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some angels

the angel of never was
the angel of the one you never met
the angel of the turn in the road
the angel of ash
the angel of your breath's journey
the angel of the mistake
the angel of glancing away
the angel that was buried and not seen
the angel that did not stop you
the angel that is on the next page
the angel that is too large for you to see
the angel that is illegible
the angel that is near and far
the angel lost in the archive
the angel who brought you
the angel you mistook for a bird
the angel that was in your dream
the angel in your photograph
the angel of your last footstep
the angel of your waking
the angel you were
the angel who took it away


Technorati Tags: angel

Emblems on the Streets

I'm doing a project at work right now involving transcribing and working with listings from old Bristol directories. My work involves looking for artisans and artists and creating relationships of place and time for various trades. However, one of the things I'm struck by is the vast variety of different shop signs there must have been.

green man

squirrel

ship

ring of bells

little tower

white hart

fountain

crown

hole in the wall

bear

white horse

black horse

etc, etc. Some streets must have been teeming with animals, ships, kings and miniature architecture of all kinds. It would be an interesting art project to realise a couple of 18th century Bristol streets by their shop signs alone. Especially when we consider what the urban landscape has become because of adverisements.

Proboscis

I'm looking at www.proboscis.org.uk today and thinking about how their work overlaps into some of the territories I'm interested in. Most of what they do depends on digital media at some point- except when it doesn't. I just bought a pack of their landscape magnets and story cube templates to use in my Bibliogroup artists' book collaborative project, but I'm thinking beyond that.

I'm intrigued with the way that their practice tantalizes my thesis' grasp of book art. I'm looking at books as an inclusive matrix of different roles and legitimation contexts, something which isn't so in evidence here where publishing seems to be more about experimentation and diffusion. I'm really intrigued by the problems that trying to describe their work with publishing and books throws up. It's not, for me, about defining book art, but about coining descriptions for their role as it applies to books. I'm going to try to find out more about their work and eventually go and speak to them. I think it'll form a counterpoint to my book-artist interviews to see some people who are 'less loyal' to books.


Technorati Tags: book, research, proboscis

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Artistic Method

Is there an ‘artistic method’ which parallels the ‘scientific method’ or has postmodernism made this question redundant?  If so, why?

I'm going to a symposium on Tuesday 5th where we'll get to talk about this. It's something I could certainly do with the help in, since I am writing about how books affect this practice. I'd attack the subject here though. I think there are these methods, several among many. Postmodernism has made our basis of judging their relative value redundant, but they are still useful categories of thought. I think that there is some sort of artistic method (though no single method in the sense the subject perhaps implies from its comparison to scientific method.) However, inasmuch as a postmodernist view of scientific method reveals it as one possible paradigm (rational, logical) among several, it is in exactly the same position as artistic method, where we have seldom had such strong paradigms for 'how to do it'. Instead, we have mutitudes of empirical ways: certainly methodical, certainly strategic, but poorly-understood in terms of a theory of their function. I need some sort of theory of what artists do  in order to frame the effects that the book medium and its attendant possibilities (roles, intermedia, book-as-social-constrction, etc) has on the artists' practice. There has to be some frame of reference for me to talk about my analyses of book artists' ways of making. This would be, on some level, a framing of artistic practice, however relativized our judgement about it has to be. So what would this look like? What would I say? How would I show how these multiple 'ways' came together, how to talk about them with some thread of commonality? As 'my view'?

Research Methodology and Artistic Practice

My viva voce exam went fairly well, but pointed up one or two areas which I could do to develop more clearly. One of these was about how exactly making artwork might help me produce new knowledge. While I have a few ideas about this (outlined below) I want better ones. I want better theoretical integration/justification, and I want more/better practical strategies for producing and (scrutinising? analysing? synthesising-from?) the artwork. Hence this parking lot to throw a few ideas about. I'm also reading G. Sullivan's Art Practice as research, and I desperately want to get hold of Katy MacLeod's book, Thinking through art. Sullivan's book looks promising but is an inscrutable read for someone with my current shopping-list approach. However, it seems worth working with...

points of reference: novels

a list of possible points of reference to the research outside the usual academic spectrum

w.Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose

Jorgé Luis Borges: The Library of Babylon

www.bibliomysteries.com has some links of interest.

also...

snip:

Neil Gaiman's Sandman Library of Dreams is a pretty explicit homage to the ideal library in James Branch Cabell's Beyond Life, which thus deserves mention -- will photocopy the relevant bits if you don't have the book. Then there's poor old Lord Sepulchrave's doomed library in Titus Groan, and Borges's exhaustive `Library of Babel', and the booby-trapped library-cum-labyrinth in The Name of the Rose....Neil Gaiman's Sandman Library of Dreams is a pretty explicit homage to the ideal library in James Branch Cabell's Beyond Life, which thus deserves mention -- will photocopy the relevant bits if you don't have the book. Then there's poor old Lord Sepulchrave's doomed library in Titus Groan, and Borges's exhaustive `Library of Babel', and the booby-trapped library-cum-labyrinth in The Name of the Rose....snip

programme of work

ideas and notes towards a programme of work

the life of the book

an ideas parking lot. buzzwords and notes for a short essay I want to write.

Circulate/recur/preserve

catalogue/vicinity/serendipity (discrete and not discrete)

review

digitize

handling / physical preservation

travelling (Wesley)

promulgation, multiplicity (media history...printing)

loss- burning, disposing, crumbling, forgetting, collections split

found- secret

opened and closed

collected/enjoyed/hated/abused/reverenced

dreaming/ interiority

editions, relations

1001 nights

mythic/quasi mythic- calvino

Scratchpad for visual collection

This is a scratch list for my visual collection. The images will be hosted on Flickr and the pages on my server. I may link from these names and objects to their entries,  a link which would require a password...

Torbjorn Rodland

Photographer. Flimsy surfaces like a badly-hinged joke hint at submerged and fractured narratives. Absurd sexual frisson, dark fringed situations. Style as a container. See Contemporary no 67

http://www.contemporary-magazine.com/

Hogarth

Sung landscape masters

Spatiality, narrative and subject order. Systems of spatial representation and narrative presentation reflecting cultural factors. Perspectival system as symbolic form. ( i must read Panofsky one day !)

Roni Horn

Looking at Roni Horn in Contemporary today. Work includes "Some Thames", a work i think I read about in a Sunday supplement magazine years ago. I think it's very good work.

"Some Thames" was the work with the pictures of the Thames filling the picture field: up close images that showed the turbulent surface with all its characterful, meaningful exactitude. But a surface that nonetheless swallows up: Horn's supporting text was full of forensic reports on bodies recovered from the depth. Depth, perception, surface: embodiment, intentionality, repetition. Horn's repetitions set up relations across a series that are fascinating. "Doubt By Water" is a sequencew of images, double-sided, on plinths, where the sequence is examined...WRITE MORE

Sophie Calle/ Paul Auster

Identity, space and chance. Narratives of chance and place. The insistence of objects on coincidence.

Italo Calvino: Castle of Crossed Destinies

ditto, but with Tarot, so the objects become symbols.

Baraka/Ron Frick

Visual components/componence rhythm and editing. Solidity of intention despite nonverbal mode.

Russian Ark

A journey through a memory palace. The way the narrative drives through on one single line, but has others meshing like gears on a toothed track. Vision, layers of presence. History and research as subject. Ghosts.

Vong Phaophanit

Especially the one with the ashes and silk.

Christiane Boltanski- "les Tombeaux"-"The Tombs"

v similar to (Tulse Luper suitcases)by Peter Greenaway

What is Boltanski doing to people though? Do his commemorations victimize?

Abelardo Morell

http://www.abelardomorell.net

Photographer. Camera Obscura series is fascinating. Section on books also. Attracted to visual games, light. Sense of hermetic value. Enclosed, gamelike.

Isaac Julien- the John Soane film.

Don't Look Now (Nic Roeg)

Francesco Clemente

Sigmar Polke
R. B. Kitaj
Tom Phillips
Richard Serra
Cy Twombly
Sol LeWitt
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Joseph Kosuth
Jenny Holzer
Art & Language
Amikan Toven
Wolfgang Laib
Christo and Jeanne Claude
Starn twins
Mary Kelly
James Turrell
Joseph Beuys
Anselm Kiefer
Bill Viola
Vija Celmins
Nancy Spero
Paula rego
John Kirby
Heraldry
Susan Rothenberg
Tony Cragg
Rachel Whiteread
Joseph Cornell
Mona Hatoum
Susan Hiller
JS Bach
Eileen Lawrence
Cornelia Parker
Tacita Dean
Niki De Saint Phalle
Louise Nevelson
Sonia Delaunay
Max Ernst
David Lynch

Possible questions

What might some of the questions be that I ask other book artists?…
This is a parking lot post...

When people pick up and read your books, what do you think is happening to them? I’m interested in ideas of immersion here.
…

Does the reader have a job to do in constructing the text? ( I mean, is there a dialogue between artist and reader?

…

Do you think there is a higher idea of “book” to which all book artists- including yourself- relate?

Do you think this idea is changing? Does it need to be changed? Is it bad if it changes? Should it be resisted?

Do you think that the advent of digital information technologies and the much-heralded death of the book affect the status of artists books?

…

Do you think book arts should be thought of as a series of objects or as a strategy, a form of practice that artists use to create work and negotiate their cultural concerns? I think that these are two different ways of looking at things and that there seems to be more thought and criticism of the objects than of the artists and their strategies. These approaches are necessarily intertwined...

in terms of conception

in terms of relationship between production and concept

…

How do you address the relationship between the idea and the material? Would you say that the available means of production dictate what you can make, or would you say that if you had an idea you'd find a way to make it?

…

Do you view books as a changing or static thing in relation to your subject matter/ sources and thought. What I mean is, are they containers into which your thought can be decanted, or are they more than that?

…

What do you think the relationship between printing and book art is?
    What about digital printing?
    Is the “democratising” principle of the multiple an important issue for you?

…

What do you think the relationship between craft and book art is?

…

Do you find book art helpful in organising your practice?
    Can you compartmentalize ideas?
    Can you better express complex ideas with a structure/overarching form that aids narrative?
Do books limit you? Is this good/bad/other?
Do books change your voice?
Can you include more than one voice in a book?
Does the idea of a “strategy of containment” mean anything to you in terms of your practice?
Is a book like a game? Does it exist because of a set of constitutive rules? And is it therefore easier to temporarily separate from the world to incorporate ideas elegantly?

…

What is the relationship of books to collage? What I mean, is that simple, flat collage allows a presentation of disparate materials together on a page, whereas books (including books of collage) present pages in relationship but as an array of possibly separate "modules"

…

 

Do you use any digital tools to produce your books? Could you imagine using the files you create in another medium rather than artists books?