Category: practice (Page 1 of 3)
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.
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
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
Also a nice review in Nottingham Evening Post by Mark Patterson. November 21st 2013.
PEOPLE who can draw, and even those of us who can only manage stick figures, will tell you that drawing is the basis of all art.
The ability to make representational marks on some kind of surface, using some kind of tool, is one of the earliest forms of human expression and everything else, including all the artistic movements and isms, follows on. And today, Joe Public still values artworks which embody a degree of God-given raw skill, including the ability to draw well, more highly than installations, films and sculptures made of shopping trolleys.
What then, will the Man and Woman on the Nottingham Omnibus make of Drawology, the new exhibition of contemporary drawing which opened this week at Nottingham Trent University’s Bonington Gallery?
For sure, this is a show where traditional drawing is ably represented by artists such as Bill Prosser, whose fine black and white pencil drawings of domestic spaces – waste bins, staircase landings – force the eye to zoom in with strange fascination on the very texture of carpets, curtains and loose wires.
Yet this is also an exhibition which also aims to seek out different forms of drawing; to investigate, essentially, what drawing can be in a wider extent.
So, at the other end of the spectrum from Prosser, Deborah Harty’s take on drawing – defined in its essence as the representation of experiences – is an enclosed installation of film projections on a glass table.
Between Prosser’s and Harty’s two kinds of drawing we get a broad range of other forms including film such as Maryclare Foa’s ‘Line Down Manhattan’, which follows her as she walks down to the southern tip of Manhattan while trailing a large piece of chalk fastened to a piece of rope. The wobbly chalk line she leaves on crowded pavements and roads is her drawing of Manhattan.
Most of the artworks here, though, are traditional flat 2D images, albeit using a wide variety of tools, such as chalk, pastels and paints, on paper of varying thickness and textures.
You’ve got to be impressed by Patricia Cain’s huge three-piece, titled ‘Riverside Triptych III’, which recreates a cavernous interior with an overwhelmingly intricate arrangement of metallic struts, railings and platforms.
And you’ve got to like Andy Pepper’s iridescent coaster-size squares, which flash shimmering images of grass at you from the floor.
Shaun Belcher, who lectures at the university, as do several other artists here, displays a minimal, anti-art market ethic with his three flat framed squares, composed of squiggles and occasional autobiographical references, which bear titles such ‘P***ed Off Drawing’.
Sian Bowen, a former artist-in-residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum, is another artist here who plays with the rules.
Her three 3D lightboxes, titled ‘Refuge/Silver’ show patterns that are so faint they are almost not there.
On a bright sepia background they look more like the archaeological imprint of ancient organic forms left in the soil.
They serve to bring the exhibition full circle back to the very roots of drawing as humanity’s earliest artistic attempt to make sense of the world that exists beyond the caves of the eyes.
Drawology can be seen until December 6.
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…
These are the three images to be shown in Deborah Harty’s curated show ‘Drawology’ at the Bonington Gallery from next week.
After the great time in New York ( Metropolitan Museum of Art and Guggenheim were fantastic) it is back to earth with a bump (work) and time to take stock of what to do next on M.A. as complete at end of January 2014. I have been in touch with James Elkins and there only a couple of chapters still to come in book so I can concentrate between now and Xmas in getting that sequence completed. I also need to update the Rakes Redrawn sequence with some Hogarthian written titles mimicking original and Gilray etc. Whether this will be enough to get into the DRN proceedings I not sure but as whole idea was that this piece was ‘drawing-led’ not written a full paper seems inappropriate. I may take ideas and rewrite into a separate paper though.
Here some images from New York conference – the final image is Yoon Bakh’s take on my talk as a visual ‘scribe’:-).
