Place-Based Arts: Brighton Writes
C21: Centre for Research in 21st Century Writings
University of Brighton
Abstract/proposal
From the cupboard to the boardroom and back: 100 plaster objects
Slide 1 title
Intro – I am an artist, I studied sculpture. I’m the Deputy Principal of Edinburgh
College of Art and prior to this role I was the Head of the Fine Art at ECA. I’m very
interested in making, the process of making, in practice-based research and in the
articulation of how we find our subject as artists. I’m also engaged in dispelling myths
about the creative process through the articulation of the experience of making work,
both as an artist and an educator. One of the things that artists working in art schools
perhaps don’t do enough is talk about their work, specifically how they decide what
to do or make, what their methods and methodologies are.
We appointed the Dutch artist Krijn de Koning as the John Florent Stone Fellow in
2012 for a period of two years. His remit was to work on live projects with students.
I’ve worked closely with Edinburgh Art Festival for a few years in programming
exhibitions at ECA and in pinpointing aspiring graduates for commissioning.
It struck me that Krijn was an artist who worked on a scale that could suit our
sculpture court in the college so with EAF we found enough funding to commission a
work called Land for the 2013 EAF.
I’m going to discuss this work first to provide some context about place and then talk
about the 100 plaster objects which was a student project. Through the next 15
minutes I’ll attempt to make sense of what I think was valuable about the experience,
as a learning experience for the staff and students but also as art work.
Then vimeo timelapse talking about the Land project, art festival, parley, student
engagement at start of semester, making the familiar unfamiliar just by raising us to a
different viewpoint of perspective. The casts you see here are familiar to staff and
students. They have been wheeled around getting in the way for decades. My office
was through a door off the sculpture court so I walk past it and through it regularly.
Krijn once half-jokingly labeled his work “neo-modernist baroque architecture,”
It’s about organizing physical reality, in order to expose beauty, or even just to
change, or emphasize something that would have been unclear without your action.
Again, it’s about intention. Why do you do it? What is it about? Who are you? What is
this world? Very complicated questions; you can’t answer them just like that. But you
have to deal with difficult questions; art means little without consciousness.
Krijn; “I wanted to make an artwork as a place, to give a use to it, so people could
walk on it or use it for a discussion or a debate’.
“To see the casts in a different way, or in a state in which we are more alert”.
“Things are temporary, either short-term or long-term temporary”.
In the Shape of Time; Remarks on the History of Things, George Kubler commenced
chapter one as follows;
“Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of
man made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful,
and poetic things of the world. By this view the universe of man-made things simply
coincides with the history of art. It then becomes an urgent requirement to devise
better ways of considering everything men have made. This we may achieve sooner
by proceeding from art rather than from use, for if we depart from use alone, all
useless things are overlooked, but if we take the desirableness of things as our point
of departure, then useful objects are properly seen as things we value more or less
dearly”.
Talk about the cast collection with images, then talk about other collections, then get
onto the ideas around active student projects using place differently, thinking about
teaching.
De Koning uses archetypal architectural constructs to imprint a sense of place on an
overlooked or charged space. Using the College’s cast collection and cavernous
Sculpture Court the artist built platforms, altering our perception of the space,
restricting sections and offering us new perspectives of the casts. He stated that he
“….wanted to make an artwork as a place, to give a use to it, so people could walk on
it or use it for a discussion or a debate.”
During the fellowship Krijn and I worked with a group of students on a project
centred around 100 small plaster objects that were donated by the estate of Eduardo
Paolozzi to the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in 2007.
I have never taken the opportunity to turn this experience into anything other than
an anecdote. This call for papers seems like the ideal situation to explore, discuss and
learn more about the encounter and I propose to relate the experience using images,
drawings and writing using ‘Land’ and my own interest in latent history and heuristic
approaches to teaching and research as touchstones.
Value. Turing.
The University of Edinburgh announced, in 2007, a major bequest from the estate of
sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, who died in April 2005. This includes a set of Paolozzi’s
“Turing” prints, together with four sculptures in chrome and bronze, and one
hundred plaster maquettes by the world-renowned Scottish artist.
These works will be housed in the Informatics Forum, the new home for the
University’s School of Informatics, currently under construction in Edinburgh. The
Forum, an 11,500 metre building on Crichton Street in the centre of Edinburgh’s
Southside, will open in 2008. It will house some 500 researchers and also InSpace, an
accessible space dedicated to public understanding and exploration of the cultural
significance of informatics.
Professor Michael Fourman, Head of the School of Informatics, said the School was
delighted to receive the bequest.
“Paolozzi was intrigued by genius and creativity. His heroes, Leonardo, Einstein,
Wittgenstein, Freud, and Turing sought to explore the inner workings of the mind,
the body and the world.
“He was fascinated by the relationship between the organic and the artificial, the
representational and the abstract; the relationship between man and machine. These
themes are central to our research, and these artworks will be used to help visitors
engage with science of informatics.
"At a practical level, Paolozzi’s work explores themes of modularity and seriality, or
repetition. Again these are ideas we study in the context of computation, and we
hope that the art will lead visitors to discussion and exploration of the science."
Notes to Editors
Informatics is the new science of information. It studies natural and artificial systems
that store, process, and communicate information – genes and proteins, neurons and
synapses, compu
ters and the internet.
Alan Turing, a pioneer in both the theory and the practice of computing was,
perhaps, the first informatician. He contributed to theoretical computer science,
artificial intelligence, and computational biology – all before the construction of the
first computer!
These models and casts were stored in cardboard boxes in a cupboard next to the
Turing Room where a set of Paolozzi’s Turing prints decorate the walls. In that room
we unpacked the boxes and catalogued the objects in sketchbooks and photographs.
Over a period of days we learned from the objects and each other. The intended
outcome was to find a way of making the works public but what was more intriguing
were the odd, disparate, delicate forms, the curious way they had been wrapped and
stored, and our discussions and ideas about the different senses of history and value
we ascribed to the collection. For us, the place they inhabited was compelling and
exhibiting them seemed disingenuous and trite. We wrapped the objects back up as
adroitly as possible and returned them to their cardboard boxes in the cupboard.
Framing a space for empathy.
Things that are said to be similar are generally very different. Analysis.
Equal sized things are more democratic
Krijn is a formalist but not enough of a formalist to do away with content
Patrick Keiller: The aim is to depict the place as some sort of historical palimpsest
and/or the corollary of this, an exposition of a state of mind.
Teaching – thinking of a forward way of understanding the creative process rather
than working back from an object which is an abduction or a sense of detectivism
and misses out the form generating possibilities. To really understand this we need to
follow how artists work, move upstream and become the criminal. To undergo rather
than do. To find a correspondence. Thinking of longing – a sense you long for things,
situations but you don’t know what they are.
Ingold – going for a walk, you prepare, put on your specialist gear, prepared for
terrain but anything can happen.
An education in practical enskilment, an education in attention. An exposure to being
prepared and unprepared. A push out, what leads and what follows, mind does the
body undergoes.
Let yourself be led by submission and let mastery follow.
An attunement to being passive. Where would action without agency lead?
To act in the middle voice, in a level register.
It falls to us, the answers fall, learn from it rather than about it.
Find a counterpoint. Be anti-disciplinary.
Embodiment is an over used term.
Thinking is taking in.
Contrary forces of friction and tension make things stick for a certain length of time.
Can we create ordinary things as ordinary as the real world. Do artists now have too
much baggage to experience things?