I noticed this unfinished monument in Bethnal Green, London, in the park next to the tube. It is awaiting funds for completion. It commemorates the 173 people who died in a crush of people entering the tube in 1943 to take shelter from German bombing.
It’s unfinishedness, with the front of the concrete pillar being muffled (muzzled) by a wooden box echoes the cover up of the incident during the war and in the intervening 60 odd years it has taken the local people to get something erected.
I noticed it because it reminded me of conversations I have had with Jo about her work. It also reminds me of ‘Peach’ by Jackson Sprague shown at Cole gallery East London in his solo show: A House the Size of A Head (2014). Something Pat posts (below) – about noticing not just with your eyes, but with your senses and your body. I often notice through my eyes as if they hurt with the feeling of something – its weight, touch, absence, tilt …. ‘Peach’ (below) has hanging ‘arms’, that are slightly prevented from hanging vertically by the based which just catches their ends and makes them bend.
It’s easy to think that noticing must be done with the eyes. But when we notice in everyday life, we often use our full sensory palette – we are struck by a sound, a smell, a taste, the feel of something.
Sensory noticing generally involves more than one sense at the same time. It also quite often means that we imagine beyond the immediate thing/event/action/person. So when we watch a film, we might notice an image or a sound or both as movement or a moment – but we might also imagine at the same time what this smells like. We might also imagine an emotional state accompanying this noticing.
Sometimes of course we notice an absence or we just sense something we can’t put our finger on.
Ethnographers like me want to notice and to interpret actions and events using all of our senses. This is a film used in research training; it was made as an exercise in sensory noticing, interpreting and imagining into the action/events.
In her book Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things (2009) Jane Bennett investigates “thingness” – the way in which objects can make us notice them. She suggests that thingness is an idea which “stretches concepts of agency, action, and freedom” and “dissipates binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination and organic/inorganic” (p. x). Bennett has looked particularly at trash and hoarders to help her make sense of ‘the call’ of things.
How do resources about art and artists call to those who use them?
‘to extract pictures from the flow of constant changes and from their perennial possibilities of movement…Stagnation, fixation, death should provoke change and life’
This reminded me of Spoerri’s book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance… Fluxus artist Daniel Spoerri analyses the 80 objects on his blue table, recording stories and anecdotes that arise. The book is a seemingly exhaustive catalogue / itinerary / archive of the objects found on the table on October 17, 1961 at 3.47pm. There is a drawn map of the position of the objects on the table at the back of the book.
“The procedure of the Topography, its modus operandi, is beautifully simple: a selection of objects and associations they evoke are described, and these in turn give rise to further associations in the form of anecdotes. An apparently infinite process is unleashed, like a walk taken in every direction at once’
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had time to make it shorter” Blaise Pascale (Letter 16, 1657) “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Marc Twain I don’t know what Twain’s awareness of Pascale was when he wrote the first quote, in fact I got confused trying to find the owner of this sentiment but it seems they were connected across centuries by their thoughts. We’ve invited Tony Grisoni, film maker to come and discuss editing with us, and the implications of the choice to edit or not to edit.
So far we have talked about magnetism and mess but we havent covered edit yet. What does it mean to edit or not to edit information/to modify or not to modify?
Have you used it in the last year?
Is there a way you can use it in the next week?
Does it have sentimental value?
Do you have more than one?
If you can contain it keep it.
One thing goes in and another comes out. What comes out can be made in one place and used somewhere else, once it is produced you can store it and use it days, weeks, months, or even years later.
How do we unpick this metaphor? The generator only makes one type of thing, it is sequential again but the thing it generates gives power to numerous other more chaotic things.
The generator is also used when something else is broken.
Frances Benjamin Johnston Stairway of the Treasurers Residence: Students at Work from the Hampton Album
On the very first page of Richard Sennett’s Together this image is printed. Having only read a few pages, I can’t do justice to the text itself and it’s something we’ll need to look at but Tash and I were both drawn to the picture of the staircase as a staged image of co-operation. It’s difficult to articulate why it feels so relevant – the object in the image, still under production is beginning its life as a conveyor, a passage, an elevator, a descender and all hands are committed to different aspects of its manifestation. Alice posted a comment yesterday reminding us of the importance of the object – desks, working spaces and furniture. Can stairs be added to the list?
“In “thinking through making” we can no longer regard making as a projection, as the projection of a ready made thought or concept on to raw material, or a projection of thought on matter as the traditional hylomorphic[1] model of making proposes. Rather, making is an ongoing binding together of material flows and sensory awareness. This is to think of making as a kind of weaving and to think of every artifact as a knot, something bound together out of lots of materials that all get scrunched up together or come together and all get tied up. That incidentally, is why I don’t use power point. There is a rational for this: I don’t believe in PowerPoint. When we use PowerPoint we project images on the screen; PowerPoint is the epitome of the logic of projection which I am arguing against. The reason why I like black boards is that the black board is the epitome of the process of creativity that I am arguing for. You stand at the black board and you scrape a line. Then your movement, your awareness, the trace of the materials are all bound up in that one performance and what you see is the outcome of that performance. That’s why I like blackboards” (Ingold, T)
In thinking through making Ingold suggests that the artifact cannot be understood as an idea simply projected on to a material.
Does this support our thinking that the learning resource cannot be a tool for projecting knowledge onto an artwork?
[1] Hylomorphism from the greek hyle (matter) and morphe (form). Whenever we read that in the making of artifacts, practitioners impose forms internal to the mind upon a material world ‘out there’ hylomorphism is at work.
Responsive to curiosity, interactions and things that emerge
