Flashmobs as Institutions

I’ve been thinking about how flashmobs have become an institution in their own right. Yesterday I received an invite to a flashmob due to be scheduled at Liverpool St between 18:24 and 18:28pm – this one in the form of a London Freeze:

Flashmobs are something I’ve watched over the net with interest as they pop up here and there, but I’d never actually been involved in one, so I decided to take part. I couldn’t decide whether to go as a participant or as an observer and film it, but I figured there would be plenty of footage around on the net afterwards, so I sent the message round to friends and headed for Liverpool Street.

On arriving about 15 minutes before it was due to start, I felt I could tell who already knew what was going to happen and was there for the purpose of the event. There were plenty of the average businessman watching the board waiting for his train, but even 15 minutes beforehand there were people starting to hang around as if they were waiting for something, shifting about, looking at their mobile or checking the time repeatedly. More and more people started to turn up with cameras. I don’t think you would have noticed anything out of the ordinary if you weren’t aware something was about to happen, but if you were you could guess who was there for the purpose. People started congregating over the barriers to watch…what? A couple of minutes before 18:24 rows of cameras started to pile up on the level above…

I hadn’t thought too much about how I was going to pose but I suddenly started to wonder if I should pose with the camera on as if about to shoot a picture or what. A few seconds before 18:24 I just started to pace along and at 18:24 on the dot, froze – mid-pace, coffee in hand aiming towards mouth…

Four minutes is one hell of a long time when you are doing absolutely nothing except breathing…I’d set my mobile to go off at the start and end times so I’d know from its buzzing what to do, but (being a moron) it hadn’t occurred to me time to sync this with the clock on the wall – so it was vibrating away in my pocket mid-freeze, which was interesting but not quite what I had planned. I see now that that is exactly why every bugger in Liverpool Street was checking their mobile and the clock endlessly the few minutes before…next time…

As my mid-pace had stopped with me looking away from the clock I had no idea how long I’d been there. However at about 2min 30 I noticed the woman in front of me had planned hers so that she appeared to be taking a photo of her two friends who were smiling merrily away at the camera – but looking at her LCD I could see the time running, and she was actually videoing it, what a great idea…

I spent most of the 4 minutes wondering if the general public were actually even noticing what was happening. People kept on milling around, but this is London, and a busy station at rush hour at that. Who in London ever speaks to a stranger, looks them in the face, pays attention to them, or even says ‘excuse me’ instead of barging on through? Or indeed finds it anything out of the ordinary if people don’t move out of their way or just look slightly odd? Odd doesn’t exist in London.

It wasn’t until 2 and half, maybe three minutes that anyone started to notice and the only way I could tell was that the station had gone quiet and people had stopped barging through. I guess as they noticed more and more and more ‘oddness’ they started to look around them and see that it was everywhere. They stopped yelling into their mobile phones for a minute or two, stopped marching along and pushing through, just for a minute…

And then it was all over – the clock turned, we finished off what we had started doing 4 minutes ago, and a hundred or so little voices poured together to make one big cheer before we all quickly ran away back into our Wednesday night.

There’s already a news story on it here, videos here and here.

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Research

So that’s my personal research into a flashmob. You can’t get more direct research than in actually being a part of it. But since then I’ve been looking more into the history of flashmobs – where they came from, where they are, why they are – and why I see them as an institution now.

Perhaps the most well-known flashmob was the Freeze at Grand Central in New York, probably because it is one of the highest-viewed videos on youtube and because of its presentation more than anything – in fact its organiser, Improv Everywhere, claim it wasn’t a flashmob at all but just one of their ‘missions’ which they claim to be ‘pranks in public places‘, and that this was something they did well before flashmobs became well known.

Definition

So what exactly is a flashmob? Wiki defines it as “a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse.” Webster’s dictionary defines it as “a group of people who organize on the Internet and then quickly assemble in a public place, do something bizarre, and disperse“.

The sudden strangeness of it is the key, as well as the ’secrecy’. A large number of people doing something suddenly at the same time, and then just as suddenly disappearing again. Flashmobs spread by text and by email just hours before the event. They don’t even have to be doing anything unusual in itself – just the fact that 200 all of a sudden WANT to buy a first class stamp in the same place is adequate. It just makes it that bit more bizarre having so many people at once. But most flashmobs are faintly bizarre. They come in many types – doing something, or not doing something. Silently dancing, asking strange questions, singing, suddenly freezing.

History of Flashmobs

The most recent in London before yesterday was the Rick Astley flashmob on April 11th when 300-400 people descended on Liverpool Street at 17:59, some in masks, counted down to 18:00 then all sang ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, which thinking back to my teenage years was weird in enough in 1987. This was part of a series of Rickrollin’ events which aren’t flashmobs themselves but are well worth a mention – Rickrollin’ involves web links redirecting to good ol’ Rick’s music vid. As an April fool’s joke this year various media companies and websites did this, including YouTube who rickrolled all of its featured videos on that day.

More recent Flashmobs have included Mobile Clubbing at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall on 12 October where hundreds of people turned up with their ipods, and at 7:01pm all started dancing to their own beat:

There’s also a video here

This is a form of Silent Disco as to anyone without the ipod everyone is dancing away to silence. Mobile Clubbing started in 2003, founded by Ben Cummins and Emma Davis, who also run Pillow Fight Club, another version of flashmob where everyone appears (with a pillow) at the designated time and has said pillow fight. These don’t instanly disperse at any set time though, they go on until the job’s done, so they’re different from a standard flashmob in that respect.

Another mobile disco is archived here, from the 11th October 2006 at 18:24 (seems a popular time). This came with a set of Rules:

This was said to be a multiple flashmob happening at the same time in Madrid, New York and Paris.

The first Global Flashmob was also London Flashmob 4 on 25th October 2003, the Rules for this one are here.

It is claimed the first flashmob was planned for Manhattan in May 2003 by Bill Wasik, senior editor of Harper’s Magazine, but was unsuccessful after the shop it was planned for was tipped off. The first successful flashmob was organised by the same man and is known as the love-rug mob of June 3, 2003. More than 100 people converged on the 9th floor rug department of Macy’s department store, Manhattan. They had originally met in 4 pre-arranged bars, where they were given further instructions just before the event began. They then suddenly gathered en-masse around an expensive rug, and if questioned had to reply that they all lived together, made purchase decisions as a group and were shopping for a “love rug”.

Later flashmobs included 200 people flooding the lobby of the Hyatt hotel in synchronized applause for 15 seconds, and an invasion of a shoe boutique in Soho by people pretending to be tourists on a bus trip.

The point in Flashmobs

Wasik claims he created flash mobs as a social experiment to poke fun at hipsters and highlight conformity, how the masses deperately want to be in the in-crowd or “the next big thing.”

It is claimed flashmobs were inspirted by the arts and social movements of the 60’s.

Flashmobs as a Social Institution – Performance Art, Collaborative Art

I chose flashmobs for their resemblance to an institution despite this supposed anti-conformity. I see it as a form of performance art, collaborative art. It is not clear who is the artist, who are participants and who is the viewer. The whole event is the art. It wouldn’t exist without the viewer, without the participants and without the organisers, it is a collaborative piece, and in this way it is more than the sum of its parts. it needs all parts to actually occur, but even so any specific part is replacable. There is no identity to the specific performer or viewer. Also it is open to anyone – you don’t need to be ‘an artist’. ‘ a performer’ – anybody who wants to can join in and be a part of it – and any one who wants to create an event can do so. It reminds me of Nicholas Bourriaud’s remarks in Relational Aesthetics – once people are involved in a collaborative work they are no longer spectators, they are contributing. The audience, artist, organisers, anyone at all are on the same level and are of equal value, there is no separation between artist and audience.

Speaking to my mother after the event her first question was ‘But why?’ But this seems to be a question in any form of art, but why not? For the fun, for the sheer hell of it! Looking at other people’s answers to this question on the net I got the following:

“It works because there is no ideological point behind it”

“It’s just about doing something fun,”

“The point is that there is no point, we do it for fun, we do it because we
can.”

“I get the impression that it’s a performance art piece, but I think that more than that it is just supposed to be silly in the way that performance art is supposed to be.”

“just some geeks having fun,”

X: “What is the game all about?” Y: “I have no idea, they are stuck in time?”

“a lot of people now spend a lot of their lives behind computer screens talking to and exchanging messages with people, often close friends, who they never see in person”

“This is a way of evolving that computer social interaction back to reality,”

“technology makes it much easier to contact the community and get it moving. It could mark the start of the largely unseen net population realising the latent power of its millions of members.”

It’s about fun, it’s new and fascinating and hilarious, and it’s about the way the internet has changed our lives – we ‘know’ people we have never met in our lives, we can communicate in a second. But it can be used as a tool as well. Bill Wasik’s original aim was in a way political – poking fun at the conformers. But it attracts such attention it can be used to make a statement too. Shutdown Day are planning a version to try to see how long we can manage without a computer to make a statement.

Back to Institutions – the wiki on Institutions says:

“Structures and mechanisms of social order and cooperation governing the behavior of a set of individuals. Institutions are identified with a social purpose and permanence, transcending individual human lives and intentions, and with the making and enforcing of rules governing cooperative human behavior. The term, institution, is commonly applied to customs and behavior patterns important to a society“

Social order and co-operation. Transcending human lives and intentions. Rules governing co-operative human behaviour.

It is a completely social thing. It is about behaviour, co-operation and rules – and about transcending these – it being more than the some of its parts, and parts being exchangeable. Back to Bourriaud – it is about breaking down boundaries between positions, and becoming a thing-in-itself.

Some links:

http://www.flashmob.co.uk/

London FlashMob

http://www.smartmobs.com/

Wiki

The Grand Central Freeze

World freeze

Pillow Fight Club

Bill Wasik

Improv Everywhere

Freeze London new item

Freeze London vid

Rug Love news item

Mobile Clubbing vid

Mobile Clubbing at Tate

Various London Freeze vids

Rickrollin’ news item

Flashmob news item

Flashmob news item

Flashmob news item

Shutdown Day

Flickr as a Gallery

The concept of gallery is wide. The dictionary gives 12 different results:

Perhaps most relevant to the area of art are:

6. a room, series of rooms, or building devoted to the exhibition and often the sale of works of art.

13. a collection of art for exhibition.

However, also important are:

5. any group of spectators or observers, as at a golf match, a Congressional session, etc.

4. the general public, esp. when regarded as having popular or uncultivated tastes.

Referring back to my interest in art as communication – art for the people rather than art for the artist – I’m interested in galleries that are available to everyone, not for the select few. I don’t mean that in a way that the public are not welcome in galleries – the White Cube, Matt’s Gallery – but that for the majority of the public it wouldn’t occur to them to go there, for various reasons. Even popular galleries like the Tate Modern, the Barbican, the ICA, the National Gallery, the Hayward, the RCA, the V&A – are not necessarily on everyone’s plans for the day. So I thought about using the everyday – the street, our surroundings – performance art, happenings, my own first semester exhibition which occurred wherever and whenever the opportunity or urge arose – bus stops, the studio, tube stations, wherever… It also relates back to my studio work on the question of Potential Art being all around us:

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But ‘Everywhere’ is a bit of a wide topic, so I wanted to filter it down to the specific that is accessible to – and used by – everyone. The most obvious gallery then, is the Internet. It is available to almost everyone and almost everyone uses it in some form. It is a method of communication – if not the main method – today, which I am very much focussed on in my studio practise.

It is also used more and more to post images – in news stories, emails, cartoons, jokes, virals, visual representations, documentation. Not only images but sound, music, action, events, instruction, performance (eg my flashmob entry). More and more people have a blog, a website. Every company or business has a website, most artists have a blog or site of some kind. Even at art college part of our practise is to have a blog, which you are reading right now

This blog is an exhibition – a display of work for observation. And it is accessible to all.

The internet itself is used as a medium in some art. We now have “net art“, which is claimed to be “part of new media art and electronic art” and which uses the internet as its primary medium, producing work including:

- websites

- e-mail projects

- artistic software

- Internet-based or networked installations

- online video, audio or radio works

- networked performances

- code poetry

….

However, I am more interested in how the internet acts as a gallery – a meeting point or viewing point for this work to be seen.

A gallery is a place to view or experience work, it is not purely a storage place. The audience is an essential component of the concept of a gallery.

The internet is a huge place, so to filter my search again I want to look into photo galleries. In particular flickr. As the internet has grown and the use of digital cameras has soared, photo galleries have popped up everywhere. A few of the most popular include PhotoBox, PhotoBucket, DeviantArt, PhotoNet and Clikpic – but flickr arguably contains the widest range of users.

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The growth of flickr as a social phenomenon

Before it was bought by Yahoo in 2005, flickr’s userbase were internet savvy ‘early adopters‘ – young, technical workers in the media or internet industry, heavy in designers with more photographic experience than the general public.

From its creation in 2002, flickr was designed with a publicly available API. to be ‘Open Platform‘ – meaning anyone could build tools to work with it – (something that facebook has built extensively on, now having over 20,000 applications built by external users). If you didn’t like the experience provided by the standard flickr upload, you could build your own. This was significant in that it encouraged the growth of third party flickr tools – with the result that its use spread beyond its original tech-savvy base. This had a major impact on the social phenomenon of flickr. You were not reliant on flickr to make tools.

Another important feature of flickr right from the start was its adoption of folksonomy and social networking. You could now use flickr tools to put your photos on social networking sites such as your blog, MySpace page, LiveJournal etc – and start sharing them. The power of bringing together tools on an open API with the social networking aspect was immense – far more than the sum of its parts. From this flickr became a social phenomenon. People built incrementally faster and better ways of sharing.

By the advent of Web 2.0 people had realised that you couldn’t predict what people would use your tool for – so the best way was to let the market decide. Flickr was created with an API – an interface that people can build their own applications to work with, and use flickr in whatever way they needed. Ultimately flickr was just storing the pictures and had no idea what the site would ultimately be used for. It may be just a host to store snapshots for friends to share (similar to PhotoBucket today) – or it may begin to house photos for professional photographers (similar to Alamy); become something more creative and experimental (similar to DeviantArt); or simply be a storage base to order prints from digital photos (similar to PhotoBox.

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Flickr today

Ultimately flickr was a business and was bought out by Yahoo in 2005. Since then, whilst it has retained part of its ’serious’ photography base, it has expanded to include more of the mass market. There are now over two billion images on flickr.

It has become a mass storage device, allowing users to share personal photos and as a base to link photos to blogs, chat rooms etc. Its popularity has been massively supported by its Organizr tools. You can tag not only your own photos, but also other people’s (Folksonomy), allowing annotation and categorization globally – not only by the creator or other experts, but also by the viewer or consumer. Within Organizr there are also features such as Sets and Collections where you can group, categorize or index your own photos as you would in an album; Groups where you can add them to public series on a theme; Map, where you can pin each photo to its location on yahoomaps; and Batch Organize to edit large batches of photos at once. A Blog option has been added, as well as Video (although so far this hasn’t really taken off).

Organizr also smooths the running of the site, making it very easy to use – with automatic resizing, rotation and drag ‘n’ drop tools. Flickr also provides both private and public storage so the user can set privacy controls to determine who can view every image, including ‘group pools’ where only members of the group can view images; ‘friends & family’ where only contacts can view images; and even a ‘guest pass’ system which allows private photos to be shared with non Flickr-members. A ‘pass’ can be emailed to anyone who you want to grant access to view to. It can apply to all, some groups of, or some individual photos. Photos can also be licensed for use by others under six types of Creative Commons Licence

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Flickr as a gallery

Flickr has a huge collaborative database of publicly viewable categorized photos, with a huge underlying structure. It is a mass gallery of galleries, in amongst the immense gallery of the web itself. It has galleries according to theme – by subject, artist, type of camera, location, colour – any theme you can think of. My first hit today was “Tell a story in 5 frames (Visual story telling)“.

As a gallery, flickr’s major component would be its social history or reportage aspect. It documents people’s lives. It is the people’s equivalent of Magnum - a living archive of everyday reportage photography – from Robert Capa to Richard Billingham; Trent Parke to Martin Parr.

It is also often a collaborative project. Just one collaborative art project I am involved in myself is FirstView, where a group of photographers take a photo on the first day of every month to document their daily lives. There is no aim to be ‘artistic’ in the shot, it is supposed to be a record shot to depict a part of your day – it can be shot on compact, disposable, mobile or SLR; digital or film, it doesn’t matter – the important part is the recording of our lives. It has now been running for 2 years, but the project is a long-term one – to document our lives over time, over 5, 10, 20 years, as we age. To document the everyday, and the special moments within the everyday. To see how our lives change and how they stay the same.
My gallery for 2007 is here, and my gallery so far for 2008 is here.

There is also the professional aspect – as well as the opportunity to exhibit your pictures, the social aspect of it allows peer review. Discussion can take place over any aspect of your work – from analysis of technique and materials, to aesthetics, philosophy and meaning. Not purely over whether a shot is technically well-orchestrated, but if it makes a good picture by nature of what it conveys. The social-networking aspect means you can find work – and other photographers – on any aspect of photography you are interested in.

You can browse according to theme, location, subject, style, period. You can network and find other photographers or work that may interest you, and you can use it as a means of finding work, people and exhibitions external to the internet.

Anyone can put up an exhibition in flickr, and there are almost infinite exhibitions to view.

Nausea

Having worked on concepts of Nothingness and Potential-to-Be in the studio recently, I’ve been thinking back to Existentialism. Existence and Existence as… Existence and Essence…

It’s not Nothing, it exists, it occupies space and has physical properties – but what (and at what point in time) does it exist as… a piece of paper and some lemon juice? An ironed piece of paper and some lemon juice? A letter? Some writing? A picture? A piece of art? A potential piece of art?

I’ve been thinking a lot about when we categorise and label things, compartmentalise them – and in what context and to what people their meaning can be different. Dependence on time, on history…

This made me think about a book I read a few years ago now, Nausea, by Sartre. Sartre was a philosopher, but he also used his philosophy in his art as a writer. The first couple of times I tried to read Nausea I didn’t get past the first 20 or 30 pages as it begans mundanely (although this comes to be its core), and it wasn’t until I read Existentialism and Humanism (or, to stick to the original French, Existentialism is a Humanism) that I went back to it. On this reading I was so inspired, it sticks in my mind as one of the most eye-opening, liberating, inspiring books I have ever read.

Both Nausea and Existentialism and Humanism are based on Sartre’s opus Being and Nothingness – his philosophy of existentialism – which I have never had the time to tackle as a whole. Existentialism and Humanism is a transcript of a lecture on it, given by Sartre in Paris on 29 October 1945. As it is short and explained in lecture terms, it is an accessible entry to existentialism (although it has been claimed Sartre later regretted publishing it, feeling that it led people to misunderstand existentialism due to it being only a superficial overview).

Nausea again is a way into the subject for the public, described as “a manifesto of existentialism“. It is a novel written in 1938 which allowed Sartre to explain his philosophy in simplified terms, as well as allowing a dry wit to carry the reader through. It focuses on the difference between existence and essence; being and nothingness which links in with my concepts in the studio of SNothing, and otential to Be – the impossibility of Nothing yet the concepts we have of it in our minds – expectations, absences, voids

Nausea

Nausea is a novel written as a journal, belonging to 30-year old Antoine Roquentin. As a preliminary dose of humour, the first page is as follows:

Editors’ Note

THESE notebooks were found among Antoine Roquentin’s papers. We are publishing them without any alteration.

The first page is undated, but we have good reason to believe that it was written a few weeks before the diary itself was started. In that case it would have been written about the beginning of January 1932, at the latest.

At that time, Antoine Roquentin, after travelling in Central Europe, North Africa and the Far East, had been living for three years at Bouville, where he was completing his historical research on the Marquis de Rollebon

THE EDITORS

Antoine Roquentin is a dejected historian who, following several years of travel, has become rooted in the fictional seaport of Bouville. It is here that he begins to experience ‘the Nausea’ – becoming convinced that inanimate objects and situations are forcing him to doubt his identity and his freedom. The nausea is a strange combination of disgust, wonder and contempt – occuring randomly and stimulated by encounters with mundane objects such as a crumpled piece of paper in the gutter, or a rock on the beach. He searches for meaning in himself and the objects around him, approaches insanity, self-hatred and doubs his own existence.

The nausea increases in frequency, but Roquentin does not understand what it signifies. One day in a park he encounters a tree and finally comes to a revelation into the nature of his being. He realises that the nausea is existence itself - existence being Something rather than Nothing was slowly driving him mad. He finally realises the meaning and limitation of existencewhen he comes to realise objects have no ‘qualities’; no color or shape, no categories or identity – no meaning. All words are separated from the ‘thing’ itself, and Roquentin is at last confronted with pure Being. This isn’t ‘a tree’ – it is pure Being, pure Existence – it IS – it is ‘Being’.

Eventually he comes to accept this and see it not as a limitation but as an opportunity. Towards the end of the book he finally learns to accept the indifference of the physical world to his human aspirations, and moves from disappointment and regret to seeing it as an opportunity. People are free to create their own meanings, but this freedom brings with it a responsibility – without this there can be no meaning.

The philosophy

The metaphor is that there are no rules, no categories, no determinism, no meaning – all that you are is a Thing That Exists. You are not a baker, a philosopher, a dustbinman, a professor. You have no definition or identity, you are Nothing. Objects do not have meaning or identity in themselves and nor do people. Try to imagine the world without language – there is nothing but Stuff – there is no categorisation, no meaning. There are no laws, no rules, no morals. But you are free – you are condemned to be free. The world is meaningless, bleak and frustrating – until you give it meaning. It does not exist. It is. Meaningless material exists. Once you give it meaning it is; it has essence, identity, purpose. It is.

There is no ‘Nothing’ - Nothingness is a state of mind in which we can become anything, in reference to our situation, that we desire.

You are condemned to be free because you did not create yourself, but you are here – any decision you make, any action you perform is your decision, and yours alone. You are responsible for your choices. You may live in ‘bad faith’ believing you have to be an office worker because of the situations you find yourself in, paste events in your life, but any choice you make is yours and yours alone. If you seek advice you ask it of those of whom you can already predict the outcome – and you still have the choice whether or not to follow that advice. In bad faith you merely exist and are no different to a stone – to be, to have essence, you have to give life meaning and purpose.

It is not only a freedom and a responsibility for the individual but for the whole of mankind. It is implicit in choosing the ‘best‘ decision that in being ‘the best’ it cannot be ‘best’ unless it is better for everyone. This freedom transcends individual circumstances and gives you the responsibility to make decisions on behalf of all humanity. The only universe we have is a human universe and the only laws we make are human laws – we have the responsibility to make these decisions for the benefit of the whole of mankind.

Nothingness is a state of mind in which we can become anything, in reference to our situation, that we desire.

Bad faith

There are points where you look at the inevitability of everything – you look at time – you predict it, and you watch it go by and see your absolute lack of control – you listen note by note to music and you can predict what note will come next and its inevitable death – despite being prepared years in advance ‘ every note dies so that it might be born‘. You see how you are Nothing and you have no control in this life, everything is inevitable. You cannot control your existence, you cannot prevent yourself from thinking, you are out of control. You are a disgusting lump of matter, dumped on this earth only to inevitably, predictably, slowly die.

But to Sartre this is where people mistake existentialism – this is ‘bad faith’. You do have control. The very fact that there is nothing – no meaning, no point to life – means that the only meaning is what you give it – you have the freedom to interpret the world in any way you wish, you have the freedom to make every decision you make. There is no escape, everything you do, every action you take, you choose to take. You are condemned to be free. The fact is you cannot not choose – everything you do is a decision. If faced with two choices, neither of which you like, if you back away and ignore both, that in itself is a decision. You cannot escape choosing – you cannot escape thinking, you cannot escape existing.

Key points

The points addressed are those in Being and Nothingness and Existentialism and Humanism – firstly that the existence of a person comes before their essence. In simple terms, this means that, although that person exists, there is nothing to dictate that who or what they are – their character, goals in life etc. “Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards” – We write our own history, we define ourselves by our choices in life. A stone would be thought of as an ‘in-itself’ and someone who is living in bad faith, as Roquentin does in the first half of the book as he hides his own freedom from himself, is equal to the stone. Only when he recognises and accepts the limits of existence, and takes the opportunity to make choices and take responsibility for himself, can he become a thing ‘for-itself’. In the process Roquentin goes through ‘Anguish’ as he realises there are no definitions, values or meanings written into objects or things. This will be associated with ‘Abandonment’ as he realises his total desertion – there is nobody there to look out for him, no rules or values to follow and that he has to make his own choices and take full responsibility for them. He finally recognises his own freedom and is fearful of it. Following this he experiences ‘Despair’ – that there is no guarantee of success in anything – he should act without hope.

Inspiration

Nausea inspires me more than all because it is philosophy presented as a novel – philosophy for the people, instead of philosophy for the philosopher; (art for the artist). It stresses more than ever existentialism as a humanism. Philosophy for the people, not for the bourgeoisie. It is presented with wit and flows easily, presenting a topic as a novel that wouldn’t be considered in its context of a philosophical text. It is also liberating and constructive – philosophy requiring action, not philosophy with its end point as just another idea in another mind, another cul-de-sac. The philosophy of freedom, but of responsibility for that freedom.

Although in many places it seems very idealistic and there are many arguments against Sartre’s ideas, it is still inspiring and enlightening to come to the realisation that nothing is what it is defined as. All definitions are manmade, fundamentally all that there is is being. It is liberating to consider the difference between existence and Being. Every choice you make is yours and yours alone and you are responsible for those choices

It also inspired me to look further at philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl and Foucault.

Snippets

Looking over the book again, I found it interesting the pieces I’d underlined or highlighted from the first time I read it:

- For the moment it’s the jazz that’s playing; there’s no melody, only notes, a host of little jolts. They know no rest, an unchanging order gives birth to them, without ever giving them time to recover, to exist for themselves. They run, they hurry, they strike me with a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I should quite like to hold them back, but I know that if I managed to stop one, nothing would remain between my fingers but a vulgar, doleful sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it; I know few harsher or stronger impressions

- I am here, I am living in the same second as these card players.

- I am won over by the purity of my surroundings; nothing is alive; the wind whistles, straight lines flee into the darkness.

- Behind him, before him, there is a universe. And the day approaches when, closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left, he will say to himself: ‘And now what?’

- I can see the future. It is there, stationed in the street, hardly any paler than the present.

- I don’t know where I am any more: am I seeing her movements or foreseeing them? I can no longer distinguish the present from the future…

- I can’t see anything anymore: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented. Moreover there are many cases where even these scraps have disappeared: nothing is left but words: I could still tell the stories [...] but they are only skeletons. They tell about a fellow who does this or that, but it isn’t I, I have nothing in common with him.

- Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn’t let itself be extended; it achieves significance only through its death. Towards this death, which may also be my own, I am drawn irrevocably. To each moment I cling with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable – and yet I would not lift a finger to prevent it from being annihilated

- Nothing has changed and yet everything exists in a different way.

- I am full of anguish; the slightest gesture engages me. I can’t imagine what is required of me. Yet I must choose: I sacrifice the passage Gillet, I shall never know what it held for me.

- I gripped the volume I was reading tightly in my hands, but then strongest sensations were blunted. Nothing looked real; I felt surrounded by cardboard scenery which could suddenly be removed.

- His judgment pierced me like a sword and called into question my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realised that; I hadn’t any right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant, a microbe. My life grew in a haphazard way and in all directions.

- If only I could prevent myself from thinking! I try, I succeed: it seems as if my head is filling with smoke…And now it starts again: ‘Smoke…Mustn’t think…I don’t want to think…I think that I don’t want to think. I mustn’t think that I don’t want to think. Because it is still a thought.’ Will there ever be an end to it? My thought is me: that is why I can’t stop. I exist by what I think…and I can’t prevent myself from thinking. At this very moment – this is terrible – if I exist, it is because I hate existing. It is I, it is I who pull myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: hatred and disgust for existence are just so many ways of making me exist, of thrusting me into existence.

- The spinning record exists, the air struck by the vibrating voice exists, the voice which made an impression on the record existed. I who am listening, I exist. Everything is full, existence everywhere, dense and heavy and sweet. But beyond all this sweetness, inaccessible, quite close, so far away alas, young, merciless, and serene, there is this…this rigour.

- Tuesday: Nothing. Existed.

- Before the war I was alone and I didn’t realise it; I lived with my parents, who were good people, but I didn’t get on with them. When I think of those years…but how could I have lived like that? I was dead Monsieur, and I never realised it; I had a collection of postage stamps.

- Things have broken free from their names. They are there, grotesque, stubborn, gigantic, and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of Things, which cannot be given names. Alone, wordless, defenceless, thy surround me, under me, behind me, above me. they demand nothing, they don’t impose themselves, they are there.Under the cushion of the seat, next to the wood, there is a thin line of shadow, a thin black line which runs along the seat with a mysterious, mischievous air, almost a smile. I know perfectly well it isn’t a smile and yet it exists [...] it persists, like the vague memory of a smile, like a half-forgotten word of which you can remember only the first syllable and the best thing you can do is turn your eyes away and think of something else…

- Never until these last few days had I suspected what it meant to ‘exist’. [...] I was like the others…I used to say like them ‘The sea is green; that white speck up there is a seagull’, but I didn’t feel it existed, that the seagull was an ‘existing seagull’; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can’t say a couple of words without speaking of it but, but finally you can’t touch it

- Existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost its harmless appearance as an abstract category: it was the very stuff of things [...] the diversity of things, their individuality, was only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, in disorder – naked, with a frightening, obscene nakedness

- It didn’t make sense, the world was present everywhere, in front, behind. There has been nothing before it. Nothing. There had been no moment at which it might not have existed. It was this which irritated me: naturally there was no reason for it to exist, that flowing larva. But it was not possible for it not to exist. That was unthinkable: in order to imagine nothingneess, you had to be there already, right in the world, with your eyes wide open and alive; nothingness was just an idea in my head, an existing idea floating in that immensity: this nothingness hadn’t come before existence, it was an existence like any other…

- I see it, that Nature, I see it…I know that its submissiveness is laziness, I know that it has no laws, that what they consider its constancy doesn’t exist. It has nothing but habits and it may change those tomorrow.

- It does not exist. It is even irritating in its non-existence; if I were to get up, if I were to snatch that record from the turn-table which is holding it and if I were to break it in two, I wouldn’t reach it. It is beyond – always beyond something, beyond a voice, beyond a violin note. Through layers and layers of existence, it unveils itself, slim and firm, and when you try to seize it you meet nothing but existents, you run up against existents devoid of meaning. It is behind them: I can’t even hear it, I hear sounds, vibrations in the air which unveil it. It does not exist, since it has nothing superfluous: it is all the rest which is superfluous in relation to it. It is.

(all quotes borrowed from Sartre, Nausea, Penguin Classics, 1965)

My Life Story

Horns are blowing, confetti is flying and frontman Jake Shillingford is sparkling in the spotlight, kicking the air and breathing life into a six year old concept band

I first came across the band My Life Story by chance on Saturday 27th July 1996 – on The White Room in a flat above a doctor’s surgery in Fulham. At the age of 22 I was awestruck – captivated by the swooping, orchestral sound and the poppy, glam showmanship of the whole band – the bold, bombastic kicks and the big band soundtrack – but with lyrics representing the “shabby romance of modern life and modern London” – a total contrast to the endless Nirvana imitations of the time. Next day I had tickets to the show at Ronnie Scott’s and was on their mailing list. It was from there that I found my home in London really. It was the peak of Britpop and Camden was its hub. My Life Story revolved around London and, as everyone else at the time was, were Camden-centric, in some ways reminiscent of Covent Garden in the 60’s. It was more than the music, it was the whole arena – the time, the place, the music, the fashion, the drama, the style – the whole performance. My Life Story were also far more than their music – they were the style, the showmanship, the glamour – orchestras and suits; sparkles, tiaras and boas – and a 12 piece orchestra every night – at the same time drawing on the pop and outrageous pomp of Marc Almond, ABC, Dexy’s and The Teardrop Explodes – to Anthony Newley, Scott Walker, PJ Proby.

“Big Strings, Glam, all the things you’re afraid to admit, Anthony Newley, The Pale Fountains, Chapeau Melon et Bottes de Cuir, Scott Walker, Marc and the Mambas, Bond Movies, Jimmy Webb, PJ Proby on daytime TV, Les Bicyclette de Belsize, Dexy’s, Punk Rock, Southend-on-Sea v’s Venice Beach, The Teardrop Explodes, Phil Spektor, Ken Nordine, Writing poems on the District line, The Dice Man, Johnny Boy, The Prisoner, Boating Blazers, Jason King, Yes..Tommy Steele, John Steed, Dressing up on a Monday night and staying in just for the thrill of dressing up, Both Elvi, Girls with Boys, Boys with Girls, Girls with Girls, Boys with Boys.” – Jake on his influences

At the same time many around them were chasing similar themes – Menswear, Orlando, David Devant, Rialto, Posh…it was the right time for the glamour, the pop and the pomp, the pretentiousness, the suits, the glitter. Every fanzine wanted them. It was the time when I would do eight gigs a week. Even 12 years later, most of my friends I met through some connotation with the band, including my partner of ten years. My Life Story were an icon – What did they have that that drew so many in?

“There are classical violinists busting bow strings as they mosh their way through pop music. Horns are blowing, confetti is flying and frontman Jake Shillingford is sparkling in the spotlight, kicking the air and breathing life into a six year old concept band: My Life Story.“ Sean McManus

My Life Story were originally an indie-pop group formed around 1991 by Jake Shillingford, a one-time ice-cream van man and Essex boy – brought up in Southend-on-Sea by his artistic father, Alan Shillingford (a Pop Art-ist of the 1950s) as well as various babysitters from the art college (including a young Alison Moyet). Jake claims it was here that he first grabbed his love of pop – in the “riotously raucous” singles they would bring round in his childhood. Jake rebelled against his upbringing by quitting college with no art qualifications, and poured his energies instead into music. The prototype My Life Story pressed just a handful of copies of their only single, “Home Sweet Zoo” (which now fetches over £125 a copy), on Think Tank in 1986, before disbanding.

After moving to London and working as a DJ at Dingwalls in Camden and Blow Up in Soho, Jake was made redundant and headed for America, where the skeleton of My Life Story was born. Musing with friends over what thought was missing from music they came up with a list including “thought-provoking lyrics; big, bombastic sounds; a bit of show-offness; personality and pretentiousness“.

“I love pretentiousness, it’s what pop music is all about“.

Jake was a showman and his performance was about more than the music – he wanted the style, the scene, the icon. My Life Story had their own arrranger in Aaron Cahill and with Jake made huge, bold, orchestral arrangements, epic cinematic soundtracks, torchsongs – a cinematic sound, with a John Barry influence. Jake had difficulty recruiting musicians to develop these plans for orchestral pop songs however, and resorted to propositioning anyone with the right shaped instrument case he found on the Northern Line. (Source) Some hid behind newspapers, some walked away, but a few were curious enough to audition for him. By Autumn 1993 his band was created – My Life Story were a 12 piece.

“Much the same as in a screenplay, I try to exagerrate the lyrics and and give it a big carchase at the end. As opposed to just getting out of a cab. People respond to that”.

Still sticking to his ideals of huge orchestras and refusing to use artificial sounds, Jake also had difficulty in the studio getting a big enough sound for the orchestral idea in his mind. He resorted to setting up a pair of mics, moving the string quartet gradually further away, and layering the recordings to make it sound like an orchestra pit full of strings. Still this wasn’t enough for Jake who stated “Next time I want to get a full 66 piece orchestra in“. At this time they were spotted by Giles Martin, (son of Beatles legend George) and offered free studio time. It was here that their debut single Girl A, Girl B, Boy C was born – released on Mother Tongue and both NME and Melody Maker’s Single of the Week – “a tale of a bizarre love triangle with a big band soundtrack…All foxy horns and horny foxes“. This was followed in 1994 by two more singles – Funny Ha Ha and You Don’t Sparkle (in My Eyes); an EP (the Mornington Crescent Companion); a track (Under The Ice) on a flexidisc; and in 1995 what was to be their last release on Mother Tongue due to its demise in 1996 – their debut album Mornington Crescent – “homage to London Transport’s notorious Misery Line” – littered with references to the times and the places of the band’s (and their fans’) lives in Camden – Mornington Crescent being not only the stop next to Camden on the Northern Line, but also where Jake worked at the Camden Palace (now KoKo); and Angel also on the Northern Line. It reached number two in the indie chart in February 1995. On the cover was Big Ben and inside 12 oil paintings (one for each song) all by Jake’s father, Alan. As did all My Life Story’s records, the vinyl version also had a message etched on each side in the runout runouts :

“A: You are never given a dream…

B: Without also being given the power to make it come true”

Mornington Crescent LineUp:—————-Golden Mile LineUp:

Jake Shillingford: Voice and Guitar————-Jake Shillingford: Voice
Harry Blue: Bass—————————Paul Seipel: Bass with Vocals
Helen Caddick: Keyboards——————-Danny Turner: Piano, Harpsichord
Jason Cooper: Drums and Timpani————-Simon Wray: Drums,Timpani
Bill Mowbray: Saxophone——————–Ben Spencer: Tenor/Alto Saxophone
Mark Bradley: 1st Trumpet——————-Mark Bradley: Trumpet

Roxanna Shirley: 2nd Trumpet—————Roxanna Shirley: Trumpet with Vocals

Ruth Thomas: Trumpet———————Becca Ware: 2nd Violin

Lucy Wilkins: 1st Violin———————Lucy Wilkins: Violin

Becki Doe: 1st Violin———————–Becki Doe: Violin

Rob Spriggs: Viola and Flute—————–Robert Spriggs: Viola

Oliver Kraus: Cello————————Oliver Kraus: Cello, Keyboards

My Life Story performed ‘A Month of Sundays’ at Dingwalls, with a different setlist for each gig. This was perhaps the turning point for them. In 1996 they were signed to Parlophone and released their single 12 Reasons Why. The newly acquired marketing and cashflow meant their popularity grew exponentially – they shifted overnight from indie music paper faves to mainstream radio and TV appearances including Radio 1, The Big Breakfast, TFI Friday, The White Room, Live And Kicking, The Bob Mills Show, GLR and more. They toured endlessly over the next two years including an unforgettable New Year’s Eve gig at the Hackney Empire in 1996 and the landmark election-night gig at the Astoria in 1997, which included a swingometer to decide the next song, and a guest appearance from ABC frontman Martin Fry. They released four more singles and an album that year – all four singles were released as dual format with different b-sides on each to encourage the collectors. One of them (Sparkle) was a re-arranged, re-recorded version of the original ‘You Don’t Sparkle (In My Eyes)‘ from Mother Tongue. The album was released with a Valentine’s Day gig at ULU. Whilst the album was well received it appeared more produced and packaged than the original Mornington Crescent era tracks – and the double (in the case of 12 Reasons, triple) releases, and blocky artwork gave it a less personal, more commercial feel. My Life Story’s fanbase were hardcore however and many still collected two of every release and followed them round the country (and beyond), even forming “My Life Story Sunshine Tours” and meeting up with other members of the mailing list (this was before the internet had really taken off). It was live that My Life Story were still spectacular – the cascading strings and trumpeting brass; the high kicks from Jake and cheeky smirks from the Crow; the teasing from the strings, the numbers thrown out into the crowd to 12 Reasons by Rox and the strings. The suits in white latex and sparkly silver, personally designed by Mr Gammon. Still the glitter, the confetti, the boas, the groupies played on.

Nowadays, Jake’s personal tailer, a Mr Gammon, takes care of his sartorial extravagances, supplying everything from the ‘little black leather Elvis numbers to ’suits like the ones John Steed wore in the Avengers’. Such attention to detail, coupled with the visual and musical shenanigans of a band the size of a football team minus the goalie, make My Life Story’s live shows quite an event.

It was short lived – there were problems emanating from the relationship with Parlophone, culminating with the cancellation of the release of You Can’t Uneat The Apple (which a promo was already in circulation for) and it’s sudden replacement with the far more regimented ‘Duchess‘. In 1998 they were dropped – some claim due to poor charting, others claim it was a change of management at Parlophone. As a parting gesture the label re-issued Mornington Crescent with extra tracks. Jake, Danny, Simon and The Crow took on a new member and signed briefly to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s offshoot business It Records. They took on a new more synth and guitar-led, 80’s-electronica influenced direction, releasing their third album ‘Joined up Talking‘ in 2000, now stripped down to a five piece. They still failed to chart and played their final three shows at Camden Underworld on 13th, 14th and 15th December. All three nights has different setlists with an acoustic set beforehand, following the shadow of their ‘Month of Sundays’ concept of 1995. The band then went their separate ways. Jake and Aaron Cahill launched their new project ExileInside in 2001, releasing an album in August 2002. Jake also went on to start a solo career without Aaron.

The band began by playing an unplugged set of ‘November 5th’, ‘Claret’ and ‘You can’t uneat the apple’. The main set included most of the third album and crowd-pleasers from the past such as ‘Suited and Booted’, ‘Sparkle’, ‘Motorcade’, ‘Penthouse in the Basement’ and ‘12 Reasons Why I Love Her’. “We’re not really splitting up,” joked Jake on stage, “we just like to see girls cry.”

As it had been at the Month of Sundays gigs, the final song in the main set was ‘Funny Ha Ha’, Jake’s riposte to cynical critics. My Life Story’s dying notes were from the final encore of the moving ballad ‘Angel’. A bootleg double CD of this concert is known to be in circulation.

My Life Story were part of the time and the place of Camden in the mid-90’s but with throwbacks to the 60’s. It all leaked into the sound and appearance of My Life Story as a band and as an icon of the time. At the peak of Britpop Camden was the scene to be in and My Life Story were a huge part of that crowd. Their output was more than the music – a performance of drama and showmanship, glamour and style, representing the shabby romance of modern life and modern London. Their fanbase was largely London-based and formed a loyal crowd. Whilst they always had this hardcore fanbase, their popularity soared when they gained the business hand to promote it, but was unsustainable without the marketing, the assets and the era. As Britpop moved on and the public were pushed to another category My Life Story found it impossible to compete.

Albums

Mornington Crescent (Mother Tongue Records – 1994)
The Golden Mile (Parlophone Records – 1996) UK # 36
Mornington Crescent (Parlophone Records – 1998 )
Joined Up Talking (it Records 1999)
Sex & Violins (The Best of My Life Story) (Exilophone Records 2006)
Megaphone Theology (B-Sides and Rarities) (Exilophone Records 2006)

Singles
Girl A, Girl B, Boy C (Mother Tongue Records – 1993)
Funny Ha Ha (Mother Tongue Records – 1994)
You Don’t Sparkle (In My Eyes) (Mother Tongue Records – 1995)
The Mornington Crescent Companion EP (Mother Tongue Records – 1995)
12 Reasons Why I Love Her (Parlophone Records – 1996) UK #32
Sparkle (Parlophone Records – 1996) #34
The King Of Kissingdom (Parlophone Records – 1997) UK #35
Strumpet (Parlophone Records – 1997) UK #27
Duchess (Parlophone Records – 1997) UK #39
If You Can’t Live Without Me Then Why Aren’t You Dead Yet? ( 1998 ) – Download-only single
It’s A Girl Thing (it Records – 1999) UK #37
Empire Line (it Records – 1999) UK #58
Walk/Don’t Walk (it Records – 2000) UK #48

Links:

Checkmate – Caroline Griffiths’ site
Twelve Reasons Why – Ricchard Harrison’s site
Sean.co.ukSean McManus’ site
mylifestory.com My Life Story official site
http://jakeshillingford.com/ – Jake’s solo site
Wiki on My Life Story

Potential Becoming Actual

Looking back at the work I’ve made and put up for the exhibition, 3 out of the 4 ‘potential’ works that hadn’t yet been made have now been completed and become actualities – the seeds, the deconstructed painting, and the signs of the paradox-of-nothing. Their previous potential has been proven, by turning them into actualities. Only the inferral-of-absence photos remain on the list of potential works. Of course, this is only on my short list and potential remains all around me at all times.

The seeds are coming along well, the test piece worked remarkably well but sadly my brain was not being very creative when it decided to plant the most obvious word of all – ‘Art’ – as a test piece. Still, the potential art has now become an actuality. Since then I’ve planted more words at different rates. Meanings will change as some plants grow alone, others later grow alongside them, and later still plants begin to die. Paradoxes will appear, and disappear.

Some plants are still no closer to even sprouting, so even I don’t know the potential that is, or isn’t, in there.

Potential Encounters

Spent most of today setting up my work for the assessment/exhibition, but today was also the day F and I had agreed to hand over the artwork for ‘recycling’. With the test piece we gave it other purposes, such as a tablecloth:

But with the actual ‘real’, (ie previously exhibited piece) I’d decided to opt out of all decisions regarding its future uses or potentials. In advance of the ‘handover’ I’d decided I would cut it up into a random number of pieces, of random sizes, and the only rule applied would be that I handed one piece over to everybody I spoke to after I cut the work up – mainly to avoid having any personal effect on its future potential. I speak to many people in a day – the postman, bus driver, art students, lecturers, neighbours, doctors, coffee shop assistants – people from all walks of life who would see its ‘potential’ (if any) in a variety of ways.

The painting was cut into 107 pieces. As of 19:04, as I’m writing this, there are 81 pieces remaining, so I have ‘redistributed’ 26 parts of the painting to 26 different people so far. It’s been quite amusing seeing people’s reaction to it – the first few were art students so perhaps it didn’t seem so bizarre to them. Some seemed puzzled and walked away looking slightly embarrassed, some asked what it was for and seemed interested, and a couple really liked the idea and we discussed the ideas of nothing and potential at length.

Sticking strictly to my rule of handing a piece over to everybody I spoke to, I found myself interacting on a different level than I would normally with various people. One was a random woman I bumped into in a toilet who simply said to me ‘excuse me’, so I replied ’sorry’ and duly moved out of the way. Once I’d opened my mouth, however, I figured this was now deemed ’speaking to someone’ as the dialogue had passed both ways – I duly stopped the lady in question and handed her a piece with only a very brief explanation. She didn’t seem too scared but I do wonder where that piece might be now…

Another random encounter was with a waitress in Starbucks. After ordering my cinnamon latte with an extra shot and paying the amount she asked for, I could see this dialogue was coming to an end and I must hand over the piece. This I did rapidly with the queue building up behind me, with a brief explanation that, as part of an art project, I was giving a piece to everybody I spoke to today. She was instantly confused and asked me to repeat it, which I did before walking away. She then stared at it for a few seconds before the woman in the queue behind me asked her what it was and they both looked in my direction.

I’m sure the vast majority of these pieces will end up in the bin, although they might hang around on tabletops, desks and handbags for a few hours or days, maybe even a week or two. Maybe they’ll elicit the odd memory of the bizarre encounter in the mind of the recipient before they dispose of it. But a few of them have already obtained new uses. One is acting as a bookmark, another is in someone’s sketchbook. One has been deemed a piece of art in its own right, another was used for polishing plastic for use in the exhibition, and one is acting as an example on my exhibition wall. As I talk to myself quite frequently I decided this was also a discussion and donated a piece to myself – this I used as a coaster in Starbuck’s:

It’s interesting seeing the potential in terms of its new uses, but also in its potential to strike up discussion and interaction between people who might previously have never said more than ‘excuse me’; ’sorry’; ‘£3.89 please’… Most conversations didn’t go far, but at least left an inkling of confusion in someone’s mind – but a few did evolve into something interesting that might never have happened before.

I love this potential. Just making something that somebody doesn’t understand on first glance (such as the lemon juice pictures) but is interested enough to ask questions about, leading to discussions that would otherwise never have happened.

The Handover

Handing over the first cut piece

Organising my Nothings – towards Potential Art

Preparing for the Assessment and Exhibition, I’m gathering together what I’ve read, thought, made and fiddled around with the last few weeks. I seem to have several categories going on here:

1) Nothing as an Absence of any Physical Thing - I demonstrated this a lot at the beginning, when investigating the existence and meaning of ‘Nothing’. Physically it appears I can look at, point to, measure, make, draw Nothing – but logically it is a paradox. It is a problem of language. Or of expecting to see Something but seeing Something Else.

2) Nothing as an Absence of Art – the Archive board as a mark or memory of art-that-used-to-be-here. Absence of art.

3) Nothing in terms of Art That Hasn’t Been Made Yet. Leads on from 1 and 2 in terms of Absence, but brings something else into the equation – Potential. With Lists or Catalogues of art that I haven’t yet made – the art doesn’t exist but there is now a list with the potential that it could be made… There is something, a start, a beginning, a hint, a possibility – an arrow in the direction of something that might be…

4) Nothing in terms of Potential Art – Latent Art – the lemon juice that hasn’t been ironed yet, ‘latent images’ or artworks on film, DVDs and memory cards; the records of the moment-before-the-shutter-has-been-pressed; html colour coded to the background so you need to highlight it to find it.

5) Nothing in terms of Readymade Potential Art in the ‘External World’ – records of Potential Art that is all around us, as images left in their original location.

1 & 2 are along the same lines – Nothing as Absence of Thing.
3, 4 & 5 are connected in another way – Potential to Be a Thing. Where 1 & 2 were about not seeing Something where you expected to see it, 3, 4 & 5 are about the Potential of Something Becoming under the right circumstances.

What are the right circumstances? What are the circumstances under which there is a potential-to-become? What makes ‘it’ in that in-between place – not Nothing (which by definition doesn’t exist), but not yet Something? The lemon in my fridge and the paper on my desk are not art. But if I squeeze the lemon, draw a picture with it and iron it it could become art. At what point does this Potential begin? Before I’d thought of the idea I couldnt really say the lemon and the paper had any more potential in them than the milk, the bread, the door, the street or anything else. But I can hint at potential by pointing at things as readymades, like in the photo-of-the-photo-of-my-foot.

What gives something the Potential to be Something Else? The arrow, the pointer of a direction of what it might Become…?

A List of Potential Art

A list of art that I haven’t made yet.

It could be things I’ve thought of at length. It could be things I’ve got halfway to organising. It could be things that have only just crossed my mind. Or it could just be things I’d never thought of in my life before.

But this is a short list of pieces of art that I have not yet made.

The Precise Size of Various Nothings

The Medium of Ideas – Conceptual Art and Beyond (pt. II)

So – Ideas as a medium. What I am trying to explore is that art (in whatever form or period) involves communication – it must involve mental processes – experiences, ideas, thinking, questioning, understanding. It begins as an idea in the artist’s mind and ends as an idea in the viewer’s mind.

Is it that today we are evoking different kinds of mental process? Pre-Renaissance art was reliant on the wealthy and was a ‘commissioned message’ – of power, status or beauty etc, in architecture and painting – religious messages, aristocratic messages.

(Without needing to go through the whole history of art) – more recently, since conceptualism, is it that it is a more active mental process? Instead of conveying a strict message, is it conveying a question – forcing the viewer to ask questions and reconsider their understanding of concepts. It is a form of active thinking. Sometimes it is the thinking. The artwork only exists when the viewer participates in the process – without the participation it is no longer an artwork, just an object. The viewer’s thinking – their active mental activity in questioning and reconsidering, is the artwork, rather than being the result of viewing the artwork.

I’ve tried to do the list-type research on conceptual art but nobody seems keen to define it. The commonest answers are along the lines of questioning the limits of art and artists, media, ideas and meaning eg – “not defined by medium or style but by the way it questions what art is”; “questions the traditional status of art as unique, collectable or saleable”; “Demands a more active response from the viewer – only truly exists in the viewer’s mental participation”. (Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, Phaidon Press, 1998)

I think the latter perhaps comes closest to my consideration of ideas as a medium – questioning, eliciting a response from the viewer so that they have to actively consider what they are viewing and its meaning – and whether their own beliefs and opinions are real, even what ‘reality’ is. But I’m not trying to look specifically at conceptual art here, I’m looking at ideas as a medium – which can (and must) go beyond the scope of specifically conceptual art.

Dibbets & Ruthenbeck’s “The Energy of a Real English Breakfast Transformed into Breaking a Real Steel Bar by the Artists Dibbets and Ruthenbeck” questions in this way.

Tony Godfrey discusses this in ‘Conceptual Art’, saying several questions are being asked implicitly in the work: “not just ‘what is a ‘real’ English breakfast?’ or ‘did this ‘really’ happen?’ but ‘what does ‘real’ mean?’“. It looks real but did it really happen? Did they really break the bar? Are they artists? Is this art? Which part is the artwork – the action of making the photo; the photo itself; or the ideas in your mind as you ask these questions?

Philosophy and art seem inseparable on this level. Both are intended to make you think. The art as a whole is the thinking. To remove the thinking (ergo the viewer) from the process is like having a letter without any writing in it. But even beyond that – do I have to have ANY physical object to have the art? Some work, eg Joseph Kosuth’s Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) series, exists whether or not the item in front of me exists:

Joseph Kosuth ‘Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) [Water]‘, 1966

It is not this particular photocopy in front of me that is the artwork – it could be replicated on any other photocopy or reprinted or written or conveyed in any other way – it is the concept, the idea, the thought that is the essential component in the artwork. This truly is beyond the visual. The medium is the idea, the concept or rather the mental action of you thinking and questioning. It doesn’t matter exactly what object in what place causes the thinking, it is the act of doing that specific thinking.

In the text within ‘Non-Anthromorphic Art‘, Kosuth states: “All I make are models. The actual works of art are ideas. Rather than ‘ideas’ the models are a visual approximation or a particular art object I have in mind. It does not matter who actually makes the model, nor where the model ends up”:

Joseph Kosuth, ‘Texts by Joseph Kosuth from ‘Non-Anthromorphic Art”, Lannis Gallery, NYC, 1967

This still seems a very narrow concept of ‘conceptual’ though. I’ve since found it in an online philosophy of art lecture as “an art of the mind rather than the senses” which seems more where I’m coming from with using ideas as a medium.

Many supposed ‘definitions’ such as “not defined by medium or style but by the way it questions what art is” are surely only categorising a single subject within the huge range of conceptual art, never mind thinking or thought as a medium. Art can act through ideas on any subject – it is about far more than questioning what art is, or the meaning of art – it is about questioning the meaning or belief or opinion or conception of anything…

On the same level as philosophy, it is about causing a hint of doubt in the viewer so that they consider other possibilities; they are no longer sure about previous certainties. In doing this they are constructing the art by participating in it themselves. On this level I cannot see any distinction between philosophy and art.

Philosophy can’t exist without a thinker – art as thought cannot exist without a thinker.