Believe In Your Hands - Making and Postproduction -3rd Post

Hi, thanks for a reasonably good turnout considering this time of the year and the excellent weather.

Glad we seemed to be reasonably engaged with this important issue, which is, to problematise and become vigilant about, the special responsibility we might feel, as sculptors, to the many modes of making, the Readymade, craft, industrialisation, and what Bourriaud calls 'POSTPRODUCTION'.

Given the enormous freedom we have as sculptors, making might be taken for granted but clearly becomes a CRITICAL concern i.e. something about which we feel we contribute an investigation, as specialists.

We made the point, during the session, that a sculpture student and a sculpture department may be unique in the world, in having this odd responsibility to investigate 'MAKING per se' -what IS making? How should we make? What does it mean to make THIS way & not that way? What values does the way we choose to make (or 'ready-make') add or detract from our work?

We covered that area relating to Craft as a crucial aspect of William Morris's concerns regarding encroaching industrialisation in the late 19th Century. We also noted the way the Bauhaus marked a changed role for artists in that here they subsumed some of their expression to adapt their creativity to design and mass-production.

Duchamp, the 1920s, Germany, Jazz, The Tiller Girls (as human echoes of production lines ) and Henry ford (Fordism) all helped illustrate the changing context of industrial consumerism within which art and particularly Sculpture operated in early modernity.

Interestingly, this led us into a discussion of music, which I'll briefly expand upon here. If The Tiller Girls represent the production line in an eroticised human form, then we might be able to discuss the phenomenon of Detroit (raised by one student) and the famous music that came from that city, as a sign that art is inevitably influenced by this kind of context. Detroit 'The Motor City' is the base of both Tamla Motown and some classic 80s and 90s Techno. A recent Radio show tried (quite convincingly) to make affinities with the steel mills of Sheffield and the original hardcore electronic sound of Sheffield bands like Human League and Heaven 17.

Tracing the last pages of Bourriaud's book 'POSTPRODUCTION' we finally mapped onto all this the demise of industrialisation, the rise of consumerism and Service Industries and a technological environment in which we are increasingly distanced from industry of any kind.

This is precisely the situation to which I believe the three new publications referred to in the first post below are responding i.e. making a plea for a society in which making reasserts itself as a crucial human activity.

You can follow up this Speculecture by looking again at Duchamp, the artists mentioned by Bourriaud (some contemporary, some from recent art history), by looking more closely at Germany in the 1920s, a place and time in which so much of modernity is forged, by doing the same with William Morris and The arts & Crafts Movement, or The Bauhaus.

As we also mentioned issues of making and Authorship you can pursue this theoretically via the classic Roland Barthes essay 'The Death of the Author', and numerous related texts that confirm or differ with Barthes' thesis.

Have a good summer, if I think of anything else I will add another post.