Gilbert Place, WC1

After class, a little wander on the way to CAA for the preview of the latest show. Gilbert Place isn't exactly a dark alley, but I doubt I've walked down it before. It's rather gloomy but has a few interesting reflections of windows on windows -The magic of digital technology (and Photoshop) brings the top windows out of the gloom (I didn't use flash) -
but the manipulation lost the reflection in the photo - here it is closer up -
At the end of Gilbert Place is the cheery comfort of the London Review Bookshop, where this tempted me (but I resisted) -
and this tempted me (but I resisted) -
I did buy Bridget Riley's collected writings on art, because of reading something enlightening by her in the London Review of Books, and because of dipping into it ("The Eye's Mind") and reading this:

"The scroll paintings in that exhibition of Chinese art at the British Museum were made by scholar poets, painter poets. After seeing the exhibition, I bought a book about the criteria by which these works were assessed. The Chinese had very, very exacting standards. They developed a way of judging based on the spirit, mood and feelings conveyed by the paintings. Shih, as I seem to remember, has to do with 'alive-ness'. The informality of the little brush marks means that they required great discernment. No matter how facile and vivid the brush marks might be, unless they were imbued with a basis truth, Li, the scroll painting was worthless. I liked the way in which the criteria were to do with states of being, and that the paintings conveyed frames of mind."

The illustrations consist of her paintings, and others ranging from Egyptian tomb decorations to Bruce Nauman.

Ceramics week 9

Two empty kilns -and here are some of the things that came out of them this week - my "mouths of hell" and "strange sea creatures", more of which next week perhaps...
Some shapes made of slabs, with patterning inside and out, and even some pins in the clay -
Pins were everywhere - in these slabby pieces made of crank clay (the ones in the picture above are white clay, Draycott) -
I spent the entire day glazing. First, grouping things according to their stage (biscuit firing, earthenware, or stoneware) -
The stoneware glazes I'm mostly happy with - or rather, won't be doing any more with -
The biscuit-fired lot includes this week's new things, as well as some I'd forgotten about; they'll be glazed eventually, if only to find out what happens "if" -
And the rest - some pinchpots from week 1 and some slabs from week 2, and some rings from week 3 (or was that week 2) that suddenly appeared on the shelf - and hiding in the corner, the saggar fired items -
I tried to be systematic with the glazing because it was all getting rather confusing! Here's my "system" in action -
I wrote down which glazes I might use (clear, white, black) and found similar pots to try them on at earthenware and stoneware temperatures, to see what would happen. The empirical approach. Very instructive, no doubt -
This lot is going in the stoneware kiln -
I get impatient to see the results, but have to wait till next week - and then a whole bunch of stuff happens the next day and then it's the weekend and then Monday is for office work, and then Tuesday is back to class (core subjects), and suddenly it's ceramics day again - the week passes in a flash.

No progress on the essay in the past 36 hours, but I'm hopeful that it's all percolating in the subconscious and will come pouring out at the 11th hour (nothing like a bit of pressure, is there!). There was quite a lot of discussion along the lines "how are you coming along with your essay" in class today, unsurprisingly.

Core studies week 9

A day for "personal work", as Core Studies will mostly be from now on. I'd brought various things - too many perhaps - the essay, my sketchy ruminations from last week, the "statement of intent", the sketchbook, my tuesday-notebook, the little notebook, the to-do list -- and a flask of coffee. It was hard to get settled in and get on with something useful.
Some people went off to the UCAS fair to find out about undergraduate degree courses all round the country - which left lots of empty spaces at lunchtime -
One bit of new knowledge was a quick lesson in using this old-fashioned instrument, the parallel rule - Jo brought in the one that belonged to her dad. (This bit of technology isn't part of the curriculum!) You hold down the little knobs and "walk" it down the page to draw parallel lines -Other bits of new knowledge came from the drawings I made, after flicking idly through a book on sculptor Richard Wilson. His "interventions" got me thinking about interior spaces -

which led - after conversation with one of the tutors about liminality, especially spaces between walls - back to a photo that Betty sent a couple of months ago, of the damage to her house - which needed the rain-soaked interior walls to be removed, a rather drastic bit of domestic archaeology. This ties in with my own history of watching my father build, from the ground up, several of the family's houses. (There was also a family house disaster, when it burnt to the ground.) And it recalls my own domestic archaeology, renovating the house in Halifax and the flat I live in now.
I think this - house walls, Canadian-style - will be the new direction for my project - it fits the theme of "inside outside in between" in several ways. I just need to get past the emotional burden.

Art I Like - Mierle Laderman Ukeles

I like the sound of what she's doing, so I tried to fit her into the "land artist" category -- some of her concerns with human systems as they relate to "the earth" just about get there -- but really she's probably better in the "public art" category. (Sometimes we like to have categories.)

Mierle Laderman Ukeles is an artist addressing the problems that progress creates. Her speciality is garbage. Waste needs maintenance, and she's been doing garbage-related works for decades. Since 1977 she's been (unpaid) resident artist for the New York sanitation department. Touch Sanitation was her first project. According to this article, "She drew attention to the maintenance of urban ecological systems in general and the use of pejorative language to represent "garbage men" in particular. Ukeles traveled sections of New York City to shake the hands of over 8500 sanitation employees or "sanmen" during a year-long performance. She documented her activities on a map, meticulously recording her conversations with the workers. Ukeles documented the workers' private stories, fears, castigations, and public humiliations in an attempt to change some of the negative vernacular words used in the public sphere of society. In this way, Ukeles used her art as an agent of change to challenge conventional language stereotypes."

In 1983 she put mirrors on the garbage trucks that follow along and clean up after parades -"Reclaiming waste materials and waste environments in an effort to create a new relationship with our material world" according to one of the books I was reading this morning.

In 1969 she sat down and wrote a manifesto: Maintenance Art. "If I am the artist, and if I am the boss of my art, then I name Maintenance Art," she said in this interview, 40 years on.

I like the sound of this project too: I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day (1976) was a performance/project exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ukeles collaborated with 300 hundred maintenance staff at a bank in Manhattan. She took Polaroid photographs of men and women doing routine jobs and asked them to discuss their labor as either art or work. Jobs were often discussed by the same person, at different times, in different ways. Later, she exhibited the workers' narrative statements alongside pictures of their daily chores. She asked viewers to challenge the social constructions of aesthetic and cultural values that define what work and art mean.

See more photos of her work here - and this one shows use of recycled "glasphalt" in a park/reclamation project -

Jonathan Ellery at Wapping

To Wapping on a dark damp evening, to the opening of a show by Jonathan Ellery. First a drink at the Prospect of Whitby, nice old pub dating from 1543 with view of river at high tide and Canary Wharf beyond -Wapping Power Station has been converted to an exhibition space and a restaurant, with some of the original machines left in place. The exhibition space was the old boiler room; at the back was the coal store. The work is engraved, reflective metal, lit to cast shadows of the images on the floor. In the coal store, the video of the artist's book that is splayed on a very long table the right of the gallery. The video has a sound track of swelling, overwhelming sound - if you're standing in the alcove at the time, the brickwork shakes with it.
I loved the way the edges of the metal caught and focused the light -
Ellery comes from a design background, and part of his art is making books - there's an interview with him here.

The Wapping Project was the site of a most amazing exhibition years ago - in fact Conductor was the inaugural exhibition in 2000 - Jane Prophet flooded the gallery with 74 tonnes of water, then had 120 electroluminescent cable suspended from the ceiling, vertically into the water. You stood on the viewing platform and listened to the occasional drip of water, watching the ripples make the long green reflections shiver. It was magic.

Sculpture week 8

The 5-minute talk was on Nancy Spero (1926-2009), who studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, then lived in Paris till returning t0 the US in 1950. Her work, on paper and in installations, is largely about war and the abuse of power, and she's a pioneer of feminist art. The work incorporates Greek and Egyptian motifsas well as lingerie advertisements. Some is ephemeral - paintings on walls that then get painted over. "it's are because I say so", she said. Some of the works shown were Black and the Red 2003 - a Jacquard tapestry
and Maypole / Take No Prisoners - the heads are just cardboard with drawings on - a lesson in presenting 2D knowledge in a 3D context.While finding these images I spotted Cri du Coeur 2005 -The sculpture room shelves needed clearing of our work, so I set to with files on the hardened clay on my carved piece. Lots of dust - work outdoors and wear a mask -The rough "inside"
and a smoother "outside" - (not sure where "in between" is here)
My starting point "sketch" - what that form evolved from, once I got beyond 2D -
This "B" is modelling clay painted with pva to keep it from crumbling - later I'll paint it with acrylic and we'll use it as a doorstop - it's about 8" long. The other piece is twice that size and four times as heavy - it'll be fired and then glazed.

My "outdoor project" is coming together at last - here are the ingredients, sticks and paper. The primed sticks have been painted with silver enamel, which hardly shows - just a bit of gleam. The handmade paper needs dipping in wax.
Some samples of ladders - crocheted and with rungs of dictionary pages, then dipped in wax. Just as I was fiddling with the wax pot, the fire alarm went off - because the wax pot being used on the floor below had overheated. (Somewhere in the dusty strata of the treasure trove known as my workroom - though recently it has become more of a storeroom than a place for creative work - are the cut pages saved from the altered book project ... )
Simple seems to be best - this one is just doubled string, knotted, with the rungs inserted into the knots -
Just need to make some more paper and wax it; join the sticks at the base with other, short sticks; staple paper to the sticks; make, wax, attach ladders; find stones to weight it down - and hope for the best - nearly done!

Ceramics week 8

Making a two-piece mould for slip casting. The "air" above the fruit and clay will be filled with plaster - but there are a few things to do first. To cast the figurine, you need a three-part mould - or you can block off the space between the ears and do some manipulations later - this all feels very complicated!

Back to the two-part mould - you need to make a hole to pour the clay in - that's done with a cone of clay that's cut in half. And you need those dimples (make them by twirling a small coin in the clay) to align the two halves of the mould.The plastic (or card) is held securely with more tape, and clay logs tucked firmly round the base. Plaster will be poured in, so you don't want it to leak out. And that wall needs to be strong.
Casting the mould had to wait for later. At the time I was sure I'd never use this - but never say never - writing about it, I can see possibilities. Unfortunately by the time the rest of the process was demonstrated, I was wrapped up in my own work. It took a long time to get going on my own stuff in this class - my mind is full of the "outdoor project" in sculpture, and also clogged with "how do I get the ceramics and the sculpture working together, now that I have a theme". So most of the morning was thinking time - it was 12.30 before I got to the clay. "Will do better next time" - class time is limited, after all!

Here's what came out of the kiln. The black slip looks very brown after bisque firing - I'll use white, black and clear glazes on these experiments.
These three with their "velvet black" stoneware glaze provided a lesson - on dusty pots, the glaze sticks to the dust and you get crawling - irregular glazing. So, sponge them off before glazing. Next time!
Other experiments were with forms (cut from foamcore), starting with houseplans-that-stick-up-in-the-air
and moving along to non-rectangular pieces, and remembering to use the third dimension - something I need more practice at -
These are "slushing around in the subconscious" and I need to look harder at them, play more, draw some, cut different ones. Not sure where this is going - at some point the subconscious, having eaten enough, will give out a geyser-like burp, and The Idea will arrive.

After lunch, some glazing - these unclaimed pots are going in to the pot sale -
and a dreadful warning - if you don't clean your pots' bottoms, they will stick to the kiln shelf -
I hope I wiped this one well enough, and that all this glaze doesn't drip -
At the end of the day I had some more slip-patterned, embossed slabs, and scary-looking "mouths of hell" with pins stuck into them. Not sure if the pins will survive, or what other technical problems might arise (this is all stabs in the dark still) - or even if the Mouths of Hell fit into my theme, which I'm trying to focus closely on (inside, outside, in between).
Something for next week - screen printing with slip on cardboard.

Maya Lin's Wavefields (and other art)

After watching the video of Maya Lin again, talking about her three Wavefield earthworks, and looking at lots of photos, I'd really like to go visit them. It will have to be a vicarious visit for now - fortunately there are lots of photos on the internet.The most recent is in New York state, at the Storm King art centre, which until Nov 15 also has an exhibition that includes Pin River, made of tens of thousands of straight pins set into the gallery wall, creating the illusion of a shadow image of the Hudson River system - here's a closeup of part of it (love those shadows) - There are three of the Wavefields. The one at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1995) has waves 3-5 feet high – “you can sit in it, it’s very intimate in scale” she says.The second, Flutter (Miami, 2005) has waves a foot high, like how water travels over sand “a very different relationship when you walk through it”.(Image is from this blog, which also shows the adjacent courthouse and points out the dangers of photography in public spaces.)

Storm King has seven rows of waves over 300 feet long and 12-18 feet high, “much larger so that you become lost in it” -Trained as an architect, Maya Lin works in three formats - art, architecture, and memorials. She says: "Especially in the art, I've gotten back to my first love and interst, which is science and nature and the environment, so I'm always trying to reveal in my art a little bit about nature that literally is invisible to us." To do so she (or rather her technicians) use technological methods like sonar resonance and satellite mapping.

An intriguing piece is a world map, in relief, that she calls Ten Degrees North - it's made in 52 longitudinal segments which you can shift about so that you can have, for example, Australia at the centre of the map - shift your world view.

Her Systematic Landscapes exhibition, which is touring in the US, sounds fascinating. Here's an image from that show -And not to forget that her famous Vietnam War memorial can be seen as a piece of land art too - the black wall with the 57,000 names is backed by earth; it looks like the land has split - and the polished stone reflects the sky. When she saw the site she "wanted to cut it open and open up the earth and polish the earth's edges" -The Academy of Achievement website has an interview with Maya Lin. With her elder brother she made"a piece for the Cleveland Public Library called "Reading A Garden." The centerpiece is a pool of water, and the title of the piece, "Reading A Garden" is spelled backwards but reflects forward in the water, which clues you in that this is a poetry garden. It's a poem laid out three dimensionally. It's all about words and the directionality and weight of reading."

She says: "I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. It's making people aware of nuances, changes in depth, height, making you aware of perceptions in a very, very subtle level. Focusing you on a new way of looking at your surroundings, at the land. That's art to me" and "One of the key things in the architecture is that I want always to have you feel connected to the landscape so that you don't think of architecture as this discrete isolating object, but in a way it frames your views of the landscape, which is a very Japanese notion. So that the house is a threshold to nature, or basically begins to explore our relationship to nature. "

"Handmade"

'Tis the season of pre-xmas craft fairs. This is Handmade, held at Chelsea Old Town Hall.Though we chatted with quite a few makers, including Carol Farrow (paper) and Martin Ward (paint), I didn't take photos - only this jewellery that caught my friend's eye - it's by Rachel McKnight -

Core studies week 8

Something different in the arrangement of the room - today we are to be an audience?Indeed we have a visiting artist - Yara El-Shebini - her work is live art, installation inviting audience participation - it's about how we explore knowledge and perceive the world, and the role and function of the artist. She's recently exhibited "A Rather Trivial Pursuit", in which she's rewritten the questions of the board game. For the New York showing, she rewrote the questions to take the cultural context into account. "Socially Engaged" tampers slightly with the wording of a loo door that was already in the gallery. "Universality Challenge" uses teams of (invited) players and an audience - its questions are meant to generate ideas in the minds of viewers. She also runs pub quizzes, usually as part of an art event that's already going on; she's written a joke book and even performed a comedy routine. The life of an artist can take many forms....
But even more fascinating than her work were her revelations about existing as an artist - how to get paid. Where do you start and how does it go on from there? Most artists end up doing lots of education activities - that's their bread and butter. Getting work shown can be a random process - either one thing leads to another ... or it doesn't. Getting know be curators seems to be rather important...they have the power.

After the tutors gave us an example of assessment/critique by looking at each other's work, we got to do some assessing ourselves. Everyone set up the project-in-progress that they'd brought along, so that there were lots of mini-exhibitions around the room -
As I'm currently so fixated on "the outdoor project" mine showed the work towards that - the house on stilts with its ladder, the rubbings that are working towards ideas for the walls, the samples of handmade paper dipped in wax, and "something I prepared earlier" - handmade paper embossed with bits of clothing, which has been living under the bed and in my subconscious for years. And from bookmaking days, the little house-book inside the big window might-be-part-of-a-book.These might seem somewhat unrelated but they "feel" related - and it was sometime during the day that the words defining my theme suddenly surfaced: Inside, Outside, In Between. What a difference a title makes - it felt like a real breakthrough, and like a weight had been lifted - the weight of all those might-have-been project possibilities - now I can easily reject them, can focus and clarify the intention and manifest the message (I hope). Not that I'm into messages, as such; for me, presenting an artwork to an audience is not about hitting people in the face and getting them all edgy; it's more a matter of giving them a "place" where they can open their minds, or even relax. And this engagement, to get back to this idea that artists spend so much of their working life in "education", can also be a matter of taking part in an activity - our hour of silent stitching in Chunghie Lee's workshop comes to mind.

For the assessment activity, we worked in pairs and critiqued two displays. The categories reflected those in the Statement of Intent (the SOI) that we are producing about our work (more about that later, no doubt!) -
1. What work is being produced? What things could be made to develop themes/idea?
2. What influences do you see or recommend? What starting points do you see or recommend? What contextual references do you see or recommend? What bibliography/reading do you recommend?
3. Recommended techniques, edia and processes. Possible timescales.
4. Recommended assessment theods for the project? How would you know when it is succeeding?
And lastly - working title or theme. The filled-in sheet was left with the work, for the maker to ponder.

My co-assessor and I seemed to concentrate most on section 2, and tried to go beyond the work shown in terms of context and recommended reading. Fortunately he knew about lots of films and current references; my knowledge is mostly "the old stuff". When I read the assessment of my own work, I was disappointed not to see a similar "stretching". But before reading it, I revisited the questions as if I was looking at unknown work, and that was a useful exercise. Yara went round and had a chat with each of us, and suggested I look at the work of Susan Hiller.

Lots of interesting things happening in people's work around the room. I was fascinated by the way Laura found her painting subject matter - she cut a square hold through a magazine, and arranged the squares in page order. The only element of choice was which side of the page to display. This random juxtaposition looks like a great way to get unrelated elements bouncing off each other and generating ideas. (And it fits the "In Between" criterion of my theme ...)

Attention

As I walked through the park I noticed a toddler standing in a pile of fallen leaves under a tree - just standing - and near him was a big ball. In the background, his mother, busy texting on her mobile phone. As I walked past the mother continued to text, the toddler continued to stand, and the ball waited too.
Something about the scene got me thinking about our constant use of communication technology - yet the important thing here should have been the mother and child communication - or rather, attention. We have so many things needing attention; what should we be paying attention to?

Note the word "paying" - complete attention is a costly commodity. A rare one too, perhaps?
Coincidentally, these thoughts on the effects of technology arrived in my inbox:

"the essential element to recognize is how much of what we call "progress" is accompanied by and measured by the fact that human beings need less and less conscious attention to perform their activities and lead their lives.

"The real power of the faculty of attention, unknown to modern science, is one of the indispensable and most central measures of humanness -- of the being of a man or a woman -- and has been so understood, in many forms and symbols, at the heart of all great spiritual teaching of the world. The effects of advancing technology, for all its material promise they offer the world (along with the dangers, of course) is but the most recent wave in a civilization that, without recognizing what it was doing, has placed the satisfaction of desire above the cultivation of being.

"The deep meaning of many rules of conduct and more principles of the past -- so many of which have been abandoned without our understanding their real roots in human nature -- involved the cultivation and development of the uniquely human power of attention, its action in the body, heart and mind of man. To be present, truly present, is to have conscious attention. This capacity is the key to what it means to be human.

--Jacob Needleman, in Time and the Soul

Drawing "a line" while on tube journeys embodies the attention to the moment - it marks, and captures, time.

Look behind the label

Ceramics week 7

This is what went into the kiln, to be fired to stoneware -
and this is what came out - the largest dimension might be 16cm -Some of my favourites - the tin glaze makes a nice caramel edge -
This slab was rolled out on a textured cloth, dark glaze (tenmoku I think) brushed on and sponged off, then applied to the textured side, and the slab rolled up a bit -
More dabbing on of glaze and sponging off - with transparent glaze on top of it all -
Pinch pots with different clays inside and out, the one on the left painted inside with tin glaze; the one on the right had the bottom dipped and some glaze dribbled -
I was aiming to make textures on slabs and by chance discovered that you could print with the wet clay, if only onto the bench -
So, why not paint the slab with slip, and print with that -- and then roll it out a bit more to distort it slightly -
This biscuit-fired bowl got slip painted on and then sponged off -
Another aim was to make some holes -
Here's what's going for biscuit firing - plain and using black slip -
The glossy snakey bits got discarded. The pinch pots have velvet black glaze and are going into the stoneware kiln.

Chord

Kingsway tram tunnel. The installation is by Conrad Shawcross - it's a few minutes' walk.Up to the 1950s, trams ran underground here -
This is what it looks like now -complete with props left over from filming -
Photos of the artwork itself weren't permitted - here are a couple of publicity shots -
And my photo of the shadow of the twisting rope -
On the way out, this little pueblo of bricks is being stored in a niche -
Back to daylight -
Shawcross says this rope line is a way of understanding time - a metaphor for defining what time is - the rope swaps space for time. He uses an aesthetic of functionality. A similar work in 2003, The Nervous System (a "periously rickety" feat of "simplistic complexity"), also "wove" a rope -On his later projects he's worked with an engineer. One such is the Space Trumpet, in the atrium of a corporate building - it moves to a new position at midday and is based on early devices used for listening for airplanes -See more of his work here.

Sculpture week 7

I was horrified to realise that my camera was still sitting at home. So while we were getting the materials out, I did a quick sketch of the arrival of the sheet of plywood -After that there was lots of information about choosing and using various types of wood - things I didn't learn at my father's knee (he was building houses after all, not making sculpture).

The 5-minute talk was on Bruce Nauman, born 1941, American, trained as a painter - who had the great realisation, "whatever I do in my studio is art" - and proceeded to do things that required complex thinking and simple execution. He often used sound and text - eg in his neon signs, and in an empty, dimly lit room full of whispers. Is looking at how words fill space a form of sculpture?

Here's one of his early neon works - "the true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths"and here's "15 pairs of hands" - it was interesting to realise that the plinths would have to be metal, and weighted, to support the cast bronze -
Then, to work on our "outdoor project" - I'm still changing mine. I'd brought in some samples of handmade paper joined with microtagsand other more ambitious shapes and sizes, waxed for durability and luminosity -all working towards the idea of a "house on stilts" - I'm still obsessed by the idea of using non-alphabetic languages, and ladders, but had a little sidetracking into houses on stilts (and igloos!) being places of safety as well as places to meet and communicate
While building a couple of examples, I came up with various things that might be used as legs - pencils, saw blades, paintbrushes, drinking straws, nails, plastic flowers (eg long stemmed roses) - and started thinking about how the qualities of materials, such as the bendiness of tracing paper that's been rolled up, might be used -
Here's the latest development -But this one (which I prepared earlier) is something to work on another time -

Women and land art

Revisiting yesterday's essay plan in the light of Olga's comment, I realised that not only had I omitted to define "land art"/"earth art", my chosen artists were all western white men. What about sites and artists not in or from the US or Europe? What about women?

Some women land artists come to mind immediately - Nancy Holt, best known for her Sun Tunnels (1973-6) - this is the iconic image, but have a look at others here -Mary Miss (Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys, 1977-8) -Maya Lin's wave fields (video here) -hmm, bit of a pause now ... no others come to mind ... bear with me while I do some research...

Jeanne-Claude de Guillebon (of "Christo and Jeanne-Claude" fame) - here's their Gates in Central Park, New York -Agnes Denes (Wheatfield - A Confrontation, 1982) - here's the 2009 version in London -Alice Aycock, with her "unerring ability to convey contradictory notions within a single sculpture" (NY Times, 1990). Her early proposals for earthworks are body-sized and body-related, and many of her early works paly upon fears and fantasies of burial. "Low Building with Dirt Roof for Mary" (1973) can only be entered by crawling; she wrote that "The sense of claustrophobia inside is increased by the knowledge that the exterior surface of the roof is covered by a mound of earth ([weighing] approximately 7 tons)." Cuban artist Ana Mendieta and her "earth body art" (using body to direct our attention not only to the landscape itself, but also to how it is experienced) -perhaps even Tacita Dean in her "Search for the Spiral Jetty" 1997 - one of a number of recent artists who have embraced the making of journeys as part of their practice - inspired by the way in which the siting of works in remote locations brought the journey to see them into the compass of the work (I'm quoting from Ben Tufnell's "Land Art", Tate Publishing 2006).

That publication also says "while earthworks constituted a male-dominated genre, in the field of body and landscape art a number of female artists were prominent". Mendieta we've briefly looked at; "both Miss and Aycock attempted to create 'real-time and real-space scenarios' through sculptural and architectural works that the audience might enter and interact with, thus creating a kind of stage for participation and experience."

So, to get to the definition of the genre - land art is about more than earthworks, it's about the experience of the land. It needn't consist of interventions - and often the "art product" is documentation.

Which takes me back to Olga's question: how would Aboriginal art fit into this? My first thought is that Aboriginal identity is so tied up with the land, and permitted art arises from those ties, that this would be better considered under essay question number 4: "Drawing on specific examples, discuss the ways in which historical and contemporary creative practitioners explore issues of personal/group and/or cultural identity." However this article mentions Yukultji Napangati, who "paints an insider's view of the land, conveying a deep empathy with place and emphasising the process of painting from within her lifetime experience of that place and its stories" - though to an outsider the painting is reminiscent of modern abstraction.The research also turned up some "land art"/"ecological art" sites in South Africa, and an Australian artist, Andrew Rogers, whose “Rhythms of Life” project is said to be the largest contemporary land-art undertaking in the world, consisting of geoglyphs (stone sculptures) in 12 sites around the globe -

Essay plan

Time to get cracking on writing “The ESSAY” for this term. I love doing the research and looking out for something interesting and hopefully new to say – well it will be new to me, if not to the lecturer!

My topic is: "The land is not the setting for the work, but part of the work – Walter De Maria, land artist. Discuss the role of context/location in relation to historical and contemporary art or design practice, referring to at least three examples.

At least three examples, and up to six. So, in as-they-came-to-me order: 1, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field (New Mexico).

2, Dani Karavan’s Ma’alot (Cologne).

3, Richard Long’s mud paintings, for example the Heaven and Earth trigrams in the first room of the recent show at the Tate.

4, something by David Nash – maybe his wooden boulder -

And passing reference to Robert Smithson’s non-sites, James Turrell’s Sky Spaces, Chris Drury’s work (the dew ponds?), maybe even Andy Goldsworthy and Christo.

5, perhaps Claudi Casanovas’ Els Vencuts – no, too much of a historical monument – could you argue that it commemorates local heroes, hence that a sense of locality and history is part of, necessary to, the work? You could say that of Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial too – how does commemoration fit together with “the land” – can “the land” be a mental place, a shared history rather than a mapped or perceived geographical place? That’s going a bit deep for 2500 words – and why don’t I just take the easier, straight-forward route...

I’ll be touching on the idea of siting sculpture (rather than memorial objects) outside – especially in sculpture parks; of secular pilgrimage; and the origins of “land art” in that tumultuous time, the late 60s. (I was there! – but just waking up to art, via reproductions of Chagall in the area of the university library where I went to study. Nearby, though (in Vancouver), Robert Smithson was doing a Glue Pour.)

Process, materials, minimalism, these will get a mention. How do they get accepted as artists (and paid), and how does their work translate to the gallery situation...

That’s the plan. Coming soon – more information on the artists. But first I have to go clean the fridge, scrub the oven with a toothbrush, that kind of thing ...

Investment

In 1962 Andy Warhol made "200 One Dollar Bills" - part of a seminal series of silk screened canvases.
On 11 November it's up for auction at Sotheby's. The collector who's selling it paid, in 1986, the record price of $385,000 - now it's expected to fetch $8m-$12m. Not bad, for an artist who started as a commercial illustator.

Guy Fawkes night

The 5th of November is Guy Fawkes night - a signal for bonfires and fireworks - bang bang bang. This evening I was washing the windows (something that's been burning a hole in my to-do list) and watching displays now and then. And when there was a particularly spectacular one, it took too long to get the camera to capture it - it had finished. So - you'll have to imagine the fireworks in the dark space at centre top, above the grocery store (open till 11pm) and beside the flats over the betting shop (which has its sign lit up all night!). So nice to live on a lively street.

But usually the municipal firework displays are held at the weekend nearest 5th November - fingers crossed for good weather. Alarmingly, Halloween seems to be gaining popularity at the expense of Guy Fawkes....

Done and dusted

Taking the quilt pic with the "grown up" camera -
And sending off the photos, as well as the 20cm fabric sample -Getting the colour right on the photos was ... suboptimal. Never mind, it's gone to meet its fate. On to the next thing.

"Love book", page 2

As November is Art Every Day Month (what, you didn't know?? it's not too late, start now!) and as there is talk of a "book journey" challenge-type-thing on AQL, I'm doing a "love book" - cataloguing some of the everyday objects I love.

Page 1 was my yellow cups - rather a lame drawing and not colourful, not even drawn with a yellow crayon!

This morning while waiting for the kettle to boil I drew these favourite tumblers, and then found all the red scraps in a magazine that was conveniently to hand in the recycling bin -Annabel is spurring me on. She's in the midst of making numerous books. But I'm not competitive, oh no ... not at the moment ...

Looking at this at one remove (in a photo rather than "in real"), I think it needs a smooth coating of ... something ... to integrate all those bits of paper and make the surface resemble the surface of the glass object.

No idea what I'll add tomorrow - it'll be a surprise.

Strange sculptural objects

At the Natural History Museum on a rainy Sunday, amid the hordes of families queuing to see the dinosaurs, these objects in an alcove caught my eye -They're wasp nests made by three different species in Brazil. Here's a closeup -
Local wasp nests aren't so grand, but do have an interesting structure. On the isle of Skye, wasps build their nests in the heather, as shown here.

Of course wasps can be a pest in late summer, but nests should be left undisturbed - the entire colony will die out in the autumn and the queen will go into hibernation. Then the nest can be removed.

Core studies week 7

Back to classes after "reading week", starting with a morning of talking in groups of six about our "collection" and what we're heading towards as a project. That was really good - both seeing how other people were approaching it, and getting input on your own from different perspectives. I was amazed at how much work people had done both gathering their collections and working on them subsequently. The topics/starting points in my group were: gestures (women abstracted from famous paintings); mapping memories; received ideas; bioluminescence; comics. Helen took notes on all of them -
Also helpful was explaining yet again what it is you think you might be doing - "I know what I think when I hear myself talk". My "imagined interiors" (not "imaginARY"!) are quite difficult to explain. Partly because they are mysterious to me, I can't put into words what it "is" about them - which means, I don't know what I'm thinking! Not sure if this state of confusion is a good starting point for a coherent project. It's certainly something to struggle with; isn't struggle supposed to be a vital component of art?

In the afternoon we sat working on our projects, somehow -- which for me meant covering sheets of paper with mark-making -- not surprisingly, most of my marks looked like stitches.
I'm going to be translating these onto clay for textures, eventually. It was a peaceful, restful (somewhat pointless??) thing to do, while the tutors were having one-to-ones. My own one-to-one identified the need to consider scale, the possibility of illusion, the idea of a labyrinth (not excited by that...), and whether the finished form could be common objects with non-visual dimensions. I'm letting all that slush around in the subconscious.

These rubbings (bits of paper placed underneath; the stencil provides boundaries and spacing) relate to the current sculpture project
and this is yet another worksheet - the project keeps evolving. It's time to actually make it -
After class, meeting Lisa in a pub on Great James Street, in the 18th-century district near Grays Inn Road - you may have seen it in Brideshead Revisited?
and to a talk about the Chord artwork. The talk was held in the Camden Local History Archive in the library on Theobald's road - a great resource!

Daimler collection, Berlin

One of the highlights of my visit to Berlin (a month ago) was the "Drawing Sculpture" exhibition at Daimler Contemporary, which is on the 4th floor of this old building - the survival, it seems, in the modern morass of the Potsdamer Platz area.The Daimler corporation (they make Mercedes cars) has lots of art in their various buildings; this gallery is open 11-6 daily, with free entry. The collection specialises in 20th century abstract art. The Drawing Sculpture show presents a selection of works on paper, about 60 works by 28 artists dating from about 1960, "staging dialogues between classical Minimalist positions from the 1960s and international contemporary art" (says the leaflet).

A complete list of artists: Leonor Antunes, Eva Berendes, Hartmut Böhm, Monika Brandmeier, Christo, Katja Davar, Gia Edzgveradze, Ulrike Flaig, Adolf Fleischmann, Marcia Hafif, Lasse Schmidt Hansen, Rita Hensen, Georg Herold, Oskar Holweck, Claude Horstmann, Markus Huemer, Robert Longo, François Morellet, Rupert Norfolk, Silke Radenhausen, Eva-Maria Reiner, Jan Scharrelmann, Oskar Schlemmer, Jan J. Schoonhoven, Auke de Vries, Andy Warhol, Georg Winter

During the two hours of Saturday morning that we spent there, Erika, Wendy and I saw only two other visitors. Some of the sculptors in the photo below are by Dutch sculptor Auke de Vries; the red drawing that Erika is looking at is a response to music, but I can't remember either the song title or the artist, only that she started at top right - which you'd have to read the label to know, and which does make a difference in how you look at/understand the work.
In "the lawn from behind", use of thread (stitching) is entirely appropriate - everyone handling a piece of embroidery automatically turns it over, and here the artist has anticipated that - and made you think about the grass growing, probably?
Another great thing about this exhibition was the labels - an informative, readable paragraph (in English as well as German); I photographed them to re-read and think about later. Photography, without flash, was permitted.

Eva-Maria Reiner's Scherenschnitt (2001) was fascinating, enlivened by the coloration brought about by the natural lighting on the right and artificial lighting on the left. (Crisper photo here.)
These works "which she started in 2000, are based on a different way of handling the human body's volumes and outlines. The Scherenschnitte start y measuring the circumference of parts of the body, and these are also listed in the title of each particular work. The number of individual body part measurements fixes the number of strips of paper to be arranged one behind the other. The circumference measurements then define a circle. Reiner calls these circles 'first circles'; they are cut out of the pieces of paper. A mathematical formula then produces a meanvalue for other circles, and cuts are made in the paper on this basis. Thus three-dimensional, irregular body forms are reduced to a disciplining and exemplary system. Reiner's morphometrics exist on the narrow ridge of two-dimensional drawing and three-dimensional relief. The absence of real physical volume creates the mutually involved presence of body and space - via the views into the holes and the realtionsip of the paper layers to the architecture surrounding them."

Also fascinating was Silke Radenhausen's "Arabian No 1" (1996-2003)- "canvas, laundered, colored" -"In technical terms, Silke Radenhausen's 'topological cloths' come under the heading of the relief but add moving surfaces which result from cutouts in the canvas and circles, triangles, squares or ellipses sewn in. The works relate to Owen Jones' book 'Grammar of Ornament' which - arising from the encyclopedic 19th century thinking - propagated the availability of the form concepts of different cultural spheres on a massive scale. The artist defines and shows the ornament as an autonomous object whose shape appears to support the dogma of Minimal Art: a mathematically precise, pure object form instead of spatial illusionism. And yet semantics of material and shape return to Radenhausen's work: her material/sculptural treatment ventures to touch on the spheres of decoration, of crafts and thus of traditional feminism."
In the background is Georg Herold's "Ohne Titel" (2002) - "one of a series of showcases in which Herold places all kinds of objects like balloons or technical devices. Load and support of the simply made work are so finely balanced that the shelves and contents, despite that rough material quality, seem very fragile. The grouping of the pumice stones follows the physical laws of gravity, friction and elasticity. The material form captures an element of movement, and also includes an imaginary sequence of events in space and time. "Gebogene Latte V sets higherto unsolved problems of virtual representation to work in a highly coarsened form. The media mix makes it a hybrid, 'coarse-grained' object, whose origins got lost in the zero gravity space of a monitor surface [Bildschirmoberflaeche]."

Probably my favourite piece was Dark Text (2006) by Claude Horstmann.
The label says: "Claude Horstmann's working material is language. She collects words from newspapers and magazines, when travelling by bus or from conversations, and then works them into new, independent texts and represents them visually through the medium of drawing. Horstmann's inspiration for Dark Text was the little slips of paper in Asian fortune cookies, where she was particularly interested in the interface between widespread objectivity and sudden subjectivity. "Everyone knows that it is pure chance what sentence you find in these cookies, but everyone hopes at the same time that they will contain a grain of personal truth. I am interested in the moment when the text opens up this field of ways of reading lying between objectivity and subjectivity, between common property and something special. The aspect of relativity is particuarly relevant to the question of when and how a sentence becomes meanningful or not." (Claude Horstmann) The sentences crossed through with a broad, black paintbrush illustrate these two planes: the text is concealed, like its meaning, which has to be discovered individually."

A small room painted grey showed some of the "loveliest" works - drawings by Marcia Hafif (American, born 1929, known for her "pigment paintings"). At that point I wasn't taking too many photos because my camera battery was getting low. More on her work in a separate post.; here you can see "January 1972" - an example of the mark-making on large sheets of paper that she did regularly. Here is an essay from the catalogue of her 2003 exhibition.Here we learn that in 1972 "Marcia was drawing vertical pencil marks, as a kind of meditative exercise into standard black drawing books. She started at the upper left corner and worked systematically down the paper. Then she began to use words instead of lines, but words semantically unrelated to each other. She tried not to make sentences or phrases, used no punctuation, left no margin, line breaks were contingent on reaching the right hand edge of the page. You saw a wall of penciled words."

The Daimler collection also comprises sculptures in the vicinity of Potsdamer Platz - by Robert Rauschenberg, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Nam June Paik, Auke de Vries, Jean Tinguely, Francois Morellet, Marc di Suvero.

On 10 February, should you happen to be in Berlin, there's a talk about the sculptures: "the architect Roger Baumgarten, who supervised the building of the Potsdamer Platz under Renzo Piano, will tell us about the integration of the sculptures into the city. All the different aspects of how the sculptures' locations were chosen, the technical challenges involved and the pieces' artistic significance will be presented in detail."

The exhibition is on till the end of February 2010.