I didn't have a great amount of work to show after my week of no ideas...
1. Three video clips of toilet paper falling to the ground, mirrored
2. Photographs of 12 compositions produced by black wool thread being dropped onto the ground
These were made as a way of investigating the materials in an active way. I learnt about Gutai in Wednesday's lecture, a post-war Japanese group of artists who used performance to highlight the properties of materials. I was drawn to their ideology more than the work itself - they believed materials should be valued for their own properties instead of being used to represent different objects, as if they are pretending to be something they're not (e.g. traditional sculpture - clay modelled to represent figures...). I realised that I am also more interested in the materials, how they move and what I can do with them, over figurative things that I can make with them.
Although only a rough idea (a video version of a maquette perhaps), I was pleased with the short clips of the falling toilet paper... If anything it is a base for an idea that interests me and I would be happy to investigate further. I think this was a key thing I was lacking last week - I had neither any confidence, nor any interest in the ideas I was coming up with. One thing that was helpful, and with hindsight seems like an important thing to remember, was the suggestion by Ed that I should focus on what inspires me. I was thinking of ideas that fitted the brief well but that I did not feel comfortable with and were quite removed from my usual way of working... although I want to grow and develop my style, If I'm stuck maybe it is sometimes a good idea to return to an idea/concept that I know has some mileage.
The feedback was quite positive, the group seemed to find the video peaceful and aesthetically quite interesting. I was asked whether I might consider using colour in my work as both my pieces were monochrome. I tend not to use a lot of colour in my work, colour itself certainly isn't something I really try and investigate - I don't really like bright colours because I always want my work to be subtle... after a discussion, we all reasoned that colour perhaps wasn't necessary because, if it is the materials I am exploring, it wouldn't make sense to give them artificial properties.
The wool composition idea seems a very simple idea, but I really like the spatial quality: some of them look to me like they are balls of thread instead of being flat on the surface beneath. I also really like how they are all different... this element of chance was something I wanted to focus on in both my experiments because of the history of this way of working in video and performance... I think it emphasises how the work was an action, unravelling the wool and allowing it to fall where it will.
It was by chance itself that I learnt that Marcel Duchamp did a similar thing in his 1913 work, '3 Standard Stoppages', dropping three threads, each 1m long, onto canvases and glued them down. I found an interesting quote about Duchamp's opinion of the work:
Three Standard Stoppages, according to Marcel Duchamp, was one of the key works in his development as an artist. He said,"In itself it was not an important work of art, but for me it opened the way -- the way to escape from those traditional methods of expression long associated with art. I didn't realize at the time what I had stumbled on. When you tap something, you don't always recognize the sound. That's apt to come later. For me the Three Standard Stoppages was a first gesture liberating me from the past." (found in: tout-fait :The Marcel Duchamp Journal On-line, Issue 1/Vol1, December 1999)
Reading this gives me more confidence to make works that may not be particularly monumental, but which are interesting and might be the beginning of another series of works.
Other hings to learn from the last two weeks would be...
- To ask for help (perhaps main aim to learn to do this)
- To not panic/get overly anxious, because it doesn't help
- To investigate what interests me
- Video can be used as another method for investigating materials and recording ideas
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