returning to this cultural backwater. If I could I would eat those digital words, now forever ingrained. I have more contemporary arts practice here than in York. Forget etchings, oil paintings and Richter-style paint laden canvases think mesmerizing objects of accumulations, Dr. Adolf Steg who posts his art (through a letter-box rather than online) and an aluminum foil bolder. Crushed and fragmented this shiny and fragile object is a collation of the discarded skin of too many consumed sandwiches. The last object, created by Tom, has been shown in the Grundy within an exhibition of his own Gallery project 'Supercollider'. The Grundy's Art fair included the work 'Supercollider Embassy' which cordoned off an area of the gallery to create a replica space filled with works from Supercollider's past and future exhibitions.

'Supercollider Embassy' really struck me. It's elegance and simplicity is combined with a complex refiguring of gallery space and expo. Of contemporary art spaces merging, of remits colliding and exhibitions morphing together. Its frenzied. Its exciting.

Blackpool is like any other place, it can have exciting and interesting propositions. There maybe money, press and larger audiences in London, Newcastle and Manchester but there is also competition and competitive spirit. In Blackpool these institutions are working together, interacting and supporting each other. They are not disallowing the cultural heritage of the town but working with it. In a town hit hard by the recession, with empty shops and lower incomes the arts provides something beyond consumption, it creeps up in the crevasses.

Art shouldn't be selective on location. Welcome to Blackpool.

www.grundyartgallery.com

www.supercolliderhq.org.uk

(First image 'An Agenda of Type' Samantha Donnelly, Second image 'Beneath the stride of Giants', Brian Griffiths)

When we don't know what to say

Sometimes, most of the time, people do not say what they really think or feel because it is too difficult, too aware of shame, embarrassment, refusal, hurt. Whether it is for selfish reasons or to save someone else pain. Sometimes people say those things; in a whisper, a letter, a text, an email. Sometimes I regret not saying things. Its no easier in the end.

In this world of supposed free, mass communication our interaction is more bound up with etiquette than ever. Our social situations no less complex than Versailles. The lines are drawn and very few cross them.

For those very reasons I have just written those lines above.

Sometimes things are better in the rain

I love the reflection in this picture. Caused by the poor drainage on the promenade and drizzling rain. The ground looks glazed. That red shines angrily yet it can only interfere with the calmer sand and sea through the reflected striations of the stone wall.

It reminds me of the floors in indoor play grounds- those bouncy, shiny floors. I think thats what makes it awkward and interesting. It contrasts with the beach, the natural playground. It reminds of fun and the seaside but the lack of population make this only a memory.

So much for the Summer sun in Blackpool.

Pistol and Fur | Reviews | Interface | a-n

Pistol and Fur | Reviews | Interface | a-n

'Fan Club'

So I've clocked up two weeks worth of research for 'Fan Club' an exhibition being put on at the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool. Its going to be a mix of art and ephemera around the subject of celebrity but particularly fan worship. This makes the exhibition seem a little precocious and patronising; 'Hark at all these people who mindlessly worship the idols of popular culture'. This is not its aim. Work included will be by artists about fans, by artists who are fans and by fans themselves. I think it will be more about legacies.

'Fan Club' is mean to accompany a touring exhibition from the Victoria and Albert museum, 'My Generation' a series of photographs by Harry Goodwin taken on Top of the Pops from 1964-1973. The icons of the rock n roll generation will adorn the walls, cheekily posing, moodily staring and even playing their stratocasters with their teeth. The black and white images engrave their subjects into icons. Framed on a gallery wall, in an exhibition named 'My Generation' they make material the essence of youth which spurned the spirit of rebellion in the 1960s and 70s. At once they historicise, this is the past- but a past you were/are a part of. Were, you lived it. Are, you listen to the records, brought up on the music, the politics, the images. You remember those depicted in the photographs.

So 'Fan Club' makes for an eloquent partner-exhibition. Exploring this remembering, through fan clubs, fanatactists and impersonators. But its not just remembering or legacies, thats all a bit past tense. Its about how these icons are made and how they thrive. Not just single artists but entire music movements. Think Mods, Rockers, Punk, Goth, Gangster what are the codes, the vocabularies that define each movement, which allow it to permeate. What is it that gives identity to these music movements? Dress code? Place?

The exhibition will explore these fan clubs, these networks of communication complementing Goodwin's photographs but also (I hope) destroying some of that iconicity in favour of highlighting the buzz which creates it.

Look what I found....

On a walk along the promenade in the rain. The label (which is a little smudged) reads Graffiti Grannies... check them out

Doldrums = good word

Home

Jarvis Cocker - "Further Complications"

I am 6ft. Thats pretty tall. Immediately people think I'm poised and graceful which is great but this is more realistic;

Stardust Memories | Project blogs | Artists talking | a-n

Stardust Memories | Project blogs | Artists talking | a-n

When its grey and cloudy listen to Tune Yards and look at Annabel Dover,

http://www.annabeldover.com

Her work is on show at the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool.

Blackpool and particularly the area I live in (Bispham) is full of odd little 1920s-40s architecture. Compact little apartment blocks, flat roof houses and the public library... pictures will follow.

My bedroom and base

Diary of a Nobody

In amidst the scandal books of the Victorian era George Grossmith wrote The Diary of a Nobody. It is a narrative of stark banality, following the everyday happenings of Charles Pooter. My OUP edition reliably informs us that Pooter is the 'English archetype. anxious, accident-prone, occasionally waspish... (he) epitomizes English Suburban life'. Well yes he does. Although what this should suggest to you is that the narrative is incredibly boring. From encounters with workmen to petty competition with the neighbours it serves as evidence that nothing much changes, one generation takes over the concerns of the other seamlessly. As down in the mouth as all that seems it is not a bad book, brilliantly written and funny, Weedon Grossmith's illustrations pick-up on all the nuances of George's narratives. It has provided a small spring of inspiration.

Moving home from the hectic whirlwind of university to the quiet and foreign realm of my hometown has made be think again over this book. University offers a capsule of responsibility and independence which offers anyone willing incredible opportunities but outside that dome those things which were so important fall by. A new year's committee takes your place. I am not so sad about this. I had a wonderful time and am happy to be moving on. I have things to look forward to come September but just for now, for these 2 months, I have Blackpool.

To this strange nutshell of nostalgia and neglect I return. It really is a lovely place, if you know where to look, at the moment I don't but I am looking. Going to university in York perhaps has spoilt me but it is also encouraged me to find what it is that is good about Blackpool. To start we have a tower and some amazing buildings. No manor houses, castles, cathedrals or ancient libraries but sites of popular culture. Sites of my family's history.

Back to Diary of a Nobody... this might be inconsequential, the details trivial but like the character of Charles Pooter this is life experienced by the majority, why not shine a light on its nuances to find difference?

So here I go, looking

Starting this to keep me occupied during my time back at home in Blackpool. Keeping my mind working whilst sorting life post-undergraduate degree.