Date: Wednesday 11th January 2012, 2-5pm
Venue: Green Room, Chelsea College of Art and Design, Millbank
Present: Deniz Akca, Elena Artigas, Dalia Baassiri, SE Barnet, Helen Couchman, Maria Christoforatou, Karl Cresser, Nerma Cridge, Cristina Figueroapalau, Rebecca Hackemann, Angela Hodgson-Teall, Maria Kheirkhah, Catherine Long, Ope Lori, Elizabeth Manchester, Aaron McPeake, Elle Reynolds, Robert, Scott Schwager, Su, Joel Yuen.
Susan Edith Barnet is in the final year of a practice based PhD at Kingston University, and is an Associate Lecturer on the Fine Art Foundation course at Central St. Martin’s. Her research looks at the experience of disorientation. In it she attempts to go somewhere else as a way of accessing the unfamiliar. She turns to the experiences of others as they are relayed to her through storytelling. As these are not her own experiences they maintain a degree of strangeness, otherness.
Recounting an experience lies in a convergence of the unconscious with memory. Telling one’s story relies on remembered experience, whether of that which has been lived and is in the moment being remembered, or which is being remembered from moments of previous telling, or of a combination of these things and others as well. There are influences that range from childhood recollections to cultural histories to the particulars of the physical body. The connection to another’s experience traverses a wide gap of both conscious and unconscious activity.
SE Barnet presented a talk given on her work at the Royal College of Art’s Edge of Our Thinking conference by the artist Anne-Marie Creamer, referring to herself in the third person. She showed transcriptions of mobile phone messages that she had exchanged with Anne-Marie Creamer before the talk, a form of narration of the various arrangements that had to be negotiated. She presented photographs taken from aeroplanes showing the landscape below, over which she had drawn in green snaking lines – a series entitled You can’t walk on water you can’t sleep on clouds. In making these and other works she was thinking about what it is to make the familiar unfamiliar.
SE Barnet always presents herself in the third person – the emails she displays are presented as part of an exchange.
In the Landmark videos, she presents open-ended scenarios around collaboration with members of the public – a form of documentation of dislocation and displacement, a movement between what is same and familiar, and what is strange.
Story of Elsewhere, which she created for her thesis exhibition, is set in public spaces. We see individuals speaking in a multi-screen video projection, in which it is not possible to see all the screens at the same time. The viewing experience is one of constant disruption as the speakers talk over one another. It is a performative act of remembering and relaying as the people describe their impressions of public monuments in another place. At the same time she presented a video showing the Eiffel tower being photographed, alongside two artist’s books.
In Story of Elsewhere there is a constant negotiation between first and third person narratives, as the subtitles translate the words of the speakers in the third person, although the words were originally spoken in the first.
Elizabeth Manchester asked about SE Barnet’s different selves – the split between SE Barnet as first and third person. How conscious, and how explicit does she feel it to be? How much is in the written part of her thesis? SE replied that the abstract of her thesis suggests a navigational approach to reading through the three written and two visual parts of her thesis, in which she uses substitute/interchangeable identities. One part is fictional – it narrates the journey of a traveler.
Scott Schwager asked about the dialogic aspects of SE’s practice. She responded that the narrative/story-telling comes from her training in film-making. Unfolding a dialogue or narrating a story come naturally to her – everything goes back to story-telling – and expresses the pleasure of engaging with narrative.
Maria Kheirkhah asked whether anything is fixed in SE’s work. SE responded that that question had been asked in her viva – her work represents a definite challenge to fixity…
Angela Hodgson-Teall asked about the notion of having a fixed artist’s identity and SE responded that in her case it comes from having had two different identities all her life – she has two birth certificates and two different names – a double identity.
Aaron McPeake brought up the issue of gender – femininity has come to be associated with multiple identities. This stimulated a general discussion around multiple identities and the notion of fluidity. SE had used Freud’s notion of the uncanny as a way to access this slipperiness in her early research – it had been an early starting point for approaching the notion of destabilization. She likes the idea of the disembodied voice of the psychoanalyst. She would like to be speaking from a hole in the ground.
http://sebarnet.wordpress.com/
Rebecca Hackemann is a second year part time PhD candidate at CCW. She received her MFA in 1996 from Stanford University, California. Her practice spans a variety of media and is inspired by theoretical concerns surrounding the position of the spectator and the structure of vision and language, both written and photographic. It consists of photo-based image text work, anamorphic drawings and most recently optical devices on pavements in neighborhoods of New York. Her recent research studies engagements with a viewing device on two pavements in New York, where they are presently anchored for the next year. Thus the work is not finished when it is installed, it consists of a process, despite having a physical form. The Urban Field Glass Project both analyses the surrounding physical location using historical photographs, and tests itself as an art/research object – it collects its own feedback.
Rebecca’s theoretical aim is to use psychoanalysis as a methodology in her thesis and furthermore bring the complicated nexus of disciplines that converge in the public and the contested definitions concerning place/space/site in the public realm into a new focus through psychoanalytic theory. Rebecca would also like to discuss the relationship between practice and research for her upcoming presentation at CAA in Los Angeles in February www.rebeccahackemann.com http://tinyurl.com/7fn2hae
Rebecca Hackemann presented very briefly her trajectory from her early training as a photographer, to what she is doing now in her practice-led research. She presented stereoscopic viewing boxes in which she controlled the viewer, forcing him or her to look through two peep-holes to see close-up photographs of parts of the body. This work was influenced by theoretical concerns, texts such as Thinking Photography, edited by Victor Burgin that she had encountered on her BA at. In 2007/8 she showed anamorphic drawings on the walls of Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta and Hunter College Times Square Gallery, New York. To see these the viewer had to stand on an ‘x’. The Looking Glass House shows an anamorphic house with Alice coming out.
Rebecca’s PhD is concerned with new role public art might play– focusing on permanent public art in places where you don’t normally expect to see it. She unexpectedly got a grant and had to act quickly – there was a deadline by which she had to spend the money and execute her project. Her starting point was to challenge the public art cliché – enlarged studio art, extended, made more durable and then put outside without consideration of place or any attempt to engage with the community around it. A theorist Miwon Kwon, analyses projects that claim to be engaging with the community. Rebecca wanted to put up work that is not finished, which attracts respondents after it is installed. She spent a few months working with people, asking them what they would like to see in the two spots that she had selected. She chose two spots in areas that were not visited by tourists, dead spaces, places where there is not much to see. For example a street next to a fly-over, with a long stretch of metal fence, behind which is a triangle shaped left over urban space. On these pavements she installed metal viewing boxes on poles that invited the viewer to look inside through peepholes like the ones on her stereoscopic boxes from previously. The viewer sees a rotation of images selected by the public – as well as two historical images of the sites that appear in 3-d. At the same time as rotating images, the boxes solicit data from the viewers who can respond/give feedback through an app accessible using a ] QR code on the back of the box and a weblink. She also sent out a questionnaire online. The questionnaire asks them how they have found the experience of seeing something in a non-tourist area, and then whether they have ever visited a piece of public art – for example the Anish Kapoor piece at the Rockefeller Centre a tourist spot. Everyone answers no to this – they are all non art-world people.
This is art that creates data – an alternative to grafitti. It has a fluidity – through Rebecca’s taking herself out as an image-maker and decision-maker. Rebecca did not create any of the images that play in the slide-show; she described the process of soliciting images from the public, before asking a panel of people to make a selection. She transferred these to slide by photographing them in order to create the final work.
Maria Kheirkhah asked about the physical object – the viewing mechanism – what is the place of the documentation of the process of making it in Rebecca’s thesis. Rebecca answered that the process is irrelevant. For her, the piece takes the place of an analyst - it is the one who asks questions. It reveals the context that it sits within. The data will be original research in her thesis. This installation in New York is the pilot work for a bigger piece of work, as yet undetermined. With this project she has been investigating how people really react to public art – it is a model for engaging afterwards – to use the information in future work. She wants to ask: what new roles can public art play in the public realm? How do people react to it? Can the methodology of psychoanalysis open the whole picture?
Scott Schwager asked a technical question about using the QR code app – only younger people have this generally, so would this not be problematic in terms of data? Perhaps there is a need for multiple ways to gather data – through surveys in documents/questionnaires?
What about the sculptural aspects of the piece? What about the work as a piece of sculpture?
Rebecca answered that the questionnaire was also asked as an e-mail and using SurveyMonkey. She is going to conduct interviews as well. Scott asked if this was not too much data, or data from too many sources to manage, to which Rebecca asked – is this not what we are supposed to be able to do well in a PhD – synthesise data. To her the object is not designed to read as an aesthetic object.
As Rebecca’s psychoanalytical methodology is Lacanian, Angela Hodgson-Teall asked about Lacan’s notions of power and the worker in relation to Rebecca’s project. Rebecca says that she is thinking about architecture as subject – the real, the imaginary, the symbolic are all intertwined in it – also many disciplines are involved, such as sociology, urban planning and social geography. She is working as a sounding board, reactivating existing work – public sculptures that people walk past without noticing at the same time as finding out what part public works can play in people’s lives.
Maria mentioned that the topic of (permanent) public art and audience seems very broad and so did Scott. Rebecca agreed, but feels she is narrowing down particular areas of concern (gaps!) and that psychoanalysis is not a seperate discipline to bring into the research (making it bigger), but is rather a method and research position that can bring all these disciplines that impinge on public art together to unlock new paradigms for public art theory and practice.
Rebecca passed out a questionnaire to everyone. It asks us about our own practice and what role it plays within our research. It is for her talk at the impending College Art Association Conference. The questionnaire is available here www.rebeccahackemann.com/Research/CAATalkHackemann.pdf
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