Research: Why Don't We Sing This Song All Together
“there are several weird and peculiar figures. Total pandemonium…Our replies signs of love, volleys of hiccups, poems, moos….” Jean Arp [i]
“Why don’t we sing this song all together, open our heads let the pictures come”
This research looks into collaboration between artists. The first collective proposal put forward by our institution, has been to organize, curate and present an online show. Immediately what has became apparent is the imminent dependency on internet, emails, online collaboration platforms, social media and digital editing tools, if we are going to be able to produce a show in the way we are being asked to, as a response. But what is in question here, for me, is the history of the digital. More so too, Is how does this fit in with my current practice? How has the space of the internet been used by the arts? Is this a sphere I want my own works to exist in? What restrictions or freedoms become apparent when using the digital sphere as a place artwork to exist? How does using the internet as a ‘tool’ tie the artist into a wider network? And does this network allow total autonomy?
The ‘space’ we have been asked to utilise has grown out of technologies that connect us to a network “processed through algorithms, which, of course, have racist, gender-specific, class-related, and national undercurrents.” [ii]
So,and immediately in question, can we use the mainstream to change the mainstream, and again, is this something I want to embroil my own practice within? Or do I just become powerless to have no other option to go out into the world and show the results of our productions in a way that take use of what is on offer by using the internet as a “technical support”? [iii]
I had recently been in contact with the essay written by Rosalind Krauss, The Guarantee of the Medium, so was intrigued to explore the use of the iPhone, wifi, apps, and the environment I found myself in whilst using them as form of what I think of as ‘Post-Medium.
This has led me to discover how music has a definite influence on my practice. There seems, to me, a dependency on music to, in someway, accompany the image on the screen. The correlation between movement and beat, rhythm and response and technology as a medium, that calls me as an artist to try to in some way adapt this new form of communication in a way I find troublesome. So what is this problematic element that accompanies my making in a digital way?
David Hockney, Untitled, 977, iPad drawing (2011).
Looking at this example of David Hockney’s car on a motorway in the drawing, Untitled, 977 (2011), [iv] its evident, to me anyway, that Hockney has utilised technology to transport “the studio setting” into the outside world. He could very well have been drawing this moment in time - probably on a motorway journey - because of his ability to let go of the traditions of painting, in as much, it can only be done in the private world of the artists studio, thus propelling his practice into a new sphere of influence.
So, I have adopted the same approach for the December show that we will be curating online. Not so much as to copy or contrive works out of hommage, but to experiment with other ways of producing work. There is something I have noticed all throughout my own artistic practice, and this show has raised the issue once again, is that I always need licence to justify my own practice, or validity of my own creative ideas that just materialize through being.
So rather than try to pin my work tightly into some bracket, cliche or pun or stifle a potential wider openness with narrative, meaning or purpose - something that I feel restricts my own artistic liberations in a lot of what I do as a maker - I thought I would use my everyday being to influence the work. By using the iPhone as a ‘tool’, letting the sofa be the ‘studio’, and whatever music I happened to be listening to at the time, I have proceeded to come up with little video edits, that either capture the relationships between the outside world and my process of making, whilst also utilising the ability to make arbitrary decisions along the way.
This First attempt takes a drawing found in my iPhoto collection and uses an app called PhotoFox to manipulate the image. This is executed by screen recording the edit process. So, what you don’t see is my actual finger scrolling through the app’s attributes and filter settings that change, in real time, the image.
Evidence of the screen record in process. It is my finger sliding the attribute scale that produces the glitch in the following images.
Glitch edit that will became part of the works put in to the London Met Collective December show.
Test edit using a mix of apps including Apple’s iMovie and an app called Motionleap by Lighttricks [vi]
Using feedback from peers during the process has become critical. What is evident, is our dependence on technology to facilitate these discussions as to what it is we feel we are working towards. In the past, artists would have relied on social settings, clubs and bars, studios and letters and phone calls, this can be evident in historical settings such as the coffee shops of london as the romantics waxed lyrical about the aesthetics of the day to the more modern day settings that became the part of the creative fermentation process for everyone from Bacon to Bowie, such as The Colony Room Club, Blitz or Dschungel. As artists today, we are relying on Direct Messages, (DMs on instagram) WhatsApps and emails. There is nothing new in this and this I found in Richard Serra’s video piece ‘Television Delivers People’ (1973), the cyclical nature that underpins todays communication, finds itself enmeshed in a wider socio-political sphere that is sometimes hard to avoid as an artist.
I am finding that there seems to be a pervasive influence, as artists rely on social media platforms to ‘exist’ in a stand alone sense. And although these platforms allow us to communicate, it raises the question, as artists are we complicite in the deliverance of people to a wider neo-liberalist network that panders to what Hal Foster terms “Nihilism all the way down”, [iv] as we accept the current parameters we have been asked to work in. Or, like Foster points out, as well as the institutions, are we together as artists being asked to '“communicate in different ways?”
41:55secs, Hal Foster eludes to a wider discourse as posited by Wendy Brown that reclaims the way in which we communicate through the institution as we deregulate the occupied spaces. How we as a peer group here at London Metropolitan want to “reclaim purchase” in the space that will be left by the current “critical gains”. And how do we do that within the institution we are part of?
What is coming out of this process of collaboration, for me, is where do I want to site my work? Does the online world work for me? What is it I am contributing to when yielding to wider dialectics that may homogenise, detract or misrepresent my own work. Working with other artists really brings to the fore my own solipsisms and antagonisms. This interests me as my experience so far up to this point has highlighted how I am not only inspired by working with other peers but also challenged by my own limitations to connect and immerse myself in a wider social media led adaptation that seems to site the work in a very virtual world that negates the haptic.
[i] Sarah Ganz Blythe and Edward D. Powers, Looking at Dada, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008), p. 3
[ii] Dorothee Richter, Curating the Digital: A Historical Prospective, Oncurating, Vol. 45, (April 2020), p. 9
[iii] Rosalind Krauss, Guarantee of the Medium, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) <https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/25800/005_09_Krauss.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y> [accessed 28/11/2020].
[iv] Hal Foster, ‘What Comes After farce?’, The Kitchen, Online Talk, (May 2020) <https://thekitchen.org/event/broadcast-week-8> 41:50secs