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.

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

I’m writing this in a field in Yorkshire as I am away for a couple of weeks, so this will be uploaded to the blog when I get home and will all be slightly out of synch.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what medium I should select to research for AE&EA and about the research process itself – what it should include what it shouldn’t, what is worth being included. The value of the project itself has been a major issue for me.

Firstly the research. We were told to go away and research each area in as much depth as possible and document it – ‘to find out everything there is to know’. It was still a very vague brief though, and given the impossibility of researching the infinite – and indeed documenting it online – I’m not seeing this as a valuable use of my time. So I’m not going to go out and research every fact and figure as any kind of list or encyclopaedia.

Instead what I will do is think, read, look, observe, interact, perform – and see what my thoughts are on the concepts of what I am looking at or producing – of medium, of institution, gallery, artist and publication. I could research the specific in detail but it is such a small part of the whole – and art being such a wide arena I don’t think it is necessarily a good thing to have detail on specifics. At least not yet. So whilst I will choose a specific medium, artist or whatever, I’m far more interested in it as part of a whole system, or as a general concept.

Which leads me to the first area I’m supposedly documenting my research on – a medium. After thinking endlessly about choosing a medium and looking at what it is, what it isn’t, what it is used for, why it used, who has used it ad infinitum and being no more inspired I have decided my medium is thought. Thinking, ideas. Communicating through ideas. My first interest at college is philosophy – or to be more precise understanding and ideas – and using art as a tool within this to gain understanding; and to communicate. Ideas are a medium for me, as well as an end result.

Last year I was told that art is about communication. There is always communication of some form intended in an artwork. This doesn’t seem to be the general view at my current college, but I don’t know if that’s through a lack of clarity or understanding or what. Regardless of my experiences last year, surely art has to be about the transfer or evocation of some kind of understanding, thought, idea or emotion in the viewer? Even without any original intent, there is communication as soon as the viewer sets eyes (or ears, or whatever else) on it.

If the viewer is not getting the message intended by the artwork then the artist wasn’t successful in their objective, it was ‘bad art’ – it could have been done better. But despite this – even if an artwork evokes the wrong message, or wasn’t supposed to have any message, it has to evoke a feeling or an idea of some sort in the mind of the viewer. Whether it is the appreciation of the beauty of a landscape, a message of power, beauty or status in a portrait, or political comment in contemporary art or anything else – it has to evoke some kind of mental activity in the viewer. Emotion, understanding, thought, idea – Descartes would label them all ‘thinking’.

However surely art today has gone beyond the evocation of idea or thinking, to using ideas as a medium. As Beuys said it has gone ‘beyond the visual’. Conceptual art. Relational art. Yoko’s Grapefruit. The philosophy of art. Philosophy as art…

This is beginning to sound confusing. Let me try to organise this a little more…

Camouflage – potential art and minimalism

I’ve tried the Camouflage photo idea on a few other objects (see Gallery 1 and Gallery 2) with varying degrees of success. First, what I like about it – I like the effect of the photo of x left within its original “place in the (normal, external, non-art) world”. I still like the simplicity of the first picture better. I like the interaction between the world and people, man and material, – the need for people for art. I like the way it refers to ideas beyond minimalism – in relation to the idea of bringing art down to its foundations, the ultimate concept of foundational art being art-that-hasn’t-been-made-yet; hasn’t even been thought of yet – then it is all around us. Everything is potential art. So photographing it seems to frame it and categorise it as art but still leave it in its original context – rather than taking a readymade out of its original context and putting it into the art context. This points at the original context and leaves it there. The un-noticed is as valid as anything else.

I’ve been directed at Victor Burgin’s Photopath:

which is a very similar idea, but while I like its simplicity and scale I also like the less-obvious quality that having something smaller brings, the fact you have to look infers that it is all around you and is not immediately obvious.

I appreciate the paradox in making it art and not-art, but my point is to bring up the idea, the question for the viewer to consider. (Ideally the photos would be left on the original but for archiving/documentation I’ve used photos of the photos-on-the-original.)

The method – hand holding the camera made the pictures with and without photo too variable, no matter how hard I tried to line perspective up with the original, so I tried with a tripod. This made it too precise though, I need some difference for it to be noticeable at all, although it was interesting to have one or two of these, to hint at it being around you and not only do you not notice it, you have to actively look for it. I’ve experimented with different amounts of editing from the original in tone, contrast etc but it works much better if I keep it as close to the original as possible with just a faint line/shadow showing a slightly different plane and making the viewer question if what they are seeing is the real scenario. Too much editing looks too obvious and doesn’t leave much to question. It also works better with good lighting to give shade below the photo and make it clearer where the border lies.

I’m quite keen on the shots having an interaction between nature and man eg the tractor tracks, the felled tree – as is a manmade product, there is no ‘category’ in the absence of people. These are probably the photos that went less well though so if I took it further it’d need more work.

A few people have asked me if I’d used a mirror and were interested in how the mirror showed an almost exact replica of the underneath. I found this quite interesting – although it wasn’t intended, it does remind me of Robert Smithson’s Mirror Displacement :

– having both a physical aspect and a non-physical/metaphysical or cognitive aspect. I might experiment with mirrors to see where they could take me.

So what don’t I like about it? Ultimately I don’t like it because does it really mean anything, is it at all clear any meaning or activity behind it? In itself, no. It doesn’t communicate anything much about Nothingness, it got sidetracked away from Potential Art or Nothingness towards mimimalism in conceptual art.

But along with other pieces I’ve had a go at regarding Nothingness and its meaning, yes. And that’s really what I’m getting at in what I’m thinking about regarding art – in itself it is not clear, it’s pretty meaningless – it’s the concept, meaning, understanding behind it that’s important. I want to make it clearer to myself what I mean by Nothingness, what I mean by conceptual art. So as a process it has a function but in itself it is meaningless.