I only remember a couple of details from this performance at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. I remember there was exegesis in the title somewhere. The most visual aspect was Bruce Barber pulling Jennifer Bolande across the gallery by a rope attached around her ankles. She was dressed like a ballerina in dancers tights. I can’t remember why, but I’m sure it was he had a very particular reading intended.
One idea that came up at a chat session several weeks ago was the idea of mind mapping digital arts. I was thinking about Jeremy Deller’s beautiful mind map of Acid Brass in History of the World/Acid Brass 1997-2004 which was first presented at The Modern Institute in Glasgow and later at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre.
Making sense of any field takes time.
When we say contemporary art- we could say we are talking about the artworks that are shown in art galleries, and museums- in exhibitions, biennials and events, and that are being discussed in a variety of art books, catalogues, magazines, and newspapers around the world.
When I try to do apply this to Digital Arts I get swamped- if we say that Digital Arts includes any art that uses digital technologies, including all digital media found in galleries, on the internet, digital videos, web sites, virtual projects etc. That’s a lots of stuff. Given how much more sophisticated search engines have become- searching any topic is huge- there is a fast flowing flood of information that keeps growing daily.
Digital arts is too big.
As a category Digital Arts ends up being to all inclusive and needs focus. I propose to consider what are the essential qualities, that make Digital Arts distinct from other forms of contemporary art. Digital Arts then, would refer to work that not only utilize digital technologies- but that wouldn’t be possible without them- the artworks only exists because of these digital technologies.
This week was a busy one. I flew back from Kansas City on Monday. I missed most of the discussion around the development of a website to post our 2 minute projects. Reading the archive from the chat it is clear it was a productive meeting between the f2f students and my online colleagues. John has kindly designed a site to post projects which is great, and the wiki continues to be the focus for the forum details, debate and discussions.
I have been working on a virtual agora as part of my contribution to the discussion. I have realized a great deal over the past week around what is needed for an online course to really succeed. Mots of the pieces are here within the MA_DA format, but as we’ve discoverd now that we’re rolling we don’t really have a need for BlackBoard other than for the weekly chats. The wiki and our weblogs are what are key.
Donald Kuspit, Robert Pincus-Witten and Joseph Masheck were the art critics to read back in the mid 70s. Kuspit seemed to be writing everywhere for a couple of years, but Artforum was what carried the most weight, at least at NSCAD and we read the most. I remember running into him in the Scotia Square: Food Fair and having a bowl of soup with him. He seemed a bit out of his element, I think he was teaching at Chapel Hill in North Carolina at the time, but he must have spent a lot of time commuting to New York City.
I’ve been wondering how our memory works and why we are able to remember certain things and why we forget others.
I have been focusing on remembering a brief but key moment in my own past and my evolution as an artist from August 1974 and over the next two years when I was an art student “back in the day” in Halifax at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. I was there at a what turned out to be a seminal moment in that school’s history, which was also a significant moment in my own history. I was 23 when I arrived, young enough to be impressionable but old enough to recognize what a great moment it was.
I’m trying to make sense of how to remember and record my memories of that time and collapse them into my current experience as an online masters student at Camberwell College of Arts. I’m planning to use a website as the home for this research- memory work laid onto autoethnographic storytelling.
Autoethnography is a postmodernist construct as anthropologist Deborah Reed-Danahay notes: “The concept of autoethnography…synthesizes both a postmodern ethnography, in which the realist conventions and objective observer position of standard ethnography have been called into question, and a postmodern autobiography, in which the notion of the coherent, individual self has been similarly called into question. The term has a double sense - referring either to the ethnography of one’s own group or to autobiographical writing that has ethnographic interest. Thus, either a self (auto) ethnography or an autobiographical (auto) ethnography can be signaled by “autoethnography”.
I’ve been reading about autoethnography as a research method and I’m trying to figure out if there could be any ethnographic interest in art students as a group. If we accept autoethnographic methods to “include journaling, looking at archival records - whether institutional or personal, interviewing one’s own self, and using writing to generate a self-cultural understandings”, then a weblog seems an ideal place for this research to take place.
A friend just put me onto Annette Kuhn, Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London and her book Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination and more recently she edited Journey Through Memory with Kirsten McAllister.
Can a laptop function as a studio? Can a website function as an artwork?
If I reflect on all the various studios I’ve had over the past thirty-five years, they all fulfillled one key function- a retreat, a place to go to make things. Over the past few years I’ve had studios- ususally for specific projects- a suite of paintings or drawings, but increasingly the space has become less permanent, more transient and circumstantial, based on the needs of the project.
This past May I was in Banff for six weeks. I asked for a space with an interenet connection with a window and a view. They gave me a beauitful office/studio on the second floor of the Peter Lochhead Building- it was ideal. It had a big table, a wall I could post prints and drawings, and a couch and chair and a beautiful view west overlooking the town of Banff and the mountains.
I’ve been traveling for the past 10 days. I was at York University in Toronto for a CAFAD- Canadian Association of Fine Arts Deans meeting where we heard Bruce Brown speak on research in Fine Arts. I spent last weekend visiting with friends, then on to Guelph, Ontario where I was giving a talk on my artwork and then doing critiques with their MFA students before traveling on to Kansas City, Missouri on Wednesday to attend the annual meetings of NASAD- National Association of Schools of Art and Design and AICAD- Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design.
NASAD is primarily an accreditation organization- that is their main focus, AICAD has a great Deans listserv that focuses on a varity of problems that all our art schools are dealing with. It was great to have a chance to meet and talk with people that I only knew via email. They are both American organizations and that is the main focus of their discussions, but it is a great chance to meet a few key educators in the same field. The NASAD meeting was mildly interesting with presentations on “low residency” MFA programs and “breaking down the silos” which I learned referred to barriers between art, media and design. The AICAD meeting was more interesting for me as we had several presentations which I’ll try to summarize in a subsequent blog. It was a great chance to meet presidents, provosts, and deans from most of the big American art schools.
The great thing about travelling is that it helps to put things in perspective. I have had a chance between flights to focus on some of the discussions going on around Digital Arts and the MA Forum- how and what to present to our colleagues. I’m pleased that the MA_DA wiki is now starting to take on a life. It has huge potential as a forum.
I took some time to look at Tim Pickup’s weblog and I’m very interested in his proposed research. I also took some time to look at Susan Mortimer’s research proposal which is also interesting- I like the idea of slow repetitive gestures.
I’ve also continued to read and have almost finished Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck- which although it doesn’t relate directly to my research is prescient in many ways. For the past few weeks I’ve been focssung my thoughts on colour around warm spectrum light research- the yellow, ochre, orange and red parts of the light spectrum- I’m thinking a great deal about that colour range- maybe it relates to the warmth of incandescent light, maybe sunset, but I’m really interested in the warm part of the spectrum. What I’m curious about researching further is how to create a work that is interactive- here I’m thinking via mobile phone. I’m not sure exactly how- but I think the idea is right- more to follow on these ideas.
Very interesting chat today about names and naming- as we found out that Digital Arts has been collapsed into a “pathway” in Visual Arts at Camberwell College of Arts. There was a bit of surprise and sadness and maybe a bit of indignation from my colleagues in our group.
I was reminded of Morrissey singing “I’m the last of the family line” from Kill Uncle. Then I also remembered the controversy around the last line from his sad lament from We’ll Let You Know, when he ends with “We are the last truly British people you will ever know”.
It is an interesting dilemma. You want a name that describes the field, acknowledges its history, but also resonates outside the university, and as many people have pointed out “naming is power”.
I’ve been looking at Elizabeth David cookbooks and trying to get a sense of what it must have been like cooking in London in the early 1950s. Provisions were clearly a lot more scarce and the range of choices we have grown accustomed to over the past few years simply didn’t exist. She was famous for introducing mediterranean cooking to England with her cookbook. Evidently olive oil was hard to find and so she recommends buying it at a pharmacy. I gather there’s a BBC film out on her which I’d love to see.
I’ve also been looking at the Camberwell College of the Arts website and trying to make sense of their values and who they list as their famous alumni. I remember researching Euan Uglow years ago when I was a student at NSCAD and my friend Doug Kirton was interested in this particular technique of measurment that he had evolved and developed as a mannered method of marking which remained as a device with his paintings.
I wonder if they ever met? I can imagine them meeting over dinner during the winter of 1950 at William Coldstream’s before he left Camberwell for the Slade.
I’ve been looking at colour bars- the vernacular as a starting point. Colour standards, degree zero.
As I’ve been thinking about certain colours that are considered degree zero as a place to start. The old television test patterns like the SMPTE colours bars used in countries with the NTSC video standards tests for how the viseo signal has been altered by recording or transmission and for adjusting the colour space and brightness of a television monitor.
Besides being a beautful image, with definitive colours- it is recognized by many people as the first image you see when looking at video art. I’m not aware of any equivalent in the broad field of digital arts.
The newer HD SMPTE colour bars have a 16:9 ratio.
I’ve proposed to use this image within the MA_DA wiki as a place to start for the spectrum project website.
beautiful autumn day today, sitting here in Vancouver thinking about Camberwell.
This week has been busy, but productive. I completed my project for the Interim Show next week and have been mapping out in my mind the outline for my final project based on my nonsite.com prototype. Camberwell College of Arts is mythic to me.
Where is the Wilson Road corridor? Tim has very kindly added a description of the two corridors on the MA_DA wiki. As I have written earlier I am attending a college in a university that I have never visited or attended in person. That’s pretty unusual and interesting. That’s the reality of my experience. Yet I have a clear sense of the place. That will form the core of my project. I have now seen a few small photographs of the interior corridors Wilson Road building. I’m trying to make sense of that space in relation to the Peckham Road campus. I have no real idea of the difference, or what goes on where which seems like a good place to start this project.
I’ve just started reading Iain Sinclair’s anthology London: City of Disappearances which Penguin published in paperback in 2007, and it’s an amazing collection of essays on the “old, real London.” I’m still trying to make sense of the history of Camberwell College of Arts, Peckham, South London SE5 from a distance.
Doing further research on 1950s roots of psychogeography and relationships to the Lettrist International and the Situationist International led back to that lovely title from Elizabeth Sussmann and Peter Wollen’s 1989 book: “On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time“ then led me to the London Psychogeographical Association. Their 1990s East London newsletters ELPAN are available online along with their polemical manifesto: Why Psychogeography.
I’m in Toronto today at York University, at a conference where I heard Bruce Brown, Pro VP Research at University of Brighton speak on practice-based research in the Fine Arts. He is very passionate about excellence in research and he had a number of very compelling arguments on a number of issues that I will try to outline.
He clarified for me the difference between artists who are creators- working in a studio and artists who are researchers- working within a publicly funded University- a distinction that had been unclear and troubling to me. Until today, I had been thinking that it was just a different definition for the same thing- research and creation- a different model or paradigm for describing what we are doing. He clarified the difference between independent creation in the studio and research within a publically funded and publicly accountable institution.
He pointed out that you can’t make people do research- they do it because they want to. His main concern seemed to be excellence- how do we develop future research leaders. He talked about his background in Brighton, where he was Dean of Fine Arts for 19 years. He said the key in Brighton were the peer based review panels that he established and how that led to encouraging the spirit of inquiry needed for good research practices.
What was particularly compelling about his lecture was his ability to articulate the criteria used by the RAE: Research Assessment Exercise used in Great Britain to identify quality research and to determine funding for Universities.
The research question is the key. One of the problems in art is that often we begin making things without really knowing why or what we are doing- that comes later. The research question only become clear after we have made something and perhaps what’s worse is when the artwork is simply an illustration of an idea. We are still developing a language for research in the fine arts.
1. what is the research question- what are the questions we are asking that drives the research?
2. what is being done in the field? Others must be interested in similar research- you need to know the field- who else is doing something similar and how do I find out about them and how do they find out about me?
What is the size of the field and what is the nature of the engagement within the field?
3. what methods are being used? 4. how will it be tested? 5. how will it be disseminated?
Researchers tend not to be very well connected.
Different kinds of research:
1. production of new knowledge
2. testing limits of existing knowledge- challenging what exists
3. rediscovery of lost knowledge
4. application of knowledge
5. conservation of knowledge
6. scholarship of research
7. explaining complex knowledge to a broader public
There are three indicators of good research- based on peer review:
1. What are the outputs- significance, originality and rigour. These three indicators can be and often are weighted differently in differnet research projects
2. Research environments- strategy, people and structure
3. The esteem within which the research is held- has been or is likely to be siginificant and the degree to which the reasreach enhances the field of knowledge
**** world leading research- essential point of reference (must know)
*** internationally excellent
** internationally recognized
* nationally recognized
For Michael Asher’s installation in the Anna Leonowes Gallery on Coburg Road, he just cleaned out the gallery. That was the piece.
We thought that this was pretty simple, dumb idea. Dumb-smart.
Michael Asher remains an outstanding example of a great art teacher. He taught at CalArts for many years along with John Baldessari and Douglas Heubler. What made Michael so influential was his sense of humour, his great intellegence and his indifference to the commercial gallery circuit. He had huge respect for his students. I remember him as a very social guy- he liked to hang out and that’s so important for a community.
windy as I walk down Spring Garden Road- the psychogeography of everyday life.
small Canadian flag blowing on the roof of the CBC building, Halifax.
NSCAD feels like a new art college. Even though it has a long history- all the ideas feels new. A number of the students have came from away- because of the myth and the hype that has built up around the school. Students arrived from across Canada and the States because of the hype.
It was the famous twin oxen postcard advertisment that drew me here. I was working in the UVIC library having pretty much completed an undergraduate degree in English, reading modern American poetry, and I wanted to go to art school. I had a studio with a darkroom and was doing photography and silk screen prints. I saw the articles in Art News and Artscanada and was curious. Here was the most contemporary art school in the country in Halifax, where I was born! I am 23. I quit my job, packed my things and took the train across Canada arriving late August 1974.
Somehow Garry Kennedy knew that in order to make the place vital, people had to come from away- there wasn’t enough of a urban infrastructure in Halifax to sustain a contemporary art scene. NSCAD had to make its own, they had to import one. Garry started with the visiting artist programme. $50,000/ year budget in 1974, and what an amazing list of artists. Garry Kennedy was the facilitator, Gerry Ferguson was the intellectual, David Askevold was the innovator and Pat Kelly was the materialist. New York City is only an hour away from Halifax by air.
