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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.
This is as far as I’ve gotten with the sculpture so far. I would like to consider more concerning the scale, because I’m hoping that the architectural shapes that I’m working with (particularly the bottom stand part that is modeled loosely after a Mayan temple) will benefit from a manipulation of scale in the objects around it. I saw Peter Coffin’s show at the Barbican last week, and was impressed with his meticulous use of scale. I was also obviously impressed with his influence and subject matter, the Japanese Garden. In particular, the use of rocks and dry ponds that use scale and placement to resemble mountains, and also ‘hide and reveal’ techniques that manipulate the viewer’s gaze. As stated on Wikipedia:
Kaiyu-shiki or Strolling Gardens require the observer to walk through the garden to fully appreciate it. A premeditated path takes observers through each unique area of a Japanese garden. Uneven surfaces are placed in specific spaces to prompt people to look down at particular points. When the observer looks up, they will see an eye-catching ornamentation which is intended to enlighten and revive the spirit of the observer. This type of design is known as the Japanese landscape principle of “hide and reveal”.
Another thing that I’ve been thinking about in relation to a collaboration between words and objects is psychodelia, and a particular sensation that goes with it called synesthesia, which is when two or more of your senses intermingle with each other. One might taste sounds or feel colours.
These sensations might be helpful to consider in relation to corelations between objects and groups of words.
That video I had posted there before was pure sillyness. I think this one might be a bit more relevant to what I was talking about.
