Art & Immorality 2nd Post

If you've been anxiously searching the Speculectures blog for a further post before tomorrow's PM session, I'm afraid the prep time was hi-jacked by the preparation of an Essay Briefing document that we also have to do in that session.

Nevertheless, I WILL collect some notes and possibly quotes in the morning and discuss IMMORALITY in the session as well as the essay.

Please look at the previous post and come with your own ideas on the theme and we'll have something to talk about and LEARN!

Art and Immorality

01/03 1pm-3pm Art and Immorality.
LEVEL 2

If we were to read Georges Bataille's transgressive Surrealist novel 'The Story of the Eye' we would quickly be reminded that, along with all the other, formal, aesthetic and social transgressions with which and by modern art carved its place in the world, morality was also, always, one of its targets.

From the outset, with the upset caused by Manet's painting of a naked (not 'nude') woman sharing a picnic with some clothed students in his Dejeuner Sur L'herbe of 1863, or even earlier, in Baudelaire's 1846 request that artists concern themselves with the seedier contents of Parisian life, reflected by the sensationalist newspapers of the time, current moral values were challenged and transformed by modern art.

But why should there be an intrinsic relationship between art and morality?

The modern world is typified by its rejection of superstitious and un-scientific beliefs, including a repression of old powers of the aristocracy, monarchy and the Church. We call this the emergence of 'secular' modernity.

However, morality itself is apparently not diminished even where and when we diminish the powers of religion. Modernity's competing ideologies, manifestos and avant-gardes are driven by a new modern morality, a search to give form to new liberties and possibilities made available by the modern world.

In this 'Speculecture' we can look at ways in which modern, postmodern and current artists (including ourselves) attend to moral concerns, even when we are not conscious of doing so. We can also consider the question of immorality and amorality as the artist might variously use their privileged position to raise issues of morality, critique current morality, transgress morality purely for the sake of transgressing, or, maintain art as a place separated from moral issues and concerned only with issues of art itself.

You can prepare for the lecture by finding out a bit abut Georges Bataille and by looking at artists you are familiar with (and your own work) and meditating on the extent to which and ways in which it might respond to these moral concerns.

I will add more detailed posts prior to the lecture, with some quotes if possible, that we might useful to use in essays etc.

The Thing -Final Post

We can look at Carpenter's film, Judd' s essay, O'Donaghue's poem or Foucault's 'Preface', but ultimately we need to draw from these resources 'fuel' for our own practices.

In Carpenter's film we see 'The Thing' as a locus of distrust, paranoia caused by the unknown (as appropriate to a 'War On Terror as to a 'Cold War' perhaps).

In Foucault's Preface, 'Things' are less important than the 'Table' or Order on which and by which we organise them as a system of Knowledge.

In Judd we can see a repeated dumbing-down of European art language, the introduction of casual and equivocal speech (e.g. 'fairly'). The word 'Things' appears in this context, a way of avoided addressing art and sculpture with grandeur, a way of making art's problems more malleable and manageable.

We can use these texts to ask our own questions about how to deploy this term, to what extent our sculpture embodies the idea of 'The Thing along with any other meaning it might have. Does our sculpture contest the historical notion of The Thing? Is it singular or dissipated? Is it resilient or ephemeral? Is it recognisable or muysterious? Which of Judd's many examples does it compare with?

Could our sculpture evoke that uncertainty celebrated in Carpenter's film? Or does it question the organisation of objects that we come to know as a reassuring culture or knowledge?

Could our sculpture evoke the human attachment to Things, or their apparent, ultimate disinterest in our own existence and duration?

The Thing -Third Post -Poppy-Shlockk-y Thing

15/02 1pm-3pm The Thing.
+ Essay Briefing
LEVEL2

Another 'Thing' that we should perhaps consider is the more Schlockk-y, pop cultural implications of 'The Thing', influenced partly by John Carpenter's film of that name (1982).

So you COULD also prepare for this session by ordering a messy pizza and watching a DVD of 'The Thing', or we could check-out a bit of it on You Tube in the seminar.

The point is however, that 'The Thing does also have sinister implications, it refers to some Thing while remaining unspecific, and it is this unspecified aspect which might make 'The Thing' disturbing.

John carpenter clearly drew upon this when choosing the title for his film. But how does Sculpture respond to this? Do we too make 'unspecified' 'things' which bring to the audience a slight sense of unease. And does sculpture do so according to a means which is unavailable to other arts e.g. Painting, Photography, Film etc.?

The Thing -Second Post

15/02 1pm-3pm The Thing.
+ Essay Briefing
LEVEL2

We can approach The Thing philosophically, asking the question Martin Heidegger asked 'What Is a Thing? e.g a photograph may be a thing, but is a film a Thing? A mountain may be a Thing but is a river a thing?

We can ask the question formally for Sculpture perhaps by going back to classic essays like Rosalind Krauss' 'Expanded Field', or Michael Fried's 'Art & Objecthood' or Donald Judd's 'Specific Objects'

We can ask the question taxonomically by looking at Foucault's short and entertaining preface to 'The Order of Things' (which I will mail you to read in preparation for Monday's session) or according to books like Baudrillard's 'The System Of Objects' or Neil Cummings's 'the Value of Things'.

However, we can also look at 'Things' with a kind of pathos, the way that 'Things' may belong to and define a self or humanity. Perhaps the Arte Povera movement come closest to this approach in Sculpture history. To illustrate this approach to Things I here paste a poem that I hope you will read and that we can discuss in the session.

Please make notes of any ideas or connections that occur to you while reading this and the Foucault 'Preface' -two very different approaches to 'The Thing'.

NEL MEZZO DEL CAMMIN by Bernard O’Donaghue

No more overcoats; maybe another suit,

A comb or two, and that’s my lot.

So the odd poem (two in a good year)

Won’t do to make the kind of edifice

I’d hoped to leave. Flush out the fantasy:

The mid-point being passed, the pattern’s clear.

This road I had taken for a good byway

Is the main thoroughfare; and even that

Now seems too costly to maintain.

Too many holes to fill; not enough time

To start again. “I wasn’t ready. The sun

Was in my eyes. I thought we weren’t counting”.

Soon we’ll be counting razorblades and pencils.

The Thing -first post

15/02 1pm-3pm The Thing.
+ Essay Briefing
LEVEL2

Hi, just a preliminary note to say, next Monday PM we will be discussing the issue of 'The Thing' in Sculpture. Please feel free to bring your own images, interpretations of what this might mean and we can make the session more of a Workshop.

(Apparently I am not, after all, expected to give Level Two tutorials in the morning, but I am waiting for clarification on this)

Meanwhile, stay tuned to this Blog and I will upload a text or some Thing-y quotes in good time before the session.

For me 'The Thing' is always a peculiar concern of Sculpture. In painting or Photography or film it can taken or left but in sculpture it seems we have some omnipresent responsibility to Things and thing-hood.

We can look at taxonomy, mass, virtuality and Objecthood, and, as ever, consider how The Thing in sculpture reveals itself in contemporary practices by comparing them with ideas from a History of art and thought

List of Level Two Sessions

01/02 1pm-3pm 'Need To Know Basis' - Knowledge. Empiricism & Speculation
LEVEL 2

15/02 1pm-3pm The Thing.
+ Essay Briefing
LEVEL2

01/03 1pm-3pm Art and Immorality.
+ Essay Tutorials
LEVEL 2

26/04 1pm-3pm The Changing Image of the Artist.
LEVEL 2

10/05 1pm-3pm 'Believe In Your Hands' - The act of making
LEVEL 2

Need To Know Basis' - Knowledge, Empiricism & Speculation. Level Two. Monday 1st February 2010

In Robert Smithson’s classic example of artist’s writing, ‘A Tour Of The Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey' (1967), we gain a sense of an artist inhabiting a world which is both blandly familiar and beguiling in its strangeness. (Uncanny?)

It seems to be new world, a world not even built yet in fact (Haussman-isation). Like the Sci-Fi paperback Smithson carries with him, the information this world imparts canot be called knowledge.

But is it the world, or the man moving through it that seems to make knowledge unattainable, unwanted? What is the artist’s relationship to the environment in this post-war, Amercanised landscape of spreading suburbia?

Smithson seems to pastiche or mock earlier arts, artists and artist’s writings. He tours this non-place, a short bus-ride from the city (and we can assume by now it has been consumed by the metropolis), as if he were an 18^th Century aesthete completing his education among the ruins of Rome or Pompeii. But his response is not awe or wonder at the greatness of a lost civilisation, what he sees are ‘ruins in reverse’, the emergence of a certain kind of future which he senses is not necessarily the only one or the right one.

Media play a large part in expanding and replacing ‘natural’ human senses. They are prostheses, extending or supplanting natural experience. He sees the sky through the poorly reproduced painting in a newspaper that makes it ‘newsprint grey’, his vision seems influenced by the Sci-Fi paperback he is reading, the speed of the bus and passing traffic give him a different view of the world, along with shiny paint on rows of parked cars. Most of all he is influenced by photographies, by the little ‘Instamatic’ he carries with him and which seems to make everything either valuable or not valuable depending on whether it should or should not be photographed.

When his film runs out he also becomes hungry, suggesting a link between his camera and his own energy. He talks about a bridge as a ‘photograph made of wood and steel’ and also repeatedly invokes cinema, which seems to have made life into a kind of movie.

By referring to certain constructions as ‘monuments’ Smithson connects his own practices to a long Sculptural tradition and questions the image of time, history, and the valuation of events, according to 60s America. A kind of equality, flatness, of victorious democracy perhaps (Baudelaire), or perhaps the effect of portable photography, seems to have rendered everything of equal merit. So who or what should be ;’great’ or remembered in this land without values? Rather, Smithson meditates on the banal signs, information given by the state highways or on the back of his film pack, while considering the biggest picture of the world, made of materials, and governed, not by god, man, or history, but by the inexorable force of entropy –a gift from recent science.

All this adds up to a journey of speculations, empiricism celebrating the limits of what we can know, prioritising the senses over the more presumptuous workings of the mind, holding the world at the level of a sensual encounter –all of which might seem appropriate to an artist, but which has also been the concern of certain philosophers –such as David Hume, Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty.

‘Knowledge’ becomes something fleeting, personal, never established or objective (Dion, Beuys, and the workings of the museum). The particular tools we use to gather information transform the kind of information we gather, selecting and omitting, like different filters or sieves, allowing certain things to be caught while others pass through. Carrying a camera makes Smithson see the world as a series of what he calls ‘stills’.

Smithson’s text, therefore gives us a glimpse of the artist’s relationship and responsibilities to knowledge. We could look at artists of the 1970s, like Susan Hiller or Mary Kelly, to see a perhaps more close and conscious engagement with scientific procedures and approaches to knowledge. Yet still here, we will notice that the artist holds these apparatuses at bay, keeping them ‘at arm’s length’, intent on bringing something to them that art and the artist has to contribute.

Today, artists like Charles Avery, Lindsay Seers, and Grayson Perry, all seem to claim that the artist necessarily inhabits and maintains a ‘world-of-their-own, a kind of ‘bubble’ or ‘island’ (Deleuze), even more removed and subjective than the moody journey performed by Smithson.

How do we inhabit and explore our world? What kind of locations would provide an example of the way we feel about our environment? What kind of ‘prostheses or technologies affect the way we perceive? Is our environment increasingly virtual? And what does that mean for the artist? How do we respond to our current environment? Are these still important questions for artists today? Do you have some answers?

Need To Know Basis

How do we inhabit and explore our world?
What kind of locations would provide an example of the way we feel about our environment?
What kind of ‘prostheses or technologies affect the way we perceive?
Is our environment increasingly virtual?
And what does that mean for the artist?
How do we respond to our current environment?
Are these still important questions for artists today?
Do you have some answers?