The Physicality of Research Thursday 7th June: 11.00-17.00 Tate Modern, Level 5, Tate Exchange Space …….activity and change are a matter of fact’ Alfred North Whitehead (1968) What does research look like, how do we see it, what happens if we poke at it? What is the value of research when we push it towards a physical form? How do we remain open to what research is and can become? We would like to invite you to co-investigate the multiple ways in which research manifests itself. The day will consist of a series of collaborative interventions, actions and experiments facilitated by Emily Pringle as part of her AHRC fellowship and Kimberley Foster PhD student at Goldsmiths University. The event will take place in the Tate Exchange space on level 5 at Tate Modern and is organised in collaboration with Tate Research Centre Learning: Beckie Leach, Helena Hunter and Rita Evans. The event aims to position us in the midst of not knowing, of forming possibilities, asking questions and intentionally playing with risk. We hope to create a space to co-consider the materiality of research and question research spatially and visually. Your participation in the day is invaluable as our multiple voices of research gather together. Therefore, we would like you to contribute to this event by bringing in something that weighs 500g. The 500g may be multiple things, one object, composite parts, random collections, made, or found, domestic and functional, related to your research or not. These will be exhibited in the Tate Exchange space and act as conduits for action and dialogue throughout the event. Introduction to Tate day. I am an artist and academic currently undertaking PhD research within Art Practice and Learning at Goldsmiths, University of London. My teaching has a direct correlation with my practice, questioning how materially driven pedagogies can inform and heighten approaches to learning, reflexivity and praxis. Part of my research is located here at Tate where I work with 2 research groups activating spaces, sharing actions and questioning how we may be mobilised through materiality - Asking what learning looks like and feels like when it is transformative and we are potentially transformed. My practice-research questions the status and necessity of vital materiality and the embodied encounter within the context of art pedagogy. I am interested in approaches that re-frame the learning event as a material act of thinking and towards a sculptural and performative exchange. . These new objects aim to directly reference and negotiate the learning experMy practice is collaborative existing between people, spaces, objects and materials where practice outcomes are fundamentally informed and activated by others or other things and matter truly drives the research. I have worked extensively with exhibitions and, collections as one half of collaborative partnership sorhed. This practice focuses on the development and enactment of pedagogical art objects that focus on enquiry and interpretation objects that both provoke and enable a questioning of authorship, affordance encounter and affect, bringing into active consideration the pedagogical agency of social and participatory practices. I see myself as a conduit, the objects I make as catalysts and the practice as a set of events. However, it can be easy to act with stuff to have an active practice active research and still allow actions to not be embedded in the thinking or that theory isn’t embedded in the matter. The space that we are questioning today is a space for theory, action, reflexivity, purpose and value systems and understanding that whilst that is always complex it can lead us to new transformative states of knowing, questions and manifestations. I am interested in how we are mobilised through the stuff of research but that we can also become very comfortable with the stuff if we don’t understand its framework and separate it out as an experience in parallel rather than an emergent state entangled and enmeshed. An old tutor of mine on my ma once said it is interesting that you might understand each of the components of your thinking and making but have you ever thought that when pushed together they have the have the components’ of a bomb. This idea of imploding difference aspects of practice of research purposely together letting the disruptive tendencies of stuff drive us forward isn’t necessarily comfortable. It is easier to separate. Especially within art practice/research there are times when the stuff/material may be manifestation of thought, and interpretation of an idea or concept and developmental rather THAN the thinking itself. It is interesting to consider what then the material/physicality of research is…. how was see it, circle it and jump in it. You will see unlike the Oscars when the goody bags they give out are expensive potions and designer goods that today you have a flat pack box and an armband. As we hope to however difficult it may be to keep the physical materiality of thinking close at hand today we wanted to provide these things as emblems of that. Rather than a note pad and a pen, the box may be a place for writing notes, it may remain flat, be made, folded differently, or anchored under your chair leg - or underneath you like a mat. The armband may be inflated, worn, provide a pillow, sit in the box, or be attached to your pen. There are no prescribed roles for these objects – but why would we choose these - what do they bring with them, what identity, what questions - what does their original function afford. In the context of research, they may allow us to change form, to be the same materials reordered, reframed. The box and the armband have the capacity to be filled to allow us buoyancy and containment, a vessel, a vehicle, as Karin Knorr Certina discusses - knowledgeable objects if these are in fact that, are ready to be complicated by others - or in a sense are never quite themselves. But they may provide a continuation and unfolding. Whilst the box has a specific way it is supposed to be put together that isn’t a rule we have to adhere to and the armband signals something by its presence within the notion of research that maybe we don’t always know and sometimes we make that place of not knowing visible to others and ourselves. Both are potential empty spaces - and filled spaces as we may choose to invest in them or a process or in fact reject it. So today your objects may be left as they are now or they might shift through the day - dependent on you and what you want, or don’t want from them. So my HOPE FOR THE DAY refers to something said by Brian Massumi: One of the reasons affect is such an important concept for him he says - is because it explains why focussing on the next experimental step - rather than the big utopian picture isn’t really settling for less. It’s not exactly going for more either. `it is more like being right where you are – more intensely.’ This is what we are interested in today. So our hope is that by the end of the day we may be slightly re-ordered 500g
When is a salami the same as a shoe…when you weigh it. 2. A football 3. A package of bacon 5. Three medium-sized bananas 6. A typical guinea pig all weigh 500g. How do we understand measurement, value systems and the hierarchies we place on matter, experience, thought, research? We cluster things under definitions that hold us, contain, reason and rationalise an approach or an outcome. But these ideas are slippery and equivalences within research can push us to measure things in a multitude of ways. So, what do we mean by research, what do we mean by its physicality. Does this have to be matter based, what are we measuring anything against. When we asked you to bring 500g the narrative of the task started maybe weeks ago for some of you or maybe hours ago for others, some things have been ordered selected weighed, some have intentions, emotional connections, some are haphazard, guesstimations, grabbing’s as you walk out the door. But are they all equal? What is the intention behind this stuff collected here today, these 30/35 lots of 500g they are reflective of a choice, an individual, they stand for something and some stand for more than their weight? What is the stuff of research as stuff - how do we look at it as practice, how do we see it, manipulate it and measure it? What do we say through the material that we say differently in words, through voice and what disruptions do these materials potentially cause, not necessarily as art but as physical manifestations of thought, intentionality, of making and meaning? How do we keep the material with us and embedded in the way we think through things and why would we need to? Is it just more problematic to pick up research and move around with it in its material form? Not as an illustration of research findings, not as an accompaniment but as itself – weighty and charged. For the first part of the day we invite you to share your stuff, understanding that your matter matters. In pairs, you will have the opportunity to discuss what you have brought and what it is, could be, what it stands for, how you understood the 500g. was thought processes enabled it to manifest and be brought here today.
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Intro to buttons Object affordances Agency and disruption of materials Material making= ideas manifest Objects as actants Ideas and thoughts become located through stuff then we can intra act with those ideas Materiality – the potential to be performed becomes physical through enactments and becomes entangled afford performance Buttons as thoughts Jug- ness, button- ness, pouring. Taking one thought – how do you hold on to it? How do we understand negative capability? Not knowing – in research as questioning and unfolding and becomings ATTENTION ALTERS WHAT IS ATTENDED (kaprow) Disruption of material event Standing inside a waterfall is a very different experience from standing outside and reflecting on it, (Atkinson) We manipulate Massumi – is it at odd with affect that emergent states are anchored by critical thinking BUT If we keep things in a state of flux what happens how do we understand digest or even pin down ideas Processing coming back from being undone, doing up again. Ordering and reordering in search of clarity. Buttons that are threaded that are strung My art practice questions the transformations that learning and matter bring into being, and the potentials for the force of things - the force of art. I am preoccupied by the material event, the disturbances and ruptures that transformative pedagogy can trigger when materials are the drivers between a human and non-human intra action. I work collaboratively, make objects to question vital materiality, reciprocity, affordance and embodied encounters. Everything I make is informed by another, made in response, handled, held, enacted and relational. I see myself as a conduit, the objects I make as catalysts and the practice as a set of events. As I move through notions of pedagogy, art and matter they become intersubjective, woven knotted and enmeshed. I describe this materially as the action of imploding, pushing, mixing, merging, weaving as we are placed within, rather than outside of a process of transformation. The intention is to make the material experience, emotional experience and pedagogical experience matter - or that the disruptions of matter become visible and valuable and vital. What are the materials of these experiences and what is the matter of transformation.? The use of the transplant as a profound example of change and exchange provides an analogy for the relationships between matter, function and reciprocity. This very direct embodied encounter located and defined by the corporeal body is inherently complex, but it is my intention to reconfigure the medical event towards the intermingling subjectivities of object exchanges, and ultimately towards pedagogical transformation. This language, these metaphors have become fundamental in informing my research. In the summer of 2015 my father donated one of his kidneys to my mother. It was a multi - layered exchange and entanglement of love, intention, thought and physicality. However, the relevance of this narrative is not just the relationship I have to the story, but an opportunity to see the transplant more objectively, in a way that concentrates on the human and non-human event in order to understand the objects involved in the process and their transformative state. How can we experience the co constructed interplay between bodies as both objects, subjects? Can we see this way of considering the object and our changing perception of it as a route towards wider aspects of transformative events? Can we make meaning through these bodily reordering’s, these exchanges, these gifts? The kidney (object –organ) that was once my father’s still lives in the same house as him, still has the same function, is the same size, and presumably still looks the same but it is now a few meters away from him, just located within another body. Neither recipient or donor have ever seen the uprooted organ, but it is fundamentally present, has a shared ownership and a double responsibility. For a period of time this object (organ) took centre stage, everything orientated around this ‘thing’ and this attention meant that it was perceived as a larger and more exaggerated version of itself. It was imagined within my father, outside of my father, inside my mother, in between both bodies, accepted, rejected and most importantly as itself and imagined in our thinking. The number of kidneys that I list here becomes multiple and through the perception of its identity, matter, potentiality and our imaginings we can move from the 1 original kidney to 8 virtual versions of itself. It may seem that the organ (object) kidney itself has developed beyond its function and has a new greater identity through the attention on it. It could be suggested that its agential status affords more both physically and emotionally and therefore the kidney holds more agency. However, Theorist Karen Barad argues that agency is seen ‘as an enactment’ and not ‘the property of persons or things’. (Barad, 2013, p.55). Therefore, the agency could be seen to be located in the event of the transplant itself and the conceptual space between the bodies where the organ (object) is newly perceived. The physical cut that took place to enable the object (organ) to be perceived with more worth and status was accompanied with an emotional and conceptual rupture – a rupture that is described by Alain Badiou as ‘a radical disruption that leads to a subsequent truth procedure. This reconfigures our existing knowledge frameworks’. (Badiou, 2005, p. 33). The altered perception of the kidney (object) is both for donor and recipient as the objects reordering re contextualises its position, its idea. It is greater than the sum of its parts, more than its matter, more than its function. It is imagined, removed, held, plumbed in, felt and remembered. Can this transformation be reinterpreted as a way of making new meaning and a metaphor of inter –subjective transformation? The object holds both a memory of an original function - for it to function in the same way elsewhere, but this function is now measured in a more activated and tangible mode. It is visualised in a way that was silent before and as an object is more materially present and we are more materially aware. This correlates with Karin Knorr Certina’s questioning of the epistemic object. She discusses how knowledgeable objects are ‘always in the process of being materially defined, they continually acquire new properties and change the ones they have. But this also means that objects of knowledge can never be fully attained, that they are, if you wish, never quite themselves.’ ( Knorr, Cetina, 2000, p.8) The reordering of materials of stuff, of matter within art practice is understood and embedded into the very nature of making – we shift the everyday towards other, things may be never quite themselves. We defamilarise, we are presented with alternatives, the re – ordered thinking of art. We concentrate, look carefully, think thoughtfully and wonder how we may interact, understand or articulate as the material disturbs the status quo. We are at sea and search for resting places of understanding or familiarity, or recognition of an experiential match. The relocation or introduction of material or of objects from a place of understanding causes ripples, disruptions to our knowns and as the invisible becomes visible through attention. Or as Alan Kaprow suggests that ‘attention alters what is attended’ In a statement from my parent’s surgeon that he was merely ‘a plumber’, the extraordinary and the impossibility of exchange became materially evened out - made ordinary. When I received a text from my friend 12 weeks ago whose husband had just donated his kidney to their daughter, it read ‘the kidney is in the cab’. The unfamiliar then becomes familiar as bodies are plumbed, objects re ordered, matter lifted and repositioned. Matter simultaneously matters and sits amongst us. I am interested in these disruptions, ruptures and disturbances that art and art pedagogy can also potentially cause. To transform we must unravel and in this process of unknowns there is an uncomfortable destabilisation that reveals a potential for new ways of making or being. If we can shift assumptions, alter our epistemologies then new interpretations can become useful but more importantly transformative. However, this process of transformation also needs the conceptual rupture I have alluded to as bodies extend prosthetically towards new possibilities. In the analogy of the transplant this rejection is held at bay by a significant medical support structure. There is an investment in the process that has taken place and in this case because a life depends on it. Whilst I am not saying that the transformative process of art and pedagogy is life - dependent I am offering the possible metaphor. This metaphor values the repositioning of knowledge (through new encounter) to highlight the relevance of the physical and conceptual orientation required when an encounter is material and relational. Dennis Atkinson discusses the force of things and the force of art as a place for ‘invention; and an event of becoming. A virtual/actual creative force of transformation’. (Atkinson, 2017, p.156). In this becoming we are required to share the territory of this stuff, matter, be it art, material or body. To encounter this magnified state and in order to take on the new perceptions in other spaces in our lives, spaces of learning, spaces of art, of new knowledge and new experiences, we need to prevent a rejection, not of an organ, but of new thought. We therefore must negotiate this new thought and make a space for it. This is a short observation of a group interacting with a set of objects made by myself and Karl Foster (sorhed) and hopes to provide a narrative of the transformation between familiar and unfamiliar states of recognition. In the gallery when confronted with 20 made and unfamiliar objects, the woman chose one. Holding the object in her hand she looked at it with disgust. It was a cast of a potato, one that had started to grow eyes, sprouts that subtly extended from its form. It was cast in a black resin which had picked up all the details of the potato. It was a potato re represented. ‘I don’t like it, ‘she said. ‘It looks like it comes from a body and I almost can’t touch it’. I tell her that she doesn’t have to have that object to talk about or hold, but she holds tight to it and shakes her head. ‘No this is the object that I want’ she says. I am conscious of the grip of it in her hand as she continues to look intently at it, whilst the others are sitting around the table and starting to discuss their objects. She interrupts their conversations as though unaware of their experience and focussed on her own. ‘It is like a growth.’ she says, ‘It is disturbing me, it is like a cancer in my hands.’ Seeing and feeling how uncomfortable the potato was making her I reiterate that she can return it and take another object, again she shakes her head. I am very aware of her sitting there looking at the object and I can almost feel her encounter and feel her grip on the form. ‘It is hot in my hands, ’ she says, turning it over and over, finding a place for it to sit in her grasp. She looks at it as though she recognises it and yet is near to rejection. She is on her own in her experience and yet sitting amongst us. It feels like it is becoming part of her grip as though stuck in her hand and onto her palm, or becoming part of her body, adhesively. She shakes her head to herself looking at it. ‘I just feel it is a part of a body and sort of part of mine’. ‘It is just a sort of potato’ says another person next to her. Near to her as part of the object collection is a turntable and whilst it did not have the capacity to play music it revolved when the arm was lifted. I asked if I could show her something and took the cast potato from her grasp, it was warmed up by her handling and she looked at the absence of it in her hand. On the bottom of the potato was a small hole and I placed the potato onto the turntable letting the small pin in the centre push into the object and anchor it there. As I lifted the arm the turntable began to turn and so did the potato, round and round. The woman watched it for a moment then suddenly raised up her arms into the air, her face changed and she laughed in what seemed like relief and as though something new had been uncovered. ’Oh, I don’t believe it,’ she said, ‘it’s Fred Astaire, my object is Fred Astaire’. I looked at the potato revolving on the turntable and what it had become through her attention, her intra action and her encounter and I understood it as a dancer, removed from its earlier definition and transformed to her new truth. ‘What has happened?’ she said. ‘How can that be, how can I be thinking this, how can it matter so much, why did I feel that so deeply. What on earth happened?’ Whilst the force experienced within art/ art pedagogy is not inflicted on the flesh of body ideas and thoughts can be equally readjusted and re-rooted. As Charles Garoian questions ‘the materiality of the body engages the corporeality of materials, tools and objects through art - making manifold sensations, associations and understandings’ (Garoian,2013, p.124). I would argue that these dislocations from what was once known, become ‘fundamental encounters’ of the physical and the thoughtful body. The analogy of transplantation enables the materials to transform - to be embodied, metaphoric and ultimately question the relationships of bodies that move between states of flesh and thought? "The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the "Other." subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one's skin, but in one's bones, in one's belly, in one's heart, in one's nucleus, in one's past and future." (Barad, 2007, p. 393) Atkinson, D. (2017). Art, Disobedience, And ethics, The Adventure of Pedagogy. Education, Psychoanalysis, and Social Transformation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Atkinson, D. (2011). Art, Equality and Learning, Pedagogies Against the State. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Badiou, A. (2005b). Being and Event. London: Continuum. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. London: Quantum. Cetina, Knorr, K, (2000). The Practice Turn in Contemporary theory. Psychology Press, Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Garoian, C, R. (2013). The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kaprow. A. (1993). Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life. University of California Press. The clay is cold and wet and is sticking itself to itself. It is a stubborn lump of matter and happy in its form. I use the spoon from my cutlery drawer and push it into the flesh of the clay and break the clear and smooth surface that formed from the packaging of its bag. I use all my force to start edging the clay upwards and outwards as though taking the largest amount of ice cream that is too frozen in its tub. It is heavy against the spoon and resistant and seems to pull away from my exertion. I want to take a handful and make a handful and can only do this by using my hand to extract the clay from itself. As the clay eases free I push it away and clear from the spoon, as it now clings to that surface, always resistant to my force. However, when in my hands the clay becomes mine and I can manipulate it on my terms, it has left its bulk behind. Or I have taken it from that bulk. It is its own form and not defined by the material that is removed from.
It fits slightly oversized in my hands and I squeeze my grip into the clay. I feel my fingers start to create channels of their own and at that moment the grip is heightened and sticky between the material and my palm. It is adhesive. This is my handful but is also being made for another. I am giving my handful away, making a handful. I am conscious that this action, this first squeeze on the clay is authentic and not prodded and shifted away from the truth of my grip to present itself more perfectly. I notice a strange lump that forms between two of my fingers and want to push it away but I leave it where it is. I feel a handful is something a little more complicated than a grasp. I pull my finger out and feel like little Jack Horner pulling out a plum. I loosen my fingers from the rest of the clay so that my hand is extracted from the material. It is a simple action but the intention is adding weight as I think of someone else holding my hand. I am thinking of them as I squeeze the clay and think about holding their hand. I think about the transaction of information and sharing ideas and sharing matter. Every time my squeeze is different, not consciously trying to be the same or altered with my action, but my pressure or my fingers always sit differently. This is something and nothing. A gesture, an impression a remnant of my action. It isn’t complete or resolved yet strangely it is not unresolved either. I place the objects on plates to dry and they start to look like organs, but these handfuls are not manipulated to become a representation of that - however they have come from the gesture of my body and the impact my body makes on the material. At this moment, they extend for me prosthetically not as compensatory but as additive. My making is still present in the material. My physical making was just a squeeze, my intention is a concentrated squeeze. A squeeze of thoughts and attention. They are materially in-between beginnings and ends. These clay handfuls need to be completed or manipulated by someone else, the manipulation is therefore not the physical change of the material in their hands but the change in perceptions that the handful may allow. small clay organs. The invested clay that was materiality hardened was ready to be re- formed through thought and encounter. However, this object was not operating alone, I was in it, on it and through it, as I handed it over and offered it up. I was also potentially offering up part of my thinking or part of myself
I can see the page and fill it with words, I can speak of encounters and the interventions that objects made when catapulted through their actions into spaces already filled with other stuff. However the page can limit me or at least tidy up the collapse of environments . So I return to drawing, to images that themselves play with the space of the page and alter a reading a perception. I need to see it and feel it again beyond a conceptualising that can distance me from the action. Bu cutting through the paper, pinching it and pushing though the portholes with other images I remember and reloacte the actions, in the page itself. The needle might punture the paper with thread and weave back and forth, maing a line having a plan. But this is physical and embedded. THINGS need to exist and dance on the page, the room the gallery and I worry that my words on the page will remian untouched, still and staining the paper but not as a force ful materail event. However thinking of embodied writing where we are in a process through the text/ the words then I see all the actions as observent . They are all observations ..
A week after the day at Tate, Jo contacted me again, she said that this last visit had been so different 'when we first went to tate it was though we just put things next to things and saw what happened but I have a very different feeling now. My object has changed things - it was a incendiary device when we were there. I was compelled by it. Now I feel that there are so many things I am thinking about , things I need to do and make that allow me to touch the work and connect with the space.'
This was clear to see by her complete cofidence to be with the work, activate everything through her object and they led each other through the experience. She was interaccting with staff and visitors and they viewed her object and talked to her about it - I was not in this equation. When asked if the object was hers - she said it was and that it helped her see the work. This wasn't part of my research project, she was not a participant, the object was no longer connected to me and maybe Jo wasnt either. She had set sail with her paddle and rather than being adrift, drowning occassionally, or out of her depth she was navigating and setting the route. The need to connect to the work exhibited has become heightened now for all involved - it as though as Jo had commented 'they need to complete the circuit'. I am reminded of the saying of 'being in touching distance' of something and as we roam these spaces the gap between us and the exhibits closens or is closed by the participants actions. I discuss that there are needs for this connection on different levels and that we have to be aware of the ease of an aesthetic choice, a form recognition or exact material repeat. This is not to say that these connections don't take place but they are done with care and thought. The image above which seems to have become a ocean liner was an image that the group grabbed and took for themsleves, lying across the floor making us or them beleve the join. Visitors peered over their shoulders and they lined up the photograph, a small lie maybe but the connection would be made even if through a visual trickery. In fact the more that the group work in the space the more the tricks and playfulness make sense. they claim a territory of new connections building almost a new space , an alternative to the untouchable one presented. 'It isn't about any of this work anymore' one of them commented, 'it just isn't as important'. This postion doesn't close off the experience of the gallery spaces but it does close a gap between us and them, this and that. The idea of attention has become so important to me, a close attentiveness, of thought- of action -of material. This is all active and physical - i feel it. I feel the tension of the group moving and doing in the spaces at Tate, i am now more uncomfortable than them. We are all attending to the context and how we fill and see it. They are not redundant or passive in this space - far from it - they are materially grounded and at times rate the objects and ingredients that I bring for them in order to see which is most resonant -most ready.
When Lloyd arrived and we sat in the space he said ' I realise that I am holding my object and I am rubbing the surface of the wood as though charging it - so it is ready'. so this goes back to much earlier thinking that these objects have a function and that function enables the connection to take place. Knorr Certina discusses how the epistemic object works because it is never complete and therefore these/my/their objects are not complete until the actions, other artworks, people complete them. They contect to complete and that is the pull. |
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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