A unity of opposites.

It is, however, the work of Jean-François Lyotard that best marks the way in which 'aesthetics' has become, in the last twenty years, the privileged site where the tradition of critical thinking has metamorphosed into deliberation on mourning. The reinterpretation of the Kantian analysis of the sublime introduced into the field of art a concept that Kant had located beyond it. It did this in order to more effectively make art a witness to an encounter with the unpresentable that cripples all thought, and thereby a witness for the prosecution against the arrogance of the grand aesthetico-political endeavour to have 'thought' become world'. [1]

Jacques Rancière

There is an arrogance of thought that shows itself in my framework of philosophical enquiry. A method of research and production can clearly be seen in the conceptualization of my artworks. As I start to approach the first elements of my degree show, I find myself looking at bits of ‘stuff’ that will become ‘something'. (see fig. 1)

Although first considerations are how things will look, there is much more to overcome. One hurdle is how the work (degree show) will exist in a space. As I look further into the main influences behind my practice, I find a common thread is the way in which artists encounter environments. Firstly, let’s consider Rachel Whiteread. Whiteread’s locational relations is one of the most obvious demonstrations of how a work can take residency. In an early essay on Whiteread’s work, I considered a piece called ‘Ghost’. (see fig. 2) If we consider the work as a space within a space, we get a contrast of things coming into contact. This act of the artwork coming into contact with things is what is guiding my questioning in my own approach. Not only is the space that the work resides in important, but how that space works with the work.

Fig. 2 Rachel Whiteread, Ghost 1990. © Rachel Whiteread.

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Fig. 1 My studio space. Putting things next to things. Taking in the considerations of how things ‘come into contact with other things’

Solidity, is a common thread in my work. Weight and density play a large part in what I have to confront as properties of the work I make. This is another opposite, another something coming into contact with something. When I first started making work with concrete, I didn’t think i would actually be working with weight as a medium. Therefore, as an artist, how can weight be used? If we go back to this idea of residency - something taking place - it is easy to think of terrain, something coming into contact via a grounding. Whitereads sculpture opposite relies on a floor, a stable basis to ‘house’ the work.

Fig. 3

FULCRUM

RICHARD SERRA (BORN 1939, US)
COR-TEN STEEL SHEETS, 1987
BROADGATE CIRCLE

Yet, other artists in Whiteread’s field of sculptural installation, also use various techniques that give us a subversion of weight being anchored to the ground via a gravitational relationship due to weight and density being a factor. Three of these artists I definitely use as a guide as to what I am doing, or should I say What I am doing continues a conversation raised in their work, is Doris Salcedo, Bruce Nauman and Sarah Sze. Each find unique and interesting ways to suspend weight. How? They use gravity as a tool. This allows for the introduction of methods and technical innovations in art, the apparatus and constructions that bring forth the object. In her work Centrifuge (see fig. 3) American artist Sarah Sze tells us that the because of how the work has been put together it “keeps visible the mechanisms that animate the installation. “The projector is here, the plug is there,” Sze says. “It makes work bleed into life. You confuse the two.” [2] This unity of opposites is crucial to bringing an authenticity to to the installation process. The revelation of seeing support wires, cables struts, amatures, lends to the integrity of method and process. My work isn’t magic. it’s not meant to defy belief, or misdirect. The work is about suspending comprehension for just long enough to get us over Kant’s transcendental line or Heidegger’s horizon, before we are brought crashing back to earth in our judgement of what we think we are beholding. Even then, as Graham Harman assures, we cannot completely exhaust and object ‘either downward or upward, to its parts or to its effects.” [3] Therefore, the method is just as important as the work itself, the work is dependent on the support system in place that brings about its being. This approach to considering the work allows further dependencies to be considered, understood or extracted from the composition as a whole. One of the results of such deliberations could be balance. Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra use this attribute in a very successful way. One evening I traveled to a location in Liverpool Street Station where a work of Serra’s resides. Fulcrum (1987) Is a piece that uses both gravity, weight and balance to bring a precarity in the coming together of steel plates. (see fig. 3) We are given the precarity through the way in which the plates are rested on each other. This ‘positioning’ is what makes this work ‘work’ . That which possesses qualities of density and solidity all of a sudden embody an imminence of dander, fragility or risk.

Bruce Nauman: Concrete Tape Recorder Piece, 1968, concrete, tape recorder, tape, 30.5 x 61 x 61 cm; photo A. Burger, Zurich; courtesy Flick Collection

Stuart Lee, Concrete Lampshade (2020)

Fig. 4 Sarah Sze Centrifuge as discussed by Bruno Latour. Courtesy the artist, Tanya Bonakdar gallery, Victoria Miro gallery. © Sarah Sze.

A word that constantly comes up in my feedback, evaluations and tutorials is that my thinking is dense. The need to find meaning in making and the finding of correlates of my thought world in the world of materials is what excites me most when trying to bring a work to the fore. So, drawing upon the oppositional attributes I have just highlighted in Serra and Sze’s work, the direction my practice most investigates, sites itself in how we identify the performaty of the withdrawn. This is something that has now become apparent over the course of my major project combined with my CCS. Bringing objects into a space where balance plays a large part in giving us something different to expectation is a tactic I want to employ more. Balance as a tactic can also demonstrate a point in time where things come into contact with each other, as well as forces. The study of ‘affect’ can now be employed. French philosopher Bruno Latour, in an essay on the work of Sarah Sze, best describes what the process of a sculpture can be. . “If the artwork is never organic as a whole, if it shouldn’t inspire naively ecological meditations, it is because it is first subjected to the regime of measurements, of precarious balance, of calculation. Sarah Sze has well documented affinities with measuring tools, astronomical models, standards, weighing scales and their delicate mechanisms, but it takes some time to understand that she is not using them through quotation or parody, not even aestheticization. She places tools inside a world that will give them meaning. Such a profound idea could only come to a sculptor’s mind.” This Idea that Latour posits, that Sze is injecting meaning over aestheticization, for me is a key understanding in my method. Unlike my ceramic works of recent weeks, my major project is a collection. If we understand that the work I propose for my Major Project is a document we are able to go into the subject matter in a way that looks at what has been laid out before us.

[1] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, ed. by Gabriel Rockhill, (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 4

[2] Robin Pogrebin, ‘Art as Kaleidoscope: The Spellbinding Assemblages of Sarah Sze’, Yale Alumni Magazine, 81.2, (Dec 2017) <https://yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/4598-sarah-sze> [accessed 20/02/2022]

[3] Graham Harman, ‘For a Thought of Objects’, PCA-Stream, <https://www.pca-stream.com/en/articles/graham-harman-for-a-thought-of-objects-89> [accessed 21/02/2022]

[4] Bruno Latour, The Verifiable of the Image World, (2006) <http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/883> [accessed 19/02/2022]