Intro
I put some slip-cast bricks on a circular white plinth. The plinth was about 30cm high and 75cm wide. Three were white (previous post) because they have been bisque fired, and three were recognisably clay. The fired ones said ‘WE WON THE WAR” and were in various states of broken-ness. The clay ones said WINSTON CHURCHILL, two were standing on their ends in a ‘soldier course’ but just like the start of it, and the third one was completely broken with the middle section fallen out revealing the bobbly inside of my slip cast and most of the letters were smashed. They were loosely arranged in a circle.
I introduced the crit by saying that they aren’t glazed but it is my plan to try an orange (hyper-brick) solar orange glaze, and a British Racing Green glaze which could reference either historical period or public sculpture. That they are intended to be photographed in various locations and dispersed, so the discussion could entail some discussion of that plan and what that would be like.
All this ceramic stuff is new knowledge to me.
Discussion:
Ideas
Hollowness / revealing / breaking
Reference to the real / departure from the real
Slogans / propoganda / nationalism
Souvenir
Weight of language vs. object
Cubism
Actions
Compression
Pushing
Deflation
Collapse
Squishing
Breaking
Collection and dispersion
Stacking (implied)
Big ideas
Monument
Irony
State
Narrative history
Formal
Twisting normal objects through casting and glazing
Minimalism, grid and spacing, building and stacking, the implication of a wall
Height
Interesting
Abject
Celebration
Isolation
Disappearance
Implication
Fragility
Outside.
Misc.
It’s a problem that they aren’t coloured and that they aren’t doing anything so all we have to read is a brick and a word
So normally you can’t see inside a break so that shows that its a departure from the real
The removal of areas of language (redaction) highlights the presence of language?
One-linery-ness can be a problem because it doesn’t hold attention and because you walk away once you feel you understand it - can be meme-y.
The apparatus of state
Still Standing
The challenge of art materials; they look like what they are. The strength and problem of art materials is that they don’t have external reference. ** this is important as use of art materials in-and-of-itself places it in the realm of artworks.
Obvious extensions
To write a whole story or a text about monumentality and build a wall
More cryptic arrangements
Take them out
Tissue box
Bird box (James in ceramics)
Misc. again
Blocking movement roadblock shape of the mold implies movement (SS)
Extra materials to add normal random connotation
Play somehow (alone? **or with others?)
First thoughts:
So they are stuck on the language, like it places it very firmly in a narrative historical reference
And on the brick, the implication of building and stacking, places it in the language of formalism and multiple might allow for emergent meaning
If I don’t reach the end of this and abandon it I just won’t have much concrete to show. But what bits did I rush past that are emergent that I might want to go back into?
My pitfall is being closed to interesting things and not noting them down or taking photos and so just forgetting.
How to capture little ideas while you are doing big jobs?
END
Sean Steadman warned me that I would ‘get shit’ in crits because it’s an unpopular language of male-ness formalism and minimalism but that he really liked the practice in general for that reason. That he found the practice itself antagonistic, not cutesy or popular, but strict and formal.
The ‘new knowledge’ generated is the simple thought that monuments are not cathartic, or placemarkers, or anything we think they are. They are how living people use them. Artists make them to make a living, they are essentially commercial from the artist standpoint. The State uses them as a tool about power structures, which is why they are targets for promoters of ‘visibility’ identity politics, and this includes urban planning applications.
I’m starting to sense the return of the chance frame; the start-stop-begin again, rooted in time. I remember now that it is incredibly difficult for me when immersed in ‘normal’ art-school-making not to make works which are ‘got,’ like I do when I pick a subject-matter. That the function of the ‘chance’ framing for me (not in this project but in general) is to as far as possible divorce myself from authorship. Perhaps its not a wider, 70s conceptual art point about authorship, death of the author. It’s about killing myself as the author, because as an author I cannot resist making sure you have ‘got it,’ and that isn’t good art.