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 ...)