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Author: shaun belcher (Page 1 of 9)
Comic produced as 'Live Scribe' at Wimbledon STEAM conference 2012.
This blog collects all the material produced for my M.A. Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University.
I was awarded a distinction in January 2014.
I would like to thank Dr Deborah Harty my supervisor and Dr David Downes my colleague for their support throughout.
The blog began in September 2011 with a discussion with Mathew Collings over the internet and ‘visuality’.
My art critic cartoon dog continues to bark at the Art World as Moogee The Doodle Dog
https://shaunbelcher.com/moogee/
The stick-chasing began one wet evening in Llandudno with the first Moogee presentation in March 2012.
My thanks to Dr. Lee Campbell for letting the inner dog out…
http://leecampbellartist.blogspot.co.uk/p/research-interests.html
The rest of my fine art related activity available on main art website at:
Yoon Bahk scribing of the lecture as delivered...scribing of scribing..she found it a bit difficult :-)
This ‘redrawing’ of Hockney’s Rake’s Progress was what I delivered at the DRN Conference in New York in 2013.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/
(downloadable)
Andrew Love provided an animation of Duchamp’s Urinal floating out Space Odyssey 2001 style to meet the plinth of ‘new knowledge’…to accompany it.
I now preparing some ‘notes’ to explain the sequence as there was no paper deliberately…it was a visual essay.
It examined the search for embodied ‘new knowledge’ as defined by Frayling in terms of where it located in an art object as ‘communicable’…I argued that this visual essay was both art work and textual therefore contained that communicable knowledge….in other words here is proof in the actual pudding of the presentation…
It sat alongside an American presenter who had produced a PhD in Graphic Novel form on same premise…..a bit ahead of myself here but it was pretty unique….still is.
The Arts Humanities in Higher Education ‘new voice’ paper ‘ Can grey ravens fly: Beyond Frayling’s categories’ has finally been published to paper in latest copy of journal.
It appears in a special issue devoted to ‘Theorising Practice in Creative and Applied Arts’. It is alongside a range of papers presented at the ‘Practice Makes Perfect Conference’ at Swansea Metropolitan University in September 2012. I would like to thank Howard Riley and Amanda Roberts for their kindness there and for giving me this opportunity.
It is my first main journal publication after a couple of conference papers in proceedings.
at: http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/13/3/235.abstract
The pdf is available through download from SAGE website if subscribed through institution and I can share with colleagues in private so please request. I cannot post separately on internet for copyright reasons.
If interested in abstracts and other my research please go to
ACADEMIA EDU : https://nottinghamtrent.academia.edu/ShaunBelcher#
Surprise of the week was news that Moogee had his own chapter in a new Loughborough/UAL/Teachers Columbia publication 🙂
M.A. ASSESSMENT
This is the final entry in the studio diary section as I will be assessed on my M.A. this Wednesday afternoon. To prepare for this I have created the pdf below and uploaded to Scribd detailing the progress made throughout the M.A. and the final outcomes at this point.
Where I go from here is a good question and not one I can answer easily.
There are three separate yet overlapping areas I have become deeply interested in.
1. Drawing research ; phenomenology of drawing and in particular an interest in sense of place and notions of ‘signature’ in terms of preparatory drawings especially in Gorky, Miro up to Motherwell and Twombly all developing out of the surrealism and dada influence on mid-century American painting.
2. Early film/photography and magazine culture of the 18th Century/early 19th century and its relation to current developments in web. I have a paper to present in Paris on Charles Dickens magazine illustration end of March and I will be concentrating on that alone from now until then.
3. The continuation of this research into artistic research theory/philosophy of aesthetics and its dissemination through fine art pedagogy.
All three are possible PhD subject matter and how my institution views my future will probably have a major bearing on where I go.
My heart though probably in number one…..my head in number three and my teaching future at present tied up somewhere in number two whether I like it or not…….
Interesting times ahead 🙂
Meanwhile I’d like to thank Deborah Harty for her very good supervision and for stopping me going off-track all the time or as they like to say in academia develop ‘focus’. Focused I am right now but come Thursday who knows:-)
please note the backgrounds have distorted in this display.
James Elkins is giving the Carnegie Lecture in Edinburgh Friday and I understand he may use some of my drawings in the event.
James Elkins illustrations..half way through when this photo taken in studio…completed today there 12 in all which will illustrate the 2nd Edition of his book ‘Artists with PhDs’ which has been revised and made larger.I had the pleasure of illustrating my ex-Dean and others. No detailed pictures as want to be surprise in book when it published. Thanks to Jim for allowing me to do this.
This series completes the third drawn sequence that I will be submitting for my M.A. assessment next Wednesday 22nd January. At the age of 55 I will finally get a Fine Art M.A. to add to the B.A. which I received a very long time ago….1981 in fact which 32 years ago! Unbelievable.
Further info. HERE: James Elkins Website
Spent afternoon at studio reading final submitted chapter of the 2nd edition of James Elkins’ ‘Artists with PhDs’. The article was Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield’s ‘Writing as practice: Notes on materiality of theory for practice-based PhDs’. This is a very fitting coda to my never-ending M.A. by research project which I started way back in September 2010 and which will finally end at end of January. It especially pertinant as Dronsfield has supervised at least two ‘challenging’ practice as research PhDs at Reading University and his analysis of art practice as ‘knowledge’ from Ranciere and Nancy points of view is superb in its pinning down of the fundamental fault-line in all art practice as research in terms of the academy.
He goes back to Kant’s third critique to mine into the basis of the ‘compromise’ all fine artists feel when confronting then toppling into the Cartesian well of rules that is the university. Most drown in the essential contradiction of ‘freedom of the artist’ V ‘the academy’ rules. Dronsfield brilliantly excavates the reason for this which present right back in Kant ( written 30 years before the first scientific ‘rational’ PhDs awarded in Berlin in early 1800s).
I will be illustrating the argument next week but essentially the ground was set early in the following paradox and leads the art practice as researcher to always be left in a APORETIC SPACE.
The humanities are in an important sense opposed to the aesthetic. The humanities draw the artist back from the truth of art, mind which is freedom, ailment from the way in which art threatens to present or show its freedom unconditionally, back to the social, to the way in which art might communicate the ideas it seeks freely to express. (Jonathan Laney Dronsfield – forthcoming article in Elkins book).
Never thought I’d end up here..started out with a locative media project end up deep in continental philosophy…
Problem is I actually enjoying it…a PhD prison cell beckons …..
Amended diagram 6th January
Interesting supervision session with DH in which I tried to present the M.A. package and look forward to what might come next.
M.A. ‘package’ =
Frayling Cartoon ( DRN Proceedings and THE) and paper ( Published AHHE 2014) (20 drawings)
DRN Hockney Rakes revisited (DRN NY 2013) (16 drawings)
James Elkins 2nd Edition of ‘Artists with PhDs’ illustrations 2014. (20 drawings?)
The above image is my crude attempt to update a previous ‘future map’. The horse-trading going on over various PhD offers at NTU means the water a bit muddied at present especially as I waiting to confirm I actually have a job in 2014-15!
What is certain is that a period of reflection before diving into a full PhD in order.
The above image highlights two possible options. (The third option is leave teaching and pure practice which financially not an option – left hand side of image).
Option One: Phenomenology of drawing and memory of place?
Fine Art practice-led PhD linking to phenomenology of drawing and its link to painting through my interest in both aspects of place and symbolic drawing in the likes of Arshile Gorky and Miro and up to Guston and beyond.
Relates to this abandoned blog on painting practice…BLANK CANVAS
Option Two: The Victorian Sequential Moment ?
If redeployed into Graphic Design next year this would link to both possible animation and film courses within Visual Communications from a ‘Visual Culture’ standpoint. Locates me away from practice in a art history position though.
Relates directly to the revised Art History BLOG here