Conceptual craft?

(via)

Andrea Walsh's "Contained Boxes" have won the 2016 Craft Scotland prize. Simple and beautiful, inviting touch and satisfying the eye.

Based in Edinburgh, she uses a range of materials including ceramics, glass, and metal to create elegantly crafted and timeless pieces, of which an independent curator has said:

“Walsh’s work seems the antithesis of the fleeting surfaces of contemporary life and yet the forms are free of the pastiche or anachronism of the self-consciously crafted thing. They possess instead what the American art historian Keith Moxey describes as a vital heterochronicity – a capacity to unfold many time worlds simultaneously through the precision and poetry of the forms.” 

My gripe, on reading and re-reading this, extracting what I thought might be its meaning, was with the small words. "Yet" - ?? "Or" - ?? How do they contribute to the sense of the sentence, or do they contribute to confusion about what might be being said? The longest word, heterochronicity, is explained (thank goodness).

So with the (possibly) oxymoronic title of this post, I'm thinking back to how the idea of conceptual art can be off-putting to people, because the artist is focussed on the idea behind the work and the viewer doesn't know enough about ... something vital ... the context, the idea, the artist; some sort of help is needed for the viewer to stay interested, to get anything out of "it".

Craft, you might argue, is about touchable objects, touch being a route to pleasure, whereas art is Hands Off and solely perceived through eye and brain. So through being able to hold or stroke the object you can overcome the off-puttingness of an important concept that can lie behind the object - and isn't a "contained box" quite a concept? - is the box inside or outside, or both ... container or object, or both ...

So for all our understanding of boxes in every day life, these remain puzzling objects - which is good, they have mystery about them ... can you say that about the famous Carl Andre bricks? I was glad to read a little about the artist's background (masters degree in glass; exploration of box and vessel form), but then, in the explanatory text, the use of words like antithesis, pastiche, anachronism - what a word soup! - got in the way again. Precision and poetry of the forms, yes, that makes sense - these boxes are beautiful, thoughtful objects, pared down to a conjunction of vital elements. We can see that.

Addendum - artspeak
When it comes to artspeak, horrendous examples abound. I found this particularly disturbing ... and am trying to discover why; is it the words/phrases, or is it what's being described? -

Plessen pushes beyond the traditional parameters of representation, employing multiple perspectives to suggest the free circulation of objects, not dictated by compositional rules or gravity. During the painting process, canvases are sometimes rotated 90 degrees, serving to disrupt the artist’s relationship with the image, thereby allowing access to what he has described as ‘a layer beyond that of coherent figuration or narration without having to cut out representations altogether’.

Monday miscellany

A little local library in London
(see unexpected pix of other London libraries here, and library/archive info here)

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Nadia Myre is a visual artist from Montréal, Québec and a member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg. She has beaded over all 56 pages of the annotated Indian Act (with the help of more than 200 participants) between 2000 – 2003. (In 2005 she started The Scar Project, an ongoing ‘open lab’ where viewers participate by sewing their scars—real or symbolic—onto stretched canvases and write their ‘scar stories’ on paper.)

A monograph featuring a richly illustrated collection of Nadia’s installation, photography, sculpture, prints, beadwork, drawings and video work from the last fifteen years is available. 

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London by water (via mappinglondon.co.uk)

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Another lovely comment on a blog post - "I just now cannot go away your web site prior to suggesting that we incredibly relished the normal details someone supply in your guests? Shall be back again continually to examine new discussions" ... can't figure it out, can you?

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Agave lace (also called aloe lace) - it's made from fibres taken from this cactus, by Benedictine nuns on the island of Hvar, Croatia. At last report, 13 sisters were still making the lace, each with her individual style. Legend has it that it was based on a sample of lace brought back from the Canary Islands (specifically, Tenerife) in the 19th century - hence the name "tenerifa", the netted variety - the sample above is filet crochet (more info here). The agave in Europe produces a finer fibre than that in the Americas, which is used for rope-making.

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Spineless Classics - pages from the book (perhaps one you've not read) are now available as an evocative poster.

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Braided rivers are, says New Scientist (pp 39-41; photo via NASA Visible Earth), "a tell-tale sign of a landscape with little or no life". Here's how it works: deep-banked, meandering rivers depend on plant roots to slow the erosion of their banks and keep them from spreading. Without those roots, rivers cut through their banks and become a network of braided streams. These are seen at the foot of glaciers or in deserts. During the Permian mass extinction, aout 250 million years ago, rivers abruptly changed from meandering to braided.

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Is there a Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Fabric? (via)

Book du jour

Isn't it a good feeling to finish a project? This bit of over-writing was started in the spring, and now that the clocks have gone back to winter time, I've finally finished it.

The work used is Pamela M Lee's essay about the temporality of drawing, in an exhibition catalogue from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles -- "Afterimage: Drawing Through Process", loaned to me by Jean (thank you!) -

Lee looks at three aspects of time in relation to drawing: entropy, transitivity, and contingency. The latter includes chance and uses the "blind drawings" of Robert Morris - who set himself a drawing task to do with eyes closed for a predetermined duration - and William Anastasi, who drew in his pocket or with a pen in each hand on the New York subway on the way to play chess with John Cage every week.

I was also interested in what Lee said about the Wire Pieces of Richard Tuttle, which traverse genres, being both drawing and sculpture at the same time. He drew lines on a wall, then traced them with wire unwound from a coil, held with a screw at both ends. "The very presence of wire confirms the marks of the pencil, which are rendered with such quietude that they threaten to pass unnoticed." And the shadow is important, confirming the impermanence of the work:

Copying the article in handwriting, I find that at some points I'm paying attention to the words and what they are saying, and at other times my focus is on making the writing "look nice" - which can lead to mistakes in the copying, leaving out words or using the wrong word. But later the line is covered over with another layer of writing, and not only the sense is lost to the viewer, but the imprecision of the handwriting is transformed into a different kind of mark. This individual, selfish labour leaves only a quickly-viewed, easily-dismissible trace.

But is this project really finished? When starting, I hadn't thought through to the end, the presentation; perhaps I'd assumed it wouldn't be "worth" presenting. What can it offer a viewer? Only the aesthetic qualities of the writing - the physical handwriting, not the careful conjunctions of words - and the choice/use of materials [felt pen on "satin" letter paper], and the puzzle of "why do this in this way". I'm still puzzling on the Why. Is there more to this copying, this overwriting, than the pleasure it gives me? can that be "shown" somehow?

The meaning of the particular text is erased, transformed such that the mental state of the viewer parallels the simultaneous mental state of the writer, having written out the words some time ago - and now forgotten their exact meaning. It becomes a matter of what can be salvaged from this wreckage - some gist, or a starting point for a conversation.

Meanwhile the pages are gathered, the source noted; the folder sits in a drawer with other "finished" over-writing projects. 

Into the blue distance

Many of the works in the show are going straight off to a book arts exhibition in Kiev. One is my "Lost in the Blue Distance" - I love the synergy of its title and its continuing journey, but hopefully it won't actually be "lost" there! Just in case, I'm taking some photos. And might make another series of blue distances ... in a while ... first I'm going off into the blue distance myself, a bit of recuperation in the south of France, where Tony has some work in the photo biennale in Arles.

Book du jour - many Blue Distances

The top row is wastage - envelopes with titles not centred, books with folding gone wrong, that sort of thing. The bottom four include one that's finished, one that's nearly there, and two blanks, ready for copying out.

A page of writing takes about 10 minutes, and each book has 12 pages. On the one hand, you're paying attention to your handwriting and keeping the margins straight and not smudging (the technical details) and on the other you're thinking about the way the author has put the words together, and trying to remember the exact words and exact order (and the punctuation) as you copy big chunks of sentences.

Book du jour - The Blue Distance

This came together quickly, and took only a few hours to do the handwriting. When there's only one layer you can read it, once you figure out where to start -

 But when the second layer goes on (it gets written on the back), it becomes mysterious and even "distant". (that splodge is something inside the camera) -

Having a little light behind the book might be a good way to show its blueness. 

Due to the grain of the paper, the cover curls round - this might not happen if I use a sheet from a large pad. Also, I'd like the blue ink to be more muted - perhaps the way it's over-written will make a difference. 

You could go on and on doing different little things, and never get anything finished!

Here it is, getting bluer with the layers of writing and layers of paper -

 The light shining through gives it a glow -

The writing comes from a chapter in "Field guide to getting lost" called "The blue of distance" - on looking in the table of contents of the book, I realised there are four chapters called The Blue of Distance! This seems to be a sign to make more books - with different quotes. Here's the next one:

"That life is a journey is a given in these [blues] songs, whose background after all is the urbanization of rural whites and northern migration of southern blacks, but the intense love of place frames this journey not as an enlightenment narrative of discovery of the unknown but an insular tale of loss of the formative terra cognita that exists in the song only as memory, a map written in the darkness of your guts, readable in a cross section of your autopsied heart. Nobody gets over anything; time doesn't heal any wounds; if he stopped loving her today, as one of George Jones's most famous songs has it, it's because he's dead. The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it's made out of memory and desire, rather than rock and soil, as are the songs."

Each book will have as its "cover" an envelope with the book's real title, taken from the quote used, possibly from the last sentence in the quote. The new one will be called "Landscape of Memory and Desire", and the one already finished is called "Something is always getting lost". 

Book du jour - back to over-writing

On the shelf directly above the desk at which I sit to type is Rebecca Solnit's "A field guide to getting lost", a collection of essays. Opening it at random:

"We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away." 

I loved typing that, both for the attention paid to the words and for the sensation of typing - and these same pleasures apply to handwriting when copying "good words". One component of my show is to be the over-writing, either pages or the book of sonnets - perhaps the pages lit from behind, or the sonnets made into a concertina with a typed version on the back - vague plans...

Yes time is running out, but it would be such a pleasure to write out those words about the blue of distance, the entire essay perhaps, imbibing through eye and hand, ex-bibing(?) through pen and ink. I fantasise using beautiful paper, sitting contentedly in a quiet room... There will be blue ink in my fountain pen, and the paper will be transparent so that "there's always something far away" and the next or previous page is almost visible - which ties neatly in to the Seepage book. This book of over-writing will encompass something that has been, and something that could be, but turns out to have already been also; something that was once clear and was skillful and meaningful in the moment of doing, but has become illegible to the doer and the observer both. (Not being able to read it doesn't matter - in fact, that's the whole point.)

That's the fantasy, now for the reality. Blue ink must be found, and the fountain pen -- not this one in its coffin, which from the start didn't write 

but the one I've had for about 30 years, and haven't used for the past couple of years...where is it now, I'd hate to lose it...

A format for the book must be decided - concertina? codex? tall and thin? short and wide? - as well as extent (something manageable, a dozen pages as they'll be written at least twice). And covers must be thought about too.

As someone (Picasso? Goethe? Einstein? - doesn't matter) once said, "If you can imagine it, you can do it". After sleeping on the idea I went to the local stationery/art supply store (Fish&Cook) and brought home some blue-ink pens. Then sorted through my paper drawers to find tracing paper, hoping to use some that I kept after an early version of my foundation course final project didn't work out. Found it, but most was too crinkled to use.

Which took us to lunchtime, and the search for a suitable, simple structure in a number of book-making books. Followed by the need to print the title and the quote before starting the writing.

 Ready to try out the pens and spacing -

But really I should do the dishes first...

Book du jour - sonnet

The first in what is intended to be a book of well-known sonnets is "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part",written by Michael Drayton (1563-1631). It was published in 1619 and is reckoned to be the only great sonnet among the 150 that Drayton wrote. (But I didn't know that before rewriting it....)

The format of my page manifests a method of memorising poetry - start at the end and work forward. So I wrote the last line, then over it the penultimate and on the line below the last, then the last three... which makes the top line very dense, because it consists of the entire poem, layered so that the first line is on top (not that you'd notice!). I'm quite familiar with the end of the poem by now, but cannot confidently recite the entire thing.

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part,

Nay I have done, you get no more of me,

And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,

That thus so cleanly I myself can free;

Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,

And when we meet at any time again,

Be it not seen in either of our brows

That we one jot of former love retain.

Now at the last gasp of love's latest breath,

When his pulse failing, passion speechless lies,

When faith is kneeling by his bed of death,

And innocence is closing up his eyes,

  Now if thou would'st, when all have given him over,

  From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.

Book du jour - meeting the eye

Recycled tissue paper, made into a book consisting of double-fold pages, was perfect for over-writing. The guide lines slipped under each page, and I used a Muji 0.5 gel pen - they come in packs of 6, which is useful for longer writing projects ... one such is languishing because the pen with which I started no longer seems to be made!

The book has 14 sides available for text, and each side takes 10 minutes to fill. I wrote down some rules for this book, including: no paragraph breaks; cross through for mistakes, but don't insert missing words; break words anywhere without hyphens; if text runs out before book is full, start again at the beginning; be aware of posture; try to remember what's been read/written.

This was done over three days, and the writing at the end is much closer-together than it was at the beginning -

What was said of Vija Celmins' work in the article I was re-writing also applies to the re-writing itself: "[the images Celmins re-uses] ultimately offer a familiar vehicle for interrogating the subtle differences in pencil, in her own mood and in her handling of space." The article goes on to relate that she holds the viewer's interest by evoking infinite depth in her images "and yet they constantly remind the eye of their inescapable flatness." I'm not at all sure how these pages will hold the viewer's interest - through their almost-sameness, through the hope - as the viewer turns each page - that something different will appear? that the hidden secret will be revealed?

The article I copied (and enjoyed reading) is in the Spring 2012 issue of Tate Etc - More to Meet the Eye, by Katharine Stout. It deals some artists who'll be in the Contemporary Drawings show at Tate Britain, opening 7 May.

Book du jour - over-writing pages

Gradually the pages torn out of an old travel journal are getting filled up. The two with "horrible obtrusive big writing" have become experiments in using two colours of ink -

I find them too ... what ... fussy? boring? cluttered? randomly senseless? ugly? Whatever the exact reason or reasons, they are so very unsatisfying.

Thus: Stick to one colour. Consider nuance. Sometimes, more is more.

Seeing a detail suddenly brought to mind all the screenprinting I was doing last year - some of which was overprinting. What goes round comes round.... lines, lines, lines.....

Book du jour - more words on onionskin

Considering ways of "scrambling" text so that the words make sense, but the sentences don't. One possibility is alternate lines written upside-down, so that the gist is hard to follow -

Although the show-through text adds nuance, it looks boring -

Another angle ... bringing thoughts of blur and size gradations -

A further dimension for consideration is the use of columns, and what size writing would be most appropriate or effective -

At base, the question is: why would you want words to be readable and sentences not to be? My task is not only to make a "different thing" (an appealing, interesting thing) but to have it make sense to a viewer (and to myself!) - so I'm letting that percolate in the unconscious for a while.

Book du jour

The plan was to make a back to back accordion book, as seen in Alisa Golden's Making Handmade Books (rather like this one) but I got a bit lazy about the length of paper used - this is only an experiment, right?

First, something for the back/inside of the pages - the text would be coming from the maths exhibition catalogue, so I used the French title. It looked very bold when it was the only thing on the page, but almost completely disappeared in the finished book, obscured by the darker pen soaking through the paper -

Each strip is written in four sections, so actually reading the text is initially tricky. In between the lines are the titles of the two pieces, both written by Mischa Gromov  (who said elsewhere, "it is very difficult to write books with a wide appeal, and very few mathematicians are actually able to do that. You have to know things very well and understand them very deeply to present them in the most evident way") - not that the text is mathematical; more philosophical and relevant to the exhibition. The larger writing in finer pen is the title, much repeated -

In trying to find aesthetic ways to present handwritten texts, I'm trying out various writing materials and book structures. The texts chosen for the experiments are ones that I enjoy reading slowly, and thinking about as I write (though too much thinking does lead to mistakes in the copying). If this develops, the text and its presentation should be in harmony - but I'm not yet clear on what that involves. Maybe the work with type (choosing style, size, spacing - and paper) will feed in to this.

The original plan was to make the text illegible ... I seem to be losing sight of that, or rather it conflicts with my desire to have interesting text readable.

"Stacked journalling" - and graphite

The "over-writing" technique I'm using has many possibilities - they are exhaustively set out in a tutorial here (thanks, Sandy, for pointing it out). It's fun fun fun - do have a go!

My over-writing project arose from journalling in two ways - from the crossing-out of old journals, and from the delight in making textures with handwriting, initially writing down my secret (and very boring) thoughts . Now my focus is on copying out plangent* texts - with a view to suiting the medium to them. I'm still at the stage of trying to define and refine my intention - and if I continue, I'll have to "explain" how this fits into my "everyday journeys" project.

*plangent (it felt like the right word but I had to look it up) = loud and resonating, often melancholy.

Another strand to this project is to be aware of subtle things and " meaningful accidents". For instance, using a fine pen that was running out of ink needed really hard pressure, and the paper underneath ended up covered with impressions - and the sheet of paper under that one still showed some marks - so before covering it with graphite, I used the defective pen to write another text, which bit deep into the paper. After 9B graphite was added and polished, it became reflective and almost readable -

On the other side, a light coat of graphite on the raised texture of the writing, and denser graphite around the edges to try to pick up the fainter marks of the ghost writing -

It looks like "nothing" - and in a way, it is...

Book du jour - more copying

The book is the catalogue of an exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1999. Artists (listed here) include "process artists" like Marcia Hafif, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, Gordon Matta Clark, Agnes Denes, Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, Bruce Nauman - late 60s stuff - and there are thought-provoking essays by Pamela M Lee and Cornelia H Butler. One way to read the essays (and think about them) is to copy them -

One of the benefits of transcribing every word is that there's opportunity to stop and look up the words that sorta make sense when you're reading quickly (or can be overlooked) - but can be seen to need explanation when you're reading slowly, and when you're reading art-speak... I should be keeping a list of them. One was "Heraclitean" (Heraclites was an ancient Greek philosopher who maintained that strife and chaos are the natural order of the universe); another was "entropy" (the natural tendency of the universe to fall into disorder - Second Law of Thermodynamics and all that).

The essay on "duration" includes the word "temporality" rather a lot, and indeed the function and use of the time factor in making and viewing art is of considerable interest to me -

In choosing this text for copying/transcribing, I'm using a considerable amount of time in a way that (by my criteria) doesn't "waste" it, and I'm learning about other artists' use of time - indeed, this slow reprocessing of "old" text about "older" art makes for many layers of time. The over-writing makes the time used in the current work double back on (or reinforce) itself. The illegibility aspect ... well, it just IS. I don't think the viewer needs to be able to read the actual words...the only person deriving didactic benefit is the (re)writer; hopefully a viewer would find the aesthetic, and perhaps conceptual, dimension to be sufficient - and there would be some sort of title to help them with this.

Book du jour - and some thoughts on copying

Trying out various formats for the over-writing - using a strip of masking tape to make a blank area in the page, for example. The text is from the catalogue of an exhibition we saw at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in December (the exhibition goes till mid-March) - "Mathematics: A Beautiful Elsewhere" -

Above, large writing with a pale pen, needing a lot of pressure, on onion-skin; below, small writing added with a pen that gave a darker line and flowed nicely over the paper. Writing on both sides, held up to the light, with and without the strip of masking tape -

Writing out other people's words is a pleasant thing to do, though old habits die hard and I'd like to edit a little here and there (after all, who would know?). You get very close to the words - not as close, though, as with copying other people's drawings, where there is so much that needs attention - the direction of the mark, the pressure on the pen, the relation to adjacent marks. The marks in the drawing are so direct; the connection to the artist is so immediate. With words there are many levels of processing before the words reach you - from the author's handwriting/typing and its revision to the printed page and finished publication. Copying the marks of handwriting - the immediate words - would be a different experience. It might feel a bit like trying to become that person? How close to, or far away from, that do you get by borrowing their words and putting them in your own handwriting? Why am I using someone else's text? How would I feel, re-writing various kinds of text - what to do next, what to do first?

Where is this going and what's it about .... ah, don't know yet ...

Another project on the go

My "over-writing" project has moved on to clean sheets of paper - an old box of onion-skin (remember onion-skin? flimsy transparent stuff, usually used in typewriters with carbon paper .. which by the way is another wonderful material) - a box dating back to typewriter days, pre-A4 size days ... salvaged from a stationery-cupboard clearout at work many years ago. Paper with history.

The round thing is simply holding the folded bits down, to show the method behind this madness.

Too much margin = not enough inside... Both sides:

As well as the negative space, can the translucency contribute? Can the pages be combined? -

This text is the introductory essay to an exhibition of Susan Derges' photography - it was in a book that happened to be on hand (role of accident, chance...).

I sit at the table in front of the window and copy text - a calming and even soothing thing to do - especially when the builder isn't here, and the other members of the family are out (preferably at work). It's an easy way to get into the studio and do "something" in the space available.