Category: graphic research (Page 1 of 4)
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 …..
No studio diary entries this week as I only made it into studio for an hour. Various work related problems kept me busy and rest of time I was starting new research at home.
My next conference is in Paris in March. It continues the theme I started exploring in Amsterdam Film-Philosophy Conference. This is the role of Victorian magazine illustration (disseminated by the railway) in development of sequential narrative that became film and comic art.
The new blog here: https://shaunbelcher.com/rpt
I have separated from this ‘Graphic Research’ blog as although related the focus there is very much on the art historical angle (Frayling’s ‘Research INTO Design’ NOT through or for which this practice-led blog is more concerned with).
I have already discovered a mine of information including original Dickens annotated sketches by his illustrators. My intention is to look at the ‘sequential moment’ and try and establish if the mass circulation of the first Pickwick Paper pamphlet might be a significant milestone in sequential terms.
This I will then relate to the cross-disciplinary proliferation of images and tropes in an attempt to build a firmer picture of what cartoon/drawing, comic and photography actually meant at this time.
I am also looking at the role of technology based on Brian Winston’s political analysis after Raymond Williams.
Here a steel engraving by Phiz from the Pickwick Papers from March 1837.
Source : http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/pickwick/28.html
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
I was in conversation with Andrei Molotiu the author of the book Abstract Comics (http://abstractcomics.blogspot.co.uk ) and he basically challenged me to go beyond the film derived sequential drawings of earlier in the year and attempt a full abstract comic approach which I duly did yesterday. The result below.
This is based on two symbols that were constant companions in my first period of intensive abstract drawing from 1981-1989. The two objects are based on a barn door and a sheave of barley both distant childhood memory derivations. At this time I was working off an abstract expressionist base where Arshile Gorky and Miro were very important in terms of memory symbols. Here I have used the two objects to tell an abstract sequential story which has abstract speech bubbles. I jokingly called it my autobiography hence the grave symbol at end. The story is subconscious there no direct narrative. I drew the structure of the comic based on memories of similar page structures in comics.
The interesting thing is that it seems to relate directly back to a ‘graphic novel’ I attempted in 1992 (below the front cover). I will try and get rest of sequence scanned which although cartoon based is more conventional cartoon figuration rather than abstract and contains quite a lot of text. For this I thank Simon Lewty ( http://www.artfirst.co.uk/simon_lewty ) who has been a constant source of inspiration in his blend of the narrative, abstract and annotated.
Andrew has asked me for a better quality photo of the work for his blog (see above) so I will update the picture above with a high quality image tomorrow.
I also just realised that it structurally hints at the kind of emblematic work Alasdair Gray parodied in his ‘Leviathan’ drawing for the front cover of his book Lanark. My memory was obviously remembering the front cover of Richard Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’.
Looking at a pencil drawing I did today (called New Yoik Sympathy 🙂 I was reminded of drawings I did in mid nineteen-eighties which scarily nearly thirty years ago! The same motifs are re-assembling from somewhere deep in my brain or maybe they never went away…..just the physical act of drawing did.
Drawing has proved to be my way back into some sort of steady work flow (I hate word ‘practice’ is part of neo-con professionalisation and meant to be uttered by mealy-mouthed curators not artists….I am sure Francis Bacon never said I am involved in a transgressive multi-disciplinary practice….even if he was.)
My future direction seems to be emboldened by trip to New York as I felt that painting/drawing…making art whatever you want to call it still had relevance and importance there and had not been belittled by translation into outcomes. The physical act of making whether in Wool, Motherwell or best of all Mike Kelley’s work was paramount. Kelley had all sorts of resonance across genres (skate/grafitti,zines) and forward in an undoubted influence on a young David Shrigley…anybody looking at works below cannot but see connection. I hope Shrigley wins Turner prize because like Grayson Perry he an active practitioner who creates stuff…oodles of it. THINKING through DOING not DOING FUCK ALL AND THINKING TOO MUCH
Here my latest scribble……Kelley’s drawings and Shrigleys wonderful pisstake of life=life-drawing….you have to look harder…
