I’m trying to formulate a research plan. Been at it for twenty minutes or so and had the initial thought to think about concepts and aesthetics under separate headings, but then realized that I seem to be writing the same things under each heading. I don’t think it’s a good idea to make these two particular separations. For one thing it’s not a realistic way to work, also what I think I’d like to aim for is a project where form is inseparable from content. On the other hand though, such a separation might be useful in terms of understanding and categorizing my own psychological motivations rather than looking at them as different aspects of the completed project.
I’ve spent the last couple of days working at the Chelsea Design Centre, and it’s prompted me to think about how such a place establishes it’s authority in the design world. My colleague and I spent the better part of the two days commenting on the extortionate prices. “£5000 for a chair?? For £5000 you can get a chair with an engine in it that will take you anywhere you want to go” was one of my favourite remarks. Among some of the other mind blowingly inefficient ways that people might spend their money there were a £3000 stool, an £8000 coffee table and a table coated in the skin of an unfortunate sting ray. I can’t remember the price off hand, but was large enough for us to be asked to sign that it was “in good nick” in case we somehow damaged it in it’s short transit through the hallway. They said that they’d had some things come back scratched, and this was their solution to make sure we’d be extra careful with their things. Of course we refused, but it did strike me how limited their insight into the problem of accountability was. I managed to suppress a strong impulse to remind her of the nature and size of my wages, pointing out that they were in no way proportionate or correlated with the price of that ugly table. I think that they would have just chalked that up to a bad attitude. It also struck me that she made no attempt to explain what type of contract we would have been signing into and what would have happened if we did drop the thing. Could she seriously have thought we would have been financially able to replace it? I should have been a smart ass and told her that if she wanted that piece of paper to stand up in court, it might be worth her while to get a lawyer around to notarize it.
It doesn’t bother me that she’s worried about her property, and it’s understandable that she’s trying to protect it, but there should be more thought about who it’s fair to hold accountable when something goes wrong. When I do my job well I get a thank you and my normal fixed £6-10 per hour, if I don’t, I don’t get work, and if I’m really unlucky (or incompetent) I pay the insurance company an excess fee. If both parties are honest, I could say that I don’t care what kind of price tag you want to put on that table, I’m going to be careful with it because I’d like to keep my job, not because I’ve allowed you to make me nervous about the price. If anything, the high price just fills me with contempt. Obviously, if you’re charging a high amount, you have to justify it with certain level of craftsmanship, and in this case with the highest quality of materials and thoughtful design. Considering all that’s at stake if this property were to be damaged, I don’t understand why the proprietors of these showrooms aren’t more involved or informed or interested in handling methods. Craftsmanship shouldn’t stop after production, it should also be applied diligently to careful maintenance. You’d think they’d realize this and be willing to supply whatever tools we might need for the careful handling of these terribly expensive items. Why does the owner of a £4000 cabinet covered in mirrors have to be asked to cover it in bubble wrap before it goes onto a small rickety trolley that my colleague and I have to carry over any number of bumps in the floor? The approach of simply trying to make your temporary labour feel accountable for property that they have no stake in just doesn’t seem adequate or fair.
I’m not just writing this to have a moan about my job, but I do feel that this is an example on quite a small scale of how money is used to establish authority. I think that the Chelsea Design Centre is a good place to start to examine power structures that surround notions of craftsmanship, quality, and value, and how money and capital play a role in preserving the power of an elite class of people. A couple of weeks ago I went to see Richard Sennet give a lecture at the Slade about structures of labour and employment in the financial crisis. One of the most important parts of the lecture to this discussion was the idea that we live in a meritocracy, which is a society governed by merit. This, he argued, creates a situation where (as a hypothetical example) one in twenty students will get a scholarship, and the rest will be neglected based on the myth that talent is rare. Chelsea Harbour can be argued to operate under the same principle. ‘Good craftsmanship is hard to find’ is exactly the presumption that helps to create the scarcity that drives their prices up. One example of this mentality in action is a roll of wallpaper hand printed by a famous artist with her own silk screen equipment. As it was explained by the sales associate in the showroom (shop), this wasn’t just wall paper, it was ‘artpaper,’ and this increased it’s value tremendously. I find myself wondering what the real difference is between a hand printed and designed pattern, and hand printed and designed ‘art.’ For example, had the maker gone through the same actions without being a famous artist, or declared his product to be design rather than art, how would it affect it’s value?
I’m not suggesting that this process is about using recognition and status to make money, but rather that it’s about the opposite: Using money to preserve status and power. At the risk of making an unsupported generalization, I would think that it would take a considerable amount of money to become educated in the design and manufacture of such expensive products, and that buying these products is an investment in one’s status rather than their sitting room. So while one party buys furniture and the other receives money, both have used the exchange to further their own status, and furthermore they have been very selective about the social aspects of the exchange. The seller uses high prices that isolate the buyer from the lower class, and the buyer spends money that justifies the expensive education of the seller and manufacturer that isolates them from other producers. Meanwhile the lower class just shake their heads and wonder how these daft rich people can be so foolish with money.
I noticed an analogy for this in several mob movies when gangsters go to parties or family gatherings. Everyone hands everyone a $20 bill, and the first thought you have is that it must be nice to be there, you’d make a fortune, but when you think about it, you have to give so many other people $20 that you’re really just breaking even by the end of the night. In this sense, the motivation behind the ritual is social rather than economic. This is the kind of mutual backscratching that maintains the status of the elite.
No? Hmm, apparently that doesn’t make sense to anyone but me. I think there’s more to think about here, but I’m not quite sure what it is yet. I’m thinking of this as a very quick sketch, and just enjoying the shape of the rope and its relationship with the fence and the view.
Industrialization and Nature are as loaded as terms come, and the relationship between them forms the context of my pending sculptural installation at Camley Street. As a nature reserve cuddled safely in the bosom of two of England’s largest international train stations it can provide a space for reflection on the cultural forces that define these terms. Its precarious beginnings as a backlash against Thatcherite policies help to put the value of nature into a particular socio-political context: what we collectively establish to be nature provides us respite from the everyday stresses of an industrial society.
I just noticed on my dashboard that the most common link leading people to my blog is the question “What does money for old rope mean?” This would bother me if I cared how many people read my blog, and why they decided to do so, but since I don’t really publicize it I can hardly complain.
So to answer the question, the saying is “You don’t get money for old rope.” The reason is that rope is manufactured, tested and rated under very stringent conditions, and if you’re a professional stage hand, or sailor, or whatever, you need to be exactly sure how much stress the rope is capable of withstanding, otherwise you might find yourself lost at sea or dropping a spotlight on Tom Cruise’s head. When the rope is brand new you can accurately attest to its breaking strain and say with certainty that it has not been weathered or shock loaded, nor has it accumulated wear and tear that might hasten its breaking strain in any other way. When you buy old rope you have no idea where it’s been or what it’s been used for, and (unless you’re trusting to an unprofessional extent) the rope cannot be depended upon in dangerous circumstances.
Telephone poles, cables above the trains to help direct them, grass hanging above the ground, flying (hanging) trains, plexiglass and grass, plants that move back and forth, audiance participation, holes in the ground, foundation- rope- things to hang from it, Infuenced by trains, city. Carrying plant life. Openness of sculptural seperations, diffusion between various sites rather than complete seperation of ’stations.’ Use abstractions, complications, nature references (grass) to avoid or help veil direct and simple references to the train station. Don’t hide what you’re doing. Flying grass. Grass trains. Reference to shipping produce? Cylander with grass growing all around it. Not possible. Watering cans operated with rope. Audience participation.
Camley Street- concept of nature in the city, psychological seperation between park and city.
“Things vs Objects” is an article in Art Monthly in the August issue by Rikke Hansen. This article was an important point of discussion for Tamarin and I during our collaboration, the most discussed point of the article being: ‘While a thing suggests a series of relations to the world, the term ‘object’ implies the performative amputation of such a reality.’ This turned out to be a very important factor in our tackling of the first, and what I found to be the most difficult and thought provoking question: How can words and objects interact and collaborate without falling back into doing what language normally does anyway when it’s at its most banal, which is to match a sound with an abstract concept of a thing (which under Hansen’s definition would make it an object). I think what we wanted to get at was that language isn’t just a group of abstract concepts backed by physical realities, (like money backed by gold) but it also has physical properties of its own, just as objects don’t just exist out there in the world, but also in our heads, tangled up in the experiences and language we associate them to.
One of the most important things here is thingness, which is an object considered within the context of its environment, its use, its appearance, its relevance, etc, the thing in your hand vs its abstract concept. For example, the word lamp on its own signifies simply something that stands up and makes light. When you come into a room and see a lamp your brain goes through the process of ‘performatively amputating’ the lamp from the reflective properties of everything around that it casts its light onto.
(This analogy is important because it points to the way that objects don’t just exist as of their own accord, but always grounded within a certain space. Every object fits into this paradigm, but the properties of light can provide a particularly interesing analogy):
Light is only useful when it’s reflected off of something else. Should it not reflect, it would either be completely invisible, or it would have a blinding effect by shining straight into your eye, (even then you could argue that your eye is the reflector, but that might be a different discussion). Picture the effect of a campfire in the desert at night. Although it may illuminate its immediate surroundings, it blinds you to anything behind by outshining the moon or the stars, and if you turn your back to the fire it is plain that the light cannot continue into the darkness without a subject to reflect itself onto.
This reminds me of a book that I started to read a long time ago about Buddhism that described the Zen Koan’s role in the development of transformative knowledge. It took the famous koan: ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ and started to break it down theoretically. I remember talking to a guy in a pub about this. His point was that because we know scientifically that such an activity would produce ‘decibles’ that we could confidently answer ‘yes it does’ and dispel thousands of years of reflective contemplation by revered Zen Masters. He didn’t seem to care that he was missing the point, which is that decibels are not sound. Decibels only become sound when the ear translates them into sound, and just as I was saying earlier, light is only useful when it is reflected first on something besides your eyeballs. The book continues to break down this koan by dividing the sentence grammatically, labelling the tree as the actor, falling the action, and the listener the subject of action, with the obvious contemplation causing problem being: what happens to the first two components now that the listener has been removed? Anything that happens in our normal day to day lives will have all three of these components. To remove one is to amputate the thingness of all three, sending them into the abstract, conceptually derived realm of objecthood. If I were to say to someone ‘I switched the lamp on’ ‘I’ would be the actor, switching would be the action and ‘the lamp’ would be the subject of action. This analogy fits into everything that we do, and I think there’s a subtle political dimension to it all. There is an underlying power balance that is easy to take for granted because of its small scale, but might be helpful to consider for the purpose of analogy.
To go back to the problem of switching the lamp on, in the sentence ‘I switched the lamp on’, the actor (I) is in possesion of the power of the action that the lamp is subjected to. The ‘on’ however, at the very end of the sentence is a very interesting word in this respect because it doesn’t fit into the formula. It ultimately helps to disrupt the status quo in this sentence that holds me in a state of power over the lamp, by providing a caesura and a handle for the lamp to take and tip the power balance of the next sentence back. The next sentence might be ‘The lamp then illuminated the room for me.’ The lamp now becomes the actor and the room and I become the subjects of its action.
These subtle trade offs and fluctuations that define these roles brings me back to what I was saying in the previous post about a kind of contract that is negotiated between the artist and his materials. It is a constant shifting of balance and power that can sometimes happen in our every day lives on such a small scale it’s not even noticeable. Walking, for example could provide another analogy. You could say that the foot with the weight on it has the power because it’s the one carrying the body, and it would be true until the next shift of weight. To refer to a foot in its objecthood would be to separate it from its other foot, and therefore separate it from the process of walking, which is ironically what characterizes it in the first place.
My collaborations with Tamarin on the 12th and 13th of March turned out to be very much informed by reflections on not only what it means for words and objects to interact during their conception and creation, but the nuances that occur as a result of how these processes are inherently carried out. She noted, for example, that because object making happens in 3 dimensional space, it is much easier to observe than writing. This is because if I wanted to see what she was doing, I had to awkwardly peer over her shoulder and read what she had written.
At the same time, however, there is an underlying similarity. Whether you can see the process or not, you can’t fully understand it until its complete. When you build something, you start at the most practical angle, and then after it’s done, you can turn the first part of the object around and see what you’ve done. You build another part of the object and then turn that one around to see how it relates to the first one. It’s only when you think you’ve finished enough to see something starting to take its shape can you be informed enough to make your next decision. The same thing occurs with writing: you finish the sentence or the paragraph (thinking from the most practical angle) and then you read it back to yourself (turning it over and viewing it more broadly from all angles). First you subject yourself to the principles of the structure, and after your actions have enabled you to understand them you can then subject the structure itself to your own scrutiny. This is a contract and its terms are negotiated between the laws of physics, the properties of the artist’s materials, and the what the artist would like to see happen. The thing that you’re making or writing isn’t just a lifeless object waiting to be told what to do, it has its own say in what it’s going to be when you’re finished and it can then take on a life of its own.
This is something that’s particularly important in terms of collaboration because it provides a different context and structure for all of these things to be negotiated in. If you assume that you have the vision for the work readily available in your head when you’re working alone, the differences in the structure of how it is created won’t necissarily change the outcome as much. For example, if you’re writing by yourself, you know exactly what’s going onto the paper. If you’re building by yourself, you know what you’re picturing for the end result and how it’s changing as you go along. There’s no decision to make about how long you want to work before you have another read of what the other collaborator is doing, and when it isn’t readily visible this becomes more important. It establishes a rhythm that has to be integrated into the rest of your working process. How much you decide to take in and when will directly affect the outcome of the work and can help you to reflect on what it is that you want from the collaboration. Even if you’ve been communicating extremely effectively about what you both want from the project, the inherent impossibility to live in someone else’s head will distort the negotiations between you and your materials, and provide a discomfort that keeps the work on its toes. In this case, the differences between objects and words and the myriads of ways for them to interact, which I will get into in the next post, also add to this discomfort.
