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The assessment process throws up some interesting questions / problems for both tutors and students. Hearing a reading from Joanna Moorhead’s biography of Leonora Carrington on the radio this morning and rereading the Lygia Clark text, that I had saved for Emily, prompted me to think, ‘don’t limit your (our) selves’. Whether it’s in response to the market, marks, or expectations. Reflect on the assessment and absorb, accept, challenge. A course is only an environment and a set of individuals – both students and staff – working it out as they go along.

Well done to everyone for progressing to the next stage – I look forward to exciting masters projects…

Between 1966 and 1988, a period that coincided with a personal crisis and subsequent long sojourn of exile in Europe, Clark achieved a radical conclusion to the concepts and practices that she had confronted during the 1960s. During this time, she made very simple objects out of ordinary things such as gloves, plastic bags, stones, seashells, water, elastics, and fabric. These “sensorial objects” were designed to make possible a different awareness of our bodies, our perceptual capabilities, and our mental and physical constraints. Clark’s repertoire of sensorial objects, all based on ready-made and transformed everyday tools, was meant to be activated in both contact and coordination with our body and organic functions. By matching our gestures with these simple objects, Clark intended to project an organic dimension over inert and industrial materials.

 Ultimately, Clark’s research drove her to profoundly question the status and utility of conventional works of art as means of expression. Claiming to abandon art making, she created a practice using materials applied directly to the body, engaging with her subjects in a very direct way. Among the propositions (as she called them) featured in this last section of the exhibition are works generally considered “biological architectures” and other experiential or “relational objects” from the early 1970s, which are shown here alongside original and replica devices that Clark conceived in order to allow the audience to approach relational experiences. It is only now, after her death, that this last chapter may be read in terms of the histories of happenings, performance, and public engagement as a radical form of art making.

 From MOMA press release, published here.

My first encounter with clay in 1989 provoked a storm inside me. Putting my hand in that wet mass of earth – dirt, matter – immediately a whole cosmos, a vision, presented itself. As material, clay is the perfect prototype. It carries within itself multi-form possibilities. Thus in the realm of creation, we are placed before a paradox: form limits the life force, imprisons it, but nonetheless permits it to organise itself. As the embodiment of discipline, form is at the same time the beginning of death. I was seduced by these reveries and ended up literally planting my feet on the ground and my head in matter, giving rise to a new series of works that considered these vital questions while putting process first.

Anna Maria Maiolino (1999) in Griselda Pollock, ‘Being, Making, Thinking: Encounters in Art as Life’ in Anna Maria Maiolino, ed. by Helena Tatay (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies), p.203 [Pollock’s emphasis]

It reminds me of something I wrote for my PhD:

Mute, dumb, passive. Sticky formlessness. I know what Chillida meant, when he said,

‘This material, so bland, so… awww…’

No purchase, until he had a block to interrogate.

 

Eduardo Chillida in Chillida [on VHS], dir. by Lawrence Boulting (Phaidon Video, London: Phaidon), 1996.

Chillida / Lurra

Maiolino 2012

From Steve Sales, who was not keen on ‘melancholic jokes’.

That doesn’t bother me, but Grayson Perry as ‘national treasure’ does. I can’t believe that people keep buying the shtick. But then it appears that the granting of national treasurehood often turns out, further down the line, to have been some form of collective delusion.

Yes yes yes

I’m generally left a bit cold by art with no sex in it. Not that every work of art need preoccupy itself with meditations on the subject or be confined to representations of the various physical acts. Quite the contrary; the world is already overstuffed with clichéd recreations of the blunt and bland doings of the flesh. What I mean is that I find it hard to rouse any interest in art or literature that relegates the life of the body to some lesser status than the goings-on of the mind or emotions.

[first paragraph]

We may live in sexually liberated times, but as the media moralises, the internet demonises and pornography compartmentalises almost every form of sexual expression, how liberated do any of us really feel? In the sexual realm, vulnerability, imperfection, naivety and the search for joy have become the new taboos. Fortunately, they remain the basic tools of art. Keeping sex and art together, to push against humanity’s increasing alienation from itself and the physical world, looks likely to soon become the most transgressive act of all.

[last paragraph] [my emphasis]

 

Yes yes yes!

Full article here: Guardian 20.05.17

Vulnerability, imperfection and naivety. In practice, it is difficult to be confident enough to display these. A paradox, perhaps. A bit like the embrace of failure. What is ‘good’ failure as opposed to ‘bad’ failure and how can the former be rewarded?

Good failure, I would suggest, is recognising that we don’t know much, while bringing total commitment to whatever it is we are doing and taking risks, i.e. making ourselves vulnerable through the performance of our imperfection and naivety.

This, tangentially, speaks to the over-use of jargon-heavy theory, my current hobby horse. See this post on academic hoaxing from Graham Harman.

 

I’ve been circling around Anna Maria Maiolino for a couple of years now – a very interesting artist, and I love what she does with clay (more later). The following, though, is an amusing, if barely credible, example of the extremely limited knowledge of process possessed by many theory / history types (more later), i.e. the editor, who shall remain nameless.