The measuring of object against object is in a sense pointless and profound. It calls us to question the assumptions we have around ‘stuff’ how one thing is seen as more important more profound, more useful, more reliable, worthier, more functional, more beautiful, more nostalgic, more personal, more throwaway, more kitsch, more contemporary. When stuff butts up against stuff all these object assumptions come into play. The Zizek book was equalled in weight by satsumas and shuttlecocks but they are surely less profound than his thoughts on framing, re framing, enframing on page 7 -32. Whilst not as profound but can they be seen as equal in any way? To question this means asking what an equal experience is or may be, what is significant and how do we measure. As the balancer of these objects I was immediately conscious of the choice of objects that balanced Zizeks’ book. I hadn’t chosen stones or cans of tomatoes but shuttlecocks and satsumas. This was already a narrative about play, the shuttlecocks without the racket and satsumas that became like orange ping pong balls. The objects provoke a reaction that draws from what their physicality affords. Their physicality becomes ludicrous and playful in comparison to the form of the book. But they start to illustrate the title of the book ‘Event’. This is another event or at the very least the components of one. Could the book become the racket that would hurtle the shuttlecocks away from the measurement of the scales. This is all absurd but the objects have started to gain a new significance a new potency through their affiliation with the zizek book. The colours of everything hum, connect and pull the register of thoughts and connections. The red form within the cover of the book that I assume is a phone seems phallic within the image we are presented with and the shuttlecocks lean and protrude upwards mirroring the red phone image. The materials balancing the zizek outnumber the text, pith and peel, juice and flesh, segments, rubber, feathers and plastic all sit alongside in their own balancing trough. How random was I with the choice of materials how led had I been with the image on the cover the title of the book. What event did I imagine, had I presented? I read the images and I read the objects before I had completed reading the book. I am questioning how without noticing we cannot notice. Our attention move away towards the main characters and the main stage. In the wings the props and models, setting and costumes enable the main character a context. These mountains of material identities can be ignored but they are pungent in themselves. They can take centre stage at times and by so as viewer or as participant we can suddenly see everything. We see it all differently, vitally. Consuming an experience is to allow a fully formed encounter that is sticky and cumbersome but embodied and processed. Mortimer J. Adler writes about the consumption of a book, the possession of it, he states ‘Full ownership comes only when you have made it part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself part of it is by writing in it.’ (Adler 1940, 1) Making it part of yourself is the experience of knowing and owning and whilst the writing within the book seems a light engagement he goes on to explore how this operates at a deeper experientail level. ‘These marking devices constitute the biting, chewing, and digestion of text and the book in which it is printed, a process of embodiment.’ (p122 the prosthetic pedagogy) I weighed a book on new materialism, I weighed ‘carnal knowledge’.
Someone once mentioned to me that as an avid reader they wondered how many words they had consumed, what was the weight of the experience of that said reading. Does that weight offer anything? If we know that ‘the speculative Turn- continental materialism and realism’ weighs 640g do we have a different relationship with it? The 640g certainly doesn’t allow us to access the complexities of the books contents and the meanings detailed inside. So why would we do this, what does the book become? We become more aware of its body, its form, its physical presence. Maybe the space it takes on the shelf becomes a little more relevant. We may look at it and suddenly try and gauge whether its neighbouring book is heavier than it and if it is what do we learn? Do we investigate further by looking at the number of pages and seeing how many there are… including the ones unnumbered. 6 unnumbered and 430 numbered. Why are the unnumbered pages not included they buffer the real contents the serious thought held in by 6 pages? But then there is the cover or as it can be called the jacket. The jacket. An item of clothing is introduced to our investigation. We may look up jacket in the dictionary, do we look online or in the pages of a real dictionary. We may wonder how much it weighs? The definition reads ‘an outer garment extending either to the waist or the hips, typically having sleeves and a fastening down the front.’. We may question that this jacket has no fastening at the front. We question the word ‘sleeve’. Do we think of the hips or waist of the book or disregard the human possibilities of the object in front of us? We may return to the numbers of pages and calculate the 1.55 grams per page. This may cause a problem as we don’t know the weight of the cover and that could ruin the truth of our calculation. We may pause, look back at the book flick through the pages and scan the odd word or chapter title. What do we want to do, what do we want to know? Slowly we may ease the book cover away from the spine seeing how easily it will be removed from the body of the book. As we ease the thicker card of the cover we may become aware of it having a spine. A spine that was hidden in its jacket. We can slowly feel the release from the book and by getting a scalpel we pick it away conscious of the glue and possible rip to the cover. After a few minutes, we have separated the parts and can weigh the cover. It is just under 3 grams. The book is now in two parts; the naked unclothed contents and the jacket that was once protective and authoritative that is now slightly limp. Have we uncovered something, have we ruined something? Did we gain something? We can’t weigh the gain from our small investigation in comparison to the gains of reading 430 pages. This has obvious and different rewards but the books affordance allowed a separate encounter. Badiou is interviewed within the book in question by Ben Woodard and gives his position on Speculative Realism he states ‘..that it investigates different forms of knowing and action outside empirical and transcendental norms’ (p.19) The action of weighing the book has given a very different form of knowing – a material knowledge. This is not a lesser action but it temporarily overlooked the contents within to understand the form itself, the materiality. We don’t arrive at a situation as a blank page ready for transformation or without previous thought, experience or memory. We know and we have known before. We are already a mess of assumptions and preconceived positions that are ready to mask, direct or predict a reaction to any new ness any new information. We are primed by ourselves, we are observers that have already observed. As Bohn comments ‘we come with our assumptions we see through them’ (page date) Imagine the blackboards that used to adorn a classroom wall, (before the digital white boards that inhabit the classroom today). Remember the roll and thunder of the mechanism that revolved to show a new plain to mark and learn from. There was always the thought of the plain that couldn’t be seen, the one behind, the one not revealed. What information was hidden there? What was preferenced above it through the roll of the new plain. After a 6-week summer break the boards would be cleaned, wiped with wet cloths or sponges to try and strip the previous thinkings that had played and danced on those plains. The cleanness of the blackboards afforded something; potential. A potential of all the thoughts, lessons, words, definitions, calculations that would or could exist there. The potential of things not already known. However, there was already the consideration of the hidden blackboard sitting behind, there was also the edges of the newly cleaned plain that told a truth. The small chalk lines at the very parameters of the board, where the board rubbers or cloths couldn’t reach. Whether ends of letters, parts of sums, small traces of knowledges still existed and if one was to look with closer inspection the wet cloths could never wipe the indentations of the heavier chalk marks that were made through excitement or frustration. These marks had pushed into the plains. These blackboards were primed for new encounters yet couldn’t be extracted from their ‘before’. We can not be extracted from our 'before'. I am thinking about affordance and affordancies. There are complex layers within the ideas of affordance. For instance, where does the affordance begin. As stated in Katherine Leduc’s paper ‘Art as affordance’ 2013, ‘the object did not spontaneously come into existence’ What does an object bring with it? As initially argued by Gell the ‘ascription of art status to an object comes through a process which he termed the technology of enchantment’ 1992. This hinges on the technology or processes of making enabling an object of beauty to be created. We can recognise the reductive position of the idea that beauty equals art. However, the definition of the affordance of art objects continued to develop and Gell moved towards the action attributed to or enacted by the object. What action occurs with the object? It may be assigned a function or a particular movement or use, but this can shift in accordance with need, potential and context. The affordance needs another beyond the object, the thing it is afforded for. This thing, individual, ultimately communicates with the object, they speak to each other and activate a meeting point. Affordance becomes married with communication for it is how that object is used and understood. That 'use' provides its affordance. “affordances may thus differ from species to species and from context to context.’ (Hutchby 2001:26) The images below are part of an ongoing Collaborative coversation with Victoria Mitchill and Karl Foster. The details and outcomes of this project can be viewed on the www.sorhed.com website. However I was interested in the links across the projects and the images of the apple that i recently used at the SCVA and at Goldsmiths with the MA AT and contemporary practices.
During the session with the MA group the coped image of the apple had been offered to them as a stimulus at the end of our time. The lowly nature of the image was cast aside in relation to the enaged and haptic relationship the students had had with the earlier objects. The apple was a mere representation and the reaction to it was that it wasn't enough. It was a dissapointment. One individual wanted to lift it from its state and allow it to become a form, a 3 dimesional form of the object it stood form. This idea of lifting it from its origins is interesting. The space between the apple and the image of the apple was an irritant after the very physical and enacted part of the session. There was an imagining that if the apple was formed with the paper it was on and became an object that replicated itself that it would have more potency. How far then is it from it's appleness. When I scrunched up the image, one person laughed dismissively and commented that it was just a piece of scrunched up paper. My preefencing and introuduction to the physical encounter took away all the value fromm the glossy photocopy, it was redundant - it was 'just' a just. another shimmer - like the earlier resonating apps but objects. There is something about the slightest flickering that makes the objects appear more than themselves, they are coming into play, acting maybe. Holding the handles without opening.
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Kimberley FosterKimberley's practice as an artist is pedagogical, it doesn’t just reference learning, it plays with, embodies and encourages learning at its core. The objects consider ideas of collaboration and authorship, discussions about touch and encounter, and bring into active consideration issues of learning within social and participatory practices. Archives
October 2018
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