By way of welcome to those still arriving.

As Summer School approaches and we invite people to the Noticer I’ve been wondering what encountering it for the first time might be like. How have we made sense of it to date or is it less about sense and more about recognising and allowing space for a need to deposit a collection of resonant things in proximity to one another?

While many of the posts have sort to make connections across the various ideas being shared the reality of a blog is a much more linear affair – and a dense one at that! So how does one encounter and, if not make sense of, make friends with this proliferation of stuff so as to be able to join in? Might it be that we (posters to date) have been aided in this task by the fact that we know one another and have a sense of each other’s interests, specialisms, practices etc? How do we invite others in? How might we come to know you?

It seems to me that the impulse here is in the ‘bringing’ or the ‘offering up’ more than any notion of consumption. And perhaps this is the Noticers particular invitation; to value what(ever) arrives with it, to allow disparate ideas and experiences to find a non-hierarchical space in which to co-exist for a time. It should allow for different knowledge and different knowing, it may re-test well versed ideas or suggest other possibilities, or not do either of these things. What I think it does do is recognise the often joyous, affirming, sometimes almost physical and active state of recognition. What we are encouraged to do is to respond.

Welcome.

The dérive is tool to stimulate noticing – see Guy Debord’s theorisation in the Internationale Situationiste journal. It was specifically directed to noticing the mutual interactions of spatialities and subjectivities.

The dérive is a walk in which “participants let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (p. 62) It is a playful psycho-geographical practice.

The dérive usually involves a small group walking independently but pooling their awarenesses and impressions at the end of a designated time. They often recorded their experiences in writing and/or image.

The dérive is beyond a casual stroll and usually involves strategic experiments in the production of random-ness. These might be in the form of reconstructed maps, instructions, throwing a dice or other predetermined prompts.  An oh yes – there’s an app for that too!! This kind of guidance helps to break the invisible boundaries of habit and familiarity.

( Long youtube lecture on the Situationist Internationale and the dérive by Tyrus Miller)

Below is an extract from the opening text SOMETHING LIKE A PHENOMENA in Debra Baxter’s artist book Wanting Is Easier Than Having. Baxter’s description of how she moves through the world and her process of making speaks to Pat’s ideas of ‘noticing with the body’ and Alice’s thoughts on the power of objects – in particular the ability to form (or break in Baxter’s example) relationships between yourself and others.

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I opened the door. He looked nervous as he stepped inside my apartment. Just inside the door hanging on a nail was an amulet, or more accurately, a piece of thrift store jewelry. It had a thick chain, a horseshoe shape, and a large iridescent green stone in the center. I saw him look at it and I said “It has powers”.

I could see the color drain from his face. He told me I was delusional. He looked at the amulet and said that it was a piece of junk. Clearly, any hope for our date ended then and there.

What he failed to understand was the power of objects – real or imagined. I have spent close to 17 years since that date trying to make powerful objects and trying to understand what makes certain objects feel more potent than others.

Power is certainly not the only goal of my making, nor is “power” the only word for what I’m cultivating. I’m invested in energy, potency, strength, momentum, and reaching for the opposite; in finding strength in vulnerable places. Pressing opposites against each other is a large part of my practice. Over the years these themes keep surfacing:

Inhaling – Exhaling

Believing in – Giving up

Wanting – Having

Protected – Exposed

Something like a phenomena. Like the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s song, my work is grounded in a bodily experience – a phenomenon that is indescribable that slides into the divine. In a interview Shirazeh Houshiary describes the sublime in her work:

“The object and the images which the artist creates have their place in the external world, but their essence and meaning are conceived in an inner world, and this internal world is an intermediate space between body and soul… So that the finished work is a real experience of continual becoming. Art making is subject to movement and ascension and descension, it it not born of the body, it becomes it.”

This becoming is how I make my way through the world. The way I experience making and seeing art is through my body. When I love a piece of art, I become physically stirred by it. I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach or an expansion in my chest, and it’s hard to put it into words.

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Later in the book in a text called PLUS AND MINUS  Sara Krajewski describes Baxter’s practice as an ‘additive process’,  a process that sees ‘adding’ as suggesting wanting – the desire to have and hold something or someone.  An acquisitive moment. Krajewski then describes ‘subtracting’  as a realization of  ‘the fear of having, once you hold something, the thought of losing it haunts you.’ I think this PLUS AND MINUS or ‘additive’ process relates to Alice’s post about gathering/stickiness/persistence and how noticing not only moves forwards, but also backwards, sideways and around.

Avery Gordon looked at a photograph taken at an early meeting of pioneer psychoanalysts. She noticed that someone was absent – a young woman who had been Jung’s lover and then a patient of Freud’s. Sabina Spielrein was listed as being at the gathering, yet she was missing from the official portrait. Why was this so, Gordon wondered. Her book Ghostly Matters investigates the missing Sabina and other ‘hauntings’.

Gordon  sees the recognition – the noticing – of ghosts as a profoundly political matter :

I used the term haunting to describe those singular and yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what‟s been in your blind field comes into view. Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in linear time, alters the way we normally separate and sequence the past, the present and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. As I understand it, the ghost is not the invisible or the unknown or the constitutively unknowable, in the Derridean sense. To my mind, the whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, demands your attention. Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way, I tried to suggest, we‟re notified that what‟s been suppressed or concealed is very much alive and present, messing or interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed towards us. 

Gordon’s concern is with the ghosts of trauma, exploitation and genocide and how they haunt everyday life, events, conversations. She sees the noticing of these ghosts as a call to action, not a reason to lament or  memorialise.

Gordon, A (2011) Some notes on haunting and futurity. Borderlands 10(2) p. 4

I remember going to see Patrick Keillor’s London at the ICA back in 1994. I’d only been a year in London and I’d just moved in to a flat in Battersea. I loved the film and Scofield’s telling of a London flaneur Robinson. But one short scene near the beginning is the thing that resonated with my own wonderings. Pat has mentioned noticing with your body and there is nothing like being new to a city to heighten this.   The depiction of the gateposts (5’57” – 6’34″) is by a brief verbal introduction, followed by the laying of the sounds of the park over the locked off shot of the Victorian sandstone columns. I remember enjoying the simple device and the implication that the post absorbs and emits the sounds of the events in its range.

Perhaps because I have been thinking about gathering as an active process that holds within it a history and particular genealogy I increasingly ‘picture’ the relationship between things visually, as a web (Meshwork – Ingold) that recognises where ideas hail from as well as what they are. A person (or thing – the Noticer) might be the reason that things find their way together and in a particular order but might not that responsibility also necessarily rest with the objects/ideas themselves and the very many connections and recommendations that led to their discovery? What and who is the driver for our desire to make connections and is it (when is it) a social, connected impulse as it is here on this blog?

I recently gave Leanne a book, The Company She Keeps, Celine Condorelli, that I haven’t read yet (see Leanne’s comment on Co-operation) but which I believe talks about friendship, perhaps in relation to making, talking, working:

‘Perhaps one of my favourite definitions of cultural production is of “making things public”: the process of connecting things, establishing relationships, which in many ways means befriending issues, people, contexts. Friendship in this sense is both a set-up for working and a dimension of production.’

My picture of the things I’m thinking about and am interested in always comes with a picture of and interest in the person from whom it arrived.

A new discovery. These artists take architectural, literary and visual sources and construct and depict absurd proposals for new constructions/cities.

Bandstand Library Service Station…(Auge)

A short time spent in the collection …

We’ve talked about how the Noticer might hold and record the information it draws towards it. We’ve talked about furniture.

Trevelyan talked about ‘a sort of mythology of cities, of fragile structures’

The structure of a sleepless night…

Beuy’s production and storage of energy: the energy of clay.

‘taking a walk with a friend, who stops on occasion and points to a scene, saying “Take a look at that”‘ – Noticing with others…